The Toxicity Of Continuity

2020

(…) To describe something as ‘toxic’, in both biological and sociological senses, is to evoke something that produces harm. Although toxicity is more routinely understood as the injurious contamination of an organism by some entity external to it, thereby upsetting its ‘healthy’ or consistent functioning, in the context of concepts, toxicity can occur in the opposite direction: by preserving what is internal to its self-referential modes of thought. That is, by continuing to confirm what is (thought to be) known, true, sufficient, necessary, or good. Avoiding conceptual contamination is the shirking of possibility to think or know otherwise, and the name for this is unreason. It is to remain fixedly entrenched in ones existing situational perspective, a plight Achille Mbembe described as “mental self-amputation.”

Article available in English and Farsi.

Patricia Reed, "The Toxicity Of Continuity", in Pages Magazine, eds.: Babak Afrassiabi, Nasrin Tabatabai, 2020. Link