TCS Special Issue: ‘Solid Fluids’
Now available: Theory, Culture & Society’s Special Issue: ‘Solid Fluids: New Approaches to Materials and Meaning’; edited by Tim Ingold and Cristián Simonetti.
Digital cover image: Crab Nebula (Hubble Mosaic). Source: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University).
The massive environmental and climatic upheavals currently occurring around the world reveal that the histories of humans and of the earth are more closely coupled than previously thought. We can no longer regard the earth as a solid platform for the enactment of human affairs, or of these affairs as carried on in a fluid domain that floats above the fixities of the material world. Rather, the very distinction between solidity and fluidity, along with that between the alleged ‘hardness’ of matter and ‘softness’ of meaning, needs to be rethought. Just how hard or solid is the physical world? How soft or fluid is our imagining of it? In this interrogation, not only are our understandings of materials and materiality at stake; so too is the established division between the natural sciences and the humanities. Our project, Solid Fluids in the Anthropocene, responded to calls to rethink the relationship between human and earth sciences in an epoch in which humans are acknowledged to have become a dominant geomorphological force. This Special Issue is assembled from a selection of contributions to the project’s closing workshop.
These contributions focus on materials that defy any simple opposition between solid and liquid phases, or that exhibit various degrees of viscosity, including glacial ice, wetland soils, concrete, colloids, glasses, clays and metals. Addressing the properties of these materials, as attested in such practical human projects as pottery and metallurgy, building ice-roads, draining marshland, archaeological excavation, digging foundations for urban development, and thermonuclear weapons testing, opens up fundamental questions about the nature and constitution of the material world. In their introduction, Tim Ingold and Cristián Simonetti ask what happens to the idea of the phases of matter, including solid, liquid and gas, if we start from the idea of material as primordially fluid, continuous rather than particulate, thus reversing the relation between statics and dynamics? What if we were to think of materials as constitutive not so much of the physical world as of environments for living beings? Is solid fluidity a condition of being in the midst of things, or of intermediacy on a solid-fluid continuum? Does the world appear fluid in the process of its formation, but solid when you look back on things already formed?
Focusing on the delta of the Mackenzie River, in the northwest Canadian arctic, Franz Krause shows how variations of solidity and fluidity are part of the tempo of hydrosocial life in an environment marked by extreme seasonal oscillations. Paolo Gruppuso’s contribution describes how Mussolini’s campaign in the 1930s, to drain the Pontine Marshes, near Rome, far from heralding a new era of human mastery, has left a legacy of rusting machinery, abandoned quarries and encroaching swamp. Germain Meulemans enters the world of foundation builders, tasked with engineering the solidity that city dwellers take for granted in a substrate that is inclined to flow, and whose unruly behaviour defies prediction and control. This is a problem for archaeologists as well as builders, as Gavin Lucas shows, since bending, buckling and seepage of depositional layers can scramble the record. Successive strata become mutually permeable. But if apparently solid materials, like earth or ice, can flow, how does this happen? Do we understand movement disjointedly, as the successive displacement and re-attachment of solid bodies, or as a process of fluid deformation?
Cristián Simonetti addresses these questions through a focus on viscosity. Long understood as an anomaly, could viscosity be a property of all matter, and even a condition for life itself? Bronislaw Szerszynski tackles this question through an investigation of the properties of colloids. In a colloid, no grain, droplet or pore can ever be alone, since it exists only thanks to a cascade of repetitions that rebound throughout the entire mass. For this reason, Szerszynski argues, colloids provide a powerful model for thinking about the social. But can they also help us think about memory? Do materials, depending on their relative solidity or fluidity, remember more or less of how they have been treated? In her contribution, Sasha Engelmann explores the mnemonic capacities of materials through a focus on the detritus of thermonuclear explosions. Finally, Nigel Clark shows how civilisation can itself be understood less as an imposition of human powers on the earth than as a particular intensification of geopower: of riverine sedimentation in irrigation works, and of volcanic activity in the pyrotechnic arts.
The Special Issue concludes with a lexicon of nineteen everyday words, ranging from ‘cloud’ and ‘concrete’ to ‘wave’ and ‘wood’, which came up most often in discussions around solidity and fluidity. All the above-mentioned contributors, along with Laura Watts, have taken it in turns to write a mini-biography for each word.
