Contamination

Søren Reith-Hauberg

In an age of widespread chemical and toxic pollution, contamination prompts a reconsideration of how we relate to the world. It calls for a nuanced understanding of the relational aspects of being alive in a world that keeps banging on our doors, heating us, cooling us, infecting us, and contaminating us (Reith-Hauberg 2024).

The term “contamination” originates from the Latin contamino, which holds dual meanings: 1) to pollute, corrupt, or degrade, and 2) (from the Proto-Indo-European tag or tangere) to touch, handle, or unite. While commonly associated with pollution, toxicity, and infection in scientific disciplines like chemistry and biology, contamination also carries a broader, more nuanced significance for the environmental humanities. As with related terms from the vocabularies of new materialism and environmental philosophy, such as entanglement and interconnectedness, contamination underscores the fundamental relationality of existence. Yet, in situating touch and contact as central to the understanding of relationality, contamination exposes and adds a necessary ambiguity to these concepts. It highlights the varying intensities of relationships between materialities and agents within an ecological system, as well as the extent to which these relationships may range from toxically parasitic to beneficially symbiotic.

In this view, contamination bears resemblance to Jacques Derrida’s reinterpretation of the concept of the pharmakon, which he introduces in his deconstruction of Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus in the essay Plato’s Pharmacy (Derrida 1981). Here, he describes the pharmakon as matter and points of contact that can be both deadly and vitalizing, poisonous and nourishing. The term appears in translation with various meanings – poison, magic potion, medicine, cure, drug, etc. – and its meaning shifts depending on who in the dialogue employs the concept. “There is no such thing as a harmless remedy”, he writes. “The pharmakon can never be simply beneficial.” (Derrida 1981: 99). And so it is with contamination. In fact, throughout Derrida’s philosophical work, there runs a more or less hidden, or at least unexplored, rhetoric of contamination. For example, he writes in his first major work, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy: “All the limits on which phenomenological discourse is constructed are examined from the standpoint of the fatal necessity of a ‘contamination’ […], the quaking of each border coming to propagate itself onto all the others.” (Derrida 2002: xv) Contamination is a “fatal necessity” in that it simply crumbles all ideas of singular, or pure, essences. As with the pharmakon, it exposes the instability of binary oppositions which dominate such a great deal of the metaphysical baggage we have inherited from Enlightenment thought.

Still, contamination is typically regarded as a form of pollution, something we should strive to eliminate or cure. This is, of course, a sound perspective when dealing with, e.g., chemical pollution, viruses, diseases, and other forms of negative infection – the AIDS virus does not have “the same right to exist as an AIDS patient”, as Timothy Morton (2021: 78) writes. We shouldn’t strive to get rid of this understanding of harmful contamination. However, what if we began adopting a broader understanding of contamination as an existential condition? An understanding that points to the ontological fact that we are always already in the process of being contaminated by and of contaminating the world, from the moment we take our first breath.

Connectedness is messy

As an ontological condition, contamination reflects how beings are enmeshed with their environments – physically, socially, and ecologically. However the concept does not merely represent yet another obscure conceptualization of ecological inter-connectedness. Instead, it points to the specific junctions where beings, materials, and events come into contact, allowing us to describe and analyse these connections with care and nuance, and with respect for feelings of separation and dualism. As the Norwegian nature critic Anders Dunker puts it: “Ecology must work on all levels: not simply as a vague idea that everything is connected, but as detailed knowledge of the connections between biological conditions, social and political practices, and mental representations, values, and concepts” (Dunker 2022: 96, my translation).

Contamination contributes to ecological and philosophical discourse in its expansion upon the concept of interconnectedness while criticizing and developing this relational framework by emphasizing both the productive and destructive implications of ecological entanglement. Contamination may add valuable nuance to existing concepts of relationality, as it remains flexible enough to encompass what has been, and continues to be, excluded by subject/object-oriented Enlightenment terminology, while still offering a stable footing – preventing a collapse into dissolving, radically nondualistic territory. The acknowledgement of contamination allows us to “hang out in what feels like dualism,” as Timothy Morton writes in their magnum opus Ecology Without Nature. “This hanging out”, they continue, “would be a more nondual approach. Instead of trying to pull the world out of the mud, we could jump down into the mud.” (Morton 2007: 205f).

Contamination points to the fact that what we do to the world that is seemingly “out there”, we ultimately do to ourselves “right here”. We cannot touch without being touched back. Thus, beyond its negative connotations, contamination reveals an aesthetic and relational-existential dimension that has the potential to enhance ecological sensibilities. This includes feelings of intimacy, boundary dissolution, and sometimes discomfort, highlighting how beings are shaped and transformed through their interactions with the world.

This has existential implications, too: Contamination shouldn’t be an abstraction – it must provoke change in our thinking and our daily lives. When we think in terms of contamination, we are urged to ask how we are contaminating and are being contaminated by the world and other beings at any given moment. The condition of contamination pushes us to reconsider our role and implications in matters of conflict on every level of existence.

