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Overview
Nostalgia, myth, and legend are intrinsic features of the conversations that surround discussions of historic and contemporary climbs of Everest, and those conversations themselves reflect changing relations between nature, technology, and ideology. Each of the book’s chapters links a particular value with a particular technology to show how technology is implicated in Mount Everest’s cultural standing and commodification: authenticity is linked with supplemental oxygen; utility with portable foodstuffs; individuality with communication technology; extremity with visual technology; and ability with money. These technologies, Mazzolini argues, are persuasive—and increasingly so as they work more quickly and with more intimacy on our bodies and in our daily lives.
As Mazzolini argues, the ideologies that situate Mount Everest in Western culture today are not debased and descended from a more noble time; rather, the material of the mountain and its surroundings and the technologies deployed to encounter it all work more immediately with the bodies and minds of actual and “armchair” mountaineers than ever before. By moving the analysis of a natural site and phenomenon away from the traditional labor of production and toward the symbolic labor of affective attachment, The Everest Effect shows that the body and nature have helped constitute the capitalization that is usually characterized as taking over Everest.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817389123 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 10/31/2015 |
| Series: | Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Everest Effect
Nature, Culture, Ideology
By Elizabeth Mazzolini
UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8912-3
CHAPTER 1
Breathless Subjects
Authenticity and Oxygen
I'd been fantasizing about this moment, and the release of emotion that would accompany it, for many months. But now that I was finally here, actually standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn't summon the energy to care. ... At 29,028 feet up in the troposphere, so little oxygen was reaching my brain that my mental capacity was that of a slow child. Under the circumstances, I was incapable of feeling much of anything except cold and tired.
— Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air
Jon Krakauer found what many climbers on Mount Everest have found before and since: that upon fulfilling the ultimate dream of reaching Mount Everest's summit, the physical capacities to experience the moment often have become so attenuated that the moment holds no possibility for meaningful, let alone profound, engagement. Of course, knowing this ahead of time has not stopped people from going. The great disparity between expectations for such an overdetermined moment and the ability to fulfill those expectations raises questions about how the physical enables and constrains the ideological. In her book Bodily Natures, Stacy Alaimo suggests a model for relating the physical to the ideological, under the rubric of "trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world." For Alaimo, transcorporeality implicates and extends human bodies throughout the environment, which is typically conceived of as mute matter, separate from and external to the human. This chapter follows Alaimo's cue and explores how the air we breathe integrates humans with nonhuman nature, and how nonhuman nature, namely in the form of the inert gas oxygen, is actually already within ourselves. In other words, I wish to foreground an aspect of the environment that is both around us and already inside our bodies and minds. Circulating along with oxygen are the effects of its chemical and cultural properties, many of which can be seen in high-altitude mountaineering's responses over the years to the human body's need for oxygen. Oxygen, both naturally occurring and supplemented in canisters, has been implicated in what counts as authentic and worthy experience on Mount Everest over the decades, and as such provides a focus for imbrications of the physical and the ideological.
Because climbing to high altitudes involves great physical exertion under inhospitable atmospheric conditions, supplemental oxygen has often seemed necessary to climbers. Discourses of authenticity on Mount Everest regularly implicate use of the gas, but they have done so in different ways at different times. Historical variation in how oxygen has figured into authenticity on Mount Everest reveals shifting cultural priorities about authenticity's significance and location — various sites upon the body and soul that need to be guarded and maintained. For example, in the early twentieth century, it has been recorded that British climbers considered use of supplemental oxygen to be unsportsmanlike, because aiding the body's natural processes would detract from the significance of the accomplishment that reaching the summit of the world's highest mountain could be for a whole and hale Briton. Then, authenticity was maintained at the national level.
