Synthetic Forms

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

Synthesis names a process of forging a radically new composite from preexisting units; it's a method for creating emergent states, and a figure of materiality that scrambles distinctions between nature and culture. This panel analyzes the aesthetic and political configurations that the concept of the synthetic has produced over the past century. We examine how synthetic materials-from perfumes and dyes to ceramics and plastics-have participated in the construction of racial and gendered embodiment, and how artists have registered these synthetic bodies in their work. Over the course of four papers, the panel will establish synthesis as a central technique in social and political world-making, one borne out of modernism yet still operative today.

Synthesis originated in the chemical revolution of the nineteenth century, when chemists first combined molecules in ways that did not exist in nature, and as such it has been associated with abstraction and artifice. Yet while it has figured in histories of science, it has been overlooked in the humanities, despite being a source of formal experimentation. Our panel session remediates this lacuna by asking how writers transformed synthesis from a strictly scientific process into both a style - invested in abstraction and the play of surfaces - and a conceptual apparatus for producing emergent wholes. We ask: how might the synthetic alter our understanding of semiotics, nature, race, and even life itself? If synthesis provides a framework for thinking of organic matter as shot through with human mediation, how might aesthetic activity itself be a type of synthesis, a remaking of the world at the interface of the social and the material? Rather than propose a single answer, we aim to interrogate the varieties of synthesis that literary imagining initiates and instantiates.

Recent work in cultural studies has turned to the history of synthesis to examine twentieth-century imbrications of art, science, and politics-yet none has addressed how the synthetic has functioned in America. As such, this panel builds on interdisciplinary works such as Esther Leslie's Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art, and the Chemical Industry (2005), Michael Taussig's What Color Is the Sacred? (2009), and Eli Rubin's Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (2012) but takes the scholarship in new directions by focusing on how the synthetic revolution unfolded within American socio- and eco-technological spaces. This geopolitical framework leads us to foreground different concerns, including the politics of mediation and the aesthetics of social legibility.

Key to our investigations is the way that the modern sensorium was imagined, figured, and constructed through an aesthetic engagement with synthetics. Through engagements with texture, color, and smell, we provide an account of embodied subjectivity that attunes us to the complex interplay of material and immaterial qualities that comprise the biopolitical realities of race and gender. Altogether, the papers in this panel draw on new materialism, feminist science studies, black studies, and environmental humanities to reveal how the chemical volatility that synthesis names can animate our understandings of politically volatile states, both past and present.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Justine Murison, University of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign

Individual Presentations

• Yellow Femme, Synthetic Forms - Anne A Cheng, Princeton University

• Organic and Sexual Chemistry - Erica Fretwell, SUNY at Albany

• Synthesis and Conviviality in Olfactory Art - Hsuan Hsu, University of California-Davis

Comment

• Justine Murison, University of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign