Global Exhaust, A Body

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“Flee, push aside fellow commuters, cabbies, strangers… Go under. A Burger King is destroyed. Water rises.”

-Andrew Durbin, MacArthur Park

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Nov. 28, 1939. Sauget, IL — “Black Tuesday.” The Cahokia Power Plant sits on the banks of the Mississippi River emitting a steady sheet of dark grey from six brick smokestacks. Built by the Union Electric and Power Company in 1928, the Cahokia Power Plant provided power for the entire city of St. Louis. Today it is situated stagnant on the Mississippi, providing a symbolic border between Missouri and neighboring Illinois. During a temperature inversion on November 28, the smoke, powder, dust, fumes emitted by area coal processing plants are trapped close to the St. Louis earth which results in a near total blackout. This repeats frequently in the subsequent days and weeks, daylight unable to permeate the dense St. Louis air.

The coal burnt by Cahokia Power Plant was soft, rich in sulfur, low-grade, and taken from strip mines in Freeburg, Illinois also owned by the the Union Electric and Power Company. This material was subsequently transported 20 miles to Sauget, then provided power to the city across the river. Upon its initial construction, the Cahokia Power Plant was the largest such structure between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean. The building supports a narrative of St. Louis development and burgeoning industry: the smokestacks, 265 feet tall, provide the city a reflection of its economic aspirations and simultaneous environmental ruin. Coal is taken from the Earth, burned, and then spat back down from six ambivalent, unceasing mouths.

Black Tuesday becomes an extended Jeremiah: the cloud of ash descends upon St. Louis and acts as a momentary revelation. After decades of worsening air quality and the constant escalation of industry, St. Louis is presented with a divine event to supposedly alter their historical path. With telos in hand, citizens seize upon Black Tuesday, newly chosen as Day Zero. Clean air regulations are proposed. Three decades later, the Cahokia Power Plant ceases to emit coal particles and onwards and onwards and so forth into the present…

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Proposed by Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, the Anthropocene is the next geologic stage in Earth’s history, where humans irreparably alter the planet’s climate system, natural landscape, and conditions to support living organisms. In the Anthropocene, Earth heads towards a state of ruin. Natural catastrophe and weather-based events increase in magnitude and frequency, a mass extinction approached in small increments.

The ensuing debate about Earth’s purported entrance into a new geological stage covers up a lived reality: the Anthropocene as symbol. The image of the Anthropocene is endlessly multiplied. It is broadcast live over television, transmitted through photographs in a constant loop. Catastrophe is the Anthropocene’s visual hallmark: the weather amplifies latent fears, desires, and paranoias that compound to resemble the shape of the divine, a reassertion or overturning, punishment progressive or reactionary, essential distraction from political hierarchy or a [dis]embodiment of tyrannical force, unassailable, without reason. This Anthropocene is without theoretical definition beyond this thesis projected by the beholder.

The theoretical efficacy of the Anthropocene depends on its reclamation as a Marxist project. The idea of the Anthropocene situates past geological stages as preceding the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Rapid technological advancements not only resulted in the acceleration of class-based struggle and the mass globalization of capital, but directly contributed to the entrance of a new geologic era. The ongoing catastrophes of the Anthropocene echo through the base, structure, and superstructure, and reveal ongoing class struggle perpetually suppressed by governmental and corporate formations. To this end, the Anthropocene in its multiplicity must be re-evaluated as an extension of Marxist thought rooted in analysis of the epoch’s impact on a globalized modern proletariat.

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The opening vignette of Andrew Durbin’s 2017 novel MacArthur Park explores the media representation of the anthropocenic event and its close resemblance to the disaster film. Through this lens the Anthropocene, in its countless definitions, becomes visible as distended metaphor. Sheltered in his boss’s Greenwich Village apartment, Durbin, stoned and paranoid, outlines his culturally mediated response to Hurricane Sandy, fears predetermined by movie spectacles and sensationalist media coverage — “rows of Manhattan skyscrapers were suddenly imploding amid plumes of smoke swirling devilishly in the hurricane wind, end-of-days-like to a soundtrack of death wails,” (4). Durbin is conditioned to expect a mass disruption of societal order, but when he looks outside he sees “the Goldman Sachs building, a Tower of Gold buried in the velvety black of the storm, glow[ing] obscenely amid its shadowed neighbors, powered apparently by its own generators,” (5). Durbin’s Sandy is more akin to Roland Emmerich’s 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow, movie frames affixing onto a public imagining of the storm.

