University of Amsterdam

DRIFTING TO THE CLOUD BAR: A SITUATED AND CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF

CLOUD APPRECIATION

Alice Nolwenn Rougeaux

Research Master’s Thesis Cultural Analysis

Professor Timothy Yaczo

Professor Niall Martin

3 August 2020

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ...... 1

Accumulation ...... 9

Dissiptation ...... 19

Aspiration ...... 28

Necropolis ...... 34

Conclusion ...... 43

Works Cited ...... 46

Annex I: Figures ...... 51

Annex II: Drifting to the Cloud Bar – A Still Life Essay ...... 55

1

INTRODUCTION

The ‘Cloud Bar’ is an open-air structure located at Anderby Creek in Lincolnshire, on the east shore of England, looking out to the North Sea. At first glance the Cloud Bar looks like an art installation or the kind of recreational equipment found on playgrounds. From

Skegness, where the nearest train station is, up to Anderby Creek, the 13-kilometer coast is home to many seasonal holiday resort towns1. The beach there is wide, sharply inclined and undulating, bordered by a wide cement footpath most of the way, the other side of which gives onto vast theme parks, mobile home parks, clusters of bars and restaurants, and various entertainment often found around British piers. On the way to the Cloud Bar, one can also see, amongst other things, offshore windfarms and ships out at sea, the now-closed Derbyshire

Miners’ Convalescent Home, a National Coastwatch station, and the North Sea observatory within the Lincolnshire coastal country park.

The Cloud Bar is designated, according the park’s pamphlet taken from the observatory,

“the world’s first official cloud spotting area” (Figure 1). Despite the blue Cloud Appreciation

Society badge stuck on one of the walls of the Cloud Bar, an email enquiry with them confirmed that the project is not actually their own2. Instead, the designation was granted by them following the request of the initiating artist, Michael Trainor. The pamphlet also indicates that the Cloud Bar is part of a wider project called Structures on the Edge. The Lincolnshire

County Council website describes it as follows:

The Structures on the Edge project explores developing small scale art-led coastal architecture. It provides a series of semi-remote coastal locations for artists and architects. They can create installations to enhance the natural environment of the

1 According to the Great Britain Tourism Survey 2019, 7.47 million (7%) domestic holiday trips (overnight stays) were made to the East Midlands in 2019 (Visit England). Snaptrip (commercial source), also ranks Skegness among the top 10 “Most popular UK staycation destinations” (Sinclair). 2 Gavin Pretor-Pinney, email message to the author, February 14, 2020.

2

coastline. The potential sites on the 10 mile stretch of coast between Chapel St. Leonard’s and Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast. The installations could be platforms, landings, hides, shelters, havens, lookouts or other structures. They help people appreciate, enjoy and understand the coastal environment. (“Structures on the Edge”; emphasis added)

A Mail Online headline from 2009 reads, “Council spends £30,000 on ‘cloud viewing platform’... and opens it on clear blue day” (Daily Mail Reporter). According to the article, the

Cloud Bar was made possible by a number of national, county and parish councils, as well as a European Union fund. It also states, and shows from the quoted interviewees, that the project is somewhat of a controversial topic: why should taxpayer money pay for something like a

Cloud Bar, compared to anything else, when people can gaze at skies from anywhere? The

Structures on the Edge description begins to provide a sense of the reasoning behind it. The request to have the Cloud Appreciation Society stamp on the Cloud Bar, as well as the county council’s description, explicitly frames it as a site of appreciation. Appreciation’s etymology of price-setting and appraisal (“Appreciation”) foreshadows the existing tensions between a language of ecological universalism, as used by the Cloud Appreciation Society, and the limitations of appreciation under conditions of extractive capitalism.

The Cloud Appreciation Society provides visibility and a frame of reference for the

Cloud Bar. I myself travelled there spurred on by the fact that CAS had little public information about the structure. I began reading The Cloudspotter’s Guide (Pretor-Pinney), which describes itself on the back cover as “the inaugural publication of the Cloud Appreciation Society”, a few months prior to my small journey. The book does what its title promises by collecting abundant, accessible information about clouds, their taxonomy, and how to understand, sight, and label them oneself. The publication is also highly self-referential, with a full colour page photo of its founder and advertisements for CAS’ memberships. These lead me online, where

I eventually spotted the Cloud Bar on Atlas Obscura, a repository of “wondrous places”

3

(Capemarsh). Other than that, a very limited amount of detail is out there about the Cloud Bar.

Apart from a basic description, the mention of the CAS designation, the names of a few people involved like the artist who conceived of it and the BBC weatherman who came to cut the ribbon… Why Lincolnshire in particular, the ramifications for local culture and environment, and other mundane questions, such as “who takes care of the place”, or “who visits it?” … remain to be pieced together and answered.

A somewhat editorial description of the Cloud Bar in an Independent newspaper article does explain how to ‘use’ it and offers more context:

You mount a stairway to the observation deck, about 10 feet above dune level, where you are regaled with scientific information about clouds, provided by the Cloud Appreciation Society. So, in that sense, the Cloud Bar is a work of propaganda. “Clouds are the great actors in the theatre of the skies” says an inscription, not so scientifically. And then you deposit yourself in a supine position on a concrete nimbus and give yourself over to the contemplation of stratocumulus castellanus and altostratus translucidus, with the aid of a small cluster of angled mirrors on stalks in a copse in one corner of the rampart. So, in that sense, the Cloud Bar is a little bit church, a little bit art installation, a great big bit tourist attraction. (Coleman)

This description differs starkly from the county’s presentation of Structures on the Edge as a place of understanding and joy. Having visited the place myself, I must admit that ‘propaganda’ and ‘tourist attraction’ were not a part of my first impression of the Cloud Bar (which one might argue is a mark of its success). ‘Tourist attraction’ crossed my mind several times on the way to Anderby Creek, watching, as I walked, the ghostlike structures of huge, dead theme parks in February. But later that day, after a morning’s journey from Skegness, I arrived at the

Cloud Bar and found it solid and free of access. If the Cloud Bar is considered an attraction, it must coexist, in its small form and in contrast, with the other littoral attractions that surround it. These are highly dependent on the warm seasons, favourable weather, and their influxes of cash.

4

Aware of the sublime difference between a colossal purple roller coaster, or the jutting architecture of the North Sea observatory, and the wooden beach rampart that is the Cloud Bar, prior to my arrival in Skegness, I was braced for being underwhelmed. I had given ample thought to the possibility of clouds being boring, as ‘mundane’ things can be, and to the corresponding simplicity of the Cloud Bar, all of which weighed against the effort of going far out of one’s way to reach it. Still, as I walked along the shore, the sudden sprouting of bright, deep blue mirrors on polls, from behind grassy dunes in the far distance, certainly had an uncanny effect. They looked like mechanical, glinting flowers, and made me think of the periscopes of submarines, poking out curiously, watching as curious wanderers approach.

The Cloud Appreciation Society was founded in 2004, and to give an idea of its proliferation and size since then, I recently became its 50548th member (Pretor-Pinney, Guide

9). As the society itself states, there is a universal quality to appreciating clouds; one certainly does not need a society for it, although being a member gives easy access to educational materials and a community (Pretor-Pinney, Guide 11). The founding figure of the society is a prolific author on the matter. Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s guide to cloudspotting is a best seller, and a number of his other books and articles make him the figurehead of a rise in popularity for practices related to cloud appreciating. Last year, The New York Times caught the trend with an article titled “Nature’s Best Poetry of 2019: Clouds” (Sedgwick), while Pretor-Pinney’s latest, A Cloud a Day, came out in a coffee-table-book style hardcover the same year. In my experience, it is hard to find informative, easily accessible content about clouds without coming across CAS or Pretor-Pinney’s name in some form or another.

In contrast to the Cloud Appreciation Society, the Cloud Bar allows for many things.

To begin with, its tangibility, as a location in time and space, cuts through the noise of Pretor-

Pinney’s appreciation empire. It allows for conversation with a space and objects that call to attention the correspondence between body, self, and affective environment. There is sizeable

5 difference between the situation and materiality of experience, versus an online community and platform that, although stemming from experience and materially (digitally) mediated, mostly convenes after the fact of clouds: around their classifications, and still-life counterparts

(photographs). Furthermore, an understanding of poetics as an elemental phenomenology emphasizes the importance of embodied and situated practices. This is the case, for instance, of drifting, which a modern genealogy of wandering or walking supports. Situationism and its concept of psychogeography make contingency, context, circumstance, culture… as inescapable as they indeed are. Visiting the Cloud Bar has meant going adrift (to an extent), going out of one’s way, and thus diverting from the mundane itineraries of everyday life. In doing so it was possible to tune in to affective ecologies (Haraway 79) that are otherwise saturated by the calls of various economies, such as those of attention, labour (including care) and finance.

Going to the Cloud Bar made possible the tracing of a line, which, like a dragging net, swept up life, seashells (Figure 2), and debris along the way. Didactic in many ways, my visit spanning Skegness to Anderby Creek and back, on foot, provided confirmation that the Cloud

Bar is entangled and cannot be considered in any vacuum: nor as an eyesore, a tourist attraction, a waste of money, a site of ecological salvation, public education, a piece of art, nor a symbol.

It is at once all these things, none of them, and more. In the aura it projects back, or that is in the ‘weather-world’ of my perception where “the eye, in smooth space, does not look at things but roams among them” (Ingold 81), the Cloud Bar ignites much to consider and weave back in recollection here. The Cloud Bar is a place where ‘appreciating the environment’–the way this is framed–coexists in tension with leisure, disposability, infrastructure, remembrance, precarity, ... Ultimately, I argue that drifting (read: Ingold’s roaming) and situatedness are useful, even urgent, dialectical concepts to revitalize in order to critique a specific kind of

6 appreciation that is modeled on extraction and consumption, as well as to consider alternatives to its articulation of a an ‘ecological’ consciousness.

The French expression ‘aller à la dérive’, literally ‘to go adrift’, can be used to mean being thrown off course by wind or current, or to let oneself go or to lose oneself to a whim, of currents and wind, or–more metaphorically–to forces outside of one’s control. The etymology of dérive itself evolved over time: first denoting the motion of flow, a running course, sometimes abruptly thrown off; then later joining a more anthropic meaning, closer the English

‘to derive’, as a process of reasoning or an act of tracing towards obtaining a goal (“Derive”;

“Dérive”). Building on Guy Debord’s “Théorie de la Dérive”, and absorbing other instantiations of the performance of walking that it entails, I take up the concept of drifting

(translated from dérive), or being adrift, and put it to further use. I argue that drifting, in its lived experiences and expressions, reveals the phenomenology of a correspondence between elemental and sentient bodies, such as the clouds and the wandering persona, particularly within the realm of what we figure as ‘everyday life’. As a field for thinking drifting, I take a special interest in the contemporary cultural phenomena of ‘cloud appreciation’, as established by the Cloud Appreciation Society, and compare this to the Cloud Bar, as a place of activity designated for the same purpose. Prompted by the various encounters I had along the way, both anthropogenic and non-human, and with the help of energy and environmental humanities literature, I ask what appreciation and drifting can reveal about a current cultural conjuncture of climate crisis.

