Massive Alienation and the Secrets of the Earth: Olfactory Resistance for Ohio

The world beneath our feet keeps its secrets very well. Capital knows that their lucrative mysteries hide in the caverns and crevices of the geologic. Industrialists play in that metallic underground space that the masses are commonly prevented from ever encountering. The opaque earth keeps the dirty lies of profit, flowing in entombed pipes, hauled by burdened bodies with blackened lungs, benefiting financial evil in marbled halls and whitewashed homes thousands of miles away. The superstructure knows that the masses cannot resist what they cannot perceive, as modern finance capitalism uses the discursive regime to destroy perceptions of that which degrades the earth, hiding the patterns of profit in the clandestine subterranean, as an ancient and menacing devil.

There is currently an ecological disaster occurring in Ohio. It has, for once, let the masses see the sins above that capital hides in the dark and dense earth. And, so, as we see the black clouds and dying fauna, taste the tainted water gradually moving downstream, feel the acidic rain as it spreads, and smell the sweet odors of the changing air of chemical spill and clouded runoff, we must not forget to realize those perceptions into praxis. Capital’s misdeeds are being released, as chemical reactions from railroad spill-off are produced in the air, land, and water. The more those failings of capitalism are exposed, the less profit will come, and major media outlets produce a new opaqueness, developing once again into the keepers of capital’s darkest ecological secrets.

Percepticide in the defense of profit swells when pollution is seen and heard and felt and tasted and smelled. The opaque earth has let out a secret in Ohio. Mass media is working on keeping that secret hidden, preserving the absurd profits of the Covid-19 years as they surge to the finely bedecked of corner offices, keeping K Street bankrolled and the halls of Congress ornamentally embellished. Rather than accept the greenwashing of our sensoriums in these moments, we must observe through our targeted senses, as only through keeping our sensations and emotions focused on these burning indiscretions can we root out their dominance in modern markets.

The earth is reacting to what has been spilled, as acid rain falls. The earth is showing us again the coming age of chemical and physical warming, as tainted water flows. We must listen and sense, we must change, we must stop accepting percepticide from greenwashed capital that compensates bureaucrats to let the corruption of the earth persist and accelerate.

Preventing the majority of the population from understanding the level of environmental threat in the coal and chemical regions of the United States and faced by the masses in spaces where similar chemicals are shipped has always been a necessary move for capital, which fought wars against coal miners, stifled labor unions with violence and threats, and always paid off leadership in diverse local, state, and federal offices. The control of messaging, of greenwashing the industrial sins of modernity through discourse, is a more recent tactic that coincides with the turn towards desensitization and obfuscation in this accelerationist phase of late capitalism and as part of increasingly digital spaces.

Capitalism has always been alien to humanity. It worked for centuries to colonize the body with viral fetishes throughout the superstructure, shifting natural perceptions into abstractions of organic existence, alienating the body from its productive labor and reifying value in false forms. Increasingly unable to perceive threats, the masses continue to be lost in the throes of accelerating percepticide, as capital more quickly burns away our sensory worlds in favor of a blinding march into the hastening mainframe. The earth is warning us to pay attention in Ohio, it is violently reacting to vinyl chloride, sugary smells filling miasmic space, showing us once again the revolting secrets of petroleum and its valuable byproducts.

We have to perceive the evil in order to understand the sin. The smell of sweet airs wafting from a poorly regulated railroad spill shows again the corporatist goals of neoliberal dominance in the age of obtuse finance capital. In this case, capitalism accelerated too rapidly; its chemical trains moved too swiftly in this moment, a spillage of much more than chemicals has arrived. Do not let this instant of clarity pass without critical perception, do not let the violence being done to the earth be greenwashed away, do not let our perceptions of this ecological violence be again demolished by a superstructure promoting a false base of financial manipulators.

We can be sure as hell now that the time is out of joint, with syrupy smells floating in blackened skies and the limiting of public outcry to these patterns of corporate malfeasance and government complicity. The state of exception that began on 9/11 for American populations has only accelerated into this new age of massive financial exploitation and ecological crimes that go increasingly undetected, as in the Tar Sands, off the Gulf Coast, or in the waters of Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi. There is currently no substantial concept of a potential world outside of this state of exception, there is rarely any imagined alternative that retains validity as a possibility for constructive worlding against or beyond these devastating structures of capitalism. In this state of exception, capital aggressively colonizes the body, and the senses, more now than ever before. 

We walk, with that whimper and not a bang, into the desensitized mainframe because of a sense of constant fear cultivated within the superstructure. We choose to trek on this oil-slickened march, with the death drive now tied to the sensorium, killing off our perceptual apparatuses while accepting the motherboard as a new fetishized and prosthetic God, giving up our observations of the violence occurring against the earth in an absurd attempt at earning digital immortality. Each new moment within this state of exception we offer up more of our human perceptions, which have, for time immemorial, informed the body how to perceive threats.

We provide our sentient bodies and their ability to comprehend the evils of capitalism to the false prophets of Silicon Valley, as the skies darken. We offer these digital administrators a new social contract, as we ask the motherboard for governmental forms of security in exchange for our very bodies, and algorithmic capitalism gratefully signs that contract, becoming the exclusive supervisor of the modern age. The precariat grows in this stage of late capitalism, the proletarian power deteriorates, and there is no resistance that remains as the body does not withstand its own erasure. What this spill in Ohio shows, what the earth reacting to this horrid leak provides, is that there are moments when the secrets of capitalism flood out to be perceived by the masses. Do not let these moments pass by without praxis, without critique. The ancient senses hold the keys to resistance.

Image credits: Ohio. By David H. Burr. Published By J.H. Matheer & Co. Hartford. 1846. Entered ... 1833 by J.H. Colton & Co. ... New York. Engraved & Printed by S. Stiles & Co.