Confusion as a State of Grace[1]:
Climate and Kinship in 2021 Installment 5 ~ Slowwashing: The Fiction of Frictionless
Cara Judea Alhadeff
September 2021
Analog color photograph by Cara Judea Alhadeff from the Offspring Project: Jie Hye mother artist of son, June, 2005.
Image provided by the author ~ Click image visit her website.
We fear that when we stop, even for a moment, the sheer enormity of our lives will overwhelm us. Our outspoken and unspoken fears, they speed up our lives. ...And so we think that our speed will save us from the void. We dance around the security that is offered from touching what is underneath the speed.
– Rabbi David Ingber, Shabbat Behar sermon, Romemu
Departing my solo photography exhibition in Antwerp, Belgium, I arrive at Seoul's Incheon Airport in an exhausted stupor—unsure if anyone from the yoga studio is at the airport to pick me up; unsure if the yoga studio even exists. Much relieved, I see my name on a sign held by a gesticulating Korean man who speaks no English. I follow Mr. Sung to his car and sit in traffic, gesturing pleasantries while trying desperately to stay awake. Both of us sweltering.
Two hours later, we reach Pure Yoga's headquarters. I am in shock. It's hours past midnight. All the electrical lights of the successive skyscrapers are lit full blast, making the heat even more unbearable. A high-rise next door to the yoga studio explodes with an entire wall of enormous shimmering neon disks, rippling every shade from green to purple, and back again. The edifice across the illuminated boulevard flashes enormous lavender neon rectangles emerging from a massive chartreuse wall. How could anyone possibly fathom that “renewable” energies power this obscene infrastructure?![2] I am seduced and horrified. Passing Hugo Boss, Louis Quatorze Flawless, and Salvatore Ferragamo, we finally enter the yoga studio. Mr. Sung and I are greeted by a blast of artificial heat, my new boss, Ms. Korea 1994 (in casual dress), and a New Zealander Vinyasa yoga teacher who looks like she just swam out of the movie set of “The Beach.”
Capitalism is alive and well in the yoga world! Pure Yoga is run by Ms. Korea 1994. She is still!? a celebrity, opening spas throughout Asia. Her yoga videos are the highest-grossing, best-sellers throughout Korea, although she does not practice yoga herself. Western-style manufactured
beauty and weight-loss regimes reign. This high-end yoga studio charges 40 USD for a drop-in class, four times more than other studios in Seoul. And predictably, this doesn't reflect how poorly we
teachers are paid for our 12-25 classes we are required to teach each week. Ms. Korea 1994
has put me up in Cheongdam—the Beverly Hills district of Seoul. This means I cannot afford to buy food in my neighborhood. Pure Yoga sits above Ralph Lauren and between Rolls Royce, Louis Vuitton, and Gucci. It is conveniently located among karaoke bars, Dolce and Gabbana, and the Dong-Duck's Women’s Center (for some reason certain names are in English). Located between my 8' x10' apartment and the most lavish of the yoga studios where I teach are double-decker rows of bridal boutiques and plastic surgeons' offices.
Since I come from a diasporic people, it is my nature to readily adapt to radically new living
conditions—but this is ridiculous. I am the first Iyengar teacher Pure Yoga has ever hired. As
such, I am clearly out of my element—a foreigner in the strange land of Power Yoga. As the
only non-Asian person wherever I go on my adventures throughout Seoul, I feel so much more at
home on the streets than I do teaching in the quick-fix yoga scene. Pure Yoga is offering “The Three-Month Challenge: A Before and After Weight-Loss Special Summer Event” (promoted only in English). Posters of a skinny Caucasian woman leaping for joy advertise this diet contest. Frontal and profile photos (name tag included) are taken before and after three months of tremendously intense yoga classes. Five prizes include a free one-year membership and Thai massages (given by two Thai refugees who appear to be in hiding in the back room of one of the studios) and facial care (first prize worth about 2500 USD for losing the most weight). I am beginning to realize my complicity, like when in 1993, I was representing US foreign food-aid policy programs in Bangladesh, but was unwittingly participating in politically vile humanitarian imperialism[3] in all its glory. I hadn't realized until much later that I had been representing USIA.[4]
The heat in the yoga studios is intended to expedite weight-loss. I have had the passing thought that while the students are in class, the front-desk associate enters the dressing room and changes the electronic device on the scale so that when the students weigh themselves after class, they have the numbers to prove their success...or failure—Bikram is a God of Constructed Desire. The heat is jacked up so high in the three studios that I must cling to the wall to keep from passing out between poses. Because I haven’t yet learned much Korean, the students' watch and mime every move I make—not realizing that I am about to pass out from heat stroke. Often when I demonstrate a pose, students gasp with horror and awe, followed by glee. I so appreciate their willingness to follow me and jump into the unknown. The students range from 6 to 70-plus years old; each one is so receptive: contempt and fear of the unfamiliar doesn't seem to dampen their expectations like it does for so many of us in the West. And, they love Savasana, corpse pose. Chronic exhaustion apparently dominates public life. This explains the subway sleepers.
