Alexis Shotwell - Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times

On the plane back from a conference titled Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planeta generative conference at my alma mater organized by Anna Tsing, a conference that made me remember why I love going to conferencesI washed my hands in the tiny, smelly, normal airplane bathroom. Then I took a picture of the soap, which was fancy soap for an airplane bathroom: philosophy brand, part of its pure grace line. It narrated, all lowercase (lowercase font is to remind us to live life with curiosity, wisdom, and abundant joy, as their website notes): philosophy: with clean hands we find our grace. we realize the slate can be as clean as we allow it to be. On the plane from San Francisco to Ottawa, using something like 5.8 tons of greenhouse gasses for my personal trip, which I had not carbon offset, although the airline offered this option to me when I was buying my ticket, I had been feeling bad about using a plastic cup to have some ginger alebut I had had some ginger ale because airline travel is irritating, flying itself is so evil that what weight does a single plastic cup hold, and I wanted some sugar and bubbles. I had been reflecting about what it meant to travel across the continent to a state experiencing a profound drought, using fossil fuels in order to talk with other scholars, many of whom had come from further awayEurope and Australia in particularabout what it means to inaugurate a term to name the time we are living in that identifies humans as responsible for harmful planetary transformation partially through our use of fossil fuels. I had doubts about what clean hands could mean in this context, and also how long theyd last after I finished rinsing the pure grace soap from my hands and touched literally anything.

There have been many conferences now about the Anthropocenewhat it is, what it means to name itand many more people writing and thinking about it. Mostly the people Ive heard talking about the Anthropocene (or Capitalocene) are aiming to mobilize a transformation in our planetary political economy. Mostly, the markers used to measure this transformation measure the effects of human behavior on the world we live in, and often these effects are externalities to economic calculations, carried as body burdens by living creatures or experienced as the entangled effects that alter or kill beings and ecosystems. Coral reefs change and die in relation to acidifying oceans, soil carries loads of lead or heavy metals from mining or automobile exhaust, new forms of rock are made out of plastic, plastiglomerates (Corcoran, Moore, and Jazvac 2014), or we acquire the radioisotope signatures of past nuclear bomb use, and we might mark these as dividing lines marking the beginning of the age were in. Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin suggest colonialism as an origin point, offering 1610 as a dividing line between the Holocene (the recent era that we may be leaving) and the Anthropocene. As Dana Luciano summarizes, that date

was chosen because it was the lowest point in a decades-long decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide, measurable by traces found in Artic ice cores. The change in the atmosphere, Lewis and Maslin deduced, was caused by the death of over 50 million indigenous residents of the Americas in the first century after European contact, the result of exposure to diseases carried by Europeans, plus war, enslavement and famine.... Lewis and Maslins proposal is compelling because it is, as far as I know, the first proposal for an Anthropocene golden spike to recognize genocide as part of the cause of epochal division. (Luciano 2015)

However we mark its start, thinking about the Anthropocene makes it difficult to feel that pure grace is available through hand soap used in carbon-intensive travel across borders laid down on genocidally colonized land.

I dont want to harp too much on philosophythe well being beauty brandbut it is a little as though the person writing their marketing copy is writing directly for me in my concern about the evocations of purity and cleanliness, so lets look at one other product: purity made simple: one-step facial cleanser. Here is the companys copy:

philosophy: purity is natural. we come into this world with all the right in-stincts. we are innocent and, therefore, perceive things as they should be, rather than how they are. our conscience is clear, our hands clean and the world at large is truly beautiful. it is at this time we feel most blessed. to begin feeling young again, we must begin with the most basic step of all, the daily ritual of cleansing. (Purity Made Simple | One-Step Facial Cleanser | Philosophy Cleansers 2015)

I turn to this product in part because the hand soap from my plane trip isnt listed on the philosophy website, and I want to talk about ingredients. But also this copy constellates brilliantly an ethos I believe we couldif it were measurable in geologic timeuse to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene: roughly, the moment that humans worry that we have lost a natural state of purity or decide that purity is something we ought to pursue and defend. This ethos is the idea that we can access or recover a time and state before or without pollution, without impurity, before the fall from innocence, when the world at large is truly beautiful. This is a time of youth, blessing, but also, interestingly, a natural state that precludes or resists educationwe perceive things as they should be, rather than how they are. A piece of this ethos is perhaps also the sense that we can buy a product that brings this natural state of purity back, though particularly in certain left scenes, ideological purity seems to behave as a one-step facial cleanser.