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SOLARITIES
Elemental Encounters
and Refractions
 Contents

Introduction 17
Cymene Howe, Jeff Diamanti, and Amelia Moore

Skin 43
Mél Hogan

Chlorophyll 49
Aster Hoving

Bloom 63
Jeff Diamanti

Respiration 71
Ayesha Vemuri and Hannah Tollefson

What Fuels You? 85

Gretchen Bakke

A Politics of Solar Abundance 93

Cara New Daggett

Exposure 105
Jason De León
Concrete Solarities 117
Cristián Simonetti

Affective Energy 125

Myles Lennon

Asolarity: Weaponized Sunlight 133

Ian J. Alexander and Nicole Starosielski

Colonial Exposure 149

Aylin Kuryel

Solar as Narrative Element: The Interrupting Surface 159

Rhys Williams

Living Too Close to the Sun 169

Daniel A. Barber

Landfill 179
Bob Johnson

The Solar Grid (excerpt) 191

Ganzeer

The Ray and the Flame, or, What It Takes for the
Sun to Shine 207
Tim Ingold

Tupilaq (In the Shadow of Solarity) 215

Amanda Boetzkes

The Kiln 231

Kim Förster

Twilight 261
Dominic Boyer
Tires 271
Caroline Levander

Seaweed 277
Sarah Besky

Black Atlantis 287

Amelia Moore

Author Biographies 301

 Acknowledgments

This collection was born in a boisterous set of heliophilous con-

versations in Montreal across the course of a dimly lit day where
bright ideas kept sparking through our shared time together.
Our initial gathering in “After Oil School: Solarity’’ would not
have been possible without the dedication and vision of Darin
Barney, Imre Szeman, and Mark Simpson who brought us all
together. All of the After Oil Schools organized by The Petro-
cultures Research Group — and the publications emerging from
them, such as the collectively authored After Oil (West Virginia
University Press, 2016) and Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice
(University of Minnesota Press, 2022)—have been especially
generative models in collaborative writing and thinking, pro-
jects in which we were delighted to participate. For helping us
bring Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions into being
we are grateful to Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, Lily Brewer, and
Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy at punctum books and for her spec-
tacular, solarized images, Krista Steinke, whose vision illumi-
nates the cover of the book. Our deepest appreciation also goes
to Abigail Antinossi who brought her organizational skills and
generous energy to the final stages of our production process to
actually make this all happen.

xiii
For Linda and her yellow mustang speckled with sunflowers

For Wesley and his radial engines

For Oxana and the promise of solar communism

 Introduction

Cymene Howe, Jeff Diamanti, and Amelia Moore

The sun, our sun. Our star. A fiery, fuming benefactor. The force
animating all lifeforms.
This is a book about the sun as an experience multiplied:
what we are calling solarities. Here are a series of contempla-
tions on the sun as an elemental form, its radiative potential,
and how it shapes the conditions of living and being on earth.
Elemental forms are those specific and situated characteristics
of forces as they cohere and inhere in phenomena and experi-
ence — wind insinuating knots into a tree trunk, water cooling
the skin, solar waves that spark photosynthesis in a wildflower.
The sun is a force, but it is also a source of myth and symbol.
Our goal in this book is not to capture the sun in its entirety
through the metrics of astrophysics or the metaphors of litera-
ture or the magic of devotional practice or the capturing of its
energetic powers.1 Instead, our hope is to seek out solarity as a

1 The editors want to very sincerely thank Darin Barney, Imre Szeman, and
Mark Simpson for hosting and organizing “After Oil School: Solarity,” out
of which the inspiration for this volume came. For crucial perspectives on
solar energy as a contingent force of social and cultural transformation,
see Ayesha Vemuri and Darin Barney, eds., Solarities: Seeking Energy Jus-
tice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022). On energy transi-

17
solarities

relational phenomenon, one that becomes arranged differently

across distinct kinds of embodied, infrastructural, and material-
ized experiences. Solarities are felt through innumerable scenes
of encounter. They are contingent and provisional, abstract, and
agonizingly tangible, cosmological, and prosaic. Solarity is the
source of all thriving on earth. But it is also, when wedded to the
anthropogenic bodies of carbon hung in the atmosphere above
us, the source of all withering and desiccation, a maker of mon-
strous heat.
Solarity pulls at the grammars of thought because its distri-
bution is tricky to capture. Solarity refracts as the spectrum of
light it produces bends to temperature, atmospheric pressure,
and time. It radiates. It raises questions. How do we navigate
our constant and evolving relationship with solarity, with the
sun, our star? What persistent disparities appear on a planet
that is so intimately bound up in a state of love and fear, rever-
ence and dependency on the primary source of all life? All that
matters. What might we learn if we embraced our solar being?
And what becomes possible when the material specificities of
solarity become the compass for our thought and actions? In
eliciting solarities as a disposition of generativity, Solarities con-
tributes to ethnographic and interpretive approaches across the
social sciences and humanities that are coming to be under-
stood as the elemental turn.2 Attuning to elemental forms asks at

tion and solarity’s position as a source of conflict, relation, and paradox,

see Imre Szeman and Darin Barney, eds., South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no.
1 “Solarity” (2020), both of which were also initiated and collaboratively
crafted through the Solarity workshop.
2 See, for example, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, eds.,
Environmental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water and Fire
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Sasha Engelmann and
Derek McCormack, “Elemental Aesthetics: On Artistic Experiments with
Solar Energy,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 108, no.
1 (2018): 241–59; Sasha Engelmann and Derek McCormack, “Elemental
Worlds: Specificities, Exposures, Alchemies,” Progress in Human Geog-
raphy 45, no. 6 (2021): 1419–39; Dimitris Papadopoulos, María Puig de
la Bellacasa, and Natasha Myers, eds., Reactivating Elements: Chemistry,
Ecology, Practice (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022); and Timothy

18
 introduction

minimum for an interdisciplinary voice, but this collection also

suggests an imaginative mode of investigating how solarities
envelope, distribute, and refract solar possibilities. The shared
endeavor in this book is to challenge ourselves with how solar
becomes situated through its lateral dispersals as it is activated
and actualized across atmospheres that are distinctive in time,
place, and being.
Solarity is singular, a cosmic companion like no other for
those of us on Earth. But is also shared across organic and
inorganic bodies, shaped by physical form and material com-
position in unique and mutable ways. Solarity’s influence is
determined by geographical and historical constraint as well as
arrangements of power, forces, and unsurprisingly, deceptions
and aspirations. Each encounter with solarity is distributed
differently, contorting and moving in ways that shift a sense
of immersion in it, especially as it is everywhere and nowhere
all at once. In this book, we ask contributors to consider how
solarity is contingent, embodied, and embedded in material
and symbolic relations. This means recognizing how solarity is
a form and a force that plays out, across, into, and between bod-
ies. Human bodies, nonhuman bodies, astral bodies. Solarity
conditions all that is organic and alive. It is also integrated into
inorganic things, materializing as concrete and plastic, shade,
and melting ice. Solarity is embedded in the built world just
as the built world often becomes refuge from and channel for
solarity’s powers. Solarity is composed into physical forms. It
manifests as infrastructure in ways that are both explicit and
unnoticed. Solarity is that precious line between thriving and
expiration, blooms and growth, desiccation, and cessation.
Solarity is a fractal tipping point between life and death, life and
non-life, a never-ending pattern. It is at once everything and
everywhere and because of its ubiquity, can be too easily over-
looked. Dissipated. With Solarities, we gather attention to our

Neale, Courtney Addison, and Thao Phan, eds., Anthropogenic Table of

Elements: Experiments in the Fundamental (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2022).

19
solarities

sun’s influence and its interference, its effects in the moment and
over time, extended. Solarities are the sun in everyone, every-
thing. A bright spark, a burning star.

Solarity Is, Solarity Does

Solarity is captured in a joule, in a room, in her body as vitamin

or as mutagen. Electromagnetic radiation proceeds. It goes and
goes. It is radiance. It is a continuance. Solarity’s biography is to
reach toward the eternal. A lifespan that appears to be never-
ending. And this is a promise. Five billion years of promissory.
The sun is discharging. Pulsing out photons that will not leave
its core for millennia. Only then is solarity delivered to earth.
Like a gift of light and heat. On which it all depends. On which
we are all depending. From core to corona to space, wrapping
around objects in sensual form. Touching and contacting. Solar-
ity is said, sometimes, to penetrate the skin, the atmosphere,
the dark. But it may be better known as passive light, passive
warmth. An antidote to the piercing logics of masculinist rea-
son. What is the method of solar encounter? For the poet, writes
Jane Bennett, solar contemplation involves “invoking one’s inner
coal, bird, and light in order to forge sympathetic links with the
minerals in tools, the pigeons in the park, the myriad bodies.”3
Solarity settles as a fog of light and heat, knowing every curve
of a surface, making its shadows, becoming the dark. A way of
lingering.

3 In “The Solar Judgment of Walt Whitman,” Jane Bennett takes Whitman’s

form of solar judgment as a kind of “method” that imagines, sees, and feels
every curve and every nook of a surface. In a section entitled “Solarity,”
Bennett quotes Whitman that “[the poet] is no arguer, he is judgment.”
The poet judges not as the judge judges but “as the sun falling round a
helpless thing.” For Bennett, the poet himself “goes solar” in order to linger
long and to “linger with a mind that is open and quiet enough” to hear
their testimonies rather than reflexively categorize and rank. Jane Bennett,
“The Solar Judgment of Walt Whitman,” in A Political Companion to Walt
Whitman, ed. John E. Seery (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press,
2011), 136, 134.

20
 introduction

Solarity is scalar paradox. It is worked into nearly every thing,

transforming matter into a blush or a scar. It is existential and
infinitesimal all at once. The sun, our benefactor. The constancy
of those rays enlivens the planet. Omnipresent. Between Sun
and Earth all movement occurs: compelling seasons, conjuring
ocean currents, driving weather, climate, and belts of radiation.
Solarity is a force that manipulates all. To call its powers vast is
to greatly understate the reality. Our sun, the “yellow dwarf ”
that feeds us. A nearly perfect sphere. Nuclear fusion becom-
ing light and heat to the point of incandescence. A mere 150
million kilometers separate the Earth and sun. If, on average,
a person will walk 110 thousand kilometers in a lifetime, a trek
to the sun’s outer corona would exhaust 1,363 lifetimes. It would
be another four lifetimes to reach sun’s core.4 And that would
be an Icarus-like journey to be sure. Eventually, however, our
sun will come to us. Except that we will already be gone. About
2.8 billion years from now, our sun will have created heat so
extreme that all life on Earth will expire. Oceans will boil and
then evaporate, never to return. In its red giant phase of evolu-
tion — in about 8 billion years — science says that the sun will
eat our planet. Then it will settle into its white dwarf state. Sated.
Solarity moves us. From one phase to another. From day
to dusk to night to dawn. Diurnal cycles of day making. It is a
time machine. The infinite clock. Even without dials or springs
or digital pulses, there is no temporal interval without it. Kyle
Powys Whyte reminds us that our altered climate is about “hap-
penings that unfold through time.”5 And that talking about
those changes, alterations, and transitions, “is an exercise in
telling time.”6 Solarity is such a time maker. There is no true
away from the sun, the light of chronicity. Even in the dark, it is

4 It would be another 432,000 miles to Sun’s core. See “Layers of the Sun,”
NASA, n.d., https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/iris/multimedia/layer-
zoo.html.
5 Kyle Powys Whyte, “Time as Kinship,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Environmental Humanities, eds. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Stephanie Foote
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 40.
6 Ibid.

21
solarities

always on the forever horizon. Always around the bend. In our

minds and in our poetry. It is a proleptic rhythm of duration,
expectation, and memory. If solarity is an elemental multiplica-
tion rousing what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls the scalability
of scale,7 then it is a peculiar kind of deictic force since it never
demures from pushing through the comprehensibility of scales
as we know them.
Solarity is arriving. In daisies and dandelions and sweat. It
is being taken up and transformed, its powers redistributed in
photosynthesis, leafing and rooting. Solarity is bending. And it
becomes bent into everything, the fibers in the Bonsai’s bark,
the back of your hand, the yellowy egg yolk consumed as cake.
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that, as human beings, we tend
to view the world through the lens of anthropocentricism.8 But
plants, she notes, so radically different from us, sense the world
in ways that are completely beyond us. Plants are more still. And
their perception is parallel with that stillness, attuning to very
long and very short wavelengths of light. Sunlight is deciphered
through floral life. Photosynthesis follows a set of electrochemi-
cal processes that move energy across folded membranes within
the symbiotic chloroplasts of green beings.9 Natasha Myers rec-
ognizes photosynthesis as an “utterly magical, totally cosmic
alchemical process,” one connecting all earthly plant life into a
“reverent, rhythmic attention to the earth’s solar source.”10 With
its heat and light, solar radiance has insinuated itself into all liv-
ing forms.
The sun has been set. It has settled itself into a corpus of geo-
forms residing in the subsurface. Fossilized solarity is what Reza

7 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not

Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales,” Common Knowledge 18, no. 3
(2012): 505–24.
8 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Minneapolis: Milkweed Edi-
tions, 2015).
9 Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan, and Niles Eldredge, What Is Life? (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
10 Natasha Myers, “Photosynthesis,” in Society for Cultural Anthropology,
January 21, 2016, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/photosynthesis.

22
 introduction

Negarestani calls the Black Sun. The sun, underground. Radiant

light and heat from past millennia have been recast into petro-
forms that ooze and leak, harden and burn. The reanimation
of fossilized lives, Negarestani writes, stimulates a process of
“eradication,” a “moving of the earth’s body toward the Tellurian
Omega — the utter degradation of the earth as a Whole.”11 This is
also the sun, once set, now re-surfacing. The necrotic energetic
potential beneath us. Oil is the corpse of solarity. A legacy. In
fossilized bodies we confront the light of past sunshine, and to
know the sun, now set in these mutated forms, begins with an
awareness of our own diminution. Our own petrifying poten-
tial. Our own solar selves becoming petrified. Blackfoot scholar
Leroy Little Bear12 explains how the oil economy turns fossil
beings into worldly threats, underlining how “narrow [our] con-
ditions of existence” actually are. These fossils, reanimated, are
not the only markers of our entanglements with a petrocapitalist
state of being. But they are some. Fossil fuels animate the politi-
cal economies of nearly every place on earth. For Zoe Todd, the
bones of dinosaurs and the remnants of flora and fauna from
millions of years ago are paradoxical kin. She writes that fossil
kin animate political economies but that “the insatiable desire to
liberate these long-gone beings from their resting place, to turn
the massive stores of carbon and hydrogen left from eons of life
in this place” are a way of weaponizing these “fossil-kin, these
long-dead beings, [transforming] them into threats to our very
existence as humans.”13

11 Reza Negarestani, “Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials

(Excerpt),” in Energy Humanities: An Anthology, eds. Imre Szeman and
Dominic Boyer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 423.
12 Leroy Little Bear, “Big Thinking and Rethinking: Blackfoot Metaphysics
‘Waiting in the Wings’,” lecture, Congress of the Humanities and Social
Sciences, University of Calgary, Alberta, June 1, 2016.
13 Zoe Todd, “Fish, Kin and Hope: Tending to Water Violations in
amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory,” Afterall: A Journal of Art,
Context and Enquiry 43 (Spring/Summer 2017): 103–4.

23
solarities

Refractions of Being

Solarity is power. Another fuel for productivity and its measure.

People are fueled by many things. Some ways of fueling have
brought pain, dispossession and toxic relations, and other pow-
ers appear with bright potential, an invitation to revolutionary
horizons of environmental equilibrium in a world that feels itself
unhinged. When solarity is made electric, or into comforting
thermality, its appeals are tremendous. Solarity is transformed
when it encounters photovoltaic panels crafted from the minor
metals of silicon and cadmium, gallium and indium, selenium
and tellurium. Absorbing and converting. The sun endures in
its shining generativity. A zenith for energetic optimism. Solar-
ity offers its power, freely it seems, to become our power. We
will take it. And we might take it for granted. Thanks to you,
benevolent star. Solarity portends a sunny flood of energy abun-
dance. Many glorious refrains about harvesting the sun’s powers
ring out in the imaginary of solar energy made electric. This is
unsurprising, given that the continuous energy the sun bestows
upon earth is more than 10,000 times the world’s total energy
use.14
Solarity is a social condition, not only an energy source. We
have grown used to worrying over the finitude of resources, and
how the angst of expiration can be misrecognized and uncon-
sidered. It can be tempting to celebrate solarity as categorically
distinct from the resources responsible for modernity’s uneven
and restricted distribution. But that discursive undercurrent
to solarity masks the violent structures into which any new
resource will get economized. Solarity has the ability to repro-
duce the extractive logics, ideologies of progress, and techno­
utopianism that fuel liberal capitalism as Imre Szeman and
Darin Barney show.15 An apparently insatiable human desire

14 See “Top 6 Things You Didn’t Know About Solar Energy,” Energy.gov, June
6, 2016, https://www.energy.gov/articles/top-6-things-you-didnt-know-
about-solar-energy.
15 Imre Szeman and Darin Barney, “Introduction: From Solar to Solarity,”
South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 1 (2021): 4.

24
 introduction

for power pairs well with solarity’s plenitude. While there is

enough power for all in the promise of solarity, it also true that
such abundance rarely gets distributed evenly. A more thought-
ful and just reckoning with solarity could change that.16 With
“intersectional ecologies,” asSarah E. Vaughn, Bridget Guarasci,
and Amelia Moore show,17environments, bodies, sites, tech-
nologies, and practices are all contingent social facts, predicated
upon their formations and their outcomes. Solarity is that sort
of unsettled entity and its unfolding powers should be under-
stood analytically, generously, and deliberately with an eye to
powers great and small.
Solarity can bring pain. It sometimes delivers death. Over-
exposure. Hyperthermia. Witnessing and then documenting
the effects of solarity upon migrants attempting to survive the
desert of the Mexico–US border, Jason De León writes about
this perilous crossing, of bodies and sun, of nation-states on the
edge of one another. In the endless desert, migrants must carry
water bottles to survive. Some have been told that they ought
to paint the plastic bottles black, like shade. This will keep the
water cool. But the opposite is true. Solar radiation seeps into the
dark more rapidly. US government programs have weaponized
the desert, pushing migrants into extreme environments. Solar-
ity is its artillery. Many deaths that occur there are never dis-
covered. Solarity thus becomes a form of necroviolence.18 Men
laboring in the sugar cane fields of Central America, as Alex
Nading finds,19 face a different kind of solar malaise. Working
long days under the scorch of a tropical sun, their kidneys have
begun to inexplicably fail. At first, it seemed that pesticides were
to blame. Now, the disease appears to gestate when the body has

16 See Vemuri and Barney, eds., Solarities.

17 Sarah E. Vaughn, Bridget Guarasci, and Amelia Moore, “Intersectional
Ecologies: Reimagining Anthropology and Environment,” Annual Review
of Anthropology 50 (2021): 275–90.
18 Jason De León, In the Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the
Migrant Trail (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 213.
19 Alex Nading, “Heat,” Society for Cultural Anthropology, April 6, 2016,
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/heat.

25
solarities

reached a “thermal tipping point.” These are solar pathologies,

the slow, thermal violence of peripheral labor, somatic mani-
festations of solarity’s mutative powers where laboring bodies
are made expendable.20 Melanoma. Malignancies. Solarity is a
kind of suffering. But its existence can also be attuned to more
benevolent encounters.
Heliocentrism was a revolution. The Copernican turn in the
mid-sixteenth century slowly shifted the planetary focus, from
earth-centrism to sun-centrism. A cosmological turn. But the
revolution was not really new. Already, people everywhere were
worshipping the sun. On every inhabited continent the list of
solar deities is long. For science, moving from geocentrism to
heliocentrism was a readjustment to the solar scheme, a new
ordering of arrangements. Spheres of influence were re-cast.
Heliocentrism allowed for the decentering of Earth as the axis
of cosmological truth. Amitav Ghosh asks whether such new
sensibilities of recognition, not unlike those we encounter now,
are coincidence. Or are they an indication that there are entities
in the world, or tethered to the world through astral attachment,
that are fully capable of inserting themselves into our processes
of thought? He wonders, if that is so, couldn’t it also be said that
the earth has itself intervened to revise many, if not all, habits of
thought? Are we not living in a moment when nonhuman forces
have the ability to intermediate directly into human thought,
human action, human being? We could wonder whether a new
heliocentrism might hold more decenterings still. On Earth, the
epoch of heliocentric awareness has not been fair or equal. Not
for humans and not for nonhumans either. In works of sci fi, like
those by Octavia Butler,21 we find trenchant critiques of colo-
nial fantasizing about extrasolar voyages. Zakiyyah Iman Jack-

20 If, as Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, “the mansion of modern freedoms

stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuels.” The wage slavery replen-
ishing that mansion is premised on an intensive exposure to unmediated
climate violence. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four
Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2008): 208.
21 See, for example, Octavia Butler, Dawn: Lilith’s Brood (New York: Aspect
Books, 1997).

26
 introduction

son reminds us that “the imperialist dimensions of terrestrial

and extrasolar narratives of exploration, discovery, conquest,
and settlement” have failed us, collectively, if unevenly.22 If we
were to refuse narratives of extrasolar conquest, might a neo-
heliocentrism draw us back to earth? There may be possibili-
ties and potentials within a neoheliocentrism that offers a more
considered revolution to re-schematize earthly powers and the
arrangement of the status quo. Within this neoheliocentrism,
sun remains foundational, the orbital apex, but its distributed
powers of vitality and thriving are more evenly diffused and dis-
persed, a source of plentitude that is cast wide.

Embodiments, Infrastructures, Materialities

Solar relations are always intimate relations between bodies,

always sensed across organs, and drawn to the elemental diffrac-
tion of solar light and energy. In our first set of essays, authors
speak directly to the modes and experiences by which solar rela-
tions get internalized in and as bodies — bodies both drawn to
scenes of solar energy and repelled, or punished by them. As
Oxana Timofeeva underscores in her work, solar elements exist
within humans themselves. “Without being identical to the
sun,” she notes, “a human eye bears resemblance to it. We can
look at this object and see it because in certain aspects we are
akin to it. The sun and the eye communicate as if they are look-
ing into each other through the layers of things encompassed by
light, and the one reflects the other.”23 At the scale of the body,
solar energy matriculates through skin and follicles, by way of
retinas drawn to illuminated sources of use and pleasure, and
through those entities that manage the miracle of converting
solar energy into botanical mass. An elemental politics alert to
the specific sensorial and biosemiotic scale of the body is one
that centralizes sub- and trans-individual embodied relations.

22 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an

Antiblack World (New York: NYU Press, 2020).
23 Oxana Timofeeva, Solar Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022), 6.

27
solarities

Our most direct and daily experience of the sun is an epider-

mal interface with the solar spectrum. In Mél Hogan’s “Skin,”
solar excess enters the scene as a warning that “the sun can kill
you.” Raising questions of knowledge by way of what solar radi-
ation unleashes at the cellular scale, Hogan asks after a notion of
solar’s force over non-identity. Can the skin read solar and can
it in turn be read as a form of environmental information since
a sun burn is felt before it is seen? Hogan narrates an experience
of “being jolted into a mediatic medical spectacle through which
solar radiation is diffracted into meaning.” In this encounter
with solarity and its outcomes, Hogan’s sense of self becomes
temporarily amplified by proleptic forces (in anticipation of its
becoming) and the analeptic (a restorative agent) of diagnosis.
But how does a body’s external interface read solar differ-
ently when we shift our attention to botanical mediation? In
an elemental reading of poetry by Isobel Armstrong and Rose-
mary Horn’s chlorophyll prints, Aster Hoving offers an analytic
inflected by the rhythms paced by chlorophyll in a variable rela-
tion to photosynthetic process. In Hoving’s interpretation, the
chemical aesthetics of chlorophyll invite a unique concept of
vision not reducible to the rational eye/I. This is because “see-
ing is not a discrete act, separated from what is seen. Instead,
vision is a tactile sensing of the interconnection of sunlight and
materials. Seeing, in other words, is solar.” But so too, Hoving
goes on, is breathing — the lion’s share of atmospheric oxygen
on earth is respiration carried by plant bodies in photosynthetic
conversation with solar energy. Embodied relation to the sun is
thus mediated across an elemental spectrum that far exceeds the
dominance of vision.
Botanical bodies read solar energy as chemo-synthetic rela-
tions with atmospheric gases, ultraviolet rays, and chloroplast
conversions with elements drawn from the soil. Agronomic sig-
natures of colonial and extractive mineralogy can also be read
into the bodies of plants and their productivity. In Jeff Diaman-
ti’s analysis of phosphorous — one of the two key elements com-
bined to create synthetic fertilizers — the question of how plants
become big business is also a question about where on earth

28
 introduction

solar surplus is dug-up. It becomes a question of how phos-

phorous comes into bodies, human and nonhuman, through
an agroindustrialized biosphere that grows bigger and denser,
reaching ever higher toward the sun. The lion’s share of interna-
tionally traded phosphorous for big agrobusiness comes from a
mine under military occupation by Morocco. Although phos-
phorous is ubiquitous — including in human DNA, bones, and
cells — the industrialization of plant life is premised on the con-
tinued displacement and military domination of the Sahrawi
people indigenous to this phosphorous-rich territory, a political
ecology that is literalized in and as bodies all over the world.
From the lithic origins of our planetary predicaments to the
mutualized entanglements that distribute solar energy into lived
and relational ecosystems, Ayesha Vemuri and Hannah Tollefson
turn to the sylvan ecologies breathing and storing the elements
animated by our planet’s solar orientation. They begin: “Res-
piration is a process of absorption and exchange that is always
shared. It names the means by which living beings assimilate
and expel carbon and oxygen through lungs, gills, stomata, or
cellular membranes. An elemental process engendered by solar-
ity, plants, animals, and other living beings’ respiration unfolds
in conjunction with photosynthesis.” This elemental process is
one that happens in and through plant and microbial networks
of mutual dependence, both in contiguous ecologies and places
made intimate by currents carrying air. Tracked at this scale,
Vemuri and Tollefson “think with respiration as a process that
constitutes forests simultaneously as sites of breath and life, as
places of commodification and precarity, and as ecologies that
hold lessons for mutual flourishing.”
Embodied relations of solarity often invite a discourse of
productivity and yield, a thermodynamic frame for ratifying
precisely the industrial logic into which energy as work became
an organizing principle of capitalist social management and
its horrors. In a counter-productivist reading of solar surplus
through George Bataille, Robin Kimmerer, and Oxana Timo-
feeva, Cara New Daggett draws out what might be described as
an energetics of generosity in excess of capitalist capture. From

29
solarities

the body to the subject of late petroculture, Daggett focuses on

the leitmotif of work and argues that solar energy belies the
twin poles of scarcity and entropy haunting the capitalist imagi-
nary. “The pursuit of solarity as a political theology can help
to reframe the abolition of fossil fuels in the West, not as the
relinquishment of the power of demi-gods, but as the pursuit of
a different kind of glory, and a different kind of pleasure. And
not in the name of sustainability or labor itself — as if the goal
of subsistence could ever provide enough aesthetic resources
to convene a mass desiring-machine — but to spend energetic
abundance better, more sumptuously, as gifts without return,
with a luxurious, ‘wild exuberance’ that sustains communal
wealth and beauty.”
In a playful inversion of the work-energy nexus long ago
politicized by George Caffentzis and the Midnight Notes Col-
lective, Gretchen Bakke asks us to consider our own alignment
with energic profiles, an effort to open the body’s facility with
energy flows more deliberately. How are the different parts of
a typical day aligned with specific energetic capacities and by
extension desires, drives, activities, and moods? Sending an
email or binging a Netflix series; drinking a morning coffee
over paper print or taking an Uber to the airport; digging in the
soil with a hoe and distributing feed over a plot of land for hus-
banded animals. “What fuels you,” Bakke asks, and what might
these experiences of fuel precipitate for an energy transition in
which efficiency metrics will become both more tyrannical and
more malleable? “Check your productivity level, are you learn-
ing to do less with more, taking the lesson of the solar panel and
putting about 22 percent of your potential energy to good use,
and then just hanging out and taking long naps on the lawn?”
Where Bakke rephrases the subjects of energy according to
efficiency, Jason De León details an embodied relation to the
thermal extremes of the Sonoran Desert separating northwest
Mexico from Arizona and California where nearly four thou-
sand migrants have been left to die since 1990 “from hyperther-
mia, dehydration, and the many other complications that result
from prolonged exposure to the sun.” What analytic style is

30
 introduction

required to shift the critical gaze from capital’s calculus of work

to the weaponizing of solar exposure where qualities of an arid
expanse of land is fashioned into an apparatus of punishment
and deterrence? “In the Sonoran Desert,” De León writes, “the
sun is the Border Patrol’s primary weapon.” De León introduces
a critical interpretive method through the technical possibilities
materialized by photography, where ISO, shutter speed, expo-
sure values, and aperture converge to prevent overexposure to
solar light. De León thus reads the bleached, dehydrated body
of the migrant left to die alongside the ethical question of how to
approach the forensic image where violence is an effect of solar
exposure and solar exposure is the condition of its evidence.
In our second section of the book, the conceptual and mate-
rial forms of infrastructure operate as an analytic and impro-
visational space. As Brian Larkin has so effectively phrased it,
infrastructures are “material forms that allow for the possibility
of exchange over space.”24 In the form of mediational entity, the
sun may have no parallel in its capacity to both animate and
decimate all that its radiative potential touches. Solarity oper-
ates as infrastructure as it enables, conveys and communicates
latent possibilities. Infrastructures, like solarities, need not
be instrumental. They are just as easily sensual metaphors or
ruinous systems. Infrastructures are made things but they are
equally what is made of them and in finding the solar points
of inflection across infrastructural encounters, we circle back to
the paradigmatic infrastructure of solarity itself.
As the city of Santiago, Chile lurches skyward and the built
environment rises ever higher, terrestrial life takes on new shad-
ows as well as new political forms. Embedded in the contradic-
tions of modern infrastructural aspirations, Cristián Simonetti
tracks the material form of concrete, the most abundant anthro-
pogenic rock on earth. Designed to be an impermeable platform
for the built human world, concrete also suffocates nutrients
and energies required by soils and plants. “Natural yet cultural,

24 Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review

of Anthropology 42 (2013): 328.

31
solarities

geological yet social,” writes Simonetti, “this synthetic rock sits

literally on the edge of both.” Concrete production, it turns out,
is “silently tied to the powers of our primary star.” The first para-
dox of solarity is that it fostered the creatures of the Cambrian
explosion that became the petrified exoskeletons to be burned
as limestone in the creation of concrete. The second paradox of
solarity, Simonetti notes, is that it is in concrete that much of the
world’s population now shelters itself from a warming atmos-
phere, seeking shade from a hotter and hotter world.
In “Affective Energies,” Myles Lennon asks us to reflect on
the politically poignant question of how we dream about the
sun, and he invites us to engage with the affective qualities of
solar infrastructures. When we are able to move beyond a crude
technophilic distillation of energy into megawatts and giga-
joules, Lennon argues, we can also begin to shift away from a
historically violent naturalism that splits humans from the envi-
ronment and confront the limits of our technologies. Solarity
is an emotive and evocative cipher for activists and others who
multiply view the allure and risks of “shine.” The affective energy
of the sun conditions a particular erasure of the human. And,
as Lennon writes, “solarity conspires with silicon machines in a
moment of climate catastrophe to inspire an ethos of nonhuman
nature.” Although solar infrastructures may appear to spring
organically from the ground, they are in fact, cultivated through
extractive economies tied to silicon and tetrachloride, abusive
labor conditions, and racial capitalism.
Ian Alexander and Nicole Starosielski take up questions of
justice and carceral violence in their incisive examination of how
sunlight becomes weaponized. They find that sunlight, itself, is
not a resource equally accessible to all, but is instead mediated by
architectural, technological, and discursive infrastructures that
are acutely apparent, and often brutal, in the US prison system.
They write that “by paying attention to solar media, it is clear
that solarity is not simply an orientation to the sun-power that
scaffolds biological and social growth — it also extends through
numerous forms of social violence.” In the denial of sunlight to
prisoners in solitary confinement for example, “asolarity” mate-

32
 introduction

rializes as a method to enact harm. Here, the sun becomes a tool

of carceral violence. Asolarity is not the inversion of solarity,
but the perversion of it — bending sunlight into a cudgel for the
operations of the prison industrial complex.
With a critical attention to solar media that parallels Alex-
ander and Starosielski, Aylin Kuryel offers her interpretation of
the film Nothing but the Sun, a collaborative effort between the
filmmaker and Ayoreo people. In this work Kuryel finds expo-
sure doubled. Film is exposed to light to create images and peo-
ples are exposed to colonial logics through the objectification
of media infrastructures. As she writes, “exposure emerges as
a caustic condition on multiple levels; the exposure of the film
to the light produces the image, which then exposes people to
the colonizers by turning them into objects of knowledge, ena-
bling locating and targeting.” The sun itself, once a source of
worship and vitality among Ayoreo populations, also doubles
as a deadly force, parching the land now that trees, and their
unique arboreal architecture, have been felled to make way for
animal agriculture. Solarity, for Kuryel, can too easily operate as
a colonial weapon as its effects take hold over time and across
representational forms.
For Rhys Williams, solarity performs particular ontologi-
cal and political aesthetics. It is an “interrupting surface” that
plays upon a poetics of light and transparency. As solar energy
infrastructures bloom across landscapes and horizons an imagi-
nary begins to collectively form, one that pictures solar futures
as without depth, impact or footprint. And yet, these sorts of
aesthetic principles that have come to dominate popular, corpo-
rate, and activist representations of solar technologies also have
the capacity to erase the deeper historical contingencies of land,
power, and light. In critically analyzing a popular television
serial, Williams locates the narrativized qualities of solar dream-
ing in satirical form. A key trope of the series that he explores
is how “solar interrupts a particular relationship to history and
land and establishes a new arrangement, where our attention is
instead drawn to the future, and upwards, to the sun.”

33
solarities

In “Living Too Close to the Sun,” Daniel Barber turns to the

supertall residential towers of Manhattan, which appear as pin-
nacles of luxury and exclusivity, both of which are “expressed in
height, proximity to the sun.” But these sorts of towers are also,
he shows, a form of architectural excess. Infrastructural giants
on the horizon, these vertiginous residential infrastructures
boast of sun-soaked perches high above the chaos imagined to
be below. But their solar abstraction is largely superficial given
their need for carbon fueled resources, from concrete to climate-
controlled interiors. As they seem to reach toward solarity, they
are equally enmired in petromodern impulses that tie them to
the extractive present despite their orientations toward futurity.
“Luxury and exclusivity here,” writes Barber, “at least in a sche-
matic, diagrammatic fashion, [capture] a more general condi-
tion: architectural concepts of value and innovation are caught
up in the priorities of capital, making them difficult to align with
the capacity for solar liberation.”
At the Apex Landfill just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada we
encounter the world’s largest dump: 50 million tons of gar-
bage (and counting), festering in what Bob Johnson calls the
“fat heat” of the southwestern desert. “A rotted head of lettuce.
Flies and larva. An old leather couch. Cowskin withered in the
desert sun. Razors, rubber duckies, nickel-cadmium batteries,
toenail clippings, old receipts, scraps of bone, a toothbrush. This
admixture of humanity’s health and decrepitude, its aspirations
and miseries, its kindnesses and crimes,” is, Johnson writes,
“tossed together without distinction.” As a tool of liberalism, he
finds, the landfill works to conceal the detritus of fossil capital as
it shuttles material entropy from sight. In the glaring solarity of
its location, however, the Apex is also exposed as an infrastruc-
tural home for misfits, anomalies and marginal things. Solarity
reveals the rotted objects that were once objects of desire and in
so doing unearths fractured traces of a system based on com-
modities and capital.
In an excerpt from his serialized graphic novel, The Solar
Grid, the artist Ganzeer draws a sickly Earth and two Cairo
orphans who have grand plans to change everything. It is 949

34
 introduction

years after a global flood of scriptural magnitude and the world

now relies on a vast grid of off-planet solar panels to power its
entire industrial infrastructure. Night-time is no more, and
all the world’s clean water is contained in a network of towers
called Skyquench, built by the richest man on earth. In this sci-fi
dystopia, the sun that shines is not a stellar body but an infra-
structural one that inflicts shadowy inequalities. But for Gan-
zeer, as for his orphaned protagonists, there is still hope in the
light beyond the grid.
Our last set of interventions are organized around spe-
cific substances and objects that materialize solar relations in
explicit ways. Materialities surface here in other-than-human
beings and through the things that solarity creates or sustains.
In vital forms, solarities emerge through the bones and bodies
of sea creatures crafting shadows and light for possible futures
on a hotter planet. In non-living forms, solarities appear as the
built world, morphing and burning under the logics of settler
colonial logics. Solarities surface relations of labor, capital, and
power and solarities materialize relations, of both organic thriv-
ing and inorganic endurance, convening in new imaginaries.
In “The Ray and The Flame, or, What it Takes for the Sun
to Shine,” Tim Ingold questions the explanatory power of
physics and psychology, making a case — in a solar turn — for
their fusion. He writes that only by repudiating the bifurcation
between the two worlds of matter and energy, and “of mind and
meaning” can we know the light that shines as sun, which is
itself both ray and flame. Like the sky itself, the light that shines
as sun is not only physical or perceptual, but instead belongs, as
Ingold puts it “to the phenomenal or atmospheric order of real-
ity.” The radiative power of the sun is real and acute, but likewise
is it a “luminous experience” and therefore an encounter with
light as both a form of geometric ordering and vital energy. Uti-
lizing both European and Incan examples of solar imagery over
time, Ingold asks how the sun’s rays are as socially emotive as
they are physically palpable. By attending to these patterns and
divergences between the ray and the flame we come closer to

35
solarities

recognizing that solarity “is an order constituted by the fusion

of the cosmic sphere with the sphere of affect.”
Amanda Boetzkes extends Ingold’s hypothesis when she
writes, “Solarity thus poses the question of how to interpret
material histories.” In her essay about environmental archeol-
ogy in the Arctic, she shows how settler interpretations of solar-
ity are reflected in scientific dating technologies that subject
Indigenous cultural objects to linear evolutionary teleologies.
But rather than succumbing to the positivist logics embedded
in these narratives, Boetzkes describes how Inuit people experi-
ence solar radiation in an elementally expressive way through
the sculptural use of sun-bleached whale bones. Instead of
relying on the archeological interpretation of light and bones,
those who make a life in the present with the bones of the past
form geocultural connections, mythologies, and relationships
with these objects the sun has consumed over centuries, and
with tupilaq — bone figures that take on power and force when
conjured in the shadows. The complex and entangled material
connections between waves of ancient peoples in the Arctic, the
contemporary Inuit, whalebones, and tupilaq are invisible under
the “controlled illumination” of settler archeology. Is there an
alternative relationship between solarity and material culture
that can bring about a more heterogeneous form of Indigenous
renaissance?
For Kim Förster, the liberatory potential of solarity runs the
risk of being eclipsed by the kiln, the crucible that materializes
cement as the bonding agent of modern industrial development.
Solarity, then, should direct our attention to building materials
as a substantive part of the fantasy of industrial capitalism that
“cheapens nature” and contributes to the “slow violence of the
climate crisis.” As the sun’s evil twin, the kiln has extended fossil
fuel-based regimes around the world, becoming a site for the
generation of lethally vibrant matter in the twentieth century.
There is no “sustainable cement” argues Förster, and thus no
solar salvation for this industry. Relational solar thinkers must
instead advocate for dismantling the building industry and its
culture of building. He writes, “The kiln carries an infinitely

36
 introduction

tragic futurity, whose planetary consequences one cannot con-

ceive: the combustion of thousands of tiny suns, given the num-
ber and rising production volume of cement plants worldwide,”
and he concludes, “We have to align with the sun and learn to
question the kiln.”
In Dominic Boyer’s spare, one-act play “Twilight” we encoun-
ter three characters prognosticating on the vague future they
think they may see in the distance. But they are not sure. They
bicker. They delay. They come up with solutions. They remain
confused and yet somehow certain in their reckoning with the
catastrophe budding around them. Racing to put out a fire, they
eventually build a structure, rocky and unsure, but one that nev-
ertheless moves them still closer to the “crepuscular spectacu-
lar.” One blithely states to another: “How brilliant. How decisive.
We’ve been doing nothing but waiting and watching for I don’t
know how long.” A measured response comes in return: “We
wait and see if it’s real this time. There have been so many false
dawns and fake dusks. I’m not getting worked up about another
one.” Their theatrics ensue but their pointed searching remains
earnest. In the end, what they see is left to us, as audience, to
decide as the materiality of potential futures fades and brightens
on an enigmatic horizon.
Taking up the question of building materials and materiali-
zations, Caroline Levander introduces us to the world of Earth
Ship construction and a present-day reality in which discarded
tires have become their own form of natural resource. Made
from “carbon black” and other fossil fuels, tires are transformed
from refuse into a strange sort of harvest “grown” from the
earth’s materials to make durable building components. Advo-
cates of the Earth Ship ethos live within the material relations of
“domestic solarity,” wherein they hope to reverse global warm-
ing through household level building, design, and repurposed
materials. A renegade architect, Earth Ship craftsman and
“biotecture” evangelist sees tires not as trash but as more akin
to trees, a building material grown from solarity through the
sooty material of carbon black and then activated as thermal
mass. “Tires grow here,” he explains. “They are indigenous to

37
solarities

the entire planet. I can always find tires. There is no place I can
go where I don’t find tires.”
The dream of a greener economy is also materialized by har-
vests of seaweed in the Gulf of Maine. Sarah Besky describes
the rise of rockweed, a seaweed species that has been commodi-
fied in order to anchor a settler coastal economy now threatened
by rising sea temperatures and the migration of lobster from
regional waters. She argues that “changing coastal economies
reframe the sun and the objects of its light into new forms of
value and property,” showing how local populations’ relations
with seaweed have led to new settler laws that reframe coastal
property rights so seaside homeowners can own “their” rock-
weed and the profits that stem from it. These profits were once
generated from an intertidal commons, meaning that new leg-
islation effectively extends private property regimes into the
ocean. Besky contrasts events in Maine with seaweed economies
in Southeast Asia where similarly warming oceans make aqua-
culture more precarious for the women who have become the
primary laborers in that industry. Solarity, materialized in sea-
weed, is thus amplifying settler colonial logics and economies
in one part of the world while exacerbating the disparities of
gendered developmentalist economies in another.
Of course, rising ocean temperatures affect blue-green econ-
omies and material relations in more places than New England
and Southeast Asia. In our final essay, Amelia Moore takes us
to the islands of The Bahamas where the sun has long been a
physical and affective resource for the (neo)colonial sun-sand-
sea tourism industry. She shows us how the sun has been com-
modified in beach vacations, the fantasy of solar powered sus-
tainable tourism ventures, and most recently in the growing
industry of for-profit coral restoration. Moore hopes that both
solarity and coral will be rescued from the supremacist trap of
colonial or corporate world making ventures. When the mate-
rial relationality of solarity is complimented and extended by
the liberatory relational thinking of Black feminist artists, scien-
tists, and intellectuals, then Bahamian biogeophysical realities
become legible as a kind of Black Atlantis, “an imperfect process

38
 introduction

by which marine restoration, in this case via coral reefs, anchors

emergent and resistant materialities of knowing and being in
the Caribbean.” Perhaps we can also see glimmers of a radical
neoheliocentrism in these emergent material worlds.

