ELEMENTAL AESTHETiCS
SUN, WIND, & TIDES BEYOND GREEN ENERGY ASTER HOVING
Aster Hoving 10274227 Research Master’s Thesis in Cultural Analysis University of Amsterdam Words: 23.857 Cover design: Nuno Beijinho Cover photograph: “At and As the Beach,” Aster Hoving Supervisor: Jeff Diamanti Second Reader: Niall Martin January 2020
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Contents
Acknowledgements / 2
Introduction. Notes to a Method The Elemental Aesthetics of Solar, Wind, and Tidal Energy / 3
Chapter 1. The Celestial Sphere Positions of the Sun in Green and Blue / 16
Chapter 2. The Atmosphere Sensing Air, Wind, Fog, and Clouds / 31
Chapter 3. The Hydrosphere A Conclusion by Way of Tides / 48
Works Cited / 63
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to say that this thesis owes its existence to more than a few people. A first thank you goes to my teachers at the UvA, Jeff Diamanti and Niall Martin. I would be nowhere without Jeff’s committed guidance and his inescapably contagious enthusiasm. If I ever get to teach, I hope to emulate at least some of Niall’s pedagogical sensibilities. In addition, I wish to thank my teachers at NYU, Elaine Gan and Anna McCarthy, whose classes were indispensable to this thesis, and Brent Ryan Bellamy and Reuben Martens, who gave me the chance to present an earlier version of some of this work at the 2019 ASLE conference. I would also like to thank Dina, Eline, Marije, Suzanne, Zoe, Zinzi, Janine, Manon, Jaimy, Maartje, Maarten, the New Utopians—Tessel (thank you for proofreading!), Solange, David, and Wouter—, Max, Signe, Justine, Stefan, and Anna—I am grateful to have met this many fascinating and kind people while finding a way through various cities and universities. My roommates at Sonnehoekje and my quasi-roommates at Nørrebrogade 122, thank you for putting up with my life in two (or more) cities. A big thanks to Nuno for the perfect cover design. Floris, thank you for being an amazing friend and editor. Furthermore, I am thankful for my family. Alies, I am so glad for your texts, which tirelessly keep up truly twenty-first century family ties. Mieke and Frans, I am grateful beyond measure. Thank you, for all of it. I strive to be there for others as you have been there for me because, more than anything, I want to make you proud. Above all else, I owe everything to my mom, dad, and brother—Caroline, Harry, and Kars. There are no words to adequately express my gratitude for the lifetime of unconditional love and support you have given me. This thesis and everything I do is always dedicated to you with all my love. And finally, Jonas, my comrade, companion, and collaborator, thank you. Here's to extending, as long as we can, this peculiar perpetual fairest of the seasons stretching back to a spring in the Bay Area.
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Introduction. Notes to a Method: The Elemental Aesthetics of Solar, Wind, and Tidal Energy
… the times of the body and the ‘natural’ environment are characterized by rhythmic variation, synchronization and an all-embracing, complex web of interconnections. Linear sequences take place but these are part of a wider network of cycles as well as finely tuned and synchronized temporal relations where ultimately everything is connected to everything else … The ‘natural’ environment is thus a temporal realm of orchestrated rhythms of varying speeds and intensities as well as temporally constituted uniqueness … These time-spans extend from the imperceptibly fast to the unimaginably slow, covering processes that last from nanoseconds to millennia. - Barbara Adam, Timewatch, 128
… in the poetics of Relation, one who is errant (who is no longer traveler, discoverer, or conqueror) strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he will never accomplish this—and knows this is precisely where the threatened beauty of the world resides. … The thinking of errantry conceives of totality but renounces any claims to sum it up or possess it. - Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, 20-1
In the opera Sun & Sea (Marina) (2019) by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė, songs about individual and collective human exhaustion, performed by vacationers in bathing suits, grow into a symphony. Below these singers, as the artists describe the work, we notice “the slow creaking of an exhausted Earth, a gasp” (Barzdžiukaitė et al.). The piece thereby addresses environmental harm as human and more-than-human exhaustion. The opera, which won the Golden Lion for best national participation at the 2019 Venice Biennale, is set on an artificial beach inside the Lithuanian pavilion. The beach is lit by bright lights suspended from the ceiling at about the same height as the balcony where viewers stand, looking down at the scene on the sand. A recording of waves and wind can be heard, but the beach of Sun & Sea (Marina) is little more than a pile of sand and vacationers. Strangely, the performance is characterized by the material absence of the elements that make up its title: the sun and the sea.
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Image 1. Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė, Sun & Sea (Marina), www.drive.google.com/drive/folders/1X0UOkKnQfLep0HWPgBoqOP5G1O3Z2QTK
Beaches, however, are a paradigmatic ecotone: a place where terrestrial and marine biomes meet. Ecotones are contact zones between different ecosystems, such as those of the sea and land, but also in an extended sense between those of the air and sun. The earth’s biosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and celestial sphere do not simply meet at the beach as an intermediary space between separate entities. Rather, the beach comes into being as they permeate and co-constitute one another. Theorized as such, the beach is thus a place that comes into being only because the materialities of the sun, air, and water flow in and out of each other. By mediating the beach as the absence of these elements, Sun & Sea (Marina) figures the contemporary as a period of environmental crisis in which a radical disturbance and pollution of a pristine nature eventually causes the disappearance of ecological rhythms altogether. This contributes to the creation of an aesthetics of environmental harm, but at the same time risks reproducing the environment as an object that is either characterized as untouched nature or signaled through its absence.1 Such an aesthetics thereby presents culture, history, and society
1 William Cronon’s seminal essay “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” traces how this kind of narrative often characterizes environmentalism: “Far from being the one place on earth that stands
5 as 1. previously separated from, and 2. incommensurable with nature, ecologies, and materialities. In this thesis, therefore, I am less interested in this fall from nature narrative, and more in what persists despite and within environmental harm. While Sun & Sea (Marina) mediates the environmental crisis as the absence of ecological rhythms, I am committed to an aesthetics that mediates ecological rhythms and entanglements that have always been and continue to be entwined with the social. I refer to this socio-ecological art as an elemental aesthetics. My research shows that this elemental aesthetics brings contemporary discourses about energy transitions into relief. Corporations that invest in green energy routinely suggest that if oil rigs and tar sands can be replaced by windfarms, solar panels, and tidal stream generators, there is no need for political and economic reorganization in response to the planetary exhaustion Sun & Sea (Marina) addresses. Because green energy cannot be exhausted, these corporations suggest, these are the fuels and technologies by which the social, as green capitalism, can continue to exist separately from the ecological.2 I thus use the term green capitalism to refer to a period of capitalist organization the wake of the 1970’s oil crisis and during the ongoing climate crisis. But if elemental artworks suggest that social and natural rhythms have never been independent from each other, how then should we think about energy transitions? Two types of questions emerge here. How to theorize the kind of work this elemental aesthetics does in relation to how we think about transitions from fossil fuels to green energy? How to historicize the intertwinement of culture and ecology, or more specifically, artworks with their specific material and temporal contexts? In order to respond to these concerns, I develop an elemental analytic as one way of fostering sensitivity to the continuously changing mutual constitution of artworks, (energy) infrastructures, and the lively materialities of the sun, wind, and tides. I thereby contribute to a wide range of contemporary elemental research. Nicole Starosielski, for instance, presents an array of these scholars in media studies in the essay “The Elements of Media Studies,” many of which I engage with in this thesis. They redefine the classic notion of the elements as timeless and essential material building blocks by working with “the elemental” as a framework for understanding materials as interconnected and dynamic (4). This is the initial definition of the elemental that I work with in this thesis. Starosielski, moreover, argues that the elemental opens up conversations in media studies to
apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. … For this reason, we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships with the nonhuman world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem” (69). 2 In chapters one and two, I substantiate this claim by looking at green energy enterprises by NASA and Google.
6 scholars outside the field (3). Pushing this last observation further, I argue that an elemental analytic is per definition interdisciplinary. Attending to materialities requires that a researcher refrains from starting out with a predetermined generic analytical apparatus. An elemental analytic is never general because it is sensitive to how particular materialities require and open up specific research trajectories. The broad array of texts that I engage with in this thesis have this sensitivity in common. My approach to the concept of analysis is thus defined by a certain improvisational response to the ways in which the elemental composes an inquiry. My definition of elemental aesthetics similarly begins with that its formal qualities are not orchestrated by a ruling human artist but emerge as part of material flows and entanglements. Throughout the various analyses of this thesis, I argue that because an elemental aesthetics materializes out of a sense of ecological vulnerability or precarity, its formal qualities do not master but instead adhere to the affordances and constraints of materialities. Forms in this sense are, as Lyn Hejinian puts it, “not merely shapes but forces” (42). In the essay “The Rejection of Closure,” Hejinian argues that form provides an opening by which one both formally differentiates and acknowledges the overwhelming undifferentiated incompleteness and ambiguity of the world (41). This understanding of aesthetic form as force helps to understand the kind of knowledge that an elemental aesthetics generates. Throughout this thesis I will argue that the supposed separation of nature and culture in green capitalism is connected to a notion of knowledge as representation independent from material forces. An elemental aesthetics, however, is always situated within and in relation to the ecologies that it mediates. The knowledge yielded in this aesthetics therefore does not claim an overview and leaves a sense of incompleteness. In this introduction, I stay with the ambiguities of Sun & Sea (Marina) in order to further unpack the challenges of analyzing elemental art. Sun & Sea (Marina) brings into relief the two central concerns of this thesis: first, analyzing an aesthetics interested in ecological flows, movements or rhythms, albeit in absence; and second, holding the historicity of ecological crisis in focus. My aesthetic archive and my choice of theory respond to these two concerns. The objects share, first, an attunement to solar, atmospheric, and tidal rhythms across a variety of localities, including countries such as the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United States, England, and Scotland. Second, common to my interpretations of the artworks is that I read them in conjunction with theory that allows me to align the objects with concepts known from historical materialism, particularly accumulation, utopia, the commons, surplus, and scarcity. These concepts afford historicization of the artworks’ material entanglements in ways that open up a discussion of the relationship between new(er) and old(ish) materialisms. In other words,
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I argue that an elemental aesthetics invites conceptual and methodological tools from both the environmental and energy humanities. I have so far stayed with the first two terms of the title of the opera, the sun and the sea. But to show the historical work that an elemental analytic demands, I turn to its final bracketed word: (Marina). From its original Italian meaning, i.e. “coastal region,” marina typically refers to a built infrastructure of docks, usually for pleasure boats (OED). These docks could be located in the Mediterranean or more precisely the Adriatic Sea, since we, as viewers of this artwork, are in an archipelago in the Venice Lagoon in northern Italy. The ambiguities of this specific location for the artwork are clear. Historically, the marina of Venice evokes the image of a harbor that is known for its role as port of the first mercantile state from around the thirteenth to fifteenth century. In this context, placing marina in between brackets in the title serves as a subtle reminder of the surplus that circulates through these transit zones. If we inscribe the (Marina) of the artwork in that genealogy, in these flows of commodities, capital, and labor that characterize the early modern history of Venice, it signifies regimes of accumulation. Sun & Sea (Marina) is inseparable from these histories. By way of the opera’s location and its occlusion of the elemental conditions of the beach, the exhaustion of the earth that the vacationers sing about is thus connected directly to the dynamics of capitalism. Along these lines, Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr argue that what some call the Anthropocene is actually the name for capital turning some ecological entanglements productive at the expense of others. They specifically theorize the ecotone as a place where value can flow. In their account, the ecotone—the beach as a space of flow and ecological entanglement—thus becomes historical: not external to but constitutive of capitalist production and circulation (161). In the context of Sun & Sea (Marina) we recognize this in how this period of value generation simultaneously marks the rising seas that increasingly threaten the very existence of the coastal city where the opera is performed. From such a standpoint, the ecological crisis the piece performs is a historical condition that, as I have suggested, is characterized by the double logic of separating elements and economics to allow capital to profit from precisely this externalized nature. In the following chapters, I continuously consider historical and ecological specificities to theorize how the embeddedness of an elemental aesthetics in specific temporal and material contexts counters this double logic. The broader claim that emerges here that this elemental aesthetics reframes discourses about energy transitions, focusing on solar, wind, and tidal energy. We need to understand the elements that we extract as energy from a perspective that is more sensitive to the specific rhythms, contexts, and histories that define the elemental. The ongoing argument in my
8 analyses of artworks that mediate these particular forms of energy is that they show how we need to move this discussion from a merely technical issue, to a social relation that comprises not only human but also more-than-human, or in other words elemental co-existence. I thus shift from historicizing the elemental to an anticipatory mode based on a poetics of relation between social forms and elemental affordances. The aim here is to show that an elemental aesthetics brings to discourses about energy transitions precisely what these tend to lack: a sensitivity to place, history, material entanglement, and ecological rhythms or, in short, elemental conditions One of the issues that emerge here is that historical definitions of fossil fuels miss precisely these sensitivities. The ways in which capital renders ecological flows productive has been central to historical readings of energy infrastructures, which focus on fossil fuels as the means by which the otherwise fluctuating movements of the sun are, to an extent, continuously accessible and transportable. Timothy Mitchell offers a perceptive definition of oil as “buried sunshine,” emphasizing that fossil fuels are a materialized accumulation of solar cycles (12). From the early eighteenth century onwards, Mitchell argues, this compressed form of concentrated space and time radically changed the speed of production, in comparison to previous epochs in which the productive apparatus relied almost completely on renewables.3 Industrial use of coal, he shows, decoupled production and circulation from the sun, the regeneration of crops and biomass through photosynthesis, and the lifespan of animals (15). Further unpacking the conceptual difference between fossil fuels and renewables, Andreas Malm refers to the compression of space and time that characterizes coal as “the stock,” as different from “animate power” and “the flow” (Fossil Capital 38-42). Malm argues that the appearance of the flow, such as wind or water, is conditioned by space and time and defines its spatiotemporal profile as “a practically immediate result of solar radiation, existing prior to or apart from human labor, incorporated in the landscape, captive of the cycles of the weather and seasons, undiminished at its source by consumption” (Fossil Capital 38-40). In opposition to this, Malm argues that the stock, though it requires labor power to transport, deposit, and turn it into energy and while it is destroyed a soon as it has been converted into motion, stands outside space and outside of time: it can be freely moved and stored and is cut off from diurnal, seasonal, and historical time (Fossil Capital 41-2). These are provoking definitions that open
3 In addition to the term “green energy” I occasionally use “renewable energy” or “renewables” to designate wind, sun, and tidal energy. My argument about green capitalism’s notion of infinite energy applies both to the language of green and renewable energy
9 up our understanding of what fossil fuels are beyond the abstractions that justify their extraction. But, as I will further demonstrate in subsequent chapters, they are also incomplete. The stock indeed allowed capital to accelerate the uniformity and speed of production and circulation with little regard for the spatiotemporal profiles of the planet, but the stock only seemingly stands out of space and time. What is referred to as the depletion, finiteness, or exhaustion of fossil fuels is not a problem of quantity, but of time: they are continuously in the making, but their generation is almost imperceptible from the anthropocentric perspective of an accelerating economy, since it takes millennia of circadian and annual fluctuations. As Barbara Adam reminds us, the temporalities of the environment range from the infinitesimal to the interminable (Timewatch 128). When green capitalism constructs green energy as an alternative to fossil fuels it is therefore not in response to depletion, or an external natural boundary, but rather because capital cannot make fossil fuels work harder, as Jason Moore phrases it (15). The problem, for capital, of the limit of coal and oil is that the rate at which they are extracted is much faster than the time it takes to regenerate them. In chapter three, I return to this thinking in terms of energy surplus and scarcity in relation to a range of tidal art and argue that an elemental aesthetics allows us to perceive energy not as isolated, finite, or infinite resources external to time but rather as ecological flows and entanglements. Insofar as the stock is indeed the materialization of vast stretches of geological time, emissions are our term for the release of time and space into other cycles. From this perspective, techno-utopian responses to the oil and climate crisis emerge as another example of how green capitalism seeks to discipline and enclose the spatiotemporalities of the world. In other words, when green capitalism, in response to the oil and climate crisis, starts to pay attention to the fluctuations of the sun, wind, and water, it develops knowledge to represent, predict, and control their entangled rhythms and materialities. As such, this epistemology renewables as continuously accessible, as standing reserve, as oil was perceived to be. In chapter one I explore the tensions between these techno-utopias and utopias of socio-economically just solar societies. I argue that the solar elemental aesthetics found in photographs by Rosemary Horn and Carolin Lange and poems by Isobel Armstrong and Lyn Hejinian requires us to recognize the extent to which capital aligns extractive infrastructures and ecological flows but also, importantly, allows us to see the persistence of rhythms that escape the disciplining power of capital. They do so by pulling us in to experience ecological rhythms and entanglements, rather than representing them. The exhaustion of humans and the earth of which the performers of Sun & Sea (Marina) sing can thus be seen as the product of capitalism’s contempt for the spatiotemporal profile of
10 human and more-than-human worlds. As my complication of the clear difference between fossil fuels and other energies urges us to take serious, capitalism persists in a green mode which perceives green energy as infinite and therefore conceives of energy transitions as a technological solution by which extraction of and from ecological rhythms can be perpetuated in the service of regimes of accumulation. In this perception, green energy is constructed as just as continually accessible to and transportable by humans as we have grown used to think fossil fuels are, but, at the same time, inexhaustible. What fossil fuels and green energy thus share, from the perspective of capitalism, is that both are epistemologically constructed as universally accessible and extractable. Insisting that both fossil and green capitalism rely on an epistemic model which perceives the elements as merely energy, the central challenge of this thesis is therefore to come up with ways of thinking the elements beyond capital accumulation. Historically, I therefore see a continuation of developments, which various historians argue are intricate to the development of modern capitalism, in contemporary discourses on energy transitions. If in Europe around the fourteenth century the technology of abstract universal clock time was supposed to regulate working hours (Thompson 56), if in the eighteenth century British industrialists preferred coal over hydropower for its disciplinary potential (Malm 146), and if in the second half of the twentieth century governments switched to oil to restraint democracies (Mitchell 236), then the recent enlistment of green energy by capitalists to promise an inexhaustible modernity continues the promethean conceit of fossil capital. We need, therefore, to interrogate how green energy infrastructures can be aligned with permanence as mode of exploitation. Moreover, decontextualized time freed up the future as realm of monetary speculation (Le Goff 152, Adam, “History of the Future” 365), the coal- based fossil economy fueled ideas of economic progress as self-sustaining which already existed in relation to hydropower (Malm 47), and the seeming inexhaustible energy derived from oil played a decisive role in post-war conceptions of financial growth as unhindered by material limits (Mitchell 140). This means that we also need to ask how an economic ideology of infinite expansion coordinates with capitalism’s understanding of a transition to green energy. The intervention of the energy humanities is to insist that fuels, resources, and their infrastructures are never mere technologies but bound up with society, politics, economy, and culture.4 This means that an energy transition that adequately responds to the current environmental crisis only takes place when these social systems transition too.
