Exposed On the InsideAuthor(s): Michelle MurphySource: Log, No. 10 (Summer/Fall 2007), pp. 109-114Published by: Anyone CorporationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41765168 .

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Michelle Murphy

Exposed

On the Inside

The good life happens on the inside. For the privileged citi- zen, city dweller, suburbanite, transnational cosmopolitan, or edge city inhabitant, the dramas and banalities of the

everyday occur within the confines of the built environ- ment. The walls of this inside carve out homes, malls, air-

ports, offices, factories, and hospitals, trimming away the back alleys, abandoned lots, and dumps, but also tenements and slums in the process. Boxed in by vinyl siding, brick, glass, or concrete blocks, the inside sets the milieu of living: to cocoon, take care of kids, work on relationships, create, clean, sleep, groom, tune in to media, tune out the outside.

Privileged lives unfurl in the individualized dramas of an inside filled with sparkling commodities, from carpet to cof- fee, from exquisitely designed knobs to rapidly obsolete dis-

posable electronics. The inside is even made mobile. Sealed behind shatterproof windshields, framed in fiberglass and steel, locked behind doors with a soft click, lives made mobile

navigate the grid: secured in cars, crushed on the subway, stowed on a plane. The inside is a grid of late-capitalist cul- ture cleaving the sheltered from the exposed.

Inside is a controlled space. It is "conditioned": heated in the North and cooled in the South. For those fully on the inside, sweat is so rare it has to be conjured with exercise

regimes. The inside demarcates those who are cut off from

high winds, rising waters, biting cold, or frying heat, and those left vulnerable to the predictable violence of climate. The inside is electrified and illuminated day and night. Cables, pipes, wires, and drains connect the bright and

buzzing inside with distant dams that have submerged forests, farms, and villages, or with a nuclear reactor's local and long-term glows, or with dusty mines and the fibrous

lungs they foster. The shiny equilibrium of the inside is maintained with much work and a plethora of chemicals. The inside is often "freshened" by fragrant chemicals and

petroleum-based perfumes. It is often carpeted, held together with adhesives, installed to evolve microscopic organic worlds of mites and microbes harvested with vacuums. The walls are foam-filled, slathered, and sealed. Inside, time is measured in minutes and space by the square foot. Home

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security systems, video cameras, motion detectors, clocks, daily planners, the watchful eyes of neighbors - all work to

keep time and space under surveillance. This belongs here and now, not there and then. The management and segmen- tation of the inside constrains lives both physically and

socially, creating myriad segregations both subtle and overt: toilets are marked "men" and "women"; there are no home- less people in the mall. The inside, as a demarcation of full

citizenship, as well as of mobile cosmopolitanism, contains lives to be fostered, to be fulfilled, to be invested in, splitting off lives that are left to wait or to die, lives that are left at risk and endangered, lives exposed to disaster, to toxic

plumes purposely released here and not there, to poisons in

exchange for wages, to food that does not nourish. The inside, as a glorious aggregate of refined commodity forms, retracts itself from the not-fully citizen. To be trapped out- side is to be outcast: homeless, loiterer, beggar, aimless

teenager, migrant, street walker. Do not trespass. To pay for the privilege of the inside - for its shelter,

space, and security - necessitates working to live, and often its converse, living to work. Inside is where money is made and spent, where swarms of accumulation are safe for the woman shopper. Inside, women of middle management min-

gle with men amongst their cubicles, cultivating a corporate culture. The feminized grunt workers of the information

economy, connected by telecommunications instead of walls, are out of sight, at a distance, located anywhere, in an inside elsewhere, the alienating spaces of data processing and elec- tronic assembly lines. Surrounding the glittering boxes of the information economy are the asphalt parking lots in which the car is allotted more space than the typical worker. Living to work, working to live, those inside increasingly trade in the commodification and control of data and emotions, super- ficially holding little resemblance to the manual, body- work of industrial labor. Inside the glass box, a laboring body might be restricted to an assigned cubicle, repetitively following the same trajectory of movements: crane neck, swivel, fingers on

keyboard, turn page, answer phone, smile, swivel. After- hours and out of sight, segregated, the office is reinhabited

by other women and men who spray, wipe, straighten, and scrub, keeping the mess at bay. The exact course taken inside is often highly individuated within this series of repetitions. From my home to my car to my designated cubicle, one

space bleeds into another, piles up on another. The grids and boxes pile up. A cacophony of advertise-

ments promotes new and improved items to add to the inside.

no

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Advertisement for LaRoche Air Systems; Chris Carlson, Healthy Reactions to Work, 1981.

