[...]al democratic order:) “having a voice = the mark of political subjectivity” --> (a very bad definition of) power: making oneself heard and heard in a manner to which others must respond

(sensation of presence and immediacy heightened in) face-to-face --> transcendent experience of communication --> that “there be no loss or dissipation between speaking and being heard”

(messianic utterance of) slogan <--> immediacy
-->? banishing ambiguity at the expensive of signification

aspiration to immediacy + communicative fullness --> simple *oppositional corrective*
a substantialized, corporealized figuration of power vs. EFF make themselves into pure proxies

(pedagogy, a horrible and wrong idea of) “perfect transmission of intention ==> production of consensus”

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[explosion of accuracies]

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after death there is:
•rumer
•afterlife
•


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(Nicholas Shapiro shows in his research on) people in ordinary toxic homes: *their apprehension of conventionally insensible domestic chemical exposure was informed by sustained attention to barely perceptible alteration of somatic function and atmosphere*

(Sloterdijk, Latour, Anderson, Berlant, Stewart, Shapiro) to explain body's relation to the world --> ancillary process of being a living body as:
•becoming sensitive
•embodying atmospheres
•somatically judging environments
•becoming corporeal aware of nonhumans
•protracted low-level encounter with domestic chemicals --accumulate--> *chemical sublime* <== (indistinct and distributed harm of) late industrial material ecologies (=/= enlightenment sublime: spectacle material threat with transcendence of immaterial reason)

silent and invisible microemissions accrue within the envelope of the home --> residents reckon with how their homes are decomposing into them as they decompose in their homes

somatic work of the chemically concerned is enmeshed with an *apprehension of their own bodies that is simultaneously sensuous and epistemological* (~ “bodily knowledge” situated within a process of “bodily reasoning” that tempers not just what one knows but what one becomes with or is estranged from [=/= forensic architecture notion of knowledge])

‘sustained bodily reasoning ==> chemical sublime’
Shapiro + Kim Fortune --> call for ways to differently know and reimagine our ongoing late industrial present, which is marked by deteriorating sociotechnical systems and economic, climate, and infrastructural instability


**somatic susceptibility and epistemic capacity** common to human life --(informed by nonhuman life)--> molecular and relational appreciation --Shapiro--> domestically exposed (the ‘chemically wounded’ attuning to their own effects and affects ~ discerning the barely perceptible constituents of their environment [=/= “deviant agents,” diagnosed, resistors]


toxic = potency --implicate--> vulnerability of a living body

years of exposure --> biochemically magnified effects --> semiotically enflamed

somatic cognizance

(Shapiro on affect and phenomenological studies of environmental exposure -->) formaldehyde indicators and agents of social abandonment and precarity

(growing literature on) the body as existential, pedagogical, and ethical grounds of (cultures of) science

Shapiro: “how can expanding the avenues and temporality of sensing yield an appreciation of what many of us are abbreviating from our own sense of the world?”

Shapiro ethnographically elucidates the *somatic mode of attention*
--> bodies are sites for both actively absorbing the world and being put into motion by its constituent medley of humans and nonhumans

-becoming with (Haraway)
-orienting toward (Ahmed)
-bodily reasoning (Shapiro): the dynamic process through which knowledge of individual spaces of chronic exposure is somatically attained

women's accounts of self-monitoring for bodily dysfunctions (--> feminization of body care)
[Shapiro discovered] men's active indifference to slight somatic abnormalities (rejecting the possibility that their bodies wear permeable --> masculine self-image)


olfaction --> take displeasing scents as primary indicators of environmental contamination
--but--> smell recede from perception over time as they become incorporated into new senatorial norms (sensitivity down-regulates in a process of olfactory adaptation)


microscopic encounters --sensed--> less nameable and more diffuse sensory practices

exposure: an affective space, at the limit of the phenomenal, the somatic proceeds and then is entangled with the rational


sublime (in chemistry): transform from solid to gas bypassing the intermediate liquid form

*nuclear sublime*
weapons scientists felt the blast bore into the being, into their faces, register of the power of the bomb
spectacular, brutal, and lightening-fast sensorial pummeling, tossing them to the ground
=/=
*chemical sublime*
formaldehyde sedate speed of chemical off-gassing and the regular human breathing; (not signalled by overwhelming sensory stimuli rather) indicated by a thickening veil of indistinction as perceptual faculties became occluded
...the bodywork employed to apprehend the qualities of indoor air

(Masco & Kant's privileging of) sublimity's correlation with public, spectacular, and violent events =/= (Shapiro's sublimity:) *profundity and density of widespread, private, indistinct, chronic, and fragmented phenomena*

chemical sublime = انباشت استدلالهای جسمانی accrual of bodily reasoning
irritations --> agitations ==> attenuate the effects of vast toxic infrastructure


(masco nuclear) sublime ==translate==> resounding ethical call
chemical sublime ==> ?

...industry's mobilization of law, science, capital


Shapiro: we must look at how the sublime has brokered relations between exposure and the status quo since at least down of the enlightenment

(quintessential of enlightenment project) Kant's sublime: the immensity/might first overwhelms our imaginative capacity (or indicating the fragility of human body yielding a sense of helplessness and distress) then this feeling is countered and ultimately overcome by reassuring one's self of power of the mind ==> reason sets humanity apart and above the physical world
[*]sublime: *internal turmoil and sensuous displeasure is elevated into the delight and superiority of reason* --> humanity's continued progressing

(Shapiro + Gene Ray: ideological function of the aesthetic category of the) sublime within Kant's critical system is anxiously bound up with deep *metaphysical optimism*

formulation of sublime:
•form (space, time, and intensity) of exposure
•the relation between the supersensible (mind) and the sensible (matter)
•orientational movement (from without to within or vice versa)
•political reckoning

*bodily reasoning =/= object (of sublime) held at a distance
*sublimation of toxicity =/= mental mastery (over perceived threats)
*amplify =/= extinguish (the tensions, agitations, dissident potentiality of large-scale hazards)
*coalescing of underrecognized disturbances =/= compensation
*beginning of a confrontation =/= resolution

foil of human triumph: “transforming the worst into the best” <-- not possible anymore
...~->? potentiality of living otherwise (---> go to Tsing's contaminated diversity, Chen's queer toxicity)


...in these spaces where *enduring and knowing* are coterminous, the feeling of a living dead seeped into the margins of life for those with even minimal symptoms


(chemical phenomenology)
molecular cohabitants who physically hold our world together also encourage our unravelling*** [Shapiro] becoming a pupil of the air [Sloterdijk] is to attune to the aerostolized material culture and more-than-human semiotics [Kohn] within which one is immersed
***


chemical sublime (does not merely refigure a form of sublime in philosophical discourse but) poses an alternative **schema of eventfulness** (or call to action)

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[title]
kulturgeist

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[...]