Given the reality that, at many different and enmeshed levels, the world today is in a state of continuous crisis, this prognosticating satire offers a unique solution to our own political and ecological emergencies by tapping into the infinite, sustainable, and renewable resource of socio-psychic trauma. Instability permeates all levels of our lives. Where once modernity may have sought to establish a sense of security, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has pointed out that this state of continuous disturbance and transformation has become an integral part of our world, where “uncertainty (has become) the only certainty”. Our time can be described as one of increasing precarity, producing subjects defined by their vulnerability, and threatening complex ecologies and systems. This vulnerability is unevenly distributed among and across different bodies and produced through overlapping conditions of power. With the unprecedented situation of COVID-19, environmental disaster, mass migrations, war, political strife, economic instability, the eruption of collective uprisings, and spontaneous events of destruction, it is clear that this constant turmoil and suffering will only increase. Extraordinary conditions have become the norm, and these events are regularly exploited by both state and capital to push through abhorrent policies and restructurings, what Naomi Klein refers to as neoliberalism’s “shock doctrine”. There is no such thing as a “natural” disaster today, every crisis is inextricably linked to the material and symbolic flows of global capitalism. Extraordinary circumstances like the pandemic or extreme weather events, amplify the normalized disasters in society, intensifying and exacerbating all those sources of stress, strain, conflict, repression, dissatisfaction, hatred, hardship, and precarity in the everyday. Our world has long fed on the trauma of others and exploited cruelty across scales and species, concentrating wealth by making humans and non-humans resources to be exploited. Contemporary globalized capitalism’s fundamental threat to life and livelihood for the planet generates a nervous energy, a sense of doom and frustration at a global scale. How can the constant bombardment of shock and emergency and suffering in our world be harnessed as a source of power and collective strength?

Yellow coal is the material residue of asymmetrical exchanges, those moments of exploitation and acrimonious survival that happen at every scale in our environment—those places where energy and matter are redistributed unequally, entities are harmed, systems are agitated, and pain is metabolized into resentment and rage. The people in Krzhizhanovsky’s tale decide as a global community to capitalize on their own alienation and disenfranchisement. This required a new thinking about how forces are exchanged in complex ecologies. This also involved designing and instigating negative interactions within their environment and manipulating the flows of people and things in a machinic system so as to generate as much negative energy as possible. Doorways were narrowed, crowds were kettled in tight spaces, and furniture were redesigned to produce discomfort. Surges of hatred, annoyance, and fear would drive pistons and gearwheels, everyone became both a battery and a charger, and reactions became intertwined with production. No longer was stress and trauma limited to the personal experience of the individual subject but were considered collective assets. The singular body, comprised of shifting relations and subject to affective forces, was treated as part of a decentralized assemblage of collective angst. At one point in the story, the factory owners realized that the workers’ hatred of their exploitation could itself be exploited for industrial purposes, and by laying the workers off, they could generate even more power from the waves of strikes and protests. This use of the workers’ precarity as a resource in and of itself is reminiscent of Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s astute observation that “Capitalism is based on the exploitation of physical energy, and semiocapitalism is grounded in the subjugation of the nervous energy of society.” By shifting to the production of immaterial and fragmented labor in a network, capitalism no longer needed workers, instead it just “needs cellular fractals of labor, underpaid, precarious, depersonalized.” Just as social media capitalizes on the surplus anxious energy of society by translating dissociated social interactions into value, yellow coal meta-mines the unequal dynamics of a system in crisis. Capitalism’s power and reach is so extensive and intensive that it has infiltrated all aspects of life, contaminating and degrading our networks of kinship, and reducing all relations to their meanest expression.  

In Krzhizhanovsky’s story, the bad vibes left over from abusive production processes and the trauma lingering in materials accrue as energetic detritus, a leftover force collecting in the background. Such a concept calls attention to the visible and invisible evidence of events within any environment and accentuates how objects get loaded by human and non-human interactions and disturbances. We’ve all come across spaces and objects that feel charged with trauma. Some vegetarians abstain from meat primarily because the negative energy from an accursed life and vicious death is seen to be left over in the animal’s flesh. Yellow coal can be regarded as the crystallization of these intensities, materializing the abuse accumulated across the entire supply chain, from molecular, biological, and geological processes, to acts of extraction, exploitation, distillation, exchange, and disposal. By charting these micro and macro power dynamics, one can see complex multispecies entanglements and can start to reconsider how society organizes production.