Todays accoutrement is made desirable, while yesterday's becomes harmful, so that potential dangers lurk around every turn of the clock. The abundance and overlap of insides, the future landfill of consumer products to decorate, deodorize, and individualize our insides, and the bombardment of information calling and cursing swirl together, pulling apart the inside. Individual paths ride and flounder on the waves of noise and affluence. The confusion of this inside is not just a concrete jungle but a chemical soup - the urban "nature" of the 21st century. The chaos of the built environ- ment spawns unforeseen consequences. Citizen bodies are assaulted with detritus and effluent, particulate and molecu- lar dangers. Doorknobs pass bacteria and microbes uninten- tionally circulate from one person to another. Dust mites consume the skin that flakes off our bodies. Their excreta form the miasma of the inside, irritating lungs, requiring the inhaling or ingesting of further chemicals, this time pro- vided by the pharmaceutical industry. The seemingly solid planes of wall, floor, ceiling, and furniture exhale exhaust. A layer of pesticide is repeatedly sprayed to suppress the ver- min that make a home on the inside. The chemical fogs and toxic waste of factories and utility companies huddled at the outskirts of urban grids seep in unannounced through plumbing, or are happily carried in on brightly colored fruits. All around, objects emit strange smells, or worse, odorless molecules, which are breathed, swallowed, or penetrate the skin. Yet, in delimited spaces, on higher ground, the efflu- ence of affluence is seemingly contained. The inside is so often pleasant.

As a physical cut and container, the thickened yet porous wall that maps the inside designates, on one face, those who are supposed to be safe, whose exposure is to be prevented, ill

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those who are called upon to shop in the name of national

security, those lives to be rescued at exorbitant cost; on the other face, those lives for whom safety, prevention, and con-

sumption are retracted. In the commodification of life, which has been woven into the state as much as into the

everyday, citizenship itself becomes a matter of life. Biocitizens are enjoined to ruthlessly attend to the problem of safe living. Protecting the value of life calibrates the

promises of citizenship that are accessed and withheld in late

capitalism. For the privileged biocitizen, this politics of life can take the form of obsessive consumptive micromanage- ment: buying organic, installing bamboo cabinets, running for a cure. For those whose lives are calculated as irrelevant, or even threatening to a citizenship defined by the capacity to expand the accumulation of an inside, which is itself understood as a vibrant and vicious economic engine, the terms of biocitizenship have become politicized. Toxic expo- sure, mass disaster, and dispossession spawn bucket brigades to capture emissions released in the cover of night, or baby teeth collections that chart the spread of radiation exposure, or demands that the pharmaceutical industry make drugs amenable to impoverished suffering, or the politicization of breast milk contaminated by the dumping of PCBs, or mas- sive protests that render legible the precarious lives of those denied citizenship.

Even with all of the protections of biocitizenship, even with all of the security measures against infinitesimal dan-

gers, even with safety belts and air bags, even with American doctors descending on rural sites in Vietnam to rearrange homes, habits, and livelihoods in the name of potential emerging viruses, even with wars fought in the name of

hunting out unexpected threats to the lucky few, health nonetheless imposes itself into the quotidian experience of

privileged life. Bodies assert themselves, such that health becomes another unpredictable element that is never absent. Bodies cramp at sitting still and ache from repetition, even if only at a keyboard. Bodies itch and break out in hives from microscopic dusts and particles. Lungs cough, tumors

grow, skin prickles, eyes burn, noses run, heads ache, sinuses

congest, temperatures rise, hearts race, addictions call, adrenaline pulses, pounds accumulate, hormones rage, panic simmers, thoughts speed or come to a halt. The inside pro- vokes a common condition called "stressed out." Feeling pressure, tension, and strain, pressed upon by the inside, even the most privileged bodies react with high blood pres- sure, ulcerated stomachs, migraine headaches, allergies, or

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cancers. Endless combinations of symptoms are possible. Such symptoms can be nebulous and vague both in their

qualities and their cause. Fuzzy feelings of being depressed, fatigued, or run-down are grafted to daily routines. The

variety of possible symptoms and possible causes is mind-

boggling. Television newscasts and magazines keep biociti- zens abreast of the latest symptoms and treatments. The abundance of information - sound bites, articles, and adver- tisements - feeds anxieties. While some individuals endure their bodies in silence and ignore its revolts, others are cap- tured by them.

Living on the endless inside among fostered biocitizens, the successfully managed body becomes a praised and valued

commodity. The converse is also true: a body that smells or leaks, which exceeds the micromanagement norms, is dis-

paraged, hidden, even surgically altered. The mass-culture tools for the incessant care of the body are easily found in the banal site of the drugstore. The trade in over-the-counter (OTC) medicines circulates in the billions of dollars, bypass- ing the doctor. There is profit to be made out of life. Everyone knows that the doctor is unable to cure the common cold or ease chronic malaise, but drugs can get the bio-citizen

through the day and move dollars. "The future of the health care business," according to the president of McNeil Con- sumer Products, part of Johnson & Johnson, "is consumer self-medication." Even prescription medicines are marketed

directly to the biocitizen, another part of the do-it-yourself culture. Consumers diagnose themselves and purchase accordingly. Self-medication is inventively combined with other modes of coping: prayer, therapy, exercise, and illegal drugs, or exclusive spas and expensive elixirs for the "well- healed." Although labeled with tiny, hard-to-read directions and warnings, it is not uncommon to experiment with OTCs, creating cocktails and tinkering with regimes. Yivarin keeps you alert, Sominex helps you sleep. Flu and cold medications come in daytime nondrowsy formulas for work and nighttime formulas for home. Medications keep people productive. "No one has time to be sick, but when you are. . . Halls, we're going to work." Dimetane helps you "avoid a bad day at the office." For the pain of work, "Motrin is spoken here." In a medicated nation, ask your doctor for a prescription.

Body micromanagement is a dangerous enterprise that can turn obsessive and paranoid. Listening carefully for every gurgle and crackle, securing against the highly unlikely becomes a personal obsession pointed inward. Is there some-

11?

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Michelle Murphy is an associate PROFESSOR IN THE HlSTORY Department and the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. She is THE AUTHOR OF SlCK BUILDING Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience , and Women Workers.

thing wrong? And, if so, what? Thermometers, insulin meters, ovulation sticks, or online quizzes might help. It is

easy for doubt to invade. Is this malaise from home or work? It is hard to separate the two: family life, that is, home work, compounds with and amplifies the bodily effects of paid work. Where does work end? Where does the inside become the outside? Such elisions are often unspeakable, insidious, and creeping. Unruly privileged bodies are rejoined to the

dispossessions that make the outside. The materials, prod- ucts, and forces which assemble to form the inside are not

fully contained there, just as the fantasy of a fully protectable biocitizenship is never realizable. The physical accumulations that make up the inside are conjured in immense investments that stretch out along commodity chains to factories in Dhaka, or along the petroleum corridor to Cancer Alley in Louisiana, or along agribusiness itineraries to the lives of

migrant laborers in California's Central Valley. In fact, the closer the inside is examined, the more tangled with disin- vestments, the more latent with uncertainty, the more inter- connected and deadly it becomes. Look closely and the inside dissolves into contingencies just at the moment it is rein- forced.

The privileged, cosmopolitan inside, then, is about both

expulsion and capture. Not only is the luxury of the inside

physically crafted by dispossession elsewhere (and sometimes even an elsewhere close by), not only has the production of this inside been generative of enormous alterations to the entire planet, with pollution clouds as large as countries and oceans stripped of life while their levels rise in climatic shifts, not only has this privileged built environment been assembled out of new chemicals that have repopulated the molecular atmosphere and permeated the micrological crevices of living-being, but also the unruly effects of this containment - its exposures of both affluence and abandon- ment, of investment and withdrawal - have themselves also become grist for reconstructing the inside and managing biocitizenship. Sickness needs drugs, destruction requires rebuilding, wastelands provoke development. Exposure and the inside carved in endless embrace.

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