Along with the concept of drifting, I engage with Gaston Bachelard’s poetics, sometimes referred to as ‘poetic philosophy’, which explores phenomena of inspiration together with ‘the elemental’–establishing a correspondence, or correlation, between matter, energy, imagination and expression. If one thinks of a flame, for instance, as it is driven in its chemical reaction, igniting, flickering, growing and eventually extinguished, and superimposes

7 this with the organicity, the minutia of bodily energy, that drives the current of one’s thoughts or dreams, it is possible to see how the connection is made. In Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, Gaston Bachelard writes:

Even so, the stream will teach you to speak; in spite of the pain and the memories, it will teach you euphoria through euphuism, energy through poems. Not a moment will pass without repeating some lovely round word that rolls over the stones. (195)

Bachelard’s poetics put forth the notion of a contagious, transmittable elemental drive. The many literary examples he refers to demonstrate how witnessed motion, or simply vibrancy

(Bennett), and on the contrary, the stillness of space, can transfer and translate into imagination in what we might call a strike of inspiration or a visceral reaction.

Given the opaqueness of processes like imagination or inspiration, poetics are susceptible to Cartesian Doubt. However, the operations encompassed by poetics, we will, play a role in the meteorological re-constitution of atmosphere. A quote from Roberto Bolaño’s novel, The Savage Detectives, about a group of young wandering poets called the visceral realists, illustrates poetics well: “But poetry (real poetry) is like that: you can sense it, you can feel it in the air, the way they say certain highly attuned animals (snakes, worms, rats and some birds) can detect an earthquake” (5). Suddenly being drawn in by the aura of a flickering flame, or being caught off guard by a passing cloud, can be understood as ‘tuning in’ to a process that is always already on the march. Affective transactions occur, and are sometimes noticeable, somewhere between the materiality of our surroundings and our cognition of them. This translation from the ecological to the affective, holds the potential of being expressed and can potentially give way to creative outcomes like, for instance, stream of consciousness writing.

In the case of appreciating clouds, for our purposes I stop before such acts of creation and linger instead in the space of atunement and lived experience.

Poetics are open to many lines of thought. Bachelard started publishing in the 1920s, a while before the consequences of a culture fueled by petrol became clear. One can wonder,

8 however, what might be at stake today for the power of imagination that he describes (and on a vaster scale for ‘cultures of energy’), from an energy humanities perspective that acknowledges that all sources of energy are “saturated into every aspect of our social substance” (Boyer and Szeman 6); especially so in light of climate change and the pervasiveness of fossil fuels. The Cloud Appreciation Society and the Cloud Bar, by their conjunctures of aesthetics, information technology, wind power, and more, reveal that toxicity and grids are a way to think through this. Both of these work to figure what is referred to as

‘the assembled’ or ‘entanglement’, which is sometimes just a way of recognising that something is messier or more complicated than prevalent discourses–full of categorizations, dichotomies and bifurcations–make it out to be. In her ethnography of the matsutake mushroom, Anna L. Tsing speaks of the ‘arts of noticing’ and concludes:

I hardly know how to think about justice without progress. The problem is that progress stopped making sense. More and more of us looked up one day and realized that the emperor had no clothes. It is in this dilemma that new tools for noticing seem so important. Indeed, life on earth seems at stake. (25)

Poetics can be thought of as an art of noticing. Although stemming from the phenomenology I have previously described, the term also implies going about the everyday and works as a tool for patient revelation. Walking to the Cloud Bar was intended as an exercise in noticing, not just clouds but a world beneath them too, all while the rapid ‘progress’ of something like the

Cloud Appreciation Society fails to make much sense in light of disappearances to come

(Saito).

9

ACCUMULATION

There are dunes facing the sea along what I saw of the Skegness coast, so that from my departure point a little south of the town, the beach was not immediately visible. Early on a

February morning, I walked up a manmade path parting the mounds of sand, past runners and dog walkers, until I had the shoreline clearly in view. It was an overcast day and still early enough that the beach and waterfront were veiled by mist. Out in this mist, was the outline of an offshore windfarm, with its turbines neatly arranged in rows to form a dotted grid far into the distance. I had no prior idea that the windfarm was there. I came to cloudspot–to see for myself what it means to designate a space for such an activity–but that train of thought was interrupted at departure by another structure. Where I had expected nothing but a line to seemingly split earth (sea, in this case) and sky, the offshore windfarm looked like the arrival of a fleet, stood poised and piercing the surface.

On the information board that lines one of the sides of the Cloud Bar, the text provided by the Cloud Appreciation Society says, “Pick a favourite cloud and turn the cloud mirrors so that you can bring it down to earth” (Figure 3). Here we first note the paradox of the appreciation at hand. Clouds impose their magnitude in size and scale, and contingency too with their flux of accumulation and dissolution. However, a certain distance is necessary for a happening to take place based on sight (‘spotting’), all while appreciation expresses the desire to overcome exactly that distance. This can be read is a child-like curiosity and play, a yearning for proximity and solidity, resulting in a reflex to grasp, to record, to classify and, somehow aspires it seems, to extract and to hold.

10

Pretor-Pinney’s Guide has a chapter dedicated to stratus clouds: “the lowest-forming of all the cloud genera, sometimes appearing at ground level, when they are called fog or mist”3

(72). In this chapter, we find out that these types of clouds are the closest humans ever come to physically interacting with clouds through touch. Put like this, one might think that stratus clouds are reason to celebrate in the world of cloud appreciation. However, these low hanging clouds are perhaps the least appreciated of all clouds. Not only are overcast days, fog, and incoming storms colloquially a negative experience in many (but not all) contexts (Pretor-

Pinney, Guide 71), but if there is a thick uniform blanket of cloud, what is there to spot? And the same could be asked of a cloudless blue sky–what is there to see? We can better understand now, perhaps, the ironic tone of the journalist who pointed out in their headline that the Cloud

Bar was inaugurated on a clear blue day (Daily Mail Reporter).

Tim Ingold, in looking to involve phenomenology of the weather with theories of perception, advances Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘coiling over’, by witch “to perceive things, then, is simultaneously to be perceived by them: to see is to be seen, to hear is to be heard, and so on.” (84). Ingold makes it clear that this is not a matter of imbuing everything in the world with sentience in an animist tradition, but rather to open up our consideration of objects to a perception that “affects […] bodily and structures […] awareness” (85). Though

Ingold posits himself against objects in ongoing debates about object-oriented-ontology (he prefers to think of them as “knots” 13), this line of thought considers a dialogical approach to objects. This is also the case for Walter Benjamin’s theory of an aura emanating from objects that can “look at us in return” (188) (a phenomenon particularly entwined with the act of walking), or also Mieke Bal’s call to “allow the object to ‘speak back’” (45). Ingold goes on to tell us:

3 The difference between fog and distance is a matter of distance and visibility. (Pretor-Pinney, Guide 82)

11

In the respiratory mingling of air with bodily tissues, human beings and other creatures that are wise to their surroundings are constitutionally not only temporal but temperate. And temperament is just another word for mood – that is, for the way the atmosphere pervades every pore of a living being and lends affect to its actions. (89)

Here Ingold emphasizes that weather(ing) and atmosphere are necessary factors in any

‘conversation’. We see that affect, in the Spinozan sense, also necessarily implicates the body

(Thompson 20). Thus, a drifting practice, as an exercise in psychogeography is defined by the

Internationale Situationniste as “that which manifests the geographical environment’s direct emotional effects”. It is a way of revealing one’s correspondence with the weather through the performance of walking, or in less ableist terms, sustained movement through a landscape, which is ideally disengaged from necessity (i.e. not commuting). The Cloud Bar, a location one must get to, and even more-so one with uninterrupted views of the sky, provides a terrain for a kind of drift that ‘affects the body and structures awareness’ (Ingold 85).

Coming back to touch, in the Merleau-Ponty sense of being touched in return, means opening a channel of communication of sorts. In the mist, we touch the cloud formation and it touches us back, we breathe in and absorb its moisture, and in doing so we share more intimately a material meshwork that constitutes the atmosphere (Ingold 82). And indeed, we are so involved in the cloud that we cannot see it, vision is no longer the triumphant sense (put to use to index it and designate favourites), but rather the mist coils over and into us, producing an awareness of atmosphere that goes beyond translation into sensibility as we may have learned to express it. The absence of this notion of porosity from contemporary cloud appreciation culture shows its depreciation of contact.

Understanding mood as correlating with weather systems, provides another of layer explanation as to why ‘poor weather’–the presence of stratus layer(s) or an erratic cumulonimbus in the case of a storm–is associated with negative mood in popular culture.

Across many anthropomorphizing mythologies of angry gods and bleak white days of winter,

12 the weather as creating affective worlds is a seemingly timeless feature of storytelling. While these stories serve as good examples that humans and the weather have always been coevals, they have also contributed to discourse that shapes how we understand the sky and clouds. This is found anew in the practice of cloudspotting as framed by the Cloud Appreciation Society.

Ingold, drawing on the history of painting, tells us that painters historically rendered the sky as

“something you could look at but not through” and clouds as “objects that hang in it”, rather than as being “of the sky” (90) as they are. In line with this, Hubert Damisch in Théorie du nuage, writes a history of painting, and thus perception, entirely through the analysis of clouds as a signifier. Analysing the rendition of clouds can, we are told, “restore the materialist and systemic dimension of the history of art” (cover copy). The result of treating the sky and its clouds as objects, as a painter might, is that it takes away the (material) reality of the sky as an effect of luminosity and atmosphere–“openness and transparency itself” (Ingold 92).

Ultimately, an aesthetic atmosphere subsumes cognition of the meteorological one. The fact that a low stratus layer (white sky) or complete lack of clouds (blue sky) hinders cloudspotting as a practice, on top of their general associations with binary moods, demonstrates that cloud appreciation has inherited the history of art’s objectification of the sky as a container or canvas.

