In Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot, her pathbreaking study of “the history of state aesthetics as it relates to the life of matter” (209), Tompkins explores materials that defy categories like individuality and collectivity, delectation and disgust, decay and abundance. Rigorously interrogating the sensory elements of state violence, she thinks with materials like gelatin molds, yeast, intoxicants, and rotting garbage, combining archival research and deep engagement with interdisciplinary theory with close readings of a broad range of artworks, essays, film, and literature.
Tompkins’s project is at least twofold. First, she sets out to “historicize the microbiopolitics of matter in the United States by posing the legal, scientific, disciplinary, and aesthetic technologies that try to securitize populations against the incipient agency of lively matter itself” (10). Second, she seeks to reflect on what she refers to as “dissident and deviant forms of lively matter” in service of resistance to this securitization, especially by subaltern and minoritarian individuals and collectives (28). Tompkins’s page-turning narrative of the emergence of hygiene as a political force, based on archival research into the early days of the US Department of Agriculture, grounds the first main chapter of the book. The rest of the text takes up the titular ferments, intoxicants, jellies, and rots. This organizational tactic first grounds the reader with insight into the foundations of “the sensory life of administrative violence” and mechanisms by which hygiene accomplishes “its aesthetic logic against the embodiment of deviant peoples” (37). It also strategically sets the book up to become more playful, more slippery, and more dissident in method, in examples, and in argument with each succeeding chapter.
Tompkins refers to her method as “promiscuous” (29), in that she applies a wide range of methods to a diverse array of objects, and boldly pursues striking juxtapositions throughout the book. In the second chapter, “Ferment,” she pairs archival research on the emergence of Louis Pasteur’s ideas in the US-American context with Louisa May Alcott’s “The Candy Country,” building an argument about emergent germ theory and the notion of fermentation as a metaphor for political action, or “a figure for the multiplying possibilities of affect and feeling” (54). In Chapter 3, Tompkins places research into the USDA’s efforts to regulate alcohol-based “patent remedies” (48) alongside close readings of Winsor McCay’s Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, a comic strip and associated short film. In so doing, she traces the interrelationship of the recuperative framing of white intoxication and the criminalization of Black and Indigenous intoxication undergirding the US-American carceral state. Her final chapters on “Rot” and “Jelly” see her exploration of deviant materials at their most exhilaratingly free. Tompkins intertwines examples from interdisciplinary art and performance art (Adrian Piper and Candice Lin), literature (James Baldwin and Herman Melville), popular film (Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer), and US history alongside theoretical interlocutors from food studies, performance studies, material and affective studies, and more. She exposes not only the challenges looming in the face of ecological collapse but also surfaces a means of feeling our way toward new versions of survival, politics, and perhaps revolution. Inspired by jelly, she wonders if “a movement truly cannot be a revolution if it cannot dance” (194).
One of the strengths of Tompkins’s argument is her insistence on the urgency of examining aesthetic phenomena “in places where they are not supposed to be,” such as governmental writing (10). Tompkins also attends carefully to the aesthetics of this volume. In a gesture that is emblematic of the intricacy of her text, Tompkins begins and ends with meditations on massage. In the Introduction, she ponders Audre Lorde’s discussion of margarine, specifically the practice of massaging a pellet of yellow food coloring into the uncolored raw product in her classic essay “Uses of the Erotic.” Tompkins lingers on Lorde’s identification of this mundane act as a metaphor for the richness of thought made possible by thinking with slippery materials. In her concluding chapter on jelly, Tompkins returns to massage, in this case Afro-Canadian artist dirtysurface’s “Generous Gesture: Butt-Massage Video Wallpaper,” an anticapitalist, communitarian, pleasure-centered piece. Here Tompkins demonstrates the benefits of staying with the slippery, tactile, and haptic features of deviance, which are both subversively pleasurable and productive of new ways of imagining collectivity, transformation, deformation, and reformation much as the array of buttocks on the screen of “Generous Gesture” bounce, slide, move, and rebound under the ministrations of anonymous hands.
Ultimately Tompkins explores the possibilities that open to us if we lean into slippery, gelatinous, “deformative” acts of care (203) that these two massages suggest. Tompkins proposes that we can learn from deviant matter in that “becoming collective, effervescent, decompositional, in bouncing back and pushing back together against the violent deformations of capital, or fascism, and of other painful encounters, we might make a difficult and hurtful world better” (211). This provocative text inspires not only in its rigor and originality, but also in Tompkins’s ability to be honest with the reader while also assiduously conceptualizing ways of moving, slithering, gliding, bouncing, or oozing toward something better, together.