This influence of turbulence and discord across scales is reminiscent of Alexander Chizhevsky’s proposal that negatively charged ions are intertwined with mass human events. The Russian cosmobiologist argued that solar phenomena were intimately tied to the activities of living organisms. Not only do geomagnetic storms resulting from sunspot-related solar flares affect electricity, mass insect infestations, and the functioning of local and global systems, but these forces also have profound impacts on the human neuropsychological apparatus. Chizhevsky suggested that human history runs parallel to the eleven-year cycles of sunspot activity, where periods of dormancy and individualization alternate with moments of maximal activity and mass unification. Increased negative ionization in the atmosphere increases human excitability, therefore triggering humans en masse to act upon existing grievances and complaints through revolts, revolutions, and wars. Such forces can lead both to progressive uprisings and reactionary and irrational movements. Solar events produce monumental effects on an atomic level, charging electrons and vibrating all the bodies on earth, which combine and accumulate to catalyze a shared anxiety, a spirit of the masses. This theory suggests not only an intimate interchange at various magnitudes, but also gives counter-intuitive insights into how spontaneous uprisings emerge, spread, agglomerate, and develop into largescale collective movements. Considering the staggering rapidity that revolt spreads in periods of mass excitability, Chizhevsky agreed with the Roman historian Titus Livius that social conflicts are an “infectious plague.” 

In the last months, we have been reminded of the volatility of the masses in shared space. It is no coincidence that acts of anger and political rebellion have bubbled up during the Covid-19 pandemic. The rise of such an epidemiological crisis is the result of a corrupted agroeconomic system and was spread through the movement of people and goods across the world, contaminating sites where bodies come into contact, and amplifying the already precarious conditions of the populace. The unequal effects of the virus, from social distancing, border closures, and surveillance regimes, to mass death, illness, and unemployment, have intensified collective and individual grievances, while suppressing the social commons. The tedium and monotony of restricted movement, as well as the urgent political and biological threats to life, have generated a fiery tension. The real need to prevent contamination has been instrumentalized by governments as a means of quashing collective assembly. But conditions have gotten so out of hand that nothing can stop the multitude from expressing their rage. Across the world, mass protests and acts of civil disobedience are rising and becoming more radical, fueled as much by specific political aims as by frustration with the feeling of hopelessness amidst threats to life itself. Whether they are shouting online, from their balconies, or coming together in public demonstration, the multitude are demanding their right to life, dignity, justice, and self-determination, as well as expressing anger with how states have used the shock of the virus to further deny their livelihoods. How do we act and be in common in a world that is constantly isolating and shocking us and destroying the very ecological and social systems in which we survive? Protest today is a collective response to an ever-increasing exposure to precarity, a channeling of anxiety into furious fulmination. 

Sudden gatherings have always been treated as dangerous, contagious, unpredictable, and violent, which must be subdued or imprisoned. The unexpected and uncontrollable crowd, the mob, the riot, the rabble, is feared because it is subject to continual change, constantly composing and recomposing itself and remaining in motion. At times, the nervous excitability of individual bodies synchronizes to produce a collective political subject that asserts its power through its presence in public space. The induced forms of economic, social, political, and ecological vulnerability are combatted by embracing instability as both an engine for coming together and a tool for disturbing the normative order of things. Acts of collective dissent are regularly condemned for their purportedly thoughtless character; they are seen to lack reason and are too incoherent in their demands. Often political movements have emphasized the need for unity and clarity, since only coherent, univocal demands are recognized as legitimate by dominant structures of power. Yet it is precisely this cacophonous plurality of the crowd, this murmur and roar that brings in differences and dissensus and threatens chaos, that gives the crowd its strength. Rather than speaking as a singular and controllable voice, a collective rumble from below shakes foundations. Where the state and their sympathizers seek to produce order through authoritative speech, the noisy crowd voices what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten refer to as “the call for and from disorder.” 

Always moving and mutating, collective dissent is powered through the confluence of emotions and the mutual positions of being at risk. Those who have been denied a voice speak out from their gut in rage, responding to the abject vulgarity of a system that has harmed them by shouting uninhibited profanities and emancipatory epithets. Today more than ever, movements across the world are converting social and ecological vulnerability and their lived proximity to death, suffering, and mourning, as vehicles for their collectivity. The existential bile of pain from the experience of subjugation and shock across scales, species, and systems, is redirected to stimulate solidarity. In a time of scarcities and susceptibilities, the surplus of nervous energy generated by a sick and destructive system is metabolized into pure power. The embodied energies built up from intersecting traumas resonate and interact to generate a heterogeneous revolutionary vibration. This murmur modulates masses of disparate bodies and creates a charged atmosphere of potentiality. Together, this force interrupts the order of things by introducing noise and multiplicity. 

This essay also appears in the book Zaklocenia i Wielokrotnosci
(Disturbances and multiplicities), published on occasion of Iza
Tarasewicz's eponymous solo exhibition at Państwowa Galeria Sztuki in
Sopot.