Marking Territory: Pollution as Appropriation in Serres’ Malfeasance

In Malfeasance: Appropriation through Pollution? French philosopher of science Michel Serres makes a provocative argument that links our seemingly unstoppable drive to pollute and befoul our environment to both an animal instinct to mark our territory and the economic imperative to amass property. The title in the original French offers some insight here that the English translation doesn’t quite capture. Le mal propre is not quite a malfeasance, a wrongdoing. As two separate words, the title constitutes an oxymoron: a clean sickness or clean evil. As a compound word, malpropre more accurately describes something dirty, or points to an unsavoury or dishonest person. The word propre, meaning clean or pure, also plays on the idea of what is proper, both in the sense of propriety (which plays into the translator’s decision to choose malfeasance, or, improper activity), but also in the sense of property, that which is proper to someone or something. Thus the connection to appropriation, the action of taking something as one’s own property, legitimately or not.

Serres’ central thesis in the book is that pollution is a means of appropriating space. Many animals mark their territory with urine, faeces, and moulted tissues. Humans are no exception. I spit in a bowl of soup, it becomes mine. I sleep and sweat in my own bed and I cast my socks onto the floor and claim my right to my household. What is clean and unmarked does not yet belong to anyone. A hotel room, for instance, is kept clean to make it “available” to others.

What is crucial for Serres is that pollution does not only come in concrete excrescences. Shit, piss, and spit are matched by noise: a bird’s song, a gibbon’s howl, a lion’s growl, a rattlesnake’s rattle. But also: the rock music I blast into the night, the volume jump on television advertisements, shouts and calls from neighbours, demonstrators, sports fans. Noise, for Serres, also counts for the jumble of ads in our mass media, on our streets, lining highways, logos barking out to us from television screens, shop window, T-shirts, the trash that litters the sidewalk.

With this in mind, Serres draw an intriguing distinction between hard and soft pollution:

Let us define two things and clearly distinguish them from one another: first the hard, and second the soft. By the first I mean on the one hand solid residues, liquids, and gases, emitted throughout the atmosphere by big industrial companies or gigantic garbage dumps, the shameful signature of big cities. By the second, tsunamis of writing, signs, images, and logos flooding rural, civic, public, and natural spaces as well as landscapes with their advertising. Even though different in terms of energy, garbage and marks nevertheless result from the same soiling gesture, from the same intention to appropriate, and are of animal origin. To be sure, the pestilential invasion of space by soft signs does not enter into the physical and chemical calculations mentioned above, for instance those concerning climate. But in combination with hard pollution, soft pollution proceeds from the same drive. Here is the result: of course, pollution comes from measurable residues of the work and transformations related to energy, but fundamentally it emanates from our will to appropriate, our desire to conquer and expand the space of our properties. He who creates viscous and poisoned lakes or garish posters is making sure no one will take away the spaces he has occupied, now or after he is gone.^[1]

The idea of “soft pollution” suggests that certain forms of media and communication practice are indeed environmental hazards that run alongside material pollutants, and are equally threatening to the sustainability of the Earth as a habitat for all forms of life.

Perhaps most crucially, Serres invites us to cast a critical eye on the ways in which we take ownership of the spaces around us. Our political and legal structures are based heavily on the right to acquire and hold property, and there are of course groups who strive to amass ever-increasing amounts of property as the expense of others. It becomes imperative, then, to seriously examine the role and value of what remains public, common to all, and to question after the appropriate limits of ownership. If what is appropriated is befouled as a mark of ownership, then the danger becomes one of universal pollution. If we give up our collective non-ownership of public places, not only the natural spaces and resources of the Earth, but also those spaces of free an open public discussion, if these become property, no matter the interests and agendas of the owning parties, then we risk living in a world and a society that can only wallow in its own filth.