In spite of oxygen's early association with weakness, in 1953 the first people to reach the summit of Everest, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, did use supplemental oxygen, and their accomplishment is generally acknowledged as the legitimate "first" to the top. Twenty-five years later, the first people to reach the summit of Everest without supplemental oxygen were Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler, in 1978. A few years after that, Messner reached the summit alone and without oxygen, another significant "first." Since then, the unaided climbing ethos Messner embodied has all but disappeared, replaced by a thriving commercial climbing industry. As I mention in the introduction, paid guides have been regularly taking clients up Mount Everest since the late 1980s, and this contemporary clientele has none of the compunctions about using oxygen that their predecessors have had. Generally, contemporary mountaineering guides and clients are more than willing to be what the British climbing teams of yore would have called "unsportsmanlike" if it means standing on top of the world. And yet many still find themselves in the same position as Jon Krakauer: depleted and uncomprehending.
Even though Mount Everest's status in culture has changed over the years, and even though the place of bottled oxygen on Mount Everest has changed over the years, bottled oxygen persists in controversies about the authenticity of attempts to reach the top, whether the agent in those attempts is a nation, an individual person, or a commercial enterprise. Bottled oxygen challenged the authentic and whole Britishness of climbers in the early twentieth century, the authentic and intense individuality of climbers in the 1970s, and the authentic and ethical practices of commercial and philanthropic expeditions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The consistencies and variations among the modes of authentication can be attributed partly to some of oxygen's innate features. Oxygen, much like Mount Everest, is simultaneously an immutably natural substance and a cultural artifact infused with ideology. Oxygen's power to grant or withhold legitimacy at high altitudes is partly a function of its effects on the body in abundance or when lacking, and partly a function of relations between nature and culture that are under constant (re)negotiation. As indicated in the Krakauer quote that is this chapter's epigraph, oxygen affects body and mind, as well as their extended correlates of nature and culture.
Latent relations between body and mind (and nature and culture) are present in the term many past and present climbers cite as their reason for going: inspiration. People are inspired to climb mountains, and they find mountains inspiring. Inspiration's literal denotation about intake of breath has been all but lost to its metaphorical meanings about creative stimulation and spiritual uplift. The connection between mind and body that links the metaphorical and material discourses of mountaineering has etymological roots in Greek and Latin. One author who notes the extensive history and multiple roles of oxygen points out, for example, three words referring to some form of "breath" in ancient Greek: pneuma, meaning air, breath of life, vital spirit, vital force, soul, or innate heat; psyche, defined as breath of life, spirit, soul, and later, mind; and anemos, another Greek word meaning "breath," lent itself to Latin's "anima," from which "animal" was later derived, and which means breath or soul.
Oxygen's role in maintaining authenticity on Mount Everest has historically depended upon producing both versions of inspiration — keeping people breathing and keeping people motivated to climb — while continuously reinscribing the mind-body relation according to ideologies of authentic accomplishment. Oxygen discourse adjudicates relations between the climber's physical and mental experience, and between that climbing experience and the earth. As we shall see in the examples that follow — which come from laboratories, hot air balloons, and high mountains — the adjudication is dedicated to maintaining authenticity in a variety of locations. Amid this variety, oxygen has played a steady role in constructing and maintaining borders between the body and mind.
