Air Quality Index as the Stuff of the Political

ABSTRACT

Thinking through the etymological roots of technology and ecology, a curious tension arises. ‘Tech’ connotes making or fabrication, and thus resonates with the essential features of textuality. ‘Eco’ connotes home, property and dwelling, which necessarily entails connections, distribution, partition, as well as the demarcation of an inside from an outside. Technoecologies are thus simultaneously writing and limiting, opening up and closing. The focus of this article is on Chinese social media discussions about the ways in which Air Quality Index (AQI) scores are measured and felt bodily. It interrogates the ‘how’ of the relationality between AQI and bodily practices of measurement. The aim of the article is twofold. First, it rethinks air quality measurement in corporeal terms, and asks about the nature of corporeality and its relation with the environment. Second, in suggesting AQI as technoecologies as bodies that number, it asks for a reconsideration of the political of environmental politics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Xin Liu is a post-doctoral researcher at Åbo Akademi University in Finland and a guest researcher at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Her research examines the question of race from feminist poststructuralist, new materialist and postcolonial perspectives and currently focuses on the political economy through which the phenomenon of climate change becomes racialised and realised. Her current research project is entitled, ‘People of Smog: How Climate Change Comes to Matter’. She teaches research methodologies, feminist sciences studies and new materialisms.

Notes

1. The ways in which the pollutants become measured as individual entities in modelling and monitoring practices performed in monitor stations or laboratories are not investigated in this article. This is due to the limited space of the article, as well as its focus on social media discussions. The ways in which atmospheric relations are modelled are discussed in Garnett’s ethnographic study. For example, as Garnett observes, ‘pollutants … [are] considered to be relational and in process … and referred to by the modellers as relations in the atmosphere, for example, as “nitrogen and sulphur deposition” or “surface ozone”’ (2016, 7). Importantly, as Garnett observes, on the one hand, modelling (simulation) process shapes how air pollution is configured; on the other hand, ‘which simulations to run is dependent on the pollutants considered as a health risk and therefore of interest to the policy maker’ (2016, 7).

2. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs313/en/, last accessed 24.11.2016.

3. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs313/en/, last accessed 24.11.2016.

4. Choy (2012) writes about Air Pollution Index (API) in Hong Kong. There seems to be a slight difference between the API (at least the model studied by Choy) and the AQI in terms of what is being measured. The API that Choy studies measures the following pollutants: ‘sulfur dioxide (SO₂), carbon monoxide (co), nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), and respirable suspended particulate (RSP)’ (2012, 144).

5. As Garnett (2016) makes clear,

[z]ero is a term used to denote a baseline from which a measurement can be made, to construct an ‘unmediated setting’. If the baseline is not zero, then the instrument is drifting by the difference between the measurement taken and zero. Drift is, then, a measurement too, and is a technique that accounts for the margin of error in a measurement. (2016, 4)

6. This is the direct translation. ‘奶奶的’ is a swearing phrase, which could be translated as ‘jesus’ in English.

7. The Chinese phrase ‘迷茫的’ also has the connotation of being confused and lost. In other words, it is not simply describing the smogginess of the air, but also an affective disorientation that resonates with the visual perception and corporeal sensation of smog. I use the word ‘muddled’ as it captures the visual, corporeal and affective dimensions.

8. The Chinese term ‘衙门’ connotes the institutions in ancient China, and the places where they are located. It was also used to indicate the gate to the palace in Tang dynasty. Here, it is used to mock the bureaucracy of the Environmental Protection Department.

9. The term ‘Celestial Empire’ was a name that refers to China that underscores its status as the political, economic and cultural centre of the world. And it was defined against the ‘four barbarians’ that bordering ancient China. The term has become a trendy word on Chinese social media. In some cases, it expresses a sense of nationalism; whereas in other cases, it is used to mock the corrupted Chinese bureaucracies. The usage in this post could be read as following the latter.

10. http://www.dw.com/en/how-smog-is-killing-thousands-daily-in-china/a-18653814, last accessed 10.06.2016.

11. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world/asia/study-links-polluted-air-in-china-to-1-6-million-deaths-a-year.html, last accessed 10.06.2016.

12. In many ways, Derrida’s theorisation of ‘originary supplementarity’ could be through the question of translation as a substitution. As Derrida clarifies,

[l]et us first note that this concept of originary supplementarity not only implies the non-fullness of presence (or in Husserl’s language, the non-fulfillment of an intuition), it also designates this function of substitutive supplementing in general, the structure of ‘in the place of’ (für etwas) that belongs to every sign in general … What we would like finally to start thinking about is the fact that the for-itself of self-presence (für-sich), traditionally determined in its dative dimension as phenomenological, reflective, or pre-reflective autodonation, arises in the movement of supplementarity as originary substitution. (2011, 75)

13. The heating system in the Northern part of China that sustains coal consumption has often been considered as one of the major causes of smog in Beijing.

14. My reading here also resonates with Timothy Morton’s critique of ‘cozy ecological thinking’ (2007, 177).