Sensory politics: The tug-of-war between potability and palatability in municipal water production

Abstract

Sensory information signaled the acceptability of water for consumption for lay and professional people into the early twentieth century. Yet as the twentieth century progressed, professional efforts to standardize water-testing methods have increasingly excluded aesthetic information, preferring to rely on the objectivity of analytic information. Despite some highly publicized exceptions, consumer complaints remain peripheral to the making and regulating of drinking water. This exclusion is often attributed to the unreliability of the human senses in detecting danger. However, technical discussions among water professionals during the twentieth century suggest that this exclusion is actually due to sensory politics, the institutional and regulatory practices of inclusion or exclusion of sensory knowledge from systems of action. Water workers developed and turned to standardized analytical methods for detecting chemical and microbiological contaminants, and more recently sensory contaminants, a process that attempted to mitigate the unevenness of human sensing. In so doing, they created regimes of perception that categorized consumer sensory knowledge as aesthetic. By siloing consumers' sensory knowledge about water quality into the realm of the aesthetic instead of accommodating it in the analytic, the regimes of perception implemented during the twentieth century to preserve health have marginalized subjective experiences. Discounting the human experience with municipal water as irrelevant to its quality, control and regulation is out of touch with its intended use as an ingestible, and calls for new practices that engage consumers as valuable participants.

Toxic politics: Acting in a permanently polluted world

“…These cases show the deep ambivalences of denunciation of toxicity through charismatic, image-driven or data-driven activism that simultaneously supports the wider structures it denounces (Fiske, 2018). They investigate how the drive to create representations of invisible, toxic, slow disasters by making better, clearer, standardized scientific representations of toxic sensorium never overcomes unevenness and representational resolution (Spackman and Burlingame, 2018). Nor are such forms of evidence required for action (Calvillo, 2018).…”

In smell’s shadow: Materials and politics at the edge of perception

“…Similarly, sensing differs within species; some humans are more sensitive than others. Further complicating this 'sensory unevenness' (Spackman and Burlingame, 2018) are popular as well as scientific understandings that odors can act as invisible signals that carry the potential to alter the functioning of the organism itself. This context, where olfaction is an unreliable witness to experience, undergirded official response to the smell.…”

Empire and indigestion: Materializing tannins in the Indian tea industry

“…Both the early Lancet studies and responses like that of MacLeod underscore that tannins were not an independently active substance, but ‘matter in relation’ (Abrahamsson et al, 2015: 13). Sensory and imaginative experiences of taste, place and race – in relation – were integral to the effort to ‘objectify’, explain, and trace the circulation of tannins, and to determine how different kinds of bodies were able to shape those itineraries (Spackman and Burlingame, 2018: 354; see also Berenstein, 2018; Shapin, 2012).…”

“…In Murphy’s formulation of materialization, ‘matter’ must be understood ‘not in terms of a prior thingness but rather in terms of the process of history, concrete social and technical arrangements and the effects of power’ (Murphy, 2006: 15). Elsewhere, STS scholars have examined the role of such materialization, in analyses of the health effects of MSG (Tracy, 2018), the microbial liveliness of fermented or raw foods (Paxson, 2012; Spackman, 2018), the potability of water (Spackman and Burlingame, 2018), and the potency of generic drugs (Banerjee, 2017; Hayden, 2007). Whether for drugs, milk or water, palatability and digestibility are underwritten by what Murphy (2006: 10) terms a ‘regime of perceptibility’, ‘the way a discipline or epistemological tradition perceives and does not perceive the world’.…”