4 Consider, for example, Living Oil (2014) by Stephanie LeMenager, Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture (2017) edited by Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman, and Energy Humanities: An Anthology edited (2017) by Szeman and Dominic Boyer.
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Despite that Malm and Mitchell enable us to see how politics and economics are entwined with certain types of energy, I object to the ways in which these historical materialist thinkers conceive of capitalism. Echoing the ideas of material feminists, natureculture theorists, and multispecies ethnographers, I argue that to speak of capital(ism) as if it is a thing, an object to be analyzed from a distance, a totality, is to repeat what Donna Haraway calls the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere and thus to repeat the abstractions we aim to criticize (“Situated Knowledges” 581).5 The primary unit of analysis of this thesis will therefore not be a totality but relations. I propose not to resolve this analytic disjunction between historical and relational approaches but instead allow for a precarious tension to persist between the two. Precarity is not only a state induced by capital, but also signifies ecological indeterminacy or life without the promise of stability (François, “Unstored Energies” 125, Tsing 2). This reading may thus be understood as a mode of ecological thinking in itself. Precarity then refers to a suspension between two analytic perspectives, something Édouard Glissant refers to as the thinking of errantry, in which a precarious mode of thought reminds of the threatened beauty of the world (20-1). In a sense, this is a precarious analysis as ecotone that comes into being at and as the conjoined differences between the theoretical and methodological considerations of historical and new materialisms. The relational thinkers I am inspired by emphasize that the world comes into being through “intra-action” (Barad 49): the observer and the observed emerge simultaneously and their connection precedes them, as do nature and culture (Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto 12) and the material and the discursive (Alaimo and Hekman 6). The human and discourse are not transcendental exceptions but rather one expression of the activity, productivity and creativity of matter (Coole and Frost 9). In Exposed (2016), Stacy Alaimo coins the concept “transcorporeality” to refer to such entanglement of bodies and environments (113). Alaimo’s concept “exposure” furthermore theorizes how a sense of political agency emerges from the vulnerability of this perceived loss of sovereignty (5). Following such a relational approach, not only the beach but also the human body is in a way an ecotone, as it is not separate from an inert natural background but embedded into lively materialities. The elemental composes the human body as much as the beach. In the case of Sun & Sea (Marina) this feminist perspective opens up the question of how, if the elements that human bodies consist of and depend on have disappeared, these human opera singers have continued to exist independently from the elemental absence they address. Similar to this detached position of the
5 Starosielski in a talk at the 2019 “After Oil School” similarly suggests that a sole focus on infrastructural reading may contribute to the reification of those same infrastructures (“Harvesting Sunlight”).
12 singers, the audience of the piece is not situated within the beach but instead hovers above it, almost hidden, able to see the scene without being part of it. If bodies, infrastructures, art, and materialities are mutually constituted, then neither the singers, nor the audience, nor the lyrics of the opera can be external to the scene of an exhausted earth. Elemental aesthetics, instead, give us a sense of how forms emerge from elemental entanglements and thereby perform a material politics of exposure. As such, an elemental understanding of energy can help open up even further the intriguing (re)definitions already put forward in the energy humanities. We thus need to cultivate other ways of knowing energy than its dominant modern definition by expanding into entangled ways of knowing energies. Fuel, resource, and energy are words that in different degrees obscure how humans and resources are embedded in an intricate web of interconnections and temporalities in excess of scientific measurement or quantification. With this excess I mean that they are not continuously and completely accessible for extraction. Laura Watts, in one of the few studies of energy informed by natureculture theories, aptly emphasizes the crucial difference between fuels as reserve and embedded energies:
Hydro-powered and fossil fuel-made electrons can appear the instant you drop water from the top of a dam, or burn more coal or gas, whereas electrons made from renewable energy rise and fall with the movement of the wind and tides, with the weather, and with the turning of the Earth. Renewable energy-made electrons don’t appear when you need them. (32)
A recurrent question in this thesis is therefore to discuss to what extent the elemental can be experienced through embodied and aesthetic mediation. Thus, the sun, which I think with in chapter one, is not a sun as seen continuously from space but rather lived on earth as it comes up and goes down. Similarly, in chapter two, I am interested in the ungraspable rise and fall of the wind as it changes continuously. Finally, in chapter three, and by way of a conclusion, I end with artworks that allow us to contrast the ebb and flow of water with hydropower generated at will through dams. In line with the concerns outlined above, my suggestion is that in order to avoid reproducing an analytic separation in the study of energy, we need modes of elemental attunement to the spatiotemporal patterns and entanglements that persist despite and within a relentless drive to impose standardized temporalities and cultivations. Multispecies anthropologist Anna Tsing refers to these as “salvage rhythms,” forms of unregularized
13 temporal coordination and cooperation between human and more-than-human patterns (131-5). Instead of focusing on singular capitalist imaginaries of progress (and how they are bound up with energy infrastructures), the art, as Tsing argues, is to notice latent commons that happen around us continuously in all the precarious modes of existence that use and refuse capitalist governance (131-5). Attunement to these circadian, seasonal, and other rhythms, Tsing suggests, is central and “such sensibilities will be needed for the end of global progress’s easy summer: the autumn aroma leads … into common life without guarantees” (Tsing 2). If, as Serpil Opperman argues, the world is storied by material agencies as narrative agencies (29), the work to be done is to let these agencies sensitize our conceptual vocabularies to an elemental world. I propose the elemental is one such sensible concept. I return to the commons in chapter two, where I look at a fog installation by Fujiko Nayaka and a fog poem by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge in order to suggest modes of attunement to atmospheric commons. To show how the historical and relational affordances of the elemental—as I have discussed them in this introduction—are manifested in other research as well, I offer a brief exposition of elemental analytics. Glissant, for example, voices how ecological entanglements and rhythms persist despite and in the face of linear, progressive, appropriating knowledges and practices when he states that “[t]he elementary reconstitutes itself absolutely” (43). An affiliated relational reading of the elemental comes from Amanda Boetzkes, who in a study of environmental art employs the term Earth Art rather than Land Art since land is only one of multiple elementals that reveal the sensorial plenitude and irrepresentability of the earth, such as the sky, light, water and weather (16). Boetzkes theorizes the elementary as a concept that brings out the earth’s alterity, which does not imply a return to an untouched nature nor a denial of the mutual constitution of humans and nature, but rather emphasizes that the whole of nature cannot be contained within limited human parameters (17). Earth art, Boetzkes argues, holds on to the tension of the simultaneous sensibility and alterity of the earth: it can open the senses to the temporalities, rhythms, and materialities of elementals through aesthetic mediation while retaining a definite sense of these phenomena escaping the artwork representing it (20). And yet, though the elemental asserts its status of radical alterity, elements are both appropriated by and serve as infrastructures. In a study that reads rising temperatures as guide for thinking material entwinement, Denise Ferreira da Silva experiments with the correspondence of the classic elements to the four typical phase transitions to figure change as material transformation rather than the temporal progression informed by Universal time (n.p.). What Da Silva refers to as elemental thinking reads the accumulation of atmospheric gases as the form of global capital itself (n.p.). Related to this reading of elements as capital is Derek
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McCormack’s interpretation of Google’s Loon project as an infrastructural experiment, in which elemental agencies are infrastructural conditions themselves (202). The project, which tests the use of balloons as high-altitude platforms for the distribution of wireless internet, has the ambition to use the wind to allow the balloons to move and therefore draws from datasets that predict the trajectory of wind (McCormack 199-201). Again, what I am interested in regarding green energy is the friction between elements-as-infrastructure and the ways in which the elements exceed the efforts intended to seize them, including both wind turbines and the wind prediction datasets used by Google, because the quasi-autonomy of the elemental is what requires us to coordinate our co-existence with ecological rhythms. In later chapters, I return to this friction in readings of other elemental infrastructures such as greenhouses, solar farms, Google wind, and tidal harbors. The elemental thus encompasses both the excessiveness of the elements and the ways in which they are put to use. “The elements gather the slow and swift, the durable and the ephemeral, the flowing and the deceptively still,” write Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, the editors of the collection Elemental Ecocriticism (2015) (8). As such, in the words of Cheryll Glotfelty in the introduction to Veer Ecology (2017), these editors encourage us to regard “the elements as fellow actors rather than props or backdrop” (ix). Materials matter not because they are valuable, but because their elemental components compose as much as they are composed. As Michael Marder argues, designating solar, wind, and hydropower as renewables rather than as elementals lumps together biofuels and human cohabitation and cooperation with the elements of water, air, and solar fire (51). The concept thus emphasizes the requirement of coordination between human and more-than-human spatiotemporal profiles. Therefore, a truly sustainable energy transition cannot be compatible with ideologies of permanence or infinite expansion. In sum, I argue that the elemental moves beyond arguments about the analytical supremacy of time or space, beyond the bifurcation of temporality and permanence, and opens up questions of energy to a mode of attention to spatiotemporal profiles that oscillate between limits and limitless renewal. The elemental gathers the durable and the ephemeral and fosters thinking in which the ephemeral is perhaps paradoxically as close as we get to permanence, since it is precisely by fluctuating that worlds perpetuate themselves. The artworks that I work with in the subsequent chapters show that an elemental aesthetics is particularly powerful in reframing discussions about energy transitions from a question of depletion, or quantity, to living with the spatiotemporal patterns of materialities. The forms of elemental aesthetics, to return to Hejinian, render the rhythms of elements known but simultaneously alter and thereby
15 reorient the premise of these discussions from only technical to political. The point is therefore not to incorporate dissenting materialities into the political but to nurture the politics that is the antagonism between the political and the materialities exceeding it.6 It is important, though, that since an object is never a mere resource, every specific instance of such aesthetic translation complicates the conceptual generalizations outlined above. My readings are therefore attuned to the specific tenses and contexts of each object and refer, when possible, to my own situation and/or experience of them. In chapter one, I analyze photographs and poems that counter the idea of unlimited solar availability by mediating the changing intensity of the sunlight that reaches the surface of the earth during the day and the seasons. In chapter two, I engage with the atmospheric elemental aesthetics of art, poetry, and various other texts that problematize quantified accounts of wind energy by way of their exposure to elemental conditions. In chapter three, I trace a range of tidal art and argue that these elemental aesthetics demand acknowledging our entwinement with ebbs and flows as well as the quasi-autonomy of this rhythm. As the rhythmic intervals which I think with in this thesis manifest themselves as precarious analytic movements between different or even incommensurable theoretical sensibilities, so are the elemental aesthetics I trace a formal requirement for my own stories about the patterns of the sun, wind, and water. In the following chapters, the celestial sphere, the atmosphere, and the hydrosphere should appear to you as interconnected, yet unique—sensed, but never fully grasped.