Oxygen before Himalayan Attempts
Oxygen's origin story implicates the gas in the authenticity of human subjective experience and in that of historic narrative. Oxygen's influence on subjective experience was known before people knew about Mount Everest. In 1775, upon having "gratified [his] curiosity" and inhaled pure oxygen (what he at the time was calling "dephlogisticated air"), scientist and liberal minister Joseph Priestley wrote that, "The feeling of it to my lungs was not so sensibly different from that of common air; but I fancied that my breast felt peculiarly light and easy for some time afterwards. Who can tell but that, in time, this pure air may become a fashionable article in luxury." Historians of science typically attribute the discovery of oxygen to Priestley and also to two others: Antoine Lavoisier and Karl Wilhelm Scheele. Priestley may or may not have been the first to discover the gas; what is undisputed is that Priestley did not use oxygen to challenge the phlogiston theory of chemistry prevalent at the time, as fellow discoverer Lavoisier did. The challenge to the phlogiston theory launched the so-called Chemical Revolution, even though Lavoisier did not isolate and discover oxygen as such. For his part, Scheele, a Swiss scientist, had done the same experiments Lavoisier became famous for, but several years earlier, and he did not publish them until later. These complications have somewhat troubled those historians of science who wish to pinpoint a single originating figure, or author, of oxygen. These science historians' mission has had high stakes, since oxygen is the first known element, closely associated with life, purity, and pleasure, and it would seem appropriate to isolate a moment of discovery for this isolated element. From its discovery and inception, oxygen has been a problem for definitive limits, seeming to simultaneously promise and withhold them. In any case, Priestley's peculiarly light and easy breast would prove prescient of the commodification of oxygen, in the form (among others) of oxygen bottles that high-altitude mountaineers purchase to help fulfill their dreams.
As Priestley found, excessive oxygen intoxicates. However, lack of oxygen also alters subjective experience. Almost one hundred years after Priestley's delightful experience, in 1874, just a few decades before Westerners attempted Everest, adventurers were nonetheless devoting large amounts of resources to gaining previously unattained heights. Joseph Crocé-Spinelli and Theodor Sivel set about establishing a new altitude record in a hot air balloon. Beforehand, they consulted physiologist Paul Bert, known today as the "father of altitude physiology" for his groundbreaking studies of air pressure. Bert authored a founding text in the study of altitude and atmosphere titled Barometric Pressure, and he pioneered experiments with compression chambers in order to study low air pressure's effects on motor and cognitive functioning. Balloonists Crocé-Spinelli and Sivel had already been experimental subjects in Bert's compression chambers, and had practiced a lower hot air balloon ascent with portable oxygen, in preparation for their unprecedented attempt.
On their record-breaking flight, undertaken with a team of balloonists, Sivel and Crocé-Spinelli planned to bring 150 liters of supplemental oxygen in three leather bags. However, a few days before launch, Bert calculated that the balloonists had not brought enough and rushed a message to the launch site, hoping to halt the misguided ascent. The message arrived too late, and Sivel and Crocé-Spinelli never received it. As a result, the balloon flight that had been planned to triumphantly break man's altitude record ended in tragedy, but not until after ascending to over 25,000 feet. All but one of the members of the experimental ascent died. Bert published the sole surviving member's account. The balloonist's account is of near bliss as his blood oxygen levels plummet: "One does not suffer at all, quite the contrary. One experiences an inner joy, as if it were an effect of the inundating flood of light. One becomes indifferent; one no longer thinks of the perilous situation or the danger; one rises and is happy to rise." This sole survivor's account of depleting oxygen echoes Priestley's account of oxygen's excess. Oxygen is intoxicating and affects the emotions, whether there is too much or too little. From these firsthand accounts of experiments with oxygen, it would seem that oxygen is written into a tautology that circles around its relation to human rationality: that for normal operations, the mind needs moderate amounts of oxygen, and moderate amounts of oxygen are those that make the mind operate normally. To put it another way, oxygen levels are measured humanistically; they register as "normal" when they accommodate capacities for normalized human experience. Oxygen has been inscribed by people's capacity to experience what is perceived to be really going on: experience authenticated by a knowing and capable subject.
