Purity

Frederik Appel Olsen

Today’s pollution is both invisible, like the microplastics and so-called “forever chemicals” accumulating and circulating in oceans and soil, and visible, like the piles and piles of fast fashion artefacts ending up along coastal regions of Ghana; it is nowhere, everywhere, around us, and within our bodies. In a time of heightened levels of pollution, as well as a heightened awareness of its consequences, the concept of purity easily becomes appealing: We might yearn for a return to a world not so ubiquitously contaminated, and we are in many respects right to do so.

However, a complete return to non-contamination is not only literally impossible but conceptually problematic. Purity is solitude, as Marguerite Duras states in the quote above, and its capacity as solitary it is, at least as a state to aspire to, disconnected, anti-symbiotic, non-circulatory, self-sustaining – rather than sustainable – and thus fundamentally non-ecological. In Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, Alexis Shotwell (Shotwell 2016, 15) identifies the “metaphysics of purity” as the root of much historical and contemporary malice, underpinning (lasting) colonial exploitation, ableism, and environmental destruction in its “conceptual attempt to delineate and delimit the world into something separable, disentangled, and homogenous”. Grappling with purity’s appeal in a climate and environmental context, then, first and foremost entails challenging its harmful metaphysical instantiations and their consequences in social and political life.

An indispensable book for conceptualizing purity as a social and cultural phenomenon is anthropologist Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger from 1966. Although in some respects sinisterly marked by its time – Douglas’ formulations about “primitive” cultures would and should not cut it today – Douglas reframed our conceptions of the pure and the polluted. To do this, she famously defined dirt as matter out of place,[i] thereby countering the common intuition that there is an essential character to “the dirty”. A culture’s fear of pollution and its attempts at purification are, fundamentally, attempts at ordering reality and making sense of the chaotic and fleeting experience of being alive: “Dirt, then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt, there is system.  … This idea of dirt takes us straight into the field of symbolism and promises a link-up with more obviously symbolic systems of purity” (Douglas 1966, 44). This goes for “modern” as well as “primitive” cultures and according to Douglas it is the key to understanding pollution and purity in both (Douglas 1966, 50). Thus, dirt becomes dirt when order is disturbed, and purity is symbolically reattained by restoring order through various rituals of cleansing.

If purity as a cultural rite arises out of the need for systems, it is an obvious target for scholars and activists aiming at disrupting oppressive hierarchies held in place such as the omnipresent but unequally distributed environmental destruction in late capitalism. According to Shotwell, purity “shuts down precisely the field of possibility that might allow us to take better collective action against the destruction of the world in all its strange, delightful, impure frolic” (Shotwell 2016, 8–9). Downstream of purity metaphysics is purity politics, the results of which will inevitably run counter to attempts to remedy environmental damage – or it will go as far as to sacrifice the Other on the altar of natural purity. As Eula Biss (Biss 2015, 76) notes: “Quite a bit of human solidarity has been sacrificed in pursuit of preserving some kind of imagined purity,” whether it be the eugenics movement’s mass sterilization campaigns targeting the poor and racialized or anti-sodomy laws targeting queer people. In such cases, an obsession with bodily purity drives the exclusion and eventual elimination of the body of the Other exactly because coming to terms with the material relations of one’s body to the bodies of others, and with the environment at large, is substituted with the unattainable idea of corporeal solitude and mastery.

Depending on the ideological context, the problematics of rhetorics and politics of purity differ substantially. In progressive environmentalist movements, purist notions of ‘cleaning up’ often serve as a useful mobilizing telos for activists and civil society actors broadly. However, as Phaedra Pezzullo (Pezzullo 2023) shows in her examination of organized efforts to establish a wholesale ban on plastic straws, such “purity politics” too easily gloss over other progressive interests such as making society livable for people with disabilities. For some bodies, sustainable alternatives to the plastic straw – glass, steel, paper, etc. – are impossible to use, sometimes even dangerous. This case illustrates that as soon as environmentalism is based on a politics of purity – “Ban all X, Y, and Z!” – the complicated web of vulnerabilities constituting our lifeworld gets bypassed too easily.