6 This way of phrasing makes clear I am arguing against a Latourian “parliament of things” (“Parliament of Things”).
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Chapter 1. The Celestial Sphere: Positions of the Sun in Green and Blue
Our solar system is predicted by physicists to continue to exist for another four and a half billion years. With this scientific prediction, Hermann Scheer, the German former social democratic parliament member known for his work for the promotion of solar energy, opens chapter two of his book The Solar Economy: Renewable Energy for a Sustainable Future (2002). Every year of this unfathomable time span, Scheer argues, the sun produces 15.000 times more energy than the total amount of energy currently consumed by what he refers to as the “human population” (62).7 Scheer pushes this quantified notion of the sun in tandem with his argument that the technology for a full-scale switch to solar energy is already there—all that lacks, according to Scheer, is political will (63-64). In this chapter I put pressure on this quantified account of the sun by arguing that it reveals a point of convergence between the way science constructs energy as an object of knowledge and capitalism’s ambition to internalize energy sources for continued and continuous production. In fact, as will become clear over the course of this chapter, these scientific measurements seem to find their correspondence in contemporary green capitalism’s claim to a seamless energy transition that requires no social or political change. In other words, though Scheer recognizes the political potential of a switch to solar energy and argues that its universal availability could free societies from control by capitalist corporations that centralize energy infrastructures (86), his way of arguing counters his political demands. I analyze photography and poetry that counters these fictions of unlimited solar availability by evoking the fact that the intensity of the sunlight that reaches the surface of the earth varies during the day and the seasons. Planetary rotation, these artworks teach us, challenges fantasies of solar limitlessness. I work with chlorophyll prints by Rosemary Horn, in which chloroplasts in foliage are the aesthetic agent of seasonal colors in response to planetary rotation around the sun, and the cyanotypes of Carolin Lange, in which a chemical compound materializes into the color blue in response to fluctuating sunlight. I juxtapose these photos with excerpts from poems by Isobel Armstrong and Lyn Hejinian, whose attention to solar temporalities gives me a language to discuss these artworks as resisting the extractive
7 As I argue in line with critiques of the Anthropocene concept in chapter two, this notion of the “human population” is problematic since it presents the human as species instead of accounting for historical relations.
17 epistemologies of green capitalism. The aim of this chapter is thus to explore how the elemental aesthetics of these artworks allows us to experience the sun differently. In the two subsections of this chapter, I argue that these artworks help us theorize solar elemental aesthetics by creating an elemental epistemology that is ephemeral, context depended, and always in excess of itself. This excess, I argue using various theorists of this and related concepts, resists the notions of surplus, representation, and extraction that otherwise define the capitalist relation to solar economies, whether in form of industrial agriculture—the focus of the first section—or large scale solar energy infrastructures—the focus of the second. In my analysis I moreover counter this utopia of unlimited energy in which capital accumulation can continue business as usual, with no regard for environmental rhythms and entanglements, by redefining the concepts utopia and accumulation in the contexts of attention to ecological processes. The earth turns around the sun and around its own axis, which means that the hemispheres of the earth experience seasonal and diurnal variations. When, in the approximately 365-day circumference of the earth around the sun, the northern hemisphere moves closer towards the sun in summer, winter begins in the southern hemisphere and vice versa. In the 24-hour clock time roughly marking a planetary day, the earth turns around its axis once. Many places on earth experience the change between day and night within this abstract clocked timeframe, though crucially all at different moments, but in the regions north of the polar circle8 the sun is up continuously for at least one day during summer and does not appear, for one day or more, in winter. A central paradox of the sun emerges from this prosaic yet astronomical account of seasonal and diurnal rhythms. The sun is the central gravitational force that keeps the solar system in its place, pulling all its matter together, and yet on earth there is no such thing as a universally lived sun, only differential, embodied, mediated experiences of the sun’s changing positions in the horizon over the course of a day and a year.9 The artworks that I work with in this chapter afford such celestial differential solar relationalities, and these counter green capitalism’s claim to complete access. I use the term photography to refer to these relationalities and thus not only refer to the act of taking pictures, but also to poetry and plants as heliotropic mediations. Heliotropes, plants that grow or turn towards the sun, designate a certain way of relating to light. I thus use the term photography as one of our terms for differential mediations of sunlight; from the Greek photo, light, and graphy,
8 For an account of light, darkness, and energy in polar regions, consider Sarah Pritchard’s “Field Notes from the End of the World.” 9 As this brief narrative demonstrates, post-Copernican astronomy is one such mediation—I have adapted its term celestial sphere as a name for how celestial bodies are experienced from the surface of the earth.
18 drawing—drawing or writing with light (OED). In Life After New Media (2012), Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska argue that mediation is a “vital process”: it is a concept for understanding the intra-active becoming of nature, technology, and society and the historically situated acts by which this process is temporarily stabilized (xv-xvi). Following such view of mediation, photographs, as mediated solar cycles, are an entryway into understanding the historical and ecological forces by which photos become objects. Contrary to its more common characterization as inanimate snapshots, this way of seeing photography shows that it is a process of lively differentiation: “it is, paradoxically, precisely in its efforts to arrest duration, to capture or still the flow of life … that photography’s vital forces are activated” (Kember and Zylinska 72). In other words, the point is not to understand photography as a representation of an object but rather as materialized imprint of the socio-ecological forces in which it is embedded. In Camera Lucida (1981) Roland Barthes states that photography exists at the intersection of two distinct procedures: one chemical, in which certain substances react to light, and one physical, in which an image is created through an optical device (10). If chemistry is interested in the behavior of elements or compounds, and if physics studies matter in space and time, this intertwinement of chemistry and physics is one way to understand the elemental aesthetics of the photographs that guide this chapter. Following Timothy Neale, Theo Phan, and Courtney Addison, who in the essay “An Anthropogenic Table of Elements: An Introduction” argue that an elemental understanding of chemicals emphasizes the relationality of matter, this elemental aesthetics counters the usual visualization of a periodic table of isolated elements in chemistry (2-3). Instead of elements as timeless and compartmentalized in a grid, the photographs that guide this chapter emerge out of the intra-action of elements, time, and space. I suggest that the only way to think about the elements as separate is to regard them as external to spin and place. The elemental aesthetics of Horn’s chlorophyll prints and Lange’s cyanotypes thus demonstrate different ways of experimenting with the chemical and physical process of photography. Both bypass the mediating function of an optical device, the camera, and let photographs emerge out of elemental conditions. Thereby, chlorophyll prints and cyanotypes are especially productive when exploring environments as processes of mediation. These mediations happen as colors their pieces are defined by monochrome color scales in either blue or green. Common to both of their practices, thus, is that their photographs materialize out of a meeting between sunlight and materials that either occur in biomass, such as the pigment chlorophyll, visible the eye as the color green, or as man-made compounds, such as ferric
19 ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide, visible as blue. These colors are therefore crucial to their practice and to an ecological reading of their work. As demonstrated in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s introduction to Prismatic Ecology (2013), colors do more than describe an inert property: they designate environmental actants with material effects (xiii). Building on these insights, this chapter follows entangled socio-ecologies of green and blue as they emerge in a Horn’s and Lange’s elemental aesthetics in a comparative reading to poems that likewise negotiate how seasonal and diurnal variations are mediated. I am, in other words, interested in the tension between these photographs and other practices of writing with light that aim to make available resources from the sun external to a condition of flux and by extension disarticulate the present from elemental conditions. As I will demonstrate throughout the chapter, attention to embodied experiences of the sun’s position in the sky challenges not only the abstract forms of temporal mediation that are inscribed in modern time keeping but also the ways in which we perceive solar energy as being unlimitedly available for capital. To rephrase this, solar fluctuation is phenomenologically dependent on an embodied relation to space and time. Industrial agriculture aims to sever biomass from its diurnal and seasonal existence, while the solar energy industry works on permanently exposing silicon, the chemical element most commonly used in photovoltaic systems, to the sun. The central task of this chapter is to render visible how capitalism’s mediation of the sun underscores current forms of ecological violence and to posit the elemental aesthetics of various poems and artworks as alternative relations to the light and energy of the sun.
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I. The Seasons: Green
Image 2. Rosemary Horn, Fences Protect, “One Sun, One Leaf, One Afternoon,” n.p., www.photogirl.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Rosemary-Horn-Plymouth-College-Lecture- Oct09s.pdf
the trees’ past is alight incandescing in cell and fibre
blazing veins and capillaries
squander aura
the year’s store of sun leaves weightless
time falls radiant light’s afterlife flares from the ground
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- Isobel Armstrong, “Defining Deaths,” Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets, edited by Carrie Etter, 18
Horn’s work takes my analysis south of the Equator to New Zealand, where she is based. The place where I live, the Netherlands, and New Zealand are located roughly on opposite sides of the planet: when it is winter here, it is summer in New Zealand—when the sun is going down here, it is coming up there. In chlorophyll printing,10 a positive film, or another high contrast image printed on transparent paper, is placed over a leaf, and combined they are exposed to the sun.11 A positive image is one in which the areas most exposed to light are the lightest areas of the transparent print. This process causes the leaf to retain its green color in the areas of the image that let light pass through and lose it in other parts. I argue that these various shades of green render an elemental aesthetics that is interested in the reaction of organisms to the changing position of the sun and varying hours of sunshine throughout the year. As in the excerpt from Isobel Armstrong’s “Defining Deaths” quoted above, from the collection Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets (2010), the sun is ever present in Horn’s images, but not directly in the form of rays of sunshine. Rather, the sun appears embodied or materialized as the process of photosynthesis in the photographs’ biomass. In so doing, the photos speak to how deciduous trees store sunlight in leaves, a process in which chlorophyll is the essential substance, since it allows plants to transform the energy from light into to chemical energy. But the tree in Armstrong’s poem is not described as being covered in thick green foliage. Instead, it’s past is seen alight, referring to the moment in fall when the tree’s leaves flare in red, yellow, orange, and brown. This happens when the amount of sunlight and temperatures drop, and deciduous trees as a response produce less chlorophyll. Since chlorophyll is responsible for making leaves appear green, the substance reflects the blue and red wavelengths of light, other pigments make leaves in this season appear as the fall’s colors.12 Xantophyll, yellow, carotene, orange, anthocyanin, red—the first have been present in the leaves all along, while the latter is produced in response to light and cold. Hues of yellow, orange, or red remind the speaker of the poem of the blazing fire of the sun that provided the
10 Horn’s account of chlorophyll printing in the lecture “One Sun, one Leaf, one Afternoon” taught me most of what I know about the process. 11 The process is thus not necessarily completely camera-free since this positive film could have been made by using a camera. 12 Not all trees change color and shed their leaves—evergreens stay green and shed leaves year-round.
22 energy for the leaves to grow, but this fire of colors also signals the discharge of this year’s work of photosynthesis. The attention Horn’s prints draw to seasonal processes of accumulation and release in biomass figure always already entangled socio-ecologies rather than pristine natures. Instead of thinking humans as a lone actors in the carbon cycle that only become entwined with nature as they destroy it, the elemental aesthetics of Horn’s work reinstates the social as part of the capture and release of carbon that plants use to photosynthesize over the seasons. As Natasha Myers reminds us, plants are a powerful actor in the carbon cycle (n.p.). Humans come on the evolutionary stage much later than plants and are more of a by-product of the breathing of plants than their masters. But there is another way they counter the idea of an isolated nature. Horn’s research shows that especially leaves of plants that grow in the understory of the forest such as Arum Lily and Rengarenga Lily, leafy green vegetables such as spinach and bok choy, and weeds tend to work well (Horn n.p.). Many of these plants are labeled as invasive species in New Zealand. In the print shown above, Fences Protect (2016), an image of a sign that designates the presence of the invasive species Arum Lily is printed on a leaf of that same plant. Horn, in her lecture, states that the damage these invasive species inflict on native species is catastrophic (n.p.). She thus utters a critique of British colonization of the islands, since the plants’ presence is not likely to stretch back to before the colonizers arrived. The prints, however, effectively emerge out of these kinds of “contamination” (Tsing 27). Since the chlorophyll prints turn out best on the leaves of invasive species, their form is tied to the messy disturbances of colonial capitalism in which species and plants are moved from their native environments and introduced elsewhere. This means that rather than evoking a nature that is first untouched and then degraded, the prints are a result of entangled socio-ecologies. And yet, in industrial farming, vast amounts of borrowed spacetime—energy, fertilizers—are consumed in service of a sense of control over the spatiotemporal patterns of isolated spaces. The Westland region in the Netherlands, north of the major port of Rotterdam, has the highest concentration of greenhouses in the world. Though the history of horticulture covers millennia, these intensive forms of cultivation in the Orangeries of Holland originate in the 15th century (Muijzenberg 37-57). Regions like the Westland that grow crops all day and all year round, semi-independent of the weather, night, or seasons, contribute to the Netherlands’ status as the second biggest exporter of fruits and vegetables after the US despite covering approximately 200 times less land mass (Viviano n.p.).13 Donna Haraway refers to
13 Though not all of the export from the Netherlands comes from the country itself—goods that have not been produced in the Netherlands also move out of its harbors.
