gration. We can watch a rotting leaf on the ground and speak of decay. But from the macro perspective of the rainforest where the rotting leaf is located, it is part of the process of the forest’s regeneration. Likewise, from the micro perspective of the rot itself, decomposition is an effervescence of a multiplicity of forms of life. In that regard, Charles Baudelaire’s (1869) famous “Une charogne” (A Carcass) is an avant-garde text. In it Baudelaire sees decay not merely as a process of decomposition but one where nature gives back “a hundredfold all she together join’d”: The flies the putrid belly buzz’d about, Whence black battalions throng Of maggots, like thick liquid flowing out The living rags along. And as a wave they mounted and went down, Or darted sparkling wide; As if the body, by a wild breath blown, Lived as it multiplied. (Baudelaire 1869, 12) Because scale joins space and tempo as an analytical dimension, decay is a fertile ground for thinking through the agency of microorganisms of the kind that multispeciesist and chemo-ethnographies are increasingly highlighting today (Shapiro and Kirksey 2017). But the fact that what is decaying and disintegrating is teeming with new life is something that can also be captured at the level of human experience. This is highlighted in Tamara Kohn’s chapter.
Toward an Analytics of Decay
The above makes it clear that the knowledge that “everything decays” is hardly enough from a socioanalytical perspective. Things decay in very different ways, and knowing the principle behind particular kinds of decay is important. Some things decay quicker and more extensively than others, some processes of decay are welcome and some are resisted, and we need to know the many internal and external factors that shape such differences. Things can decay because they are too exposed, and they can decay because they are too closed. There are processes of endo-decay, where things decompose from the inside, and processes of exo-decay, where disintegration is caused by external environmental factors. This differentiation between endo- decay and exo-decay is hardly ever neat, and the two processes can often be 6 | Ghassan Hage