On the Right, environmental purity has different but much more severe implications. Bernhard Forchtner highlights these implications in his examination of contemporary far-right ecological thought. In the mind of the ecologically sensitive subject on the extreme right, the homeland is an “ecosystem [that] must be preserved, remain pure, that is, free from Others, and the imagined ‘ideal’ subject has to act accordingly” (Forchtner 2019, 300). This ideology of “ecological” purity is not new: The Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) movement in late 19^th Century Germany – an influential precursor to Nazi ideology and hegemony – was built on the mythical idea of a special relationship between peasant farmers and their land in perpetual risk of being defiled by industrialization orchestrated by an alleged Jewish conspiracy. In today’s accelerating climate and ecological crisis, imaginaries of ecological purity are strategically pushed by far-Right movements to “appeal to those disillusioned with modern society by romanticizing a mythical past where a ‘pure’ race supposedly lived in harmony with nature, offering a fabricated historical justification for eco-fascist beliefs” (Kingdon 2024, 200).

Adopting purity as a telos of environmental politics and thinking, one is left with never-ending efforts to rinse, clean, to decontaminate, without a real prospect of returning to any “natural” state that one may yearn for. This path can only lead to more extreme and contradictory attempts at purification, in the end, either leaving us in passive despair or fanatic fantasies of absolution from “the unclean”. Thus, in moments of global biological crisis such as environmental and climate deterioration or life-threatening pandemics, we are bound to constantly navigate our bodily boundedness and unboundedness, or as Judith Butler (Butler 2022, 108–109) calls it, our porousness:

As porous, the body is neither pure boundary nor pure opening but a complex negotiation among the two, situated in a mode of living where breath, food, digestion, and well-being – for sexuality, intimacy, and the taking in of each other’s bodies – are all requirements (for oneself, of and by the world). We cannot live without each other, without finding ourselves inside another’s pores, or without letting another in.

In this perspective, recognizing porousness becomes the antidote to Biss’ description of the obsession with purity as an imaginary of absolute bodily boundedness. Yet, as Marco Amiero stated in a talk on his work on The Wasteocene in 2024 at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Applied Ecological Thinking in response to a question posed by this author: “Purity is a fiction, toxicity is not.” Rejecting the concept of purity as ultimately counterproductive to environmental struggles should not lead us to wallow in apathy or despair of the inevitability of contamination. We all have toxic chemicals in our bodies; we do not all have equal amounts of toxic chemicals in our bodies. The distribution is upheld and exacerbated systemically. Where there are systems, there is toxicity. Where there is toxicity, there is inequality and an ongoing struggle to be had against the culprits of environmental pollution.

Duras’ essay on “The Pure Number” ends with the author fantasizing about the ascendance, and eventual dissolution, of the proletariat as the sole legitimate form of purity – not a specific number of people belonging to this class but the number as such; forever erasing capitalist hierarchies. This is fiction. Yet fictionality might be needed to salvage the appeal of the pure from more sinister missions of breaking free of contamination.

[I] Although Douglas brought this definition to broader academic attention, she lifted the formulation from William James (see James 1968, 129 and Douglas 1966, 202-203).

References

Armiero, Marco. 2021. Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Biss, Eula. 2015. On Immunity: An Inoculation. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Butler, Judith. 2022. What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology. New York: Columbia University Press.

Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo. London, New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Duras, Marguerite. 2011 [1993]. “The Pure Number”. In Writing. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Forchtner, Bernhard. 2019. “Nation, nature, purity: extreme-right biodiversity in Germany.” Patterns of Prejudice 53 (3): 285–301. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2019.1592303.

James, William. 1968. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Glasgow: Collins.

Kingdon, Ashton. 2024. “Far-Right Environmentalism and the Supernatural Imaginary: Runic Writing, Ethnic Ruralism, and Occult Practices.” In The World White Web. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-75393-0_7.

Pezzullo, Phaedra C. 2023. Beyond Straw Men: Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Shotwell, Alexis. 2016. Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Durham: Duke University Press.