23 this sense of independence and control as a plantation logic: a plantation, she argues, strives for the detachment of all its generative units, such as plants, microbes, animals, and people (Haraway et al. 557). It also strives to keep out ecological rhythms (weather, day and night, seasons) by glass enclosures heated and lit by energy consumption and regenerated through carbon-based fertilizers. In a greenhouse, the growth and harvesting of organic material paradoxically appears to become independent from planetary rotation precisely by extracting accumulated spacetime. This harvesting independent from time and place is also suggested by solar geoengineers, whose solar energy powered capitalist futures Jamie Cross critically refers to as “pastoral” (16) and “ecological-economic utopias” (17). The pastoral as a concept is especially helpful in the finetuning of historical continuities between the long history of plantations, industrial agriculture, and limitless solar imaginaries. It is Raymond Williams, in The Country and the City (1975), who teaches the difference between a classical pastoral literature and the later Renaissance pastoral image. Though classical pastorals idealized images of nature to some extent these still contained traces of labor and loss, but the conventional Renaissance pastoral image rather represents only a bountiful nature (18). This timeless rural order with unmediated harvests, Williams continues, depends on ignoring laborers and obscures the “turning produce of the seasons” (33). The Renaissance pastoral thus shares with solar energy utopias a vision of harvest and consumption that obscures both the human labor and seasonal and diurnal fluctuations that are inseparable from the reproduction of elemental conditions. We can recognize how this seasonless pastoral imagination seeps into accounts of green energy in historical materalialisms, for instance, when Andreas Malm states that since the flow “hangs like a fruit for anyone to pick, there is little surplus-value to extract in its production” (Malm, Fossil Capital 372). For Malm, this explains why industrial capitalism relies on the extraction of fossil fuels. Malm’s thinking about the spatiotemporal profiles of the stock, which he associates with fossil fuels, and the flow, solar, tidal, and wind energy, suggests to him that the latter by definition “does not allow for anything as lucrative as the primitive accumulation of fossil capital” (Fossil Capital 372). However, contrary to this pastoral image of nature, a piece of fruit does not continuously simply hang there for anyone to pick. Fruit grows seasonally. Moreover, the stark line that Malm draws between fruit—and other biomass such as vegetables, flowers, and leaves—and fossil fuels fails to acknowledge that that some fossils were at some point in time fruit. Furthermore, fruit and fossils are both solar mediations. Since a piece of fruit is also an accumulation of solar cycles, fruit, like fossil fuels, allows for the spatial decontextualization or transportation of the sun’s energy. From that perspective,
24 metabolic practices such as eating and digesting fruit are also forms of temporal decontextualization of the sun’s energy in the sense that it carries energy beyond its initial flow. It is therefore important to maintain that just because biological or geological processes are mediated, this does not mean they stand out of spin and place. In other words, the ontological difference between the stock and the flow that Malm makes a claim to only holds when considering some elements as external to space and time. The practice of decontextualizing to gain control relies on the assumption that mediation separates an object from space and time. Mediation is neither separation, nor an intermediary of separate entities, but a temporary accumulation of planetary spatiotemporalities. The difference between fossil fuels and fruits and vegetables is therefore not so much that one is stock and the other is flow. What is important, rather, is that both are subject to capitalist appropriation. My intervention here is to insist that Mam’s understanding of green energy fails to account for the complexity of ecological mediations of energy and thereby reproduces the same regime of accumulation he interrogates. One way to phrase a returning question of this thesis is therefore how to think traditionally Marxist concepts, in this case accumulation, in the context of attention to ecological processes. The concept of accumulation, in Marxist analysis, is productive in its insistence on social forms of appropriation but has difficulties addressing ecologies that rely on rhythms between storage and release. One challenge that I address, therefore, is determining what distinguishes these forms of accumulation. This is precisely the work the elemental aesthetics of Horn’s prints and Amstrong’s “leaves weightless” (18) help us do. By designating leaves as weightless Armstrong offers a vision of a gathering of time and energy that far from serving accumulation or even being harvested departs weightless as falling leaves. 14 This departure is not simply a flow but is an accumulation of energy that is in excess of the needs of a plant. Similarly, Georges Bataille, in The Accursed Share (1949), argues that when productive activity is considered in its ecological context, the “general economy,” the capitalist economy in which material resources are understood as restricted and scarce and have to be used productively, turns out to be at odds with living matter (20). Organisms ordinarily receive more energy than can be used for growth and when a system can no longer grow this wealth needs to be lost without profit (Bataille 21). Bataille’s analysis of the general economy is thus based on a notion of excess rather than restriction and scarcity, which allows us to recognize acts such
14 My interest in these aesthetic mediations of ecological processes of retention and release owes much to Anne- Lise François’ “Ungiving Time: Reading Lyric by the Light of the Anthropocene.”
25 as Armstrong’s falling leaves as accumulations of energy that bypass the requirement of capitalism to make capital of such effort. In her analysis of Bataille’s text, Amanda Boetzkes translates this restricted economy, “capitalism’s failure to acknowledge our innate solarity,” as a “fundamental prohibition of expenditure” which “results in the extreme pressure to accumulate energy without waste (in the form of profit)” (“Solar” 315). Capital, in other words, prohibits the work of releasing as in leaves falling weightlessly, since all excess has to be rendered productive, given weight, and serve accumulation. Another definition of a capitalist economy in the context of natural cycles comes from Jonathan Crary, who in 24/7 Capitalism (2013) argues that contemporary capitalism depends on “permanent expenditure, … endless wastefulness for its sustenance” (10). With the catchphrase 24/7 Crary captures the logic by which capital relies on continuously disposable resources. In this sense, the disruption of the gradual cycles of build-up of chlorophyll that I have looked at in this section declares the permanent falling of leaves in the service of accumulation. In that way, Bataille and Crary characterize the economy by either continuous wastefulness or the prohibition of waste. Both thereby show that these mechanisms of expenditure work in the service of growth and profit. Taken together, their thinking shows that the problem lies with the notion of permanence itself. Permanence allows neither excess nor waste, since nothing should escape capitalization. In the case of the production and release of energy in the forms of leaves, we can recognize this in thinking that bifurcates and isolates either the permanent growing or falling of leaves. The significance of Horn’s aesthetic for my argument is thus that it creates another way of thinking the rhythm of growth and fall. Since in Horn’s prints, chlorophyll remains more present in uncovered areas while the amount of chlorophyll in the areas of the leaf that are shaded by the dark parts of the image decreases, the image appears on the leaf as a range of more or less chlorophyll in different parts of it. The leaf-print encompasses both an abundant presence of the sun in summer, in the form of green biomass, and the scarcer availability of the sun during the winter months, in the form of biomass in other colors than green transitioning to different stages. Moreover, the aesthetic agent responsible for the aesthetic economy of seasonal color is not a human artist but the chloroplasts of the leaves. The elemental aesthetics of Horn’s chlorophyll prints, by embodying not one part but a range in a cycle of buildup and release, challenges our conceptual vocabulary to understand social processes not in the context of a static environment, but in the context of interchanging accumulation. In this solar elemental aesthetics, we see a rhythm of excess and release of which the human is not a master but instead immersed in chlorophyll and other materialities.
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II. The Day: Blue
Image 3. Carolin Lange, sluizhuis, Under the Same Sun, www.carolinlange.com/under-the-same- sun-2017
The quest for knowledge couldn’t be satisfied with familiar things; little as the nature of familiar rains, the everyday rising and setting of the sun, etc., has been understood, the quest for knowledge has remained primarily attracted to novelty, difference … The sun hangs from a dangling filament torn from a web. … For anyone interested in the unfolding of ideas, and in their subsequent displacement under the pressure of alternative ideas, and in the contingent materials that destabilize the contexts in which they are ideas about something, nothing can be entirely literal. - Lyn Hejinian, Positions of the Sun, 28
In the harbor city through which much of the produce of the Westland is likely to move, Rotterdam, many of Lange’s works from the multi-year project Under the Same Sun (since 2017) were made. The project consists of a series of cyanotypes which explore the relationality of time and space as the earth orbits around the sun. Technically speaking, a cyanotype is created by first applying a mixture of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide to a cloth. When these chemicals encounter sunlight, they develop a deep blue color also referred to as Prussian blue (Ware 20). Characteristically, cyanotypes are also referred to as sunprints.
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Lange’s use of the technique to mediate the sun thus puts her work in a genealogy of cyanotypic thinking about the relations between space, time, and matter trough the fluctuations of the sun.15 The print above, from sluizhuis (2018), exhibited in Gallerie Le Clerq in Rotterdam, was made by placing a chemically treated cloth in the the Parksluizen complex in Rotterdam. As this complex is also home to two hydrological sluices, Lange’s work exemplifies the intertwinement of the elements and (energy) infrastructures that I am here engaging as elemental aesthetics. 16 Lange’s prints are made by exposing a piece of cloth to varying intensities of light through the day. As the sun moves in the horizon, the angle of light that falls into the building and the shadows cast by it change, creating a dynamic rendition of how light changes over the course of time. Placing cloths that have been exposed at different times of the day next to each other generates a sense of a particular solar rhythm.17 For me, the experience of seeing another work in this series, created in and exhibited at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, made me aware of a movement that plays out so slowly and casually that it’s hard to realize it is involved in my experience of a built environment. In her own writings on her work, Lange aptly describes the cyanotype as both a material and a method: it’s sensitivity to light captures how the experience of a place changes with the shifting light conditions as the earth moves around the sun (n.p.). In that way, her work allows for an understanding where space, time, and matter appear not as separate entities but as co-dependent as they change with each other. As sunlight is always differentially experienced and mediated, so is a Prussian blue imprint that emerges specific to a geographical location, (architectural) environment, time of day, and time of year. Unlike Lange’s cyanotypes, capitalist solar energy technologies render the mediation of sunlight spatially and temporally decontextualized, independent from a location on a spinning earth. Scheer, in his book, argues against infrastructural plans such as GENESIS (Global Energy Network Equipped with Solar Cells and International Superconductor Grids) and an orbiting solar farm conceived by NASA since they aim to centralize and thereby control and profit from solar energy (83-84). GENESIS implies a belt of photovoltaic panels that convert light into electricity across the equator, while the solar farm would consist of solar panel platforms with a surface area of multiple square kilometers that orbit the earth. Projects like these, however, do not only attempt to scale-up solar energy, but also aim to satisfy capital’s
15 Consider, for example, Anna Atkins’ cyanotypes. 16 The complex is located in Delfshaven, an area incorporated as part the Rotterdam harbor in the early twentieth century but since long outgrown by the postwar annexation of the Botlek, Europoort and, from the 1970’s on, newly reclaimed from the sea, the Maasvlakte. In the conclusion I adress questions of tidal infrastructures. 17 In the context of this chapter’s engagement with both seasonal and diurnal rhythms, it would be very interesting to see Lange execute a study like this one over the course of a longer period.
28 desire to free energy extraction from diurnal rotations by perpetually positioning silicum to the light of the sun and continuously extracting the electric current generated in this exposure. In both projects, we recognize the impetus to harness the power of the sun, traversing the rhythm of the seasons and day and night either through escaping the boundedness of the surface of the earth or through a large-scale infrastructure. Lange’s work makes legible how elemental aesthetics differ from profit driven practices of energy extraction. Lange’s prints make no attempt at continuous exposure, or a rendering of the sun as entirely known. By dividing the day into various moments, Lange’s prints, too, display a certain willingness to categorize, but elemental conditions escape the universal notions of representation and capture inscribed in green capitalism’s solar infrastructures. To push this analysis further in terms of elemental aesthetics, Lange’s prints are again defined by a sense of excess. In a study of solar metaphors, Elizabeth DeLoughrey draws on Jacques Derrida’s theorization of the heliotrope as being at once natural and yet unrepresentable to examine the solar metaphor as figure for alterity (“Heliotropes” 237). DeLoughrey thus offers the sun as a way to understand that which is incommensurable with representation. This concept of solar alterity is one way to understand the epistemological consequences of the intertwinement of matter, time, and space, which I argue characterizes Lange’s practice. I argue that by conveying the strangeness, to rewrite Tim Ingold’s phrase, of what it is like to see the sun by its own light (Life of Lines 97), Lange’s cyanotypes manage to convey this solar alterity. I cannot look at the sun directly without damaging my ability to see, and yet I am dependent on the light of the sun to see at all—I can only indirectly see the sun on which my vision depends and thereby it is part of everything I see. As Sasha Engelmann and McCormack argue, an elemental aesthetics is not so much interested in the representation of the sun but rather in how exposure to the sun is a condition in which a sense of the aesthetic emerges (246). My reading of Lange demonstrates that an elemental aesthetics of the sun is thus interested in how both the sun and aesthetics are defined by a sense of excess. Lange’s cyanotypes capture a transitory phenomenon, but by juxtaposing many different solar intensities, Lange’s work makes explicit that each of the photos are but one in a multitude of other mediations of this rhythm that exceeds them. As I argued in the previous section, this idea of a multiplicity of mediations, of resources that escape their use, opens up a space for thinking economy and social relations. In the final part of this chapter, I therefore want to return to the concept of utopia as one way to understand the possibilities for political thinking that these elemental aesthetics might contain. If critics such as Cross refer to the future imaginary of solar engineers as utopian, this means that
29 utopianism in this sense refers to the desire to overcome externalized materialities. Fredric Jameson, in his book about the genre, Archaeologies of the Future (2005), suggests that this disarticulation of the political from the material is a general dilemma for utopianism, for example when he asks how utopian “texts designed to overcome the needs of the body can remain materialistic” (Archaeologies of the Future xiv). The paradoxical problem is thus that while utopianism is a mode which affords thinking solar futures with truly different social relations, it shares a promethean imaginary with the solar engineers who imagine solar futures as merely technical. As with the concept accumulation, the challenge here is to think utopianism in the context of attention to ecological rhythms and relations. “For anyone interested in the unfolding of ideas, … nothing can be entirely literal” (28)—the narrator of Lyn Hejinian’s poetic novel Positions of the Sun (2018) captures the significance of analytic attention to the everyday rising and setting of the sun. History, the narrator insists, is as much historical as it is ecological. The cyanotype or blueprint, however, has historically served mostly as a way to mass-produce floor and elevation plans and other schemes and has thus been perceived primarily as a tool for schematizing and controlling labor and environments. Likewise, in the twentieth century, the term utopia became synonymous with totalitarian political “blueprints” (Vieira 22). What we see at work in this metaphorical stigmatization of utopian politics as blueprint is the idea that planned economic systems are politically unimaginable precisely by being totalizing. The irony here, of course, is that this very stigmatization served to push so-called pragmatic neoliberal policies which themselves forged the continuation of a long history of subjecting a multitude of planetary dynamics to economic regulation. Against this use of the blueprint as either totalizing scheme or its rejection by neoliberal justifications of market domination, I argue that Lange’s work shows us a kind of political imagining, in the form of an unprecedented blueprint, that does not try to overcome but emerges from materialities. Jane Bennett refers to such practices as going solar, which is to elide the abilities of social categories “to channel and organize perception” and “to buy time for the things outside to make their mark” (142). This means that Bennett and Lange keep open the possibility that political blueprints, social ideas, could be responsive to solar fluctuations. Other relational accounts of energy futures, however, refuse the idea of planned economic systems altogether. In the introduction to the 2019 “After Oil School,” for example, the authors state that “there has been and will be no solarity, only solarities, and the diverse character of these solarities will be determined by the relations, not the source, of their energy” (2). Key here is that “After Oil” collective introduces relationality into the definition of energy in a way that breaks with the attempts, in science, green capitalism, and utopian thinking to
30 render it external. I nevertheless wish to open up, however tenuously, a reading of these cyanotypes as embodying a politics of attention to material entanglements and a utopian imagination, without collapsing one into the other. As blueprints of a future politics that does not desire to overcome materialities but instead comes into being as a response to the movement of the sun in the horizon, the elemental aesthetics of the Under the Same Sun project provide an occasion for staying with the trouble of an unresolved tension between the unnoticed and the unimagined, for hanging in suspension between attention to a sensorial plenitude of existing solarities and a dream of a solar society radically different from what is.
