I don't really have a way to connect these week's reading to my paper. Or at least not yet. I've got a mountain of historical resources to sift through before I have a better grasp on the details for my paper. So I'm just going to try to work through this week's articles-some parts I understood, but some parts I did not.
Chen and Latour both draw attention to the way inanimate objects or phenomena that seems abstract actually have a kind of agency (or animacy) that is usually overlooked. Latour's actor network theory operates on the redistribution of action, therefore including objects or whatever that can be a part of this process. His space shuttle example demonstrates how the action of flying, and the Columbia's explosion, is an action that redistributes or reverberates across a series of technical parts, NASA departments, and bureaucracies. All of these independent actors came together as a network to all contribute to this one action, which is actually smaller than the sum of its parts, since these actors also all exist independently with actions of their own. NASA as a whole is already bigger than the Columbia. However, I'm not really sure what Latour means when he says "universality is fully localizable" (8). He emphasizes that it's the work that's being foregrounded and not the net itself...is it because you can see the whole of the object from the point of any actor? Is that why digitality is an increase in network materiality? When we look at the satellite, which is just one actor, we know that it is there for the purpose of sending the signal, therefore enabling our web surfing?
Chen traces the phenomena of toxicity through several network-like relations, showing how narratives and images of toxicity cross and tangle and reverberate across sexual and racial contexts. As the toxicity of lead gets animated as a danger to children, Chen notes that it presents a danger simultaneously to the nation and to the individual home unit, stretched between how the nation and the home unit are connected through things like public safety policies and economics. Embodied in symbol of the white boy licking a toxic Thomas the Train, lead toxicity then exposes an inverse relationship between America and China, one that covers up a previous history. Chinese labor and materials are now targeted as a danger to the national body where Chinese labor was once integral to it, since the U.S. was able to consolidate itself as a totality through their exploitation on the railroad lines. Like Latour, Chen exposes the interconnectedness of nonhuman actors: the lead, the toy, the news story, and the symbol of lead's danger. Then when interweaved with the obscuration of the disproportionately high lead poisoning rates in neighborhoods of color, toxicity then becomes integral in forming a racialized image of the black child since the white child needs to be saved from the debilitating effects of lead, though those effects don't seem to affect the black child. The black child is seen as already suffering the effects of lead or identified as a location of poisoning so that their bodies become associated with the toxin itself. The toxin infects the white body through the act of licking and thus the whole campaign then can also be metaphorized as a fear of queerness as the debilitating effect is gained through the child licking a phallic shaped object. It's inappropriate relations that animates the illness, but the toxicity itself animates the idea that these kind of relations are inappropriate. However I lose the thread when we get the point where Chen talks about queer intoxication. How does the couch come into play?? Please explain.
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