39
solarities

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 1

Skin

Mél Hogan

The surgeon carved out a hunk of flesh. Forever after the scar
will be the scalpel line, with wisps of pink and white where
sutures made knots, barriers against infections. Plucking
out the stitches, the doctor inquired about childhood sun-
burns — apparently even one bad burn as a kid could explain
this. Doctor said they’d caught it in time. How lucky. Use sun-
screen, he said, the sun can kill you.
What happens next is the parsing of the skin. Reading solarity.
The sun as hostile information. Or the skin as hostile informant.
Being jolted into a mediatic medical spectacle through which
solar radiation is diffracted into meaning, he says, “let me know
if anything changes,” as though I’m qualified to read my own
body in this way. Am I qualified? My sense of self becomes tem-
porarily amplified by both the proleptic (in anticipation of its
becoming) and analeptic (a restorative agent) diagnosis. I was
the one to spot the tiny mole near my ankle after all. For months
I’d tell myself to get it checked.
But I don’t feel like I’m dying. Am I dying? I call a friend and
ask her this. “Am I dying?” She says she doesn’t know. The physi-
cian’s assistant tells me it’s urgent that I come in the office for a
full body scan. I’m not sure I feel the sense of urgency.

43
solarities

What happens next is the reading of the skin, as a surface,

the search for the oddly shaped, too dark, uneven. My skin is
the medical screen, read across for signs of life, illness, death.
The doctor reads my skin quickly, diagonally, like he’s done this
a hundred times before, a hundred different skins. He’s looking
through my hair. Between my toes. Just like every doctor that
would examine me after, this one tells me about Bob Marley,
how he could have had his toe amputated to save his life. But
the doctor says that, really, pale white skin with many different
kinds of moles is the most dangerous skin.
A year later the dermatologist asks me why I’m there. “A
yearly checkup,” I say, “don’t I have a file?” The process is of
being reminded. I don’t know why I’m there. Two years, a few
more scars, but none necessary, all superficial, all cautionary.
No phone call. Three years, and he says, “you don’t have it,” and
I nod along and put my clothes back on. But I don’t know what
this means. What’s the it? Where is it? Am I it?
Delighting in his own knowledge, the doctor stops me as I
get ready to leave and lets me know that “it’s genetic.” That I
should urge my brother to get himself checked. I tell my mother
that the doctor said it was “genetic” and she says that that’s ridic-
ulous. Nobody has had this in the family. What happens next in
the reorientation to family, to generations, to what’s inherited,
to mutation, to decisions I’ve made about sun exposure, to deci-
sions my parents made for me when I was a kid.
This one is on (in) me, a somatic mutation that spontane-
ously arose in a cell in my body. A different mutation might
have simply contributed to genetic diversity, theoretically a
healthy thing for the species. But a rogue mole is just a defect, a
glitch in the code.

***

In reading my skin, and the experience of mediated skin as

a form of social text, I consider all the ways in which its data
is more valuable than this simple reflection offers. Skin has

44
 skin

become part of the genomic industrial complex. For 24 USD you

can purchase a DNA collection kit for DNA Gene Skin (Skinet-
ics) informing you that “DNA is the key to learning what works
for your skin.”1 Ever since the idea of the gene came to be, it’s
been in its perpetually unfulfilled promise to be the key to just
about everything that it delivers anxiety-based products and
services with so much purchase. With HomeDNA™ Skin Care,
for example, you get a “science-based DNA test that identifies
your skin’s genetic potential in seven key areas” — with this one,
for a mere 134 USD, you can get your “skin decoded” to better
understand your “collagen quality, skin elasticity, fine lines and
wrinkles, sun protection, pigmentation, skin antioxidants, and
sensitivity.”2 For these companies, skin DNA tests are for “ail-
ments,” such as sunspots and wrinkles and cellulite — things
that are skin deep and can be “fixed” with cover up, moisturizer,
or various beauty products. Some of these creams offer DNA
repair, which proposes a new depth to skin.
And if we read deeper?
Do I cease to be myself as my genetic makeup is modified by
radiation or is somehow altered? After the doctor excises part
of my leg, does my genomic profile reflect this? Gene expres-
sion can change in one’s lifetime, known as “epigenetic drift,”
and interpretations of one’s genome are subject to what’s been
sequenced and mapped by the industry, made at that time, in
those contexts, and usually to for-profit ends. Genes also change
with gene science. And with the growth in popularity of direct-
to-consumer genetic testing, the dogma of the gene, as causal
or deterministic, has made it difficult to think outside of those
logics and parameters, and to embody more than a sequence
of ATCGs, the building blocks that make up the DNA molecule.
I think back to the White House’s 2003 announcement of
the first map of the human genome, when I was 26 years old.
President Clinton equated the human genome with a code for

1 “DNA Gene Skin (Skinetics),” Lumminary, n.d., https://lumminary.com/

dna-gene-skin-skinetics.
2 Ibid.

45
solarities

life: “Today we are learning the language in which God created

life,” he stated plainly and proudly.3 He also paraphrased Gali-
leo, who insisted that the universe itself was written in the lan-
guage of mathematics in order to make the same point about
our genomes, that they’re just letters, numbers, codes. The event
was a religious celebration, a confirmation that God exists and
that science is merely at the service of decoding the meaning of
life. The scientific religiosity that was the basis for the launch
of the Human Genome Project has deep roots, and two dec-
ades later these remain within the philosophy of Evolutionary
Creation (EC) held by many prominent US-based scientists. On
a website featuring Evolutionary Creationist thought, it explains
that EC includes two basic ideas: “First, that God created all
things, including human beings in his own image. Second, that
evolution is the best scientific explanation we currently have for
the diversity and similarities of all life on Earth.”4 While science
and religion have often been viewed as necessary adversaries,
genomics is so complex and magnificent that it brings us back
to cosmogony and cosmology.
Genomics begs for a universal theory — a settling of the crea-
tion myths and origin stories about life — something that will
explain everything about ourselves and render it tangible, edit-
able, and controllable.
With a new code for life, we can determine good and evil, the
worthiness of some over others, as conscripted by God. Biopoli-
tics. Historically, we’ve done this many times before, of course,
but now we have the potential to index and compare every liv-
ing being. Faith, literally, in the genome also renders concrete
thinking of the body — and maybe life or death itself — in data-
fied and newly commodifiable ways. Biocapitalism. Only 1–2
percent of our genome encodes the necessary information to
make a protein, to then perform some function within our cells,

3 National Human Genome Research Institute, “Draft of the Human

Genome Sequence Announcement (2000),” YouTube, August 29, 2012,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slRyGLmt3qc.
4 “What Is Evolutionary Creation?,” BioLogos, November 4, 2022, https://
biologos.org/common-questions/what-is-evolutionary-creation.

46
 skin

and the remaining 98–99 percent is “non-coding DNA.” Scien-

tists don’t know exactly what makes a gene express itself given
that all the cells in our body have the same DNA but do different
things — become nail, neuron or skin. And even though only 1
percent of the human genome unites and distinguishes us from
one another, as human individuals, the genomics industrial
complex would have us believe that our genetic differences hold
great power, great importance, shifting attention away from the
impacts of social conditions and the environment. It’s easier
to control humans from the inside than from the outside. Bio-
power.
It makes it hard to think about life, my body, death, illness,
healing, the cause, the cure, the sun, and my skin in ways that
aren’t flanked by either the science or the religion of genes. My
relationship to the sun is forced into a molecular one, encoded
by God and decoded by scientists.
What happens next is a resurfacing. A reskinning. One might
think that a kind of self-scanning obsession develops, or that
one becomes scared of their skinsuit, or that the sun becomes
an enemy, but these things didn’t happen for me. Without the
sun, we’d freeze and be left in the dark, we’d be in free fall in
space, with nothing for the planet to orbit around, and we’d get
low on serotonin, vitamin D, and our blood pressure, bones,
and brains would quickly become defective. The skin incases
and mediates this reality and makes a vital connection between
outer space and inner space. Life is the sun in skin.

47
solarities

References

“DNA Gene Skin (Skinetics).” Lumminary. n.d. https://

lumminary.com/dna-gene-skin-skinetics.
National Human Genome Research Institute. “Draft of the
Human Genome Sequence Announcement (2000).”
YouTube, August 29, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=slRyGLmt3qc.
“What Is Evolutionary Creation?” BioLogos, November 4,
2022. https://biologos.org/common-questions/what-is-
evolutionary-creation.

48
 2

Chlorophyll

Aster Hoving

Chlorophyll, as the green of leaves, attunes us to photosynthesis

and the seasonal growth cycles of plants. The pigment is pro-
duced in the chloroplasts of plants to transform the energy of
light into to chemical energy, or sugar. In this sense of turning
sunlight into energy, chlorophyll is similar to the photovoltaic
panels of solar energy infrastructures. But whereas solar power
companies see the fluctuations of the sun as a problem to over-
come, working to gain permanent access to its rays to generate
a stable and profitable energy supply, chlorophyll makes visible
embodied relations to the sun that stay embedded in seasonal
changes.
Chlorophyll allows plants to store sunlight in leaves to use
as energy when needed. As such, chlorophyll mediates the sun,
transforming its energies and redirecting parts of the color
spectrum of its waves. We encounter this mediation as the color
green because chlorophyll recasts the blue and red wavelengths
of light. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues, colors designate envi-
ronmental actants with material effects.1 Green, in this case, sig-

1 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Introduction: Ecology’s Rainbow,” in Prismatic

Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis:

49
solarities

nals chlorophyll as an actor that materializes the light of the sun.

As the pigment makes solar energy available to plants, it also
makes it available to those who consume the mediated afterlives
of the sun in the form of leaves, roots, flowers, and fruits. The
green appearance of chlorophyll is relational.
Moreover, chlorophyll is sensed by an embodied observer.
Solarity illuminates the colors of leaves since they emerge as
materials absorb and reflect light differently. These materials
include our eyes: that colors are even available to our senso-
rium is because our eyes and chlorophyll both respond to a
small part of the electromagnetic spectrum called visible light.
This means that the sunlight required for photosynthesis also
sustains vision. Theorized as such, seeing is not a discrete act,
separated from what is seen. Instead, vision is a tactile sens-
ing of the interconnection of sunlight and materials. Seeing, in
other words, is solar.
In the northern hemispheric spring of 2016, I took a picture
of an ivy branch that brings together, all at once, the multiple
colors that leaves can take over time (fig. 1). On one end of the
branch the leaves are a light green, while further down they
change to yellow, orange, and deep red. I am not sure whether
this is a kind of ivy that changes its color and sheds its leaves
seasonally. California, where I took the picture, knows a variety
of species commonly referred to as ivy and they occur both as
deciduous and as evergreens. Perhaps its bare branches and var-
ious hues are due to other elemental entanglements such as the
dry conditions in which summer deciduous plants shed their
leaves. But this branch also brings into focus how, in particular
deciduous trees and plants, solarity materializes seasonally. The
combined shades of this ivy as such make thinking about fluc-
tuating solar relations possible. If chlorophyll sensitizes us to
seasonal growth, the different colors and the shedding of leaves
attune us to seasonal discharge. I want to suggest that, taken
together, these solar mediations complicate desires for continu-
ous green growth fueled by permanent access to the sun.

University of Minnesota Press, 2013), xiii.

50
 chlorophyll

Fig. 1. Ivy branch. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Specifically, an analysis through and with chlorophyll brings

into focus that notions of perpetual growth assume an econ-
omy detached from space and time and thereby also from solar
fluctuations. Perceptive definitions of fossil fuels as solar cycles
accumulated over long stretches of time have shown that these
materials, as fuel, provide a sense of continuous availability of
the sun.2 Andreas Malm thus refers to fossil fuels as the “stock,”
which to him stands outside space and time as finite reserve, as
opposed to what he theorizes as the endless spatial and tempo-
ral “flow” of green energy.3 These are provoking concepts that
explain capitalism’s historical reliance on fossil fuels, but they
also inhibit analyses of the imaginaries of green capitalism. A
more nuanced understanding of green and fossil fuels starts
with acknowledging that fossil fuels are not external to space

2 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

(London: Verso, 2013), 12, and Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of
Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016),
41–42.
3 Malm, Fossil Capital, 38–42.

51
solarities

and time: they are simply (re)generated on timescales foreign

to human experience. Furthermore, green energy does not flow
permanently. Stating that the flow “hangs like a fruit for anyone
to pick” obscures that fruits grow seasonally and are, therefore,
neither continuously nor effortlessly available for picking.4
Chlorophyll complicates the apparent separation between
the stock and the flow, and the separation between the social
and the ecological it enables, as the pigment is a stock of avail-
able energy that seasonally turns back into other temporalities.
Isobel Armstrong’s poem “Defining Deaths” aptly envisions this
process in deciduous trees as a “weightless” release of energy,
referred to as the “trees’ past,” built up over the course of a year:

the trees’ past is alight

incandescing in cell and fibre

blazing veins and capillaries

squander aura

the year’s store of sun

leaves weightless

time falls radiant

light’s afterlife flares from the ground5

Before returning to the significance of this “leaves weightless,” I

want to draw attention to the descriptions of passed time stored
in leaves as “alight,” “blazing” and “radiant” as it “flares from the

4 Ibid., 372.
5 Isobel Armstrong, “Defining Deaths,” in Infinite Difference: Other Poetries
by UK Women Poets, ed. Carrie Etter (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2010), 18.

52
 chlorophyll

ground.”6 These images speak to the moment when the earth

moves away from the sun and the days become shorter, meteor-
ologically beginning in March for the southern hemisphere and
in September north of the equator. The amount of chlorophyll
in a leaf then decreases because sunlight is required for its pro-
duction. When the chlorophyll in a leaf breaks down, other pig-
ments change it into the radiant colors described in the poem.
Xanthophyll and carotene, yellow and orange pigments, have
been present in the leaf all along but were masked by a domi-
nant amount of chlorophyll. In some species, anthocyanin, a
red pigment, is produced in response to lower temperatures and
fewer daylight hours.
Hues of yellow, orange, and red, as the afterlives of sunlight,
seem to remind the poem’s speaker of the blazing sun that pro-
vided the energy for the leaves to grow, but this fire of colors
also signals the discharge of this year’s work of photosynthesis.
Armstrong’s phrase “leaves weightless” helps us do the work
of thinking energetic stocks and flows as relational rather than
oppositional by distinguishing a different kind of accumula-
tion.7 If accumulation, as a concept, straddles both capital accu-
mulation and the accumulation of chlorophyll in leaves, then
the aesthetic economy of deciduous plants is integral but also
troubling to economies of perpetual growth precisely because
of its seasonal pattern of growth and discharge.
By designating the changing colors and shedding of leaves
as weightless, Armstrong offers a vision of a gathering of time
and energy that far from serving capital accumulation, or even
being harvested, departs weightless as falling leaves. Capital
works to prohibit chlorophyll and leaves falling weightlessly
since all excess must be rendered productive, given weight, and
serve accumulation. We see this in the energy infrastructures
extracting solar surplus in the shape of fossil fuels as well as in
the greenhouses of industrial agriculture, which seek to detach

6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.

53
solarities

plants from the seasons and days to scale up fruit and vegetable
production to a perpetual bountiful harvest.
Instead, Armstrong’s falling leaves “squander.”8 They are
accumulations of energy that bypass attempts to make capital of
such effort. In this sense, my analysis speaks to George Bataille’s
theorization of a general economy in which the expenditure of
energy and wealth, rather than continuously hoarding them, is
the primary objective.9 Bataille argues that a general economy
functions like an organism, since these too must lose the energy
they cannot use to grow without profit.10 The leaves in the poem
indeed change color and fall not to serve another round of capi-
tal accumulation but as part of a rhythm of growth and rest. As
such, they return energetic stocks back into other flows. What
distinguishes solarity from economies of perpetual growth, in
the case of chlorophyll in leaves of deciduous plants, is a sea-
sonal rhythm of both accumulation as well as release.
Like Malm’s fossil capitalism, green capitalism too seeks to
free itself from ecological rhythms. Whereas fossil fuels ini-
tially powered seemingly permanent and endless growth, green
energy is supposed to keep fueling such an economy. Thin
solar panel films in the shape of leaves, developed by Solliance
Solar Research and recently picked up by design firm Studio
Roosegaarde, illustrate the persistent naturalized image of solar
energy as incompatible with extractive economies (fig. 2).11 Solar
panels shaped like leaves buttress the idea that renewables are
“a practically immediate result of solar radiation, existing prior
to or apart from human labor, incorporated in the landscape,

8 Ibid.
9 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. I:
Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 9.
10 Ibid., 21.
11 @SRoosegaarde, “This is a solar panel! Prototyping at Studio Roosegaarde
#sun #energy #innovation,” Twitter, August 21, 2020, https://twitter.com/
SRoosegaarde/status/1296829039408222208. For the Solliance Solar
Research version of the solar panel see @SollianceSolar, “(zeker 5 jaar
oude) zonnecellen van @SollianceSolar #opv. Misschien liepen we wat ver
voor de troepen uit. pic.twitter.com/UENaRHdnb7,” Twitter, August 31,
2020, https://twitter.com/SollianceSolar/status/1300433715831681024.

54
 chlorophyll

Fig. 2. Leaf-shaped solar panel. Photograph courtesy of Studio Roose-

gaarde.

captive of the cycles of the weather and seasons, undiminished

at its source by consumption,” or, more concisely, antithetical to
capitalist appropriation.12 But when we consider infrastructural
imaginaries such as GENESIS, a belt of solar panels around the
equator, or a solar farm orbiting the earth conceived by NASA,we
recognize continued attempts to free the sun’s energy from plan-
etary temporalities.13
These imagined infrastructures aim to perpetually position
silicon, the chemical element most used in photovoltaic sys-
tems, in the light of the sun to continuously extract the electric
current generated in this exposure. To traverse the rhythm of
the seasons and day and night to obtain permanent access to the
sun, these projects imagine ways to detach solar mediation from

12 Malm, Fossil Capital, 41–42.

13 For further description and critique of these two infrastructures, consider
Hermann Scheer, The Solar Economy: Renewable Energy for a Sustainable
Global Future (London: Earthscan, 2009), 83–84.

55
solarities

the boundedness of a specific place or to escape the surface of

the earth all together.
Thinking with chlorophyll counters such imaginaries of
decoupling solar energy from spin and space by attending to
temporalities specific to place. Chlorophyll, in other words,
situates solar energy temporally and materially. As the earth
turns around the sun and around its own axis, the aesthetics
of solar mediation in leaves follow the relative position of the
earth to the sun. Another instance where we see these situated
mediations in art is Rosemary Horn’s chlorophyll prints. As I
will explain, the aesthetics of Horn’s prints work by formalizing
planetary solar temporalities.14
Horn’s chlorophyll prints use the light sensitivity of leaves
as their photographic medium. A chlorophyll print is made by
placing a positive film, or another high contrast image printed
on transparent paper, over a leaf and then exposing those two to
the sun. A positive film is one in which the areas most exposed
to light are the lightest areas of the transparent print. This pro-
cess, such as in the leaves of “3 Textures, Weeds, Introduced Spe-
cies,” paradoxically causes the leaf to retain its green color in the
darker areas of the image while the areas exposed to the sun are
bleached (fig. 3). In a sense, the printing process reverses the
aesthetic logic of chlorophyll accumulation as I have described
thus far, which is likely related to the fact that the leaves Horn
works with are picked. A picked leaf is no longer part of a liv-

14 In the lecture “One Sun, One Leaf, One Afternoon,” Horn explains that her
practice is inspired by a range of photographers that explore the aesthet-
ics of ecological processes by using them as medium, such as Heather
Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, Lloyd Godman, Susan Derges, and Binh Danh.
Danh also makes chlorophyll prints, but I am working with Horn here
because of her explicit interest in the technique as a sustainable medium.
“One Sun, One Leaf, One Afternoon. Lecture at the Plymouth College
of Arts, 15 October 2009,” Rosemary Horn, n.d., http://photogirl.co.nz/
wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Rosemary-Horn-Plymouth-College-Lecture-
Oct09s.pdf.

56
 chlorophyll

Fig. 3. Rosemary Horn, “3 Textures, Weeds, Introduced Species.”

Photograph courtesy of Rosemary Horn.

ing plant that perpetually generates chlorophyll to use as solar

energy.15
Nevertheless, Horn’s prints are embedded in planetary rota-
tion around the sun and composed by diminishing chlorophyll
as aesthetic agent. I propose to think about this as elemental
aesthetics, which materialize out of a sense of ecological vul-
nerability or precariousness and as such their formal qualities
do not master but instead adhere to ecological affordances and
constraints. If green capitalism’s fantasies of solar limitlessness
are tied to a notion of mediation independent from material and
temporal forces, then elemental aesthetics are inextricable from
the ecologies they mediate.
Horn’s works especially foster thinking through capital and
chlorophyll accumulation because they yield other conceptions
of rhythms of growth and fall. The elemental aesthetics of the
prints appear as intersection between a range of more and less
chlorophyll in different parts of a leaf. Chlorophyll decreases in
the uncovered areas while the amount of chlorophyll remains
stable in the areas where the leaf is shaded by the dark parts
of the image. Horn’s works encompass both an abundant pres-
ence of the sun in summer, peculiarly not the form of green bio-

15 A major thanks to Rosie Horn for pointing this out when she generously
read and commented on a draft version of this essay.

57
solarities

mass but as bleached areas, and the scarcer availability of the

sun during the winter months, also in reverse as bright green
areas rather than in the form of biomass transitioning to differ-
ent colors. In other words, chlorophyll prints emerge as aesthet-
ics of relation between storage and waste, or energetic stocks
and flows. This relationality contradicts the separation required
for extraction and helps us redirect attention away from distin-
guishing between fossil and green fuels and towards politicizing
both.
The elemental aesthetics of chlorophyll printing furthermore
push definitions of capitalist economies as, inspired by Bataille,
either the “fundamental prohibition of expenditure,” or the
“permanent expenditure” that defines Jonathan Crary’s theori-
zation of 24/7 capitalism.16 The problem, Horn’s work suggests,
is perhaps not either continuous wastefulness or the prohibition
of waste, but the notion of permanence. The permanence and
endlessness of growth economies require the bifurcation and
isolation of the growing and falling of leaves as well as the sepa-
ration of energy production from its use. Materially and concep-
tually isolating energy, growth, and decline as such underwrites
a sense of social independence from fluctuating ecologies.
Horn’s chlorophyll prints, however, are inextricable from
the rhythmic oscillations of the sun and chlorophyll. That is,
the seemingly seasonally stable green color of leaves relies on
a plant being alive to keep the production and use of chloro-
phyll as energy in perpetual motion, which in Horn’s chloro-
phyll prints means that the green of a leaf once it is picked is no
longer used nor regenerated and its aesthetic logic is reversed.
The processual rather than permanent nature of chlorophyll as a
solar energy form is thus equally a challenge for the permanence
of Horn’s work, a challenge I faced myself when framing three
distinctly red, yellow, and green leaves: all of them have turned

16 Amanda Boetzkes, “Solar,” in Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and
Environment, eds. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 315, and Jonathan Crary,
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2014), 10.

58
 chlorophyll

brown by now. As such, the prints question notions of sustain-

ability based solely on the renewability or carbon emissions of
different fuels. Horn’s work helps us to think of sustainability,
instead, as temporal and material situatedness.
Finally, in both Horn’s work as well as in the leaves of liv-
ing plants, the aesthetic agent responsible for the elemental
aesthetics of seasonal colors is not a human artist but the chlo-
roplasts of leaves. Chlorophyll and chloroplasts are agential in
the sense that they materialize solar energy as chemical energy
and because, as Natasha Myers argues, photosynthesis makes
the world of breathing creatures by releasing, almost inciden-
tally, the oxygen that they need.17 Plants respire too, but they
need less oxygen than they produce. That the oxygen supporting
all other breathing life forms is a byproduct of photosynthesis
recasts the idea of the human, as if there ever was such a thing
as the universal human, as dominant lifeform. After all, chlo-
roplasts and their photosynthetic sibling mitochondria simply
outnumber us, as biologist Lynn Margulis reminds us.18 Breath-
ing is one more bodily process making apparent that far from
the only aesthetic agent in a subordinate world, people depend
on chlorophyll’s photosynthetic attunement to the sun.
The variations of chlorophyll, in sum, challenge our concep-
tual vocabulary to understand social processes not in the context
of a static environment, but as entwined with and dependent on
fluctuating elemental solarities. As embodied and embedded
relation to the sun, chlorophyll brings into relief how making
the sun into a profitable resource requires a seeming decoupling
of solar energy from a position on a moving planet. Every time
the seasons change, as leaves turn into their radiant colors and

17 Natasha Myers, “Photosynthesis,” in Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, eds.

Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian (Earth: punctum books, 2020), 317.
18 Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (New York:
Basic Books, 1998), 38. Margulis’s work on the symbiotic rather than
Darwinist evolution of chloroplasts and mitochondria might be another
example of how attending to chlorophyll opens up conventional concep-
tions of the social.

59
solarities

foliage is shed, chlorophyll makes visible solar relations differ-

ent from those chasing solar-powered perpetual growth.

60
 chlorophyll

Note

This essay is based on the chapter “The Celestial Sphere: Posi-

tions of the Sun in Green and Blue” from my master’s thesis, Ele-
mental Aesthetics: Sun, Wind, and Tides Beyond Green Energy.
If it has improved at all, in the meantime, that is thanks to the
editorial precision and intellectual generosity of Jeff Diamanti
and Cymene Howe.

References

Armstrong, Isobel. “Defining Deaths.” In Infinite Difference:

Other Poetries by UK Women Poets, edited by Carrie Etter,
18. Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2010.
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General
Economy, Volume I: Consumption. Translated by Robert
Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1988.
Boetzkes, Amanda. “Solar.” In Fueling Culture: 101 Words for
Energy and Environment, edited by Imre Szeman, Jennifer
Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger, 314–17. New York: Fordham
University Press, 2017.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Introduction: Ecology’s Rainbow.”
In Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, edited by
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, xv–xxxv. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2013.
Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep.
London: Verso, 2014.
Horn, Rosemary. “One Sun, One Leaf, One Afternoon.
Lecture at the Plymouth College of Arts, 15 October 2009.”
Rosemary Horn, n.d. http://photogirl.co.nz/wp-content/
uploads/2016/11/Rosemary-Horn-Plymouth-College-
Lecture-Oct09s.pdf.
Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the
Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso, 2016.
Margulis, Lynn. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution.
New York: Basic Books, 1998.

61
solarities

Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the

Age of Oil. London: Verso, 2013.
Myers, Natasha. “Photosynthesis.” In Anthropocene Unseen:
A Lexicon, edited by Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian,
317–22. Earth: punctum books, 2020.
Scheer, Hermann, and Hermann Scheer. The Solar Economy:
Renewable Energy for a Sustainable Global Future. London:
Earthscan, 2009.

62
 3

Bloom

Jeff Diamanti

Figure 1 overleaf shows a phosphorus mine. Nearly seventy

percent of internationally traded phosphorus comes from this
place. Neither the phosphorus nor the political conditions sur-
rounding the functioning of this mine get much attention in
environmental discourse, at least not directly. But phosphorus
is an element on the periodic table that is uniquely important
to the production of industrial fertilizers, and exponentially so
since the standardization of the Haber Bosch process patented
in 1918, a patent awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry in Stock-
holm and credited with nearly doubling agricultural yield in
the twentieth century, which explains the intensive arc of what
earth scientists now regard as the Great Acceleration. This mine
is in the center of the contested Western Sahara, under military
occupation by Moroccan forces since the 1970s, and backed by
the US and Israel since the early 2020s. Its borders are a war
zone, contested by the socialist liberation army of the Sahrawi
Democratic Republic, the Polisario Front.

63
solarities

Fig. 1. “Bou Craa, Western Sahara,” NASA Landsat 5 – TM and 7 –

ETM+ (January 20, 1987).

This mine marks the terminal edges of what Martin Arbo-

leda calls the “planetary mine.”1 Terminal, since phosphate ferti-
lizers give the value form of capital its shape in motion between
intensive yields of biomatter on one end, and the rise of pho-
tosynthetic bloom events turning coastal waters hypoxic (i.e.,
closer to terminal decline) all over the world. The geographical
arc of this stuff drawn up here as it travels from mine to bloom
involves a recasting of how we might read solar energy and its
manifestation as elemental amplification.

1 Martin Arboleda, Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late

Capitalism (London: Verso, 2020).

64
 bloom

According to the United Nations Environment Programme,

primary nutrient loading of global marine ecosystems has dou-
bled since 1950. “Before the industrialization of the western
world, the annual flux of nitrogen from the atmosphere to land
and aquatic environments was 90–130 million tons per year and
phosphorus 1–6 million tons per year. Anthropogenic sources
have created an additional flux of 200 million tons of nitrogen
and 10.5–15.2 million tons of phosphorus per year.”2 Upwards of
60 percent of this additional tonnage comes from industrial fer-
tilizer runoffs along tributaries and rivers, collating with alluvial
sediment as currents carry eroded soils rich with minerals out
into coastal waters. In warmer and heavier waters, this elemen-
tal collation subtends the hydrological equivalent of global
forests, where over fifty percent of primary marine bioactivity
reproduces at a respiratory interface with the atmospheres, fix-
ing carbon and other elements into bodies as they exhale over
half of the oxygen we breathe. But when excess nitrogen and
phosphorus mixes with spring bloom of diatoms, phytoplank-
ton, and other microorganisms, and those organisms exceed
trophic containment, those same waters turn eutrophic, and the
water column stills into a quiet death known as a red tide, or a
hypoxia event.
Red tides are dead zones — nothing can live there except
for cyanobacteria and seafloor organisms — and their negation
of life follows suddenly from life’s ecstatic unfurl. In 2021, the
great dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico measured 6,334 square
miles.3 The largest on earth, in the Gulf of Oman, measured
63,700-square mile in 2019. In 2022, there were 415 reported
dead zones on earth, and most of them are increasing in scale.
What kind of critical inquiry does the rise of red tide and the
coming of hypoxia ask for? What kind of concept of historic-
ity gets materialized between this dialectic of expansive life

2 “Nutrients,” United Nations Environment Programme, n.d., https://www.

unep.org/cep/es/node/150?%2Fnutrients=.
3 “Happening Now: Dead Zone in Gulf 2021,” Ocean Today, n.d., https://
oceantoday.noaa.gov/deadzonegulf-2021/welcome.html.

65
solarities

and sudden death? And how might twenty-first-century bloom

ecologies unnerve normative habits of humanities research?
What currents in the history of radical critique get summoned
by this intimacy between frenzied life and mass death?
I want you to try to think with me about the involvement of
life in currents that carry these tides — your life, the channels
of nutrients, energy, and resources that your body takes in, and
the supply chains and contracts, conflicts, and erasures that fold
into that current — but also current as a kind of medium under-
stood kinetically, as in the ostensibly autopoietic force of aeolian
winds and oceanic overturn. And think with me too about the
historicity of capital’s ontology as one of those strong currents
now written into the geological and climatological record of the
planet.
Phosphorus is particulate and particular, and it grounds the
inorganic composition of twentieth- and twenty-first-century
capitalism. Phosphorus is just about the most banal substance
on planet earth. It does not do a lot, look like much, or react in
any spectacular way. Unlike oil, coal, or uranium, there is not
a lot of potential energy stored up in phosphorus, at least not
kinetic or thermal energy. Its value to the mining industry and
agricultural sector is wholly other to the value of gold, copper,
or bundles of wheat. If you were to hold phosphorus in your
hand, there would not be much to say about its affective or aes-
thetic properties, except that it is nearly indistinguishable from
the ground in which you found it in the first place.
The ground in which phosphorus does its work, however, is
a good place to begin this story, because this story is about the
fundamental capacities that phosphorus affords life on earth,
anxieties about the future, so-called “peak phosphorous,”4 and
the cultural geographies that relate materially, politically, and
economically in a geocultural era portended by late petrocul-
ture. Phosphorus is an element on the periodic table, and it is

4 Dana Cordell and Stuart White, “Peak Phosphorus: Clarifying the Key
Issues of a Vigorous Debate about Long-Term Phosphorus Security,”
Sustainability 3, no. 10 (2011): 2027–49.

66
 bloom

the twelfth most ubiquitous known to chemists. Like carbon

and hydrogen, therefore, phosphorus is the ground. Which is
to say, unlike copper or neodymium which is of the ground,
and figured distinctly when encountered and yielded from
the ground, phosphorus retains its grounding properties when
extracted from the earth’s lithosphere. You cannot burn or eat
phosphorus in order to unlock its calories or kilojoules, and you
certainly cannot fill up a gas tank with it, so since it is not espe-
cially potent as a source of energy, its elemental force and func-
tion requires a different ethnographic approach.
Phosphorus is a structuring element in organic chemistry: it
provides DNA, bones, and cells with its material coherence and
integrity. In short, phosphorus incorporates into life as form, as
infrastructure, and not as content, not as information, code, or
blueprint. Its analog is rebar, pulp, and bone. It is the plastic in
the floppy disk, not the software written into the film. This is
what makes it a contingent ingredient in industrial fertilizer. It
isn’t that plant life eats phosphorus. It is instead that their body’s
structural integrity depends on it.
Algae blooms and eutrophication are limited by phosphorus,
which means that they cannot bloom beyond their chemical
limit — beyond the point at which the oxygen in the water is
entirely consumed, leading the inevitable bust of bloom — with-
out the structural plenitudes of phosphorus. The life and nonlife
distinction is both stabilized and made porous by the ubiqui-
tous presence of phosphorus. The lithic truth of all life — its
contingent manifestation through carbon, calcium, phospho-
rus, the animation of life by nonlife, by the inorganic — is writ-
ten in the medium of long mineral cycles and life’s provisional
embodiment of those cycles. Between the mine and hypoxia are
the currents carrying plundered phosphorus to the ports, prod-
ucts, and phytoplankton blooming into accelerated expansion,
an elemental menagerie amplified by waters drenched in solar
energy. What kind of critical inquiry do our shared phosphate
futures ask for? Where the spectre of its depletion in the min-

67
solarities

ing sector, revolt in occupied territory, or hydrological hypoxia,

draw the currents of climate change into terminal futures?

68
 bloom

References

Arboleda, Martin. Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction

under Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 2020.
Cordell, Dana, and Stuart White. “Peak Phosphorus: Clarifying
the Key Issues of a Vigorous Debate about Long-Term
Phosphorus Security.” Sustainability 3, no. 10 (2011):
2027–49. DOI: 10.3390/su3102027.
NOAA. “Happening Now: Dead Zone in Gulf 2021.” Ocean
Today, n.d. https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/deadzonegulf-2021/
welcome.html.
“Nutrients.” United Nations Environmental Programme, n.d.
https://www.unep.org/cep/es/node/150?%2Fnutrients=.

69
 4

Respiration

Ayesha Vemuri and Hannah Tollefson

Respiration — the source of energy that lets us farm and dance

and speak. The breath of plants gives life to animals and the
breath of animals gives life to plants. My breath is your breath,
your breath is mine. It’s the great poem of give and take, of
reciprocity that animates the world. Isn’t that a story worth
telling?
— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass1

Respiration is a process of absorption and exchange that is always

shared. It names the means by which living beings assimilate
and expel carbon and oxygen through lungs, gills, stomata, or
cellular membranes. An elemental process engendered by solar-
ity, plants, animals, and other living beings’ respiration unfolds
in conjunction with photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is the pro-
cess in which plants, algae, and other chlorophyll-containing
beings transmute solar energy into chemical energy, creating
the energetic basis of most life on earth. Through the process of

1 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific

Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions,
2014), 344.

71
solarities

respiration, living beings break down this stored energy and use
it for all the processes of life: eating, growing, reproducing, play-
ing, working, breathing, thinking. Photosynthetic beings har-
ness sunlight, carbon dioxide and water to form glucose, sugary
potential energy, and release oxygen. Respiration reverses this.
Cells use oxygen to break down that sugar to fuel life-sustain-
ing processes, releasing carbon dioxide and water. The output
of one process becomes the fuel for the other, creating a cycle
of photosynthetic capture and respiratory consumption that
affirms the deep codependence of plant and animal life.
Following the dynamics of energetic solar ingestion and
expenditure, we want to think through respiration as a process
of mutual breathing as it manifests in forest ecosystems. This
focus is informed by our own encounters with forests as spaces
where solarity infuses longstanding and dense biotic and abiotic
relations, but also by the way these ecosystems are managed and
valued for their “service” as planetary “lungs.” Here, we think
with respiration as a process that constitutes forests simultane-
ously as sites of breath and life, as places of commodification
and precarity, and as ecologies that hold lessons for mutual
flourishing.2
Respiration names a biochemical process of elemental
exchange, but for much longer has been associated with both
air and animacy. From the Latin re (again, anew) + spirare
(blow, breathe, be alive), to respire is to continuously breathe
energy into life. While the sun is often deified as the source of
planetary life, the earthly process of respiration mediates stored
solar energy in cells to facilitate growth and expenditure in liv-
ing beings. As chlorophyll containing organisms such as green

2 Here, we are drawing not only on the work of Indigenous scholars and
thinkers whom we cite below, but also the work of movement builders and
activists like adrienne marie brown, whose concept “emergent strategy”
looks to nonhuman beings for lessons on shaping human worlds in ways
that encourage mutual flourishing. See adrienne marie brown, Emergent
Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico: AK Press, 2017). For an
incredible example of such lessons, see Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned:
Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (Chico: AK Press, 2020).

72
 respiration

plants, algae, and cyanobacteria, photoautotrophs capture car-

bon dioxide and water in the presence of sunlight to store it
as sugar. Both photoautotrophs and heterotrophs (living beings
that do not produce their own energy) imbibe this stored solar
energy and release it in respiration. As environmental scientist
and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Robin Kim-
merer writes, it is the twin, cyclical processes of photosynthesis
and respiration that “lets us farm and dance and speak.”3 It is
through shared respiration that the sun’s radiation is translated
into living matter.
As mediators of sunlight and carbon, trees have emerged as
central protagonists in the contemporary moment of climate
crisis, and forests as crucial sites for modelling, managing, and
mitigating future climatic changes. Some studies present evi-
dence of afforestation as a form of geoengineering that would
inhale and capture overabundant carbon from the atmosphere.4
Others warn that with increased temperatures and insect infes-
tations, forests may act instead as precarious tinder boxes await-
ing combustion and further carbon emissions.5 The uncertain
position and promise of forests in imaginaries of a future plan-
etary ecology is often communicated in forms of representation
such as homology and proxy.
Since at least the mid-1980s, campaigns against anthropo-
genic deforestation have articulated the value of forests in terms
of their planetary metabolic function as the “lungs of the earth.”
Environmental groups seeking to protect the old growth forests
of Clayoquot Sound from logging in the 1990s mobilized the
analogy to frame deforestation and forest protection as global
issues. Appealing to forests as the lungs of the earth was a pow-
erful metaphor that connected local forest protection to plan-

3 Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 344.

4 Jean-Francois Bastin et al., “The Global Tree Restoration Potential,” Sci-
ence 365, no. 6448 (2019): 76–79.
5 Natasha Myers, “Photosynthesis,” Society for Cultural Anthropology, Janu-
ary 21, 2016, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/photosynthesis.

73
solarities

etary survival.6 The comparison draws on a primary lesson of

biology, that is, the symbiotic gas exchange between plants and
animals. They breathe, we breathe. Forests as planetary lungs
offer a scaled parallel of this mutual relation, demonstrating the
deep dependence of humans and other animals on photosyn-
thesizing beings.
Ecological equivalences are powerful means of shaping envi-
ronmental imaginaries.7 Pointing to the “inadequacies of direct
knowledge,”8 Chun notes that such figures enable a transcend-
ence of scale and allow us to make sense of unfathomable pro-
cesses that exceed comprehension. While they hold great peda-
gogical and affective power, they may also overly simplify and
reify the very ecologies they seek to celebrate and care for. In a
1935 speech, the United States president Franklin D. Roosevelt
claimed that as the lungs of the earth, forests purify the air and
give strength to the American people. Known for his conserva-
tive preservationism and its connections to eugenic ideas and
policies,9 Roosevelt’s evocation of this phrase illustrates the dan-
ger of such simplifications, as forest management was enrolled
into a white supremacist, nation-building project.
Though the analogy has long since existed in the public
imagination, climate change has only increased the circula-
tion of the notion, notably in the wake of forest fires around
the world and deforestation in the Amazon. The valuation of
sylvan spaces based on specific ecosystem services — natural
processes that support biological and cultural life constructed

6 Sarah Pralle, Branching Out, Digging In: Environmental Advocacy and

Agenda Setting (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2006), 52.
7 Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2019), and Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of
Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008).
8 Wendy Chun, “On Patterns and Proxies, or the Perils of Reconstructing
the Unknown,” e-flux, September 25, 2018, https://www.e-flux.com/archi-
tecture/accumulation/212275/on-patterns-and-proxies/.
9 See Dorceta E. Taylor, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement:
Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2016).

74
 respiration

as the “benefits that people get from nature”10 — is a model of

conservation that assigns ecological spaces and features mon-
etary value based on their use-value for particular humans. In
other words, ecosystem service models are forms of commodi-
fication that render such spaces precarious to changing mar-
ket pressures. Described as planetary lungs, forests and other
spaces valued for their carbon-capturing potential are treated
as “sinks.” As “land-based places to store waste,” sinks are both
technoscientific instruments and often, as Métis/Michif scholar
Max Liboiron argues, colonial technologies that presume access
to Indigenous lands.11 Furthermore, though some forests are
protected on the basis of their ability to act as sinks for anthro-
pogenic carbon waste, older forests may be logged or reforesta-
tion efforts abandoned if they fail to hold and capture waste.12
Trees do not simply filter air and store carbon, but in respiration
and combustion, release it. Thus, forests valued for capturing
carbon face abandonment or destruction for performing their
own life-sustaining processes.
Framing forests as lungs tends to focus primarily on the pho-
tosynthesizing and carbon storing capacity of sylvan ecosys-
tems and fails to account for the complexity and mutualism of
breath as the “reciprocity that animates the world.”13 By conceiv-
ing of forests in terms of their utility, the comparison forecloses
understanding the “social life of forests”14 and the complex
interdependencies among animal beings and our arboreal kin.
Respiration is a symbiotic process, perhaps best understood as
occurring in conspiracy with other beings. Con + spirare is to

10 “Payments for Ecosystem Systems,” World Wildlife Foundation, n.d.,

https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/black_
sea_basin/danube_carpathian/our_solutions/green_economy/pes/.
11 Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press,
2021), 40.
12 Myers, “Photosynthesis.”
13 Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 344
14 Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They
Communicate, Discoveries from A Secret World (Vancouver: Greystone
Books, 2016).

