Liboiron Max, Tironi Manuel, Calvillo Nerea
Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NL, Canada.
Instituto de Sociología and CIGIDEN, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
Soc Stud Sci. 2018 Jun;48(3):331-349. doi: 10.1177/0306312718783087.
Toxicity has become a ubiquitous, if uneven, condition. Toxicity can allow us to focus on how forms of life and their constituent relations, from the scale of cells to that of ways of life, are enabled, constrained and extinguished within broader power systems. Toxicity both disrupts existing orders and ways of life at some scales, while simultaneously enabling and maintaining ways of life at other scales. The articles in this special issue on toxic politics examine power relations and actions that have the potential for an otherwise. Yet, rather than focus on a politics that depends on the capture of social power via publics, charismatic images, shared epistemologies and controversy, we look to forms of slow, intimate activism based in ethics rather than achievement. One of the goals of this introduction and its special issue is to move concepts of toxicity away from fetishized and evidentiary regimes premised on wayward molecules behaving badly, so that toxicity can be understood in terms of reproductions of power and justice. The second goal is to move politics in a diversity of directions that can texture and expand concepts of agency and action in a permanently polluted world.
毒性已成为一种普遍存在的状况，尽管并不均衡。毒性能让我们关注生命形式及其构成关系，从细胞层面到生活方式层面，是如何在更广泛的权力系统中得以形成、受到限制以及走向消亡的。毒性在某些层面扰乱了现有的秩序和生活方式，同时在其他层面又促成并维系着生活方式。本期关于毒性政治的特刊中的文章探讨了有可能带来不同结果的权力关系和行动。然而，我们并非聚焦于那种依赖通过公众、具有魅力的形象、共享的认识论和争议来获取社会权力的政治，而是着眼于基于伦理而非成就的缓慢、亲密的行动主义形式。本引言及其特刊的目标之一是，将毒性概念从基于行为不良的任性分子的 fetishized 和证据制度中脱离出来，以便能从权力和正义的再生产角度来理解毒性。第二个目标是推动政治朝着多样化的方向发展，从而在一个永久污染的世界中丰富并拓展能动性和行动的概念。