I have traveled back sixteen years—teaching yoga in Seoul, South Korea. The city had been suffering a heat wave. Cicadas screeched relentless day and night.[5] Entering the Bikram-like yoga classes, there was no temperature distinction between the inside: ultra-modern architecture housing emaciated young women competing to physically disappear and the outside: boulevards of fierce commerce and cars. Regardless of interior or exterior location, we melted.
Consumer Reports, car commercial, 2021. Image provided by the author ~ Click image to enlarge.
Recently, in conversation with Carl Honoré[6] about the virulent falsehoods of the green economy and ostensible “renewable” energies, he drew the connection between the insidiousness of this greenwashing and what he calls “slowwashing.”[7] Slowwashing and greenwashing converge in the intensive commodification of our bodies. Pure Yoga, perhaps ]extreme yet still symbolic of the international yoga industry,[8] is a prime example of slowwashing: hypercommercialized “well-being” resulting in another proliferation of capitalist profit-driven psycho-social infrastructure. Companies attempt to rebrand themselves, “cloak themselves in the robes of 'slow'” (Honoré). Eco-yuppie consumer-convenience culture is rooted in marketing “sustainability.” It includes often contradictory elements within the Renewable Revolution,[9]hybrid and fully electric vehicles, the New Age industry, ecovillages, natural building, fair-trade commerce (as economic “alternatives” to fast fashion, blood chocolate, and palm oil,[10] for example), health food conglomerates (this includes gluten-free[11] hysteria), meditation apps on smartphones,[12] and surrogate band-aids that are frequently equal to or worse than what is being replaced (including compostables, bioplastics, phthalates replacements, and HFC’s).[13]
Slowwashing, like “sustainability” (fundamentally dependent on the capitalist framework of greenwashing), reinforces climate catastrophe. Such solipsistic mania underlies ecocidal infrastructures that eradicate diversity. Honoré reminds us that, in fact, “society is not frictionless.” Fast-forward-cultural tyranny of Silicon Valley helped shape the normalcy of frictionless—constructing the desire for immediate gratification. Our techno-euphoric sped-up society feeds the dangerous illusion that friction does not exist. Friction inherently involves difference. Honoré urges us to remember that friction generates light; it generates heat. Friction causes us to pause, to reflect.[14]
Friction-based practices necessitate a public-private dialectic; they embody simultaneous analysis and action. Disentangling the roots of our crises helps us understand how institutionalizing fossil-fuel dependent “renewable” energies echoes the illusory solution that corporations and convenience-consumers simply need to “slow down.” Replacing one hegemony with another by superimposing privatized band-aids obscures the actual conflict and maintains hyperindustrialization—speed society: enmeshed systemic psychological, corporeal, ecological, and economic violences (ranging from e-waste to 5G/ AI/ Internet-of-Things juggernaut). Conversely, by invoking Bertrand Russell's “In Praise of Idleness” in which he reminds us that what we do with our “leisure time” is the true measure of civilization, we must remember that what we can learn from other cultures[15] can help us reframe civilization as a people's pluriverse. In my next series of articles for Mother Pelican, I will explore a revival of friction in the context of the politics of fire mitigation, biological and cultural diversity,[16] and alternatives to our hyper-inflamed, illusory frictionless sped-up society.
“Long Live Friction!” (Honoré)
Painting by Micaela Amateau Amato
in Chapter Seven: Quantum Entanglements,
Zazu Dreams.
Image provided by the author ~ Click image to enlarge.
Notes
[1] With deep respect, I cite my Iyengar yoga teacher and lifelong mentor Judith Lasater: https://www.judithhansonlasater.com/.