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Chapter 2. The Atmosphere: Sensing Air, Wind, Fog, and Clouds
June 2019. San Francisco. The sky is a stretch of impenetrable blue. The sun burns on my skin. It is the third day of an extremely rare heatwave. The weather forecast announces relief is on its way: “we can see a fog bank offshore” (Graff). Meteorology tells me that in the midst of California’s dry and warm climate, weather phenomena such as the cool fog offer occasional nutrition, shade, and water. Under summertime conditions regular to the twentieth century, San Francisco experiences a daily pattern of fog rolling in by the end of the day. But summertime fog in the area has decreased by a third, which threatens the cloud-connected coastal ecologies of the Bay Area,18 and rising atmospheric temperatures are among its speculated causes (“The Pacific Coastal Fog Project” n.p. ). Fog is a low hanging cloud that consists of airborne elements (mostly water, but also sea salt, dust, and other nutrients) called cloud condensation nuclei. There are many different kinds of fog, but the water of the San Francisco fog comes from the Pacific Ocean, where moisture evaporates into a layer of air referred to as the marine layer. Along the California coast, the sea surface temperature is cool due to the prevailing ocean current from the North Pacific in the northwest and coastal upwelling of subsurface waters. When the moist marine layer encounters cold coastal water, it reaches its dewpoint, and liquid waterdrops form. The fog is blown in by the wind in the late afternoon, when the atmosphere has warmed up: cold air causes high pressure and makes air flow away, while hot air rises, causing air to move in to equalize the low pressure underneath it. These winds follow planetary rotation since they are mostly the result of difference in atmospheric temperatures resulting from sun exposure. Most days, the wind in San Francisco comes from the northwest due to the North Pacific High, an area of high atmospheric pressure. What is at stake in this contrast between meteorological climate models and my experience of hot weather? While weather is the word for momentous changes in the atmosphere that can only be approximated by prediction, climate designates known, long term, relatively stable atmospheric patterns. Mike Hulme therefore argues that the idea of climate is a way of normalizing the unpredictability of weather: whereas the weather often fails to meet our expectations, the fact that we have expectations is due to the idea of climate (238). The
18 Redwood trees for example depend on the humidity of this cloud-connected coastal ecosystem (Johnstone and Dawson 4533).
32 warm weather of those few days was predicted by meteorological institutes, and yet I experienced it as an unexpected deviation from San Francisco’s climatic averages. This chapter works with this tension between the experience of weather phenomena and climate prediction in order to outline and contrast two ways of reading the atmosphere: as abstracted overview and as immersive experience. This first way of reading, an abstract mode of climate representation, anticipates and predicts in order to control and profit. Immersive experiences, however, are contingent, improvisational, and cooperative. Similar to how I in chapter one argue that mechanisms of endless profit in an extractive relation to the sun and solar energy depend on a logic of detaching solar mediations from their elemental conditions, this chapter turns to relations to weather not based on prediction, representation, control, or techniques of enclosure. I find examples of this latter conception in Google’s recent attempts—in advertisement and in infrastructural projects—to quantify and manipulate wind patterns in order to create stable and profitable streams of wind energy, thereby effectively enclosing our atmospheres. Looking for alternative relations to weather, I turn to an aesthetic archive that thinks with fog, clouds, and wind as atmospheric mediations and in that way pursue practices that conceive of the elemental as a common condition. The elemental analytic to which I am contributing thus questions whether energy extracted from the atmosphere is as appropriable green capitalism wants it to appear. I am especially inspired by Cymene Howe’s Ecologics (2019), in which she pits the materiality of wind against investment bank Santander’s notion of wind as a quantifiable resource. Because wind is subject to changes in intensity, Howe shows that quantification depends on ways to predict its behavior (33). If we understand quantification as isolation, in the sense that for something to be quantified it has to be conceived of as totality seen from outside,19 Howe’s research points out that wind refuses the very separation required for quantification. Wind, she argues, emerges out of an interplay of gases and heat and only becomes visible through its impact on other materials (11). The aesthetics of wind, in other words, only appears “in the context of contact” (Howe 11). This is relevant to my consideration of the aeolian aesthetics of green capitalism because a calculation of the atmosphere as investment and energy resource to
19 Tim Ingold, in the paper “Globes and Spheres: The Topology of Environmentalism,” also explains this link between a view from outside and quantification as totality. He argues that of the two conceptions of the environment in western thought, a globe can only be seen from a distance, while a sphere is perceived from within (30). Both of these conceptions, however, are based on the choice of either being inside or outside the world (Ingold “Globes and Spheres” 39). In this thesis I work beyond this binary by theorizing how elemental worlds comes into being with perceptive capacities, or, mediations.
33 be extracted in the service of endless accumulation fails to account for the epistemological implications of the relational appearance of wind. In this chapter I build on Howe’s analysis of the material conditions of capitalist wind politics when reading an artwork and a poem that are interested in the weather of the Bay Area: Fujiko Nakaya’s installation Fog Bridge #72494 and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s poetic work in I Love Artists (2016). Both refuse to separate the atmosphere from its material entanglements. The operation I am pursuing is important because technological and textual media, or in other words atmospheric mediations, that are vulnerable to elemental conditions put pressure on the notion that sustainability is merely a matter of technological transition. The aeolian politics in Howe’s work thus opens onto a larger set of questions relevant to addressing the political ecology of twenty-first century climate change. In section one, I unpack an aesthetic conjuncture of quantifying nature as (energy) resource, climatic modelling, cloud computing, and painting in a reading of a video from Google Netherlands’ recent corporate advertisement. By tracing the epistemological mechanisms that discipline weather into abstractions such as energy and climate, this reading complicates the notion of the digital and green energy as immaterial and fossil fuels and the analog as material. In section two I change the geographical focus of my analysis from Google Netherlands to the location of the company’s headquarters in the Bay Area. In an analysis that intermingles my own experiences with the elemental aesthetics of Nakaya, Berssenbrugge, and various other texts, I trace how these experiences and aesthetics problematize quantified accounts of the atmosphere by way of their exposure to elemental conditions. This means that I differentiate painting atmospheric conditions in the sense of controlling them from the elemental aesthetics of painting with atmospheric conditions and atmospheric conditions as painting. Finally, by situating my analysis within the weather phenomena of the Bay Area, I am interested in the relation between concepts—the commons, enclosure—and the spatiotemporal profiles of the atmosphere. I argue that elemental commons are constituted across the nature-culture divide and form the basis from which human and more- than-human entities emerge.
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Reading the Atmosphere I: Climate Exists in the Cloud
The difference between atmospheric clouds and the digital cloud is a relatively recent semantic shift caught up with imaginaries of cloud computing. Thinking data storage and transmission as a cloud evokes something intangible, but research aimed at materializing cloud computing has pointed out that the data-industry presents itself as materially weightless to obscure its vast consumption of resources.20 That the industry claims to be weightless while simultaneously forefronting its use of green energy supports a conventional understanding of green energy and the data industry itself as immaterial. It is this contradiction of simultaneously rendering consumption invisible while foregrounding green energy use that speaks to the concerns of this chapter. What I am particularly interested in here is tracing data-imaginaries as epitome of the representational and epistemological model that renders the atmosphere as a resource in the first place. In this section I show how this epistemological logic is contained in the concept of climate. The idea of climate, a notion of ecological balance, has been instrumental in yielding contemporary understandings of climate change (Hulme 239). In so representing weather as something that can deviate from a norm, and by investigating the causes of this deviation, it is climate change discourse on which the concept of the Anthropocene depends. The Anthropocene designates a supposed age in which historical and natural time, conceived of as formerly independent, converge as the human as cumulative geologic force dominates and alters climatic averages.21 Critics have pointed out that this model simultaneously suggests a pre-existing separation between nature and culture and reinforces a separation between culture and the environment by claiming the social is now nature. Moreover, it places the human as species at the center of understanding climate change, re-establishing universal man paradoxically as the cause and in total control of climate change. These criticisms and analyses of the specific colonial and capitalist relations that drive planetary exploitation have done important work in historicizing the material processes that are obscured in the otherwise important realization that social relations are implicated in the weather. 22
20 Work regarding data centers includes Mél Hogan’s “Big Data Ecologies,” “Where the Internet Lives” by Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vondereau, and “Data that Warms” by Julia Velkova. 21 I am here referring to “Geology of mankind—The Anthropocene” by Paul Crutzen and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” 22 My description of Anthropocene-criticisms is based on “A Geology of Mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene Narrative” by Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, Jason Moore’s theorizing of the Capitalocene (77), the coinage of the Plantationocene in “Anthropologists Are Talking – About the Anthropocene” by Donna Haraway et al., and Haraway’s article “Plantationocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.”
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Adding to these criticisms I suggest that climate is the conceptual condition or milieu of the Anthropocene. The crucial argument here is that the idea of climate implies a totalizing view. Jennifer Gabrys in the essay “Becoming Planetary” points out how especially computational technology, understood as gigantic systems that capture the planet, suggest total dominion of the earth (n.p.). This total view might even seem necessary, Gabrys states, since in order to act upon it, climate change has to first come into view, become knowable, through global infrastructures (n.p.). But in “Bad Weather: On Planetary Crisis,” Joseph Masco argues that early data sets and infrastructures of climate science all received their initial support through the security interests of the nuclear state (Masco 14-16). As such, it was Cold War military planning that simultaneously generated understandings of the biosphere and encapsulated it (Masco 29).23 This logic now determines responses to environmental harm. We recognize this as what Richard Grusin in the introduction to Anthropocene Feminism (2018) refers to as the masculine authority of the institutional scientific discourse that coined the term Anthropocene in the 1980s and which continues to rely on the technocratic and anthropocentric assumptions that created the problem in the first place (x). Collectively, these critiques of militarized and masculine climate computing and green energy discourses to trace the epistemological mechanisms that discipline weather into abstractions such as energy and climate. Google Netherlands’ recent corporate advertisement is one of the places where the totalizing view of Gabrys’ and Masco’s analyses is visible. In their 2017 April fool’s day video, Google Netherlands jokingly introduces the technology “Google Wind.” In the video, a Google employee states that the company has solved the problem of rain in the Netherlands “by repurposing Holland’s old windmills using them not to capture wind, but to generate it” (00:19- 00:27). Narrating over a close up of screens filed with precipitation maps, graphs, (infrared) pictures of clouds, and a big Google logo, the employee states that they used “Google cloud platforms to predict how clouds will behave” (00:31-00:35). The video then shows how Google connects all Dutch windmills, collaborating through “machine learning,” to “prevent bad weather from happening”: like giant fans, the windmills blow away clouds and rain (00:36- 01:10). The logic by which this advertisement represents weather is a poignant example of imaginaries of knowing atmospheric conditions through cloud computing. In the video, data harvesting renders all human and more-than-human behavior visible, and this visibility renders
23 This chapter does not make visible atmospheric militarization but consider for example Amy Balkin’s artwork The Atmosphere: A Guide (2013-16) and the text “Free Seas, Free Skies” (n.d.).
36 climate change knowable in a way that produces weather and creates the possibility of dominion over atmospheric conditions by the Anthropos.
Image 3. “Introducing Google Wind," Youtube, uploaded by Google Nederland, www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAwL0O5nXe0.
But Google doesn’t stop at predicting and controlling the weather. Acknowledging that “we need some rain now and then,” 24 they send a single cloud to a man tending an urban garden in order to water his produce, exemplifying that Google can “decide when and where it rains” (01:15-01:23). The closing statement of the video is that “from April 1st, we’re able to guarantee clear skies for everyone” (01:33-01:40). The fact that it is a multinational corporation which can decide when and where it rains does, of course, not mean clear skies or rain for everyone. It means that Google produces a vision of a world in which they can sell atmospheric conditions to whoever can afford it. In this scenario atmospheric conditions are construed as a source of energy that requires forms of knowledge that register weather conditions in order to control and even produce them.25
24 If we follow the prediction paradigm in which Google operates, the more likely scenario than selling sunshine would be selling shade and rain since rising temperatures of the atmosphere are predicted to cause the disappearance of clouds (Wolchin n.p.). For more on the politics of shade and heat consider “Shade” by Sam Bloch and Nicole Starosielski’s “Thermal Violence.” 25 Google itself depends on atmospheric control: the biggest Google datacenter in the Netherlands, in the Eemshaven, generates its energy through private wind turbines and their company “Google Energy LLC,” also referred to as “Google Environment,” was founded in 2009 to reduce costs of energy consumption for Google and produce and sell green energy. In September 2019, Sundar Pichai, Google Energy LLC’s chief executive,
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This easy slippage between predicting, controlling, and subsequently owning and selling the weather is unsurprising when considering that the history of a disembodied view is not limited to the computers of the Cold War era but also an integral part of the establishment of colonial and capitalist relations. I follow DeLoughrey here, who in the essay “Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth” argues that “modern ways of imagining the earth as totality, including those spaces claimed for militarism and globalization, derive from colonial histories of spatial enclosure” (261). These colonial imaginaries rely on the visual act of imagining the earth as a globe seen by a detached, omniscient, disembodied viewer since the totality of a globe can be appropriated as an object (DeLoughrey 262). In other words, climate as knowable object through data collection and other computer technologies first of all depends on a perspective which is historically situated and in its universal appeal is tied up with capitalist and colonial enclosure.
Image 4. Jacob van Ruisdael, Windmill at Wijk Bij Duurstede, Rijksmuseum, www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-C-211. This disembodied, omniscient perspective makes climate appear as an unmediated nature rather than as a historically mediated idea. In the case of the “Google wind” advertisement I therefore suggest that we need to historicize its representation of weather as a continuation of a long history of perceiving resources as extractable and thus render them
announced “the biggest renewable energy deal in corporate history”: plans for a 2-billion-dollar investment in solar and wind energy (Ambrose n.p.).
38 subject for enclosure. In relation to painting similar claims have been made about the introduction of perspective in painting in early modern Europe.26 The important intervention here has been to historicize techniques of visual representation such as perspective painting to make legible how perception is implicated in constituting the object of appropriation. This provides historical context for the pictorial citation between “Google Wind” and Jacob van Ruisdael’s Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede from 1670, which both feature a windmill facing breaking clouds from the exact same perspective. This similarity in motif brings into relief that the fundamental assumption of a fully knowable world shared by twenty-first century computational imaginaries and seventeenth century perspectival landscape painting is an aesthetic matter. Jennifer Wenzel coins the term “resource aesthetic” to refer to such alignment of the beautiful and the profitable in which a landscape is perceived for what can be extracted from it (n.p.). In a feedback loop of mutual enforcement, paintings and enclosures establish the perspective of a detached viewer that moves through a world that can be encapsulated, controlled, and owned. The establishment of the planet as property and source of energy is thus highly dependent on aesthetic operations, and the idea of climate in turn depends on precisely these resource aesthetics. This complicates the stark opposition between digital and analog representation as suggested by Google. Google’s infrastructure, representational techniques, and energy consumption are far from immaterial. Contrary to the modern idea that data gathering provides unmediated, complete access to the world (Bridle 31), totalizing data imaginaries first of all rely on the assumption of a detached observer with an omniscient view, which is an idea about 500 years in the making.
26 Kenneth Olwig for example suggests that the rediscovery of Euclidian geometry and its understanding of space as a uniform grid in the Renaissance is the foundation of both global expansion and perspectival representation in Venice and elsewhere (Haraway et. al. 560). Similarly, Bernhard Siegert argues that Dutch seascape paintings are based on the “cultural technique” of navigation, piracy, and nation building (9).
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Reading the Atmosphere II: Sensing Weather
Image 5. Fujiko Nakaya, Fog Bridge #72494, Exploratorium, www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/fog-bridge-72494.
Fog is a kind of grounded cloud composed like any cloud of tiny drops of water or of ice crystals, forming an ice fog.
