The Brooklyn Rail

Between production and consumption, the micro and the macro, detailing the shocking and unexamined effects of effects of affluence, effluence, influence in an interfluent confluence of ecological costs, Johanna Drucker’s 2025 astonishingly prescient Affluvia (a neologism tracing “the means of emission, gasses and pollution generated by affluence”¹), chronicles the connections between one self and the multiple systems of extraction, human exploitation, and the natural resources it pollutes. Affluvia highlights how every act—no matter how banal or insignificant—is embedded in a global drama of interconnections, interlocking patterns of networked toxicities. And through a personal and political frothy brew of “Making Coffee” and “Feeding the Cats,” Drucker reroutes the minutia of her morning routine through generative roots, wroughts, fraught horrors, arrows, errors, sorrows, exposing the invisible underpinnings of our “everyday” activities, and how they contribute to re-combinatoric circuits of damage.

Highlighting how no/thing (or act) is a thing-in-itself, but carries with it a plethora of histories, traditions collisions; a complex of il/legalities, l’égalités, vortices, indices, travesties; an [in]habitable palimpsest of roughed-up recombinant / itinerant rigged torqued contorts, Drucker discloses how, for example, each coffee bean carries the weight of the hands that grew it, planted it, labored over it, the molecular configuration of the water that contributed to it, the cup that holds it, the grinder that grinds it, the packaging that houses it, the contours of electrical circuits, cups, labels, spoons, cords—each object embedded in an intra-dependent complex of histories, technologies, where each micro moment, a vast network of sociopolitical economic re-sources, of pollution, dissolution, re-solutions, emissions, submissions, whispers, slaughters, sod-squalor cinders, abscesses of ominous dissonance, immanence, and (im)permanence as she demystifies interlocking patterns towards a sustainable future.

And through roughly 60,000 words and 328 pages of deliciously technical idioms, iron mining, sand mining, strip mining, data mining, graphs, percentages, socio-ethnographic and bio-chemical research, the text also feels very Steinian. Reminding us for example, how Affluvia’s “Arabica bright cherries,” hail from Yemen, Brazil, Central America, Vietnam, India, the Caribbean, parts of Africa and Indonesia. Each bean inscribed in a geo-political vagrant nomadicism of “shattered scattering” with no traceable origin. Or like how for Gertrude Stein, “a piece of coffee … is whiter and not coal color, never more coal color than altogether … a not torn rose-wood color,”² similarly, Drucker inscribes a self reflexively dirty lexicon reminding us that whether it’s a bean, a spoon, a jar, a bowl, “a single image is not splendor,” but a many-splendored thing brimming with “mingle[d] astonishments,” “wonder and warning.” 111 years after Stein’s “Objects,” Affluvia erupts as an objet trouvé re-fin[d]ing itself through excavations of meaning (and mining) production.

Presenting almost cubist blocks of histories, contexts, politics, and socio-economic/environmental impacts spills over in a border-blurring hybrid text, swirling between theoretic speculation, personal essay, documentarian poetics, bio-chemical-geo-political scientific research/first person narrative, video accounts, Boolean algebra, boots-on-the ground investigation through Russian factories, with intertextual references to Terry Gilliam’s 1985 Brazil, Thomas Edison’s electric power plant, vacuum packed with hard-core research and hand-drawn industry diagrams, in form and content, Affluvia re-caffeinates normative expectations. And in-so-doing is as infinitely satiating as that first cup of morning coffee—deliciously underscoring how a la Stein’s “a piece of coffee,” “the time to show a message is when too late and later there is no hanging in a blight.”

Through a full-bodied brew, a robust blend of media/messages, Drucker’s illustrated study explodes galaxies; detailing cultivation, harvests, marketing packaging, aluminum foil, flexible plastics packing, shipping transportation, transmissions, emissions, tracking their flow through interlocking patterns across time, space, cycles and systems; a contextatic flex of effects reflective of all that refigures, prefigures through figures and grounds, questioning where the ground is when what is or has been is rewound in a future which is sutured in a fracturous sprachage packaged through invisible yet ever-present technologies.

Whether it be the lifecycle of the coffee bean—inks, plastics, jute, steel, paper filters, glass, a drop of water as it moves from sky to sink—or the innocuous coffee grinder power cord made out of PVC—the single most poisonous plastic contributing to the most damaging pollution³ (yet the third most popular synthetic plastic in the world), which affects the reproduction of wildlife, causing deformities, brain damage, contributing to ADD, resulting in more ignorance and disregard for these effects,⁴ which leads to more self-delusion, exhaustion, passivity and inaction—Drucker exposes the effects of effects of these unexamined aspects of our daily activities; patterns of exploitation that cyclically endanger our lives, our planet, and (in large part) are responsible for global systems of “unevenly distributed privilege, hardships and misery.”⁵

The prose is as aromatically visceral as all that she describes. For example, semio-ecologically unpacking the rubber component in her coffee grinder, Drucker traces it through the rubber plants from which it was sourced. Fueled with systemic contaminants, chemical and production data, yet so utterly imagistically detailed through “puffertanks” of “vulcanized soup,” where “synthetic chunks of rubber in close-up have the consistency of high-end whale blubber,” “white and creamy” and marked by “mounds of fluff like pure cumulous clouds rising into atmospheric splendor.”⁶ It was as if I was rewatching Björk’s 2005 erotic Drawing Restraint 9⁷, an epically disturbing, dystopic fever dream where her and her then partner Matthew Barney’s flesh metamorphosize into viscous, sticky whale blubber, a mess of jelly. And then as they wildly embrace, they slice off each other’s legs. Their severed stumps become the waving tails of whales: re-cycled.

Affluvia continues to be read through an uncannily hotly erotic prose-style. For example, in describing the clear Pyrex bowl from which Drucker feeds her cats, she outlines its crystalline structure where “chemicals go wild,” “electric currents,” “hot substances,” “thick syrups,” or how four oxygen atoms “chemically bond in a 6-sided square dance configuration.” Or, speaking of the molecular makeup of water, it becomes a “subatomic romance”⁸ of flirty electrons, pressure and response; a romantic throuple of “twist-weaving” copped filaments/sensors and transfers, coagulation and flocculation.

From coffee beans, filters, grinders, pet food and its packaging, inks and adhesives, thermoplastics, inorganic pigments, and tin ties, Drucker serves up a caffeinated read that is infinitely rigorous, frothy and sumptuous. Like for Stein’s “A piece of coffee is not a detainer,” Affluvia’s cat-embossed c[o]pula definitely runneth over dripping through all the many interdependent chains, events, advents lifecycles of labor, and transportation, translation, and production reproducing as we drink in the effects of effects—all of which connects us to the history and strife, struggle and pollution embedded in our everyday activities; the silent codes that pervade contemporary culture and politics—and how that contributes to a potentially incriminating barbarous future marked by shocks, scarcity, collapse—through an ever-expanding assemblage of effects.

Thus, from the pour to the purr, “in [an unfiltered] system to pointing,”⁹ in an age of increasingly unregulated authority, where you can’t tell fact from fiction—where truth is infinitely slippery leading to a lack of trust, and with no trust no shared reality, and with no shared reality it's increasingly difficulty to solve problems—in an ever-growing chasm of escalating disaster; toxic-off-gassing, Drucker’s Affluvia invites us to sit down over a grande half c[a]p full, beside our PETs, and be vigilantly attuned to, jolted toward the monstrous interdependencies, “earthy finish” implications of waste, fraud and abuse hidden within every moment of our lives.