75
solarities

76
 respiration

Figs. 1a and 1b. An account of the ecosystem services provided by a

tree in Square Saint-Louis, encountered on a neighborhood walk in
Tio’tia:ke (so-called Montreal). Photograph by Ayesha Vemuri.

77
solarities

breathe with, to breathe together, albeit in an “unequally shared

milieu.”15 Despite varied conditions of breathability, breathing
together is a relational act that earthly dwellers engage in to
maintain a life-sustaining world. Breathing with forests requires
us to rethink our models and analogies of forest beings. See-
ing forests and other ecologies as “gifts and guides”16 rather than
commodities foregrounds reciprocity and gratitude.17
Solar energy, transmuted into stored carbon through pho-
tosynthesis, moves through spaces outside the purview of the
sun’s rays, deep into the soil. Nicole Starosielski’s notion of
“embedded solarities,” which names “the ways that solar energy,
effects, and affects permeate the environment itself ” turns our
attention to the ways the sun’s radiation suffuses even subter-
ranean ecosystems.18 In such spaces, trees and their fungal co-
conspirators together create the symbiotic communities that we
call forests.19 Vast mycorrhizal networks “stitch organisms into
relation.”20 As hyphae (filamentous strands of fungi) penetrate
root tips at the cellular level, they trouble the idea of individual
life forms.21 Using these dense interspecies networks as chan-
nels for sharing nutrients and information, trees communicate,
support, and compete with one another: “mother” trees nourish
young saplings, healthy trees care for ailing or ageing ones, trees
warn one another of pests and disease, all while contending for
sunlight.22 Mycorrhizal fungi maintain forest health by decom-

15 Timothy Choy, “Distribution,” Society for Cultural Anthropology, January

21, 2016, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/distribution.
16 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the
Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2015), 2.
17 Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass.
18 Nicole Starosielski, “Beyond the Sun: Embedded Solarities and Agricul-
tural Practice,” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 1 (2021): 15.
19 Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees.
20 Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change
Our Minds & Shape Our Futures (New York: Random House, 2020).
21 Suzanne Simard and Daniel Durall, “Mycorrhizal Networks: A Review of
Their Extent, Function, and Importance,” Canadian Journal of Botany 82
(2004): 1140–65.
22 Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees.

78
 respiration

posing organic matter, providing protection against pathogens,

“fixing” atmospheric nitrogen, and transporting water.23 Plants
provide their fungal companions with sugars produced through
photosynthesis, imbuing the dark understory with converted
solar energy. These subterranean webs of connection ask us
to follow the sun underground, into the soil. They invite us
to approach our conception of life under the sun with a deep
sense of humility — a word that etymologically derives from
humus — regarding our entanglement with other beings. For
Kimmerer, it is humility that allows us to learn from other spe-
cies and to become teachable.
As we write this essay in the midst of a global pandemic,
brought about in large part by anthropogenic ecosystem destruc-
tion, learning from the conspiracy of forest beings is an increas-
ingly urgent task. We echo Achille Mbembe’s suggestion to con-
ceive of breathing as “that which we hold in-common with other
humans and all other living beings.”24 For Mbembe and others,
this moment breaks down delusions of individualism, requiring
that we “answer here and now for our life on Earth with others
(including viruses) and our shared fate.”25 Conspiring is a deeply
political act, underscoring the ways in which breath and respira-
tion are at the center of struggles for life.
Unequal conditions of breathability in both so-called postco-
lonial and settler-colonial contexts are saturated with histories
and ongoing processes of colonialism and imperialism. As the
ongoing movement for Black lives coincides with the Covid-
19 pandemic, disproportionately impacting Black, Indigenous,
and poor people, the common threads of racial and economic
oppression become starkly apparent. A kind of planetary suf-
focation engendered by longstanding extractive and disposses-
sive forces predated the “pathogenic period” of the pandemic,
generating an ecological precariousness that began “by tak-

23 Simard and Vyse, “Mycorrhizal Networks.”

24 Achille Mbembe, “The Universal Right to Breathe,” trans. Carolyn Shread,
Critical Inquiry, April 13, 2020, https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/
the-universal-right-to-breathe/.
25 Ibid.

79
solarities

ing away breath” and condemning most of humankind to the

“premature cessation of breathing.”26 While Mbembe draws on
the suffocating neocolonial practices that render breath pre-
carious for many people in the Global South, Sefanit Habtom
and Megan Scribe address how “settler atmospherics”27 inhibit
breath for Black and Indigenous peoples in white supremacist
settler states. They suggest “co-breathing,” building relationships
as co-conspirators to challenge the “supposedly natural violence
found in settler colonialism and anti-[B]lackness.”28
Thinking with forests and the symbiotic processes they fos-
ter hold important lessons for inculcating an ethos of reciproc-
ity: “Humankind and biosphere are one.”29 Indigenous thinkers
across many cultures and philosophies have long been attuned
to the multitudinous relations within forests as sources of law
and as teachers in living well with others. Kimmerer, whose
work has informed and inspired our thinking, weaves together
teachings from pecan groves, sweetgrass, strawberries, and
mushrooms alongside the stories of her family and her people.
What might appear as ontological claims emerge from material
ecologies and stories of the way her and her people’s lives have
been shaped by abundance, mutual cooperation, and joy but
also by colonial violence and dispossession. Indebted to such
forms of bio-cultural knowledge, recent scholarship has focused
on the life of forests as multispecies ecologies30 and explored
sylvan semiotics and communication.31 Attending to forests in
these ways invites us not only to see them as photosynthesizing

26 Ibid.
27 Kristen Simmons, “Settler Atmospherics,” Society for Cultural Anthropol-
ogy, November 20, 2017, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/settler-atmospher-
ics.
28 Sefanit Habtom and Megan Scribe, “To Breathe Together: Co-conspirators
for Decolonial Futures,” Yellowhead Institute, June 2, 2020, https://yellow-
headinstitute.org/2020/06/02/to-breathe-together/.
29 Mbembe, “The Universal Right to Breathe.”
30 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World.
31 Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the
Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

80
 respiration

Fig. 2. Nurse log on the Big Tree Trail, Wah’nah’juss Hilth’hooiss

(Meares Island, so-called British Columbia). Photo by Ayesha Vem-
uri.

sinks for carbon, but as participants in interspecies networks of

microbial and macro-biotic life that co-constitute one another.
From different paths and places, both of us have found
ourselves as settlers and visitors in the forests of the northern
Pacific coastal region.32 Forests’ diversity and density stem from
evolutionary adaptation and symbiotic growth. In these temper-
ate forests, cycles of life, death and decay, mycelial soil networks,
and salmon runs, have generated complex ecosystems over mil-
lennia. They have also been sites of change and intervention

32 I (Ayesha) am an immigrant/settler of color who lived and studied for

many years in so-called Portland, Oregon, which rests on the traditional
village sites of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Chinook, Tualatin
Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along
the Columbia River. I (Hannah) am a settler who grew up on Ləkʷəŋən ̓
and W̱ sáneć territories in Victoria, and the coastal forests in the shared,
asserted, and unceded territory of the Penelakut, Lamalcha and other
Hul’q’umi’num-speaking peoples on Galiano Island. Both of us currently
live and work on the territories of the Kanien’kehà:ka Nation in Tiohtià:ke.

81
solarities

wrought by both human and nonhuman forces. While settlers

may have mistakenly seen these lands as uncultivated, support-
ing the terra nullius doctrine, they have been stewarded since
time immemorial by Indigenous peoples, through various man-
agement practices including burning, harvesting, and mainte-
nance. It is not simply ecosystems such as forests that provide
services to humans, but plants and more-than-human animals
depend on people for their worlds to flourish. They have co-
evolved through millennia of breathing, living and flourishing
together.
Thinking through solarity has turned our attention to stories
that show us how solar energy conditions and moves through
various forms of life in our heliocentric universe. This includes
following the way that plants store, release, and make use of the
sun’s energy in processes that sustain us and other beings. In
the contemporary moment of multiple planetary crises, follow-
ing breath through forests suggests humility in recognizing the
co-constitution of multispecies worlds and orients us toward
forging relations of conspiracy in the face of the uneven condi-
tions of breathability. Solar energy, reflected and absorbed by
the forest canopy, is revealed not merely as a fuel for endless
human consumption, but a gift that, when accepted along with
a corresponding recognition and work of reciprocity and care,
can enable multispecies flourishing.

82
 respiration

References

Bastin, Jean-Francois, Yelena Finegold, Claude Garcia, Danilo

Mollicone, Marcelo Rezende, Devin Routh, Constantin
M. Zohner, and Thomas W. Crowther. “The Global Tree
Restoration Potential.” Science 365, no. 6448 (2019): 76–79.
DOI: 10.1126/science.aax0848.
brown, adrienne marie. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change,
Changing Worlds. Chico: AK Press, 2017.
Choy, Timothy. “Distribution.” Society for Cultural
Anthropology, January 21, 2016. https://culanth.org/
fieldsights/distribution.
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “On Patterns and Proxies, or
the Perils of Reconstructing the Unknown.” e-flux,
September 25, 2018. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/
accumulation/212275/on-patterns-and-proxies/.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. Allegories of the Anthropocene.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons
from Marine Mammals. Chico: AK Press, 2020.
Habtom, Sefanit, and Megan Scribe. “To Breathe Together:
Co-conspirators for Decolonial Futures.” Yellowhead
Institute, June 2, 2020. https://yellowheadinstitute.
org/2020/06/02/to-breathe-together/.
Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The
Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous
Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.
Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2014.
Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology
beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2013.
Liboiron, Max. Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2021.
Mbembe, Achille. “The Universal Right to Breathe.” Translated
by Carolyn Shread. Critical Inquiry, April 13, 2020. https://

83
solarities

critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-
breathe/.
Myers, Natasha. “Photosynthesis.” Society for Cultural
Anthropology, January 21, 2016. https://culanth.org/
fieldsights/photosynthesis.
“Payments for Ecosystem Systems.” World Wildlife Foundation,
n.d. https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/
where_we_work/black_sea_basin/danube_carpathian/
our_solutions/green_economy/pes/.
Pralle, Sarah. Branching Out, Digging In: Environmental
Advocacy and Agenda Setting. Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press, 2006.
Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our
Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures. New
York: Random House, 2020.
Simard, Suzanne, and Daniel Durall. “Mycorrhizal Networks:
A Review of Their Extent, Function, and Importance.”
Canadian Journal of Botany 82, no. 8 (2004): 1140–65. DOI:
10.1139/b04-116.
Simmons, Kristen. “Settler Atmospherics.” Society for Cultural
Anthropology, November 20, 2017. https://culanth.org/
fieldsights/settler-atmospherics.
Starosielski, Nicole. “Beyond the Sun: Embedded Solarities and
Agricultural Practice.” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 1
(2021): 13–24. DOI: 10.1215/00382876-8795668.
Taylor, Dorceta E. The Rise of the American Conservation
Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of
the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel,
How They Communicate, Discoveries from A Secret World.
Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2016.

84
 5

What Fuels You?1

Gretchen Bakke

Are you in need of an energy transition? It’s a question worth

asking. After all, everything else is doing it — the power plants
most especially. So many now are converts or in disuse that it
can feel like a new god’s been born with all new rules to the
fact of the following. Sun Ra says: “The impossible attracts me,
because everything possible has been done and the world didn’t
change.”2 That seems right.
The cars are threatening to do it too, this energy transition
thing. Moving from the ¡pow! ¡bang of explosions (they are small,
!

that’s why the tiny font) but there are lots of them. It should look
like this: explosion explosion explosion explosion explosion explosion explosion bang bang chitty chitty bang bang explosion
explosion explosion explosion explosion explosion explosion explosion explosion explosion.
“That’s so twentieth
century,” says my granddaughter one future day. She knows.
We alls knows that “the age of the Internal Combustion Engine
(ICE) is over. Electric cars are the future. The transition has just

1 Drafted in 2018, revised during the pandemic, and finished thereafter with
a tip of the hat to Karen Pinkus, Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
2 Sun Ra, The Immeasurable Equation: The Collected Poetry and Prose, eds.
James Wolf and Hartmut Geerkin (Waitawhile: Enterplanetary Koncepts,
2005), 457.

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solarities

begun…,” or so says Forbes in 2018.3 Would that this were the

only ICE to melt from our world, this newly acronymed engine
that we used to just call an engine. And by used to, I mean, like
last week or maybe just yesterday. But past is past.
And what about you? Are you still powering forward, aim-
ing for maximum productivity, maximum output, the slim tight
efficiency of the neoliberal businessman? Do you fly to meet-
ings in an airplane? That’s so kerosene of you? Do you work on
that plane instead of watching X-Men XIV: Climate Apocalypse
and missing most of details because those teeny tiny ear buds
don’t really work that well? That’s a bit more biomass. You are
still on a plane after all traveling to a meeting after all, but at
least you can contrive to squander some of your time along the
way. Or perhaps you are homeofficing your way to that meet-
ing now, your eyes turned to saucers of Zoom. Coal. You. Inert
desk chair bound until burned. And burn you do. All those tiny
squares of Zoom = a hundred thousand pounds of coal a day.
Plus, one pound to make your new reading glasses, cuz your
eyes are seriously shot. It’s a one-to-one material, coal is. Burn a
pound of it and get pound of carbon dioxide. At least the math
is easy. Take a deep breath; its warmer already.
Breathing.
Breathing with others.
Remember?
The color beige.
Generic corporate spaces.
Remember?
Plastic tables that look like wood.
Remember?
Remember the world economy and being a part of it. Remem-
ber Money. Profits. Bottom lines. Is desire what fuels you?
A desire for more. prestige, publications, shoes, sex, money,

3 Tom Raftery, “Seven Reasons Why The Internal Combustion Engine Is a

Dead Man Walking [Updated],” Forbes, September 6, 2018, https://www.
forbes.com/sites/sap/2018/09/06/seven-reasons-why-the-internal-com-
bustion-engine-is-a-dead-man-walking-updated/.

86
 what fuels you?

thread counts, miles this month. More. When more is what

you pour in your tank, desire’s what cranks your drive. If it’s
goin’ up it’s gettin’ better. “Don’t stop believing,” says Journey,
mediocre band. Just “get on the midnight train goin’ anywhere.”
There’s a thought. When this derailment is past, consider the
journey and take the train, but please avoid the night train; that
would be you just trying to petroleum the fuck out of a low
carbon lifestyle, sleeping on a train like that so you can work all
day and then work all the next day as if you are on a plane, but
more exhausting. Instead take a day train and add a day to get
there — wherever it is you are going — and add an extra night in
a hotel, sleep in a comfy bed not a berth, and don’t work at all.
Now you are starting to get somewhere. That’s almost solar of
you. Bringing your efficiency down to 22% or so. Solar thermal
is a bit higher, if you really want to keep one claw in the modern.
And once you get there to that place wherever you’re going, but
not on an airplane this time, and you’ve stopped zoom zoom
zooming don’t bother to charge your phonetabletcomputere-
bookcigarette, instead how about a walk? Where are you in any-
way? How does it smell there? Is it all diesel stink and speed?
That’s one way to be, or one way to avoid being. Do they drink
this there? The Mauresque. Meaning “of inspiration by African
kings.” Invented to be “consumed by female drinkers who find
Pastis a little too strong.”4 Really, the Mauresque is the theme
drink of the energy transition. Nothing too strong. The female
is future inspired by African kings and all that jazz.
Anyway, if they drink that there, where you’re spending
an extra night in a hotel because you didn’t fly to that meet-
ing, you should probably drink it too. Not too much though
because alcohol’s a fuel too, but if that’s what fuels you, you’ll
find things go poorly over the long term. Solar really is the way

4 One part Pastis (1.5 oz.), one part Orgeot (almond syrup, 1.5 oz.), 1 to 2 ice
cubes depending on the heat of the day. Cold water, to taste. I recommend
carbonated water. Recipe from experience; history from “Mauresque,”
Social and Cocktail, n.d., https://www.socialandcocktail.co.uk/cocktails/
mauresque/.

87
solarities

Fig. 1. Petrocapitialchinoism, Shell cafeteria fancy drinks station,

Houston, TX. Photo used with permission.

to go, and the math on it is easy: 22% efficiency. If you are coal,
let’s say you are (Zoom Zoom Zoom) your normal efficiency
is 37% — though you can co-gen on up to 67% or so — that’s
writing emails at 10:30 PM pestering your colleagues, who’ve
gone hydro and have their feet up with a good novel by then.
Forget about it. You’re like a petrochemical company rolled up
in human form, maximizing bang for buck. If you are think-
ing seriously about an energy transition, then you have to turn
some things on their heads. Like all that efficiency, like more is
more, like publish or perish.
So check your productivity level, are you learning to do less
with more, taking the lesson of the solar panel and putting about
22% percent of your potential energy to good use and then just
hanging out and taking long naps on the lawn? Or, if you must,
you can go all Marx on yourself and “do one thing today and
another tomorrow, […] hunt in the morning, fish in the after-
noon, rear [sheep] in the evening, criticise after dinner […]

88
 what fuels you?

without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”5

Add in some time for watching cat videos on the internet, and
it’s not half bad as far as energy transitions go. Plus, you’ll need
those sheep to keep the lawn shorn6 because otherwise its back
to the scythe, and nobody really wants to transition quite all
the way back to age of muscle, analog metabolism. That’s you,
a hierarchically inclined hunk of meat with an obsessive attach-
ment to semiotic systems; you, slightly more energy efficient
than a sheep and slightly less so than a kestrel.7 Figure it at 70
calories for kilo of body weight and even you can do the math
on you. “Food is fuel.” “You are what you eat.” Platitudes plati-
tudes. “When you think of a leaf, you use the energy of a leaf,”
that’s more like it. Howard said that, as he wandered past us
at the breakfast buffet, ignoring the forever-temptation of the
waffle station. Instead, his eyes captivated by the dust caught
in the sharp light of morning. “Merely a mote […] suspended
in a sunbeam.” Carl Sagan said that, speaking the earth, you’ve
heard of him.8 But here it’s Howard the mote, with no fame to
claim. Later, I saw him disappear. Consumed by the forest as he
past. I remember.
A leaf doesn’t need an energy transition; it is an energy tran-
sition, forever knitting itself into existence from sunlight, H2O,
and CO2. Photosynthesis. Until we eat it. Energy transition.
Potato chips? Leaf. Blueberries? Leaf. Idea of a leaf? Leaf. It’s
all leaf leaf leaf all the way down. Even gasoline, it’s just a very

5 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C.J. Arthur
(New York: International Publisher, 2004), 53.
6 Alex Blumberg and Kendra Pierre-Louis, “Sheep + Solar, A Love Story,” in
How to Save a Planet, produced by Kendra Pierre-Louis, Rachel Waldholz,
Anna Ladd, Daniel Ackerman, and Hannah Chinn, podcast, October 21,
2021, https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/39hgkba/sheep-
solar-a-love-story.
7 Blaxter “reported that F [Basal metabolism] in sheep was below the
interspecies mean; in cattle it was above,” quoted in A.J.F. Webster, “The
Energetic Efficiency of Metabolism,” Proceedings of the Nutrition Society
40, no. 1 (1981): 122.
8 Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New
York: Random House, 1994), 6.

89
solarities

old leaf. And what is a leaf (when compared to beef)? It’s pretty
much the least efficient thing on earth, that’s what it is: 3% of the
potential energy in a ray of sunshine becomes plant. The rest is
just there for the pleasure of it.
Bask in that; 97% inefficient and the origin of the world.
Caused our good Bataille a conniption. After all, what to do with
all the excess granted to us by the sun?9 War, the status quo while
an effective way to waste what we got, was not, he felt, the best
possible approach the endless creeping increase of leaf-sunshine
relations. How about a romp in the bushes, he suggested? Blow
off steam. The turbulence of the bull. *Wham***Bam***Thank
you Man*. Follow that advice and before you know it you’re
pressed up against a world population of 7.7 billion. Fewer now
of course, corona non-negligible, but still six billion more than
1859 when we figured out how to drill up rock oil from under-
ground and burn it; seven billion more than way back before
coal came into vogue.
Fossils, that’s what fuels you. Its 5:45am and you’re on the
tread mill working off that bottom line. Breathing. Remember?
Just open your mouth, and blow. That’s all it takes: 25 sextillion
molecules come hurtling out of you and into him and her and
them. The others. The company. Lust. We thought it was ideas
we were exchanging when once we flew to meet in no-Zoom
rooms, but really it was ourselves. Weep with it; molecular love.
Or perhaps upon waking reorient. Perhaps to dream. Said
Shakespeare, overachieving bastard. Adore him, but don’t emu-
late. Instead, upon waking, reorient. Work hard to accomplish a
fraction of what you did last year, or yesterday, or this morning.
That’s solarity; breath it in. Then. Don’t work hard, just roll. Like
a 5 year old rolls down a perfect hill. Leaves clung to hair, sheep
on her lawn. A tick or two. Gravity. And when the dizzy stops,
look up. You can see the creatures of this world and those not
of it in the clouds drifting by. No need to be too cirrus on this
day, a-cumulous they climb to the heavens. No need to take that

9 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. I: Consumption, trans. Robert

Hurley (New York: Zone, 1991).

90
 what fuels you?

Fig. 2. Cloud Rhino Surfs into Twilight. Photo by the author.

stairway too; just watch. See. They them there in their world.
You in yours. The ras of the sun. Reorient.

***

It’s impossible to confuse a sunflower, did you know that? There

was a scientist (running on diesel) who snuck up on them and
turned them around during the night (her flowers were in plant
pots) but lo’ and behold, when the new day dawned their heads
were facing back east; they knew even as we don’t how to follow
the light of the day.

91
solarities

References

Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share, Volume I: Consumption.

Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
Blumberg, Alex, and Kendra Pierre-Louis. “Sheep + Solar,
A Love Story.” In How to Save a Planet, produced by
Kendra Pierre-Louis, Rachel Waldholz, Anna Ladd, Daniel
Ackerman, and Hannah Chinn, October 21, 2021. Podcast.
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/39hgkba/
sheep-solar-a-love-story.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology,
Part One. Edited by C.J. Arthur. New York: International
Publisher, 2004.
“Mauresque.” Social and Cocktail, n.d. https://www.
socialandcocktail.co.uk/cocktails/mauresque/.
Pinkus, Karen. Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Raftery, Tom. “Seven Reasons Why The Internal Combustion
Engine Is a Dead Man Walking [Updated].” Forbes,
September 6, 2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/
sap/2018/09/06/seven-reasons-why-the-internal-
combustion-engine-is-a-dead-man-walking-updated/.
Sagan, Carl. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in
Space. New York: Random House, 1994.
Sun Ra. The Immeasurable Equation: The Collected Poetry
and Prose. Edited by James Wolf and Hartmut Geerken.
Waitawhile: Enterplanetary Koncepts, 2005.
Webster, A.J.F. “The Energetic Efficiency of Metabolism.”
Proceedings of the Nutrition Society 40, no. 1 (1981): 121–28.
DOI: 10.1079/PNS19810017.

92
 6

A Politics of Solar Abundance

Cara New Daggett

The destruction endemic to fossil fuels is not without its pleas-

ures. Many of us, and not just the privileged, have become
accustomed to thinking about our desires in terms of what is
made possible by fossil fuels. That is why the abolition of fossil
fuels requires not only new fuels to plug into existing pleasures,
but new subjectivities, desiring different energetic relations. An
inversion of fossil life will demand that those of us who extract
from an imagined world of scarcity become attuned to the ethi-
cal responsibilities of energy abundance. It will require the con-
version of petropeople into solar subjects.
Becoming solar is different from plugging solar panels into
the status quo. Becoming solar subjects, and not just consum-
ers of solar energy, means nurturing solarity as a way of life, a
geotheology, a system of values that transforms desires. Theol-
ogy might seem an odd emphasis for understanding modern
fuel. However, in studying the history of energy, I have come to
appreciate that fossil fuels have a strong cosmological dimen-
sion that helps explain their grip on contemporary life.
Fossil fuels feed modern conceptions of the sacred, what I
have elsewhere described as a “geotheology” of energy, a theol-

93
solarities

ogy dusted in coal ash.1 Energy is not a timeless concept, and it

had no scientific meaning prior to nineteenth-century efforts
to make coal-fired engines more efficient. The resulting science
of thermodynamics served as a basis for a dominant logic of
energy, which married the Anglo-Protestant mania for work
and thrift with an imperialist drive to put the world to work for
Western profit. This was not the only possible interpretation of
thermodynamics, although it remains a dominant one.
The fossil sacred is work, and its evil is entropy. This is a
particular kind of work, one that moves matter in support of
extractive capital. Meanwhile, entropy, the second law of ther-
modynamics, describes the underbelly of energy. It says that
energy tends to dissipate into forms that cannot do work.
Entropy, categorized as waste, haunts human efforts. Things
fall apart; perpetual motion is impossible; inertia drags. Nature
appears to be against us, or at least against efficient work. Work
orients what petropeople are encouraged to desire — mass con-
sumption that thumbs its nose at scarcity — while rationalizing
the pain and violence of fossil capital as sacrificial, as serving
the greater glory of putting the world to work in the name of
mastering it.
This helps explain the urgency with which petrocultures
extract and accumulate energy. It arises from the twin assump-
tions that energy is both scarce and recalcitrant, always get-
ting lost to dissipation. There are racial and gendered relations
at play here, in the demonization of “dull, feminized matter,”
chaotic and awaiting the push into ordered motion.2 Racial
categorization relies upon such geological judgments, Kathryn
Yusoff writes, that divide “matter (corporeal and mineralogical)
into active and inert. Extractable matter must be both passive
(awaiting extraction and possessing of properties) and able to

1 Cara Daggett, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the
Politics of Work (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
2 Ibid., 75. See also Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the
Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2001), 42.

94
 a politics of solar abundance

be activated through the mastery of white men.”3 The evil of

waste, stasis, and indolence, must be overcome, not just locally,
but cosmically, to glean more from the sun’s dissipation. Waste
must be overcome not because it gets in the way of survival, but
because waste stands for the nature that exceeds human con-
trol, for all that the sun fritters away when it promises such an
amassing of motive power.
It may be strange to think of fossil theology as engaged in a
struggle against entropy when massive waste is its byproduct,
and wasteful consumption is its lodestar. But fossil theology, and
its underlying thermodynamic logic, are aware that increasing
the fervor of industrial activity will inevitably increase waste.
Nature’s sins are always with us. It is not about avoiding waste
per se, but of capturing as much energy expenditure as possible.
For fossil theology, this only underlines the importance of an
ever more vigorous exertion of masculinized order: accounting,
surveillance, treatment, discarding into sacrificial zones.

“Be Like the Sun!”

Political struggles against fossil fuels will need to engage with

its theological dimensions and disrupt the affective charge of
its value system. Solarity is particularly well suited as a politi-
cal-theological strategy because it neatly reverses fossil values.
Indeed, the sun is a reminder of natural sin for petrocultures, in
that it offers itself abundantly with no concern for efficient out-
comes. Much of the energy created by its conflagrations radiates
into the cold surround of space, with little discernible effect, at
least to humans. From the perspective of petrocultures, it is only
thanks to creatures on Earth, who receive tiny amounts of that
energy and put it to work, that anything seems to happen at
all. And although the sun offers an abundance of terrific force
each day, our ability to accumulate or hoard it is limited when
compared to fossil fuels. Neither can solar energy be made arti-

3 Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 2–3.

95
solarities

ficially scarce, stymying the primary avenue for profit-making

in fossil capital systems. Finally, the sun is emblematic of natural
decay, of a mortal style of divinity. For although the sun feeds a
glorious explosion of life, dissipation overrides it and, like us,
the sun will die.
And so, while fossil theology is rooted in work and extrac-
tion, urgently pursued against the twin threats of scarcity and
dissipation, the sun gives us an entirely different model. The
iconoclastic theorist Georges Bataille proposed just such a “gen-
eral economy” based upon a heliocentric reading of energy,
arguing that the sun shows how energy abundance, and not
scarcity, best characterizes the cosmic exchanges that comprise
life and death. According to Bataille, the narrower econom-
ics of capitalism are based upon the unfounded assumption
of resource scarcity, which animate the drive to accumulation,
competition, and unlimited growth. But the perception of scar-
city is only ever a local one. A cosmic perspective reveals that
energy is always in excess of what can be used toward growth,
which will face geographical, and not energetic, limits. Energy
excess is the ontological truth of the universe. Bataille’s general
economy takes this cosmic view, inspired by the sun’s expendi-
ture, in excess and “without any return. The sun gives without
ever receiving.”4
A cosmology of abundance finds ultimate meaning in
expenditure, rather than production. Bataille’s general economy
presents giving as a rational response to the dangers of energy
excess. While production can expand in certain contexts, once
the limits of growth are reached, the energy excess “must neces-
sarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not,
gloriously or catastrophically.”5 New technology might offer
expanded opportunities for growth, but it, too, eventually meets
limits. Industrial forces have only intensified the energy surplus
that accumulates, such that “henceforth what matters primarily

4 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. I: Consumption, trans. Robert

Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 28.
5 Ibid., 21.

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 a politics of solar abundance

is no longer to develop the productive forces but to spend their

products sumptuously.”6
Energy becomes political to the extent that it poses problems
for a public. If energy is understood to be fundamentally abun-
dant rather than scarce, then its politics would shift dramatically
in response to a different set of problems. Instead of fossil capi-
tal, whose problem is to find ever more energy to accumulate, a
politics of expenditure confronts the potential perils of energy
excess. The more energy that builds up in time and space, the
more that excess poses an existential threat. Bataille argues that,
because energy “cannot accumulate limitlessly in the produc-
tive forces,” it is bound to escape and be spent, “uselessly” or lav-
ishly.7 Humans have some limited ability to “choose an exuda-
tion that might suit us,” but if they fail to manage the excess, war
and other “catastrophic expenditures” become more likely, as
especially effective means for burning through a massive energy
stockpile.8 This is why a politics of expenditure would both seek
to avoid a dangerous build-up of energy, while continually giv-
ing away energy abundance in ways that promote multispecies
thriving.
Whatever we make of the material claims of Bataille’s notion
of excess, as a political orientation, his calls for expenditure can
feel off-putting to readers worried about wanton fossil-fueled
consumption and the need to recognize limits. Indeed, the
problem we confront today seems to be excess, excess every-
where, and not a limit in sight — to the moon and Mars and
beyond with Tesla trucks, if needs must. Scarcity is still relevant,
of course, but it is too often treated as a challenge for technology
to overcome. And so, environmentalists are led to take up the
call for limits and conservation as the logical counterargument
to late modern capitalism.
However, it is solar abundance, and not anemic calls for
reduction, that is best equipped to counter the cruel pleasures

6 Ibid., 36.
7 Ibid., 23.
8 Ibid., 23–24.

97
solarities

of fossil-fueled life. Abundance has more than tactical advan-

tages. It confronts petrocultures on the terrain of the sacred.
There is an aesthetic and ethical chasm between an approach
that calls for energy limits, for giving things up, and one that
proclaims energy abundance. The ascetic approach finds moral-
ity in foregoing energy expenditure, while the other encourages
the development of better spending and giving. Both involve
limits, and both would likely result in overall reductions in
energy use, but in worlds of abundance, the goal is to limit dan-
gerous accumulation, and to appreciate how cooperative spend-
ing leads to more wellbeing, rather than to demonize consump-
tion itself. In this sense, Allan Stoekl, a close reader of Bataille,
shows how Bataille’s notion of expenditure can function as the
door through which we arrive at a respect for limits, because
limits become merely the means to ensure the continual possi-
bility of spending.9 Oxana Timofeeva interprets it as, “Be like the
sun! — this is basically a Bataillean motto for the possible future
of the political economy adjusted to the planetary scale and bal-
anced with the ecological whole.”10 Be like the sun, rising each
day to give without return.

A Political Economy of Abundance

In terms of a political strategy that could undermine extraction,

solarity suggests paying attention to expenditure, to giving with-
out reference to utility. Fortunately, as Bataille also recognized,
solarities do not need to be invented, and contrary to Bataille’s
focus on premodern gift economies, they are not confined to
the distant past. Biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of
the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, provides important ethical and
scientific arguments for an “economy of abundance” that are

9 Allan Stoekl, “Excess and Depletion: Bataille’s Surprisingly Ethical Model

of Expenditure,” in Reading Bataille Now, ed. Shannon Winnubst (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 265.
10 Oxana Timofeeva, “From the Quarantine to the General Strike: On
Bataille’s Political Economy,” Stasis 9, no. 1 (2020): 154.

98
 a politics of solar abundance

somewhat lacking in Bataille’s more speculative odes to solar

abundance.
Kimmerer encourages us to derive economic lessons from
plants such as serviceberries or Saskatoon trees that “trans-
mute these gifts [light, air, water] into leaves and flowers and
fruits. They store some energy as sugars in the making of their
own bodies, but much of it is shared.”11 In this economic model,
“wealth means having enough to share.” Energy is still the cur-
rency, as it is in fossil capital, but abundant energy is circulated
rather than hoarded. Exchanges are

based upon reciprocity rather than accumulation, where

wealth and security come from the quality of your relation-
ships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency. … Even if [Ser-
viceberries] hoarded abundance, perching atop the wealth
ladder, they would not save themselves from the fate of ex-
tinction if their partners did not share in that abundance.
Hoarding won’t save us either. All flourishing is mutual.12

An economy of abundance recognizes that thriving multispe-

cies worlds, which make human life possible, are constituted by
entangled reciprocities of giving and receiving excess energy.
This contradicts the reigning evolutionary paradigm, which
assumes that the primary driving force of evolution is the strug-
gle over scarce resources. Kimmerer draws upon long-standing
Indigenous knowledge, as well as more recent critical voices
in evolutionary biology, to argue that the scarcity paradigm is
“fiction.” Scarcity arises in certain contexts, of course, but Kim-
merer also emphasizes how capitalism depends upon manufac-
turing artificial scarcity to make a profit. Ironically, she observes
that, as a result of capital accumulation and mass consumerism,
genuine scarcity becomes more common and intense.13 In this

11 Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance,”

Emergence Magazine 9 (December 2020), https://emergencemagazine.org/
essay/the-serviceberry/.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.

99
solarities

way, both Bataille and Kimmerer help us to understand how

excess can be truly dangerous. Giving away abundant energy is
not only ethical, but ecologically advantageous.
While economies of abundance can be nurtured at local
and regional levels, there are likewise transnational policies
that would help enact a shift from petrocultures, anxious about
energy scarcity, to solar cultures that take seriously the respon-
sibilities of abundance. In the North, this would include safely
redistributing the dangerous excesses that are hoarded here and
switching the focus from private extraction to public spend-
ing. Bataille proposes massive transfers of wealth from North
to South, a cancellation of debts, as one way to depressurize the
built-up energy.14 More specifically, and parochially, it might
mean, in the halls of the United States Congress, the rechan-
neling of defense spending toward public health, education, the
building of sumptuous communal spaces, and yes, solar panels
and grids, but developed with collective flourishing in mind,
and not growth-at-all-costs. After all, as David Schwartzmann
argues in his call for “solar communism,” the military-industrial
complex is one of the main culprits in climate change, and it
has been largely ignored by climate justice movements, and by
many Green New Deal proposals.15
Of course, Schwartzmann does not need the notion of a solar
sacred to advance these critiques. And, indeed, Timofeeva points
out that Bataille’s solar economic proposals are totally incom-
patible with global capitalism and would require a revolutionary
politics that remains underdeveloped in Bataille’s writing.16 Nev-
ertheless, where the solar sacred is helpful to eco-Marxist poli-
tics, and arguably indispensable for countering petrocultures, is
in the fraught question of how to mobilize petropeoples, of how
to “convince a planet of demi-gods and gods, and creatures even

14 Bataille, The Accursed Share, 39–40.

15 David Schwartzmann, “Beyond Eco-catastrophism: The Conditions for
Solar Communism,” in Socialist Register 2017: Rethinking Revolution, eds.
Leo Panitch and Greg Albo (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016),
143–60.
16 Timofeeva, “From the Quarantine,” 154–55.

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 a politics of solar abundance

greater than gods, that they want to be mortals. And specific

kinds of mortals: ones who know the attractions and powers of
having once been deities.”17
Petrodemigods are slowly remembering that the sun is a deity,
too, and it is a frightful one to cross. Petropeople like me, whose
ancestors willfully ended so many other lifeworlds through
extraction and possession, are now cowering with other Earth-
lings under the excess heat of solar radiation, trapped under an
atmospheric quilt thickened by fossil fuel emissions. Kimmerer
tells us that “[I]ndigenous story traditions are full of these cau-
tionary teachings. When the gift is dishonored, the outcome
is always material as well as spiritual.”18 Petropeople now fear
the kinds of dystopian conditions that Indigenous peoples have
already endured for centuries, as Kyle Powys Whyte, another
prominent Potawatomi scholar, observes.19 Petropeople live in
“worlds their ancestors would have fantasized about,”20 and the
looming climate crisis is as much about the end of that fantasy
world as it is about the loss of the World more broadly.
That is why the death of the fossil God/Man, that dream of
vanquishing entropy and harnessing the entire sun, will require
more than affixing solar panels to the roof of communism.
Bataille gives us ideas for converting fossil demigods, which, as
the rise of far-right reactionary movements reminds us, include
more than elite capitalists, pointing out that “to solve political
problems becomes difficult for those who allow anxiety alone
to pose them. It is necessary for anxiety to pose them. But
their solution demands at a certain point the removal of this
anxiety.”21 Conservation, metering, measuring our footprints,
reducing our consumption: these are anxious behaviors, and

17 Jeff Diamanti and Imre Szeman, “Nine Principles for a Critical Theory of
Energy,” Polygraph Journal 28 (August 2020): 143.
18 Kimmerer, “The Serviceberry.”
19 Kyle Powys Whyte, “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene:
Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises,” Environment
and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, nos. 1-2 (2018): 226.
20 Ibid., 225.
21 Bataille, The Accursed Share, 14.

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solarities

still posed by fossil subjects, primed to experience the end of

our fossil fantasy world as primarily a loss. It will be mostly a
loss for a small number of fossil elites, to be sure, but there are
more people, like me, who are complicit in and hurt by fossil
violence, who derive both privileges and pain from it. A politics
oriented around solar abundance would mean a better world
for most.
The pursuit of solarity as a political theology can help to
reframe the abolition of fossil fuels in the West, not as the relin-
quishment of the power of demigods, but as the pursuit of a
different kind of glory, and a different kind of pleasure. And
not in the name of sustainability or labor itself, as if the goal
of subsistence could ever provide enough aesthetic resources to
convene a mass desiring-machine, but to spend energetic abun-
dance better, more sumptuously, as gifts without return, with a
luxurious, “wild exuberance”22 that sustains communal wealth
and beauty. In Timofeeva’s vision, “nonproductive expenditure
must be taken seriously and organized as a conscious politics
of gifts without reciprocation — a glorious politics.”23 In this,
it is clear that solarity extends far beyond solar panels and the
grid, and into the entire sociotechnical system of how energy
gets spent. Whereas fossil theology demands extraction as its
sacrifice, including extracting from our labor, our creativity, and
our communities, solarity at least allows petropeoples to ask the
right question: how can we spend energy better?

22 Ibid., 33.
23 Timofeeva, “From the Quarantine,” 155.

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 a politics of solar abundance

References

Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share, Volume I: Consumption.

Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1988.
Clarke, Bruce. Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era
of Classical Thermodynamics. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2001.
Daggett, Cara N. The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels,
Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2019.
Diamanti, Jeff, and Imre Szeman. “Nine Principles for a Critical
Theory of Energy.” Polygraph Journal 28 (August 2020): 137–
50. https://polygraphjournal.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/
polygraph-28_diamanti-and-szeman-article.pdf.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. “The Serviceberry: An Economy of
Abundance.” Emergence Magazine 9 (October 2022). https://
emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-serviceberry/.
Schwartzmann, David. “Beyond Eco-catastrophism: The
Conditions for Solar Communism.” In Socialist Register
2017: Rethinking Revolution, edited by Leo Panitch and Greg
Albo, 143–60. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016.
Stoekl, Allan. “Excess and Depletion: Bataille’s Surprisingly
Ethical Model of Expenditure.” In Reading Bataille Now,
edited by Shannon Winnubst, 252–82. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2007.
Timofeeva, Oxana. “From the Quarantine to the General
Strike: On Bataille’s Political Economy.” Stasis 9, no. 1
(2020): 144–65. DOI: 10.33280/2310-3817-2020-9-1-144-165.
Whyte, Kyle Powys. “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the
Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of
Climate Change Crises.” Environment and Planning
E: Nature and Space 1, nos. 1–2 (2018): 224–42. DOI:
10.1177/2514848618777621.
Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

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 7

Exposure

Jason De León

The cramped room’s only window is the size of a porthole and

relatively useless. It’s hidden behind a dirty blanket that guards
against any hope of natural light or fresh air. On the outside, the
glass is fortified with rusting metal bars. The curtain keeps out
the prying eyes of nosey neighbors and immigration agents. The
bars remind you that you aren’t free to leave, at least not until
your family Western Unions more money to your smuggler.
The bare bulb hanging from the ceiling has become your
sun and moon. Hours, days, and weeks are increasingly illogi-
cal ways to measure your forward progress north. Honduras
to Houston in only two to six months for the bargain price of
around 10,000 USD.
The bustling life of Mexico City carries on outside while a
half-dozen migrants and their smugglers create a world behind
closed doors devoid of clocks, calendars, or sunlight. Waiting
and hiding is a way of life. All you can do is stay occupied while
time laughs.

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solarities

Fig. 1. Migrant Safe House, Lechería, Mexico City. Camera: Nikon

F3. Film: Kodak Tri-X 400. ISO: 3200 (pushed 4 stops). Aperture: 1.2.
Shutter Speed: 1/30. Photograph by the author.