In the Himalayas
Having been used to understand aspects of human experience, in the early twentieth century, oxygen levels began to be used to normalize and authenticate identities and accomplishments. The first use of supplemental oxygen in the Himalayas was in 1907, on a reconnaissance mission funded by wealthy British publisher and mountaineer Arnold Louis Mumm, to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the (British) Alpine Club. On this expedition, recounted in A. L. Mumm's Five Months in the Himalaya, Mumm brought oxygen tanks. He wrote, with diffidence inserted perhaps only retrospectively, "I took out, as my special contribution to our outfit, some oxygen generators, or pneumatogen cartridges, manufactured by Siebe, Gorman and Co., Limited, of Westminster Bridge Road. They are intended to be employed in mines where the air is foul, but I thought they might be useful at great heights. However, I never could get any of the others to take much interest in them, and no really good opportunity offered itself of testing their efficiency." Mumm's observation, that because of lack of interest there was no good opportunity to breathe the oxygen he brought, indicates the social stigma developing around supplemental oxygen use. People seemed to want to avoid the oxygen tanks rather than experiment with what the tanks could offer, even though it was known that they helped breathing because of their well-established use in mines.
Mumm's widely reported experience in the Himalayas helped form oxygen's reputation among British mountaineers in the early twentieth century. A "good opportunity" to test the efficiency of equipment (which must have been extremely heavy and unwieldy) did not present itself in spite of several members of the expedition suffering the headaches, loss of appetite, and shortness of breath associated with altitude sickness brought on by low oxygen levels in the blood. Supplemental oxygen would have eased their discomforts. Shortly after the passage in which he resignedly notes "no good opportunities" for the use of oxygen, Mumm details a hellish night spent in a spiral of insomnia and depression. Like many mountaineers suffering from low blood oxygen levels, Mumm reports mental, physical, and emotional sluggishness. He writes, "I was utterly cowed and miserable, and spent my recurring periods of wakefulness in abjectly regretting my folly in ever having come out." This could have been a very good opportunity indeed to try out the supplemental oxygen. Depression like Mumm's seems to be both the cost and benefit of unaided climbs, as they would not be worth doing if they were not so physically and emotionally difficult.
Later episodes in Mumm's book describe other members of the expedition experiencing the multiple forms of unease brought on by oxygen depletion, which also perhaps would have been good opportunities to use the equipment, though we can perhaps surmise that by "testing their efficiency," Mumm meant using the oxygen bottles to climb, instead of only easing climbers' mental torment while trying to sleep. In any case, Mumm does steal a chance to use his oxygen generators, when he used them in order to breathe well enough to smoke. Mumm writes, with some humor, "In the interests of science I tried whether a dose from the pneumatogen cartridge would assist me to enjoy a pipe. I think it certainly did; and I found I could smoke with satisfaction for several minutes continuously, which I had not been able to do before inhaling the oxygen; even so, however, it left me rather breathless." The joy smoking brings to Mumm is modest in comparison with the achievement a climb unaided by oxygen would be in this environment, where social pressure was building to have a discrete, unaided, and achieving body on the mountain. Smoking's bodily infusion of a substance taken in only for personal pleasure seems somewhat embarrassing for Mumm, as breathing supplemental oxygen would be, if it were "only" to allow for sleep and to ease a cough. There is a singular, permanent, and authentic ownership of experience implied in achieving high-altitude summits that cannot be part of the fleeting and pleasurable act of smoking or the amelioration of emotional problems. Within this emergent cultural context, Mumm is diffident about bringing the oxygen. Mumm was reconnoitering part of the Himalayas, but he was also contributing to a map of the modern, masculine, and British climbing body's capacities and limitations. Mumm's account of suffering without oxygen, even as the equipment he troubled to haul is nearby and would certainly help, contributes to his reconnaissance achievement because such mental discomfort is a necessary result of willfully denying the body's weaknesses — a triumph of mind over matter, and of subjectivity over corporeality. (Even though arguably, it was actually a triumph of matter over mind.) Mumm's trip helped map the Himalayas for British mountaineering interests and also laid the groundwork for future climbing ideologies. In refusing the oxygen that would make him feel better, Mumm disavowed bodily needs in favor of his mental accomplishments. Put another way, the effects of nature, in the form of depleted oxygen levels, became a foundational component of culture, in the form of British high-altitude mountaineering ideology.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Everest Effect by Elizabeth Mazzolini. Copyright © 2015 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS.
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