Indeed, Ingold argues that, genealogically, humans have divorced their aesthetic understanding of atmosphere from a meteorological, affective, one, and thus calls to repair the bifurcation (77). Jean Baudrillard’s theory of how atmosphere is constructed in The System of

Objects (SoO), aligns well with Ingold’s notion of an aesthetic atmosphere:

The entire modern environment is thus transposed onto the level of the sign system, namely ATMOSPHERE, which is no longer produced by the way any particular element is handled, nor by the beauty or ugliness of that element. […] under the present system the success of the whole occurs in the context of the constraints of abstraction and association. (40)

13

When faced with something akin to clouds, their lack of tangibility and fixedness, along with their fragmentation and disconnection–cause a system of ‘whole’ to be created in order to remedy the ineffable quality of these features. Abstraction and figuration, unintentionally (and deliberately we will see) inscribe themselves into the interpretation of everyday life. For

Baudrillard, the meteorological gets translated into functionality. This desire for functionality, or at the very least expressability, is antithetical to the fact that a system like weather escapes computation in many ways. In Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, the character Valentine explains this well:

If you knew the algorithm and fed it back say ten thousand times, each time there’d be a dot somewhere on the screen. You’d never know where to expect the next dot. But gradually you’d start to see this shape, because every dot will be inside the shape of this leaf. It wouldn’t be a leaf; it would be a mathematical object. But yes. The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It’s how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about–clouds– daffodils–waterfalls–and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in–these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks. We’re better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it will rain on auntie’s garden party three Sundays from now. We can’t even predict the next drip from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows prediction apart, and the weather is unpredictable the same way, will always be unpredictable. When you push the numbers through the computer you can see it on the screen. The future is disorder […]. (47)

The forging of an aesthetic atmosphere, along with computation and other means of feeling in control of what one constructs as ‘environment’ (an external space one is ambiguously part and

14 outside of), acts like a security blanket to ward off disorder. The Cloud Bar’s mirrors, used to bring clouds down to earth, while playful, embody very well what Baudrillard calls “gestures of control”, often applied to the domestic sphere as a “functional environment”, through

“buttons, levers, handles, pedals”, which “have thus replaced pressure, percussion, impact or balance achieved by means of the body” (SoO 49). Drifting, on the contrary, I argue, is a means of the body.

We also hear of the effect of the ineffable, and the cleavage between the meteorological and aesthetic, in Timothy Morton’s writing about ‘hyperobjects’. Morton writes the following about raindrops: “raindrop phenomena are not raindrop things. I cannot locate the gap between phenomenon and thing anywhere in my given, phenomenal, experiential, or indeed scientific space” (12). This can be transposed from raindrops to clouds in order to differentiate between thinking of ‘cloud as phenomena’ and ‘cloud as thing’. The gaping liminal space of processual occurrence, between what appears as a weather event, for instance, and the need to compute and name it, is for some scholars referable to as ‘thing’. Julia Breitbach tells us, referencing

Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory”, that “pointing to an in-between-conception of ‘liminality’, things can be said to ‘hover over the threshold between the nameable and the unnameable, the figurable and unfigurable, the identifiable and unidentifiable’” (33). Thingness is an alternative to what may otherwise have been rather straightforward: are clouds appreciated as objects or not? Breitbach’s text unpacks the way that Brown, via Martin Heidegger, differentiates between object and things, ultimately saying that they are “two sides of the same coin” and that

“things seem to fall through the grid of legibility and escape the order of objects, or at least demand an alternative (mis)reading of well-rehearsed cultural scripts” (34). Thingness can thus be understood as a term for the cause of a “system of objects” (Baudrillard) and the construction of atmosphere.

15

The stratus cloud in particular is an adequate allegory for what Morton coins as hyperobject: in the mist we are so implicated in the cloud that we cannot see it for what it is.

Despite the widespread semiotics of clouds and the active making of ‘the cloud’ as object, the image of an ideal cloud for appreciation, we have seen, does not effectively communicate the larger processes at work behind cloud formation. The viscosity of hyperobjects (Morton 1) works well to understand the penetrative, yet obstructive, way that beings come into contact with clouds. Water is always present in the air and both constitutes and is shifted by a material, energetic, weather system, but this knowledge is not held or expressed in everyday instantiations of what we might point to and call “cloud”, despite the fact that a cloud is a manifestation of this larger system.

Vastness is a key feature of a hyperobject. It is clear that art and other representations’ objectification of the sky stems from the otherwise impossibility of conveying the intangibility and extent of its depth, or of its color as a phenomenon of luminosity rather than pigment. The atmosphere’s sublime quality stems in part from its size (anthropocentrically relative to humans). Morton says about scale, “The vastness of the hyperobject’s scale makes smaller beings—people, countries, even continents—seem like an illusion, or a small colored patch on a large dark surface” (32). Indeed, in the atmosphere, some values dwarf living creatures drastically, such as the height of some storm clouds 4, their density 5, temperature extremes 6, or the speed of wind 7. What is at stake in matters of scale is not simply the aesthetic and

4 “The largest examples tend to occur in the tropics, where they can extend from low bases, 2,000ft [60 m] above the ground, up to summits at 60,000ft [18 km] or so. The energy contained within a cloud like this has been estimated to be the equivalent of ten Hiroshima-sized bombs”. (Pretor-Pinney, Guide 45) 5 For a cloud to appear opaque, the density of water droplets is “around 10,000,000,000 per cubic meter”. (26) 6 Lightning “instantaneously heats the air to 27,700°C”. (63) 7 “Up at the top of the troposphere, winds will often be as strong as 100-150mph [160-241 kmph]”. (173)

16 cognitive flattening of sky and its weather, but the ways in which this flattening extends into tackling climate change.

Timothy Clark, in an essay on the topic of scale, argues that “Policies and concepts relating to climate change invariably seem undermined or even derided by considerations of scale” (1). He goes on to offer a critique of liberal “green moralism”, which focuses climate change action onto individuals or small groups, rather than larger, systemic operations that are only possible to compute if acknowledging imbrications and multiplicities of scale. This type of ‘green’ moralist approach omits, for instance, that “Climate change disrupts the scale at which one must think, skews categories of internal and external and resists inherited closed economies of accounting or explanation […]” (6). So rather than individualised green politics,

Clark calls for ecologically conscious critiques that are willing to “derange” the way we read scale, to align more accurately with the fact that climate change and the weather already operate on a multitude of deranged, contradictory and corresponding scales.

Other scholars have put forth arguments that problematize the reduction of the explicitly ecological to the status of a delimiting object. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s emphasis on the concept of ‘planetarity’ is an example of this. Planetarity, she writes is,

“figured as a word set apart from notions of the planetary, the planet, the earth, the world, the globe, globalization, and the like in their common usage” (291). Indeed, we are told that these latter terms and their figurations, cast the planet as “object” and create, among other things, an

“undivided natural space” to “accommodate the good policy of saving the resources of the planet” (291). The ‘planet as object’ is flattened into a site of intervention, like a canvas. In turn, in her article “Satellite Planetarity”, Elizabeth DeLoughrey explores how satellite images of the earth contribute to notions of the planet as object by “reduc[ing] the earth to transparency under and Apollonian eye” (265). When we think of the planet from the vantage point of

Google Earth, for instance, as a publicly accessible satellite image, we are imbued with a

17

“sense of detachment from the earth, leading to an extraterritorial vision with distinct epistemological and ontological effects” (DeLoughrey 264). This means that we think of ‘the

Earth’ or ‘the planet’ as an object we are external to and therefore as a site of control. Such critiques do not ask that scale be overcome by humans, as it is technologically to an extent with microscopic and macroscopic (satellite) imaging, but that it be thought differently altogether, in ways not accounted for by language or the logics of objects and things.

What the planet as object fails to do, eventually, is convey the planet as a ‘species of alterity’ (Spivak 291). Spivak’s conclusion, that “We must persistently educate ourselves into the peculiar mindset of accepting the untranslatable, even as we are programmed to transgress that mindset by ‘translating’ it into the mode of ‘acceptance’” (292), conveys the problem of a kind of environmentalism that strives to convey everything in a universal (human) register. As

Breitbach noted in speaking of a “grid of legibility” (34), translation is an operation of infrastructural grids (whether they be literally concrete and steel, or structures of ideas and bureaucracy, Bakke 12). These grids, according to Gretchen Bakke’s introduction to the concept, serve to “make the unexpected of the world into useable, systematizeable, standardizable, navigable and profitable products” (20).

As a case in point of ‘environmental legibility’, just across the North Sea from Anderby

Creek, the ‘Embassy of the North Sea’ was founded in 2018 in The Hague as part of Bruno

Latour’s Parliament of Things initiative. The embassy paradoxically states that it “departs from the starting point that the sea owns itself”, while it also “researches how non-humans […] can become full-fledged members of society” (Embassy of the North Sea). The former recognises sovereignty, while the latter establishes dependency. Elizabeth Povinelli in a 2017 South

Atlantic Quarterly (SAQ) article playfully imagines a symposium in which “other clusters of existence” are invited to tackle climate change catastrophe in a similar way. She asks the question,

18

Can they refuse to take up subjectivity in (human) language? Let’s anthropomorphize them and imagine them saying to the delegates sent to solicit them: You want us to join your efforts to save the planet you have made? Then you can learn to become unintelligible to yourselves by adapting to our intelligibility. (295)

Povinelli criticizes anthropocentric discourse around climate change, which seeks to translate even the unintelligible into pre-established human concepts, categorizations, and modes of action. Speaking of the planet as man-made not only refers to the physical evidence of an

Anthropocene era–humankind’s intervention into the geological–but also the figuration of object-planet as discussed previously. Povinelli goes on to conclude that discourse, like that of the Embassy of the North Sea, operates with ‘spectral humanism’, holding a logic of sovereignty and extraction, even when geared towards environmentalism. Like for Spivak and

DeLoughrey, accepting unintelligibility, as intelligibility in its own non-human ‘right’, is key for Povinelli.

Comfort-making, through computation and prediction, is highly relatable and a part of

‘getting by’ in everyday life. Yet, cloud appreciation and its comforts, by placing more value on aesthetics than contact or porosity, for instance, fails to acknowledge both the alterity and pervasiveness of clouds. This, we will later see, goes hand-in-hand with the Cloud Appreciation

Society’s commodification of clouds. Commodification, as a driving force behind an extractive, capitalist, late liberal, system of order-making, necessarily implicates the practice of cloud appreciation in climate change. Cloud appreciation thus cannot always fulfill its own ideals or live up to an association or county’s ecological ideal of appreciation. Like everything else in a world of encapsulated atmosphere and objects secured into place, it must contend with the weather forecast and hope for the best.

19

DISSIPTATION

The Cloud Appreciation Society’s main way of showing appreciation is by crowdsourcing photographs of clouds. Through its platform, it collects sightings of clouds from all its members, selects them, describes them and dispatches them through newsletters, via its website, and other online social media, as well as a smartphone application. Across CAS’ content, and especially in Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s Cloud A Day for example, photography is the most frequent way that the most sightly, rarest, or peculiar-looking clouds are conveyed. Some other renditions of clouds include NASA imaging, and various historical and more contemporary artworks. In almost all cases the cloud depicted is indexed with its Latin name.

The history of cloud taxonomy follows about fifty years after Carl Linnaeus consolidated the 1758 Systema Naturae–the first official classification system for plants and animal species. Luke Howard is credited with the first system for naming and organising various clouds in a similar manner, which he first presented at a lecture in 1802 (Pretor-Pinney,

Guide 52). At this point in time, western European Humanism was well in the process of consolidating a modern version of itself. Thomas Paine’s aptly named third volume of the Age of Reason would be published just a year later in 1803. Although Linnaeus’ initial classification system “divided the four races” on the basis of physiological, behavioral and ethnographical criteria, it was apparently not presented as hierarchical, although the generalizations it makes of human differences do cause Stanley A. Rice to state that “the prejudice and racism of these attributes are obvious to modern scientists” (195). Critical and postcolonial studies have widely demonstrated that the ‘reason’ and ‘Enlightenment” revered during this period cannot be extricated from ideas of biological racism and evolving subjection, as humans too were classified into systems that forged and reinforced extractive capitalism and white supremacy.