You eventually emerge from prolonged darkness only to be

thrust into the killing heat1 of the Sonoran Desert where at least
4,0242 migrants have died since the 1990s from hyperthermia,
dehydration, and the many other complications that result from
prolonged exposure to the sun. These deaths are the direct result
of the 1994 United States border policy known as “Prevention
Through Deterrence,” a strategy that uses security infrastruc-
ture to funnel migrants toward remote areas in the hope that
extreme temperatures and rugged terrain will be impediments
to human movement.3 In the Sonoran Desert, the sun is the US
Border Patrol’s primary weapon.
Undocumented migration is a life lived in shadows, a con-
stant negotiation with metaphorical and literal exposure.

1 Alex Nading, “Heat,” Society for Cultural Anthropology, April 6, 2016,

https://culanth.org/fieldsights/heat.
2 “Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants,” Humaneborders.info,
n.d., https://humaneborders.info/.
3 Jason De León, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant
Trail (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).

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 exposure

Fig. 2. Memo resting in the shade. Sonoran Desert, July 2009. Kodak
disposable 35mm camera. Photograph taken by Lucho.

Exposure Triangle

Making photographic images is about finding4 and dealing with

light. You cannot take a picture without some bit of electromag-
netic illumination capable of eliciting a response from a roll of
analog film or a digital camera’s sensor. Once a photographer
finds a usable moment of light, she must negotiate with it so
that a legible image can be produced. This negotiation is based
on the balance of three variables — aperture, shutter speed, and
ISO5 — that form the basis of what is called the “exposure trian-
gle.”
As a camera-wielding anthropologist committed to making
visible the humanity and brutality of the migration experience,

4 “Finding” assumes you are not producing your own light with a flash.
5 ISO stands for International Organization for Standardization, an
organization that sets the technological and product standards globally.
However, ISO in relation to cameras refers to either a film’s sensitivity or
the sensitivity of a digital sensor.

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solarities

Fig. 3. Preparing lunch on the Central American Migrant Trail, Chi-

apas, Mexico, 2015. Camera: Nikon F3. Film: Kodak Ultramax. ISO:
400. Aperture: f/8. Shutter Speed: 1/60. Photograph by the author.

I chase light and wrestle with the exposure triangle so that I

can make what John Szarkowski would call a “lively” image,6
a picture that has the potential to expose new ways of seeing
difficult-to-access worlds. However, the process of image mak-
ing is not simply a matter of balancing camera settings. Nor is it
as apolitical as Szarkowski would have us believe.
Anthropologists can’t ignore the fact that the images we make
of people, just like the ethnographies we write about them,7
expose elements of ourselves. This includes how we frame our
practice and the corporeal relationships we have with our sub-
jects.8 In the context of migration, photographic practice is both
a technological negotiation with essential light and an ethical
struggle with an elemental form of nature that can and does kill

6 John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye (New York: Museum of Modern

Art, 1966).
7 Timothy Pachirat, Among Wolves: Ethnography and the Immersive Study of
Power (London: Routledge, 2018).
8 David MacDougall, The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the
Senses (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

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 exposure

Fig. 4. Migrant Safe House, Lechería, Mexico City. Camera: Nikon

F3. Film: Kodak Tri-X 400. ISO: 3200 (pushed 4 stops). Aperture: 1.4.
Shutter Speed: 1/60. Photograph by the author.

people daily. There is perhaps much to be gained by thinking

about the mechanics of picture making as part of the ethno-
graphic encounter.

Aperture

The hole in a camera lens that allows light to pass through it is

called the aperture. It’s often adjustable so that you can make it
bigger or smaller to let in more or less light. In addition, aper-
ture size impacts an image’s depth of field, that is, how much is
in focus. A large aperture gives you a blurred background. A
small aperture gives you sharp focus from the foreground to the
distant horizon.
Ethnography, like aperture, vacillates between construct-
ing an up-close look at an individual’s experience and bringing
into focus the background forces that influence their existence.
Unlike most photography though, the relationship between
foreground and background is not so simple. Ethnography ben-

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solarities

Fig. 5. Killing time on the migrant trail, Pakal Na, Chiapas, Mexico,
2015. Camera: Fuji XT-1. ISO: 400. Aperture: f/5. Shutter Speed: 1/150.
Photograph by the author.

efits from (or perhaps is plagued by) our ability to use words
to complicate the depth of field and its meaning. We can play
with light in order to cast smugglers in shadows to protect their
identity while using depth of field to contemplate the disconnect
between how they view themselves and how they appear to the
world.9

Shutter Speed

An erratically moving guitar string cuts a hot cat scratch into

flesh. The whirling Walkman motor sprays a fine mist of blood
and computer printer ink. The left arm is chosen because the
right one is covered in machete scars, a reminder of what you
are running away from in Honduras.
Cameras are equipped with a shutter that opens and closes to
let light enter. The length of time that light is let in is measured

9 Also see Jason De León, Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World
of Human Smuggling (New York: Viking Press, 2024).

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 exposure

in seconds or fractions of a second (e.g., 1, 1/2, 1/250, etc.). Fast

shutter speeds tend to freeze motion while slow shutter speeds
produce blur and convey a sense of movement.
In 2014, Mexico launched Plan Frontera Sur, an anti-immi-
gration security program supported by the Obama Administra-
tion that aimed to stop the movement of people leaving Central
American headed for the US–Mexico border. This policy led to
an astronomical growth in immigration checkpoints, migrant
detention centers, and armed guards patrolling the freight trains
that migrants were accustomed to hopping on and off on as they
ambled north. To avoid detection, people now walk through
dense jungles where they face a combination of intense heat,
exhaustion, and criminals with a propensity for kidnapping,
robbery, and rape. Mexico and its natural environment have
become a second border for the United States.
Pakal Na is a place many migrants refer to as caliente, not
because the humidity averages 80 percent annually but rather
as a nod to the many immigration agents, gangsters, and locals
looking to exploit and profit from undocumented Central
Americans passing through. Heightened security on the out-
skirts of town and the 100 USD head tax collected by the local
chapter of MS-13 make it hard to get out of Pakal Na safely. It
has become a place where a lot of waiting happens. The Sonoran
Desert, where many are headed, is over 3,000 kilometers away.
Szarkowski posits that all photographs are physical records
of a particular length of time.10 They are also moments of cap-
tured light that sometimes illuminate pain from the past that
continues to exist in the present.

ISO

The light-gathering ability of analog film or a digital sensor in

a camera is referred to as ISO. Higher ISO numbers denote a
greater sensitivity to light. For example, ISO 50 film is optimized
for bright sunlight while ISO 3200 film is designed for extreme

10 Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye, 11.

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solarities

Fig. 6. Still image from digital trail camera video used in forensic
experiments involving pig carcasses serving as proxies for human
bodies, Arivaca, Arizona, 2018. Photograph by the author.

low light conditions. Film with a low ISO (or low ISO settings on
a digital camera) produce a fine grain appearance and tend to
make sharper images.
Over the years, I have conducted multiple forensic experi-
ments in the desert using pigs as proxies for humans. The goal
is to make visible how migrants die and improve our under-
standing of how bodies decompose in this environment. Results
suggest that bodies left in the desert are often quickly destroyed
by weather conditions and scavengers before they can be recov-
ered. The primary animals responsible for this destruction are
turkey vultures who typically wait for a corpse to heat up and
reach a particular state of decomposition before they begin
feeding. Once scavenging begins, a body can be defleshed, dis-
articulated, and scattered far and wide in less than seventy-two
hours. In this environment, the sun kills you and then cooks
your body in preparation for making it disappear.
By design, migrants die in remote parts of the desert where
there are no cameras or witnesses. We are not supposed to see
the human costs of Prevention Through Deterrence or the des-
ecration and disappearance of bodies. This brutality happens
under bright sunlight and yet it is impossible to photograph.

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 exposure

Exposure Value

Margaret Mead argues that photographs can correct the errors

in observation that ethnographers are likely to commit early in
their fieldwork.11 According to her logic, the pictures one pro-
duces are never naïve or experienced, they are simply unadul-
terated snippets of real life. I disagree with Mead. Over the
years, my relationship with photography has evolved and forced
a constant questioning of its practice, veracity, logic, and worth.
My frustrations have made me better at negotiating with avail-
able light and increased my sensitivity to the geometry of expo-
sure and its inherent politics.

Case Number: 12-01567

Name: Carmita Maricela Zhagui Pulla
Sex: Female
Age: 30
Reporting Date: 7-2-2012
Location: N 31.8322 W -111.278
Cause of Death: Exposure
Body Condition: Decomposed
Postmortem Interval: <1 week

We covered Maricela with this blanket and sat for hours until
the Sheriff arrived and took her away. While we waited, I made
a couple dozen images of her body. I didn’t know what else
to do with myself. Photography gave me temporary purpose.
Maybe I was collecting evidence of a human rights violation.
Maybe looking at her through a lens made me less sensitive to
an incomprehensible reality. Camera work kept me from crying
or screaming in front of my students about the world of crush-
ing heartbreak and everyday injustice that migrants endure. It
stopped me from railing against what often feels like anthropol-

11 Gerald Sullivan, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Highland Bali:

Fieldwork Photographs of Bayung Gedé, 1936–1999 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press 1999), 4.

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solarities

Fig. 7. Sonoran Desert. Camera: Pentax 67ii. Film: Kodak Ektar 100.
ISO: 125. Aperture: f/11. Shutter Speed: 1/125. Photograph by the author.

ogy’s futile attempts to create shared understanding and empa-

thy. I would do those things later in private.
This photo is from January 2020. The blanket still rests in
the location where Maricela exhaled her last breath. Every year
I visit this spot and take this picture. I now know that it doesn’t
matter how many pictures of the dead we take or how in focus
or well composed they are. People are still dying in the desert
from hyperthermia, exposure, and whatever else nature, under
the watchful eye of the US Border Patrol, can cook up. The body
is gone but this landscape of violent light persists.

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 exposure

References

“Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants.”

Humaneborders.info, n.d. https://humaneborders.info/.
De León, Jason. Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the
World of Human Smuggling. New York: Viking Press, 2024.
———. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the
Migrant Trail. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.
MacDougall, David. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography,
and the Senses. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Nading, Alex. “Heat.” Society for Cultural Anthropology, April 6,
2016. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/heat.
Pachirat, Timothy. Among Wolves: Ethnography and the
Immersive Study of Power. London: Routledge, 2018.
Sullivan, Gerald. Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and
Highland Bali: Fieldwork Photographs of Bayung Gedé,
1936–1999. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Szarkowski, John. The Photographer’s Eye. New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 1966.

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 8

Concrete Solarities

Cristián Simonetti

In a 2019 interview with The Economist on the occasion of

his 100th birthday, Nobel Prize winner famous for his Gaia
Hypothesis, James Lovelock, proposed a four-point plan to save
humankind from climate disaster. It is the first point I focus
on here. According to Lovelock, humans should first retreat to
megacities. The proposal responded largely to the 140 million
people expected to migrate from their countries by 2050 as a
result of climate change. In Lovelock’s words: “Humans should
go to megacities if they want to avoid the worst dangers of cli-
mate change. Mainly because a city is a smaller unit to control
and regulate the composition of the atmosphere, the soil. Rather
similar to the nests of invertebrates of various kinds: ants, wasps,
bees.”1 Key to this proposal in an awareness foundational to the
Gaia Hypothesis, wherein the earth behaves like a single com-
plex self-regulating living entity. According to it, the soil plays

1 The full plan included in the following order: 1) “Retreat to Megacities”;

2) “Use Nuclear Energy”; 3) “Artificially Control the Earth’s Temperature”;
and 4) “Let Artificial Intelligence Take Over.” See The Economist, “How to
Save Humankind (According to James Lovelock),” YouTube, July 26, 2019,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuGj5n_vYz4.

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solarities

Fig. 1. “Without the sun there is no happiness.” Santiago residents

protesting about urbanization blocking sunlight. Photograph by the
author.

a crucial role in regulating the atmosphere’s composition, as

plants exchange nutrients and energy across earth and sky.
Yet when considering its etymology, the word “disaster”
underlying Lovelock’s proposal is a fitting term to describe how
urban dwellers have increasingly found themselves. From the
late-medieval Latin “dis” and “astrum,” the latter linked to the
Greek term “astron,” the word refers to a state of disorienta-
tion resulting from a sudden disconnection from the stars. This
is precisely the state in which urban dwellers in Santiago find
themselves at times nowadays, as the campaign “without the
sun there is no happiness” lead by local residents in Santiago
illustrate; residents who experience isolation from the sun as
their city grows in height (fig. 1). Historically, lack of sunlight
has been responsible for a number of health issues in the human
populations, most notably rickets, a bone-deformation disease
described initially in northern Europe by the Polish scientist
Jędrzej Śniadecki at the time of the industrial revolution when
buildings were increasingly constructed in close proximity, and

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 concrete solarities

smoke from coal burning clouded the urban atmosphere. Dis-

eases related to sunlight deprivation also include osteomalacia
and osteoporosis in adults, as well as multiple other long-term
conditions.2 Understanding the relationship between sunlight
and bone health spurred global campaigns in the 1930s to
enrich dairy products with vitamin D. This ancient hormone
has been produced for over 500 million years by some of the
earliest forms of life on earth and is critical to the metaboliza-
tion of calcium, affecting skeletal health in most vertebrates.3
Lovelock’s proposal is paradoxical in yet more profound
ways. To achieve massive urbanization cost-effectively would
require the use of concrete on a scale that would obscenely
exceed the current rates of production and consumption of the
fastest-growing economies today. These would include China
which, during the past decade, has produced and consumed in
only three years more concrete than the United States has in its
entire history. In its association with steel, concrete is arguably
the material that has most significantly contributed to spread
modernity’s narrative of progress, the very same narrative sig-
naled often as responsible for the current environmental crisis.
Advancing forwards on the road of civilization, concrete has
provided modernity with a solid and impermeable platform
from which to transcend its rural origins while suffocating the
exchange of nutrients and energy on which soil formation and
plant growth, empowered by sunlight, have depended geologi-
cally.4 Moreover, concrete is also a substantial contributor to
global warming because the production of cement, concrete’s
agglutinating substance, is alone responsible for between 5 and
8 percent of global carbon emissions — figures that can increase

2 These include multiple sclerosis, hypertension, cancer, diabetes, and

depression, among others.
3 Matthias Wacker and Michael F. Holick, “Sunlight and Vitamin D: A
Global Perspective for Health,” Dermato-endocrinology 5, no. 1 (2013):
51–108.
4 Cristián Simonetti and Tim Ingold, “Ice and Concrete: Solid Fluids of
Environmental Change,” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5, no. 1
(2018): 19–31.

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solarities

by up to 10 percent, depending on the academic source, signifi-

cantly exceeding the impact of more notorious industries such
as air transport.
Interestingly, despite the cosmological isolation that concrete
generates as urban infrastructure rises, concrete production is
silently tied to the powers of our primary star. Cement results
from the burning of limestone, a sedimentary rock made of
petrified shells, the appearance of which relates closely to the
emergence of bones in evolution, both resulting from a sudden
calcification of the oceans that occurred when calcium appeared
in the fossil record. Emerging out of this calcification was the
so-called Cambrian explosion, an intense diversification of life-
forms out of which most animal phyla known today emerged.
In burning the remaining exoskeletons of sea creatures that for-
merly constituted ancient, submerged reefs, urban dwellers have
somewhat created their own reefs on land to protect their fragile
bodies. But this has come at an extremely high prize. Not only
have they deprived themselves of the exchange of nutrients and
energy on which plant growth depends at the ground level, but
people’s relationship to the cosmos, and the sun in particular,
appears increasingly abject with the rise of urban infrastructure.
Moreover, in their Prometheus efforts to emulate the powers
of the sun on earth, humans have put themselves at risk from its
influence by warming the planet — an influence of which life on
earth, human and other-than-human, is simultaneously a prod-
uct. Inside a rotary kiln at Melón, the oldest industry to pro-
duce cement in Chile, furnaces operate at around 1900º Celsius,
that is, a third of the sun’s surface temperature (fig. 2).5 This is
accomplished by burning fossilized shells with fossil fuels, both
of which are nothing but fossilized sunlight. The joint calcina-
tion of these substances releases approximately a kilogram of
CO₂ per kilogram of cement produced, contributing irrevers-

5 To reduce carbon emissions, a recent start-up funded by Bill Gates has

been unsuccessfully exploring the possibility of condensing solar light to
produce cement. Daniel Oberhaus, “A Solar ‘Breakthrough’ Won’t Solve
Cement’s Carbon Problem,” Wired, November 22, 2019, https://www.wired.
com/story/a-solar-breakthrough-wont-solve-cements-carbon-problem/.

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 concrete solarities

Fig. 2. Inside Melón’s rotary kiln. Photograph by the author.

ibly to the acceleration of global warming through the absorp-

tion of sunlight into the atmosphere.
Reflecting on the relationship between solar energy and
concrete is critical when thinking of the human condition in
the Anthropocene.6 With more than 50 percent of the world’s
population now living in cities, concrete is not only currently
the most abundant building material surrounding humans
but, according to many, including Lovelock, their only escape
from climate disaster. Furthermore, it is also the most abundant
anthropic rock ever produced in earth history, the vast surfaces
of which, poured mostly over the past century, make the material
a candidate to mark the stratigraphic onset of the new epoch.7
Famously baptized in Victorian times by Joseph Aspidin as an
“artificial rock,” concrete resonates intimately with the image of
an epoch defined by humanity’s capacity to become a geological

6 Cristián Simonetti, “Dwelling in the Anthropocene,” in Global Changes:

Ethics, Politics and Environment in the Contemporary Technological World,
eds. Luca Valera and Juan Carlos Castilla (New York: Springer Open,
2020), 141–51.
7 Colin Waters and Jan Zalasiewicz, “Concrete: The Most Abundant Novel
Rock Type of the Anthropocene,” in Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene, vol.
1: Geologic History and Energy, ed. Scott Elias (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2018),
75–86.

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solarities

force of planetary proportions. Natural yet cultural, geological

yet social, this synthetic rock sits literally on the edge of both,
especially knowing how separations between matter and spirit
have been mapped traditionally in the western imagination on
a division between earth and sky.8 Since its modern rediscovery,
enough concrete has been poured to separate momentarily the
entire surface of the earth from the sky with a kilogram of con-
crete for every square meter.
Perhaps, after much discussion on terminology, the new
epoch should be named the Concretocene, a term that can do
justice both to the interests of geologists and humanities schol-
ars involved respectively in discussions around how to date
and to name the new epoch. Whereas stratigraphers have been
focusing their efforts in finding a globally isochronous marker
to signal the start of the new epoch, humanities scholars have
been concerned with how the term masks an unequal distribu-
tion of environmental responsibility.9 Concrete provides a rela-
tively isochronous marker in geological timescales that is widely
distributed and that provides a distinct cartographic clue as to
who on earth is largely responsible for the environmental cri-
sis.10
Bearing in mind the importance of concrete’s use for the
growth of Chile’s neoliberal experiment, it is somewhat unsur-
prising that, since the October 18, 2019 riots, much of the dis-
content Santiaguino protesters have expressed has been so
directly focused on upsetting this anthropic stratum. Protest-
ers at the front lines have organized into clans, where members
assume different roles in their fight against Carabineros, Chilean
police forces. In charge of procuring weapons from the urban

8 Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description

(London: Routledge, 2011), 95.
9 Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique
of the Anthropocene Narrative,” Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (2014):
62–69.
10 Cristián Simonetti and Tim Ingold, “Ice and Concrete: Solid Fluids of
Environmental Change,” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5, no. 1
(2018): 19–31.

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 concrete solarities

Fig. 3. Miner. Photograph by Laura González Márquez.

landscapes, in this case concrete stones, are so-called “miners,”

whose systematic work over the months have turned Plaza de la
Dignidad, the area designated as the battlefield, literally into a
mining ground (fig. 3).11 For many protesters this mining ground
is now a symbol of a fight for social equity, as well as indigenous
and environmental rights, against private interests.

11 The plaza known officially as Plaza Baquedano, site of most protests and
celebrations in Santiago, was re-baptized by protesters as Plaza de la
Dignidad. Magdalena Claude, “Retrato de un Clan de la Primera Línea,”
CIPER, January 6, 2020, https://ciperchile.cl/2020/01/06/retrato-de-un-
clan-de-la-primera-linea/.

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solarities

References

Claude, Magdalena. “Retrato de un Clan de la Primera Línea.”

CIPER, January 6, 2020. https://ciperchile.cl/2020/01/06/
retrato-de-un-clan-de-la-primera-linea/.
Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and
Description. London: Routledge, 2011.
Malm, Andreas, and Alf Hornborg. “The Geology of Mankind?
A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative.” Anthropocene
Review 1, no. 1 (2014): 62–69. DOI: 10.1177/2053019613516291.
Oberhaus, Daniel. “A Solar ‘Breakthrough’ Won’t Solve
Cement’s Carbon Problem.” Wired, November 22, 2019.
https://www.wired.com/story/a-solar-breakthrough-wont-
solve-cements-carbon-problem/.
Simonetti, Cristián. “Dwelling in the Anthropocene.” In
Global Changes: Ethics, Politics and Environment in the
Contemporary Technological World, edited by Luca Valera
and Juan Carlos Castilla, 141–51. New York: Springer Open,
2020.
Simonetti, Cristián, and Tim Ingold. “Ice and Concrete: Solid
Fluids of Environmental Change.” Journal of Contemporary
Archaeology 5, no. 1 (2018): 19–31. DOI: 10.1558/jca.33371.
The Economist. “How to Save Humankind (According to
James Lovelock).” YouTube, July 26, 2019. https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=HuGj5n_vYz4.
Wacker, Matthias, and Michael F. Holick. “Sunlight and
Vitamin D: A Global Perspective for Health.” Dermato-
endocrinology 5, no. 1 (2013): 51–108. DOI: 10.4161/
derm.24494.
Waters, Colin, and Jan Zalasiewicz. “Concrete: The Most
Abundant Novel Rock Type of the Anthropocene.” In
Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene, Volume 1: Geologic
History and Energy, edited by Scott Elias, 75–86.
Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2018.

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 9

Affective Energy

Myles Lennon

As we imagine a world beyond fossil fuels, we often dream

about the sun. We fixate in particular on its capacity to generate
solar electricity, declaring, for instance: “The Sun emits enough
power onto Earth each second to satisfy […] human energy
demand for over two hours.”1 While this sentiment is focused on
the sun’s solar energy, I want to suggest that it is partly animated
by the sun’s affective energy, the ways it “saturates the corporeal,
intimate, and political performances of adjustment” that make
“a shared atmosphere […] palpable.”2
We can detect such affective energy when we bask beneath
the sun’s rays or feel its warmth on our skin, as these encoun-
ters invoke a sense of something beyond ourselves, a “shared
atmosphere,” one of tropical leisure or a warming planet or the
sweltering discomfort of summer. This affective energy is per-
haps most detectable in the sun’s visually arresting glare when it
interacts with other forms of matter to produce what we com-

1 Emily Kerr, “The Future of Solar Is Bright,” Harvard University, The School
of Arts and Sciences: Science in the News, March 21, 2019, http://sitn.hms.
harvard.edu/flash/2019/future-solar-bright/.
2 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011),
16.

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solarities

Fig. 1. Digital rendering of the shiny pastoralized solar panel. This

images resembles those in the activists’ PowerPoint. Image created by
Cynthia Zhang.

monly call shine. As we will see, the captivating sight of this

shine compels us to imagine the power of the sun in ways that
exceed the crude distillations of megawatts and gigajoules that
make palpable the nebulous idea of sustainable futures. As an
anthropologist researching solar infrastructure in New York
City, I found that shine affectively informs energy transitions
from fossil fuels to renewables, enabling us to imagine, feel, and
pursue the technological natures of tomorrow.
This affective energy first felt acute to me not when I was
basking in the sun’s rays but, instead, when I was sitting in the
back of a small, poorly lit room at a community-based organiza-
tion’s office in Brooklyn in the company of two dozen grassroots
activists from all parts of the city. Focused on bringing solar
to dense urban communities, this meeting resembled similar
gatherings in cities throughout the country where local lead-
ers devise strategies to “green the ghetto” through renewable
energy. Indeed, solar is often imagined as a source of “sustain-
ability” for metropolitan spaces that have traditionally been
regarded as the antithesis of nature.
The activists and I were watching a PowerPoint presentation
on how solar energy works. Prepared by the community-based
organization, the PowerPoint was supposed to inform local

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 affective energy

renewable energy advocates about the specifics of solar elec-

tricity technologies and local energy policies and regulations.
It consisted of several slides that visualized these technologies
with hyperreal, digital images and cartoon illustrations accom-
panied by written information. Yet, in spite of the dense urban
location of our meeting, all but one of these images showed
solar farms in idealized pastoral settings rather than in city
environments, and the panels shone across green, grassy fields
beneath a blue sky and a bright sun without buildings or any
trace of city life (fig. 1). Why would an organization based in
and exclusively focused on a massive metropolis give a presen-
tation to local activists that situates solar not in an urban setting
but in a pastoral one?
This question demands we look beyond the community
organization’s stated purpose in preparing the presentation, that
is, their interest in informing the activists. After all, PowerPoints
are not just about conveying factual information, they are also
about eliciting interest in a topic at hand, captivating an audi-
ence. As such, an effective PowerPoint hits certain emotional
registers and subtly resonates with people’s hopes, wants, fears,
and dreams. A close look at the pastoral images makes evident
that they were intended to do this affective work. Instead of
didactically breaking down how solar infrastructure operates,
these visuals were used to entice their viewers by aestheticizing
the affect of the sun in several ways.
First, these images visualized shine, calling attention to the
sun’s glistening vitality. Literary scholar Anne Cheng aptly illu-
minates the affectivity of shine. She explains: “Shine offers less a
description or quality of light than an active mode of relational-
ity: a dynamic medium through which the organic and the inor-
ganic fuse.”3 We can identify this “active mode of relationality”
at the point in these images where the sun’s rays intersect with
a flat anthropogenic surface, the solar panel. This shiny inter-
section evinces the sort of organic-inorganic fusion that Cheng

3 Anne Cheng, “Shine: On Race, Glamour, and the Modern,” PMLA 126, no.
4 (2011): 1034.

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solarities

describes as a biospheric phenomenon (the sun) conjoined with

a manufactured energy technology. The visual simulation of
the panels’ shine, then, attempts to endow an electricity com-
modity with the feel of a natural process, the organic liveliness
often attributed to the sun’s rays. In other words, the images’
aestheticized shine evokes conceptions of the sun as a site of
nature, affectively transferring these conceptions onto a man-
made machine.
In the process, the shine in these images accents a broader
rendering of the solar panels as a naturally occurring form of life
embedded in nonhuman landscapes. Consider fig. 1, which situ-
ates solar panels in a seemingly vast, unchanging field of grass
beneath a sunny sky. The panels form the horizon of this pasto-
ral scene, as if they’re the natural outgrowth of the land. As the
visual line between sky and ground, the panels appear like they
sprouted organically from the grassy plain. Absent from this
pastoral view is the host of industrialized relations that make
solar panels possible: the extraction of silicon, the unhealthy
labor conditions of photovoltaic production, the processing and
dumping of toxic silicon tetrachloride, the panels’ interconti-
nental fossil-fueled supply chains, and so forth.4 Furthermore,
no people are to be found in this image and the solar panels
don’t seem to be powering anything in particular. The solar
technologies and the space they inhabit appear bereft of human
intention or human society, a curious elision given that activ-
ists were using these images with the ultimate aim of catalyzing
social movement-building in their urban communities.
The sun’s shine, the panels’ embeddedness in the ground, and
the dearth of humans in these images work to naturalize solar
energy production. Industrialized commodities appear embed-
ded in “nature” here, distant from the anthropogenic environ-
ments of late capitalism that have made them possible. As such,

4 Daniel Nugent and Brian Sovacool, “Assessing the Lifecycle Greenhouse

Gas Emissions from Solar PV and Wind Energy: A Critical Meta-survey,”
Energy Policy 65 (February 2014): 229–44, and Ozzie Zehner, Green Illu-
sions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmental-
ism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012).

128
 affective energy

these images resonate with hegemonic imaginaries of nature in

postindustrial cities,5 attesting to the modern will to “return” to
“the” land without an imprint of modernity.
At the same time, the PowerPoint’s shiny images visualize a
nature imagined by a public that looks for life not only beyond
the human but also within their anthropogenic landscape. We
can detect this gaze, for instance, at Manhattanhenge, an annual
event in which New Yorkers gawk at the sunset on the days in
which it’s optimally aligned with Manhattan’s street grid, seek-
ing out the vitality of the cosmos when the city skyline glistens.
Such entrancement, though, is not particular to this annual
event. Innumerable city dwellers every day watch the city’s sky-
scrapers with fascination when these towers are kissed by the
sun during its descent, engrossed with their environment as the
yellow orb in the sky makes their buildings shine. This affec-
tion for the sun is perhaps most legible at public protests against
proposed high-rise developments focused on the obstructive
shadows of luxury towers. At these events, New Yorkers literally
deify the sun with Venetian masks, calling on elected officials to
“save our sunlight.” Pastoral solar images seek to tap into these
postindustrial relations with the sun, engendering an emotional
connection between the PowerPoint’s urban audience and
shiny infrastructural commodities made in China. In this way,
the PowerPoint’s shine locates solar in what William Cronon
calls the domesticated sublime,6 an external nature that mod-
ern subjects paradoxically identify in manmade landscapes.
Amidst this domesticated sublime, the sun’s affective energy
blurs boundaries between the built environment and more-
than-human life.
It is significant that the PowerPoint aestheticizes the sun’s
affect in ways that transform solar infrastructure into a visual

5 K. Sivaramakrishnan and Ismael Vaccaro, “Introduction: Postindustrial

Natures: Hyper-mobility and Place-Attachments,” Social Anthropology 14,
no. 3 (October 2006): 301–17.
6 William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in
Nature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995).

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solarities

trope of nature because one could deduce from its images that
the panels “naturally” tap into the sun’s energy without the
assistance of engineers, transnational supply chains, permits,
installers, contractors, plastics, chemicals, fossil fuels, or any
of the other actors and entities involved in the production of
a solar farm. The aestheticized affect of the sun, then, dislo-
cates us from the solar panels’ means of production, calling us
to fetishize an industrial technology as an offshoot of the natu-
ral world. Indeed, many New Yorkers consciously subscribe to
the pastoralized conception of the solar panel that these images
visualize, sharing their visions of clean energy futures that align
us with the trees, forests, and air. This is particularly fascinating
when we consider dominant theories of commodity fetishism
that suggest that commodities alienate us from nature. In these
images, commodities are instead fetishized on the grounds
that they can overcome such alienation. While solar panels and
iPhones are made under comparable conditions with many of
the same industrial materials, the sun enables us to see one of
these as more natural than the other.
But the sun’s affective energy is not the only or even the pri-
mary reason why an urban activist might affiliate solar panels
with a normative understanding of nature. As an infrastructure
for reducing humans’ greenhouse gas emissions and pollution
from the power sector, solar technology is an integral part of
a contemporary naturalist ethos that views “the environment”
as something that can be saved from the destructive impacts of
fossil fuels. Solar power has long been understood as an antidote
to the denigration of “the” climate and it therefore seamlessly
coheres with liberal ideologies of nature that view it as external
to human society. Put differently, the capacity of solar to quanti-
fiably reduce greenhouse gas emissions has the effect of natural-
izing solar technologies.
But in the PowerPoint, the panels appear not as a mitigation
device to forestall humanity’s impacts on an already degraded
environment. Instead, the panels appear as a part of a peace-
ful, pristine environment, existing and operating independently
of humanity and its destructive whims. The significance of this

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 affective energy

image, then, lies not in the fact it associates solar with a broad
conception of external nature but, rather, in the ways it aestheti-
cizes shine to situate an anthropogenic technology in only a
particular pastoral vision. The sun’s affective energy conditions
this very particular erasure of the human, and solarity conspires
with silicon machines in a moment of climate catastrophe to
inspire an ethos of nonhuman nature.
The pastoralization of solar is by no means particular to a few
activists’ PowerPoint images in New York City. While city dwell-
ers want to know and see how solar works in their dense urban
environments, and while solar advocates in the city very fre-
quently display images of solar on urban rooftops in their Pow-
erPoints, pastoralized solar nonetheless persists in visual ren-
derings of the “clean-energy future” that circulate in city spaces
imagined to be divorced from nature and in the testimonies of
people who inhabit these city spaces. When we recognize the
ways in which the sun’s affective energy, not just its solar energy,
animate our energy politics, we can shift our efforts away from a
historically violent naturalism that separates humans from “the
environment” and confront the limitations of our technologies
while we do the difficult work of moving beyond fossil fuels.
Indeed, solar energy is a necessary improvement but not a
panacea to our ills, a distinction that’s easy to miss when you’re
entranced by the sun’s shine.

131
solarities

References

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University

Press, 2011.
Cheng, Anne. “Shine: On Race, Glamour, and the
Modern.” PMLA 126, no. 4 (2011): 1022–41. DOI: 10.1632/
pmla.2011.126.4.1022.
Cronon, William. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human
Place in Nature. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995.
Graham, Megan. “NEE and IFN Generate Green Energy
Returns.” Next Investors, September 4, 2018. https://finfeed.
com/opinion/the-green-keeper/nee-and-ifn-generate-
green-energy-returns/.
Hyder, Zeeshan. “The Ultimate Guide to Solar Energy.” Solar
Reviews, January 23, 2023. https://www.solarreviews.com/
blog/solar-power-comprehensive-guide.
Kerr, Emily. “The Future of Solar Is Bright.” Harvard University,
The School of Arts and Sciences: Science in the News, March
21, 2019. http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2019/future-
solar-bright/.
Nugent, Daniel, and Brian Sovacool. “Assessing the Lifecycle
Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Solar PV and Wind
Energy: A Critical Meta-survey.” Energy Policy 65 (February
2014): 229–44. DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2013.10.048
Sivaramakrishnan, K., and Ismael Vaccaro. “Introduction:
Postindustrial Natures: Hyper-mobility and Place-
Attachments.” Social Anthropology 14, no. 3 (October 2006):
301–17. DOI: 10.1017/S0964028206002643.
Tiwari, Gyan Prakash. “Why Rooftop Solar Systems are
Generating Less Than Ground Mounted Solar System
and How Can We Improve This by a Better Solar System
Design.” My Sun, February 27, 2017. https://www.itsmysun.
com/system-design-solar-generation-rooftop/.
Zehner, Ozzie. Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean
Energy and the Future of Environmentalism. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2012.

132
 10

Asolarity: Weaponized Sunlight

Ian J. Alexander and Nicole Starosielski

Even as it is broadcast across the planet’s surface, sunlight is not

an equally accessible resource. It is mediated by architectures
that block solar rays. It is mediated by social practices that posi-
tion some bodies in the sun, while depriving others of sunlight. It
is mediated by words, sounds, and images that condition solar’s
material possibilities. Access to sunlight affects human and non-
human organisms at the cellular and molecular levels, and dep-
rivation of sunlight has devastating health consequences, such
as impeding the body’s ability to defend itself from viruses like
SARS-CoV-2. Even if most phenomena are entangled with the
sun, “solar media” refract these rays through a political topog-
raphy, and as a result, sunlight manifests as social form.1 Solar
media, as we discuss here, range from buildings that amplify
solar rays, to technologies such as windows that increase solar
exposure, to discourses that normalize social relations with the
sun.

1 For a detailed description of solar mediation and solar media, see Shane
Brennan, “Practices of Sunlight: Visual and Cultural Politics of Solar
Energy in the United States,” PhD diss., New York University, 2017.

133
solarities

By paying attention to solar media, it is clear that solarity is

not simply an orientation to sunpower that scaffolds biological
and social growth, and it extends through numerous forms of
social violence. It is weaponized in border patrol.2 It is used to
amplify military force. And as it illuminates film and photogra-
phy, sunlight literally forms the medium of colonial and racist
visibilities and photographic struggles against these visual tools
of domination. This has a long history, documented in Thomas
Allen Harris’s film Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers
and the Emergence of a People (2014) and exemplified in work
like LaToya Ruby Frazier’s haunting collection of photographs
and reflections on her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania,
The Notion of Family.3 Beyond the multitude of solar violences
that work via exposure and overexposure, in which available
materials are often engineered to intensify solar heat in people’s
bodies, violence is also enacted through the asolar, the creation
of social forms in which sunlight is not only absent, but blocked
as a means of inflicting bodily harm and social disaggregation.
We consider one site where the asolar has long been a means
of violence: the prison. Inside the prison, captors enact harm
through a multitude of mediated forms — architectural, tech-
nological, and discursive. In sweatboxing, wooden boxes are
used to amplify the sun’s rays, intensifying heat in the bodies of
people constrained inside. However, as we describe below, the
asolar, and the deprivation of sunlight, has been a key tactic of
carceral violence. It is impossible, in the prison, to secure even
the most basic of “human rights,” that is, the capacity to encoun-
ter the sun.4 Describing a critical struggle against the South

2 Jason De León, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant
Trail (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
3 LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Notion of Family (New York: Aperture, 2014).
4 We use the term “human right” with hesitation, heeding the interventions
of Sylvia Wynter, Frank B. Wilderson III, and other critics of the category
of “human” and its anti-Black, racial-colonial deployment, as well as the
well-documented use of “human rights” discourse for justification of
imperial aggression. See Dan Kovalik, No More War: How the West Vio-
lates International Law by Using “Humanitarian” Intervention to Advance

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 asolarity

Carolina Department of Corrections, and the broader context

of using solar media in solitary confinement, we explore how
asolar environments have been weaponized. In turn, we argue
that counter-mediations of sunlight made by those held captive
articulate a redistribution of sunlight as necessary to freedom.

“Sunlight Is a Human Right”

In October of 2019, prisoners held by the South Carolina

Department of Corrections (SCDC) and their free-world sup-
porters called upon the United Nations (UN) to intervene and
see that the state’s prisoners’ demands for basic dignity were
met. Organizers and activists used the slogan “Sunlight is a
Human Right” to draw attention to the horrific conditions of
SCDC’s facilities and the prisoners’ demands in response. Those
demands included access to basic educational and recreational
programs, and improvement to conditions that included “24
hour solitary confinement without cause, mold, contaminated
water, spoiled food, filthy air rushing in all day, no chairs, no
tables, no radios, no television, no access to legal work, and no
access to showers.”5 The letter, addressed and delivered to the
UN, argues that the conditions produced and maintained by the
United States’s carceral apparatus violates international law, and
warrants a formal intervention drawing on the tradition of the
1951 petition to the UN, We Charge Genocide, signed by W.E.B.
Du Bois and Claudia Jones among other Black communists and
activists and delivered by Paul Robeson and William Patterson.6

Economic and Strategic Interests (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2020),

and Neda Atanasoski, Humanitarian Violence: The US Deployment of
Diversity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2013).
5 “Sunlight Is a Human Right — International Humanitarian Intervention
Called for By South Carolina Prisoners,” Incarcerated Workers Organiz-
ing Committee, October 23, 2020, https://incarceratedworkers.org/news/
sunlight-human-right-international-humanitarian-intervention-called-
south-carolina-prisoners.
6 William Patterson, We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government against
the Negro People (New York: International Publishers, 1970).

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solarities

In this call for intervention, sunlight was not only an organ-

izing discursive frame, but a vital substance withheld from
those inside. By appealing to the UN, situating themselves in
the tradition of We Charge Genocide, and employing the slogan
“Sunlight is a Human Right,” South Carolina prison organizers
undermined the white supremacist juridical epistemology of
rights and genocide. They wielded what Dylan Rodriguez calls
“a de-provincialized genocide concept” that worked to “burst
the discursive seams of prevailing languages that avert direct
and substantive reference to conditions of normalized, broadly
unrecognized forms of systemically induced suffering and
degradation.” This was enacted in both discourse and action,
enfolding solar access into what Rodriguez calls a “poetics of
genocide.”7
The prisoners’ third demand reads:

3. We demand the South Carolina Department of Correc-

tions remove all steel coverings off of all windows prohibiting
sunlight from entering through the cell windows.8

These steel coverings are a form of asolar media, installed to

fully block sunlight and air circulation in the 9-by-11-foot of
mostly two-person cells where many prisoners were and con-
tinue to be held for up to twenty-four hours per day. The incar-
cerated organizers’ letter pointed out that the purely and cruelly
punitive measure depriving prisoners of sunlight is a clear vio-
lation of the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of
Prisoners, known as the Nelson Mandela Rules. Rule 14, section
(a) requires that “windows shall be large enough to enable the
prisoners to read or work by natural light, and shall be so con-
structed that they can allow the entrance of fresh air whether or
not there is artificial ventilation.”9 The Mandela Rules, requir-

7 Dylan Rodríguez, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics

of Genocide (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 147, 153.
8 “Sunlight Is a Human Right.”
9 The United Nations Department of Drugs and Crime, The United Nations
Standard Minimum Rules for Treatment of Prisoners (The Nelson Mandela

136
 asolarity

ing natural adequate reading and writing light, clearly designate

sunlight as a vital substance. The SCDC’s light-depriving steel
plates go much further than solar restriction. They are a form
of violent asolarity, one that leverages people’s biological reli-
ance on the sun to re-weaponize the architectural, social, and
psychic environment of the prison, inflicting the harm of total
darkness. One captive, speaking anonymously with journalist
Kelly Hayes, described “a desperate environment, where prison-
ers brawled in cells without interruption, and where prisoners
experiencing mental health crises were ‘slicing themselves with
razors.’”10
In order to understand the violence of the SCDC, it is criti-
cal to understand how the prison is an architecture of environ-
mental violence already. Prisons are designed as such efficient
chambers of deprivation and withholding that only a single
sheet of cheap steel is required to push captives into days-long
sunlessness. The steel sheet is not in itself the only technology
of asolarity here. It is simply the final one in a long chain of light
removing processes and structures: enforced immobility, cin-
derblock, police, courts, parole officers, anti-Blackness, and the
law. All of these carceral technologies contribute to the produc-
tion of the asolar environment, the deprivation of sunlight, and
the threat of darkness.
The effect here of asolar violence is not simply individual
harm, a mere separation of prisoner from environment, light,
and life. In prisons, human beings are locked together in tiny
cages, harassed and assaulted, served inadequate and spoiled
food, and deprived of clean water, and all of these techniques
are meant to simultaneously enact individualized punishment
and at the same time catalyze group punishment. The asolar
environment produced so easily by SCDC simply by sliding a

Rules), December 17, 2015, https://www.unodc.org/documents/justice-and-

prison-reform/GA-RESOLUTION/E_ebook.pdf.
10 Kelly Hayes, “South Carolina Prisoners Appeal to the UN for Relief From
Torturous Conditions,” TruthOut, November 1, 2019, https://truthout.
org/articles/south-carolina-prisoners-appeal-to-the-un-for-relief-from-
torturous-conditions/.