Since water is 800 times denser than air, investigators were long puzzled as to why fog did not quickly disappear through fallout of water particles to the ground.
It turns out that the drops do fall, but in fog creating conditions, they are buoyed up by rising currents, or they are continually replaced by new drops condensing from water vapor in the air.
Their realism is enhanced by smoothing away or ignoring discontinuities in the fog, for images of what we really see when we travel. Beautiful, unrepeatable, fleeting impression can be framed only within the contradicting ambition of her consciousness to acquire impressions and retain her feeling, a way of repeating a dream.
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- Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, “Fog,” I Love Artists, 38
Google’s overview of atmospheric conditions as energy resource is contrasted by my own experiences of fog. While I stand on the pier at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, a fog bank rolling in through the Golden Gate coastal opening appears vast and unitary. Later, while walking on the Golden Gate Bridge, an incoming fogbank envelops me. As my skin contracts and the hairs on my arms stand up in response to its cold and wet presence, I can see neither the sky nor the land on opposite ends of this bridge now suspended in the clouds. The atmospheric conditions of the Bay are also a central concern in the work of Nayaka, whose Fog Bridge #72494 has been permanently installed on a bridge connecting piers 15 and 17 in the San Francisco harbor since 2013. The work, one of her many fog sculptures, intermittently shrouds the bridge in fog created from desalinated water drawn from the Bay. Together with a scientist, Nakaya created the first water-based engineered fog in 1970.27 Whereas fog before their invention could only be produced chemically, the system used by Nakaya disperses water into billions of microscopic fog droplets. As the speaker of Berssenbrugge’s long poem “Fog” (2016) notes, the visual phenomenon of fog is created because dispersed waterdrops are suspended in a constant fall, since water is denser than air but at the same time pushed upwards by aircurrents. According to the speaker, fog is thus a contradictory visual event in the sense that it is a “[b]eautiful, unrepeatable, fleeting impression,” a kind of ephemeral aesthetics, which the observer seek to frame and to retain as “realism” in order to become an impression as such (38). This reflection on the condition of visuality of fog evokes a poetic understanding how Nakaya, when creating fog installations, is interested in the interaction of the water vapor with local organic and inorganic materials, structures, and atmospheric conditions. The waterdrops are moreover continuously replaced by new condensing drops, which in the case of Fog Bridge #72494 are generated by a technological system. Fog, like wind, emerges out of fleeting atmospheric entanglements that continuously give rise to it and in Nakaya’s work this condition is both technological and ecological. These entanglements are always contingent and specific to the location of Nakaya’s fog sculptures. The realism of fog which the speaker of the poem notes, furthermore, opens up to another paradox of fog: it appears as relational process but also as unified totality, for instance as when I perceived fog rolling in from a distance. This kind of poetic sensibility to abstractions of ecological entanglements is symptomatic for
27 My descriptions of Nakaya’s fog sculptures are largely based on Janine Randerson’s account of it on page 32- 35 of Weather as Medium (2018).
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Berssenbrugge’s poetic work in I Love Artists (2006), in which she continuously traces how one can know a sensuous world that exceeds definition. To rephrase this: I am interested in how fog appears in “the context of contact” (Howe 11), but also in the tension between perceiving fog or clouds from a distance and experiencing fog from within. This tension makes fog, as atmospheric mediation, an especially productive environment for thinking. The feminist scholars I engage with theorize varieties of immersion such as in the ocean (Alaimo 13) and in a forest (Gabrys n.p.) as experiences in which one cannot but perceive how we are part of our surroundings. Being enveloped by a fogbank is one such experience but looking at fog or clouds from a distance can give us the idea that we are looking at something in which we are not immersed, since air is imperceptible.28 Air cannot be seen, smelled, touched, heard, or tasted. But it is matter: it has mass and weight, contrary to the weightlessness claimed by data and energy harvesting industries. Like the sun, air cannot be perceived unmediated but a sense of aesthetics does emerge in exposure to its elemental conditions since it is precisely by its imperceptibility that we can sense its mediations. Mary Jacobus, in an essay on John Constable’s romantic cloud paintings, argues that clouds thus verge on aesthetic indeterminacy: they are confusing not only because they mix elements and change shape, but also “because they challenge the phenomenology of the visible” (221). One way to understand this is that by the invisibility of air, by looking through air, we see the water suspended in it. Put differently, a sense of atmospheric aesthetics paradoxically emerges out of elemental imperceptibility. The elemental aesthetics of Nakaya and Berssenbrugge open up the two opposing concepts traditionally used to theorize, on the one hand, the privatization of and extraction from nature, enclosure, and on the other hand subsistence from and reproduction of elemental conditions, the commons. Specifically, their works allow us expand these concepts to go beyond traditional Marxist understandings of the social. Critics argue that Marxism has reaffirmed a notion of collectivity based on the social and that it is this separation of the social from the natural that has allowed the pillaging of resources (Geneviève Lynes 113). If atmospheric enclosure depends on exactly the imaginaries of techniques of measurement and control that “Google Wind” encapsulates, then I argue that an elemental analytic demands attending to the commons in a way that emphasizes human and non-human entanglements rather than viewing the common as a social category isolated from material rhythms. The
28 In The Invention of Clouds (2001), Richard Hamblyn demonstrates that the idea of clouds as objects was only introduced in 1802 with the basis of the current taxonomy of clouds which orders them vertically as tendrils, Cirrus, heaps, Cumulus, and layers, Stratus (Hamblyn 35).
42 elemental conception of the commons that emerges from Berssenbrugge and Nakaya’s work reintroduces the kinds of bodily experiences of weather that easily get lost in computational imaginaries and emphasizes that the commons are not a social mediation of resources but rather an ongoing negotiation of human and non-human, social and material, relationalities. A crucial part of thinking this elemental commons is holding on to both nature as bearing traces of culture and culture as immersed in a nature that exceeds it. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that holding on to these notions requires that we historicize the elemental. Thus, in the introduction to Ecological Form (2018), Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer give account of the atmosphere and colonial capitalism, in which they suggest that pollution the fossil-fueled British Empire makes air legible as history (3). And conversely, John Durham Peters’s essay “The Media of Breathing” provides an account of the elemental history of the formation of oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis (183). These scholars render air legible as history, but an elemental aesthetic challenges the completeness insinuated by these historical ways of reading. If a conventional understanding of history conceives of it as a totality, a feminist critique of this would be that it supposes an external reader of history. Thus, Gayatri Spivak in the chapter “Planetarity” coins the concept planetarity as an alternative to the concept of the globe, since a representation of the earth as globe requires a disembodied, external perspective. Spivak argues that this representation contains in it the impetus to control: “The globe is in our computers. No one lives there. It allows us to think we can aim to control it” (72). The planet itself, however, according to Spivak, is something we inhabit but not own (72). Rather than “global agents,” she argues that we should imagine ourselves as “planetary subjects” (73). Following this line of thought allows us to see that air is not only composed by human or anaerobic actors, when it is polluted or oxidized, but that those who breathe air are co- constituted with the atmosphere itself. The materiality of air suggests that there are things that escape conventional techniques of historization.29 Margaret Ronda theorizes this sense of escape in Remainders (2018). Air, Ronda argues, offers an index of how the natural and historical are interconnected, but it also complicates an understanding of itself as historical (43-44). Air, by its material qualities of invisibility and continuous motion is a material form that complicates perception (44). Air appears not as an overview of larger natural-historical relations but as a “sense” of them (Ronda 44). It is this
29 There are other ways of analyzing pollution based on embodied experiences of the differential distribution of various forms of what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence” (2), such as “Bodies in the System” (2013) by Vanessa Agard-Jones, Kristen Simmons’ “Settler Atmospherics” (2017), and Michelle Murphy’s recent publication “Afterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations” (2019).
43 sense of socio-ecologic relations rather than a disembodied external agent that animates the central concerns of this chapter on atmospheric elemental aesthetics. The tradition of knowledge in which Google operates does everything it can to remove the body from the epistemological scene and it is precisely this tradition that already dominates responses to environmental harm. This means that though paintings, computers, data, wind, and clouds are all media, as Durham Peters argues in The Marvelous Clouds (2015), Google’s elision of the body in runs contrary to the sensorial experiences that define the concerns of the artworks I engage with in this section. The tradition of omniscient climate science that makes claim to a total representation beyond bodily perception, that somehow sees clouds simultaneously from all sides, forecloses relationships not based on the totality of climate and instead on the contingency of weather. Contrary to ever improving representations of a pre-existing nature, Nakaya and Berssenbrugge do not attempt to represent the atmosphere as such: instead, their elemental aesthetics gives a sense of the atmosphere in its mediation as wind and fog. Berssenbrugge’s poems share Spivak’s concerns for the porosity of subjective and objective accounts of planetary dynamics and we can therefore, as Megan Simpson argues, think of Berssenbrugge as a phenomenological poet. Simpson points out that Berssenbrugge in another section of the poem “Fog” plays with the ambiguity of the word “feel,” which evokes both emotional and physical sensation, arguing that this play is definitive of phenomenology, in which the knower is not separable from her emotions or her body (230). In the poem, the figure for this phenomenogical sensibility is fog:
The fog of the way we feel our way into this focus, seeking by feeling, lies in the indefiniteness of the concept of continuing focus, or distance and closeness, that is, of our methods of comparing densities between human beings. (45)
This fragment emphasizes the entanglement of humans and the atmospheres they focus on and thereby unpacks the difficulty of objective knowledge. As Simpson argues, fog both hinders clear perception and is the thing that is being perceived: “because the fog takes on a moist and cool physical presence in the poem, perception itself becomes more tangible” (231). The tangibility of perception here refers to a situated, embodied perspective that we can contrast with disembodied quantified accounts of planetary dynamics as energy resource. In other words, being surrounded by fog in Berssenbrugge’s poetry is the experience of a planetary subject who cannot have objective knowledge of a globe since her perception is always embodied, submerged in fog and other atmospheric conditions, and mingles knowing,
44 emotions, and physical sensation. Berssenbrugge’s poetry gives us a sense of elemental envelopment.
Image 6. Fujiko Nakaya, Fog Bridge #72494, Exploratorium, www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/fog-bridge-72494.
Nakaya’s fog sculpture generates a similar experience of sensing planetary weather. The bridge between the two piers is a windy place, so unlike other installations where the fog is relatively immobile and mostly parts in response to the movements of human visitors, Fog Bridge #72494 is often blown away by the wind. Nakaya has stated that she appreciates the rough wind of San Francisco and how it interacts with the fog: “it’s working beautifully, although it’s more windy on the bridge, it really gives more vigor and the constant change is really part of it. I feel like I can converse with the wind more than just trying to control it, to tame the wind” (“Artist Fujiko Nakaya Muses” 1:30-2:15). Remarkable about this account is that Nakaya explicitly addresses that her work is vulnerable to, rather than control of, elemental atmospheric conditions. To restate this in the language of painting rather than that of sculptures or installations, Nakaya’s work allows the wind to use the material of fog as paint, creating ephemeral forms in continuous motion. Nakaya’s piece creates a vision where atmospheric conditions paint not only with fog but also as fog since it is the movements of air in which water is suspended. In so doing, her work counters the representational logic that I traced across the
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“Google Wind” video and perspectival painting. If the aesthetic operation of perspectival painting and climate computing paints atmospheric conditions in the sense of controlling them, Nakaya’s work is a kind of painting with atmospheric conditions and atmospheric conditions as painting. Moreover, when experiencing the fog sculpture from a distance, one feels the same San Francisco wind. The wind pushes up against human bodies and the situation in which one perceives the sculpture is thus predicated on immersion in the same atmospheric conditions. I have not experienced the art piece myself, but once inside the fog installation I imagine visitors of the work having a similar experience to the one Berssenbrugge’s poetry creates and I had on the Golden Gate Bridge. Across these aesthetic experiences, the notion of detached movement through an overseen environment is complicated by a sense of envelopment. I am using the term envelopment inspired by Derek McCormack’s Atmospheric Things (2018). Envelopment for him refers to both the condition of being immersed in an atmosphere and the process by which entities emerge from a milieu without separating from it “in the same way that a cloud is a process of differentiation within an atmosphere without being discontinuous with it” (McCormack 4-5). That fog and clouds are differentiations in the atmosphere while also being embedded in it creates, according to McCormack, a condition of immersion that can be sensed but is never fully disclosed (4-5). McCormack’s understanding of sensing helps to think, in other words, of the elemental aesthetics of Nayaka’s Fog Bridge #72494 and Berssenbrugge’s poems as an experience of the excessiveness of elements—all that escapes our techniques of representation, capture, enclosure, and computation. This excessiveness is not due to their status as objects that turn away from us.30 Their excess is rather found in the ways in which we are part of them, and they are part of us. Immersion in fog helps makes legible, similar to how the atmosphere cannot be perceived as such, how one in elemental terms cannot look at ones’ own body from the outside while paradoxically a sense of aesthetics emerges from this embodied condition. Embodied perception, in other words, leaves the excess that the resource aesthetics of totalizing computation and perspectival painting wish to overcome. In a final turn on this reading across different texts, artworks, and theories, I want to return to the question of the commons and offer few concluding remarks on how an elemental notion of the commons has consequences for what it means to live in and as atmospheric commons. What is most important for an elemental conception of the commons is that these
30 As in Object Oriented Ontologies, consider for example work by Graham Harman.
46 are not something outside of us that we can choose to share.31 An elemental commons is our common, though also uneven, condition. To be in and off the atmosphere entails exposure to its elemental force, as Nayaka’s and Berssenbrugge’s works in particular foreground, and as such these works urge us to think about vulnerability and precarity. The commons themselves evolve around this question, since they historically refer to means of subsisting, but there is also a rich tradition in poetry and poetics that thinks the commons in terms of breath as relational atmospheric mediation. I thus come back to breathing to suggest that alternatives to an historical overview of air are found in a poetic tradition of thinking about breath as entwined with poetic language.32 Thinking breathing in addition to fog and wind matters concretely in terms of our everyday experiences, since it is a way of thinking atmospheric relationality at moments when there are little perceptible atmospheric mediations, such as on a cloudless, wind still day. Thus, I find in a Heather Davis essay, about Tomás Saraceno which draws on Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone With Lungs (2005), a formulation of an atmospheric “commons” (10):
We are the air that we breathe … In calling for us to live in the air, we are implicitly asked to live with the air, to live with the air as with ourselves, as with each other, to live with the consequences of how we relate to air—as dumping ground for carbon dioxide and methane and particulate matter, or as the very core of our being. (10)
Davis here points to the interconnectedness of bodies and atmospheres through breathing air, examining what the speaker of Berssenbrugge’s “Fog” refers to as the “indefiniteness” of “distance and closeness” (45). Moreover, in “The Ga(s)p,” M. NourbeSe Philip theorizes the breathing of a mother for a child she carries as a model of community in an embodied universe (36). We see here, again, the idea of envelopment and the challenge it offers to the idea of ownership since every gasp challenges the gap required for enclosure. In Philip’s essay there is furthermore an email exchange between the author and Andrea Brady, who writes that this community of mother and child is “the fundamental political unit,” and that therefore a theory of the collective is “something we have all already known” (37). By thinking the relations between bodies and atmospheres and mothers and children as elemental existence beyond the enclosure of the individual, these conceptions of the commons share the
31 In this account I am drawing on the article “Levinas and the Elemental” in which John Sallis argues that all possessions are enveloped or contained within the elemental, which is uncontained, and therefore unpossessable (Sallis 157). 32 For more on this tradition, consider Nathaniel Mackey’s Inaugural Robert Creeley Lecture in Poetry and Poetics, “Breath and Precarity.”
