Co-sponsored by Science and Literature and the Medical Humanities and Health Studies, this panel addresses the world-making effects of modern industrialism as they disrupt, modify, and change the “metabolism” of living forms. In the environmental and health humanities, the recognition that “we” are intricately embroiled in the multi-scalar remaking of nutritive and toxic relations under postindustrial conditions seems historically urgent. For those industrial conditions affect everything from disease emergence, health disorders, and food habits to the waste management, chemosphere expansions, and climate crises. How we imagine nutritive and toxic relations has immediate and long-term consequences: What, then, can imaginations of metabolic relations relay about planetary health? What histories and theories of metabolics inform the politics and practices of health? The panelists variously approach historical and contemporary metabolic imaginaries: some offer political critique and cultural histories of the metabolic while others attempt creative metabolic reorientations that—as Michelle Murphy suggests—live “life otherwise.”
As a research concept, “metabolic imaginaries” mines two genealogies. The first line of thought is best exemplified by Hannah Landecker’s writings on metabolism. While twentieth century breakthroughs in genetic research privileged the gene, generation, and hereditary as the central tenet of life, in the twenty-first century, we are now more aware than ever before of the importance of metabolism—of those cyclical processes and relations that are at once biologic, geologic, and atmospheric. In the health humanities, a range of literature probes the “feeding forward” of industrial toxins into foods and the life-sustaining elements (water, soil, air), and therein to humans, animals, and plants; literary, philosophical, and artistic practices have been critical to tracing the consequent health impacts (cancers to epigenetic change). A second strain elaborates Marxian conceptions of a metabolic rift for environmental politics. Scholars like John Bellamy, among others, write about the institution of difference between natural and social existence under capitalism: no longer a part of energetic processes, for example, capitalist imaginaries set the “human” apart as the master of nature who can therefore convert energetic processes into products (coal, ore, oil...). Repairing the metabolic rift mandates reimagining connections and interdependencies, attending equally to microscales of bodily cycles (ingestion, digestion, excretion) or cellular change (illnesses, disabilities, pharma intensions) and to macroscales of geologic alchemy (mutating and forever chemicals) or multispecies relations (virulence, microbial resistance). All these processes mandate apprehending the imperceptible in the present alongside other futurities of planetary health.
The three presentations explore both dimensions of the metabolic. In “Systems of Allopathic Care: Towards a Decompostable Imaginary,” critic Jacob Leveton and contemporary artists Camila de Andrade Bianchi and Liza Stout present from their ongoing work on the vibrant matter of compost. Drawing out the critical contours of a multiyear project, they articulate how their art practice imagines a postindustrial, community-oriented metabolism. The idea is to understand how proletarian labor relations include birds, insects, humans, bacteria, and other forms of creatureliness. The second panelist, Austin Lillywhite tracks present-day materialisms to early twentieth-century life philosophies that established race-as-metabolics. In “Raw Materialisms: Race and Environment as Metabolic Imaginaries,” White examines ideas about “rawness” in order to understand how a settler colonial environmental politics underwrote a racialized vitalist metabolics. Reading modernist and contemporary fiction by Wilson Harris and Imbolo Mbue, White analyzes not only the limits of contemporary materialist theories but also the metabolic logics underpinning new forms of environmental racism and climate colonialism. The final panelist, Joseph Darda takes up the Men’s Health contributing editor Christopher McDougall’s writings on the Indigenous Tarahumara (or Rarámuri) famed for their long-distance running. In “Colonize Your Diet: Born to Run and the Selling of the Indigenous Metabolism,” Darda analyses popular sports and health science writing (including McDougall’s Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen) that offered a new science for the American man in the form of marketable diets, health remedies, and performance enhancers. The upshot is the selling of Indigenous metabolism for neoliberal body optimizations that feed the colonial desire to indigenize. As they reflect upon literature and philosophy, popular science writing and art practice, the three presentations chart the many pasts, presents, and futures of metabolic imaginaries as survival guides for our times.