For the sake of context, 1802 was also the year that Napoleon Bonaparte reinstated slavery in the French colonies (Peabody) following the French revolution.

20

Although clouds themselves, in their ‘base materiality’ (Bataille 45), are unintelligible to their own classifications, they do not escape mechanisms of mean-making. Clouds are not tangibly or discursively divested from the arts and technology, despite their radical alterity or unintelligibility. Both taxonomy and representation, in which humans have heavily involved clouds, are forms of meaning-making, and as Nicholas Chare argues: there is a “violence of meaning-making” and “losses involved in any process of interpretation” (136). Pretor-Pinney, in The Cloudspotters Guide, addresses a debate in which both Henry Thoreau and John Keats, are, separately, quoted as being exasperated by the scientific language of Isaac Newton, for instance, who by explaining rainbows as “wavelength of light passing through water droplets” dispels the literary quality of the rainbow (147). Pretor-Pinney acts as a pacifier, stating that,

Cloudspotters will float above these petty divides between science and art–float above them like our fluffy friends. For us, there is no contradiction in regarding the clouds in ways that both stir our blood by exciting our imagination and enrich our understand with ‘cold philosophy’. (Guide 148)

And while I very much also advocate for doing away with a nature/culture feud between artists and scientists, this bridging of the two by those Pretor-Pinney calls ‘the cloudspotters’ does not absolved the violence of both types of mean-making, taxonomy and representation, but rather hybridizes them.

Thus, the taxonomy of clouds has a genealogical relationship to cultures of empire and various forms of human prowess. In the same short review of the state of autonomist movements, Povinelli writes: “But to be autonomous from the capture of capital does not mean to be removed from the history of capital” (SAQ 298). The same could be said of clouds, which are certainly autonomous in some respects, but still carry with them traces of capitalism and its history. Povinelli’s implicit criticism of the strange anthropomorphizing that takes place in wanting to establish something like a ‘Parliament of Things’ was only part of a larger criticism of the abstract ‘Human’ that thinkers concerned with environmentalism today tend to have

21 accompany all their thinking, no matter how self-aware of anthropocentrism they are.

Povinelli’s use of ‘spectral humanism’ throughout her article therefore seems arguably applicable to contemporary cloud taxonomy, but also, we will see, the toxic processes that clouds inevitably take part in. Toxicity, along with taxonomy, is another clear marker of how clouds do not escape human ‘drama’ (Davis 353). This toxicity can take place in the form of explicit interferences with clouds, such as cloudseeding practices to force rainfall, contrails left by planes (and their interpretation as chemtrails; Pretor-Pinney, Guide 256), or anthropogenic aerosols found in the atmosphere (i. e. pollution, which clouds, like sponges, expound from the atmosphere when it rains. Pradinas and Renucci, “Le nuage, protecteur de l’atmosphère”), but also even less tangibly in what Povinelli takes up as ‘semiocapitalism’, or ‘information capitalism’ (SAQ 295).

In Borrowed Light, Timothy Brennan offers criticism of what he calls ‘Posthumanism’, under which he collapses a vast array of approaches, thoughts, and disciplines that, while positing themselves as anti-humanist or critical of the Enlightenment, still carry the specters of these in many ways. Brennan speaks of a “demotion of the human” (233) in posthumanism, and that these (non-specified) “social evolutionists” strive to “explain all systems” (227) as they did in the ‘age of reason’, but under new guises this time. Something like a hyperobject defers responsibility according to Brennan: “[…] we cannot choose, […] we are a part of something larger, something structural, which directs us” (233). For Brennan, considering scale to such an extent removes agency. While these perspectives are certainly arguable, the generalities they make of certain currents of thought give the impression of mutual exclusivity; that is, of an antagonism: if you demote the human, then you “leave unchecked and unaddressed the injustice to the invisible within our own species” (234). Brennan’s idea that the posthuman is ‘taking away humanity from the slave’ (234) might be accurate for thinking, for example, of eugenicists as posthumanists, which depends in part on where one locates the beginnings of

22 the posthuman as a concept. We will see that newer critiques also argue that ‘the invisible within our own species’, which Brennan speaks of, are overlooked or misconceived of by ecological discourse today. Povinelli’s writing, when asking “How is a spectral humanism still operating the machinery of resistance?” (SAQ 296), is essentially also positing that humanism didn’t just vanish with the emergence of anti-humanism. For Povinelli, however, this does not mean doing away with any and all modes of thinking that can be collapsed into a single idea of posthumanism, and, above all, it does not prevent Povinelli from still speaking of “entangled existence” (SAQ 300).

Povinelli’s figurations, such as the virus, spectres, ghosts, monsters… serve to convey that the very things we resist have a parasitic power of operation. In her writing, Povinelli differentiates figures from their factual counterparts in some cases–they are not intended to subsume the factual things themselves, such as a spreading virus, but rather they help to better grasp the dynamism and operations of certain8. Figuration also serves to restitute materiality to the otherwise intangible or out of sight. Walter Benjamin wrote “In the Image of Proust” that the author “describes a class which is everywhere pledge to camouflage its material basis”

(210). Camouflage–as the obscuring of material relations and flows–is epistemic: storytelling and other modes of figuration can convey material existence or precisely the opposite, relegate into non-existence.

Mythology has evolved from the theatre of weather, where storms could express fate, to take heed of newer substances instead. In Roland Barthes’ essay “Plastic”, the origin of the substance is an “enigma” (97), which in turn gives the final product made from it an impression of miraculousness. The enigma does not stop there–the mysterious after-life of plastic (for only

8 Povinelli’s figurations operate very much like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ‘concept personas’, which are “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract…” (Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? 27), compared to figures that operate aesthetically and affectively (67).

23 some social classes operating camouflage, as Proust noted) lives on thanks to the portal-to- disposability that is the trash bin: where things just vanish out of sight and mind. Along with bringing ideas to life, figurations–modes of imagination–can indeed also create monsters. Yet, when Brennan speaks of the style and method of a gargantuan posthuman tendency, he does not acknowledge the ways in which figuration has also become a mode of resistance in an era of the posthuman:

[…] reverse personification, which becomes very important for later posthumanism both methodologically and stylistically. This is crucial to [Norbert Weirner’s] eventual move, in fact—also without transition—to the liberation of information itself from ‘the chemical and the electrical’ so that it may become the purely signatory or semantic: a code without body (a body without organs). (Brennan 228)

Weiner’s cybernetics, established in the 1940s, can hardly be cast aside equally with more contemporary ‘posthumanist’ thought. Brennan’s critique remains somewhat valuable because it does reveal a common paradoxical ground when thinking of the posthuman as a vast category of thought: the same actors who helped pave the way to a posthuman vocabulary (and, granted, its neo-humanist pitfalls), first invented the vocabulary to accompany the advancements in technology. This technology, which paved the way to automation and artificial intelligence, vastly accelerated an on-going camouflage of matter and energy, which contemporary posthuman thought tends to position itself against by articulating entanglement and toxicity for instance. The “historical continuity” (1) that Brennan points to should therefore not make outcasts of all notions conveying entanglement. Povinelli argues:

More crucially, in the anthropogenic condition of climate change and toxicity, even the phrase ‘forms of life’ mystifies rather than analyzes how the concept of antagonism works when every region of existence is a set of accumulating and dissipating entanglements (see, e.g., Povinelli 2016). In other words, although a multitude of immanent forms of entangled existence exist in any given actual world, this does not mean that all actually exist. Thus, three illusions of contemporary late liberalism

24

surround us: the autonomy of objects, the antagonisms of position, and the pluralism of being. (SAQ 300)

Entanglement exists, but always in its specificity and while difference, threshold, boundary, also operate. To reduce all of posthumanism, broadly, to the spectres it is haunted by, such the

“pluralism of being”, is, in my view, to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Ultimately

Brennan’s position performs what Povinelli called the illusion of the “antagonisms of position”, which functions, as Brennan himself ironically understand, according to a logic of conquest and thus imperialism. Humanism and its present-day monsters are viscous, meaning that they are born from and operate even within the terrain of their own critique.

To operate within the posthuman, and to establish a posthuman condition as a site of resistance to the some of the very forces that made it, is a form of “staying with the trouble”

(Haraway). The works of anthropologists like Povinelli, Tsing, Donna Haraway, and others, tie together both specificity (ethnography, participant observation, slowness) and figuration, in a way that is resistant to the idea that personification propels one into a black hole of the “purely signatory or semantic” (Brennan 228). Rather, the act of imagining, through figuration or what

Haraway refers to as ‘SF’ (“science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact” 2), is “crucial for staying with the trouble in real and particular places and times” (3). Poetics, at the root of inspiration, imagination and storytelling (similar perhaps to the “autopoiesis” Brennan includes in his critique of posthumanism), can offer a terrain of resistance in service of the real, without conflating all forms of abstraction as being decisively problematic. Toxicity is one such example of a figured operation that works against the operations of a camouflage mythology as I have previously described. Toxicity cannot be wished away, cannot be disposed of (think: nuclear waste, microplastics…) it can only be displaced, spread, shared. Therefore, figuring toxicity by giving it a form, perhaps in the shape of a virus as Povinelli does, is a way to actively convey the processes it implies. Tsing also does this by figuring the matsutake mushroom as something that can thrive in capitalist ruins,

25 through processes of contamination and disturbance as modes of resistance. Figuration for these authors becomes a mechanism of hope and is useful for avoiding what Cymene Howe coins as “extinctophilia” (11) in the face of climate change. Haraway expresses this as follows in Staying with the Trouble:

[Anna L. Tsing] looks for the eruptions of unexpected liveliness and the contaminated and nondeterministic, unfinished, ongoing practices of living in the ruins. She performs the force of stories; she shows in the flesh how it matters which stories tell stories as a practice of caring and thinking. ‘If a rush of troubled stories is the best way to tell contaminated diversity, then it’s time to make that rush part of our knowledge practices . . . Matsutake’s willingness to emerge in blasted landscapes allows us to explore the ruins that have become our collective home. To follow matsutake guides us to possibilities of coexistence within environmental disturbance. This is not an excuse for further human damage. Still, matsutake show one kind of collaborative survival’ (Tsing). (Haraway 37)

It is precisely the care behind ‘making-do’ in a “collective home” that resists Brennan’s critique that posthuman currents “leave unaddressed the injustice to the invisible within our own species” (234). Collaborative survival acknowledges and integrates operations of entanglement and contamination as mixing, and does not see all problems as a play of antagonisms to be overtaken by one successful party. In toxic ruins, everyone is a loser, even if some more so than others9. Entanglement does not advocate for ecological ends to subsume all others; in

9 Povinelli writes: “Ghassan Hage (2016: 45) notes ‘the increasing inability of industry and government to control, manage, and recycle the by-products of the exploitation and transformation of natural resources. This has given rise to an ungoverned overflow of unrecyclable waste that is increasingly polluting—visually, chemically, and in many other ways—our lands and waters as well as the atmosphere. As with the flow of unwanted refugees across national borders, waste of all kinds appears to be beyond our control: ungovernable.’ Thus not humans and nature, but some humans and the crap they have consumed and produced in the processes of consumption (mega trash heaps of Lebanon, Rio, Mumbai, the Pacific Ocean) as massive fires, sand storms, and tornadoes keep time— what Tim Morton (2013) might call hyperobjects of human consumptive informational capitalism. This ungovernable flow is coming home to roost” (307, emphasis added). While climate change is disproportionately going to affect some populations before others, it’s effects will eventually reach more affluent populations too.