137
solarities

steel plate between a prisoner and natural light is used to push

even the most resilient prisoners past their limits. This sets
off a cascade of effects from the experience of sunlessness, to
waves of interpersonal conflict (brawls) and “self ” harm (“slic-
ing themselves with razors”); to physical and mental impacts
such as Vitamin D deficiency and a destabilized sense of time;
and suicide. SCDC’s use of sunlight deprivation fits into a larger
strategy of violence, which has included planned, premeditated
deployment of gas and chemical weapons11 and the deadly engi-
neering of riots.12 In a perverse carceral allegory for the cycle of
Earthly life, the sun’s administratively and technologically pro-
duced absence works on the entirety of the prison through the
skin and bodies of imprisoned people.

Solar Isolation

SCDC is not alone in getting between the sun and those held
captive in prisons. Sunlight deprivation and the construction of
asolar environments is a mainstay of carceral isolation, impos-
ing a range of tortuous medical effects. A prisoner at Califor-
nia Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s (CDCr) San
Quentin State Prison describes two methods of weaponizing
sunlight against captives: overexposure and total deprivation.
They write:

Unlike the torture cages in the SHU III D.R. (The Adjustment
Center) which are completely exposed to the elements with
no protection whatsoever, the SHU II D.R. torture cages have

11 Over a six-month period, SCDC deployed gas 457 times, 69 of which were
planned. See Jared Ware, “South Carolina Prisoners Call for UN Interven-
tion as Abusive Conditions Worsen,” Shadowproof, December 17, 2019,
https://shadowproof.com/2019/12/17/south-carolina-prisoners-call-for-un-
intervention-as-abusive-conditions-worsen/.
12 Jared Ware, “Interview: South Carolina Prisoners Challenge Narrative
Around Violence at Lee Correctional Institution,” Shadowproof, May 3,
2018, https://shadowproof.com/2018/05/03/interview-south-carolina-pris-
oners-challenge-narrative-around-violence-lee-correctional-institution/.

138
 asolarity

a corrugated steel cover over 1/4 of its top and every one of
these 40 or so cages are under a gigantic modified metal pa-
vilion which could be comparable to a rusted metal circus
tent. The only direct sunlight penetrating this bizarre big top
of the CDCr circus pierces through rust holes in the massive
metal canopy.13

Just as SCDC mobilizes a single steel plate as a solar technology

in order to intensify the asolar effects of existing carceral archi-
tectures, here the CDCr’s torture cages are likewise constructed
specifically with solar orientations in mind. They force people
either endure the sun directly with no protection, or subject
them to an asolar environment.
These conditions, architectures, and practices are com-
monplace. It is difficult to estimate the number of people held
in solitary in the US, due to the prison system’s decentralized,
almost feudal organization and the constant innovation of new
forms of isolation that are not officially recognized as such, and
are designed and named precisely against that recognition. But
solitary confinement remains a widespread practice in United
States prisons and jails, despite being re-christened into a litany
of abbreviations like SHU, RHU, SMU, POC, and AdSeg. Accord-
ing to Solitary Watch, the minimum number of people held in
solitary on a given day is above 60,000 and could be as high as
100,000.14 It has been estimated that in the years 2011–12 about
400,000 spent some length of time in solitary.15 And many of

13 “Bringing the Truth to Light: The Result of Sunlight Deprivation at San

Quentin,” prisoncensorship.info, August 2014, https://www.prisoncensor-
ship.info/article/bringing-the-truth-to-light-the-result-of-sunlight-depri-
vation-at-san-quentin/.
14 Joshua Manson and Jean Casella, “Solitary Confinement Gets Another
Sharp Rebuke from a Supreme Court Justice,” Solitary Watch, March 20,
2017, https://solitarywatch.org/2017/03/20/solitary-confinement-gets-
another-sharp-rebuke-from-a-supreme-court-justice/.
15 Brie A. Williams, “Older Prisoners and the Physical Health Effects of
Solitary Confinement,” American Journal of Public Health 106, no. 2 (2016):
2126–27.

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solarities

these solitary environments, as the CDCr’s torture cages exem-

plify, are constructed as a mode of mediating sunlight.
The architectures and practices of solitary confinement have
an enormous psychological toll, including “hallucinations,
anxiety, withdrawal, aggression, paranoia, depression, and even
suicide.”16 These effects are felt even more acutely by prisoners
with various health conditions, and by the estimated 44,000
people over the age of 45 who are held in carceral solitude.17 Sun-
light is used, not only in South Carolina, but across the United
States as a means of intensifying these psychological effects.
Whether subjecting prisoners to thermal radiation or plac-
ing them in the complete darkness, the use of solar and asolar
media in solitary confinement enfolds sunlight into the modes
of isolation and deprivation that make up the soul of penal prac-
tice, and their violent permutations form mutually compound-
ing chains of harm. Distance from family combines with lack of
social contact, malnutrition interacts with lack of bodily mobil-
ity, hyper-surveillance complements sensory deprivation. Here,
solarity is not simply used as a means of disaggregating prison-
ers, but as a means of amplifying and intensifying existing forms
of bodily manipulation.
One of the many ways this carceral asolarity works on the
bodies of prisoners is by inhibiting the production of Vitamin
D. Medical Doctor Brie A. Williams, evaluating the health
impacts of solitary confinement on older prisoners, argues that
“a prolonged lack of sunlight can cause Vitamin D deficiency,
putting older adults at risk for fractures and falls, a leading
cause of hospitalization and death.”18 The asolar environment
of prison, finding its most extreme expression in solitary con-
finement, results in widespread Vitamin D deficiency that can
literally break bones and, in the case of aging prisoners, lead to

16 Lucius Couloute, “Aging Alone: Uncovering the Risk of Solitary Confine-

ment for People over 45,” Prison Policy Initiative, May 2, 2017, https://www.
prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/05/02/aging_alone/.
17 Ibid.
18 Williams, “Older Prisoners and the Physical Health Effects of Solitary
Confinement.”

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 asolarity

death. Given the prison’s tendency to accelerate biological aging

of its long-term captives, asolarity’s intensification of bodily vul-
nerability is a deadly threat to incarcerated people.
Another danger of asolar isolation has been augmented by
the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which has decimated prisons from
the beginning of the outbreak. According to a May 7, 2020 study,
there appears to be a correlation between Vitamin D deficiency
and COVID-19 mortality. Though the data is not conclusive, it
suggests that “patients with severe deficiency are twice as likely
to experience major complications” with COVID-19.19 Vitamin
D deficiency is also linked to melanation, and “dark-skinned
individuals with higher melanin content will experience
slower vitamin D synthesis in comparison with light-skinned
individuals.”20 When Black people are six times more likely be
locked up than their white counterparts, and imprisoned Black
people are more likely to end up in solitary confinement, and
because dark-skinned Black people are more likely to suffer
from Vitamin D deficiency, asolarity scaffolds the prison’s archi-
tecture of anti-Blackness.21 During a pandemic that has torn
through crowded prisons full of malnourished, aging, immobi-
lized human beings, over 130,000 of whom have suffered from
COVID-19, asolarity has become an even sharper instrument of
genocide.

19 Amanda Morris, “Vitamin D Levels Appear to Play Role in COVID-19

Mortality Rates,” Science Daily, May 7, 2020, https://www.sciencedaily.com/
releases/2020/05/200507121353.htm.
20 Naveen R Parva et al., “Prevalence of Vitamin D Deficiency and Associ-
ated Risk Factors in the US Population,” Cureus 10, no. 6 (June 2018): e2741.
21 Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie
2020,” Prison Policy Initiative, March 24, 2020, https://www.prisonpolicy.
org/reports/pie2020.html, and “Report of the Sentencing Project to the
United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism,
Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance,” The Sen-
tencing Project, March 2018, https://www.sentencingproject.org/publica-
tions/un-report-on-racial-disparities/.

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solarities

Shining a Light on Prisons

The revelation of carceral violence is often framed as “shining a

light” on prisons and prisoners. The New York Times, in an article
entitled “Inmates’ Videos Shine a Light on Life in Prison” reports
on Hidden Lives Illuminated, a media project that worked with
people inside to develop short, animated films.22 Broadcast on the
walls of Eastern State Penitentiary, these images, project organ-
izers hoped, would catalyze awareness and possible reform. In
a letter to the editor of the New York Times also titled “Shine
a Light on Prisons,” Jennifer Scaife, executive director of the
Correctional Association of New York, echoes the fundamental
assumption of such projects: “Prisons are violent places because
they are cut off from public view.”23 And prison chaplain Dwight
Burch expresses the same sentiment, but with a faith-based mis-
sion, where it “feels like I am holding a flashlight directly on
someone that has been stuck in the dark for the better part of
their life.”24 Whether an animated film, a newspaper, a flashlight
or a chaplain, mediating the violence, deprivation, anguish, and
torturous conditions of the prison is often naturalized as a form
of illumination, one that will simply lead to reform or improved
conditions for people inside.
While the “shine a light” metaphor is deeply connected to
western enlightenment thought, it is also naturalized by many
popular assumptions about the sun: the sun is naturally giving,
it fosters growth, and it is equally accessible by all. Our attention
here to asolarity in the prison, however, reveals how sunlight
is highly managed. Solar and asolar media, whether steel pan-

22 Jon Hurdle, “Inmates’ Videos Shine a Light on Life in Prison,” The New
York Times, August 18, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/arts/
design/hidden-lives-illuminated-prison-videos.html.
23 Jennifer Scaife, “Shine a Light on Prisons,” The New York Times, April
3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/opinion/letters/prisons-
inmate-deaths.html.
24 Dwight Burch, “Shining a Light in the Darkness of Prison to Bring Hope
and Change Lives,” Global Leadership Network, March 16, 2020, https://
globalleadership.org/stories/shining-a-light-in-the-darkness-of-prison-to-
bring-hope-change-lives/.

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 asolarity

Fig. 1. This image from the Hidden Lives Illuminated project casts a
light illuminating a zoetrope as a kind of sun, lighting up not only
a nineteenth century animation technology, but the faces of those
incarcerated at Eastern State Penitentiary. Source: https://www.east-
ernstate.org/hiddenlives/about-the-project/.

els, torture cages, or the prison architecture itself, fundamen-

tally alter the direction, accumulation, and form of radiation, in
ways that are intended to produce social effects. These include
the sense of intense isolation; vulnerability to illness and vio-
lence; the engineered provocation of inter-group conflicts; and
the intensification and infliction of countless other harms. Har-
nessed as part of the prison’s operation, sunlight proves to be an
essential substance in a “durable material structure of normal-
ized social liquidation.”25
In this context, the struggle over “Sunlight is a Human
Right,” in resistance to the violent tactics of the SCDC, offers
a critical insight to our conceptualization of solarity and the
sun. The framing and the invocation of the Mandela Rules not

25 Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the

U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005),
223.

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solarities

only reveals how impossible it is to secure even the most basic

“human rights” in the fundamentally de-humanizing, rights-
depriving institution of the prison, but reveals that the capacity
to mediate sunlight — to control one’s access to it — is funda-
mental to freedom.

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 asolarity

References

“About the Project.” Hidden Lives Illuminated, n.d. https://www.

easternstate.org/hiddenlives/about-the-project/.
Atanasoski, Neda. Humanitarian Violence: The US Deployment
of Diversity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2013.
Brennan, Shane. “Practices of Sunlight: Visual and Cultural
Politics of Solar Energy in the United States.” PhD diss.,
New York University, 2017.
Burch, Dwight. “Shining a Light in the Darkness of Prison to
Bring Hope and Change Lives.” Global Leadership Network,
March 16, 2020. https://globalleadership.org/stories/
shining-a-light-in-the-darkness-of-prison-to-bring-hope-
change-lives/.
“Bringing the Truth to Light: The Result of Sunlight
Deprivation at San Quentin.” prisoncensorship.info, August
2014. https://www.prisoncensorship.info/article/bringing-
the-truth-to-light-the-result-of-sunlight-deprivation-at-
san-quentin/.
Couloute, Lucius. “Aging Alone: Uncovering the Risk of
Solitary Confinement for People over 45.” Prison Policy
Initiative, May 2, 2017. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/
blog/2017/05/02/aging_alone/.
De León, Jason. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on
the Migrant Trail. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2015.
Frazier, LaToya Ruby. The Notion of Family. New York:
Aperture, 2014.
Hayes, Kelly. “South Carolina Prisoners Appeal to the UN for
Relief From Torturous Conditions.” TruthOut, November 1,
2019. https://truthout.org/articles/south-carolina-prisoners-
appeal-to-the-un-for-relief-from-torturous-conditions/.
Hurdle, Jon. “Inmates’ Videos Shine a Light on Life in Prison.”
The New York Times, August 18, 2019. https://www.nytimes.
com/2019/08/08/arts/design/hidden-lives-illuminated-
prison-videos.html.

145
solarities

Kovalik, Dan. No More War: How the West Violates

International Law by Using “Humanitarian” Intervention
to Advance Economic and Strategic Interests. New York:
Skyhorse Publishing, 2020.
Manson, Joshua, and Jean Casella. “Solitary Confinement Gets
Another Sharp Rebuke from a Supreme Court Justice.”
Solitary Watch, March 20, 2017. https://solitarywatch.
org/2017/03/20/solitary-confinement-gets-another-sharp-
rebuke-from-a-supreme-court-justice/.
Morris, Amanda. “Vitamin D Levels Appear to Play
Role in COVID-19 Mortality Rates.” Science Daily,
May 7, 2020. https://www.sciencedaily.com/
releases/2020/05/200507121353.htm.
Parva, Naveen R., Satish Tadepalli, Pratiksha Singh, Andrew
Qian, Rajat Joshi, Hyndavi Kandala, Vinod K. Nookala, and
Pramil Cheriyath. “Prevalence of Vitamin D Deficiency and
Associated Risk Factors in the US Population (2011–2012).”
Cureus 10, no. 6 (June 2018): e2741. DOI: 10.7759/cureus.2741.
Patterson, William. We Charge Genocide: The Crime
of Government against the Negro People. New York:
International Publishers, 1970.
“Report of the Sentencing Project to the United Nations Special
Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial
Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance.”
The Sentencing Project, April 19, 2018. https://www.
sentencingproject.org/publications/un-report-on-racial-
disparities/.
Rodríguez, Dylan. Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical
Intellectuals and the US Prison Regime. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
———. White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics
of Genocide. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020.
Sawyer, Wendy, and Peter Wagner. “Mass Incarceration: The
Whole Pie 2020.” Prison Policy Initiative, March 24, 2020.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html.

146
 asolarity

Scaife, Jennifer. “Shine a Light on Prisons.” The New York

Times, April 3, 2019. www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/
opinion/letters/prisons-inmate-deaths.html.
“Sunlight Is a Human Right — International Humanitarian
Intervention Called for by South Carolina Prisoners.”
Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, October 23,
2020. https://incarceratedworkers.org/news/sunlight-
human-right-international-humanitarian-intervention-
called-south-carolina-prisoners.
The United Nations Department of Drugs and Crime. The
United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for Treatment of
Prisoners (The Nelson Mandela Rules). December 17, 2015.
https://www.unodc.org/documents/justice-and-prison-
reform/GA-RESOLUTION/E_ebook.pdf.
Ware, Jared. “South Carolina Prisoners Call for UN
Intervention as Abusive Conditions Worsen.” Shadowproof,
December 17, 2019. https://shadowproof.com/2019/12/17/
south-carolina-prisoners-call-for-un-intervention-as-
abusive-conditions-worsen/.
———. “Interview: South Carolina Prisoners Challenge
Narrative Around Violence at Lee Correctional Institution.”
Shadowproof, May 3, 2018. https://shadowproof.
com/2018/05/03/interview-south-carolina-prisoners-
challenge-narrative-around-violence-lee-correctional-
institution/.
Williams, Brie A. “Older Prisoners and the Physical Health
Effects of Solitary Confinement.” American Journal of
Public Health 106, no. 2 (2016): 2126–27. DOI: 10.2105/
ajph.2016.303468.

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 11

Colonial Exposure

Aylin Kuryel

The sun was shining on the sea,

Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright
— And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
— Lewis Carroll, “The Walrus and the Carpenter”

We hear a cassette being put in a tape recorder, and it starts

recording. On a black screen, the deep voiceover speaks: “Nature
sends us signals of danger or violent encounters.” A barren field,
a curtain of sand in the air. “White missionaries took us out of
our paradise.” Two dead horses lying on the land, a car passes by.
“And I wonder, what was our sin?” This is Mateo speaking, as he
explains his original name was Sobode Chiqueno, before he was
forced to quit the forest and convert to Christianity, as most of
the Indigenous Ayoreo people in Paraguay have been since the
1950s. Although some still live in isolation in the forests, most
now live in the barren and hot Chaco region with their land
stolen, divided, and sold. The tape recorder stops, and the name

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solarities

Fig. 1. Still image from Apenas el Sol (Nothing But the Sun) (2020, dir.
Arami Ullón). Courtesy of the director.

of the film appears on the screen, Apenas el Sol (Nothing But the
Sun) (2020, directed by Arami Ullón).1
The film follows Mateo’s journey while he records his own
reflections and conversations with others since the 1970s, with
an old tape recorder, a medium that is in fact brought by the
missionaries to distribute audio recordings of the Bible to the
displaced Ayoreo community. Mateo subverts and repurposes
the medium itself, while trying to accumulate stories of a com-
munity with a fading sense of belonging. Nothing But the Sun,
made possible by a rare form of collaboration between Mateo
Sobode Chiqueno and the director Arami Ullón,2 generously
lays out the material consequences of colonialism and capital-
ism in the region, and offers fragments of a collective contem-
plation on being uprooted. To be uprooted in this context gen-
erates an unsettling relation to the solar through being exposed
to it, and being exposed to it differently, after having to leave the

1 Arami Ullón, dir., Apenas el Sol (Nothing But the Sun), 75' (2020) was the
opening film of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam
(IDFA) in the Netherlands, between November 18 to December 6, 2020.
2 In our interview, Arami Ullón shared that she would sit with Mateo every
day during the shoot to decide how to shape the rest of the shoots. The
small film crew went there for three years without cameras and had forty
hours of footage after twelve weeks of shooting. The interview was made
on December 12, 2020 with Fırat Yücel, for Altyazı Cinema Magazine’s
supplement Altyazı Fasikul: Free Cinema.

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 colonial exposure

Fig. 2. Still image from Apenas el Sol (Nothing But the Sun) (2020, dir.
Arami Ullón). Courtesy of the director.

forest with the arrival of the missionaries in the late 1950s and
the early ’60s. What seems to be the driving force of Mateo’s
search is not the hope of reconstructing a lost culture and
identity through collecting its fragments, but rather the urge
to meditate on its impossibility. One of the most crystallized
manifestations of this impossibility is the drastically altered
relation to the solar, upon which both Mateo in his recordings
and the film itself reflects, turning the encounter between the
people and the sun into a violent one as one of the material con-
sequences of being displaced.
José Iquebi, who was captured and forced to help white peo-
ple find other Ayoreo in the forest in the late fifties, tells Mateo
that he was deadly scared when he first saw the flashes of the
photo cameras since his grandfather told him, “it’s the guns that
have flashes.” Jose’s uncanny analogy between photo cameras
and guns — long before drones were used as weapons — sharply
alludes to the destructive capacity of image-making. Exposure
emerges as a caustic condition on multiple levels, where the
exposure of the film to the light produces the image, which then
exposes people to the colonizers by turning them into objects of
knowledge, enabling locating and targeting. Consequently, peo-
ple are removed from their land, which radically transforms the
way they are exposed to the sun. The film unpacks the changing
dynamics of their relationship to the solar, with solid yet gentle

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solarities

Fig. 3. Still image from Apenas el Sol (Nothing But the Sun) (2020, dir.
Arami Ullón). Courtesy of the director.

steps, aware of “the depth of responsibility that comes when we

tarry with the infinite.”3
The sun appears throughout the film not as an infinity with-
out context, nor as a metaphor, but as a material entity within
which meaning and function change drastically throughout
colonial history. Mateo tells us that his ancestors worshipped
the sun, which they called Yoquimamito, “a superior and gen-
erous being protecting us from above.” While detailing a tech-
nique in which his tribe would climb up the tress for the sun
to hear them better, we see the sun shining through the trees.
The scene cuts to a loudspeaker placed very high, and we hear
a priest preaching at dusk, and the sun seems to be replaced
by the words of the god brought by the whites. This is not the
only alteration the sun goes through for the Ayoreo who live
in the remote, deforested region, where the land and the wild
animals belong to the white people and the Chicoi root of water
once running under their feet can now only be found on private
property.

3 Imre Szeman, “On Solarity: Six Principles for Energy and Society After
Oil,” Stasis 9, no. 1 (2020): 136.

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 colonial exposure

Fig. 4. Still image from Apenas el Sol (Nothing But the Sun) (2020, dir.
Arami Ullón). Courtesy of the director.

Redistributing Shame

Before unpacking the formal and conceptual figure of the sun

in the film, let’s rewind for a moment, together with Mateo,
and press play. We are listening to the various testimonies that
Mateo records throughout the film, and those testimonies shed
light on the ways in which the encounter between white people
and Indigenous people has been deadly on various levels since
the beginning of missionary practice. Ayoreo people were poi-
soned by the food brought by the settlers. They got sick from
the viruses the colonizers carried with them. Cattle ranchers
shot people who refused to leave the forest. As the conversa-
tions multiply, affects pile up: shame, hope, grief, and nostalgia.
Shame is sown in the community to “weaken them by being
ashamed of their culture,” in Mateo’s words. It comes with learn-
ing to measure community values through colonizers’ stand-
ards. Hope lingers in dreams of having a better life among white
people, a dream that some community members still hold on
to and uneasily reflect upon. Grief taints these words, alluding
to the unrealized hopes, stolen lands and animals. It runs like a
multiple fissure through conversations. Nostalgia, according to
Pebidate to whom Mateo asks to do a blessing ritual, “leaves one
sleepless at nights if allowed into the soul.” Pebidate is the only
person who still practices shamanic healings, and she says she

153
solarities

can still do it because she has no more reason to be ashamed.

She has no more fear of being exposed. The film’s narrative starts
with shame and ends with its absence. At the heart of this inter-
play between the presence and absence of shame, other ques-
tions lurk. Is recording and archiving whatever is left of the past,
as Mateo does, a way of getting rid of shame? Is it a way of own-
ing the image and sound by becoming the agents of exposing
history? Is filming Mateo’s journey a way of transferring part of
this shame to the viewer to open up space to discuss complicity,
continuity, and proximity?
In one of the last scenes, we see the government agents com-
ing to the area to distribute government handouts of 65 USD per
family, which is given every two months, while Paraguay’s mini-
mum wage is 300 USD per month. People need to show their
Paraguayan identity card, which doesn’t specify that they are
Ayoreo, and give their fingerprints to collect the money, while
there is armed security around. In this twilight zone of surveil-
lance capitalism operating on the colonized land, Mateo says,
“thankfully, so far no one has claimed the sun as their own.
Maybe the sun is the only thing white people don’t consider their
property yet.” The forest used to be their protection, like a “soft
blanket,” yet now they are stuck in this desolate place without
any vegetation. For decades, trees are cut down to make more
space for animal stock and beef farming. The same sun, with
which they once communed from the trees, now acts as an agent
of aridity and transformed from a companion into a threat. The
sun that used to be benevolent when they were still living in the
forest under the protection of the trees, which allowed fruit to
grow and animals to live, is now a brutal energy, not the source
of vitality but a deadly entity. When there is no more a mediat-
ing milieu between the sun and the people, the encounter turns
violent, exposure to the solar rays become destructive.4

4 Arami Ullón, in our interview, reminded that currently in Paraguay, one

is allowed to fully deforest the land they own, which is a law implemented
by the current government led by the president Mario Abdo Benítez, who
used to be the right hand of the dictator Alfredo Stroessner, who ruled
Paraguay between 1954 and 1989.

154
 colonial exposure

Fig. 5. Still image from Apenas el Sol (Nothing But the Sun) (2020, dir.
Arami Ullón). Courtesy of the director.

But the Sun

At the end of the film, Mateo likens Ayoreo people to a cut tree,
one that dries and dies as we see red smoke fills up the sky. The
forest is burning, and the sun appears behind the smoke. Its
warmth is certainly not felt under a soft blanket anymore. While
watching the sun, the viewer feels suffocated too. Things that are
on the verge of extinction pile up in a sweltering way: the for-
est, Ayoreo memories and language, and eventually humankind,
unless the regimes of property are altered. “There” becomes
“here,” “then” becomes “now,” as around the globe, it is nothing
but the same sun that we all see in the sky. It is not a source of
infinite energy nor a source of vitality without transforming our
relationship to property.
Yet, there is a last twist to what the image of the sun behind
the smoke might tell us. It looks like it is shining in the middle
of the night, This is a world where there is nothing that is not
turned into private property but the sun. As Szeman asks, “how
can one own what is infinite?”5 Mateo presents it as the only
natural source that is not commodified yet and the film uses
this insight as a framework, visible in its title, portraying the sun
as resisting to be owned, reminding the possibility of another
world, not one that will be restored but one yet to be imagined.

5 Szeman, “On Solarity,” 131.

155
solarities

This framing alludes to the vitality of the sun for memory reten-
tion. Refracting into the dark rooms of memory and history, it
shines as an archive that reminds the cultural and ecological
destruction of beings and relations brought by colonialism and
capitalism and the urgency to reshuffle our existing coordinates.

156
 colonial exposure

References

Szeman, Imre. “On Solarity: Six Principles for Energy and

Society after Oil.” Stasis 9, no. 1 (2020): 128–43. DOI:
10.33280/2310-3817-2020-9-1-128-143.
Ullón, Arami, dir. Apenas el sol (Nothing But the Sun). 2020.

157
 12

Solar as Narrative Element:

The Interrupting Surface

Rhys Williams

The episode begins with a drone shot across the steel and glass
spires of London’s skyscrapers, cutting inside to a young busi-
nessman striding through corridors high above the city, a dra-
matic parody of The Apprentice UK theme tune, “Dance of the
Knights” by Sergei Prokofiev, playing in the background. He
arrives at a boardroom in time to hear the end of a business
pitch:

For centuries man has looked for the Earth’s bounty below
the ground, but now we are on the brink of a new age of
clean, carbon-neutral energy production from the Sun, and
the treasure, ladies and gentlemen, is very much above our
heads.

The speaker stands in front of pop-up banners carrying the ven-

ture’s name, “Photon Harvest,” and the tagline “an unlimited
resource all above our heads.” He steps to the central table and
unrolls a large satellite image of green fields. The camera swoops
up over the table and descends, entering into the image, leaving

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solarities

the boardroom behind and panning slowly down to two figures

striding across the field in glorious sunshine, carrying metal
detectors. “Look at that,” one says to the other with innocent
satisfaction, “not a cloud in the sky.”
This is the opening scene of season three of the much-loved
homely British comedy, Detectorists.1 Across the previous two
seasons we have followed the minor trials and victories of our
two protagonists, Lance and Andy, as they navigate their every-
day lives and regularly escape to pursue their passion for metal
detecting on the fields of Church Farm. They live in the invented
town of Danebury in Essex, an area of England recognized for
its archaeological riches. They’ve had some significant histori-
cal finds — season two ends with Lance unearthing a late-Saxon
gold æstel — but these are exceptional climactic breaks from the
typical coins and ring-pulls that make up the routine hauls of
their hobby. The prospect of the solar site establishes the narra-
tive drive of this final season. Six episodes later the show ends
forever with the solar fields in place, with our heroes no longer
granted the farmer’s permission to pursue metal detecting on
Church Farm.
A poetics of weightlessness and light, of being sheer surface
without depth or footprint, has come to dominate popular, cor-
porate, and activist representations of solar technologies.2 This
widespread uptake is due to solar’s narrative and aesthetic affor-
dance as an interrupting surface, acting to break the purchase
of history upon the present, and excusing imaginaries of the
future from the need to engage with the past. The poetics of
solar perform an ontological and political assertion in an aes-
thetic register. This claim will be explored through three exam-
ples in the final season of Detectorists: firstly, solar as facilitating
the reorientation and continuation of capital beyond the fossil-

1 Mackenzie Crook, dir., Detectorists, season 3, episode 1, BBC 4, November

8, 2017.
2 Rhys Williams, “‘This Shining Confluence of Magic and Technology’:
Solarpunk, Energy Imaginaries, and the Infrastructures of Solarity,” Open
Library of Humanities 5, no. 1 (September 2019): 60.

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 solar as narrative element

fuel age; secondly, solar as interrupting a particular relationship

to history and land and establishing a new arrangement, where
our attention is instead drawn to the future, and upwards, to
the sun, which is read through solar’s impact upon the show’s
generic language; and thirdly, solar deployed to end the condi-
tions of possibility for a narrative, which is a rare complement
to its typical narrative affordance as a vehicle for allowing narra-
tives to continue, cleansed of historical baggage or as a platform
for generating new ones.

Capital’s Gaze: From Depth to Surface

The adoption of coal as primary fuel source in the nineteenth

century inaugurated an era of deep extraction as the master-
signifier of resource production. Prior to this, biomass in the
form of trees and animals harvested from the surface of the
earth, coal grazed from just under it, or the flow of water or
wind to power turbines provided for the needs of humanity.
With deep-mined coal, and then fossil fuels more generally, the
gaze of capital turned conclusively to the depths. In doing so it
turned to exploit the riches of the past more fully, the eons of
captured sunlight, growth, death, and downwards pressure that
formed the buried carbon-rich sources of modernity’s power.
This reorientation of its energetic input was driven, it has been
argued, by its facility to allow capital greater control over the
tempo and geographical arrangement of its productive powers,
doing away with the limiting frustrations occasioned by previ-
ous reliance on seasonal flows and quirks of landscape.3
In all-too-slow response to the climate crisis, capital is gradu-
ally reorienting itself away from these underground sources and
turning its gaze upwards to preserve itself. Here we shift from a
metaphor of extraction to one of gathering or harvesting, from
a system parasitic upon the past to one grasping at the future as
it falls in steady streams from the sun. These two polar systems

3 Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of
Global Warming (London: Verso Books, 2015).

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are united in this case by their facility to produce energy and

profit, and the surface of solar spread over the earth interrupts
the previous bowels-focused gaze by providing the means to
spin light into gold and acts as a fulcrum around which capital
can relocate the source of its treasure from beneath the ground
to the sky above. In coating the ground, the surface of solar
negates both our capacity and our need to look below.
Photovoltaic solar (PV), from ubiquitous panels to experi-
mental paint, is the apotheosis of solar as surface. Fully distribut-
able and extendable, it carries the promise of coating every facet
of our energy-dependent technological society, sealing build-
ings and infrastructure off from the troubled networks of fossil
fuel extraction, distribution, and consumption, and interrupt-
ing the present’s dependence upon them. Whatever it touches it
appears to liberate from the problems inherent in a relationship
to depth and history and the difficulties of the metabolic rift of
fossil-fuel consumption driving up the inexorable carbon coun-
ter of parts per million. In doing so it facilitates a narrative in
which the present can continue without radical change, without
addressing the inequities of our history, requiring merely a lick
of PV paint to transform it into the figure of a shiny clean future.
Solar’s surface of interruption here provides the techno-
logical means to facilitate a more profound continuation,
from fossil capital to solar capital. If “Wall Street is a way of
organizing Nature,” then the camera’s movement in the open-
ing scenes — from the City of London to a boardroom to an
abstract cartography of fields to the fields themselves and the
people whose lives are entangled with them — enacts these rela-
tions, moving along conduits of capital flow as they effect mate-
rial change far from the financial center.4 The narrative sense,
and the agency that drives the narrative, is here captured as the
invisible linkages connecting boardroom to newly minted solar
site. The logic of the camera’s narrative flow here traces the logic

4 Tom Keefer, “Wall Street Is a Way of Organizing Nature: Interview with

Jason Moore,” Upping the Anti, August 16, 2017, https://uppingtheanti.org/
journal/article/12-wall-street-is-a-way-of-organizing-nature.

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 solar as narrative element

of capital’s flow. And what flows is business as usual. As techno-

logical solution for the status quo, solar carries the drab utopian
promise of a future much like the present: in 2030,

Solar PV isn’t just powering glamorous urban buildings or

massive industrial plants; PV materials are now light enough
to be supported by flimsy shanty roofs in the slum outskirts
of megacities in the developing world.5

Under this shiny new assemblage, nothing has fundamentally

changed, and both rich and poor alike are still forbidden from
sleeping under solar-paneled bridges, and wealth continues to
flow to the financial hubs from peripheries of extraction.

Generic Shifts: The Weight of Light

In reality, of course, solar is not free from depth or darkness.

Its weightless poetics of light and surface belie both upstream
extraction and production and downstream waste and dispos-
al.6 It belies the extension of colonial history, enacted through
landgrabs and externalized costs, reframing deserts as periph-
eral goldmines of sunlight to be extracted and channeled to the
core, decisions taken and money moved in distant boardrooms
bent over abstract maps. It also belies the reality that solar is not
only distributed PV panels but concentrated solar power plants
(CSP) too. These vast steam engines squat heavily on the land-
scape, yet even here the public relations machine bends them to
weightlessness as best it can. God’s-eye images flatten them and
the complexities of the desert ecologies in which they sit, striv-
ing to naturalize these titans within an apparently bare land-
scape of mountains and plateaus.7 Detectorists features far less

5 Varun Sivaram, Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and
Power the Planet (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018), 8.
6 Dustin Mulvaney, Solar Power: Innovation, Sustainability, and Environ-
mental Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).
7 Jamey Stillings and Bruce Barcott, The Evolution of Ivanpah Solar (Göt-
tingen: Steidl, 2015).

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solarities

intrusive fields of PV. A CSP plant on the outskirts of Danebury,

on the other hand, could hardly not loom dystopian. It would
be an interruption for sure but one that would break the bounds
of the narrative’s realism, bursting the Detectorists’s frame of
the homely comedy genre, and by extension the sensibilities of
Middle England, transporting us suddenly to an unexpected
future. Dennis Villeneuve’s choice to open his 2017’s Blade Run-
ner 2049 with endless fields of CSP straining in the gloom is the
aesthetically correct one with regards to the poetics of solar
infrastructure. They are the obviously retro, industrial, colonial,
capital-intensive, centralized choice, freighted with history like
a nightmare weighing upon the living.8
In Detectorists, solar interrupts the flow of narrative that car-
ries historical meaning through the present and into the future.
It does so by taking away and coating over the place that hosted
the narrative, and the specific depth-oriented relationship
to history that was played out there. In characters Lance and
Andy’s world, detecting is a source of potential magic, mean-
ing, and value. It is also, importantly, a source of interruption.
Their hobby provides them with a sense of purpose and beauty
that rises above their mundane lives equaled only, in the end,
by love, when the final season provides emotional and formal
closure by replacing the lost hobby with a making-good of their
love lives. The objects unearthed punctuate the present with
glimpses of lost ages, mysteries unsolved, ways of life long-lost,
and, of course, the monetary value that accompanies the value
placed upon history-as-heritage. Detectorists, a resolutely real-
ist comedy, dramatizes this affect of history by punctuating the
realism with moments of mild eeriness. Ghostly scenes per-
vaded by haunting folk-singing show the objects being lost or
buried long ago, and Lance is alerted to the presence of a rare
æstel by an otherworldly echo of thundering hooves. The overall
effect is that of an eerie “failure of presence,” where the objects
conjure the cultures and symbolic structures which made sense
of the objects and which have now long since disappeared, leav-

8 Denis Villeneuve, dir., Blade Runner 2049 (Sony, 2017).

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 solar as narrative element

ing us confronting “the unintelligibility and the inscrutability

of the Real itself.”9 The political resonance of the eerie is thus
as a kind of memento mori. On the one hand it draws atten-
tion to the invisible structures that make our present make
sense by contrast with the conjured absent paradigm of the past.
On the other hand, it says that “this too shall pass.” Yet in the
final season, with the solar panels installed and the fields out
of bounds to our detectorists, the solar surface interrupts the
narrative’s access to the depths of historical meaning communi-
cated through and mobilized by the eerie, negating it as a mode
of estrangement and so negating its potential political charge.

Solar Narratives: An End as well as a Beginning

In Detectorists, solar is deployed to interrupt the conditions of

narrative possibility. Lance and Andy can no longer pore care-
fully over the ground, lovingly brushing dirt from the historical
objects, mundane and spectacular, that they unearth.10 As nar-
rative element, solar always carries the present into the future by
interrupting its relationship with the past, either by proposing
to make business-as-usual livable in a narrowly environmental
sense or, much the same in terms of narrative affordance but
rooted in a more radical political desire, providing a platform
for revolutionary new livable narratives to begin, free of the pet-
rocultural era’s poisons and path dependencies. In imaginaries
ranging from Ian McEwan’s realist novel Solar,11 through neo-
liberal futures,12 to the radical speculative solarpunk canon,13
solar takes the form of sheer interrupting surface, with the nar-
rative affordance of negating history and offering a fresh start, of

9 Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016), 63.
10 As one reader of this chapter pointed out, this is already a taming of the
radical potential of history to a hobbyist’s enthusiasms. As I hope is clear,
Detectorists is not a particularly radical show, and therein lies its interest
here.
11 Ian McEwan, Solar (London: Vintage, 2011).
12 E.g., Sivaram, Taming the Sun.
13 E.g., Williams, “Shining Confluence.”

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solarities

redemption from the past, no matter how undeserved. In Detec-

torists, however, we see solar as future-bearing only in so much
as it brings a particular narrative present, a particular mundane,
realist scenario, to an end. This makes it a rare entry into the
solar mega-text that manifests its power to register “processes
of decay.”14 Genuinely radical innovations do not only present
new opportunities, but “render previously important forms of
competence redundant; and […] reconfigure interpretations of
value and significance.”15 If this is the case, then narratives driven
by future-bearing innovations should register both opportunity
and decay, both the birth and death of practices. It is a mark of
how much inflated hope is invested in solar that, once installed,
it is depicted as interrupting the flow of history to the extent that
history is simply no longer relevant.16
The present of Detectorists is a petrocultural one, not unique
to the United Kingdom but certainly representative of it. The
fallow field that facilitates detecting; the decades of mechanized
tilling that pulls the objects close to the surface; the arrange-
ment of urban and rural; even, banally, the cars and roads that
provide access, are all fossil-fueled. The history that speaks to
our detectorists through their finds is one that skips over the
fossil-fueled present, over the long era of capital, one that harks
back to romantic notions of earlier Britons, earlier ways of life
and modes of production, unrationalized, mysterious, and

14 Elizabeth Shove, “Beyond the ABC: Climate Change Policy and Theories of
Social Change,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 42, no. 6
(June 2010): 1278.
15 Ibid.
16 A rare exception to this rule is the collection Joey Eschrich and Clark A.
Miller, eds., The Weight of Light: A Collection of Solar Futures (Tempe:
University of Arizona Press, 2018), featuring four short stories, three of
which dramatize the way a solar future leaves something behind: a town
previously dependent upon coal for its living; an old woman whose house
doesn’t meet new sustainable regulations; a poor part of town experiencing
power loss as the energy generated by the city grid is sold elsewhere for
profit. This collection is, however, the product of collaboration between
authors and academics, and it suffers from its own issues, principally the
repeated use of the hybrid individual protagonist with one foot in both
worlds to neatly resolve the social and infrastructural contradictions.

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 solar as narrative element

thereby capable of wonder. Spreading itself over the field, solar

is then an interruption of a source of interruption, a negation of
the capacity of place to contain traces of radical historical dif-
ference. A negation, in generic terms, of a capacity for the eerie,
rendering mute the haunting failure of presence that is a mark
of history. Henceforth, the field will be a mark of the future-
as-eternal-present, an eternal present distinguished by looking
always forwards, always up, concealing beneath its glossy sur-
face the possibility of unearthing difference.17 The product of a
cultural imaginary that lacks a strong sense of a living alterna-
tive to the petrocultural present, Detectorists reveals the narra-
tive impasse produced by thinking with solar under such cir-
cumstances: it can act as the vehicle for imagining a renewed
future, but it covers over the past and polishes the present free of
any historical blemishes that might otherwise require discom-
fort and acknowledgement.

17 Contrast this to the ongoing Indigenous solar projects in Canada, where

the hope is for solar to interrupt the transmission of colonial energy
extraction relations from the present into the future, winning energy inde-
pendence from the state that historically exploits their land for fuel. Here
solar can be understood as negating an unwanted and (relatively) recent
history, providing a platform for the resurgence of Indigenous culture.

167
solarities

References

Crook, Mackenzie, dir. Detectorists. Season 3, Episode 1. BBC 4,

November 8, 2017.
Eschrich, Joey, and Clark A. Miller, eds., The Weight of Light:
A Collection of Solar Futures. Tempe: University of Arizona
Press, 2018.
Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater, 2016.
Keefer, Tom. “Wall Street Is a Way of Organizing Nature:
Interview with Jason Moore.” Upping the Anti, August 16,
2017. https://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/12-wall-
street-is-a-way-of-organizing-nature.
Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the
Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso Books, 2015.
McEwan, Ian. Solar. London: Vintage, 2011.
Mulvaney, Dustin. Solar Power: Innovation, Sustainability, and
Environmental Justice. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2019.
Shove, Elizabeth. “Beyond the ABC: Climate Change Policy
and Theories of Social Change.” Environment and Planning
A: Economy and Space 42, no. 6 (June 2010): 1273–85. DOI:
10.1068/a42282.
Sivaram, Varun. Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar
Energy and Power the Planet. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018.
Stillings, Jamey, and Bruce Barcott. The Evolution of Ivanpah
Solar. Göttingen: Steidl, 2015.
Villeneuve, Denis, dir. Blade Runner 2049. Sony, 2017.
Williams, Rhys. “‘This Shining Confluence of Magic and
Technology’: Solarpunk, Energy Imaginaries, and the
Infrastructures of Solarity.” Open Library of Humanities 5,
no. 1 (September 2019): 60. DOI: 10.16995/olh.329.