47 fundamental assumption that the elemental commons are the precondition of the human and more-than-human entities that emerge out of but never separate from them. Thinking the entwinement of poetic language and the atmosphere through breath as medium, they offer a vision of an elemental aesthetics emerging from and vulnerable to material entanglements, ever adhering to the affordances and constraints of breathing in and out.
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Chapter 3. The Hydrosphere: A Conclusion by Way of Tides
The absence of ecological rhythms in Sun & Sea (Marina), as I argued in the introduction to this thesis, mediates environmental harm as the disturbance and disappearance of an untouched nature. This total absence of ecological rhythms produces a vision of nature as having succumbed to cumulative social processes—an idea that makes sense, considering the rate at which the planet is warming, melting, and flooding and at which the sixth extinction is unfolding. At the same time, in environmental crisis discourse, this vision produces a notion of human society as potentially flooded by altered and extreme environmental patterns. I argued that these twin-imaginaries of nature dominated by man and man dominated by nature are two sides of the same coin, united by the notion of a choice between the disappearance of either nature or culture, presenting them as fundamentally different and incommensurable with each other. In this chapter, I pick up on Sun & Sea (Marina) again as part of a broader artistic, political, and economic contemporary sensibility to tidal rhythms at this moment of environmental crisis. To open up the either/or logic in which the opera and this more general environmental preoccupation operate, I analyze the elemental aesthetics of artworks that give us a sense of socio-historical relations that persist within and despite environmental harm. In the Netherlands, where I do most of my writing several meters under sea level, yet mostly unaware of it, the idea of control over and social immunity from the tides is foundational to the narrative of Dutch modernity.33 Dykes were built from the twelfth century onwards, but especially from the fourteenth century, with the help of windmills, dykes, sluices, and other hydrological infrastructures, the Dutch dredged, drained, and reclaimed to build and solidify a border between land and sea. Dutch landowners thereby transformed a river delta in which human and more-than-human existence lived exposed to the tides and subsisted from intertidal commons into the checkered agricultural landscape familiar to me. Stefan Helmreich, in the article “Domesticating Waves in the Netherlands,” aptly refers to these ideas of tidal mastery or domestication as “Golden Age dreams of windmill-powered pumps transubstantiating watery waves into wealth” (n.p.). Greenhouses, as I discussed them in chapter one, are a powerful example of this drive to master ecological rhythms for the sake of profit, but in the
33 Consider Johan van Veen’s Dredge, Drain, Reclaim: The Art of a Nation (1962), in which van Veen relates human infrastructural mastery of the tides in the 1400s to the so-called Golden Age of the early 1600s: “It was the reward of 2 centuries of severe education in freedom, reclaiming, colonizing, shipping and trading” (57).
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Netherlands much of the ground on which these greenhouses stand before anything else had to be enclosed and severed from the sea. However, the artworks of this chapter show that tidal rhythms continue despite the epistemic and technological systems that foster unawareness of them. The tides and other ecological rhythms are entwined with social modes of time and labor, such as in the case of the maintenance of dykes, where laborers work in particular seasons and at low tide. My argument throughout this thesis has been that the separation of social from natural rhythms is a fiction with powerful consequences. In chapter one, I emphasize that agricultural fields seemingly separated from the sedimentation of the tides rely on carbon-based fertilizers, which are a concentration of the environmental rhythms industrial agriculture seeks to master. Similarly, I showed that Dutch practices of farming are powered such borrowing of spatiotemporal patterns to keep up an image of control. By way of an analysis of this specific type of agricultural capitalism I thus identified a logic that guides capital accumulation more generally, namely its attempts to discipline, master, and render itself external to elemental rhythms. But the artworks that structure my analysis have a way of emphasizing their own and their viewer’s ecological embeddedness. My analyses of artworks and poems therefore demonstrate that thinking with elemental aesthetics puts pressure on the promethean imaginary of capital’s separation of nature and culture. In chapter one and two I pursued various texts and artworks that complicate the separation of humans, organisms, media, atmospheres, and celestial bodies. Aesthetic mediations of ecological rhythms that persist despite and within environmental harm create space for thinking beyond the aesthetic binary in which Sun & Sea (Marina) is caught. Hydrological infrastructures are akin to greenhouses, equator-wide or extraterrestrial solar panels, and climatic predictions of atmospheric patterns in the sense that they exemplify an imaginary based on control of ecological rhythms, which I have argued historically co- emerges with the development of capitalism. But in the late twentieth century, capital does not merely rely on domestication of tides in order to profit from them. Whereas an infrastructure of mastery of water serves to stabilize an environment for the progressive expansion of an economy, the emergence of so-called resilient hydrological infrastructures shows that an unstable nature can also be utilized as source of economic gain. Keller Easterling formulates the logic of this type of resilience as follows:
The banking and real-estate structures that currently leave stranded houses physically and financially underwater would respond to changing geological boundaries as a matter
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of prudence and practicality. … Attuned to ebbs and flows of development and environment, this more kinetic and cosmopolitan urbanity would be most successful when in a constant state of imbalance. (n.p.)
In this quote, Easterling captures a change of attitude in which tidal patterns are no longer kept out but rather integrated in the fabric of cities. Two examples in the Netherlands are the “Programma Rivier als Getijdenpark” (n.d.) in Rotterdam and the national program “Ruimte voor de Rivier” (n.d.), which restore intertidal and flood areas as climate-change proof infrastructure. Characteristic and paradoxical of these infrastructures is that they seek to make the market accommodate imbalance precisely in order to stabilize profit, such that profit itself stays severed from material rhythms altogether. Following the work of Orit Halpern, this logic comes from financial futures derivative markets where money derives from relations between time instead of between markets and controlled environments, since these markets open up to bets on changes in the weather or other atmospheric, bio- and geological phenomena (“Golden Futures” n.p.). Halpern shows how these immaterial financial markets are in fact a convergence of machinery, capital, chemistry, data, logistics, and materials (“Golden Futures” n.p.).34 In chapter two I similarly suggested ways of complicating the seeming immateriality of endless value generation in the case of data. Instead of tracking the resources of technologies, such as in studies of the geology of media,35 I traced the aesthetic operation that supports Google’s claim to transcendence. Whereas oil was once presented as the fuel for infinite expansion, as I have argued in the introduction by way of Timothy Mitchell’s work, green energy, data, and finance are now perceived as such. These arguments make legible that an ideology of unlimited economic expansion co-exists with massive consumption of green energy since both are presented as immaterial. What this means is that in green capitalism, value and the social are still considered external to elemental conditions. With this critique of a so-called resilient economy, I thus add a perspective to my sketches of economic mastery and thereby make clear a final aspect of my criticism of green capitalism throughout. The emergence of resilient (hydrological) infrastructures is important to discuss, since the difference between a resilient and an elemental attentiveness to the ebbs and flows of the tides is subtle yet crucial. It is not enough to merely pay attention to fluctuations,
34 Halpern’s article “Hopeful Resilience” has been influential to the understanding of resilience I work with here: “Resilience has a peculiar logic. It is not about a future that is better, but rather about an ecology that can absorb constant shocks while maintaining its functionality and organization” (n.p.). 35 I am referring to Jussi Parrika’s A Geology of Media (2015).
51 which both resilient infrastructures and elemental aesthetics make a claim to. What matters is whether the value—which can be monetary profit or knowledge, for example—generated through such attentiveness is immune to or isolated from the tides, or remains embedded in and vulnerable to ebbs and flows. The language of energy surplus and scarcity, occurring both in critical theoretical and economic discourses, is another instance in which I find such a sense of independence. As I showed in the introduction, rather than perceiving them as existing in different timescales, it is common to designate fossil fuels as finite and sustainable energy as a resource that is inexhaustible. In economic terms, this translates into fossil fuels being designated as a resource that becomes increasingly scarcer and thus ever more profitable, while sustainable energy is designated as an eternal surplus to be extracted in the service of endless accumulation. This framing of fossil fuels as scarce and sustainable energy as surplus relies on an understanding of excess and limitation as conceptually and materially isolated from each other. I argue that understanding surplus and scarcity as two isolated concepts underwrites a sense of independence from natural rhythms that fluctuate between abundance and shortage. In other words, it produces thinking that separates social rhythms from natural rhythms.36 My general claim is that this sense of independence supports the idea that energy transitions are merely technological, rather than also political, economic, and cultural. The four tidal artworks that structure this concluding chapter generate an understanding of the tides that is inextricable from a rhythmic oscillation between surplus and scarcity. Similar to how I in chapter one read the concept accumulation in the context of buildup and release of chlorophyll in biomass, I here situate surplus and scarcity within an intertidal environment. I suggest that if the following aesthetic translations of the tides should be a model for current or future energy transitions, they are so not only by generating attentiveness to the transitions continuously happening all around us, but by generating knowledge that remains exposed to tidal fluctuations. While moving through my analyses of the following four tidal artworks, I lay out some of the central concerns of an elemental analytic as I have developed it in this thesis. The first argumentative thread throughout the previous chapters has been that an elemental aesthetics, by pulling us in and setting the parameters of our experience, demands expanding a singular notion of history by attending to the relations between elemental and social forms. In both the celestial and atmospheric chapter, I explored various theories, artworks, and poems that open up, rather than reduce, the complexities of ecological-historical
36 Another study of such abstraction is Jamie Linton’s What is Water? (2010) in which he refers to water decontextualized from social and ecological relations as “modern water” (8).
52 relations. I did so in order to argue that an elemental analytic holds on to the idea that the celestial sphere and atmosphere are historical and also elude the sense of capture, representation, and legibility implied in techniques of historization. Ana Mendieta’s film Ochún (1981), named after the goddess of sweet water and fertility in the Cuban Santeria religion, is one such elemental artwork in which the entwinement of history and ecology complicates our understanding of both. In the film, which features a beach sculpture in Key Biscayne, Florida, we see two sculpted lines of sand slowly disappearing in the tides. The sculpture thereby mediates that the tides themselves are materially and temporally ephemeral too. This ephemerality of the tides manifests itself in the movements between ebb and flow peaking once or twice a day, but also on a planetary time scale in which the movement of the tides itself provides the friction which will at some point in time stop them from occurring.37 The moon is driven away by the friction of the tides, which means that when it was half its present distance from the earth, tidal range was so much more aggressive than it is now that terrestrial life as we know it might not have developed if the pull of the moon had not receded. Moreover, at the time of that extreme tidal range, it took the earth as short as four hours to make a complete rotation, and the receding of the moon and lengthening of the day will continue until the length of the day and the month coincide and until there are no more lunar tides.
37 My knowledge of the tides and intertidal ecologies is based on the work of two scholars. First, Rachel Carson, who is most famous for her terrestrial work in Silent Spring (1962) but whose main body of work concerned the sea. I consulted the books The Sea Around Us (1951), The Edge of the Sea (1955) and Under the Sea Wind (1941). Second, I draw from the work of Owain Jones, particularly the articles “Lunar-Solar Rhythmpatterns: Towards the Material Cultures of Tides” and “The Breath of the Moon: The Rhythmic and Affective Time-Spaces of UK Tides.”
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Image 7. Ana Mendieta, Ochún, Art Basel, www.artbasel.com/catalog/artwork/80707/Ana-Mendieta- Och%C3%BAn.
The tides are therefore not a universal and continuous backdrop to human activity, but instead a stage in a historical trajectory. Human activity, despite all the intentions to master them, emerges not separately from but in relation to the slowly receding power of the tides. As I have argued in relation to solar and atmospheric intra-action, an elemental aesthetics recalibrates our understanding of history by emphasizing the entanglement of ecological and historical rhythms. Elizabeth Deloughrey works with the poetic concept “tidalectics” to designate such layering of the flows of history and the tides (Routes and Roots 2).38 Moreover, the sculpture is not just the shape that the artist gave it initially but is rather co-created by the sculptural agency of the tides. To rephrase this, the disappearance of the sculpture, which in a contemporary context evokes Florida’s disappearance into the sea, is the sculpture. Mendieta’s piece does not only disappear under the influence of the tides: it’s very coming into existence is dependent on them too. The tides not only take away the sand, but have deposited it in the
38 I came to Deloughrey’s work with the concept through Tidalectics: Imagining a World Through Art and Science (2018), edited by Stefanie Hessler, which includes the essay “Dream Haiti” by Kamau Brathwaite, the poet that coined the term.
54 first place, and the human who sculpted the figure could only do so in the planetary window of time in which the tides are neither too aggressive, nor nonexistent. Ochún asks us to consider how sand is not only sculpted, but how the tides, sand and humans all sculpt as much as they are sculpted. What this means is that the tides remind us of the persistence of rhythms often forgotten in the continuous twenty-four seven economy. The tides complicate the productive day, if we as such understand the constant availability of labor and resources, since tidal movements historically have limited access to tidal harbors and waterfronts. The tides also challenge what Barbara Adams calls decontextualized systems of keeping time, which separate universal time from ecological rhythms (“History of the Future” 365). They do so by lengthening the days, which is not shown on conventional clocks geared to the earth’s rotation, and by the very principle of the movement of water carrying within itself its ecological limit while it also carries on. One of the paradoxical implications of an elemental analytic of ebbs and flows is thus that the tides power social, economic and political activity as much as they trouble them. In other words, the unfolding of history is dependent on ecology, and as such our usual understanding of history and techniques of historization are complicated by this entwinement. The second thread throughout my research is that I have traced the elemental as a way to think the relations between media and their environment, in which the elemental is both the environment of (energy) infrastructures and serves as infrastructure. The elemental framework I am suggesting thus shares affinity with “ecomaterialism,” as coined by Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker in the book Sustainable Media (2016), which articulates the entanglement of textual and technological media practices, infrastructures, and resources (3). In the tidal installation Source (2001) by Anne Bevan, water transported from Venice in a large test tube hangs suspended in the water of the Stromness harbor in Orkney. The name Stromness combines the Norse word “straum,” which refers to strong tides, and “nes,” which means headland, and translates as headland in strong tides (“Orkney Place Names”). The water in the test tube is revealed or covered by the rise and fall of the strong tides in the harbor and this evokes a contrast between water that is rendered transportable by its containment in glass and the movement of water that is not decontextualized from its local marine ecology. This contrast between water as either part of or excluded from an economy is complicated however when we consider that the installation itself is embedded in the tides as an infrastructure. Bottled water is a commodity, but the tides are part of the infrastructure that shape its circulation in the sense that harbors without an artificially maintained water level or dredging to remove sedimentation can only serve as point of circulation when the tide is high enough for boats to enter and exit
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(Thompson 59). This means that both water that is decontextualized from ecological rhythms and the tides themselves are inscribed in an economy.