26 other words, entanglement is not a gateway to ecological fascism. Rather than seeing posthuman tendencies as ‘taking away humanity from the slave’ (Brennan 134), currents of thought within posthuman thinking show that the issue is not who does or doesn’t get the gift of ‘humanity’. Rather, critiques like Povinelli’s question ‘humanity’ as a category, the fact that it was even involved in such a language of the gift to begin with, and that it could subsequently be extracted, and commodified.

In A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Kathryn Yusoff speaks of “the twinned discourses of geology and humanism” (16). It suffices not to say that humanist discourse is violence through mean-making; rather, Yusoff shows that the discourse of humanism and the science and discourse of geology cannot be thought apart, and even more so, cannot be thought today without attention to the extractive logic they have in common. ‘New world’ discovery, colonial expansion, land settlement, ‘global’ dispossession, … are imbricated in a distinction between ‘resource’ and ‘life’: “Rendering subjects as inhuman matter, not as persons, thereby facilitated and incorporated the historical fact of extraction of personhood as a quality of geology at its inception” (Yusoff 17). To establish a ‘Human’ and its prowess of reason, one necessarily also had to define what was ‘Not Human’. Yussoff gives as an example, “the Gold

Coast as a source of both gold and slaves was itself referred to as ‘the Mine’ (Hartman 2007,

51)” (20). Re-situating the geological shows that the category of the Human has always been a matter of subjection and negotiating what get to put away under the guise of a “Life” and “

Nonlife” (Povinelli, Geontologies 4). With this in mind, the birth of the Anthropocene, which figures greatly in the vocabulary of ecological advocacy, does nothing new in pointing to toxicity as a marker of a human and geological mingling. Perhaps making it explicit in critical theory is new, but the calculated blurring of ‘human’ and ‘resource’ precedes it:

If the Anthropocene proclaims a sudden concern with the exposures of environmental harm to white liberal communities, it does so in the wake of histories in which these

27

harms have been knowingly exported to black and brown communities under the rubric of civilization, progress, modernization, and capitalism. (Yusoff 11)

‘Staying with the trouble’ here means staying with “the complex histories of those afterlives of slavery”, which Yusoff tell us,

[…] continued in the chain gangs that laid the railroad and worked the coal mines through to the establishment of new forms of energy, in which, Stephanie LeMenager (2014, 5) comments, ‘oil literally was conceived as a replacement for slave labor.’ Approaching race as a geologic proposition (or geologies of race) is a way, then, to open up the imbrication of inhuman materials and relations of extraction that go beyond a place-based configuration of environmental racism as a spatial organization of exposure to environmental harm. (17)

Going beyond pre-established notions of location and exposure to harm, as does Yusoff and other scholars who understand that to adequately critique humanism requires the geological too, reinforces energy as the ultimate (social) relation (Boyer and Szeman 3).

‘Energy humanities’ argue that the arts and humanities, although primarily concerned with figuration and imagination, are implicated in struggles against climate change. Not only are they de facto entangled in resource extraction by the materiality of their mediums, but

‘figuration’ itself is a means of revealing and expressing energy processes that otherwise cannot be seen, as well as imagining alternatives to the world our current culture of energy has built. If, as Yussoff puts it, “[…] the semiotics of White Geology creates atemporal materiality dislocated from place and time—a mythology of disassociation in the formation of matter independent of its languages of description and the historical constitution of its social relations”

(16), then there is much more at stake in critiquing the dissociations and mythologies of something like cloud appreciation than simply debunking their status as ‘objects’. The mythologies at play in the contemporary phenomenon of cloud appreciation operate within many embedded and shifting planes.

28

ASPIRATION

The offshore windfarm, visible from the stretch of beach between Skegness and

Anderby Creek, had an uncanny effect on my walk to the Cloud Bar. At different locations along the coast, its layout and size seemed to alter drastically, to the point that I believed it was moving along with me or shifting. I thought I was walking past the windfarm, that to do so was feasible, but it stayed alongside me until North Sea observatory all the way at Chapel Saint-

Leonard’s. The vastness of the sea, the size of wind turbines, and my distance to them (8 km from the shore) distorted my perception. Research following my trip to the Cloud Bar then showed that there are in fact multiple windfarms visible from that area of Lincolnshire: two sister windfarms at the forefront called the Inner Dowsing and Lynn windfarms, the Lincs windfarm behind it, and another to the north called Race Bank. A map (Figure 4) by Centrica

Energy, a partial owner of these windfarms, shows that a fourth farm was also planned, however the project was refused by the government over concerns for the cumulative impact of so many windfarms on a species of birds (Macalister). News articles and project descriptions show the many tensions and antagonisms that exist between the various actors involved in establishing these windfarms, whether it be technology and energy corporations, their subsidiaries, governmental institutions, environmentalists, or local populations. From the vantage point of the shore, these farms merge together into one huge sea of wind turbines far out in the distance. The dotted grids they form are an apt visual aid for the grids they power.

Not even the clouds, despite their aura and mythology of autonomy, exist outside of toxicity. Elizabeth Povinelli points to a historical shift from industrial capitalism to “what

Berardi, Negri, and others see as emerging in the wave of industrial production [as] semiocapitalism (or informational capital)–the predominance of the technological mechanization of immaterial signs as the principal objects of capital production and

29 expropriation” (SAQ 298). Clouds and their semiotics, like everything else, do not escape capitalism. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, following a thread from industrialisation, Povinelli quickly arrives at discussing the phenomenon of cloud-computing. Building off of autonomism’s focus on industrial labour, Povinelli writes about a world of labour and information:

Workers are not merely the precarious laborers within the Silicon knowledge factories but all the dispersed and fragmented nodes within and across which information-desire is being produced, elaborated, amplified, distributed, and consumed. This vast assemblage includes geologists, geneticists, biochemists, miners, software coders, biocircuitry, computer algorithms, massive data storage facilities, air conditioners, satellites, human fingers and rare-earth-based screens, legislation for appropriating gas and minerals, ships and ship canals and the teaming life and toxicities carried and discharged in their ballast that cross territories, sink into soils, and are ingested in drinking water. All existence is turned into abstract labor and oriented to the accumulation of informational capital. (SAQ 299)

Povinelli lists the expanding entanglements of information and semiocapital, which serves to fill the intangible, abstracted, and yet still material, distance that exists between actual clouds in the sky and the crowdsourced database(s) of information stored in ‘clouds’ by the Cloud

Appreciation Society. In doing so, Povinelli shows that toxicity is not limited to something like the contamination of atmosphere (air and water) in the form of pollution (anthropogenic aerosols). Toxicity is much more expansive; it seeps and travels, through channels both affective and carbon constituted.

In trying to trace the origin of when ‘cloud’ was first used in a technological context,

MIT Technology Review quotes Reuven Cohen, cofounder of something called ‘Cloud Camp’, saying that, “The cloud is a metaphor for the Internet. It’s a rebranding of the Internet”

(Regalado). It certainly seems apt that when trying to market technology that’s main feature is intangibility, ‘cloud’ was the word of choice to do so. Clouds are network-like, they are a cluster of droplets tied to vast water and weather systems. They make up the everyday, they

30 are indispensable, invisible, and yet a source of wonder when observed closely for their prowess. The Cloud Appreciation Society plays on this link between clouds and cloud- computing too. Their e-mail newsletter (Figure 5) sent last July had a section titled “Use the cloud to spot clouds”, in which we were told that a member was “training [the AI Cloud

Identifier] to identify all 58 of the cloud classifications and optical effects” because the CAS app can currently only automatically classify ten.

Unlike for Povinelli, where the entanglement of all forms of life with information capital is clear (that is that the ruins we roam in are acknowledged), this is not the case for the culture of cloudspotting and appreciation. As was the case of Pretor-Pinney settling the

Thoreau-and-Keats-versus-Newton debate, the few modes of linking that appreciation culture gratifies itself with have a pacifist and hybridized stance: artificial intelligence works only in their favour. To raise the question that their own medium might be antithetical to their object of appreciation, would be in itself antithetical to the lightheartedness and pleasure with which

CAS frames its endeavours. This is precisely why, I believe, Povinelli refers to semiocapitalism as a “pneumaphagia, a spirit-eater” (299), so that we are not just dealing with ghosts of the past spectral humanism), but a whole cohort of monsters. The “Manifesto of the Cloud Appreciation

Society” states, “We believe that clouds are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul” (Pretor-Pinney, Guide 11). And yet the semiocapitalism involved in the business of cloud appreciation, because it is a business of paid memberships and data collection, eats away at this idea of soulfulness10. Not only is the meaning-making of this ‘information-age appreciation’ contentious because it fails to see how this has always already been mixed up in

10 Gilles Deleuze writes in his speculation of what he predicted to be a “control society”: “the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas”. In this allegory too spirits are eating spirits.

31 the meteo-geo-logical, but it is so especially, we will see, because appreciation is modeled on information and consumption.

In Formless: A User’s Guide, Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind. E. Krauss take up George

Bataille’s concept of the formless. However, even ‘concept’ seems to be a counterintuitive qualification. The formless for Bataille must refuse definition: “allowing one to operate a declassification, in the double sense of lowering and of taxonomic disorder”; Krauss writes,

“The formless is an operation” (18). Thus, to operate with formlessness is to resist taxonomy and to consider the thing at hand processually, rather than in a fixed state. Bataille in

“Formless” speaks of the act of definition as a “mathematical frockcoat” (31). Like Valentine’s leaf made of algorithms in Arcadia, the result is a mathematical shape of a leaf, not a leaf in and of itself. Krauss says that “the type of matter Bataille wants to speak about is what we have no idea of, what makes no sense” (29); thus, Bataille is also an advocate of alterity and the unintelligible. Along with resisting classification, the formless also resists idealism. Krauss quotes Bataille in his Dictionnaire critique:

Most materialists […] ended up describing an order of things whose hierarchical relations mark it out as specifically idealist. They have situated dead matter at the summit of a conventional hierarchy of diverse types of facts, without realizing that in this way they have submitted to an obsession with an ideal form of matter… (29)

Despite speaking specifically of materialists and in a context of refuting Modernist and

Surrealist trends, Bataille describes a process of ideation that is found in the appreciation of clouds. The fair-weather cloud (the cumulus, the same used for instance to symbolise the overcast weather) stands in as a default or normative image of ‘the cloud’.

