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- Weathering (6)
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- Chachkhiani, Vajiko (2)
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The chapter engages the nature-culture divide with the generative ambivalences of weathering in both language and physics. Taking the different uses of the enantiosemic and ambitransitive verb as indicative of the human's fraught relationship with its environment and itself, it analyses multiple ways in which 'weathering' can involve subject-object relations, objectless subject-predicate relations, or even subjectless processes, and proposes to think them with mechanics, thermodynamics, and chaos theory.
Over the six months in which Vajiko Chachkhiani's "Living Dog Among Dead Lions" was exhibited at the Georgian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, heavy rain was pouring inside the installation. This artificially generated process provokes thoughts on the nature of the here and now as well as of the afterlife and of the future appearance of the hut's water-sensitive insides. Eventually, the spaces and furniture exposed to rain and water stagnation will begin to rot and disintegrate, and mould and moss might grow over them. Its viewers feel caught between what they see and what they hope to see; between their perceptions and expectations, in an exceptional time zone where 'natural' weathering is being performed as a subject of meditative observation.
Following Hannah Arendt's remarks on refugee camps as spaces of 'worldlessness', I examine how, in films on European asylum facilities, systemic violence 'makes itself known' in images of nature. Nature separates and isolates ("La Forteresse", "Forst"), it constitutes a sphere of domination and control ("View from Above"), and it functions directly as a murder weapon ("Purple Sea"). Nature, in these films, indicates the Outside within, haunted by the latent and ghostly presence of systemic violence.
The essay investigates the meteorological phenomena represented in Dante Alighieri's Commedia and their interrelation with the subjectivity of the dead in Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Examining how the dead weather the afterlife and how the elements affect them, in turn, the essay takes the complex enantiosemy of the word 'weathering' as a conceptual guiding thread for the exploration of dynamics of exposure ('Inferno'), vulnerability ('Purgatorio'), and receptivity ('Paradiso').
One of the theoretical tensions that has arisen from Anthropocene studies is what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called the 'two figures of the human', and the question of which of these two figures of the human inheres in the concept of the Anthropocene more. On the one hand, the Human is conceived as the universal reasoning subject upon whom political rights and equality are based, and on the other hand, humankind is the collection of all individuals of our species, with all of the inequalities, differences, and variability inherent in any species category. This chapter takes up Deborah Coen's argument that Chakrabarty's claim of the 'incommensurability' of these two figures of the human ignores the way both were constructed within debates over how to relate local geophysical specificities to theoretical generalities. This chapter examines two cases in the history of science. The first is Martin Rudwick's historical exploration of how geologists slowly gained the ability to use fossils and highly local stratigraphic surveys to reconstruct the history of the Earth in deep time, rather than resort to speculative cosmological theory. The second is Coen's own history of imperial, Austrian climate science, a case where early nineteenth-century assumptions about the capriciousness of the weather gave way to theories of climate informed by thermodynamics and large-scale data collection.
This chapter argues that paying attention to the weather and its associated processes of geological, biological, and social weathering can destabilize knowledge traditions that insist on dichotomies. Looking to specific histories and current conditions in Guyana and Suriname, this chapter shows how notions of weathering can accommodate a wide range of referents, ranging from the weathering of rock to socio-political and historical afterlives of violent colonial displacements.
This essay restages Arendt's 'Auseinandersetzung' with Heidegger regarding 'political beginnings'. Sketching Heidegger's exceptionalist account of 'new beginnings' and Arendt's dispute with him in relation to the tension between the spheres of 'philosophy' and 'politics', I trace her position about 'political founding'. I claim that Arendt invites us to recognize the 'principle of an-archy' innate to 'political beginnings', which cannot be absorbed by exceptionalist invocations of the 'history of Being'.
Radiating exposures
(2020)
The brief explorations of radiation exposures presented within this essay draw primarily from nuclear art and culture and contribute to the field of nuclear aesthetics, which has long been fixated on the problem of visibility and the representation of nuclear residues. The examples draw primarily from photographic technologies and other aesthetic registers that capture visual residues of radiation. The challenges of nuclear aesthetics are also political and social. This constellation of objects and inquiries is meant to explore the fraught political, environmental, and social relations between radiation, visibility, toxicity, through the concept of exposure. They offer feminist glimpses into other ways of thinking exposure, as it develops in relation to (often imperceptible) toxicity that is not inscribed into a logic that partitions the passive victim of suffering from some pure or unaffected subject. They are examples that are both forms of exposure specific to the nuclear while also, perhaps, helping to expose more nuanced and complex ways of understanding forms of exposure that extend beyond nuclearity.