After the storm passes, the slightly altered city becomes a canvas for Durbin’s expectations. “The first gray light of this new world, which was probably the same world” echoes “a scene from a film I hadn’t wanted to see let alone appear in,” (5, 6). In turn, the outside world inflates the destruction with an ambivalent shrug, imposing a moral judgment onto the storm. New York becomes a site of reckoning, the city at long last punished for its history of transgression: “FWD: FWD: FWD: FWD: FWD: You won’t BELIEVE what Sandy did to NYC!!” (7).

In a 2013 article quoted by Durbin, Ed Holter of Artforum describes the merging of the disaster film with the neoliberal rhetoric of management. In contrast to disaster films that show a veritable overturning of societal structure, the modern crisis is instead closely managed to ensure a maintaining of order. Catastrophe and mass death are considered inevitable — instead, one is left to “fantasize about negotiating survival within a failing system rather than letting [one] hope to replace it with something better,” (8).

The anthropocenic event, in this respect, resembles the concept of the shock outlined by Naomi Klein. Following the shock, a governmental or corporate system briefly contracts, lets off accrued steam. In turn, the shock is inflicted onto a destabilized working class who must rely upon the existing structure for survival. The proletarian body politic is once again subsumed. Industry is quickly recreated to yield high profit margins. Capital readily survives the attack.

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Just north of the Cahokia Power Plant is a vast mound of spoil tip. Over eight times the size of the power plant itself, the mound consists of waste rock, excess shale created during the process of coal extraction. The mound gained mass through the beginning of the 1950s, and was maintained by Union Electric and Power Company as a coal washer. It is largely intact today, although flooded yearly by the Mississippi River, gradually eroding back into the surrounding Earth.

Littered alongside the Mississippi River, mounds contain a theoretical weight as sites of ongoing disturbance, piles of discarded processed material, often rich in elements and nutrients. These mounds act as a visualization of the energy expended in pursuit of the commodity, a constant suck of raw material and labor into a fleeting output, accompanied by growing accumulations of mineral chaff. They are perverse natural formations in former industrial zones, singular metaphors that only signify their own total futility. In spite of the continual movement of industrial technology, constant change, improvement, and alteration, the mound is a base reality left behind, like coal sinking down from the skies in a steady drip.

Unless toxic, the mound is an anti-crisis — it is the material monotony that accompanies the shock; it is an alien, unforeseen byproduct of the Anthropocene that stuns with its own dull reality. In the age of the missile, which moves with constant speed towards its target, the mound simply stares out and out and out into the abstract abyssal plain. After the death of the coal burning industry, a mass closure of outdated mines and industrial plants, an attempt at refurbishing diluted, polluted rivers, spaces rewilded, a washing of history’s slaughter bench, the mound resists the impulse of telos to believe that this is, in fact, leading anywhere besides the slow dissolve back into the Earth.

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Sources:

The sections that discuss Cahokia Power Plant and St. Louis are heavily indebted to Jesse Vogler and Matthew Fluharty’s The American Bottom project, which provided much of the information, as well as initial inspiration.

“Cahokia Power Plant.” The American Bottom. http://www.theamericanbottom.org/powerPlant.html

Colten, Jennifer and Vogler, Jesse. “Significant and Insignificant Mounds.” The American Bottom. http://www.theamericanbottom.org/itineraryTwo.html

Durbin, Andrew. MacArthur Park. New York: Nightboat Press, 2017.

O’Neil, Tim. “Nov. 28 1939: The day ‘Black Tuesday’ Rolled into St. Louis.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 28 Nov. 2016