While the act of photographing a cloud is a reflex of memory-making, it is also an act of making still something to which movement is fundamental. Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of clouds in L’Air et les songes correlates the element of air, and clouds that make the medium of air visible (Horn), with the phenomenology of imagination and dreams. Hubert Damisch takes

32 up Bachelard’s work as well, confirming that of all things elemental, clouds are certainly the most apt at exploring the phenomenology of dreams, specifically because the psychology of imagination “neither can nor should work on static figures” (33). The subtitle of Bachelard’s work is “an essay on the imagination of movement”. Motion constitutes clouds. There is no such thing as a still cloud, they are in perpetual flux, to the point that no true average lifespan of a cloud can be determined11. Clouds can therefore be said to be formless. Any momentary form is contingent on a play of moisture density and light. There is plenty of moisture that we never see in the atmosphere, to the point that meteorologist Adelin Villevieille refers to clouds as icebergs, because we only ever see the tips of them so to speak (Pradinas and Renucci, “La formation des nuages”).

What becomes of Bachelard’s elemental poetics and the possibility of attunement, when they encounter semiocapital pneumaphagia? The language of dreams is present in CAS discourse, and yet it is incompatible with Bachelard’s type of ‘elemental’ dream. The reason for this is that in establishing a semiotics of clouds, or a culture of appreciation based on collecting photographs and turning these sightings into data and a platform community, one necessarily gives clouds a form and arrests their movement. Digital photography is certainly still material, but the materiality operates differently than the clouds’ drift. The flows of cloud- related data initiated by the Cloud Appreciation Society operates towards storage of the data, its sharing, and Artificial Intelligence training. This information is not still, it is in motion and operates in lines. According to Arjun Appadurai’s, a commodity is a statehood and operates in flows, having a ‘social life’ as such (21). CAS’ cloud-data can be thought of as such a commodity. The dreams of the cloud appreciation society are more akin to tropes of dream as goals of personal development: an interplay of desire, accumulation of commodities, pomp,

11 Information provided by CAS on the Cloud Bar states that the average lifespan of a cloud is ten minutes, however scholarly publications do not appear to agree about this.

33 achievement… rather than a process of dreaming understood the move like substance– accumulating and dissipating. It is the difference between what Jean Baudrillard might designate as the ‘simulacra dream’ versus the ‘reality dream’. Indeed, in a chapter spectrally titled “A New Humanism?”, Baudrillard speaks of an “ideology of competition […] now giving way everywhere to a ‘philosophy’ of personal accomplishment” (SoO 182).

Walter Benjamin’s concerns over artistic value in the industrial age can be shifted here onto a concern over mass production in age of information and semiotic capitalism. Mass production is not only a matter of waste or devaluation, but it also works to commodify attentions (Kane) on the receiving end, especially because digital materiality, by its intangible nature, does not make quantity and proliferation obvious. If attention itself is a value, then practicing the ‘arts of noticing’ is necessarily affected by this. Baudrillard, across his writing and especially through the notion of ‘simulacra’, argues that systems of signs, including ‘the media’, devalue contact and create spaces “without atmosphere” (Simulacres et simulation 11).

Baudrillard even goes as far as to speak of images as a murder of the real (Simulacres et simulation 5). Confounding simulation with its reality sounds like idolatry (SoO 4), where worship of the representation subsumes devotion to the real object of representation. However, learning from Spivak and Yusuf amongst others, applying a logic of sanctity to a substance

(versus its image, which would be profane) does little more than to cast the substance as atemporal (rather than coeval to ourselves) or engage in a satellite view of it (as existing in a space to which we are external). There are ramifications for appreciating clouds as part of a platform society versus showing appreciation of clouds through practices of attunement that are necessarily situated and bodily; which, I would argue, drifting and a location like the Cloud

Bar allow for.

34

NECROPOLIS

Consumption is part of how the Cloud Appreciation Society’s appreciation operates.

Consumption today, for many reasons, is a matter of the necrotic, and we see this theme arise everywhere: in the psychogeography of the landscape, the social life of energy, the infrastructures surrounding the cloud bar, the ephemerality of clouds and their representation, in the late liberal establishment of what is Life (Povinelli), as well as in figurations of climate change. As I have previously discussed, plastic is a useful substance for speaking of a mythology of substance, and especially so for discussing the ramifications of such a mythology in a contemporary context. Plastic is a highly visible substance between Skegness and Anderby creek. Rows of holiday homes with plastic cladding are lined up on synthetic turf, while plastic is central to operations of the hospitality industry, fills in a number of practical uses around beaches, and visible overflows from bins. Plastic, like the clouds, blends very well into everyday life. It is there, but rarely is it much of a topic. At the North Sea observatory, a cargo ship illustrated on the back wall does try to have a conversation about materials and resources.

The ship has drawers you can pull open to get an idea of the various commodities that come through or pass by the area. Some of them contain samples of raw materials, some of them miniatures of imported goods.

Not far from a National Coastwatch office, a plaque I had seen commemorated two drowned sailors who disappeared doing “see defence work”. Bouquets of flowers had just recently been tucked behind the plaque. An article from the Scotland Herald specifies that the four fishermen who died on 24 March 1993 were in fact “helping with a delivery of

Scandinavian granite rock” (“Four Fisherman Feared Drowned at Sea”). Safety signs and buoys lined the beach all along the coast, showing a general awareness of the sea’s dangers.

Laminated and taped to the window of another coastal watch office, a text from 1955 attributed to Patrick Joseph Keating ends with the lines, “So be wary of me, / I am so powerful, / I am

35 the sea” (Figure 6). In this office I could see many screens with active nautical maps spanning areas of the shore and sea it looks onto. In some respects, the sea is computed, externally as a whole, as an object to witch the language of battle and defence can be applied. While in other respects, loss and the comparative scale of energy between life ‘forms’ (such as myself and other humans) and the body that is the sea, makes it obvious that one subsumes the other. Scales are colloquially arranged, rather than deranged (to borrow Timothy Clark’s phrasing), in such a way that the colossality of something like the sea is compacted into a tameable and mythical given area. Language, technology and narratives would derange scale if on the contrary they worked to reveal entanglement, rather than abstract the relativity of humans to global commodity flows and the sea. We would no longer be in a position of defence–human technology and sustenance versus the sea–nor imagined as external to it. As Heather Davis puts it: “We must learn to enter into an untenable world, instead of operating from the fantasy that it can be barricaded against” (355).

Formlessness and motion are not the only things at stake in the photography of clouds.

Keeping in mind Bataille’s “dead matter”–the result of an obsession with ideals– renditions of clouds could be thought of as a genre of still-life. Bataille writes of matter, that it “cannot be reabsorbed by the image, (the concept of image presupposes a possible distinction between form and matter, and it is this distinction, insofar as it is an abstraction, that the operation of the formless tries to collapse)” (Krauss and Bois 29). The operation here is the same that makes the sky a container, that turns, as we have seen, the atmosphere into a canvas. This resistance to reabsorption works in a very similar way to the mythology of plastic. Like dead matter,

Davis speaks of the substance as “undead molecules” and that it “serves as a container, both literally and metaphorically” (352). Plastic is form, not formlessness. It arrests movement.

Barthes says of plastic that the substance is the “very idea of its infinite transformation” and that it is “less a thing that the trace of a movement” (97). And yet the idea of plastic–its trace,

36 infinity, transience–operates in sublime contradiction with its materiality. Plastic has a close and complicated relationship to cyclicality: “Plastic represents a shiny new world, one that removes people from the cycles of life and death, one that supersedes the troublesome, leaky, amorphous, and porous demands of our ancestors, our bodies, and the earth” (Davis 350). If the latter can work as a definition of a plastic mythology, or a plastic culture, then the term is applicable in ways to cloud appreciation.

Adding to the play-like spirit of wanting to grasp clouds and to objects being a source of comfort, as I have previously mentioned, Baudrillard writes the following:

[…] The object is the thing with which we construct our mourning: the object represents our own death, but that death is transcended (symbolically) by virtue of the fact that we possess the object; the fact that by introjecting it into a work of mourning–by integrating it into a series in which its absence and its re-emergence elsewhere ‘work’ at replaying themselves continually, recurrently–we succeed in dispelling the anxiety associated with absence and with the reality of death. Objects allow us to apply the work of mourning to ourselves right now, in everyday life, and this in turn allows us to live–to live regressively, no doubt, but at least to live. A person who collects is dead, but he literally survives himself through his collection, which (even while he lives) duplicates him infinitely, beyond death, by integrating death itself into the series, into the cycle. Once again, the parallel with dreams applies here. (SoO 97)

In this view, collecting photographs and other representations of clouds–in both cases looking for a way to possess the cloud–is a result of their dissipation, but more importantly a response to one’s own sense of ephemerality. The history of still life painting as a genre is imbued with the entanglement of decaying bodies, the idea of an afterlife, the creation of atmosphere and the classification of objects and matter. The earliest examples of still life were found in ancient

Egyptian tombs and was used to represent “exceptionally detailed scenes of everyday life”

(Richman-Abdou). This type of “organization of things”, as found in the rituals of death, are according to Baudrillard “a powerful springboard for projection and cathexis” (Baudrillard 29,

System of Objects). As simplistic as it is, the aesthetics of still life serve to project order onto

37 the otherwise chaotic–a trope carried by the spectres of humanism. The ‘vanitas’ genre in Dutch renaissance art is a specific type of still life representing symbolically chosen objects and carrying a “memento mori” message (Richman-Abdou). Despite the anxiety of death that

Baudrillard speaks of and its remedy through possession, still life, as an ornamental reminder of one’s mortality, also fetishizes it. Like for Howe’s “extinctophilia”, this is what Davis, in unpacking a culture of plastic, refers to as “finitude”.

