Pores compose materials around us such as gypsum, clay, lead, concrete, whose strength and durability are paradoxically analyzed in their capacity to resist porosity, or contain. Anthropogenic engagements with pores hold this ambivalence–resisting to perceive pore as a passage into the world and reducing them to their instrumental capacity to hold and contain. Pores, such as stomata on leaves’ surfaces, sponges (both Phylum Porifera, an aquatic organism also known as sponges and cellulose sponges) or in a rainwater harvesting system, on the other hand, are passages that facilitate interaction and blur the perceived ontological boundaries of a material, enabling its flourishing. Here, pores entail the material’s interaction with the elementary and corporeal worlds that compose more-than-human ecologies. The ambivalent instrumentalization of the pore in the former and its generative capacity for interaction in the latter, compels the question, “how to witness pores?”
It is the latter capacity of the pore to blur perceived ontological boundaries that scholars draw upon, metaphorically, to question the artificial divides between human and non-human, the technical from the social and moral, the skin and the external world (Ahmad and Stacey 2001; Haraway 1990, 61). They press on how porosity opens up the scientific and the technical to the social world (Brosnan and Michael 2014), differentiated by race, gender, indigeneity and more. Such witnessings treat porosity as conceptual metaphor, push for an interactionist ontology that holds complexities of the material-semiotic world (Tuana 2008) and call for exploring the “uneven relations of porosity to exposure” (Murphy 2017). In witnessing pore, such accounts tap onto the metaphorical value of porousness to understand the material world “ as radically porous” (Clarke 2019) and generate possibilities of closer engagement with porosity.
This series extends such inquiries to initiate ways that reconcile pore as metaphor with pore as material as, the “material world is fluid and porous, and steeped in the immaterial” (Ford 2020, 19). It asks those invested in the utilitarian approaches to the pore–that construct porosity in its ability to hold, to contain, to absorb–to instead witness the ways pores make up the surrounding worlds. Here, materials are not merely differentiated into highly porous and more solid ones. Even the solid structures consist of materials whose definitions of solidity are a function of their porosity and structural makeup, say, tightly packed with less porosity. Witnessing materials as porous, rather than in the terms of solidity, undermines (the faith in) ‘impermeable’ physical and social structures, and hence acknowledges and warrants materials’ capacity to interact with the external world and at times, their tendency to collapse. Such witnessing alters calculations that pledge infallibility of a material’s capacity to hold and contain, say, toxic industrial effluents.
Abraded gravel on an agricultural land due to constant exposure to contaminated water with high alkaline and uranium concentration near Tummalapalle Uranium Mine’s tailing pond. A farmer walking across the land as a drop of the contaminated water trickles from a drip hole on the drip irrigation pipe. Image captured in October 2021 by author.
Pores make up the material world around us and through capillaries, affect permeability, tortuosity and viscosity and vice versa. Pores become elemental portals–they enable elemental transference across materials for example, heat conduction in ceramic burners, water through gravel/clay and the air that occupies their void space (Shostak as cited in Alaimo, 2010, 107). Pores are the passages through which traces of the Anthropocene find their ways to settle on/in the corporeal and the planetary through the elemental. Thereby pores also integral to the biogeomorphological choreographies between plant-human-soil that shape landscapes through more-than-human interactions and care (Mathieu 2022); pores affect/alter structural or even landscape stability. This also renders pores as powerful tools in making necropolitical calculations on when, where, through whom and into whose world elements are let to flow through, in the capillaries formed through pore’s socio-material compositions.
In witnessing pore, attention simultaneously shifts to that (toxins, information and knowledge) which flows between and through the pore and thereby their viscosity. Attending to the capillaries formed between interparticle and intraparticle pores and the viscous flow through them is then simultaneously attending to capillaries of power. The blog series is an effort to see the world through (and as composed of) pores, and seek objects that convey the compulsive porosity of worlds and the socio-material flow through such pores as compulsory.
Witnessing (the world through) pores is not an assertion of complete fluidity in interaction, as Nancy Tuana (2008) puts it, but a recognition of the viscosity of knowledge making process that carries social, political and cultural stories in them. To attend to knowledge production during the deeply interactionist planetary crisis, it asks, “what happens to the social worlds that flow through the pore and inversely, to the pore as the social worlds flow through them in an absorptive and resistant manner? How do they come to compose one another? In such compositions, what sociological understandings of the world are altered and questioned such as, purity/pollution, natural/cultural, technical/social, objective/subjective?’ The resistive capacities of pore to transport and that which is transported become matters of concern that animate technoscientific controversies.
This blog series emerges from porous interventions at the intersections of environmental humanities and science and technology studies whereby scientized objects are opened to the world they animate through ethnographic engagements. The objects that compose the series include “The Crawford Core” (by Allie E.S. Wist), “Bentonite clay of Tummalapalle Uranium Mine and Mill’s tailing pond” (by Misria Shaik Ali), “Delhi’s Polluted Air”(by Vasundhara Bhojvaid) and one other porous object that adds meaning to the engagement of the blog series. The posts in the series discuss cases where pore, porosity, permeability and viscosity animate technoscientific controversies, allowing for what is transported, to matter. In such a way, the series unravels the materiality of thus far metaphorical “pore” to witness a world composed of pores and as porous, and the tortuous and viscous flow through them.
Notes
[1] Aquatic organisms also known as sponges.
References
Ahmed, Sara and Jackie Stacey. 2001. Thinking through the Skin. London: Routledge.
Alaimo, Stacey. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Brosnan, Caragh & Mike Michael. 2014. “Enacting the ‘Neuro’ in Practice: Translational Research, Adhesion and the Promise of Porosity.” Social Studies of Science 44(5): 680-700. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312714534333
Clarke, Jennifer. 2019. “Porosity and Protection.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, April 25. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/porosity-and-protection
Haraway, Donna. 2016. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” In Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ford, Andrea Lilly. 2020. “Purity is Not the Point: Chemical Toxicity, Childbearing, and Consumer Politics as Care.” Catalyst 6(1): 1-19.
Mathews, Andrew S. 2022. Trees Are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Create Landscapes. Yale University Press,. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2vvsx03.
Tuana, Nancy. 2008. “Viscous Porosity: On Witnessing Katrina.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