Abstracts and article links appear below
Tim Ingold and Cristián Simonetti, Introducing Solid Fluids (Open Access)
This issue opens an inquiry into the tension between solidity and fluidity. This tension is ingrained in the Western intellectual tradition and informs theoretical debates across the sciences and humanities. In physics, solid is one phase of matter, alongside liquid, gas and plasma. This, however, assumes all matter to be particulate. Reversing the relation between statics and dynamics, we argue to the contrary, that matter exists as continuous flux. It is both solid and fluid. What difference would it make were we to start from our inescapable participation in a world of solid fluids? Is solid fluidity a condition of being in the midst of things, or of intermediacy on a solid-fluid continuum? Does the world appear fluid in the process of its formation, but solid when you look back on things already formed? Here we open new paths for theorizing matter and meaning at a time of ecological crisis.
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Franz Krause, The Tempo of Solid Fluids: On River Ice, Permafrost, and Other Melting Matter in the Mackenzie Delta
Seasonal and historical transformations of ice and permafrost suggest that the Mackenzie Delta in Arctic Canada can be understood as a solid fluid. The concerns and practices of delta inhabitants show that fluidity and solidity remain important attributes in a solid fluid delta. They are significant not as exclusive properties, but as relational qualities, in the context of particular human projects and activities. Indigenous philosophies of ‘the land’ and Henri Lefebvre’s notion of ‘tempo’ in ‘Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life’ (2004) may help to illustrate the predicament of living in a world that is solid and fluid rhythmically, and in relation to particular practices. Economic, political, sociocultural and physical transformations can all be experienced as both solid and fluid, depending on the degree to which they resonate with people’s purposes. In a world where everything seems to be changed and changing, solidity and fluidity may best be seen as indications of relative differences in tempo.
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Paolo Gruppuso, In-between Solidity and Fluidity: the Reclaimed Marshlands of Agro Pontino
During the 1930s the fascist government launched a programme for the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes, one of the largest forested wetlands in Italy. In less than a few years the muddy and uneven ground of the forest was transformed into flat land to be cultivated and into solid surface where three new towns were built. Hegemonic narratives describe the fascist reclamation as a process that imposed a solid form upon the raw materials of nature, thereby establishing an unbridgeable divide between nature and culture, natural and built environment. The article challenges this dualism, drawing on ethnographic and historical materials to explore spatial and temporal zones in-between fluidity and solidity. It suggests an approach in which fluidity and solidity are understood as patterns of social and ecological relations rather than mutually exclusive properties of matter, thus exposing the continuity between them.
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Germain Meulemans, Solidifying Grounds: The Intricate Art of Foundation Building
Modern thinking about the ground tends to take it as a purely material base for the unfolding of history and ideas emerging on its surface. In this article, I question above-ground visions of city building by drawing on both the history of ground engineering and ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Paris with geotechnicians. I address the difficulties that theorists have faced over past centuries in modelling soils, and the contemporary practice of building piles underneath buildings to anchor them. From this unfolds an understanding of the ground as produced through an equilibrium between forces and materials in which buildings become participants, rather than a solid base upon which they stand. Looking at the activities of foundation builders, we find that the inertia of the urban soil no longer betokens an absence of activity or movement, but is rather a continuous achievement, a slow and dangerous process of balancing tensions.
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Gavin Lucas, Archaeological Stratigraphy and the Bifurcation of Time. Solido intra solidum
The goal of this paper is to explore the ways solidity and fluidity have been articulated in relation to understandings of time and the archaeological record. It reflects on the paradox that led the 17th-century Danish scholar Nicholas Steno to write one of the first discourses on stratigraphy: how can solid objects (such as fossils) occur within other solid objects (rock)? His dissertation (‘De solido intra solidum naturalitur contento’, 1669) offered the simple solution: the containing solid was once a fluid. However, such a solution came at a cost which still haunts contemporary understanding of the archaeological record: a bifurcation of time into past and present expressed through the ideas of archaeological statics and dynamics. In addressing the way ‘solid fluids’ are entangled with time and archaeological stratigraphy, this paper attempts to draw novel perspectives on all three.