168
 13

Living Too Close to the Sun

Daniel A. Barber

In Greek mythology, the flight of Icarus is a tale of both material

and psycho-social overreach. Icarus’s wax and feather wings are
delicate and fragile, clearly under-engineered for the flight he
and Daedalus attempt. And yet, Icarus’s hubris famously pushes
him to surpass his wings’ reasonable limits, feathers falling from
the sun-melted wax. His ill-fated flight builds out of Daedalus’s
excavation of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. It is posed as a reaching
toward the sun that stands in contrast to, and as a consequence
of, terrestrial extraction.
Current Icarian hubris retains a connection to terrestrial
excavation. This connection is represented in the overreaching
cycles of extraction, processing, and emission, through which
carbon energy is materialized in the built environment, and
which in turn creates the degenerating feedback loops of climate
instability and economic inequity that contemporary skyscrap-
ers and other monuments to excess continue to exacerbate. Like
the mythical Icarus, we cannot overcome these material limita-
tions, though recent so-called supertall residential towers aim
to do so. They aim, that is, to ignore, if not exactly overcome,
the resource dependencies they embody. While these kinds of
ventures may not as yet be generally felt and experienced, they

169
solarities

nonetheless frame a structure of excess and of reaching for the

sun that has broad material and cultural consequences.
Since about 2010, a half-dozen or so so-called supertall resi-
dential towers have risen in Manhattan, puncturing the skyline.
Sometimes referred to as pencil towers for their tall, skinny
profile, these buildings have come to represent the pinnacle of
a contemporary form of architectural excess. They are both an
engineering and design feat to an extent and also a virtuosic
expression of the financial machinations of the super-rich: the
vast majority of these multi-million-dollar apartments are pur-
chased as assets rather than homes. In short, they are evidence
of a now-emerged structural aspect of the global economy put
in place by the seemingly endless real estate “boom” that con-
tinues to shape many so-called global cities, perpetuated by a
cycle of valuation, purchasing, and repurchasing, as well as shell
companies and real estate investment trusts that have spun out
as part of the familiar accelerations of capitalism.
Further, the pencil towers also reveal the ambitions of devel-
opers and architects to market a different kind of natural envi-
ronment, a sun-soaked perch high above the chaos below. To
facilitate the extreme height this environment requires, build-
ing codes must be manipulated, which is no easy feat in New
York City where interpretating and maneuvering strict codes is
an industry in and of itself. In the case of supertall towers, the
experts rely on two related tricks, both of which take advantage
of a bureaucratic loophole: when a building’s height is assessed
relative to the specific limitations of its precise location, floors
that do not contain habitable space are not taken into consid-
eration. Thus, in the administrative building approval process, it
is not the actual built height that is at stake, but the manipulated
height as calculated in the permit application, a hubristic reach
closer to the sun.
To take advantage of the bureaucratic invisibility of unin-
habited floors, the first trick developers use is to create entire
floors dedicated to mechanical systems. Take for example 432
Park Avenue, one of the better known of these pencil tow-

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 living too close to the sun

ers. Designed by Raphael Viñoly Associates and completed in

2015, the building has a number of double- and triple-height
floors containing only mechanical systems. These mechanical
systems, and the height they add to the building, represent a
felicitous feedback loop in which extreme height significantly
increases the demands on and scale of mechanical systems.
For instance, windows cannot be opened on high floors given
the wind speeds and temperature at that atmospheric level, so
the building is fully sealed, and conditioned by a robust air-
conditioning and heating system. Because such HVAC (heating,
ventilation, and air conditioning) systems are powered by fossil
fuels, this building trend, then, exhibits no interest in the sorts
of innovations or derivations relevant to sustainable architec-
ture as the excess height is facilitated by an excess of energy
use.1 Similarly, some of the tall, mechanical floors at 432 Park
are also filled with equipment dedicated to managing water
pressure on higher floors, equipment which is necessary in
part due to the height added by the equipment itself. Thus, the
increase in scale of mechanical systems leads to more mechan-
ical-only floors, thereby increasing the height of the building,
which in turn requires even more aggressive HVAC, and so on
and so forth — these various mechanical systems as, perhaps,
the feathers being singed as the towers climb higher. Alas, the
design creates a feedback loop seemingly representative of the
capacity for capital investments to distort and expand energy
use with no regard for socio-ecological costs.2
The second trick developers use to manipulate building
codes and allow for these supertall towers leverages the bureau-
cratic invisibility of uninhabited floors to address some of the

1 Oliver Wainwright, “Super-Tall, Super-Skinny, Super-Expensive: The ‘Pen-

cil Towers’ of New York’s Super-Rich,” The Guardian, February 5, 2019,
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/05/super-tall-super-skinny-
super-expensive-the-pencil-towers-of-new-yorks-super-rich.
2 Michael Kimmelman, “Critic’s Notebook: The Hidden Feats That Built
New York’s Towering Skyscrapers,” The New York Times, April 29, 2020,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/29/arts/design/new-york-virtual-tour-
virus.html.

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solarities

engineering challenges of supertalls. At 432 Park, for example,

there are a number of “empty” floors, areas in which the con-
crete grid of the tower is left open. This element of the design
reduces the potential for uncomfortable sway of the building
by allowing air to flow through while simultaneously making
the building taller. Similarly, the building contains a number
of “sloshing dampers,” tanks filled with water that compensate
for some of the sway caused by high wind speeds. The dampers
are installed on mechanical floors, thereby creating additional
height and contributing to the feedback loop.
As a recent article in The New York Times explores, however,
these dampening measures, while successful in adding to the
height of the building, have not been adequate in addressing the
other challenges of the supertall structure. Informed by inter-
views with residents at 432 Park, the article exposes structural,
mechanical, and social inadequacies, including water-pressure
challenges that have led to a number of burst pipes and water
damage as well as the fact that at high wind speeds, the tow-
ers emit otherworldly creaking noises.3 Further, as the article
described, the supertall elevator is prone to malfunction, in
one case trapping residents inside for ninety minutes while the
building swayed. These problems have led to suits and counter-
suits as the super-rich engage in legal fights to preserve the value
of their multi-million-dollar condos. As one resident told the
Times, “everybody hates each other here.”4
The article also notes that the yearly maintenance costs for
a typical condo at 432 Park exceeds the median annual income
of residents in the Bronx, just a few miles north. In this sense,
and especially due to their sparse occupation, the supertalls are
not residential towers so much as monuments to the inequitable
accumulation of capital, extreme versions of the growing cat-
egory of a building or a home as an asset rather than a residence.

3 Stefanos Chen, “The Downside to Life in a Supertall Tower: Leaks, Creaks,

Breaks,” The New York Times, February 5, 2021, https://www.nytimes.
com/2021/02/03/realestate/luxury-high-rise-432-park.html.
4 Sarina Abramovich, quoted in ibid.

172
 living too close to the sun

One thinks again of Icarus, his glee at his capacity to fly, his
apparent inability to exercise caution or concern about himself
or others as he kept climbing higher.
In a somewhat perplexing outburst of dissatisfaction, another
frustrated resident interviewed by The Times expressed her
regret at buying her condo as a second home: “everything here
was camouflage.”5 What looked like wings, tools for a remarka-
ble new experience, were just wax and feathers. An illusion. But,
at the tower, what is camouflage for what? What is being hid-
den, and what does it blend into? On one level, the resident may
be subtly referring to the building code tricks, shell companies,
and other feints that provide the tower with its financial logic.
Like so many other late-capitalist games, the supertalls operate
as money laundering systems that allow the ultra-rich to park
their excess profits in real estate while minimizing taxation and
other so-called burdens. After all, these and many other large-
scale projects rely on such investments. The development pro-
cess is rooted in a financial logic reliant on excess. Architecture
is here deployed to maximize novelty, through ornament, lux-
ury, mechanical conditioning, and height, as an instrument and
expression of excess with zero incentive for energy efficiency,
affordability, or attention to social costs.
What is especially suggestive, in the context of solarity and
relative to these supertall towers, are the precise terms of that
excess. Luxury and exclusivity here, are expressed in height,
proximity to the sun. And yet, the technical capacity to reach
that height is served by a dramatic increase in mechanical
conditioning and carbon emissions. In this sense, the towers
express, at least in a schematic, diagrammatic fashion, a more
general condition as architectural concepts of value and inno-
vation are caught up in the priorities of capital, making them

5 Sarina Abramovich, quoted in ibid.; also quoted in Victoria Bekiempis,

“High Anxiety: Super-Rich Find Supertall Skyscraper an Uncomfortable
Perch,” The Guardian, February 7, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/
artanddesign/2021/feb/07/supertall-skyscraper-new-york-432-park-ave-
nue-rich.

173
solarities

difficult to align with the capacity for solar liberation. Ambi-

tions are caught up in hubris and illusion, while the labyrinth
of redistributing resources, reimagining futures, is darkened by
these pencil thin shadows.
This schematic structure, both material and psycho-social,
recalls Amitav Ghosh’s scathing rebuke of contemporary cul-
ture captured in his 2016 title The Great Derangement: Climate
Change and the Unthinkable. In this now familiar critical analy-
sis, Ghosh acknowledges that buildings are one potent symp-
tom of a larger cultural myopia, an inability, at least amongst
some professions, to adjust methods and ambitions beyond the
status quo. Ghosh writes, “if contemporary trends in architec-
ture, even in this period of accelerating carbon emissions, favor
shiny, glass-and-metal-plated towers, do we not have to ask,
What are the patterns of desire that are fed by these gestures?”6
Perhaps the most obvious answer to Ghosh’s question is that the
desire being fed is for wealth accumulation, at all costs. Disci-
plinary questions of value and metrics, the terms which frame
and identify “design excellence” in architectural commissions,
prizes, and exhibitions, collapse in the shadow of this reality.
Keeping Ghosh’s critique in view, literary repurposing of the
skyscraper suggests a few other directions for considering the
inherent hubris of the supertalls. In the London of 2136 depicted
in William Gibson’s Jackpot Trilogy, for instance, supertall sky-
scrapers, though not quite as tall as 432 Park, are arranged in a
grid of “Shards.” Though habitable, these structures serve the
primary purpose of scrubbing the carbon out of the atmosphere
by virtue of a technology not clearly described.7 Looking up at
them, one character asks: “Carbon capture?” Another responds:
“Those two store energy from renewables. I think they have
molten silicon cores.”8

6 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthink-
able (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
7 William Gibson, The Peripheral (New York: Penguin Books, 2014).
8 William Gibson, Agency (New York: Penguin Books, 2020).

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 living too close to the sun

As with much in these novels, and in Gibson’s oeuvre more

generally, there is a tether to the more familiar present. Not only
does the author persistently reference techno-mythologies of
carbon capture suggestive of a realm of techno-fixes familiar
to the climate change debate, but he also tethers the buildings
themselves to present day structures. The Shards, for example,
are based on a recently erected building in London. Completed
in 2012 and designed by Renzo Piano, the skinny pyramid-like
glass tower is, as of this writing, the tallest building in the United
Kingdom. It was the tallest in the EU before Brexit, but a Foster
and Partners tower in Poland will soon exceed it. The Shard is
a commercial building, unlike the pencil towers in Manhattan,
and has taken its appellation from a criticism levied by the herit-
age approval board. The board claimed that the structure’s reflec-
tive, sharp profile would be “a shard of glass through the heart
of historic London,” a derisive critique that has been embraced,
not only for the building, but also the mixed-use development
extending from its base, called the Shard Quarter.9 The quasi
pyramidal Shard, unlike Piano’s early experiments with exposed
infrastructure at the Centre Pompidou with Richard Rogers,
does not consider the solar exposure of the elongated face as a
space for absorbing radiation, for working with the sun. Instead,
it is a bulwark against it, as at the supertalls: a sealed edifice built
to keep the sun out rather than to engage or redirect its power
for social benefit.
In his novels, published in 2014 and 2020 with the third
installment forthcoming, Gibson’s repurposing of the Shard is
suggestive of a possible redemption for the pencil towers, albeit
a fictional one. Likewise, other speculative fiction writers with
an interest in both the material and symbolism of the built envi-
ronment have seen similar opportunities for broad socio-cul-
tural negotiations regarding the bottleneck of carbon accumu-

9 Ellie McKinnel, “The Story behind the Design of ‘The Shard’ and the
Surprising Way It Got Its Name,” My London, May 18, 2020, https://www.
mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/story-behind-design-shard-surpris-
ing-18268813.

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solarities

lation. Kim Stanley Robinson’s waterproof, structurally sound

carbon plating in New York 2140 gives up the game. In the after-
math of the epochal flooding of lower Manhattan, Robinson’s
fictional technological solution allows for a cultural renaissance
to commence rather than the structural and social disaster such
an event would no doubt augur. The ending of Robinson’s novel,
in which the financier class embraces the politics of the collec-
tive, parallels this techno-architectural fantasy offering a dif-
ferent sort of camouflage, a speculative technology amidst the
social effects that hide its impracticality.10
Paulo Bacigalupi offers a different model of the future in The
Water Knife. Unlike Robinson’s, Bacigalupi’s novel is awash in
the ambiguities and contradictions of contemporary life and
its extension into numerous possible futures. Amidst pitched
battles over water in the American southwest, Bacigalupi ima-
gines the use of “Arcologies” as the space of salvation, which
in this case takes the form of a repository for Chinese invest-
ment that allows for comfortable inhabitation within the harsh
sun and scant water of the climate changed desert.11 Bacigalupi’s
term, “Arcology,” combining “architecture” and “ecology,” was
coined by Italian-American architect Paolo Soleri in the 1960s
as a means to frame possible architectures of the present and
future. Arcologies are built ecological systems with no deter-
minate shape. Though they are often imagined as built into or
emerging out of the ground, they focus on structural efficien-
cies, the selective use of thermal mass, recycling of water, and
generally minimizing mechanical systems. In Soleri’s own work,
most arcologies were drawn rather than built, with the impor-
tant exception of Arcosanti, an experiment in communal living
Soleri and his acolytes initiated in 1971 in the desert outside of
Phoenix.12

10 Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140 (New York: Orbit Books, 2014).
11 Paulo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015).
12 Paulo Soleri, Arcology: The City in the Image of Man (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1969).

176
 living too close to the sun

In Bacigalupi’s near future version, Arcologies are a bea-

con of hope funded by Chinese capital amidst a collapsing US
economy. Their materials mitigate the overheated desert and the
careful and performative reuse of water. This involves a complex
recycling system as an atrium waterfall that itself plays a role in
the narrative and stands counter to the ongoing drought and
resultant social devastation of the world outside. The Arcology
of Bacigalupi’s world shapes the patterns of desire of the dis-
traught citizens, eager to gain access to the lifestyle these archi-
tectural techno-fixes allow. Exclusivity is the accompaniment to
technology.
Bacigalupi’s positing of an inside and outside, of who is
allowed in and who is kept out, and of the role of capital accu-
mulation in structuring both the built environment and the
terms of the social environment, brings us back to the pencil
towers and their infractions. And to solarity: to the prospects
for life under a different relationship to the sun. What the super-
talls represent, in the end, in addition to absurd levels of wealth,
is the apex, one hopes, of the imbalance of that relationship, a
reach toward the sun that simultaneously aims to keep it out by
sealed windows and excessive HVAC. Despite their height, the
supertalls blend into the development imperative of finance and
hedge funds, yet they stick out when seen in relation to the sear-
ing and growing need to reimagine the terms of innovation in
the built environment within the context of a new sort of life
with the sun.
A new understanding of innovations in architecture are
being valued differently today as they resonate across social and
ecological conditions. Structural and mechanical conditioning
extremes for the super-rich may be less important than focusing
research and capital on recycling water, upcycling materials, and
other technologies of horizontal distribution. If we are to emu-
late Icarus’s overreach, perhaps we can do so by absorbing solar
radiation rather than reaching so high — through unbuilding,
rebuilding, retrofitting, retooling, rebooting.

177
solarities

References

Bacigalupi, Paulo. The Water Knife. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

2015.
Bekiempis, Victoria. “High Anxiety: Super-Rich Find
Supertall Skyscraper an Uncomfortable Perch.” The
Guardian, February 7, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/
artanddesign/2021/feb/07/supertall-skyscraper-new-york-
432-park-avenue-rich.
Chen, Stefanos. “The Downside to Life in a Supertall Tower:
Leaks, Creaks, Breaks.” The New York Times, February 5,
2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/realestate/
luxury-high-rise-432-park.html.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and
the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Gibson, William. Agency. New York: Penguin Books, 2020.
———. The Peripheral. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.
Kimmelman, Michael. “Critic’s Notebook: The Hidden
Feats That Built New York’s Towering Skyscrapers.” The
New York Times, April 29, 2020. https://www.nytimes.
com/2020/04/29/arts/design/new-york-virtual-tour-virus.
html.
McKinnel, Ellie. “The Story behind the Design of ‘The Shard’
and the Surprising Way It Got Its Name.” My London, May
18, 2020. https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/
story-behind-design-shard-surprising-18268813.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. New York 2140. New York: Orbit
Books, 2014.
Soleri, Paulo. Arcology: The City in the Image of Man.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969.
Wainwright, Oliver. “Super-Tall, Super-Skinny, Super-
Expensive: The ‘Pencil Towers’ of New York’s Super-Rich.”
The Guardian, February 5, 2019. https://www.theguardian.
com/cities/2019/feb/05/super-tall-super-skinny-super-
expensive-the-pencil-towers-of-new-yorks-super-rich.

178
 14

Landfill

Bob Johnson

The sun falls unjudging on all things alike.1

Apex Landfill. Las Vegas, Nevada. 2021.
A rotted head of lettuce. Flies and larva. An old leather couch.
Cowskin withered in the desert sun. Razors, rubber duckies,
nickel-cadmium batteries, toenail clippings, old receipts, scraps
of bone, a toothbrush. This admixture of humanity’s health and
decrepitude, its aspirations and miseries, its kindnesses and
crimes, tossed together without distinction under the fat heat
of a Nevada summer.
All things mingled in the garbage heap — rich and poor, high
and low, garish and austere. Yet solarity shines even here with-
out pretense.

To understand this.
To penetrate this secret.
This mountain… unconcealed…
unique cultural deposit,

1 Jane Bennett, “The Solar Judgment of Whitman,” in A Political Companion

to Whitman, ed. John E. Seery (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2011), 132.

179
solarities

fifty million tons…

carved and modeled.2

This euphemism for the stinking remains of ourselves, for the

discarded externalities of life, for the wreckage of material cir-
culation and accumulation, the landfill is the proper place to
begin an Elemental Solarity. For here in Nevada, outside of Las
Vegas, we look out on the world’s largest landfill by size, 2200
acres, 50 million tons of garbage, 9000 more tons with each
cycle of the sun, being tiered and layered like a sheet cake,3 this
vast repository of capital’s drive, its expenditure and its exhaus-
tion, its excess that can’t be contained, bound, or narrated
within modernity’s oily terms. Here, looking out on this gar-
gantuan sacrifice zone, capital’s empty claims to its ascendance
over the natural world and liberalism’s paeons to itself unravel
like the spooling yarns they are.

How clean the sun when seen in its idea,

Washed in the remotest cleanliness of heaven
That has expelled us and our images.4

The landfill returns us, in other words, to a bold facticity, to

sights, smells, and sounds that restore the senses, to the physi-
cality of the real in full exposure, unsorted again, sprawled out
in the rays of the sun without symbolic cover. At least for a
moment nothing is concealed from us. At least for a moment,
before the bulldozer arrives to cover it up again with autofluff,
the sort of linguistic and literal incinerators we depend upon to
sanitize the world are held at bay and the dwarf stars we orbit
around — a constellation of false consciousness that speaks in
free market exigencies, merit societies, austerity programs, eco-

2 Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 185.

3 Stephanie Tavares, “Mountains of Garbage,” Las Vegas Sun, December 7,
2009, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2009/dec/07/mountains-garbage/.
4 Wallace Stevens, “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction,” in Wallace Stevens:
Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 329.

180
 landfill

nomic externalities, liberalism, and enlightenment — these dim

solar pretenders get blanched out in the incandescence of the
sun.
There is no gaslighting in the landfill. Only sunlight.
So why an Elemental Solarity? And wherefore the landfill?
First, the analytic.
Elemental Solarity is a project of radical simplicity. The
adjective in the phrase, elemental, refers us to the basic build-
ing blocks of life, to the objects around us, to the thingness of
things, that is, both to the irreducible chemical elements that
comprise life and to the social mattering of that life. In this
respect, it points us to a new materialism that is more honest
about the relationship between words and things, a material-
ism that better reckons with what Jennifer Gabrys calls the two
classic directions of epistemology: knowledge as it derives from
engagement with matter and matter as it is molded by engage-
ment with knowledge regimes.5 To be elemental is, in short, to
see, touch, and feel the object-world anew and to pause before
we start to speak again. As for the noun in the phrase, solarity
implies a radical exposure to the thingness of this world, to its
materiality, out of shadow, where we appear with our eyes wide
open to see commingled together not only the exhilarating jou-
issance that characterizes some people’s lives today but also the
terrifying wreckage that others experience in this thoroughly
capitalized and commercialized way of living. In this second
sense, the solar analytic gestures towards restoring solidarities
to each other, to nature, and ultimately to the facts around us.
But to get there, it first must expose liberalism’s failed episte-
mologies by candidly confronting its refuse, its redacted reali-
ties, its deferred limits, and its dead ends. Only then can we
return to a solar economy that was there in the beginning and
that is still waiting to be put to new purposes and to new ends.
The landfill is the obvious place to begin this analytical
work of recovery. It is what Joshua Reno calls the “constitutive

5 Jennifer Gabrys, Gay Hawkins, and Mike Michael, Accumulation: The

Material Politics of Plastic (London: Routledge, 2015), 7.

181
solarities

absence” of modernity — the gap, the lacuna, the interstice, the

repressed ID — where the modern world appears for a minute
unnatural, unfamiliar, strange, and new again, before the work
of narrative erasure begins.6 The landfill is, in other words, the
place where the energopower of modern life turns back on itself,
to quote Dominic Boyer, where the unceasing drive to bring
fossil fuels to bear on work, to absorb all life into the logic of
commercialized production and consumption, spins out into
undifferentiated waste, inefficiency, and renewed possibility.7 To
really see, smell, touch, and hear without defense or preoccupa-
tion — to be present here for a moment — is to come to know
ourselves outside the circuitry of market exchanges, outside the
platitudes of liberal political economy, and outside the murmur-
ings from the husks of hollow men who speak only of progress,
growth, and the satisfaction of yielding to capital.
To be present here is to expose the quandaries of a lazy liber-
alism that falsifies reality and keeps us in shadow.

Quandary 1: Objects

The landfill does liberalism’s work by concealing the detritus of

fossil capital, shuttling away the sinister material entropy that
liberalism seeks to give ideological cover to. Solarity, in contrast,
returns our attention to these discards, to the margins, the mis-
fits, and the anomalies that keep piling up, waiting to be reinte-
grated into our world.
Let us be proper about the phrasing.
The sanitary landfill, for that is its euphemism, performs the
work of erasure, repression, and denial. It tidies up the messy
material world of unregulated fossil capital by performing four
key functions that make its dominant ideology appear palatable
to us. It functions to spatially relocate the offal that capital gen-

6 Joshua Reno, Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American
Landfill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 7.
7 Dominic Boyer, Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Dur-
ham: Duke University Press, 2019), 5.

182
 landfill

erates offsite, to socially remove capital’s uncomfortable smells

and textures beyond the senses of the world’s privileged actors,
to psychologically bury capital’s most traumatic residue in an
unreachable unconscious, and to symbolically render what we
so generously call fossil capital’s externalities unavailable to us
for narration.8
But to arrive here by way of an Elemental Solarity is some-
thing quite different.
Solarity recovers the thingness of these many discarded
things that can still be seen, touched, and smelled but that
resurface in this other place outside of ideology. Splayed out
in the sun, we see here every kind of used and lost and eroded
object of desire9 resisting the script that capital initially intended.
Beyond the official chain of circulation, these objects no longer
appear as fetishized commodities meant to string us along in
this oily system but rather as the be-slimed and fractured traces
of a system of maldistributed joys and pains that even seventy
years later we still struggle to properly name. The plushness of
a teddy bear tossed into the trash bin, its fluffy acrylic polymers
still intact, juxtaposed now to this hypodermic needle with
its residue of opioid, factory-produced steel and polymer pal-
liative — these physical testaments to both lost innocence and
human traumas generated by a system that does not live up to
its promises. Is this the material evidence of a just process of
circulation, of a righteous system of extraction, production, dis-
tribution, and political economy that doles out joy and effort in
fair shares, that answers to who we really are? Or are they signs
of something else?
The landfill, in other words, performs the messy removals
needed to uphold the impression that everything is as it should
be, that everything is in its place. It gives to the bourgeoisie’s
project the appearance of plausibility. But under the exposure
of the sun, all of these little fractured objects reemerge as what

8 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1986), 3.
9 DeLillo, Underworld, 185.

183
solarities

they are, that is, the entropy of human ecstasy, injury, and waste
generated by the fracking of life under this oily form of late capi-
tal.

Quandary 2: Time

The landfill performs a second function by subsuming history

into the homogeneous time of late capital, by compressing the
past, present, and future into a liberal timeline that always already
relates the same story of a world moving forward with opportu-
nities limitlessly expanding and with eyes always focused on the
future, oblivious to what has been left in the wake. Solarity sees
something different in these traces of the past. It sees the “poly-
chronic nature” of time, in Reno’s apt phrasing, the multitude
of temporalities, human and nonhuman, that have been tossed
aside in order to keep the story straight.10
The landfill works, that is, like a perpetual motion machine,
to bury deep in the ground not only objects but also the dis-
carded vestiges of time. It operates, quite literally, twenty-four
hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year to redact our
history and to persuade us into believing that life under capi-
tal proceeds neatly as if by nature through one timeless process
beginning in extraction with mining and tilling the earth and
proceeding through production, growth, and consumption only
to end in a final and tidy burial as refuse. But this temporal work
of the landfill is just a Herculean project aimed at containing
what Walter Benjamin once called the catastrophe of time, the
piling wreckage, historical debris growing skyward that capital
has left behind, sometimes in objects, for us to sort through.11
To the extent that the landfill serves to facilitate the impression
of homogeneous time, it reinforces what petrogeographer Mat-
thew Huber calls the subsumption of life under capital, reducing

10 Joshua Reno, “The Time of Landfills,” Discard Studies, September 25, 2015,
https://discardstudies.com/2015/09/25/the-time-of-landfills/.
11 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations:
Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York:
Schocken Books, 1968), 257.

184
 landfill

even our history to something that merely reflects its transac-

tional nature.12
Solarity, when it shines upon the landfill, sees instead a res-
ervoir of alternative genealogies that are always resurfacing
like the proverbial rubber tire that keeps the sanitary engineer
awake at night. Solarity awakens the dead. It exposes, unbur-
ies, and emancipates again these lost timelines, both human and
nonhuman. A stool with a leg gone missing that stinks of cheap
bourbon, a stained apron from the local diner, and a splintered
police baton with scratches and residual DNA. These radiate into
the future the collective and individual human histories that
were never really contained by capital and never merely transac-
tional in the first place. They are a material resource that speaks
to the experiential time of real people, of personal histories, and
of collective stories that can’t be contained by liberalism’s script.
These objects when exposed to the sun no longer promote the
claim that we are being emancipated through free markets and
private property. But so too this debris carries with it “natural”
histories beyond people’s cognizance, nonhuman histories tied
up in biology, chemistry, and ecology that can’t be subsumed by
capital either. This bread festering in the sun with flies propagat-
ing, maggots growing and proteins, lipids, and polysaccharides
breaking into their constituent chemical parts on nature’s own
timeline. When tuned to the solar analytic, we learn to watch
more patiently as these things get reanimated by unplanned
agents, by atmospheric, lithospheric, and ecological pressures
that have as many designs for them as does capital.13 For here
the world’s elements are not really being put to rest so much as
they are being reassembled on new timelines in this unlikely
place of propagation, where cadmium, carbon, and nickel get
layered into the ground, where plastic bags get carried off by
crows, where decomposition gives way to methane, and where

12 Matthew Huber, Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Material Forces of Capital
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), xix.
13 Reno, “The Time of Landfills.”

185
solarities

things sit under the sun decomposing and rebirthing oblivious

to bourgeois time.
The landfill might try to police the temporal borders of the
liberal project by ensuring that time’s evidence stays within the
proper plastic lining, but the sun relentlessly exposes its well-
kept secret that capitalism does not know where it comes from
and cannot tell us where it is going.

Quandary 3: Society

The landfill serves a third, and obviously related, function by

erasing the evidence of social stratification which the liberal
paradigm intentionally or unconsciously blinds itself to. By
reducing all things to sameness, by reclassifying everything as
either valuable commodity or worthless junk, the landfill oper-
ates much like liberal ideology to neutralize the uneven histories
of systemic class, racial, and gender inequality that, in this case,
are still being carried forward in these objects spread around us.
The solar analytic by contrast sees in the landfill not so much
garbage as a macabre mausoleum dedicated to the stratification
of life under late capital.
The landfill operates by abstraction, by flattening the lan-
guage we have for recognizing difference. In this case, every-
thing becomes just trash to us, garbage headed into a common
pit, the end point of a life immersed in capital where all things
can only be either this or that and nothing in between. But the
garbage that is heaping upwards and sinking downwards in the
sun is a reflection of society. It is heterogeneous, stratified, and
incommensurate. Just as a used battery tossed into the pit bears
little resemblance to the tamale husk that sits beside it and just
as the high-priced lobster tail has a different genealogy than the
lowly potato, these artifacts of inequality and degradation are
always being reduced in the landfill to this one terminal and
muted thing we call waste, thus silencing the social life of these
objects that were never adequately measured in capital’s univer-
sal currency.

186
 landfill

But solarity restores to the world the difference and differen-

tiation that can be seen in these objects. It looks out not merely
on trash but on the vestiges of human lives produced and spit
out by late capital. This tarnished hubcap from a Mercedes Benz
next to this sooty lawnmower are not merely garbage in the sun
but the relics of gated communities and manual laborers, of
racial powers and racial servitudes, of class protections and class
exposures to the sun: these are the remnants of capital’s logic of
extraction and accumulation. Or perhaps it is this KFC wrapper
next to this discarded and now-rotting remains of a sea bass,
imported, filleted, and stripped to the bone for paying tour-
ists in this city, a small reminder of those who labor and those
who get to consume the fruits of that labor. Perhaps solarity
even shines down on this discarded condom, drying up in the
sun, a withered prophylactic that could mean so many different
things in this commercialized city of easy marriage and pros-
titution where even bodies are used as commodities. And, yet,
if the landfill, like its liberal owners, works by airbrushing and
scenting the unwanted objects of misery and discord around us,
solarity demystifies these mystifications, shining light back on
the lost signifiers once ejected from the language of the bour-
geoisie but still here to be reckoned with.
That is to say, the landfill transmutes into trash the traces of
class crimes, racial abuses, and gender inequalities, but these
overflowing bins of waste and shame wait to be dug up, uncov-
ered, unearthed, and brought back under solar management.
Resilient, they persist as the resources for something new, hori-
zontal, and nonviolent when the sun is once again permitted to
shine on them.

Quandary 4: Nature

Lastly, the landfill upholds liberalism’s foundational, and most

problematic, claim, its grandest gesture that says man stands
in ascent over nature looking down on these things beneath
us. The landfill materializes an enlightenment mythology that
would have us somehow extracted from this object-world laid

187
solarities

out before us. But the solar analytic sees in these discarded
“things” not the rent fabric of life nor does it accept a lazy dia-
lectic that would split the world between us and our objects,
between humans and nature. Rather it sees spread out before us
this colorful tapestry of neglected kinships, discarded alliances,
and excommunicated identities that bring us down to earth,
that offer up new resources, and that take us out of the shadow
we labor in.
For some time now, the landfill, not only this one but every
other one, has waylaid life’s generative chaos by enabling a thick,
if false, claim that we stand above the fray of the world, that
human Reason and Capital act upon this world rather than
through it. The landfill’s omissions, erasures, and removals on
behalf of late capital function to promote a prevailing belief that
we are realigning nature, as if by an invisible hand, into some-
thing better. But the comfort we get in that faith comes with
strict prohibitions and taboos that distort what we see here and
deny what we are. If there is one thing the landfill demands of
us, it is that we repudiate this junk as not being part of ourselves,
that we deny in an infinite number of refusals during every min-
ute of every day the reality staring back at us here that the iron
in this tossed-out, cast-iron skillet is the same iron in our blood,
that the sucrose dripping from this bottle of Pepsi is already in
our veins, that the carbon dioxide released from this decaying
carcass is soon to be part of the plants we ingest, and that this
methane drifting into the atmosphere is the composition of the
air we breathe. Is it really possible, as we have been told, that
this landfill will take whatever we choose to eject from our lives,
whatever we rend from the fabric of life to call contamination,
for 300 more years?
Solarity proposes something different. It refuses to see this
garbage as other, instead reclaiming these lost objects of our
desire and distaste for their reintegration back into our life both
literally and figuratively. It understands that bourgeois Reason
can only work when it is able to cast out of itself what it can’t
understand, only when it is able to reclassify as pollution what-

188
 landfill

ever resists its models.14 But solarity knows that sooner or later
everything returns to its original contamination and that these
provisional containers always break down sooner or later, that
the plastic lining degrades, that the leachate seeps back into the
ground, and that the sun resumes its business of decomposing
the lines we have drawn around life. Solarity knows, in other
words, that the landfill is an instrument of political ontology,
that it takes its name and purpose after the Latin verb dispo-
nere, which announces that the business of the disposal site is
“to divide,” “to arrange,” and “to place” life into acceptable cat-
egories for this oily form of capitalism and its ideologues. But is
this how we want to say I exist?
The landfill, like the bourgeois project, supposes that sen-
tience puts us beyond the laws of nature, but an Elemental Solar-
ity knows that a true materialism cannot cast things beyond the
logic of the sun.
For now, however…

the garbage keeps coming, the garbage keeps coming.15

14 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and

Taboo (London: Routledge, 1984).
15 Reno, Waste Away, 5.

189
solarities

References

Bennett, Jane. “The Solar Judgment of Whitman.” In A Political

Companion to Whitman, edited by John E. Seery, 131–46.
Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah
Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn, 253–64. New York:
Schocken Books, 1968.
Boyer, Dominic. Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the
Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
DeLillo, Don. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of
Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge, 1984.
Gabrys, Jennifer, Gay Hawkins, and Mike Michael.
Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic. New York:
Routledge, 2015.
Huber, Matthew. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Material
Forces of Capital. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2013.
Reno, Joshua. “The Time of Landfills.” Discard Studies,
September 25, 2015. https://discardstudies.com/2015/09/25/
the-time-of-landfills/.
———. Waste Away: Working and Living with a North
American Landfill. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2016.
Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of
Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.
Stevens, Wallace. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose.
New York: Library of America, 1997.
Tavares, Stephanie. “Mountains of Garbage.” Las Vegas Sun,
December 7, 2009. https://lasvegassun.com/news/2009/
dec/07/mountains-garbage/.

190
 15

The Solar Grid

(excerpt)

Ganzeer

191
TOKYO, JAPAN up in the
heavens is an
energy source

2019 A.D.
that is never
extinguished.

the sun,
ladies and
gentlemen.

our next
great leap as a
species falls entirely on
effectively harnessing
the sun’s relentless
power.

but it’s quite

clear we have hence,
reached the limit of the solar
what is achievable grid.
in battery With a
technology. design inspired
by nature herself
--lilies in particular--
this great coloSsal
satellite will harness
the sun’s power
where it is never
obscured.

outer
space.

193
 The satellite
will absorb the
sun’s unfiltered
energy, and beam it
down to earth,
concentrated.

put a
thousand of
them in orbit, and
you even have the dark
side of the earth
covered.

the cost
of such a project
may indeed be exorbitant,
but the rewards?

incalculable.

Dr. kojima
kazuo, Kyoto
I hear a university.
hum of murmurs
forgive me,
already, so let’s open
but is it not
the floor up for a
too much of an
little q&A.
elaborate...
uh...
how
do you
say..?

ah,
chindogu.

ha
ha ha ha ha
ha ha haha
ha

194
CAIRO, EGYPT
9 A.F.
*

*AAer the Flood

195
 You
getting
this, abdel
maugoud?

sir,
yessir.

TAP
TAP
TAP
TAP
TAP
TAP

Y’know, It
um... isn’t in your
best interest to
stick with that
story.

It’s
not a
story.
aya.

why
... are you
OkaY, opposed to
then. the solar
grid?

TAP I... I
TAP never
TAP said--
TAP
TAP
TAP

196
 Now
you listen to
me you little
cunt...
If you
want to be
treated with
respect around
here...

TAP
you’re
TAP gonna have to
TAP refrain from
TAP insulting my
TAP intelligence!
TAP

I’m
trying to
help you out
here, Aya.

This
is a serious
crime you’ve
committed
here.

No
need for a
young college
girl like you to
throw her life
away.

197
 It’s...
just
art.

Not
Like a...
When going okay
uh, conceptual
back home to your fiiiiiiine!
piece about... y’know,
studies tonight is
the world’s envelop-
well within
ment in, uh--
reach.

Excuse That it’s

me for expressing not fair that
my opinion about a if one lousy girl
project that will clearly in cairo suggests
ruin the life of every otherwise, She
human being on the gets beat to a
planet! pulp and labeled
To
invest in this a criminal!
Excuse
me for saying monstrosity
it’s not that will clearly
fair! be the death
of us!
That it’s
not fair that you’ve
got billboards and
multimedia commercials
all around the world
telling people to buy
solar bonds!

But, tell
you what?

I’m
willing to make
an exception in
your case.

Well...

I don’t because
write the I can see that
law, Aya. you’re a sweet little
TAP
TAP girl who doesn’t
I merely
TAP know any
enforce
TAP better.
it. TAP
TAP

198
No. 187,961 TUESDAY, JULY 13, 474 A.F. K20.00

America: a

“China’s
Apology is b

Not Enough.”
Unavoidable Conflict
on the Horizon
Deliberate
Targeting of Mars
Missions
By ALISSA SCHMITT
and LIANG ZHANG
Washington –– Significant g roups i n Leaked blueprints show Skyquench’s plans to syphon produced water
directly to Mars-affiliated spaceports.
Skyquench CEO, Sharif Algebri (right), with Mars representitive
Ivor Snowjin (left). [Kramer Westin / The Global Guardian]
both China and the United States claim

Skyquench is
that a contest for supremacy between both
countries is leading to an unavoidable con-
flict of massive proportions. As the U.S. is
a leading member nation in the Federation
of the Global North, and China has since

Stealing Your
been calling for a Coalition of the Global
South, a conflict i gnited b y e ither s tate
will surely dwarf any previous World War
known to man.
Tensions between both nations have

Water
been increasing since a Chinese sattellite
collided with an American Mars-bound
space shuttle. All 224 passengers were ei-
ther killed upon impact, or flung out into
deep space. The C hinese g overnment r e-
leased an official apology, claiming that its
satellite moved into the shuttle’s path as a Classified Files Reveal the Company’s Sinister Plans
result of an odd malfunction that could
only be the result of a spy-hack gone wrong.
By BUSTER BETHLEHEM Little has been known, however, of
The Chinese did not shy away from point-
Skyquench’s intentions to connect its wa-
ing fingers at Japan, w hich has d enied a ll New York –– A review of top secret
ter-harvesting towers directly to spaceports
allegations. Intel however shows that Japan documents suggests that water generated
operating launches to Mars. The Global
did attempt to hack into China’s through Skyquench’s much touted global
Guardian has acquired top secret docu-
defense apparatus surrounding Miyako program is destined for the colonies on
ments from a company insider who has
Island. It should be noted that China Mars.
chosen to remain anonymous for fear of
only made claim of the island a few Skyquench’s CEO, Sharif Algebri, has
reprecussion. The documents reveal de-
decades following The Great Flood, and been in the mainstream limelight as of
tailed schematics of major pipelines con-
the United Nations has since issued late, since signing an agreement with UN
necting Skyquench’s towers to large-scale
multiple resolutions de-manding the member states enabling his company to
spaceports with potential for water storage
Chinese return the island to Japan. develop a series of towers across the planet
capabilities. While the public has been gen-
China, however, has insisted that its to harvest clean water from the clouds. The
erally positive about both The Solar Grid
expansion towards the island is a project has been applauded by economists,
and Skyquench plans, it is questionable
natural result of its population growth, arguing that not only would it afford an
whether or not such sentiments will be re-
and that the population decline of abundance of clean water, but it would also
tained with knowledge of their water going
Japan suggests that the island is no longer eliminate restrictions imposed on running
to other planets.
necessary to the Japanese people. the Solar Grid for more than 3 hours a day.
This information is extremely timely,
U.S. officials, however, claim to While the Solar Grid may have helped re-
as Mars predicts a sharp increase in popu-
have significant evidence that show verse the effects of the Great Flood, and
lation numbers over the next two months,
that the Island
Miyakojima Japanese-Chinese dispute
has little to do with the spark what is dubbed as “The Solar Revo-
especially with arrangements in place for
surrounding
downing of the American space craft, and lution” –where industries across the globe
what has been dubbed the “3rd Exodus,”
that the Chinese government is deliberatly have had little reason to avoid a full switch
due to take place from Japan’s impressive
to Solar Power– there is fear that health
hazards caused by The Solar Grid are be-
Space Elevator by the end of August. Stud-
199
 “And we’re back. We’re cel-
ebrating Musk Day with
our very special guest, Mr.
Sharif Algebri, famed
inventor and enterpreneur,
founder and CEO of
Skyquench, which hasn’t
been without its fair share
of controversy lately.”

RIOTS BREAK OUT IN OVER 100 CITIES WORLDWIDE OVER ABUSES BY VARIOUS LAW E

“Mr. Algebri, you were just

about to tell us why moving
water off the planet is sup-
posed to be a good idea?”

“Haha! You don’t mess

around at all, do you, Jen-
na?”

LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES, THE BIGGEST OF WHICH IS “SAFTEY FIRST.” CHANTS

“Okay, here’s the thing.

Earth houses about 332.5
million cubic miles of wa-
ter, the vast majority of
which we do not use. Since
the beginning of time to
this very day, humanity has
made use of no more than
WITH US NOW! approximately 0.7% of that
SHARIF ALGEBRI water.”
inventor / CEO Skyquench
LIKE THIS ONE: “NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE, TILL THE END OF CORPORATE POLICE” COULD

“Zero. Point. Seven Percent.

That’s all the human race
has ever needed. Now imag-
ine if we were to double that
quantity. We’d have more
water than we could’ve ever
dreamed of and it would
still be no more than 1.5%
of available water on the
planet.”
BE HEARD FROM NEW YORK ALL THE WAY TO TOKYO. “MAZAJ INDUSTRIES” T

200
 “Technically, there
shouldn’t even be a water
crisis, but the only reason
there is one is that we aren’t
utilizing the technologies
available to us today.”