Davis’ use of finitude comes from Elizabeth Povinelli’s critique of the distinction between “Life (bios) and Non-Life (geos, meteoros)” as a tool of governance prevailing “in late settler liberalism” (Povinelli, Geontologies 16). As we have seen, this distinction is laid bare and disturbed by the organization of Non-Life as referring to all that can be conveniently sourced, extracted, and valued, and Life as that which must be defended and transcends notions of value. Povinelli refers to this distinction as “The Carbon Imaginary”, figuring this concept as the Desert–a space that “seeks, iterates, and dramatizes the gap between Life and that which is conceived as before or without Life” (Geontologies 37). Finitude is a part of this imaginary:

Povinelli uses finitude to represent a Western metaphysics of understanding death as the end of a carbon-based life form. Finitude represents the drama of existence played out in relationship to the teleological orientation of time towards our own end: a one- way trajectory from birth to growth to death, focused on the individual. Jean Baudrillard also remarks that, as we are increasingly “[p]lunged by chance [or by a blind design] into an abnormal uncertainty, we have responded with an excess of causality and finality.” This drama of finitude is intimately tied to our notions of existence, as an individual and as a species, and is seen explicitly in some current narrations of apocalypse within the discourse of the Anthropocene. (Davis 353)

For Davis, the drama of finitude goes beyond an awareness of the end of selfhood and relies instead on the idea that all things will end in the same manner. A plastic logic reveals the misleading impressions of this finitude: objects, especially disposable ones, despite being a comforting marker of permanence, have a limited lifespan. Trash bins for instance, become a

38 portal to the Desert–an imagined, barren, non-space. The afterlife of trash, in landfill, landscapes, even in the lifeforms that dwell in these, in infrastructures of waste management, its workers, and the energy that powers them all, … are eclipsed into non-being by the users of the trash bin. On the other extreme, a substance like plastic is also subsumed by the idea of plasticity–what Barthes saw as “infinite transformation” (97). This infinite transformation, when considering the materiality of the substance, is the root of its toxicity. Davis says of plastic that it “seals off the cyclical mechanisms of circulating matter” and that pieces of it

“photodegrade and break apart, [but] do not biodegrade. That is, the pieces may get smaller and smaller, but they do not turn into something else. They do not go away” (350). Finitude is thus misapplied twice: it either declares a swift end for all and all their comfort-objects, or it gives abrupt endings to that which travels and lives on. The latter is better recognised at operating with toxicity.

Another example of a myth of finitude or infinity can apply to (renewable) energy infrastructure, like that of offshore wind farms. In researching the various windfarms visible from the Skegness shore, I came across mention of “decommissioning” (Centrica Energy 3).

Wind turbines, it turns out, have a life expectancy of 25 to 30 years, after which they must be decommissioned, or else substantial maintenance is required to extend their still-limited lifespan. This expiry date of infrastructure is hardly ever mentioned and is instead absorbed by the ‘renewable’ of ‘renewable energy’. Decommissioning a windfarm entails sawing off the turbine column at a specific height and leaving its trunk embedded in the ground. Therefore, a sighting of a windfarm is the promise that in time, the site will resemble, even if visible under water or at ground level, a cemetery of infrastructure. Gretchen Bakke describes cemeteries as

“those great civilizational griddings of the afterlife” (13), because they are visually, ritually and administratively representative of the fact that grids govern everything, even the necrotic.

However, as we have seen so far, one must ‘stay with the trouble’ and avoid wielding Non-

39

Life in order to recognise the ongoing dynamics of a toxic afterlife. The carcasses of windfarms will, in reality, neither become impenetrable tombs nor organically dissolve.

Research indicates that some lifeforms do reinvent themselves and thrive in what we consider to be debris. In a For the Wild podcast, Max Liboiron, an environmental scientist and activist working on monitoring plastic pollution, explains that even in their work there are tensions and disagreements regarding the desire to clean up something like the Great Pacific

Garbage Patch–that is, the desire to remove the still-sublimed contaminant that has become an allegory of all pollution: plastic. Not everyone agrees that removal is optimal, because it risks affecting or killing the life forms that have learnt to build life in the waste. Researchers in Santa

Barbara, California, have reached the same (somewhat unsatisfying) conclusion about the remains of an old offshore oil rig: “[…] up to 45 species of fish–rockfish, lingcod, perch–live in its vicinity, while the legs of the structure support innumerable arthropods, such as barnacles, crabs and tiny crustaceans” (Curwen). While oil rigs pose more of a problem in terms of ecological threat, because they penetrate deeply and leak, findings like these show that there are important things happening (such as ‘life’ finding a way) at the interstice of antagonisms like renewability and disposability.

Ultimately, Davis advocates for exhaustion over what she sees as the drama of finitude, which in a context of climate change enables defeat and the lure of an apocalypse narrative that implicates all and everything in one mass ending. The poet Alicia Stallings, in an epigraph before a poem titled “Glitter”, quotes the 2014 Winter issue of British Vogue: “All that will remain after an apocalypse is glitter”. Plastic itself, despite the finitude or infinity we misapply to it, debunks the myth of an End to the present times. Exhaustion, on the other hand, works more like toxicity and ‘staying with the trouble’–“we must learn to enter into an untenable world” (Davis 355). Exhaustion is processual, cyclical, drawn out and staggered. To think with exhaustion is to recognise energy as the true form of all social-carbon life. In other words, it

40 might be “thinking with heat” as Denise Ferreira da Silva calls for, which “displaces universal time” as a teleological, linear progression with finite ends, and casts it instead as a set of exchanges and constancy across embedded scales. Thinking with exhaustion or heat is this manner can justify also ‘thinking with clouds’, which operate in processes of accumulation, dissipation and drifting.

In the summer of 2019, Reuters published a special report by Mari Saito titled, “A cloudspotter’s guide to climate change”. It recounts how a group of CAS members took a cloudspotting trip to an island off the coast of England. In this report we can read:

Later in the weekend [Gavin Pretor-Pinney] asks those gathered if the society should take a more forceful stand on environmental activism. One member from Denmark says he plans to devote his life after retirement to climate activism, while several American members say the society is a respite from the news cycle and want the organization to stay out of advocacy. For them, clouds provide an escape. (Saito)

Here, as I had first noted with pneumaphagia, we find a common antagonism between the respite of the apolitical, a desire for a lightness of being that would align with the lightness of clouds, and the inescapability of what operates in what can be best described, figuratively and literally, as contamination: something that necessarily spreads, travels, pulsates, is liminar12, lingers like ghosts…Toxicity cannot be wished away, it can only be displaced, spread, shared.

However, siding with the Danish member looking to engage in climate activism in light of toxicity being here to stay, does not eclipse the desire for escape voiced by the other members.

While toxicity is factually not a matter of weighing the options of its existence, being ‘active’, or even just aware, about it does present itself as a matter of choice in everyday life. Without

12 ‘Liminar’ as described by Victor Turner: “The intervening liminal period, [where] the state of the ritual subject (the ‘passenger’ or ‘liminar’) becomes ambiguous, neither here nor there, betwixt and between all fixed points of classification; he passes through a symbolic domain that has few or none of the attributes of his past or coming state” (96).

41 entering into the discourses of moralism or science denial that exist in this tension, a situated analysis (meaning that psychogeography allows for consideration of the body and energy in a broad sense) serves to acknowledge that exhaustion is also a personal, physical reality. In this arena of exhaustion, choosing not to care can be a form of self-care. The Danish member, perhaps not exhausted, still has to wait for retirement and orient himself towards a future limited as such by labour and necessity. Thus, everything, even the way one appreciates the clouds, can be understood as a matter of affordance.

Saito’s report does detail ways in which the Cloud Appreciation Society does indeed implicate itself in mitigating climate change. The platform, we are told, is helping promote participation in a project that crowdsources the location of clouds in order to detect and compute blindspots in climate models: “Global climate models are a computational mesh that use grids of the Earth that are tens to hundreds of kilometers wide. Clouds and the complicated processes they are made under are smaller in size and present a ‘blind spot’ in climate modeling, says Schneider, the Caltech climate scientist”. Thus while cloudspotters are feeding images of clouds into a GPS-tracked app, they are not just collecting photographs of clouds, but helping scientists model the climate and note its changes over time. Strangely, the report’s author calls this “the climate-change equivalent of the Manhattan Project, a multinational effort championed by leading scientists in the European Union”, which either implies, ambiguously, that computing climate change is equivalent to engineering a nuclear bomb, or simply alludes to the fact that climate change is manmade. Either way, the reported promotion of this crowdsourced cloud-data is a reminder that grids (computational, informational and infrastructural in this case) produce their own means of resistance.

Modeling the climate is crucial to tracking how it is changing and for assessing risk.

Walt Lyons, a meteorologist and CAS member present on the trip is interviewed say, “Every time you turn around, there’s impact from warming. It’s exactly as climate modelers have

42 predicted”. In the same section of the report titled “A sense of loss” we find the contradictory dynamics of the cloud appreciation society. In one sense, Lyons sounds exasperated that decades of warnings have had “little effect”, while also stating that “it’s getting harder to look away”, implying that change is happening. The reality of climate change is one of amplification, which will inevitably cut through its abstraction in a saturated attention economy and become more universally tangible. Despite this, Lyons concludes that “Just appreciating clouds is a big job, because people are reconnecting with nature […]. If more people could begin to understand what they’re about to lose…”. Cloud appreciation, put like this, is valuable simply because it engenders noticing the clouds. The fact that this is ‘too late’ compared to the decades of knowledge amassed by the scientific community and their public communications, or that it is really just a basis of cognition for acknowledging loss that is to come, is met with a ‘better than nothing’ attitude. This begs the question of what can be done differently in a terrain of appreciation that does not allow for ‘prefigurative politics’, understood as orienting ones actions in the present towards collectively desired ends, because politicizing everyday life, as seems to require ‘climate action’, is a labour that is perpetually subdued by other forms of materiality and their exhaustions.

43

CONCLUSION

Close reading the Cloud Appreciation Society and its various methods of communication has allowed me to unpack in detail how ‘appreciation’ is carried out by an institution of sorts. I hope to have conveyed that appreciation of clouds applies a logic of objects to them, which in turn imbues clouds with all the contentions of objecthood. One such result is that the atmosphere of which clouds are a part is constructed as a system for containing these objects. In doing so the atmosphere is flattened into what can be referred to as an aesthetic one, omitting the characteristics of meteorological phenomena. I then traced this operation back to the very beginnings of ‘translating’ clouds into information; showing that their taxonomy cannot be picked apart from the histories of reason-making and imperialism, both of which were fueled by the search for and accumulation of resources.

Situating my analysis of cloud appreciation has meant understanding the relationship between Humanism and Posthumanism because much of the literature I have relied on for argumentation stems from or at least passes through these. Critiques and modes of thought found in posthuman, new materialist, and energy studies have served to better understand the place of imagination and figuration within scholarship that looks to be actively engaged in thinking through the realities of climate change. These theories have also, in many ways, helped to notice the meshwork or grids that operate on larger scales, tying everything together structurally, in both tangible and intangible ways. But despite these well gridded, camouflaged, networks, Gretchen Bakke reminds us: “there is always an in-between” (22), and so too does

Elizabeth Povinelli by employing in all seriousness the suffix “-ish” (Geontologies 13). The in-betweens become apparent wherever contradictions arise, wherever, as is always the case, something is ‘neither this nor that’, or two sides of one reality, which one would think cancel each other out, exist all at once. Thinking of a mythology of substance was a case in point for this. So much about ‘thinking plastic’ entails dead-ends, illusion, and paradox. Water, which

44 makes up clouds, surely has a very rich mythology too–hydrofeminism or Gaston Bachelard’s take on water are just two examples of this. However, the logic of plastic, by being imbued with the complications of undead or spectral matter, by operating with the logic and factualness of toxicity, and by being a decidedly ‘modern’ and now present-day problem to contend with, made it apt for considering what happens to a substance’s mythology when it is translated into information–no longer just as a system of taxonomy, but as cybernetics. Information capitalism operates in such different ways to the ‘formlessness’ of clouds, that the existence of a ‘cloud of clouds’ offered rich and uncanny grounds for comparison.

