these individuals are apprehending their bodies using the rational, Enlightenment language of biomedicine. If Carl Sagan (1996) truly laments the modern revolt against science and the resurgence of a “demon-haunted world,” he should be pleased to hear of ordinary people who are struggling to know something logical and reasonable about their bodies.
The environmentally ill are likely to apprehend their somatic misery using the technical language of biomedicine rather than some variation of New Age knowledge for at least one rather obvious reason: they experience their bodies changing in the presence of consumer items commonly regarded as safe and in ordinary environments commonly regarded as benign. Consider, for example, the following field note describing an incident that occurred during an interview with a person who claims to be environmentally ill:
I sat roughly twenty feet from Jack. We were in his living room. Jack’s house is set up for someone who is environmentally ill. Air-filtering machines are running in several rooms. Magazines, newspapers, and other printed materials are noticeably absent. A plastic housing covers the TV screen to block harmful low-level electromagnetic waves emitted from the picture tube.
I am properly washed and attired. (That is, I showered without using soap and am wearing all cotton that has been washed dozens of times.)
Shortly after starting the interview, Jack became visibly agitated, lifting himself from side to side and up and down in his chair. Red blotches appeared on his arms and face. He started to slur his words. He explained that he was reacting to something new in the house. Since I was the only new thing around, he started to ask me questions: Was I wearing a cologne? Was I wearing all cotton? Could I have washed my clothes using a fabric softener? And so on. With the exception of the cotton question, I answered “no” to each query.
His symptoms were increasing in severity. He looked at my pen and asked if it contained a soy-based ink. I told him I bought it at a bookstore without checking the chemical composition of the ink. He smiled knowingly and asked me to put the ink pen outside. Within a few minutes his symptoms subsided.
The question is not whether Jack’s body changed in front of me. It did. The question, rather, is how to interpret the change. Using a process of elimination, Jack concluded that the one foreign item in his house responsible for his somatic distress was an ordinary ballpoint pen. Remember, the distance between Jack and the pen was approximately twenty feet. I asked him to explain how he knew the cause of his symptoms was the pen and how an ink pen that was twenty feet away could affect him so seriously. He told me about the synthetic chemicals in ink and their particular effects on him. He explained how the air circulator in the living room was pointing at my back and facing him. Thus, it blew the offgassing ink from the point of my pen toward him.
Jack’s carefully thought-out explanation of his somatic distress struck me as interesting, if debatable. Every move in his “first-this-and-then-that” style of reasoning is grounded in a testable assumption. And Jack was not surprised when his symptoms subsided after the pen was removed from the house. “What else could it have been?” he reasoned. Jack is in the habit of theorizing his illness by constructing what for him and, at least some, others are reasonable accounts of the causes of his misery. For Jack, theorizing his illness in a language of instrumental rationality allows him to explain his body to others and, importantly, allows him to live with some degree of self-respect in a very sick body.
For some people, however, Jack’s story is questionable, indeed bizarre. He tells a fantastic tale about bodies and environments. Moreover, he requests that others modify and change what have always seemed benign, if not aesthetic or pleasurable, behaviors. If they do not do so, they are implicated in the exacerbation of his illness. His spouse, a friend, the teller at the corner bank, an office mate, a sociologist who requests an interview, and even a complete stranger become potential sources of acute, debilitating distress; once safe, innocuous places are now health risks. Jack approaches his new life as environmentally ill armed with an explanation of his body and its complicated relationship to common consumer items and local places.
For Jack, MCS is not only a chronic sickness; it is a vocabulary of motives, a type of “justificatory conversation” (Mills 1967). The “truth” of Jack’s story can be measured in the degree of accommodation people make to his disabled body. The success of the environmentally ill in convincing others of the threat to health posed by mundane environments and ordinary consumer items, while also claiming the right to institutional recognition of their sickness, depends, as we will see, on the ability to borrow liberally from the vernacular of biomedicine to lobby for the transformation of their illness experiences into an official disease.
Environmental Illness as a Practical Epistemology
What is true for Jack is true for thousands of people living with bodies they believe are made sick by the environment. Multiple chemical sensitivity is a nascent theory of bodies and environments. It is a novel form of theorizing the relationships of people, bodies, and environments that unhinges an expert knowledge from an expert system and links it to historical and biographical experience to make a particularly persuasive claim on truth. It is a local knowledge, constructed in situ by people who believe they need to reorganize how they think about their bodies and the environments that surround them. Power may be a source of knowledge in a post-Enlightenment world, as Foucault announced, but rational knowledge nevertheless remains a powerful social resource. Indeed, if modernity has a commandment it is to act in accord with reason.5 Rational knowledge is always an assertion of the correct, the logical, the appropriate. If something is accepted as true, then rational organizations and human beings are expected to organize their conduct to reflect this truth. Rational knowledge “is always a legitimating idea” (Wright 1992, 6). In fact, it is self-legitimating insofar as its claim to truth rests on the premise that “all that is real is rational, [while] all that is rational is real” (Lyotard 1992, 29). Thus, to accept someone’s account as rational is to tacitly commit to the line of conduct and belief embedded in that account, or to risk the charge of behaving irrationally.
Society places a particular premium on the authority of rational knowledge to regulate nature and health (Wright 1992; Touraine 1995; Freund and McGuire 1991). Knowing nature, including the nature of the body, depends upon a detached observer trained to identify by means of calibrated instruments the intricacies of biological and physical systems. It is not surprising, therefore, that the privilege of theorizing the body and its relationship to the environment is limited to people educated and licensed by the state to speak the language of biomedicine.
It is the chemically reactive, however, and not the medical profession, who are classifying and explaining their anomalous medical condition. People who identify themselves as environmentally ill are shifting the social location of theorizing bodies and environments from medical professionals to nonprofessionals, from experts to nonexperts. When theorizing somatic distress in the language of biomedicine shifts from experts to laypersons, it enters a new social world, one governed by purposes other than institutional legitimation. Thus, when expert knowledge is separated from its institutional moorings and taken into another world, it is likely to be fashioned into a new cultural tool, or, as Geertz (1983) would have it, a “practical epistemology” (151). While Geertz leaves this term purposively vague, we will mean by it a technical, rational way of knowing that is responsive to the immediate personal and communal needs of nonexperts. A practical epistemology, in other words, joins the world of personal and biographical experiences to forms of instrumental rationality. Jack’s story of an ballpoint pen is a good example of a practical epistemology at work. The state-sponsored owners of biomedical knowledge most likely would dismiss his account as nonsense, if not evidence of delusion. Jack, however, borrows liberally from biomedicine and common sense to conceptualize and organize a world of signs that allows him to explain and respond to a body his doctors cannot understand.6
It is not a desire to engage