INDUSTRIES” TO BUY BACK UP TO 465,000 SELF-DRIVING CARS AND PAY OWNERS FOR

“There’s obviously the Solar

Grid: a spectacular network
of satellites that beam sun-
rays onto the planet in the
dead of night! Such power!
And we only use it for what?
3 hours a night? It’s been
over 400 years since the
flood and our solution to
dealing with it is increasing
daytime by a mere 3 hours?
The Statue of Liberty is still
under water for cryin’ out
loud!”
FOR DAMAGES. THEODORE TAPLIN UNRESPONSIVE TO MEDIA REQUEST

“I propose running the Grid

for 6 hours. Or heck, all
night if we have to. Sea lev-
els would drop so fast, and
all that water would evap-
orate into the atmosphere.
And that is where Sky-
quench comes in to harvest
it all from the clouds.”

REQUESTS AFTER FLEEING THE U.S. FOR CHINA. TESLA PROBE SNAPS SP

“What that means is we

could purify all 332.5 mil-
lion cubic miles of water
on the planet if we wanted
to. Not only would there
be enough water for both
Earth and Mars, but for
virtually every planet in the
entire Solar System if we
felt so inclined.”
SNAPS SPECTACULAR SHOTS OF PLANET X, THE SOLAR SYSTEM’S NINTH PLANET.

201
 “But… running the Solar
Grid all night? The impact
on the environment that
would have… would be…”

SCIENTISTS REVEAL: GIANT REPTILES A MYTH. MOST DINOSAURS WERE EITHER FEATH

“The environment? Are you

kidding me? Half the world
is underwater, Jenna!
We’ve already manipulated
the environment beyond re-
pair. What I am suggesting
merely entails manipulat-
ing it to the advantage of
the human race.”

OR FURRED. PROJECTED LIFE SPORES COULD REACH “SKYROCKET” GALAXY IN NEX

“Uh, Sharif. I’m gonna have

to agree with Jenna on this
one. I mean, don’t get me
wrong. I’m all for innovation,
but we don’t really know
what kind of impact some-
thing like this would have on
the planet, let alone on us.
Y’know, higher probabilty of
skin cancer maybe or God
knows what else.”
NEXT DECADE. A GROUP OF COSMOLOGISTS AT THE MOSCOW INSTITU

“We have the technology

to deal with that, Jim, we
have it. The fabrics they’re
developing now... you wear
one of those Solar Suits out
during Grid hours and you
don’t even notice its acti-
vated at all.”

INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY THEORIZE THAT ASTEROIDS ARE SENT TO O

202
 “What about Aquatic life?”

“It would be at risk, that’s

true. But it’s either that or
putting the future of hu-
manity at risk.”

“...”

OUR SOLAR SYSTEM BY DISTANT INTELLIGENT LIFE-FORMS.

“Listen, we have an oppor-

tunity to finally create a
utopia for all of humanity
here. For one, we would
have access to 24 hours of
Solar energy. Free. Energy.
Forever. You realize what
that would do? End our en-
ergy crisis and more or less
afford goods and services to
every human being alive.”

A RARE SPECIES OF FLAMINGO, THOUGHT ONLY TO EXIST IN TURKEY, HAS ALSO BEEN

“Secondly, sea levels would

decrease very rapidly.
Which means more land.
More farm land, even. Pos-
sibly enough to provide
food for us, the colonies
on the Moon, colonies on
Mars, and maybe even Ve-
nus.”

BEEN DISCOVERED IN GUATEMALA. NEW SELF-GOVERNING ARTIST COLONY

“Thirdly, enough fresh

clean water for us here on
Earth, and anywhere else
in the entire Solar System.
Probably till the end of
time. What we have on our
hands here is an equation
for paradise.”

COLONY ESTABLISHED IN CANADA’S ARCTIC NORTH. NATIVE INUIT GROUPS DE

203
 475 YEARS LATER

Hurry
up already,
willya?

204
 About
Okay, fucking
all done time!
now.
Shh, they’re
with old man
kovsky.

We’re
SISYPHUS!

MEHRET, I
UNDERSTAND
NOW! WE’RE
SISYPHUS!

205
 16

The Ray and the Flame, or,

What It Takes for the Sun to Shine

Tim Ingold

What does it take for the sun to shine in the sky? What does
it mean to experience the brilliance of its light? You might
think that these are entirely different questions, one inviting an
answer in terms of the physics of radiation, the other in terms of
the psychology of perception. I aim to show, to the contrary, that
physics can no more account for sunshine than psychology for
luminous experience. We shall see that these are not different
questions but alternative versions of the same question — one
which can be answered, however, only by repudiating the bifur-
cation between the two worlds, of matter and energy on the one
hand, and of mind and meaning on the other, which has tradi-
tionally separated the disciplines of physics and psychology. For
the light that shines belongs, in our experience, neither to the
physical nor to the mental but, like the sky itself, to the phenom-
enal or atmospheric order of reality. It is an order constituted by
the fusion of the cosmic sphere with the sphere of affect.1

1 I have developed this argument at greater length elsewhere. See Tim

Ingold, The Life of Lines (London: Routledge, 2015), 94–100.

207
solarities

Physicists, of course, tell us that sunlight consists of elec-

tromagnetic emissions that, having travelled some 93 million
miles through the void of space, eventually reach the surface of
the earth, both catalyzing the photosynthetic reactions that fuel
the growth of plants and triggering a response in the photore-
ceptive cells of those animals, including human beings, that are
equipped with eyes. We see things, at least in daylight, thanks
to this solar radiation, as it differentially rebounds from, or is
absorbed by, the surfaces it encounters. But do we see the light
itself? “Of all the things that can be seen,” asked the psychologist
James Gibson in his pioneering work on the ecology of visual
perception, “is light one of them?” It is not, he answered. We
see the sun and the moon, the embers of the fire and the flame
of the candle. But these, he insisted, are objects disclosed by
the light; they are not light “as such.” Pared down to its radiant
essence as waves or photons in a physical universe, light is the
one thing we never see.2
What, then, are we to make of the varieties of luminous
experience? They are surely real enough, and every language
has a wealth of verbs with which to describe them. In English,
for example, we have not only shining but also glowing, blazing,
flickering, and many more. The sun shines; the fire blazes and
its embers glow; the candleflame flickers. But radiant energy
can do none of these things. If light consisted only of rays, then
it could neither shine, nor glow, blaze or flicker. Yet for us, the
shining of the sun, along with the blazing logs and glowing
embers of the fire, and the flickering flame of the candle, is no
illusion, no hallucination in the world of appearances. It is as
real as is the pitch darkness of a stormy night. This is not to
say that we are right and physics wrong, or vice versa. We and
they can both be right, but only because we start with different
definitions — respectively physical and phenomenal — of what
light is. For physics, light is an energetic impulse of which our
experiences are mere effects and induced in the theater of con-

2 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale:

Lawrence Erlbaum: 1986), 54–55.

208
 the ray and the flame

sciousness. For us earthly beings, light is the experience itself

for which radiant energy is but a condition.
What then must the sun be, for it to shine? It cannot be a
distant cosmic object, or an emitter of rays. Shining does not
connect me, by a long straight line of transmission, to the sun.
It rather carries on, in real time, along an axis orthogonal to
this line, an axis along which the sun and I measure out our
days together. This is the temporal axis of sentient awareness
in the midst of a world forever on the burn. As with the blaze
of the woodfire or the flickering flame of candle, it is the sun’s
shining, rather than spanning an interval of transmission, that
endures in the glare of combustion. For in our experience, the
sun is its light, not a source of light, and in its shining, it erupts
into a vision that, far from having closed itself off from a world
“out there,” has opened itself to the boundless sky. Thus, sun-
light does not arrive from afar but ignites in the consciousness
of the seer who sees with it, with eyes bathed in its luminosity.
After all, as poet-scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe mused,
“if the eye were not sun-like, the sun’s light it would never see.”3
Note that Goethe wonders how the eye sees the sun’s light,
not the sun as an object by way of its light. The sun is of course
a star, and a telescope can detect the stars by their lights. But
it does not see the light of the stars. Goethe wants us to com-
pare the eye to the sun, not to a telescope. Its function is not to
pick up energetic signals conveying information about distant
objects, and to refer them to an interior mind-brain for process-
ing. Our sun-like eyes, for Goethe, are not the organs of a body,
nor does the comparison rest upon the spherical form of both
the eyeballs and the sun. He sees in the eye, rather, the affec-
tive disposition of a body that, opening itself to the heavens,
becomes a creature of the light. It is as though the body, satu-

3 In the original German: “Wär nicht das Auge sonnenhaft, / Die Sonne
könnt es nie erblicken” (from “Zahme Xenien III,” 1827), cited in Frederick
Amrine, “The Metamorphosis of the Scientist,” in Goethe’s Way of Sci-
ence: A Phenomenology of Nature, eds. David Seamon and Arthur Zajonc
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 34.

209
solarities

rated with light, were to become all eye — as though we were

eye-bodies, not bodies with eyes. And it is to understand the
sun likewise not as a celestial body — an object of vision to be
seen, at best, through a glass, darkly — but as that which lights
our existence and the world from within, on the hither side of
vision. As the sun is its shining, so it shines in our own eyes.
For us humans, of course, sunlight not only illuminates our
world, but it warms us too. So do, on a lesser scale, the flames
of the fire. In the eyes of medieval people for whom the naked
flame was far more central to both warmth and nocturnal illu-
mination than for most of us today, light and combustion were
inseparable. Wherever there was light, something was burning.
The rising flames of a fire twist and curl in response to atmos-
pheric conditions, much as do the trunks of trees, rising from
the earth. The metaphor of the beam of light has its source in
this comparison. The word referred originally to a living tree, a
usage preserved in the names of such common arboreal species
as whitebeam, hornbeam and quickbeam. The archetypal incen-
diary analogue of the tree-trunk was the Biblical columna lucis,
the fiery “pillar of light” by which, in the Book of Exodus, the
Israelites were guided on their way at night. And for the Vener-
able Bede, writing in the eighth century, the beam was the light
or fire ascending from the body of a saint. Light beams from the
saintly body, according to Bede, as the tree trunk grows from
the earth.
Here, the beam was a flame. So, too, the thirteenth century
painters who decorated the wooden ceiling of the stave-church
of Ål, in central Norway, depicted sunbeams as flames, spewing
out in all directions from a blazing solar fireball (fig. 1). Only
later was the beam straightened. Eventually, it would refer to
straight-cut timber, not the living tree; to the rectilinear ray and
not the flame. The timber was felled, the flames extinguished,
light dematerialized. The world was straightened out, geome-
tricized. Yet radial geometry did not have to await the birth of
physics, let alone the discovery of electromagnetic radiation. It
was already there, in Ancient Greece, in the set-up by which a
stake in the ground, rising erect like the gnomon of the sundial,

210
 the ray and the flame

Fig. 1. The sun and the moon. Detail from a painting from the
wooden ceiling of the stave-church of Ål, in central Norway, dating
from the thirteenth century. Courtesy of the Museum of Cultural His-
tory, University of Oslo.

would cast its shadow by the sun’s rays, allowing measurement

by proportion. But in this setup, as philosopher Michel Serres
remarks, “there is no place for the eye, nor site that can be called
a point of view.”4 The sun alone disposes, leaving mortal eyes
to pick out the forms of things from patterns in the light, while
blind to the light itself.
In short, the ray is as distinct from the flame as emission
from combustion. They rest, fundamentally, on wholly differ-
ent ontologies of the sun and its light. As an emitter of rays, the
sun is transcendental, master of the cosmos, invisibly disposing
its visible objects according geometric laws. But as a beaming
fireball, it is elemental, shining in the eyes and warming the
hearts of all who are dazzled by its splendor. It is no wonder
that throughout human history, those with aspirations to abso-
lute power have sought to enlist the sun in their enterprise, or
even to model their rule upon that of the sun itself. Yet none
has managed to resolve the duality between the two suns, of
geometry and of fire. The ruler who would order his kingdom
according to principles of geometry, but who would also daz-

4 Michel Serres, Geometry: The Third Book of Foundations, trans. Randolph

Burks (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 139.

211
solarities

Fig. 2. Pachacuti, the ninth ruler of the Inca state, worshipping the
sun-god Inti, at the temple of Coricancha. From the seventeenth-
century chronicles of Martín de Murúa.

zle his subjects with the brilliance of his light, must command
both. Perhaps that is why the sun-god Inti, worshipped by the
rulers of the Inca people, is depicted as a golden disk radiating
arms that are alternately wavy and straight (fig. 2). These are the
arms of different suns, with different lights. The straight arms
are rays, they ordain the order of the Inca state, with its straight
roads radiating out from the capital, Cusco. With their sharp
points, they pin the people to the land, each community in its
appointed place. But the wavy arms are flames, sources of heat
and vitality. With them, the sun-god wraps his devotees in the

212
 the ray and the flame

warmth of his embrace. And as we go around the sun’s disk, first

the ray, and then the flame, is invoked.
In late medieval Europe, heraldic depictions of the “sun in
splendor” adopted a similar solar imagery, again with an alter-
nation of wavy and straight arms. Drawing on both Incan and
European traditions, the same iconography is reproduced today
in the national flags of Uruguay and Argentina. Each flag carries
an image of the sun, known as the “Sun of May” in commemo-
ration of the events of May 1810 that marked the beginning of
independence from the Spanish Empire. The Uruguayan ver-
sion has sixteen arms, and the Argentinian has thirty-two, but
on both flags the arms are alternately straight and wavy: light
as ray; light as flame. The straight lines order the universe, but
it takes the wavy lines for the sun itself to shine. For to repeat,
the sun in splendor is its shining, and it shines in our own eyes.

213
solarities

References

Amrine, Frederick. “The Metamorphosis of the Scientist.” In

Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature, edited
by David Seamon and Arthur Zajonc, 33–54. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1998.
Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986.
Ingold, Tim. The Life of Lines. London: Routledge, 2015.
Serres, Michel. Geometry: The Third Book of Foundations.
Translated by Randolph Burks. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

214
 17

Tupilaq (In the Shadow of Solarity)

Amanda Boetzkes

We up here live two kinds of life, in the summer under the

torch of the sun and in the winter under the scourge of the
northern wind. But the cold and the darkness is what makes
us think. And when the great darkness covers the land many
hidden things are revealed and then the thoughts of human
beings go along pathless ways.1
— East Greenlander, 1914

I position “solarity” here as one among many elemental agents

that shape the cultural regimes of the circumpolar North. The
concept of solarity tempts a line of theorization bound to a
scientific perspective and its assumed position of objectivity,
whereby the “solar” is defined as both the medium of scholarly
insight (the source of illumination) and an energy resource (and
therefore an object of study). I suggest that solarity is better
understood through elemental philosophy and its commitment

1 Merete Demant Jakobsen, Shamanism: Traditional and Contemporary

Approaches to the Master of Spirits and Healing (New York: Berghahn
Books, 1999), 45. Translation of an East Greenlander quoted in Anton
Berthelsen, Neuropatologiske Meddelelser fra Grønland II (Copenhagen:
Quist & Komp, 1914), 33.

215
solarities

Fig. 1. Whale Bone Arch, Barrow Alaska. Courtesy of the US Fish and
Wildlife Service.

to thinking the irreducibility of elements in their overlap, co-

implication and withdrawal from one another. This trajectory
counteracts the technoscientific perspective at work in environ-
mental archaeology with an understanding of solarity as a force
that vitalizes material culture through its interplay with other
elements, its capacity to cast shadows, and the way it yields an
account of artifacts beyond positivist narratives of culture and
history. Here, the insights of solarity come by way of an aware-
ness of its interaction with the moon, the night, with bone and
sinew, with land and water, tools and carvings, climate changes,
human and animal migrations, and the forced displacement of
the circumpolar Inuit.

Thule Remains under the Sun

In Barrow, Alaska, the immense jawbone of a bowhead whale

stands as a passage to the Arctic Ocean. Bleached white in the
sun, the Whale Bone Arch is a monument to the Iñupiat (Inuit)
people of Alaska whose history and contemporary livelihood

216
 tupilaq

is bound to sea hunting (fig. 1). The jawbone is also an iconic

structure of the Thule people, the ancestors of the circumpolar
Inuit, who used whale skeletons as architectural supports for
their coastal settlement homes. The Thule migrated eastward
across the Arctic Archipelago from Siberia to Alaska, Nunavut,
and across to Greenland during a period of climate warming
that began around 1000 CE and lasted until the sixteenth cen-
tury.
In environmental archaeology, weathered whalebone and
other artifacts made of walrus and seal tusks, teeth, and skins
are crucial objects for analyzing the cultural transformations of
the Thule as they traveled across the circumpolar North. This
early period of climate warming caused the breakup of glacier
ice and a proliferation of Arctic waterways, which in turn led to
the flourishing of open-sea hunting, the development of more
complex harpoons and other tools, textiles, and architectural
scaffolding that integrated the bones and teeth of sea mam-
mals.2 The jawbone in Barrow therefore corroborates the Thule’s
dynamic cultural ecology.
Using Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating,
environmental archaeologists analyze the sediment on these
artifacts, gathering data about the Thule migration by assess-
ing when the objects were last exposed to the sun. OSL dating
situates the artifacts in the archaeological settlements based on
their luminescence signal. Mineral grains that were attached
to the objects acquired luminescence upon exposure to the
ionizing radiation of the sun, which in turn effected the trap-
ping of electrons. OSL provides an encompassing picture of the
Thule’s use and discard of objects and tools deduced from an
analysis of their biochemical exchange with the sun. Yet while
the OSL analysis of the objects informs a seemingly objective
understanding of the Thule’s relationship to the land, it never-

2 See Robert W. Park, “Frozen Coasts and The Development of Inuit Culture
in The North American Arctic,” Landscapes and Societies — Selected Cases,
eds. I. Peter Martini and Ward Chesworth (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010),
407–21.

217
solarities

theless leaves many questions unanswered regarding the Thule’s

understanding of the sun, moon and other elements, and how
this informed the evolution of their flourishing material culture.
In other words, the sun may illuminate and situate this historic
culture from the perspective of environmental archaeology,
but if understood as a medium of objectivity, it ultimately casts
shadows over Thule historicity and its legacies in contemporary
Inuit culture.
Among the remaining mysteries of Thule settlements is the
question, why did they so readily choose whalebone and walrus
ivory rather than the antler and bone of land mammals that were
more readily available and more pliant? Archaeologist Robert
McGhee suggests that Thule artifacts seemed to have been fab-
ricated and grouped in consonance with the classic land-sea
dichotomy elaborated by Marcel Mauss.3 In the early twentieth
century, Mauss noted that modern Inuit, the descendants of the
Thule, did not mix cookware for caribou and sea mammal meat
nor could caribou skin be sewn on the ice.4 His influential study
established a structuralist discourse of the mythological associa-
tions of land (as male) and sea (as female) along with seasonal
changes in settlements in archaeology. Thus, McGhee proposes
an extension of the land-sea dichotomy and its counterparts to
other dichotomies such as man/woman, summer/winter and
antler/ivory (land mammal/sea mammal) in interpreting Thule
material culture. Ivory and whalebone became the material of
choice for a culture that coevolved with the conditions of cli-
mate warming and correspondingly an increase in sea-hunting
and northeasterly migration.
Yet, this structuralist framework does not account for its
own overcoming as it is recounted in the mythology of the
circumpolar Inuit. For example, the relationship between the
moon (Moon Brother) and the sun (Sun Sister) is understood

3 Robert McGhee, “Ivory for the Sea Woman: The Symbolic Attributes of a
Prehistoric Technology,” in Interpreting Objects and Collections, ed. Susan
M. Pearce (New York: Routledge, 1994), 59–66.
4 Marcel Mauss, “Essai sur les variations saisonnières des societies eskimos,”
L’Année Sociologique 9 (1906): 39–130.

218
 tupilaq

as polarized by an incest taboo. Arctic skies are animated by

Moon Brother’s drive to transgress, a desire that is fulfilled
during the solar eclipse. The two siblings enliven the sky as a
dynamic unity of opposites as Moon Brother chases Sun Sister
across the celestial vault in search of sexual gratification. On the
occasion of the solar eclipse, when volatile Moon Brother’s pas-
sions override, and Sun Sister is overtaken by his advances, the
entire order of Sila — the vital breath that binds all living things
together — is threatened and might even induce a social panic.5
Such violations of the dichotomous separation between moon
and sun led to the ritual of the illuminanganak qungaujaqpuq
(“paradoxical smile”), when people pretend to smile with half of
their face upon the first appearance of the sun after the winter.
The half-smile is meant to induce Sun Sister to shine brighter,
as though she might think “since they are making fun of me, I’m
going to shine my burning rays on them.”6 During the darkness
of the polar night, women would play cat’s cradle in order to
catch the light of the sun in the game’s crossthreads and prevent
it from vanishing.
The solarity of the circumpolar Inuit appears in its radiations
through its material culture, the interleaving of Sun Sister with
other celestial bodies, affects, objects and beings. Yet an appre-
ciation of the sun’s elemental expressivity in Inuit myth does
not often register in the archaeological accounts of Thule settle-
ments. Instead, the Thule have been theorized straightforwardly
in terms of the effects of sun exposure on their tools and objects
rather than their meaningful co-implication. The sun is framed
as a primary environmental cause of cultural change and is
therefore an object and medium of analysis.
Under the sway of OSL dating, environmental archaeology
focuses on the centuries-long time period after the fifteenth
century when the Little Ice Age struck, and the Thule withdrew

5 Bernard Saladin D’Anglure, Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth: Gender,

Shamanism and the Third Sex (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press,
2018), 99–100.
6 Ibid., 100.

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solarities

from the High Arctic and migrated south. It was during this
time that the open water hunting season shortened, and the
cooling climate became prohibitive for long-term habitation.
The Thule disbanded, leaving their settlements, and abandoning
their artifacts. As the land froze into an Arctic desert, the sun
exerted itself on the bones, teeth, and skin that shaped the Thule
settlements, consuming the fleshy residue of their sediment.
Curiously, the desertion of the Arctic has become the condition
of possibility to hinge the culture of the Thule and that of the
contemporary Inuit in environmental archaeology. While they
are defined as distinct peoples, it is assumed that the former
are predecessors to the latter. The assumption of continuity is,
however, argued through an environmental determinism, that
climate change caused the migrations and technological evolu-
tion of the Thule. The centuries of nonhuman environmental
activity between the sun and the artifacts when the high Arctic
was uninhabited invited settler projections and intentions to
the archaeological analysis. These projections should cue us to
the risks of theorizing solarity as an exclusively environmental
agent without the elemental mythologies that disclose its trans-
gression of dichotomous relations. The scientific drive to purify
the sun as a geophysical cause effaces the cultural complexities
that illuminate the proliferation of the Thule into the heteroge-
neous peoples of the circumpolar North.

The Revitalization of Whalebone in Places Without Dawn

In the late twentieth century, Thule whalebone artifacts became

newly important to contemporary Inuit who started using the
bleached whalebones from Thule settlements as a material for
sculpture carving.7 Whalebone acquired an added layer of signi-
fication when it entered a lucrative global art market. Not only
was it an ideal material insofar as the Inuit found it pre-bleached
and ready for use, but it conjoined their contemporary culture

7 Susan Hallett, “Eskimo Sculpture: The Archaeology of Whale Bones in

Art,” Canadian Review 3, no. 4 (1976): 30–31.

220
 tupilaq

to that of the Thule. Inuit sculpture therefore doubled as high

art and ethnographic artifact, encompassing an archaic quality
that appealed to southerners.8 Whalebone sculpture indexed an
ancient and exotic culture while feeding a belief that the Inuit
were closer to nature. However, the discursive construction
of a linear continuity between the Thule and the Inuit invited
colonialist projections that framed both the Thule and the
Inuit in primitivist terms.9 Nineteenth-century anthropologists
and archaeologists framed the Inuit as living examples of the
“prehistoric” Thule who were unusually “adaptable” to harsh
environmental conditions. These social sciences positioned
the Inuit as an ancient culture lacking modern social organiza-
tion and technology and at the same time as naturally possess-
ing supreme skills to survive High Arctic environments.10 The
geocultural specificity of the whalebone was subsumed into a
generalized narrative that effaced the Little Ice Age, the disper-
sal of the Thule, the southern migration that defined and dif-
ferentiated the Inuit, and the centuries of exposure of the Thule
artefacts to the sun over which time their meanings and uses lay
dormant.
The archaeological discourse of the Inuit’s “environmental
adaptability” was unattuned to the specific peaks and valleys
of climate change in the High Arctic that had instigated the
southern migration of the Thule. Indeed, the Inuit’s presumed
“natural adaptability” to any Arctic environment was the pre-
tense for the Canadian government to relocate the Inuit from
the Subarctic regions of Hudson Bay hundreds of kilometers

8 Heather Iglioliorte, “‘Hooked Forever on Primitive Peoples’: James

Houston and the Transformation of ‘Eskimo Handicrafts’ to Inuit Art,” in
Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism, eds. Elizabeth Harney
and Ruth Phillips (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 62–90.
9 Robert McGhee, “The Archaeological Construction of Aboriginality: The
Inuit Case,” in Archaeologies of Us and Them: Debating History, Heritage
and Indigeneity, eds. Charlotta Hillerdal, Anna Karlström, and Carl-Gösta
Ojala (New York: Routledge, 2017): 97–108.
10 Ibid., 99.

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solarities

north to Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord in the 1950s.11 The gov-
ernment promised them economic prosperity through better
hunting opportunities, which they could purportedly optimize
using their presumably inborn patterns of thought and reaction
inherited from the Thule. The Inuit relocatees immediately con-
tested the new conditions and accused the Canadian govern-
ment of using them as human flagpoles to declare its sovereign
claim on Arctic lands.12 The relocation was both shockingly new
and wholly traumatic in that it enforced the separation of fami-
lies and communities from one another. While the government
deployed the archaeological rationale to theorize the connec-
tion between the Thule and the Inuit to reinforce its military
position, in fact centuries of climate cooling and an entirely dif-
ferent set of knowledge, resources and skills separated them. As
Amy Prouty charts, the Inuktitut names given for these places
by the relocatees discloses exactly how impoverished these envi-
ronments were from their perspective: they named Grise Fiord
Ausuittuq, “the place that never thaws,” while Resolute Bay was
called Qausuittuq, “the place with no dawn.”13
Despite the government’s shameful misuse of archaeology,
the Inuit discovered a use for the solarized Thule bones they
found abandoned there, which became a preferred material of
Inuit sculptors. While in the early twentieth century, Inuit carv-
ers had primarily sculpted walrus ivory and soapstone, after the
relocation, dozens of art cooperatives were formed in Nunavut,
Québec, and the Northwest Territories, and Alaska and started
selling whalebone sculpture. The cooperatives — among them
the now famous Kinngait Co-Op (originally the West Baffin
Eskimo Co-Operative) — functioned under the model of colo-
nial trading posts. Though an affirmation of colonial economy,
they nevertheless yielded an opportunity for hunters to earn

11 Ibid.
12 Amy Prouty, “How Art Brought About an Apology for High Arctic Reloca-
tions,” Inuit Art Quarterly, June 18, 2020, https://www.inuitartfoundation.
org/iaq-online/how-art-brought-about-an-apology-for-high-arctic-reloca-
tions.
13 Ibid.

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 tupilaq

extra income under the deprived conditions of forced reset-

tlement. The cooperatives increased the southern market for
Inuit whalebone sculpture to such an extent that whalebone
started to be harvested for that express purpose.14 Yet fresh,
unbleached whalebone came with a set of challenges: it leaches
strong-smelling oil and can even breed worms, sometimes dec-
ades after it has been sculpted, and the period of solar exposure
had actually prepared the bones for Inuit sculpting. Moreover,
by the 1980s, embargoes on whale products in Canada and the
United States led to a decline in the exchange of new whalebone.
Consequently, the renewed market value of sun-bleached Thule
artifacts in and as a material for Inuit sculptures consolidated
their history as inheritors of Thule land and culture. Neverthe-
less, this inheritance was predicated on a complex form of mili-
tary, colonial, and scientific paternalism.
If whalebone sculpture acts as a suture between the Inuit and
their Thule predecessors, then it also points to the gap between
the two cultures and the centuries of time over which the whale-
bones lay discarded, exposed to the sun. For whalebone became
informative as an artifact for archaeologists using OSL, and
useful as a sculptural material due to a discontinuity between
the Thule and the contemporary Inuit, a lapse in history over
which time the sun exerted itself as an agent without narration
or myth, while it leached the whalebone of its oil, sinew, and
fleshy residue. This solar activity materialized the rupture of the
artifacts from their cultural life and throws a geological lens on
the history of the Inuit. The most meaningful solar activity in
this context is, paradoxically, a time without human occupation
in the area. It coincides with a time of climate cooling, when
the High Arctic became inhospitable, when the whales departed
and the Thule left their whalebone settlements, so that eventu-
ally when colonial expeditions arrived to rediscover the area,
they could claim the land and its meaning for themselves as
though for the first time.

14 Susan W. Fair, Alaska Native Art: Tradition, Innovation, Continuity, ed.

Jean Blodgett (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2006), 45.

223
solarities

Recasting Colonial Shadows

What is solarity in this complex history of the circumpolar Inuit?

The sun appears here as a two-fold force: the first, as one that
conditions archaeological objects for scientific analysis in its
weathering of human and nonhuman animal remains and sec-
ond, as one that strips those same remains of their specificity in
a cultural ecology, priming them to be recoded under the terms
of settler epistemology. It is as though the sun fulfils an ideal of
objectivity that is coextensively scientific and economic. It pro-
duces scientific information by consuming the fleshy layers that
constitute the matter of diversity. But the solar consumption of
bone is ambivalent. Did it enable the colonial resettlement of the
Inuit by yielding Thule artifacts as a commodifiable material?
Or was it an element that revitalized whalebone, charging mod-
ern Inuit sculptural practice with energies that allowed them to
summon a Thule renaissance?
Read as a corrosive force that consumes organic matter, the
sun’s energies can efface differences in a totalizing way. Archae-
ology subtly deploys the sun to reduce the objects of the Thule
assemblage to geological information, thereby it uses solarity as
a controlled illumination. The use of OSL dating subtly divides
the artifact between geology and culture in such a way as to
mask their co-extensiveness. This application of solar light to
produce a totalizing knowledge tempts a discourse of environ-
mental adaptability with an impoverished understanding of cul-
tural innovation as naturally occurring from set environmental
conditions. It also leads to slippages and effacements of the cli-
mate events, political conflicts, and composite resolutions that
animate the long history of the Inuit.
Read as an entangled energy, the solarity of Inuit sculpture
raises the manifold environmental changes that differentiate but
also re-knot the present-day Inuit and the Thule, changes that
enrich an understanding of the reciprocal relationship between
geological forces and cultural change. For example, the period of
climate cooling led to a decline in bowhead whale hunting, the
dispersal of large Thule settlements into smaller semi-nomadic

224
 tupilaq

groups, an increase in seal hunting and sealskin trade, the rise of

European whaling settlements that traded metal which the Inuit
used for designing new tools, and the proliferation of sculpt-
ing in government-enforced resettlements. All of these devel-
opments are definitive of today’s Inuit culture. But they require
a converse reflection to account for how the Inuit seized solar
effects to take hold of Thule history and make claims to the land
in and through the aesthetic usefulness of their remains. Solar-
ity thus poses the question of how to interpret material histories
with a new acuity, coextensively with the transformative power
of the elements. It is from this perspective that one can read the
solarized whalebone archway in Barrow for its positioning of
the Inuit in the colliding meanings of Thule whaling culture, the
Little Ice Age, a traumatic modern resettlement, and an emer-
gent future of land reclamation in the midst of global climate
warming.
Solarity must not be misunderstood as the condition for a
new level objectivity. It is not an evenly distributed illumina-
tion of land from above. Nor is it an invariant condition that
can yield the linear development of a cultural ecology. Rather, as
the sun shines its light down, warms the land and consumes its
fleshy remains, it also nourishes new material relations. Solarity
could therefore be understood as an elemental vector with the
potential to multiply the meanings of archaeological remains.
As much as the sun is endemic to techniques and interpreta-
tions of climate history and environmental archaeology, then,
we must nevertheless seek from it the heterogeneous conditions
from which fractured material histories come to light. By read-
ing solarity alongside the shadows it casts, it becomes possible
to enlighten the multiplication of meanings unfolding within
the geology of the High Arctic.

Tupilaq, under the Moonlight

If sun-weathered whalebone artefacts provided an opportunity

for contemporary Inuit to actualize a Thule renaissance, then
we might wonder what kind of history can be probed from the

225
solarities

Fig. 2. Tupilaq figures. Greenland National Museum and Archives.

Photograph by the author.

nocturnal opposites to whalebone sculpture: the tupilaq fig-

ures of Greenland. Tupilaq originated in Thule oral tradition.
The cultures of Iñupiat Nunaat (of Alaska), Inuit Nunangat (of
Canada), and Kalaallit Nunaat (of Greenland) developed differ-
ent versions of the figure, some preserving it as a ghost story,
others as a mythic entity. When Danish and European traders
arrived in Greenland in the late nineteenth century, they were
transfixed by the mythology of the tupilaq and recorded ani-
mated stories about them. Greenlanders began to carve tupilaq
figures to elaborate the ritual and its oral narration, and these
soon became popular objects for trade (fig. 2).
In their shamanic origins, tupilaqs are spirits conjured
through objects made of animal sinew, hair, teeth, skin, and
bone, ideally combined with the bones or skull of a human
child. The tupilaq is summoned to seek out and wreak havoc on

226
 tupilaq

the enemy of its maker. The makeshift object would come to life
through a ritual undertaken at night, galvanized by the light of
the moon. The manufacturer would don an anorak backwards
(with hood over the face), and chant over the tupilaq. Awak-
ened in this way, the tupilaq would then glean magical power
and be nourished by sucking on the maker’s genitals. Finally, the
maker would fling the tupilaq into the ocean to hunt the enemy.
A tupilaq might be raised in vengeance but not without a risky
condition: if the maker’s enemy was more powerful, they might
turn the tupilaq on its maker and the ritual would backfire, and
the tupilaq would return to hunt the one who had cast the spell.
It was therefore more than a magical conjuring because it netted
magical force to an existing rivalry between two people. In this
way, the social fabric of the Inuit accounted for the dangers of
recoil in any covert exertion of power.
While the Christian sensibilities of European traders fed into
a hysterical framing of Inuit cosmology as a barbaric “death
cult,” they were nevertheless compelled to collect tupilaq.15 The
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw stylistic flourishes
in their manufacture. Soon they became objects to be traded
and collected in their own right. Greenlanders began to fash-
ion tupilaq from walrus and narwhal tusks, giving them flaring
nostrils, gleaming wide eyes with dilated pupils, stretched lips,
and polymorphous tongues. The ritualized assembly of human
and animal parts was subsumed into a specialized carving prac-
tice. Today, tupilaq are, like whalebone sculpture, widely circu-
lated commodities and a recognizable signifier of Greenlandic
Inuit culture. But like the whalebone sculpture that recovers the
Thule artifact, the tupilaq is an object that springs from a shad-
owy history of the circumpolar Inuit. Where the former object
subsumes hundreds of years of sun exposure over which time
it consumed and neutralized the material remains the Thule
culture, the latter — charged by skin, sinew, and moonlit chant-
ing — was prepared and refined for intercultural trade.

15 Jens Peder Hart Hansen, Jørgen Meldgaard, and Jørgen Nordqvist, The
Greenland Mummies (Copenhagen: The British Museum Press, 1985).

227
solarities

The concept of solarity is therefore set at a crossroads: it

tempts the scientific discourse of environmental adaptabil-
ity whereby primacy is afforded to climate-based phenomena
and cultural change is taken to be a secondary effect. Yet this
account of whalebone sculpture and tupilaq figures suggests
that the Inuit took hold of the elemental charge of their artifacts
as they cultivated new environmental relations. Solarity could
either overshadow or elucidate the choices, innovations, and
flourishes of the Thule and the Inuit undertaken over hundreds
of years, as well as their coevolution with European settlers,
often under the duress of colonialist deceit and trauma. Solar-
ity is therefore not a determining environmental condition of
cultural change, just as lunar energy is not a purely coincidental
backdrop to the efficacy of the tupilaq. The complexity of Inuit
history demands a rethinking through geocultural limitrophy
rather than environmental determinism. With this in mind, we
might question the extent to which solarity can overcome the
dichotomous framework at the heart of the discourse of envi-
ronmental adaptation, and whether tupilaq still seek out their
enemies, but now vitalized by the rays of the sun.

228
 tupilaq

References

Berthelsen, Anton. Neuropatologiske Meddelelser fra Grønland

II. Copenhagen: Quist & Komp, 1914.
D’Anglure, Bernard Saladin. Inuit Stories of Being and
Rebirth: Gender, Shamanism and the Third Sex. Winnipeg:
University of Manitoba Press, 2018.
Demant Jakobsen, Merete. Shamanism: Traditional and
Contemporary Approaches to the Master of Spirits and
Healing. New York: Berghahn Books, 1999.
Fair, Susan W. Alaska Native Art: Tradition, Innovation,
Continuity. Edited by Jean Blodgett. Fairbanks: University
of Alaska Press, 2006.
Hallett, Susan. “Eskimo Sculpture: The Archaeology of Whale
Bones in Art.” Canadian Review 3, no. 4 (1976): 30–31.
Hansen, Jens Peder Hart, Jørgen Meldgaard, and Jørgen
Nordqvist. The Greenland Mummies. Copenhagen: The
British Museum Press, 1985.
Iglioliorte, Heather. “‘Hooked Forever on Primitive Peoples’:
James Houston and the Transformation of ‘Eskimo
Handicrafts’ to Inuit Art.” In Mapping Modernisms: Art,
Indigeneity, Colonialism, edited by Elizabeth Harney and
Ruth Phillips, 62–90. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Mauss, Marcel. “Essai sur les variations saisonnières des
sociétés eskimos.” L’Année Sociologique 9 (1906): 39–130.
McGhee, Robert. “Ivory for the Sea Woman: The Symbolic
Attributes of a Prehistoric Technology.” In Interpreting
Objects and Collections, edited by Susan M. Pearce, 59–66.
New York: Routledge, 1994.
———. “The Archaeological Construction of Aboriginality:
The Inuit Case.” In Archaeologies of Us and Them: Debating
History, Heritage and Indigeneity, edited by Charlotta
Hillerdal, Anna Karlström, and Carl-Gösta Ojala, 97–108.
New York: Routledge, 2017.
Park, Robert W. “Frozen Coasts and The Development of Inuit
Culture in The North American Arctic.” In Landscapes and

229
solarities

Societies — Selected Cases, edited by I. Peter Martini and

Ward Chesworth, 407–21. Dordrecht: Springer, 2010.
Prouty, Amy. “How Art Brought About an Apology for High
Arctic Relocations.” Inuit Art Quarterly, June 18, 2020.
https://www.inuitartfoundation.org/iaq-online/how-art-
brought-about-an-apology-for-high-arctic-relocations.

230
 18

The Kiln

Kim Förster

Key to understanding the “large technological system” of a

primary industry that the contemporary built world relies on,
the cement kiln surprisingly has not yet received much critical
attention despite its central role in cementing ideas, practices,
and institutions of modernity throughout the twentieth century
and despite a growing concern about its environmental, and
social, damage.1 Within the scope of revising architectural his-
tory, only recently has concrete — like steel, glass, and plastic a
dominant building material today — become scrutinized for its
carbon emissions, and others.2 The kiln, inherently Promethean,
must be seen as an actor in its own right, a technology that coun-

1 Thomas P. Hughes, “The Evolution of Large Technological Systems,” in The

Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociol-
ogy and History of Technology, eds. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and
Trevor Pinch (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 45–76.
2 Mark Jarzombek, an architectural historian who at the turn of the millen-
nium still believed in the possibility of sustainability within the capital-
ist system, today questions the industrial global production of certain
building materials, and thereby making the architectural profession
responsible for its addiction — here, he refers to unquestioned universals
(“quadrivium”) — to the industrial complex of steel, concrete, glass, and
plastic. Mark Jarzombek, “The Quadrivium Industrial Complex,” e-flux

231
solarities

Fig. 1. Coal dust nozzle burning, in kiln, no date. In order to sinter the
raw meal of limestone and marl at a temperature of 1450°C, a flame
of significantly higher temperature is essential, and the combustion
of fossil fuels in the rotary kiln is necessary. In the burning process
of clinker, the limestone and marl mix is calcined, releasing carbon
dioxide (CO₂). Source: Research Library Pestalozzianum / Pestaloz-
zianum Foundation, Zurich, GD_83_8-009.

teracts any kind of “solarity” as a fundamental social reorienta-

tion towards the sun and the political change that accompanies
this. Elementary for much construction activity throughout the
twentieth century, the kiln in the cement plant is a key site and
subject of the Anthropocene that mixes industrial production,
scientific knowledge, technological development, politics, and

architecture, November 11, 2019, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/

overgrowth/296508/the-quadrivium-industrial-complex/.

232
 the kiln

design at different scales, all architectural, urban, and infra-

structural, with financial interests.3
In elemental terms, the kiln, first of all, is an important tech-
nology in modern architecture, whose metabolism is shaped by
the burning of fossil fuels and on these grounds enters into the
environmental humanities. For the cement industry, it is pivot
and axis for grinding and burning a raw meal of rock (mixed
limestone and marl) that is rich in calcium carbonate (CaCO₃),
into clinker (an intermediary product).4 This includes pro-
cesses of drying, preheating, calcinating, and sintering (a ther-
mal treatment to produce or change hardness and firmness) at
a temperature of 1450° Celsius and above, which can only be
reached with the help of air and fossil fuels.5 Since the end of
the nineteenth century, the industrial kiln has been the central
device in the global cement industry both from the point of
view of materialization and capitalization:6 on the one hand, in
mass producing Portland cement as hydraulic binder (next to
water and aggregates — sand and gravel — the main raw mate-
rial for pouring concrete) and, on the other hand, with cement
plants spreading globally, it is an unprecedented and by all

3 Adrian Forty, “Myths of the Origin of Modern Concrete,” gta papers 3

(2019): 69–77.
4 Adolf Koelsch, “Vom Kalkstein zum Zement: Dem Beton die Zukunft!,”
Cementbulletin 1, no. 12 (1933): 2–5. Since 1933, the Cementbulletin, a publi-
cation of the industry representation Technische Forschung und Beratung,
has published on topics of production and application of cement.
5 Fritz Keil, Zement: Herstellung und Eigenschaften (Berlin: Springer Verlag,
1971).
6 Portland cement as a main ingredient for modern concrete has passed
through a layered history of inventions beginning at the end of the eight-
eenth century; reinforced concrete as a global building material, however,
only became used a hundred years later with material, processual, and
technological innovations. Given a material history of cement, that can
be traced back to the Roman Empire, it is of no surprise that the OED lists
earlier uses, both literal and metaphorical: cement (v.) — “To unite solid
bodies with cement”; cementing (n.) — “The action of uniting with or as
with cement”; or cementation (n.) in is alchemic use — “The action or
process of cementing or producing cohesion.”