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Cristián Simonetti, Viscosity in Matter, Life and Sociality: The Case of Glacial Ice
A tension between solidity and fluidity tends to divide the sciences and the humanities along lines that define what is hard and soft in knowledge. This divide relates to similar dichotomies, between exteriority and interiority, material and spiritual, homogeneity and heterogeneity, matter and form, all of which have been partially mapped in Western thinking onto a traditional separation between earth and sky. Yet particular forms of knowledge sit uneasily within these tensions, a paradigmatic example of which is an understanding of solids as ‘viscous fluids’. This article explores the concept of viscosity, attending to how it has impacted on understandings of matter, as well as broader social and cultural issues. It does so, particularly, by looking into the scientific study of ice, a material that has historically been regarded as solidfluid, to argue that life and sociality remain possible only in so far as matter that is viscid allows solid and fluid states to mingle.
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Bronislaw Szerszynski: Colloidal Social Theory: Thinking about Material Animacy and Sociality beyond Solids and Fluids (Open Access)
This paper argues that an exploration of colloids can help us situate human social life within a wider understanding of the sociality and animacy of matter. Colloids are substances such as sols, foams, powders, gels, doughs and pastes that exhibit complex and shifting macroscale physical properties that do not conform to standard conceptions of solids, liquids or gases. Colloids can behave in complex and creative ways because of their topological enfolding of dispersed and continuous matter, in different phases, at a ‘mesoscale’ intermediate between the scale of molecules and that of the macroscale substance. I relate colloids, with their twin phenomena of ‘repetition’ and ‘mediation’, to an understanding of social life as reducible neither to the interaction between separate individuals nor to a transindividual whole. I suggest that human social life participates in a colloidal ‘metapattern’ of repetition and mediation that is manifest across diverse material substrates and spatial scales.
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Sasha Engelmann, Elemental Memory: The Solid Fluidity of the Elements in the Nuclear Era (Open Access)
The epistemological challenges of the Anthropocene trouble distinctions of solid and fluid. In this contribution, the author proposes, after Gabrielle Hecht, that the ‘nuclearity’ of the Anthropocene contributes significantly to destabilising these categories. Nuclear materials and ideas of nuclearity' force (re)consideration of deep timescales and imperceptible processes, problematising fixed material ontologies. The article engages with nuclear matters and queries the logic of solids and fluids by developing the notion of ‘elemental memory’. An attention to elemental memory – an element’s capacity to auto-affect over time – reveals the inadequacy of terms like solid and fluid, and highlights the expressiveness of solid fluid substances. Empirically, the author demonstrates, first, how elemental memory informs the solid-fluid processuality of radioactive glasses, especially trinitite. Second, engaging with the work of artists Mari Keto and Erich Berger, she addresses the slow auto-transformations of radioactive minerals.
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Nigel Clark, Planetary Cities: Fluid Rock Foundations of Civilization (Open Access)
Whereas recent framings of planetary urbanization stress the planet-scaled impacts of contemporary urban processes, we might also conceive of cities as being constitutively ‘planetary’ from their very outset. This article looks at two ways in which the earliest urban centres or ‘civilizations’ on the floodplains of the Fertile Crescent harnessed the deep, geological forces of the Earth. The first is the tapping and channelling of sedimentary processes, central to what Wittfogel referred to as hydraulic civilizations (1963). The second is the use of high-heat technologies to smelt and forge metals, which can be construed as a capture of igneous processes. What both sets of practices have in common is that they involve skilled intervention in fluid-solid phase transitions between solid rock and flowing particulate matter. Viewing cities as constitutively geological or planetary in this way can help us reimagine the challenges posed to urban spaces by looming transformations in Earth systems.
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Nigel Clark, Sasha Engelmann, Paolo Grupposo, Tim Ingold, Franz Krause, Gavin Lucas, Germain Meulemans, Cristián Simonetti, Bronislaw Szerszynski and Laura Watts, A Solid Fluids Lexicon (Open Access)
In our discussions around the theme of solid fluids, we often resort to everyday words, many of them of ancient derivation and rich in association. We have decided to make a list of some of the words that come up most often – barring those that already figure as the principal characters of individual contributions – and to distribute among ourselves the task of writing a sort of mini-biography for each. The resulting lexicon with 19 entries, ranging from ‘cloud’ and ‘concrete’ to ‘wave’ and ‘wood’, serves as a conclusion to the collection as a whole.
