PeterSebastianChesney Annotations

Can you suggest ways to collage, add to the framing, or otherwise elaborate this image to strengthen its ethnographic messaging?

Friday, December 14, 2018 - 5:43pm

I just spent an awful lot of time fixating on and highlighting one of the smallest words in the image. That's because I approached the subject as a critic, hoping to prove myself by finding something unusual and unexpected to say about it. If you were to accept my reading, you might consider finding a way to zoom in on the words "Swiss quality." A callout would leave these words in small scale on one side, while blowing them up visually so viewers will not miss them.

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How does this image interpellate you as a subject?

Friday, December 14, 2018 - 5:39pm

I'm somewhat uncomfortable admitting, and yet will anyway, that images like this remind me that I have much more in common with the purchasers of a service like this than I do with the working people who end up poisoned by mercury or whatever. I live in Southern California, so I know I'm exposed to all sorts of horrific pollution (in the air, surely in the water and soil too, this having been the center of aerospace research and industry for the length of the Cold War). That said, I associate pollution with preventative regulation and public-sponsored, sometimes even public-executed, cleanup efforts (think Superfund). Thinking of this Peruvian example, I'm reminded that Latin Americans, especially poor workers out in Amazonia, are living lifes much closer to the utopian fantasies of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. For them, a Swiss pollution clean-up company might be the closest thing they'll see in their lifetimes to the work the E.P.A. does here in the U.S. That's abhorent to me as a beneficiary of state services here. But I'm also exposed to the infrastuctures which do arise in a neoliberal setting. I'd call this level of regulation and caretaking negligent and minimal, but at the same time, these services are more than nothing. Rand Paul would likely look at this image and conclude that corporate welfare does function. These companies do clean up after themselves because the total destruction of the environment would constitute a risk to their investments and their future.

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How is this image “ethnographic”? Would you add anything to this image’s “design statement”?

Friday, December 14, 2018 - 5:31pm

I'm going to take ethnography pretty literally for a moment and reflect on the use of the words "Swiss quality" in promotional material. My research has led me to trouble the notion that quality ever means anything outside the context of identity politics. That goes for German aesthetic theory (Wagner) as much as for New Age spiritualism (Pirsig). Anyway, the idea that the Swiss somehow guarantee the worthiness of a project by virtue of labeling themselves its providers evokes a number of Western imperialist traditions. We know from Edward Said that a country did not even have to have colonies, or even to engage in conflict, in order to benefit from empire. That the Swiss are profiting from this company profiting from an ecologically destructive gold rush in Peru, well, I can't help thinking about the other ways Swiss capitalists have historically benefitted from gold extraction. As in all the gold Swiss bankers managed to hide and to horde on behalf of Nazis who got that gold, during the 1940s, by prying or mining it out of Jews' teeth while they waited to die in the gas chambers. Anyway, I'd think about ways you can stress this momentary violation of Godwin's Law. Forgive me but for once a Nazis allusion makes incredible sense! Returning also to the topic of quality, I'd venture a guess that the true test of Swiss quality is the country's ability to transcend its past and present investments in such ignoble money-making schemes.

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What does the image convey about “toxic subjects” (their character, dynamics, etc.)? (How) Does this image open up the concept of “toxicity”?

Friday, December 14, 2018 - 5:21pm

Projects like this do the necessary work of explaining how toxicity takes literal form and has undeniable physiological effects. That said, you would not always know it from promotional material. Batrec's approach to advertising solutions for this toxicity problem aestheticizes the mercury such that polluters can comfortably and innocently hire this service. The whole dynamic reminds me of Derrida's critique of forgiveness/reparations discourse, that it mostly facilitates states and actors in their search for "forgive and forget." The juxtaposition of an environmental services company and your words describing Minamata is jarring. I'd expect to see those other characteristic images from Greenpeace or whoever featuring cats gone crazy and wasted away Japanese peasants. Instead, mercury itself looks like just as beautiful an element as gold.

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