Finally, it took focusing on the (somewhat) offline endeavours of the Cloud

Appreciation Society to understand better how they approach climate change. What I found most interesting about the Cloud Appreciation Society is that it is quite clear that, as an organization, they avoid active engagement in what are deemed to be ‘political’ issues, including climate change. However, it goes without saying that anything relying on clouds–the real clouds–is already heavily implicated in a changing climate. To say otherwise is, again, an exercise in aesthetic wistfulness: creating graspable, ownable, ornamental worlds of lasting fair-weather clouds. I emphasise Elizabeth Povinelli’s writing, along with references to Anna

Tsing, Donna Haraway, and Kathryn Yusoff, precisely because they have, for a long time already, made it clear that aesthetic worlds and their plastic-style mythologies are not resistant to toxicity and freak weather. Part of the preparedness behind their thinking is also to recognise the affective worlds that come with factual, material events. Beyond establishing politics of engagement or disengagement, the pervasiveness of what might be called semiocapitalism, information capitalism, or capitalist ruins, means that valuation, affordance and exhaustion seep into everything.

I speak of everyday life–the realm of the mundane–often because it recognises that there is a spatio-temporal dimension to which we relegate all that is at once everything and

45 nothing, that is the ordinary and yet crucial. Clouds make up part of this everyday life. They are a background hum until tuned into. The same has widely been established about walking.

Walter Benjamin in exploring Charles Baudelaire’s wandering flâneur made walking a liminal practice (165); especially (anachronistically) in doing so the way of the Internationale

Situationniste: as a resistance to the functionality and monetisation of everyday life under industrial capitalism. Not only was the flâneur neither inside nor outside the crowd, but he had the privilege of using space freely–of not belonging, but not owing anything either for a moment. This flâneur is of course an idealism, and why I much prefer the figure of the drifter as a more explicit concept-persona–idealist but with good reason, and with no defining features. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, walking of the drifting type, as they saw in

Virginia Woolf’s writing, allowed for the self to become imperceptible (263, A Thousand

Plateaus). By slicing through space, the body somehow is reduced to just that–the body, while the mind and its imagination enter a substance-like state.

It is this that I think holds value in contrast to the way the Cloud Appreciation Society mediates ‘noticing the ecological’. As a practice, although it will always be performative, drifting is a sure way to engage with being ‘cloud-like’ and to pay attention to what else operates like clouds, in processes of accumulation, saturation, dissipation, … . The Cloud Bar, although it does not exist in a vacuum and is not meant as an Eden of cloud appreciation, at the very least gets us closer to drifting. It is still inscribed with the discourse of the Cloud

Appreciation Society, and aims to control gestures, but its factualness as a structure does more.

As a location, one must (in some form or another) spend energy and engage with a landscape, with other people, with infrastructures, with the view, with the weather forecast, and so on, in order to get to it. This means that the situation created is necessarily propitious to paying attention to porousness (of self, of other living things) within a meteorological atmosphere.

46

WORKS CITED

“Appreciation”. Online Etymology Dictionary, www.etymonline.com/word/appreciation.

Accessed 1 August 2020. Online.

“Dérive”. Littré, www.littre.org/definition/d%C3%A9riv%C3%A9. Accessed 24 July 2020.

Online.

“Derive”. Online Etymology Dictionary, www.etymonline.com/word/derive. Accessed 24 July

2020. Online.

“Dr. Max Liboiron on Reorienting Within a World of Plastic (Episode 156).” For the Wild,

hosted by Ayana Young, 29 January 2020, forthewild.world/listen/max-liboiron-on-

reorienting-within-a-world-of-plastic-156. Online.

“Structures on the Edge”. Lincolnshire County Council, www.lincolnshire.gov.uk/coast-

countryside/structures-edge. Accessed 7 July 2020. Online.

Appadurai, Arjun. The future as cultural fact: essays on the global condition. New York, Verso

Books, 2013. Print.

Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Green College Thematic

Lecture Series). Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2002. PDF.

Bataille, Georges. Visions of excess: selected writings, 1927-1939, translated by Allan Stoekl.

Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Print.

Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects, translated by James Benedict. New York,Verso,

2006. Print.

Benjamin, Walter, and Leon Wieseltier. Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by

Harry Zohn, New York, Schocken Books, 1969. Print.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, Duke University Press

Books, 2010. Print.

47

Bolaño, Roberto. The savage detectives, translated by Natasha Wimmer. New York,

Picador/Farrar, 2008. Print.

Boyer, Dominic, and Imre Szeman. “Introduction: On the Energy Humanities”. Energy

Humanities: An Anthology, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. PDF.

Breitbach, Julia. “The Photo-as-Thing”. European Journal of English Studies, vol. 15, no. 1,

2011, p. 31–43. PDF.

Capemarsh. “The Cloud Bar”. Atlas Obscura, www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-cloud-bar.

Accessed 7 July 2020. Online.

Clark, Timothy. “5. Scale”. Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change (vol. 1),

edited by Tom Cohen, London & Atlantic Highlands, Open Humanities Press, 2012.

PDF.

Coleman, Nick. “All This ... and Eight Donuts for a Quid? Get Me to Skeggy”. The

Independent, 22 October 2011, www.independent.co.uk/travel/uk/all-this-and-eight-

donuts-for-a-quid-get-me-to-skeggy-1786344.html. Online.

Curwen, Thomas. “A Historic Oil Platform off Santa Barbara Turns into a Rusty Ghost Ship.”

Los Angeles Times, 14 March 2019, www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-platform-holly.

Online.

Daily Mail Reporter. “Council Spends £ 30,000 on ‘Cloud Viewing Platform’... and Opens It

on Clear Blue Day”. Mail Online, 10 April 2009, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-

1168980/Council-spends-30-000-cloud-viewing-platform--opens-clear-blue-day.html.

Online.

Damisch, Hubert. Théorie Du Nuage: Pour Une Histoire de La Peinture. Paris, Seuil, 1972.

Print.

Debord, Guy. “Théorie de La Dérive”. Internationale Situationniste No. 1 (1958) to No. 12

(1969). Amsterdam, Van Gennep. Print.

48

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia.

Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987. PDF.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie. Paris, Les éditions de minuit,

1991. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” JSTOR October, vol. 59, 1992. p. 3–

7. Accessed 2 August 2020. Online.

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth”. Public Culture, vol.

26, no. 2, 2014, p. 257–80. PDF.

Embassy of the North Sea. “Embassy of the North Sea”. Parliament of Things,

theparliamentofthings.org/case/embassy-of-the-north-sea. Accessed 7 July 2020.

Online.

Ferreira da Silva, Denise. “On Heat.” Canadian Art, 29 October 2018,

canadianart.ca/features/on-heat. Online.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental

Futures). Durham, Duke University Press Books, 2016. PDF.

Horn, Eva. “Air as Medium,” Grey Room, Fall, vol. 73, 2018. p. 6–25. Accessed 2 August

2020. Online.

Howe, Cymene. Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham, Duke University

Press Books, 2019. PDF.

Howe, Cymene. Ecologics: wind and power in the Anthropocene. Durham, Duke University

Press, 2019. PDF.

Ingold, Tim. The Life of Lines. London, Routledge, 2015. Print.

Internationale Situationniste. “Definitions”. Situationist International Online, translated by

Ken Knabb. www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/definitions.html. Accessed 24 July 2020.

Online.

49

Kane, Lexie. “The Attention Economy.” Nielsen Norman Group, 30 June 2019,

www.nngroup.com/articles/attention-economy. Online

Macalister, Terry. “Wind Farm Scrapped over Fears for Birds.” Guardian, 14 February 2018,

www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/06/wind-farm-scrapped-fear-birds.

Online.

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.

Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. PDF.

Peabody, Sue. “French Emancipation”. Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets, 2014. Online.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. “The Ends of Humans: Anthropocene, Autonomism, Antagonism, and the

Illusions of Our Epoch”. South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 116, no. 2, 2017, p. 293–310.

PDF.

Pradinas, Jean, and France Renucci. “La formation des nuages.” INA, 3 June 1980,

https://www.ina.fr/video/I19059972/la-formation-des-nuages-video.html. Online.

Pradinas, Jean, and France Renucci. “Le Nuage, Protecteur de l’atmosphère.” INA, 3 June

1980, www.ina.fr/video/I19059973/le-nuage-protecteur-de-l-atmosphere-video.html.

Online.

Pretor-Pinney, Gavin. The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds.

London, Hodder & Stoughton (Sceptre), 2007. Print.

Regalado, Antonio. “Who Coined Cloud Computing?” MIT Technology Review, 31 October

2011, www.technologyreview.com/2011/10/31/257406/who-coined-cloud-computing.

Online.

Rice, Stanley, and Howard R. Ernst. Encyclopedia of Evolution. 2019. PDF.

Richman-Abdou, Kelly. “How Artists Have Kept Still Life Painting Alive Over Thousands of

Years.” My Modern Met, 31 May 2018, www.mymodernmet.com/what-is-still-life-

painting-definition/. Online.

50

Saito, Mari. “A Cloudspotters’ Guide to Climate Change.” Reuters, 25 July 2019,

www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/climate-change-britain-clouds. Online.

Sedgwick, Josephine. “Nature’s Best Poetry of 2019: Clouds”. The New York Times, 13

December 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/arts/design/weather-cloud-

pictures.html. Online.

Sinclair, Leah. “The Most Popular Holiday Destinations in the UK Revealed –Will You Be

Visiting?”. Express, 7 January 2020, www.express.co.uk/travel/articles/1225152/most-

popular-holiday-destinations-uk-revealed-travel-news-latest. Online.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Planetarity (Box 4, WELT)”. Paragraph: A Journal of Modern

Critical Theory, vol. 38, no. 2, 2015, p. 290–92. PDF.

Stoppard, Tom. Arcadia. London, Faber & Faber, 1993. Print.

The Newsroom. “End of Era as Derbyshire Miners’ Convalescent Home near Skegness

Closes”. Skegness Standard, 8 October 2018, www.skegnessstandard.co.uk/news/end-

era-derbyshire-miners-convalescent-home-near-skegness-closes-245334. Online.

Thompson, Marie. “Productive Parasites: Thinking of Noise as Affect”. Cultural Studies

Review, vol. 18, no. 3, 2012. PDF.

Tsing, Anna L. The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist

ruins. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015. PDF.

Turner, Victor. “Passages, Margins, and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas”. The

Anthropology of Politics: A Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique, edited by

Joan Vincent. Malden: Blackwell, 2002. PDF.

Visit England, Great Britain Domestic Overnight Trips Summary - Holiday – 2019.

www.visitbritain.org/sites/default/files/vb-corporate/england_holiday_trips_2019.pdf

51

ANNEX I: FIGURES

Figure 1

52

Figure 2

Figure 3

53

Figure 4

Figure 5

54

Figure 6

55

ANNEX II: DRIFTING TO THE CLOUD BAR – A STILL LIFE ESSAY 56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70