Purity

Chapter 4 examines the production of material after extraction as both a practical and an ideological process. Although mineral ores are inorganic and ostensibly inert, industrial designations of purity and impurity shape their refining. These “dreams of purity” correspond to normative delineations of normal/deviant, white/black, civilized/native, etc., that prop up the hegemonic “vision of homogeneity, order, and discipline” that haunts “the plantation regime as industrial formation and enduring logic” (Chao 2023: 184). As Manuel DeLanda notes, “both human workers and the materials they used needed to be disciplined and their behavior made predictable” (DeLanda 2004: 20). Delving into the processes of smelting and casting, I will outline how the disciplining order of refining introduces both the qualities that make metal valuable (malleability married to resilience; luster accompanied by durability) as well as numerous lurking molecular instabilities. Drawing on Simondon’s influential discussion of clay bricks in L’individu et sa gènese physico-biologique, I turn to Katie Lloyd Thomas’s attentive study of industrial building materials, which help us observe the complex latticeworks of commingling energy exchange that animate these seemingly inert blocks of raw material (Lloyd Thomas 2022). Although harnessed by industrial production in search of isotropically utilitarian materials, refining and purification rely on intervening stages of energetic “metastability” (Simondon 2005/2020). Even within the rigidly controlled conditions of industry, close examination of these materials reveal complex behaviors of bonding and, consequently, metamorphosis. The history of metallurgy reveals a complicated dance between disciplined materials and those that resist—corroding and reacting in unpredictable chemical choreographies. Ironically, the conditions in which this material disobedience thrives have flourished under the regime of late capitalism, as the drive for cheap, unregulated production allows ever more materials to slip through the cracks. These materials—corroded, distorted, and expelled from the industrial pipeline—defy the disciplining grasp of plantation capitalism and take flight through the molecular percolations of their own chemical agency. Inspired by speculative “chemo-ethnography,” I will trace these “molecular dreamworlds” (Shapiro and Kirksey: 2017: 481) as their corrosive assertions of self-determination evoke alternative configurations of animacy, communalism, and the resultant potential for “‘care’ across the realm of animacy […] as a means of unlikely cross-affiliation” (Chen 2012). In attending to these networks of agency and animacy, I join Mel Y. Chen as they ask: “what are the possibilities of rejoinder, of response, for those considered nonsubjects or errant subjects?” (Chen 2012: 212).