[2] See my “Greenwashing: The Lure of Eco-Capitalism.” “Renewable” energies, such as solar and wind, are low-power density: they produce very little energy in proportion to the energy required to institutionalize them. See also Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilber's Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It (Politics of the Living). Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish Publishing, 2021.
[3] How we measure our ecological footprint and global biocapacity is often riddled with paradox—particularly in the face of green colonialism, or what I call “humanitarian imperialism.” The litany of our collusion with corporate forms of domination is infinite within the Anthropocene Era (increasingly characterized as the Plasticene). Disinformation campaigns spread by fossil-fuel interests deeply root us in assimilationist consumerism.
[4] In 1993, I traveled across Bangladesh through the Hubert Humphrey Program at Penn State University, during which, in addition to visiting poor rural women engaging in Grameen Bank practices (the Grameen Bank is another megabusiness that masquerades as grassroots mutual aid), we met with the Ministry of Culture, Finance Ministry, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Education— as well as President Abdur Rahman Biswaseach of Bangladesh. Scrutinizing our USIA sponsored food-aid mission laid the foundation for my later work deconstructing international development politics and environmental racism. Decades of unquestioned assumptions dictated by USAID and international food aid NGO's have led to institutionalized bypassing of the underlying roots of poverty created by transnational neocolonialist interventions. See my “Disentangling Green Colonialism: Greenwashing and Environmental Racism in the Renewables Revolution:” a discussion of poverty defined through assimilationist US-style democracy in Miguel De Torre's upcoming edited volume: Shifting Climate – Shifting People, Pilgrim Press, 2021.
[5] Cicadas are the loudest insect on planet earth (that we know of). Its most voluminous song is almost 107 decibels when measured at a distance of 20 inches away, almost as loud as a chainsaw—about 110 decibels.
[6] Carl Honoré’s 2004 book, In Praise of Slow, explores the potential of industrialized societies recognizing slowness in terms of a movement that challenges the institutionalized belief that ‘faster is always better.’
[8] “One of the most grotesque contemporary examples of gender toxic mimicry is the multi-billion dollar industry of yoga. The new documentary film on yoga and women, “Yogawomen,” looks at gender through a western feminist lens which fails not only to recognize the cultural specificity of women’s roles in India, but also demonstrates a blatant disregard for the capitalist appropriation of yoga. The film displays packed mat-to-mat classes of intensely focused spandex-bound, yoga-geared, homogeneous-bodied women. It espouses how the current state of the yoga industry has offered an opportunity for woman to develop a sense of self-authority. The film neglects to discuss the extraordinarily common concerns of psyche-soma disorders associated with those who practice: orthorexia nervosa—is an obsession with health, with purity that afflicts many yoga zealots. I teach Iyengar yoga to people with chronic diseases to help engage their kinesthetic awareness. On the other hand, yoga, like art, has become a form of entertainment—stripped of its pedagogical underpinnings. The phenomenally profitable trend of yoga, essentially yogaerobics, feeds on and into the absurdities of our narcissistic culture—not just in the West, but throughout the Far East as well” (Cara Judea Alhadeff, Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene. State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 131).
[9] Currently, human and natural-world habitat destruction are implicit in the mass production and disposal infrastructures of most “renewable energies:” solar, wind, biomass/biofuels, geothermal, ethanol, hydrogen, nuclear, and other ostensible renewables.
[10] Consumers need to navigate advertisements’ misleading messages. Numerous companies that manufacture obviously unhealthy products like Nabisco’s Oreos, claim to be ‘Certified Vegan’—yet, they too are responsible for the destruction of human and animal habitats where palm oil is harvested. Overt ethically-questionable corporations like Cargill are not the only culprits; many ‘health-conscious,’ ‘sustainable-production’ companies are also responsible. Earth Balance, the company that makes a popular plant-based butter spread claims sustainability is its number one production standard. It also claims that its products are ‘animal-free.’ Yet, Earth Balance’s primary ingredient is palm oil (www.onegreenplanet.org/news/earth-balance-vegan-butter-commits-to-sustainable-palmoil-but-is-it-enough/). Even though Earth Balance states that its products are part of an ‘environmentally friendly food chain,’ it proves to be yet another greenwashing company using ‘sustainable’ and ‘healthy’ as manipulative marketing tools. ‘Green’ business maintains some of the most insidious economic practices today (Jeff Conant, “Going Against the Green,” Yes! Magazine. Fall 2012: 62-64). In contrast, there are companies discovering ethical alternatives. While researching biodiesel, the algae company Solazyme came up with a product, called ‘algalin’ that may be a sustainable alternative to palm oil.