Transformation through encounter

As I have already touched upon, the rhetoric of contamination can work as a bulwark against dualistic Enlightenment thought that has its roots in traditional Greek binaries between essence and accident, reality and appearance. At the core of the metaphysics of Enlightenment thought, we find a teleological goal of de-mystification. This kind of thinking and methodology, whether consciously or not, inevitably ends up suppressing or even destroying that which deviates from principles of ontological purity or specific ideas of (Western) techno-scientific progress. Such thinking drove the political and social disasters of the 20th century and continues to underpin the ecological and environmental crises of today. As Morton puts it, “the end of the world has already happened” (Morton 2010: 98) – but the end isn’t how we imagined it: It comes for different kinds of beings at different kinds of intensities and times. Now is the time to adapt to life in the contaminated ruins of a world that is, after all, still standing.

 Anthropologist Anna Tsing uses the concept, arguing that contamination can be understood as a basis for collaboration – a process of mutual influence and transformation that challenges traditional binaries of purity and impurity as well as traditional ideas of what it means to survive. “Staying alive”, she writes in The Mushroom at the end of the World, “requires livable collaborations. Collaborations means working across differences, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die” (Tsing 2016: 28). For Tsing, collaboration emerges from contamination which she describes as a particular form of “transformation through encounter”. This stands in contrast to the dominant political and scientific ideologies of the 20^th century that position self-interest and economic and reproductive growth as the goal of all individual and social existence (ibid.). The result is societies that do not think in terms of contamination, mixture, and transformation through encounter, but rather in terms of individual survival, power accumulation, and linear progress. According to Tsing, contamination reminds us of the intrinsic precarity of existence and of the ethical obligations we all hold toward each other and to the environment.

Contamination aesthetics

In art, contamination aesthetics has emerged as a response to the ongoing ecological crises. Some artists have gone beyond merely making ecologically oriented art that aims to either romanticise nature, warn of possible future calamities or reintroduce forgotten past attitudes towards the environment. Instead, they stay with the trouble – as Donna Haraway’s slogan goes (Haraway 2016) – making art in the thick of it all while embracing an already contaminated world that we must now figure out ways to adapt to.

As early as the 1960s, Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo began working explicitly within an aesthetic of contamination through a series of performances, sculptures, prints, and text. The artist invites us to consider the possibility that we are already situated in a new, contaminated ecology, far removed from the ideals of purity and enlightenment in any modern, Western sense. The works shock and provoke in their often grotesque displays of radioactivity, pollution, and decomposition, but they manage to keep revulsion at bay by insisting on elements of humour and play – elements that help emphasize the potential for creativity and collaboration within a shared contaminated reality. In other words, through these works, we gain aesthetic access to an ecological sensibility where contamination can be seen as the basis for collaboration and transformation rather than something we must always strive to eliminate.

Another quality of contamination aesthetics is its emphasis on the fact that all actions have effects on and in the world, both temporally and spatially – a recognition that nothing ever truly “goes away”. When Olafur Eliasson, in works such as Green River and LIFE, pours the non-toxic dye uranine into rivers, ponds, and streams, transforming them into toxic-looking sites of contamination, we are explicitly reminded that everything poured into a river inevitably ends up in the ocean or the soil at some point. Eliasson’s explicit contamination of the water evokes feelings of ambiguity and paralysis in the face of overwhelming pollution, while simultaneously fostering an awareness that problems do not disappear simply because we can no longer see them.

Closing

We are in dire need of acknowledging that to exist is to touch and be touched, to contaminate and be contaminated. This perspective reframes contamination as not only an ecological or social challenge but also as a fundamental condition of life.

To think, imagine, and visualize within a framework of contamination aesthetics might be a particularly effective methodological, analytical, and artistic practice in and beyond the Anthropocene. On the one hand, it offers an alternative to traditional, dualistic systems of thought, while on the other, it acknowledges genuine and concrete feelings of dualism, as well as the hierarchies and touching points between species, materialities, cultures, and ideologies that may ultimately be produced or reproduced as a result of such a dualistic worldview.

The future is contaminated by the past, and the crises are undeniably evident. But we must not allow ourselves to imagine the future as either pure paradise or pure apocalypse. In fact, “purity is not an option”, as Anna Tsing (2016: 27) writes. Within this fact lies a responsibility to cultivate an ecological sensitivity to the contaminated diversity of the material world, from which nothing and no one can be said to be separate.

References

Derrida, Jacques. 1981. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. London: Athlone. [Translation of La dissémination. Éditions du Seuil (1972).]

Derrida, Jacques. 2002. The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. Translated by Marian Hobson. University of Chicago Press. [Translation of Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (1990).]

Dunker, Anders. 2022. At tænke på planeten: Essays om nutid og fremtid fra Le Monde Diplomatique 2015–2021. Copenhagen: Forlaget Virkelig.

Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Morton, Timothy. 2021. All Art is Ecological. London: Penguin Classics. Green Ideas 3.

Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology Without Nature. Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press.

Morton, Timothy. 2010. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press.

Reith-Hauberg, Søren. 2024. Kontaminationsæstetik. Økologisk sensibilitet i en verden uden fremtid. Copenhagen: Forlaget Spring.

Tsing, Anna L. 2016. The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.