Image 8. Anne Bevan, Source, www.annebevan.co.uk/source.html.
And yet, both the water in the test tube and the tides in the Stromness harbor somehow exceed these attempts to render them productive. The water contained in glass is never completely decontextualized since it is, like all mass, subject to gravity and therefore still entwined with the push and pull of the moon, though this is a connection that escapes human perception. The tides themselves balance precariously between extremity and nonexistence as one slice in a long spatiotemporal unfolding and thereby resist the notion of a linear economy of their variations. Paradoxically, since the tides structure the circulation of commodities through harbors, they are both a fuel and a challenge to imaginaries of uninterrupted progress. The third argument that runs through my chapters is that the elemental refers both to a web of ecological interconnectedness and to the differentiations, such as chlorophyll and fog, that occur from and within this material unity. The body of photographic work by Susan Derges explores this play of connection and specificity as it occurs in and as the tides. Whether low or high tide is experienced as surplus or scarcity is dependent on the terrestrial, semi-aquatic and aquatic bodies existing in intertidal zones, and what interests me is how these bodies thereby differentiate the universal pattern of the tides as connected to the movement of celestial bodies,
56 most notably the moon, but in theory every single star, planet or formation in the universe. And the other way around, besides a gravitational pull, the activity of creatures breathing oxygen either through lungs or through gills that filter it out of water, the local terrain and also the weather, or in short the history of a particular place, influences the local manifestation of the tides, which can be dramatically different over short geographic distances. To rephrase this, I here find yet another ambiguity: the tides embody a paradox in which they are both materially linked to everything and temporally differentiated. The geological, biological and cosmological spatiotemporal patterns of the tides are simultaneously connected and to a certain extent autonomous. This circling back to paradoxes, not only in the tides but in the elemental as a concept, is one of the strong methodological affinities between elemental analytics and feminist theory. As Astrida Neimanis argues in the book Bodies of Water (2017), staying with paradoxes rather than solving them is the strength of feminist theory (18). The challenge, Neimanis argues, is not to eliminate complexity but to experiment with ways of living with and within them (18). This phrasing is particularly relevant to my understanding of an elemental aesthetics since I have tried to follow rather than reduce the complexities of the artworks I analyze.
Image 9. Susan Derges, River Taw, Victoria and Albert Museum, www.collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O10 402/river -taw-photograph-derges-susan/.
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Stromness is one example of the paradoxical phenomenon of the tides, but so is the Taw river that runs through the county of Devon in Southwest England. In a series of images created in the Taw river, Susan Derges uses a cameraless photographic technique, which she pioneered. In this technique, a sheet of photographic paper is submerged in a river and exposed to a flash of light. The Taw river is a tidal river which shares the large tidal ranges of the Bristol channel to which it is connected, and at its mouth fluctuations between 6 and 8 meters are not unusual. In the above photograph River Taw (1997) from the River Taw series, Derges does not so much capture the context dependent movements of the tidal river, but rather has a photograph emerge as differentiated mediation of an indeterminate encounter between a flash, light sensitive paper, the universal pattern of the tides, and a local geography. The photograph thus materializes as a precarious balancing act between the incommensurabilities of the tides and thereby embodies an aesthetic experiment that does not eradicate complexity but exists by and because of it. The fourth and final concern of this thesis is that I have argued that a feminist epistemology is foundational for these elemental approaches to history and ecology, infrastructure and environment, and material unity and temporal differentiations. Feminist epistemologies that are embodied and thus always embedded in the object of their analysis are partial, though not less objective when we understand objectivity as accounting for situatedness, and thereby counter abstracted overviews. Stacy Levy’s Tide Field (2018), an installation which consists of strings of buoys which make tidal variations visible through changes in color and shape in response to the rise and fall of the Schuylkill river in Philadelphia, yields such an incomplete sense of the tides. The artwork preserves the semi-autonomy of the tides by making a process of astronomical scale legible through a particular and situated experience. Levy’s Tide Field offers us something different than resilient, green capitalism since it does not attempt to sever the knowledge it generates, its aesthetic economy, from the patterns and connections it registers. One of the patterns Tide Field offers to urban passers-by is the tidal rhythm that occurs over an extended period of time, usually only available to those who work on or at the water, and the connections it registers are those of a terrestrial place such as Philadelphia with the planetary tidal movements of the sea and the myriad of celestial and other bodies and rhythms they are tied up with.
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Image 10. Stacy Levy, Tide Field, www.stacylevy.com/tide-field.
The sense of tidal patterns Tide Field generates is much like what Karin Amimoto Ingersoll theorizes as a seascape epistemology in Waves of Knowing (2016). The kind of knowledge, or literacy as Ingersoll refers to it, a seascape epistemology generates is not “a matter of being “fluent” in the language of standing up on a board and riding a wave”—rather, her “literacy is valuable as a way of moving through the ocean (and life) by anchoring myself within its fluctuations” (23). This seascape epistemology shares with Tide Field that it allows the temporal and material scales and alterations of the tides to become legible through an ebbing and flowing performative experience that remains exposed to and dependent on the movements of the tides. Put in the language of literacy, Tide Field yields an elemental writing and reading. This specific kind of experience means that that Tide Field allows knowledge, like renewable energy, to peculiarly disappear as soon as it is caught. If the discourse of energy surplus works according to the logic of limitless availability of energy, and if the discourse of energy scarcity functions to stimulate pricing mechanisms, I suggest that a discussion about energy transitions from fossil fuels to green energy should start by paying attention to the transitions that take place around us and which interrogate isolated notions of surplus and scarcity. Attention to the tides opens up to other ways of existing within interchanging infinity and finiteness, attuned to rhythmic alterations, precariously in suspension between abundance and shortage, both as tidal variations and as concepts. An elemental aesthetics of the tides implies acknowledging both our intimate entwinement with the tides as well as the quasi-autonomy of their variations. Such attentiveness shifts the premise of discussions about energy transitions from a question of depletion, or quantity, to living with the
59 spatiotemporal patterns of materials and thus reorients the premise of these discussions from only technological, to political. What is at stake in the elemental is an analytic sensitivity to more-than-human spatiotemporalities and a political sensitivity to the question of how to co- exist with them. Thinking with an elemental aesthetics, the aesthetic translation of the tides into a medium of experience which renders them simultaneously known and alien, is one avenue of opening up the dual logic of either indifference or appropriation as energy resource.
Concluding Remarks
To end, then, I want to take step back and add some concluding remarks about the general theoretical concerns of the thesis. I have argued that the elemental aesthetics of the cluster of contemporary artworks that I have worked with, dating from the 1970s onwards, brings into relief a more general economic, social and political sensitivity to environmental patterns in the wake of the 1970’s oil crisis and at the moment of an ongoing climate crisis. My argument is that the crucial difference between these works and other ways of generating knowledge about the environment is that they not so much represent ecological patterns and entanglements but rather pull us in to experience them. This sense of immersion rather than representation therefore characterizes my analysis. The works are distributed over a series of geographical ecologies, and I have thereby opened each artwork up to a discussion of historical developments in places such as Venice, the Netherlands, New Zealand and California. The sensitivity to specific ecologies that characterizes these works allowed me to explore the tensions between the artworks and various modes of capitalist organization, ranging from the early Venetian mercantile state, to agricultural and colonial capitalism in the Netherlands and New Zealand, to California as the center of data capitalism. Juxtaposing the elemental aesthetics and local ecologies of these artworks with these modes of organization have allowed me to denaturalize the conception of energy that underscores each of these modes of capitalism, and which currently culminates in contemporary green capitalism’s attempt to master and profit from environmental and climatic rhythms. In my theorizing of the elemental I have, like many of the elemental theorists that have guided my understanding of the concept, aimed to expand classic and periodic definitions of discrete elements. As such, I have worked to counter what Starosielski in the article “Thermocultures of Geological Media” refers to as the belief in “the purity of elements” (296). Elements, as Starosielski argues, do not pre-exist extraction isolated from each other: separating them is the extractive operation (299). I have argued that while the elemental
60 designates such interconnectedness of all matter, it is equally important to attend to differences in temporal patterns across ecologies. It is precisely these temporal differences that green capitalism seeks to discipline: homogenizing, then, is the extractive operation. To this end, I have ordered my chapters along the terms celestial sphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere. On the level of analysis, the specific spatiotemporalities of artworks mediate these spheres in ways that open up slightly different paths of inquiry and thereby give rise to a sense of the elemental that counters green capitalism’s attempts to separate the social from the ecological. The point of such analysis, contrary to an extractive notion of them, is that it conceives of these spheres not as existing independently of or prior to their mediations. Green capitalism thus conceives of green energy as external to itself, thereby completely accessible for extraction, and therefore as the fuel for perpetual economic expansion. But the spatiotemporal profiles of the sun, wind. and tides problematize this notion of permanence. The sun, from a position on earth, goes up and down and moves closer and further away and materializes in a multitude of daily and seasonal heliotropic mediations. The wind rises and falls, rendering the atmosphere sensible in continuously changing ways. And the tides ebb and flow, exposing intertidal existence to an excess or scarcity of oxygen and nutrients. I have argued that an extractive view of energy in green capitalism primarily depends on an epistemological operation that detaches its mediations of sun, wind and tides from ecological conditions. The paradigmatic example of this is an epistemology where both the scientist or observer and the tool used for measuring are considered as external to the materialities they study. But in this thesis, I have found expressions of this disembodied epistemology across agricultural, data, finance, and green energy industries. I have argued that this detached epistemology produces the abstractions of ecological processes, such as resource, climate, and energy, that create the conditions where they can be calculated and marketized. I have, simply put, theorized the elemental aesthetics of various texts and artworks as a way of perceiving environmental and climatic rhythms in antagonism to these processes of abstraction. I have done so not to contrast aesthetics with epistemology, but rather to show the potential of this aesthetics as a kind of epistemology that is less concerned with creating a disembodied object of knowledge and more with knowledge bound up with sensorial experience. But, as my analyses also show, the artworks and ecological conditions I work with simultaneously pose challenges to this very notion of the sensorial. In my theorizing of elemental artworks I have therefore highlighted two aspects of the concept of aesthetics. On the one hand, they are far from the product of the individual genius of an artistic master, since they are mediums that come into being as sensibilities to specific celestial, atmospheric, and
61 hydrological elemental conditions. As such, an elemental aesthetics produces situated ways of knowing sun, wind, and tides that do not rely on the extractive notion of objectivity as disembodied, disinterested, and detached. On the other hand, the notion of exposure to elemental conditions I have worked with expands this notion of aesthetics as sensing. The formal qualities of elemental photography, painting, and writing emerge as ecologically embedded, porous, and vulnerable mediations of the ecological processes they register by adhering and remaining exposed to the affordances and constraints of the spatiotemporalities of sun, wind, and water. These elemental mediations are differentiations within, but never detached from, a web of material and temporal ecological relations, and as such, to a viewer, they render these relations sensible while simultaneously holding on to a sense of these materialities and rhythms as escaping aesthetic (and epistemological) mediation. In other words, they do not make a claim to all-seeing or anticipatory representation since they are exposed to the ecologies they mediate. Building on these epistemological insights, I have argued that the elemental aesthetics of the works I have analyzed is thus in contrast with contemporary corporate discussions about energy transitions. Corporations such as Google that invest in green energy for the sake of profit rely on a perception of energy as a stable resource outside of the social, and benefit from the notion of energy transitions as a change from one fossil fueled technology to another that runs on green energy, instead of a social and political transition that questions that profit. Green capitalism therefore not only needs an abstract epistemology of energy, but also works actively to render not only energy but the elemental as external to the social, and thus needs to rid it of rhythms and entanglements. The metacritical concern that emerges from this tension between extractive and elemental aesthetics is that the critical theoretical vocabulary familiar to cultural analysis tends to take the position of a distant observer. Accumulation, utopia, enclosure, the commons, surplus, and scarcity are concepts often encountered by readers of critical theory and vital to our understanding of the appropriation of natural resources. But most of this conceptual work was done before the slowly increasing recognition of the climate crisis that marks the time at which I am writing this thesis. I argue that the theorists of these concepts tend to designate social rather than socio-ecological processes. In order to explore their potential at the conjuncture in which I find myself, I have offered modes of reading these familiar and helpful concepts in the context of attention to ecological processes. To this end, I have complicated the idea of a one-way relationship between those concepts and the materialities that they claim to describe or explain. An elemental analysis as I practice it in this thesis is akin to what I theorize
62 as an elemental aesthetics, of which the elemental is its environment of mediation, in the sense that the elemental is, to borrow a phrase from Melody Jue’s Wild Blue Media (2020), its “environment of interpretation” (17). Jue is interested in how the concepts and grammar of media studies “hold up under conditions of oceanic submergence” (21). Similarly, instead of a critical distance from which concepts describe materialities, an elemental analytic is interested in the relation between concepts of historical materialisms and the possibilities and limitations of the elemental conditions of sun, wind and tides. Without addressing the history of theoretical dialogue about these concepts, which would surely enrich my analysis, I have limited myself to an understanding of them as coming up short on ecology by designating only social processes. I argue that defamiliarizing these often-used concepts helps us encounter them anew. Whether it is the everyday rising and setting of the sun or the face-value of the concept of accumulation, this defamiliarizing matters because it demands what Donna Haraway terms “response-ability” (Haraway and Kenney 231). One of Haraway’s many useful neologisms, response-ability is, in her theorizing of it, not a reaction to a world that is already there, demanded by established political, theoretical and ethical frameworks, but the capacity to respond to collective worlds (Haraway and Kenney 231). This response-ability is one term that captures the context dependent and improvisational character of an elemental analytic, which is a decisively feminist endeavor because it situates me, as critic, the concepts I engage with, and the analysis I produce within the forms and rhythms of the solar, atmospheric and hydrospheric mediations that animate my research. The politics of this elemental analytic lies with its refusal of resolution in the way it yields both a mediation of ecological processes that are not available to the senses as such, in the form of analysis, and simultaneously points at what is in excess of the analysis since it is always situated within ecological affordances and constraints rather than explaining them. In the introduction to this thesis, I referred to this elemental analytic through Édouard Glissant as the thinking of errantry, in which one conceives of a totality and yet renounces any claims to possess it. It is this unresolved analytic suspension, between the theoretical and methodological considerations of different materialisms, between ecologies and their mediations, between concepts and worlds, between the rhythmic intervals that compose our environments, that gives us a sense of what it may mean to think the elemental. In the energy transitions to come, such elemental thinking could displace the kind of sustainability that sustains exploitation and open up to existing and other ways of collective existence.
63
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