[11] Stephanie Seneff postulates that allergies to gluten may not be caused directly by the gluten. “Glyphosate [from, for example, Monsanto's glyphosate-heavy Round-UP] likely gets inserted into the gluten protein by mistake in place of glycine, which makes it more allergenic. But also, glyphosate kills off the gut microbes that have specialized proteins that help us digest gluten. Gluten is a difficult protein to digest because it contains a lot of prolines. When the gluten peptides survive digestion, they induce a leaky gut barrier and they escape into the circulation. The immune cells respond by producing antibodies to the gluten peptides, which can become autoantibodies and attack human proteins through molecular mimicry” (in conversation 2017). See Seneff's new book: Toxic Legacy: How the Weedkiller Glypohsate is Destroying Our Health and the Environment, Chelsea Green: Hartford, VT, 2021.
[12] For examples of technology-aided “meditation” (Tricycle Magazine: The Buddhist Review, Winter 2017, 94 and tricycle.org/magazine/meditationapps/). These techno-utopic crutches include: 10% Happier $79.99 per year, My Gratitude Journal $2.99, and Zen Bound 2 $2.99—essentially a video game.
[13] 1. Compostable disposables, also known as bioplastics, are most frequently produced from GMO-corn monoculture and “composted” in highly restricted environments that are inaccessible to the general public. Due to corn-crop monoculture practices that are dependent on agribusiness's heavy use of pesticides and herbicides (for example, Monsanto’s Round-Up/glyphosate), compostable plastics are not a clean solution. Depending on their production practices, avocado pits may be a more sustainable alternative. But, the infrastructure and politics of actually “composting” these products are extraordinarily problematic. These not-so eco-friendly products rarely make it into the high temperatures needed for them to actually decompose. Additionally, their chemical compounds cause extreme damage to water, soil, and wildlife. They cause heavy acidification when they get into the water and eutrophication (lack of oxygen) when they leach nitrogen into the soil. 2. The trend to replace Bisphenol A (BPA) led to even more debilitating phthalates in products. 3.Lastly, we now know that hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), “ozone-friendly” replacements, are equally environmentally destructive as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).
[14] Sitting Bull was given the Lakota name, Hú?kešni, meaning “Slow.” He refused to participate in violent warfare; “Slow” was recognized for his ability to pause, to take his time before answering any question.
[15] In Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era, my cross-cultural, climate justice book, I explore principles found in ancient Judaic and Islamic texts and laws as antidotes to our consumer-waste culture: water politics/infrastructure, architectural heating/cooling, the sacred embodied in bioregional agricultural systems, medico-magical rituals, and zero-waste/creative-waste living.
[16] I will explore Dr. Suzanne Simard's ground-breaking (ground-nourishing) research in relation to the precariousness of assimilationist-enforced equality. See Simard's July, 2021 lecture: Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cara Judea Alhadeff, PhD, is a scholar/activist/artist/mother whose work engages feminist embodied theory, and has been the subject of several documentaries for international public television and film. In addition to critically-acclaimed Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era (Eifrig Publishing, 2017), her books include: Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene (Penn State University Press, 2014) and Climate Justice Now: Transforming the Anthropocene into The Ecozoic Era (Routledge, forthcoming). She has published dozens of interdisciplinary essays in eco-literacy, environmental justice, epigenetics, philosophy, performance-studies, art, gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies’ journals/anthologies. Her pedagogical practices, work as program director of Jews of the Earth, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Her photographs/performances have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic Freedom Foundation, Artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the ACLU), and are in numerous collections including SanFrancisco MoMA, Berlin’s Jewish Museum, MoMA Salzburg, Austria, Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets, sculptors, architects, scientists. Cara is a former professor of Performance & Pedagogy at UC Santa Cruz and Critical Philosophy at the Global Center for Advanced Studies. She teaches, performs, parents, and lives a creative-zero-waste life. She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars, and artists from other disciplines. If you are interested please contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com or via her websites, Cara Judea and Zazu Dreams. See also this article: Social ecology pioneers return to Nederland.
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