233
solarities

Fig. 2. Rotary kiln plant, no date. At the beginning of the 20th cen-
tury, the Polysius AG Dessau, Germany became the market leader
for rotary kilns and other machines used in the industrial produc-
tion process of cement. Polysius equipped cement plants worldwide,
including the one in Holderbank in Canton Aargau, Switzerland,
from 1912 onwards the nucleus of today’s global market leader
Holcim. Source: Research Library Pestalozzianum / Pestalozzianum
Foundation, Zurich, GD_83_8-007.

means modern building material.7 Similar to the oil refinery,

and along with the steel mill, the glassworks, or the chemical
plant, the cement kiln orchestrated an industrial process at the
center of an elemental metabolism of matter and material that
facilitated the growth of global modernities.
And yet, more than just an instrument within the indus-
trial production of cement, the kiln is also a modernist trope.

7 Adrian Forty, “Mud and Modernity,” in Concrete and Culture: A Material

History (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 13–42, esp. 15. Forty, an architec-
tural historian who recently discussed its different origin myths, has most
outspokenly been interested in what makes concrete a “modern material.”

234
 the kiln

It was and still is associated with the fantasies, hopes, myths,

and promises of industrial capitalism and its system of resource
extraction, the cement industry being a continuation strategies
to cheapen nature.8 As Fordist production changed the patterns
and dynamics of the global economic system both in terms of
production and consumption at the onset of the second indus-
trial revolution, the mechanized and soon fully electrified
cement plant has fundamentally shaped how we build and live.
Manufactured and sold as complete equipment called a “turn-
key” factory, cement plants because since they objectify nature
and externalize costs require new global histories of extraction,
construction and architecture, and the kiln interferes with any
future-oriented imaginary about energy and resource transi-
tion, corporate, state-led, or radical in the light of climate emer-
gency. When taken as a point of departure, the kiln, in all its
Anthropocene paradoxes, allows us to look beyond the depos-
ited modernities of concrete (and those that vanished into thin
air!).9 As the heart, or hearth, of a building material, construc-
tion and real estate industry, it has meanwhile influenced the
earth system in a variety of ways, accelerating the sedimenta-
tion and sealing of the pedosphere, emissions and the heating
of the troposphere and thus contributes to the slow violence of
the climate crisis, both directly and indirectly.
Modern narratives of architecture have presented those
buildings, forms and structures made of reinforced con-
crete — considered man-made, “artificial stone” — as virtually
indestructible, almost immaterial.10 And yet, exposed to the

8 Jason W. Moore and Ray Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap
Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
(London: Verso, 2018), and Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life:
Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015).
9 Jan Zalasiewicz, “The Anthropocene Square Meter,” in Critical Zones:
The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, eds. Bruno Latour and Peter
Weibel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020), 36–43.
10 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New
Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941), and Peter Colins,
Concrete: The Vision of a New Architecture (London: Faber and Faber,
1959).

235
solarities

elements such as the wind, rain, and sun and subject to chem-
ico-technical processes, concrete also weathers and decays,
acquiring a certain temporality, a lifespan of about fifty years.11
Nevertheless, this has not detracted from its success. Its myth of
durability, as possessing a kind of eternal time, in conjunction
with the new economy of construction, based on obsolescence,
helped distribute the cement as bulk commodity, replacing other
building materials (e.g., timber, brick, and rammed earth) and,
in the process, changing labor relations.12 Even so, cement pro-
duction has depended upon the availability of almost inexhaust-
ible raw material deposits, the availability of entropy between
sun and earth through coal, lignite, and oil, and recourse to
unskilled labor. Those who worked with the kiln and the quarry
performed some of the roughest, coarsest, dirtiest, and loudest
jobs of all until dust and noise emissions were tackled. Espe-
cially in the Global South, where production is increasing due
to the promise of modernization and development, workers
continue to suffer because labor and environmental rights are
violated there.
While the kiln, in all its activity, has fired the spread of indus-
trialized prefabrication, mass housing, and infrastructure space,
through the development of national and globalized markets, it
has also relied upon and inherited a particular arrangement of
the world that took shape in the twentieth century.13 As a cen-

11 J.W. Simpson and P.J. Horrobin, The Weathering and Performance of

Building Materials (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1970), and Fritz Keil,
“Natürliche und technische Einflüsse auf Beton,” in Zement: Herstellung
und Eigenschaften (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1971), 244–303.
12 For the modern paradigm of obsolescence, see Daniel Abramson,
“Obsolescence and Its Future,” in The Routledge Companion to Critical
Approaches to Contemporary Architecture, eds. Swati Chattopadhyay and
Jeremy White (London: Routledge, 2020), 231–43. For cement as bulk com-
modity, see Sarah Nichols, “Pollux’s Spears,” Grey Room 71 (2018): 141–55.
For changed labor relations, see Michael Osman, “Managerial Aesthetics
of Concrete,” Perspecta 45 (2012): 67–76, and Sérgio Ferro, “Concrete as
Weapon,” trans. Alice Fiuza and Silke Kapp, Harvard Design Magazine 46
(Fall/Winter 2018): 8-33.
13 Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich: Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbe-
ton (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1928); Sigfried Giedion, Building

236
 the kiln

terpiece of the modern building material industry, the cement

kiln, while at the beginning of a profitable yet unsustainable
commodity chain, representing a move away from natural, solar
building materials, surpassing them with an increasing capac-
ity of constructive volume, has remained almost untouched,
unchanged, and unchallenged.14

Antinomy to Solarity

One of the tasks of an elemental solarity is to rethink, redefine,

and readjust not only our relationship to modern energy sources,
but also to industrially mass-produced building materials, espe-
cially reinforced concrete, insofar as we in the humanities today
find ourselves within the contradictions of the Anthropocene.
This is a dual challenge that is both historiographical and episte-
mological.15 From this position, we can consider the cement kiln
as a twin fire to the sun, but unlike the sun, it mirrors the intri-
cate relationship of humankind and the nature of modernity.
And yet, rather than the productive excess, the “accursed share,”

in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete, trans. J. Duncan

Berry (Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Arts and the
Humanities, 1995); and Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture. In contrast,
the kiln is in the foreground in numerous company histories, which
are often told as pioneering stories; see Jura-Cement-Fabriken, ed., 75
Jahre Jura-Cement-Fabriken: Aarau-Wildegg 1882–1957 (Wildegg, 1957),
and Cementfabrik Holderbank, ed., 75 Jahre Cementfabrik Holderbank
(Rekingen, 1987).
14 Environmental scholar Vaclav Smil discussed energy and resources as
the two economic, ecological, and social key issues and challenges of the
twenty-first century. Herman Scheer, late social democrat, and father of
the German Energiewende (energy transition), on the other hand next to
solar energy also spoke of solar materials. Vaclav Smil, Making the Modern
World: Materials and Dematerialization (London: John Wiley & Sons,
2013).
15 Eva Horn and Hannes Bergthaller, The Anthropocene: Key Issues for the
Humanities (London: Routledge, 2020): 113ff. Literary scholars Horn and
Bergthaller in a humanities perspective applied the geological metaphor
of fault lines in order to work with, historicize, and think through the
Anthropocene in various directions.

237
solarities

of the sun, the fire of the kiln is environmentally destructive,

utilizing land to explore, mine, and quarry privatized deposits,
and, ultimately, devastating social relations.16
Nevertheless, the bright light of cement production and
concrete consumption has been repeatedly associated with pro-
gressive and utopian construction projects throughout the last
century, for example through socialist and democratic mass
housing or the Brutalist welfare state projects, such as education
facilities, communal centers, cultural institutions, etc.17 These
modern, industrial processes centered around the kiln — of
producing, transporting, and building with cement — have been
massively capital- and energy-intensive and have consumed vast
amounts of fossil fuels, through coal and oil-firing furnaces.
Within modernity, concrete and cement were seen as universal,
unavoidable, and unquestionable. The kiln was kept running, at
least indirectly, by the habits, education, regulations, and dis-
courses of a settled reality in which other possibilities did not
exist, and, in the end, particular corporate interests prevailed.18
Alternatives were, and still are for many unthinkable.
Despite the universality and anonymity of its product, the
kiln, and its hedged solarity, is also sited and situated. A para-
digmatic case study is the Aargauische Portland-Cement-Fabrik
(Aargau Portland Cement Plant) in Holderbank, the canton of
Aargau, Switzerland, which began at the foot of the Jura moun-
tains along the river Aare where thick layers of limestone rock
are exposed. This is the birthplace of the multinational Holcim
Group, the self-proclaimed world leader in the production of
cement and aggregates.19 Founded in 1912, Holderbank was not
the first modern cement plant in Switzerland. Various produc-
tion sites had already been established in connection with the
construction and expansion of the Swiss railroad network at

16 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. I: Consumption, trans. Robert

Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
17 Forty, “The Geopolitics of Concrete,” 101–44.
18 Nichols, “Pollux’s Spears.”
19 Peter Müller, “Holderbank,” Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, November
22, 2006, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/041872/2006-11-22/.

238
 the kiln

Fig. 3. Schematic illustration of cement manufacturing by the wet

process at the Holderbank plant, no date. Shown are all the machines
and processes organized around the kiln in the manufacture of Port-
land cement, exploiting rock strata and labor: from the quarry, via
coarse crushers, a sludge treatment, a sludge basin, an electric filter, a
rotary kiln hall, a coal mill, a clinker hall, a plaster mill, a cement mill,
cement elevators, to a packing and shipping plant. Source: Research
Library Pestalozzianum / Pestalozzianum Foundation, Zurich,
GD_83_8-002.

239
solarities

the time.20 While Holderbank had entered an already saturated

national market, wherein the prices were fixed by a trust after
WWI, despite the cyclical fluctuations in the interwar year, the
company grew quickly, profiting from the new construction
projects of the modern era, and the globalization of production.
What distinguished Holderbank as a new supplier and com-
petitor was that their kiln, indeed the entire cement plant, was
supplied by G. Polysius, a German iron foundry and machine
works based in Dessau. After representing itself internationally
at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, Poly-
sius specialized in the sale of all kinds of machines for processing
hard raw material, and especially in the innovation of grinders
and rotary kilns.21 While it is important not to overemphasize
the technological history of patents, plants, and processes alone
as the cause for Holderbank’s success, in a sort of technological
determinism, the double rotary kiln at the heart of Holderbank
was nevertheless a technology that set it above others in terms
of its productivity. This state-of-the-art machine produced high
quality cement consistently, day and night, all year round — all
of this was made possible by the orchestration of ropeways, belt
conveyors, coarse crushers, a drying plant, a coal mill, a clinker
hall, a cement mill, storage sheds, and packing plants.22 Poly-
sius also provided the power plant, steam boilers, generators,
motors, iron construction, railway tracks, railway cars, in addi-
tion to the various kinds of expertise from engineers, chemists,
assembly inspectors, supervisors, and fitters. The kiln thus was
situated within a modern “megamachine” that to stay profitable
had to continue rotating.23
This productive capacity would have been unconceivable,
however, without the quarry, where limestone and marl were

20 Andreas Steigmeier, “Adolf Louis Gygi,” Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz,

May 18, 2005, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/029550/2005-05-18/.
21 Renate Köhne-Lindenlaub, “Polysius,” Neue Deutsche Biographie, 2001,
www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd139799877.html.
22 G. Polysius AG, ed., Aargauische Portlandzementfabrik Holderbank-Wildegg
(Dessau, 1912).
23 Lewis Mumford, “The First Megamachine,” Diogenes 14, no. 55 (1966): 1–15.

240
 the kiln

Fig. 2. Holderbank cement works, pit, and crusher, 1936. Aerial and
landscape photography showed early on the wounds of industrial
exploiting the native rock strata, limestone and marl deposits of the
Jura mountains in Northern Switzerland, and the architecture of the
nearby cement works, the extended shed with the double rotary kiln
in the background. Source: ETH-Library Zurich, Image Archive,
Photographer: Leo Wehrli / Dia_247-09799 / CC BY-SA 4.0.

extracted first by the “Rolloch”-method, a mix of surface and

underground mining of driving tunnels in the lower part and
excavating funnel-shaped pits down to the shaft to extract rock,
and later by open-pit mining with large pipe-hole blasting. A
political geology of the modern kiln and its underlying knowl-
edge must necessarily address the granting of concessions for

241
solarities

the exploitation of natural resources.24 At Holderbank, the stone

put to work in the kiln was quarried from a 250-meter-thick
limestone strata of the Oxfordian age — sedimented minerals
of the upper Jurassic period, mixed with fossilized crustaceans
that had thrived under the sun some 155 to 180 million years
ago.25 Tectonics and the erosion of the river, which cut its way
further and further into the Jura mountains, facilitated mining.
The emergence of aerial and landscape photography in the first
decades of the twentieth century captured the extent that the
kiln and the quarry had impacted the environment, inflicting
wounds, and leaving scars in the landscape at that time.26
As elsewhere, at Holderbank the assemblage of kiln and
quarry was wide-ranging: always driven by a powerful com-
bination of entrepreneurial spirit and profit-making interests;
enabled by railway tracks and the supply of adequate fuel, with-
out interruption, to generate the heat needed; powered, at first
by hydroelectricity utilizing the river flow for energy produc-
tion; supported by the advancement of modern sciences, chemi-
cal knowledge27 on calcination and geological knowledge28 on

24 Adam Bobbette and Amy Donovan, “Political Geology: An Introduction,”

in Political Geology: Active Stratigraphies and the Making of Life, eds. Adam
Bobbette and Amy Donovan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 1–34.
25 It was Alexander von Humboldt who in 1795 had introduced the term
“Jura stone” for a lime stone, which was applied to rock strata in scientific
literature.
26 The aerial photography taken by Walter Mittelholzer from 1919 to 1937 and
the landscape photographs taken by Leo Wehrli in 1936 are archived in the
Image Archive Online of the ETH Library, Zurich; see http://www.e-pics.
ethz.ch/en/home_en/; esp. http://doi.org/10.3932/ethz-a-000492273, and
http://doi.org/10.3932/ethz-a-000082059.
27 Chemical knowledge was produced in laboratories, e.g. by Empa, the Swiss
Federal Laboratories for Material Testing, which in the 1920s prove the
quality of cement for Holderbank; see Mirko Roš, Die Portlandzemente der
Aargauischen Portlandzementfabrik Holderbank-Wildegg (Schweiz) (Lenz-
burg: Cement Holderbank, 1929), and Bruno Meyer,“Ludwig von Tetmajer
Przerwa,” Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, October 29, 2013, https://hls-
dhs-dss.ch/de/export/articles/031686/2013-10-29/.
28 Geological knowledge was disseminated through publications and visu-
alizations, e.g., by leading Swiss geologist Albert Heim, who in 1919–1922
published a new two-piece volume of his Geology of Switzerland; see

242
 the kiln

Fig. 5. Polysius’s products — “Our line of manufacture”, no date.

A multilanguage brochure of the Polysius AG Dessau offered its
machines, entire “turnkey” cement plants (including belt conveyors,
coarse crushers, drying plants, coal mills, cement mills, and rotary
kilns), around the globe through a system of agents, dominating the
market in the interwar period. Source: Saxony-Anhalt State Archives,
Germany I 414 Polysius AG Dessau, No. 436/3 fol. 429.

stratigraphy at the service of resource extraction; capitalized

upon by the distribution to nearby markets readily accessible by
rail and trucks; and eventually manifested through the works of

Albert Heim, Geologie der Schweiz (Leipzig: Christian Bernhard Tauchnitz,

1919–1922), and Sibylle Franks,“Albert Heim,” Historisches Lexikon der Sch-
weiz, May 29, 2008, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/028851/2008-05-29/.

243
solarities

architects and engineers eager to experiment.29 An environmen-

tal history of construction and extraction that addresses all of
the fulfilled as well as unfulfilled hopes, of both the winners and
the losers — past, present, and future — according to a meth-
odological symmetry complicates architectural histories and
draws from new materialisms, vitalist or historical, to articulate
and counteract the impact upon and exploitation of people and
planet, at high energy intensity, which must be at the center of
any radical solarity for a planetary livability.30

The Global Kiln Paradox

Over the course of the twentieth century, the kiln as key

technology gained global relevance, with the industry’s claims
to ubiquity.31 Polysius, already market leaders by WWI not just in
Europe but also globally, had distributed their kilns and entire
cement factories around the world, fueling the globalization of

29 Cement as a mass product entered the market through architecture

and infrastructure, e.g., the industrial facilities, bridge constructions,
also sanatorium buildings and resting halls, of Swiss civil engineer and
entrepreneur Robert Maillart, which were featured in Sigfried Giedion’s
classic Space, Time and Architecture, at first delivered as a lecture series at
Harvard University in 1938.
30 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010), and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “When the Things
We Study Respond to Each Other: Tools for Unpacking ‘the Material’,” in
Anthropos and the Material, eds. Penny Harvey, Christian Krohn-Hansen,
and Knut G. Nustad (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 221–44. A
material history of concrete and cement, as anthropologists have pointed
out, will speak of complex biographies, stories of extraction, production,
promotion, distribution, and construction, if not demolition; see Penny
Harvey, “Materials,” Cultural Anthropology, September 24, 2015, https://
culanth.org/fieldsights/materials, and Eli Elinoff, “Cement,” Cultural
Anthropology, June 27, 2019, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/cement.
31 From an anthropological perspective, Kali Rubaii is interested in the
local specificities of globally active corporate enterprises; see Kali Rubaii,
“Environment in Context: Cement, War and Toxicity: The Materialities of
Displacement in Iraq,” interview by Huma Gupta and Gabi Kirk, Jadaliyya,
June 8, 2020, http://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/41244.

244
 the kiln

Fig. 6. Escher Wyss Switchboard, Roche cement plant, no date. As a

result of the Second World War, the mechanical engineering company
Escher Wyss & Cie. of Zurich, specializing in turbines, centrifuges,
and boilers, started to also produce kilns and grinding machines. The
new Roche cement plant, which opened in Valais in 1947 as part of
the Holderbank company, also featured a new type of control panel,
including operating devices and instruments, such as a kiln monitor-
ing system. This measured the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide
content of the combustion gases at the end of the kiln, thus providing
effective knowledge of the emissions. Source: City Archives, Zurich,
Switzerland, VII.419, Company Archive Escher Wyss AG.

cement and concrete as a modern building material.32 Holder-

bank too had extended its activities internationally in the inter-
war period, first with subsidiaries in Europe (the Netherlands,
Belgium, France, and Germany) and then in Egypt, Lebanon
and South Africa. Parallel to this, as the building material indus-
try globalized, Holderbank introduced a new form of organi-
zation, separating cement production from financial holding,
which was investing in kilns worldwide, as had already been

32 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Polysius began to sell complete

cement plants, and not only marketed them throughout Europe and North
America, but also shipped them to Egypt in 1907 and China in 1908. A
year before reorganizing as a stock corporation in 1928, G. Polysius AG
had entered the promising American market opening a foreign branch in
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

245
solarities

the case in the oil, mining and transport industries. In 1930, the
“Holderbank Financière” was founded, presided over by Ernst
Schmidheiny, and eventually became the nucleus of a billion-
francs corporation.33 Since then, Holderbank has capitalized on
the scalability of cement production in and through the kiln
in the postwar years, producing in North and Latin America
under the name of “progress,” “innovation” and “growth,” with
low profit margins.
Besides the extractive practice of “Abbau,” or unbuilding,
the constructive practice of “Bauen”, or building, encompass-
ing both the creation of structures and infrastructures exerted
an equally significant impact on the geosphere.34 After WWII,
new construction in Switzerland not only materialized in single
family homes and large-scale housing estates of the 1960s, as
documented in the Swiss architectural magazines of that very
decade.35 It also took on the special form of “Terrassenhäuser,”
literally “terraced houses,” i.e., horizontally staggered residential
housing typologies made from concrete, which became popu-
lar in the 1960s for home ownership, and were erected, not far
from the kilns, on the southern flanks of the Jura mountains
and the Alpine foothills. On these flanks, they were oriented
toward the sun, less for solar gain though than for big sunroofs

33 Architectural historian Sarah Nichols has pointed to the historical con-

nections of the Swiss cement industry importing the trust model from
American capitalism, while focusing on the national level, and the state as
an economic actor, and not at the international scale, see Nichols, “Pollux’s
Spears,” 142ff. This was the kick-off of the Schmidheiny-dynasty, encom-
passing the asbestos cement industry of Eternit as well as leading machine
works; see Ernst Schmidheiny, “50 Jahre Cementfabrik Holderbank-Wil-
degg AG,” Schweizerische Bauzeitung 80, no. 40 (October 4, 1962): 685–88,
and Hans O. Staub, From Schmidheiny to Schmidheiny: Swiss Pioneers
of Economics and Technology, vol. 4 (Meilan: Association for Historical
Research in Economics, 1994).
34 Lewis Mumford, “Paleotechnic Paradise: Coketown,” in The City in
History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World 1961), 446–81.
35 Prominent Swiss architectural magazines were Werk: Schweizer Monats­
schrift für Architektur, Kunst und künstlerisches Gewerbe and Bauen und
Wohnen, which later merged.

246
 the kiln

and big views.36 From an Anthropocene perspective, these Ter-

rassenhäuser could, therefore, be viewed as an anthropogenic
form of orogenesis, applying a concrete coating to the upper
rock strata. As a fundamental technology at the center of geog-
raphies of extraction and construction — histories of destratifi-
cation and restratification in an appropriation of geological ter-
minology37 — in the second half of the twentieth century kilns
in the Global North had provided cement for a certain “impe-
rial” mode of living, while in the Global South self-building pre-
vailed.38
With the construction boom and the push toward urbani-
zation in Switzerland during the post-war decades, the kiln’s
capacities for growth within the domestic market also expanded.
This phase of acceleration, increased resource (especially oil)
consumption, termed by Swiss climate historian Christian Pfis-
ter the “1950s Syndrome,” culminated with new forms of energy
production, the construction of water dams in the Alps as well
as of nuclear power plants especially in the canton of Aargau, all
of which were poured in concrete.39 By 1958, a turning point in
material history, Holderbank had also been publicly traded on
the stock exchange. Therefore, crucial to the impact of Holder-
bank’s kilns worldwide as the main mechanism of an interna-
tional corporation, integrated into regional supply chains and
global value chains, in economic, ecological, and social terms,
was the interplay between consolidation at home, eventually
controlling the domestic market, and a global corporate strat-

36 Lucius Burckhardt and Urs Beutler, eds., Terrassenhäuser, Werk-Buch, no.

3 (Winterthur: Werk, 1968). On “Terrassenhäuser,” see also two special
issues by Werk, October 1964 and June 1966.
37 Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York:
Swerve Editions, 2000).
38 Markus Wissen and Ulrich Brand, “Imperial Mode of Living,” Krisis:
Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 2 (2018), https://krisis.eu/imperial-
mode-of-living/.
39 Christian Pfister, “The ‘1950s Syndrome’ and the Transition from a
Slow-going to a Rapid Loss of Global Sustainability,” in Turning Points
in Environmental History, ed. Frank Uekötter (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 90–117.

247
solarities

Fig. 7. Krupp Polysius AG: European Patent Application EP 0041093A1,

1981. Method and plant for burning cement, wherein the preheat-
ing and precalcination of granulated raw material takes place on a
travelling grate preheater using cooler air, while exhaust gases from
the rotary kiln are fed to a cyclone preheater for preheating floury
raw material. Later, alternative fuels are added in a cyclone preheater.
Source: Patent Bulletin 981/49, December 9, 1981. https://data.epo.
org/publication-server/document?iDocId=40043&iFormat=2.

egy that involved expansion into the Asia Pacific region in the
1970s, and further advances into Eastern Europe, the Middle
East, China, India, and Southeast Asia in parallel with the new
geopolitical situation that emerged in the 1990s in the neoliberal
age.40

40 The history of corporate environmental communication encompasses,

that in parallel the energy and ecology crisis of the 1970s, the Holder-

248
 the kiln

In recent decades, with production having quadrupled, the

international cement market has reorganized itself around a
global web of kilns through large corporations. The Swiss mul-
tinational cement producer Holcim, which since 2001 is operat-
ing under the new name, to act even more strongly as a global
corporation, has been competing with multinational companies
like Heidelberg Materials from Germany, Cemex from Mexico,
or Dangote from Nigeria, not to mention the large-scale state-
owned Chinese enterprises. In fact, the cement industry has
since been making use of other paradigms to stimulate their
business. In order to optimize production costs and secure
competitive advantages, company history prides itself with that
kilns in Switzerland (and internationally) are for some time
now fueled also by so-called “alternative fuels”, as conventional
fossil fuels, whatever is cheapest, are replaced under the ban-
ner of sustainability by what is considered waste — and would
otherwise end up in landfills or incineration plants.41 However,
environmental justice literature sees running co-incineration
plants in so-called “sacrifice zones” as highly emissive, “produc-
ing wasted people and wasted places,” while not reducing waste
at all. We must be aware that “alternative fuels” here refers to a
strange mix of the dirt of civilization: animal fat and meal, waste
oils, scrap materials, sewage sludge, plastic refuse, solvents, and
especially used car tires, etc. making hazardous waste recycling
big business.42 Despite a substitution grade of 40 percent (and

bank group in Switzerland, operated for a short time a cement plant in

Rekingen, Aargau, then considered the “most modern” in Europe, while
after closing down its oldest production site in Holderbank and demolish-
ing the kiln there in the 1980s, reused the old sheds for art exhibitions, and
recultivated the former quarry, turning it into a conservation area, a place
of learning and contemplation.
41 For the use of alternative fuels, see Georges Spicher, Hugo Marfurt, and
Nicolas Stoll, eds., Ohne Beton geht nichts: Geschichte der schweizerischen
Zementindustrie, NZZ Libro (Zurich: Editions Neue Zürcher Zeitung,
2013), 270–73.
42 Marco Armiero, Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2020), 10. For a discussion of the “sacrifice
zone,” see also Jason W. Moore, “Wasting Away How Capitalism Lays

249
solarities

various forms of air, soil and water pollution linked), these fuels
merely mas the real issue of the kiln, which is its continued
emission of high levels of carbon dioxide.
Today, from a climatological and civilizational point of view,
kilns are once again making history, but now with regard to
their impact on the composition of the atmosphere. Moreover,
Holcim, which since its merger with the French competitor
Lafarge in 2015 is world leading by volume and thus responsible,
not only in Switzerland but internationally, has been repeatedly
criticized for their “toxic factories.” Even at the Swiss locations,
kilns still produce pollutants (e.g., benzene, which is carcino-
genic, as well as ammonium gas, carbon monoxide, sulfur diox-
ides, nitrogen oxide, and particular matter, etc.), as regulated by
the Swiss Clean Air Acts, and despite state-of-the-art filter and
sensor technology. Internationally, kilns admittedly are subject
to different standards and levels of inequality, for example in
India, which was debated with regard to both particulate matter
and elemental emission in addition to exploitative employment
contracts before Holcim decided to better sell its businesses
there (as well as in Brazil) in 2022 to rather concentrate on
refined products for the North American markets while cement
production and atmospheric pollution is ongoing.43 Can we
therefore say from an elemental perspective that, as a “vibrant
matter,” the kiln kills?44

Waste to the Web of Life, and Why It Can’t Stop,” Working Paper, World-
Ecology Research Collective, 2022, https://jasonwmoore.com/wp-content/
uploads/2022/10/Moore-Wasting-Away-WERC-Working-Paper-Octo-
ber-2022.pdf. For a critique of waste incineration in co-processing plants
of the Mexican cement industry by the Global Alliance for Incineration
Alternatives (GAIA), see Magdalena Donoso, “In Mexico: Time to End
‘Sacrifice Zones’,” Zero Waste Europe, December 22, 2017, https://zerowas-
teeurope.eu/2017/12/in-mexico-time-to-end-sacrifice-zones/.
43 R.K. Gupta, Deepanjan Majumdar, J.V. Trivedi, and A.D. Bhanarkar.
“Particulate Matter and Elemental Emissions from a Cement Kiln,” Fuel
Processing Technology 104 (2012): 343–51.
44 Timothy Morton, “Elementality,” in Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with
Earth, Air, Water, and Fire, eds. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 271–85. To apply a
question raised by Morton, namely what is elemental about each element.

250
 the kiln

This question, extrapolated on a planetary scale, concerns the

ongoing agency of the kilns of the world, which alone contrib-
ute an astonishingly 8 percent of global carbon dioxide emis-
sions. This is all the more startling when there is more cement
produced, more concrete poured worldwide than ever before,
and construction continues to rise at a growth rate of 5 percent
annually.45 It is particularly damaging that the interplay at the
global scale between the growth-based exploitation of resources,
modernization, and social change on the one hand and global
heating, extreme weather events, and sea level rise on the other
is known not just to experts but also to what is repressed in the
collective mind. And particularly serious is that most environ-
mental impact will happen over time and elsewhere.
The kiln counteracts any kind of solarity: socio-cultural
ideas, values, and symbols fundamentally different from those
of “petro-modernism” or what might be called “cement-mod-
ernism” that would demand a closure of all cement plants and
a shift toward solar energy and solar materials (i.e. a biobased,
circular, non-extractive, regenerative way of building and liv-
ing in tandem with strategies of recultivation at all scales). In
other words, when the principles and possibilities of an elemen-
tal solarity are addressed and advocate for transition, they must
also always include arguments for dismantling and replacing the
building industry and the building culture of modernity.

Is There a Solar Solution to the Kiln Problem?

One would think that there could be a solar solution to the

kiln problem. Yet, as we know, innovation is not salvation.
Even though the industry, often said to be inert, is active in
several arenas primarily through the promotion of sustain-
able technologies, it also knows how to make itself “indispen-

45 David Harvey, Abstract from the Concrete (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016).
Following Vaclav Smil, David Harvey was one of the first in critical dis-
course to point to the high increase of cement production for China’s rapid
urbanization.

251
solarities

sable” without actually addressing the real problem. It pushes

it downstream — a technological fix to a much larger problem.
This is evident in experimentation with solar-powered furnaces,
which, nevertheless, produce a synthetic gas out of high-carbon
waste without cutting carbon dioxide emissions. It is also evi-
dent in Holcim’s implementation of the fourth industrial revolu-
tion, “industry 4.0,” in cement production in Switzerland since
it is capital intensive, which saw an increase in the industrial
automation of the kiln based on a complex networking and
communication of machines, devices, sensors, humans, in addi-
tion to an upgrade through AI, once again a promise of greater
efficiency.46
The sustainability paradigm’s solution to the kiln problem
can also be seen in the construction industry’s introduction of
recycled concrete products onto the market, which are energy-
intensive to produce and still require cement as a binder; or
its experimentation with alternatives binder, for example, the
admixture of additives, fly ash from hard-coal-fired power sta-
tions or slag sand from steel production, both industrial resi-
dues, or other substitute materials, which can partially mini-
mize or even eliminate the cement content but do not solve
the energy issue of industrial production and that of waste as
such; or, possibly too, digitization through the automation of
construction, design, and formwork and through the use of
robots, which promise optimization, precision, and economy in
material terms, while also introducing completely new human-
machine relationships in extraction and construction.47

46 The use of solar energy for cement production has been tested at the Paul
Scherer Institute in Villingen, canton of Aargau; see “Die Sonne geht
auch für Zement auf,” Paul Scherer Institute, January 14, 2013, www.psi.ch/
de/media/forschung/die-sonne-geht-auch-fuer-zement-auf, and “Solar
Energy in Cement Manufacturing,” Holcim, June 26, 2015, https://www.
holcim.com/solar-energy-cement-manufacturing.
47 At the NEST building in Zurich, a pilot and demonstration project, part
check-in desk, research laboratory, guest house, as well as offices, confer-
ence room, and event space of Empa on behalf of the ETH domain, which
aims at imagining the future of construction, mixing the interests of
architects, academia, state and industry, concrete had been the “go-to”

252
 the kiln

However, can we put the sole blame on the kiln itself?

Embedded as it is in complex networks of building culture, cor-
porate interests, and federal agencies, which issue comparatively
lax environmental requirements, foster international competi-
tion, and allow corporate lobbying in the public sphere. The sad
material fact is that we would still need concrete and cement for
retrofitting existing infrastructure, not to mention building new
ones. And even if conventional cement production volume is
reduced and regulated, we must not forget a fundamental con-
tradiction that the chemical process of calcination in the kiln,
the so-called thermal decomposition reaction that turns lime-
stone and marl into calcium oxide (CaO) and releases carbon
dioxide (CO₂) will still be responsible for half of the climate-
damaging emissions.48
As a technology that has been and still is upgraded for effi-
ciency and profitability, yet still seems deemed to be un-retro-
fittable, or at least in conflict with large-scale energy transition,
the kiln thus poses a twofold problem that eludes the nation-
alization and the global governance of resource production:49
it is not only that no satisfactory solar substitute for fossil fuels
in cement production can be found, but that carbon dioxide
escapes from processing rock strata itself in the transforma-
tion of matter into material, of limestone and marl into cement.
And even if the Swiss industry and other countries of cement
production in the Global North can afford new technologies for
carbon capture and storage (CCS), which are considered neces-
sary, especially to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, but expen-

material for the shell, as opposed to a timber construction; https://www.

empa.ch/web/nest/overview. Swiss architecture firm Gramazio Kohler,
who designed the building, with their dfab house, a unit presented on the
upper floor, test and showcase their recent experiments in digital fabrica-
tion; https://dfabhouse.ch
48 Forty, “Natural and Unnatural,” in Concrete and Culture, 69.
49 Cymene Howe, et al., “Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and
Risk,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 41, no. 3 (May 2016): 547–65.
The kiln, because of its generative and degenerative characteristics, thus
might be seen as a paradoxical infrastructure.

253
solarities

sive and electricity-consuming in themselves, a gap remains in

their practices in the Global South.
Due to this default or impossibility, the kiln carries an infi-
nitely tragic futurity, and its planetary consequences one cannot
conceive: the combustion of thousands of tiny suns, given the
number and rising production volume of cement plants world-
wide (in 2018, Holcim alone owned 270 cement plants), while a
large share of the coal burned in cement plants globally is actu-
ally traded in Switzerland. However, for a solarity to unfold next
to the consideration of social and economic dimensions, a new
cultural and political valence of cement is needed; and consider-
ing this dark side of the sun, going beyond its all-encompassing
democratic spirit, to contribute to decarbonizing, and decoloni-
alizing, future imaginaries, new forms of international govern-
ance and justice are also needed: responsibilities need be shared
across states and corporations; there must be climate restoration
and cultivation of all the systems of Earth; and there must be
continued reparation for long-term impacts so that all the costs,
once externalized in the name of progress and economic, eco-
logical, and social growth, can be covered, even if this is already
anticipated and adopted by industry.50
The questions remain whether a “global society” can limit
and control the kiln and if so how might we collectively man-
age it in a more effective and sustainable way. For many it is
still difficult to reimagine what it means to recycle, to reuse, or
to even reduce both building materials, elements, and entire
buildings, if building, then with circular or compostable materi-
als and otherwise design for deconstruction and disassembly.51

50 Holly Jean Buck, After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Resto-
ration (London: Verso, 2019), 24ff.
51 Hermann Scheer, The Solar Economy: Renewable Energy for a Sustainable
Global Future (London: Earthscan, 2002). Another research unit at the
NEST is UMAR (Urban Mining and Recycling) by German architects Wer-
ner Sobek, Dirk Hebel, and Felix Heisel, which pilots and demonstrates
recycled materials and which also serves as a case to calculate the envi-
ronmental impact of concrete vs. timber structures; see Efstathios Kakkos
et al., “Towards Urban Mining — Estimating the Potential Environmental
Benefits by Applying an Alternative Construction Practice: A Case Study

254
 the kiln

This also means to stop demolition — while achieving longer

life spans by practices of repair, care and maintenance — and,
more extremely, to stop new construction. Despite statements
to the contrary from all kinds of stakeholders, while align with
the sun we have to learn to question the kiln — and the assem-
blages that it activates and mixes together — and revise modern
industrial processes which underlie our dependency, not only
on fossil fuels but on concrete and cement.

from Switzerland,” Sustainability 12 (2020): 5041. A more recent research

unit is Sprint, realized in 2021, by Baubüro in situ, a Basel-based office,
that made a name for a rather reuse-oriented practice of elements; https://
www.insitu.ch/projekte/320-unit-sprint-im-nest-empa

255
solarities

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 19

Twilight

Dominic Boyer

Curtain opens to reveal a small clearing surrounded by rocks

somewhere in the wilderness. Three figures are huddled
around a fire.

ONE gets up and squints at the horizon.

ONE
Can you tell yet?

TWO stands impassively, arms crossed, shaking their head.

ONE (cont’d)
How about you?

THREE steps quickly forward to the edge of the clearing, gazing

into the distance and opens their mouth before closing it again.
Stands on their tiptoes.

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solarities

THREE
Ok, yes, I think I can definitely make
out that… Well, actually, no.

ONE
(a bit tense)
It has to be one way or the other,
doesn’t it? How much longer are we
supposed to wait?

ONE turns accusingly toward TWO.

ONE (cont’d)
Would it kill you to say something,
anything? Your silence is stressing
everyone out.

TWO rolls their eyes, turns away. ONE throws their hands up
and stalks to the other side of clearing. THREE tries to calm the
situation down.

THREE
What we know is that we’re the chil-
dren of light or the children of dark-
ness. We’re on the verge of something.
In other words, we’re dawning or
dusking right now.

ONE and TWO are unmoved, backs still facing each other.

THREE (cont’d)
And, my feeling, and it’s no secret, is
that we are dawning.

262
 twilight

ONE
(over their shoulder)
And what’s your evidence for that
conclusion might I ask?

THREE
Well the birds are singing for one
thing.

ONE
I don’t hear any birds.

THREE
If you weren’t talking so loudly you
could hear them.

They listen for a moment.

ONE
That’s a bat if it’s anything.

THREE
Well then, look at how the sky is
brightening. You know how the sky
swells with light just before dawn. The
blackness shimmers and turns silver
gray. And that’s just the beginning of
the whole crepuscular spectacular.
First purples and indigos wash across
the horizon…

ONE
(shaking their head)
Stories and dreams.

263
solarities

THREE
(growing increasingly
enraptured)
And then the first flickers of salmon
and dusky orange play across the hori-
zon, the opening credits of a new day.
It’s not long now until the sweet plan-
tain light comes and finally daybreak!
The sun itself, slicing the belly of the
sky, lustrous rays searing the heavens!

ONE
None of that is there! Please stop with
this lunatic fantasy.

THREE slumps.

THREE
I wish it were memory.

ONE
We can’t see anything because of these
rocks. And the smoke from the fire. At
least I can do something about that.

ONE spins and walks purposefully to the fire, trying to dramati-

cally stomp it out but they keep getting singed and retreat.
Their efforts get more dramatic and slapstick and it isn’t long
before they are rolling on the ground trying to extinguish the
fire while avoiding being burned. TWO turns around and walks
swiftly over to ONE pulling them away from the fire.

TWO
All you’re doing is spreading the fire
and smoke around. Now we really can’t
see what’s going on.

264
 twilight

ONE, singed and disheveled, sits up and pants.

ONE
Oh, now you can talk. So what’s your
big idea?

TWO ambles away.

TWO
We wait.

ONE
How brilliant. How decisive. We’ve
been doing nothing but waiting and
watching for I don’t know how long.

THREE lets out an existential sigh.

THREE
I’m so depressed.

TWO
We wait to see if it’s real this time.
There have been so many false dawns
and fake dusks. I’m not getting worked
up about another one.

ONE
Because your sensitive soul can’t han-
dle another disappointment. I get it.
But you appall me.

TWO shrugs and ambles away to the edge of the clearing, back
to the horizon.

ONE (cont’d)
Control freak! Coward!

265
solarities

THREE rolls over on to their belly and let’s out another loud
sigh.

THREE
We’re doomed.

ONE
Don’t let that idiot over there get you
down. We’re going to try something
else. We have to keep trying, right?

THREE sits up quickly.

THREE
I’m in!

ONE begins stalking around the clearing. THREE begins follow-

ing them, imitating them unconsciously.

ONE
Okay we really can’t tell what’s happen-
ing because of the smoke, right?

THREE
And the rocks.

ONE
Right, also the rocks. And we know
that we’re either facing dawn or dusk.
One or the other, for sure.

THREE
And the world is always turning
toward the morning. I heard a bird.

ONE gives THREE a skeptical glance.

266
 twilight

ONE
What we need … is a higher altitude!

THREE
And a better attitude!

ONE begins to run manically around the clearing again, trying,

unsuccessfully, to scramble up the rocks. THREE follows behind
trying too, only with less skill and energy.

ONE
You know, what I would give for nature
just this once to be on our side!

THREE
Oh God, we’re working so hard for this
tragedy.

ONE
Not hard enough evidently.

ONE pauses to catch their breath but then snaps their fingers.

ONE (cont’d)
I’ve got it. It was so obvious the whole
time. We’ll build a pyramid.

THREE
Yes! A pyramid so one of us can rise
high enough to see what is going on.

ONE
(looking around)
We don’t have a lot to work with here.
We’ll use our bodies.

267
solarities

ONE goes over to TWO and gently coaxes them back to the
center of the clearing.

ONE (cont’d)
We can’t do this without you.

TWO
Fine. But I’m not doing very much.

ONE
Fine. Just stand there, will you.

THREE
I should be on top. I have the best
vision.

ONE maneuvers THREE next to TWO and begins to climb up

their backs.

ONE
But you can’t be trusted. You are con-
stantly seeing and hearing things.

ONE clambers unsteadily to the top of the human pyramid,

standing up, looking to the distance.

TWO
Is it me or is it getting darker?

THREE
It’s only darker before the dawn.

ONE
Just lift me a little higher. I’m almost
there.

TWO and THREE struggle to lift ONE even higher.

268
 twilight

ONE (cont’d)
Higher! As high as you can, lift me! I’m
seeing something now.

The unsteady pyramid sways and then collapses into a tangle of

limbs and moans.

Recovering, THREE grabs ONE and shakes them.

THREE
Tell us! What did you see?

ONE
(breathless but with a
strange air of confidence)
Twilight!

Curtain

269
 20

Tires

Caroline Levander

His mentor is a tree.

Because it has solar collectors. And harvests water with its
roots and leaves. Because it puts out oxygen that creatures in
the ecosystem transform into carbon dioxide. It is a perfect
system — no waste, no refuse. That’s why, according to Mike
Reynolds, renegade architect and founder of the earth-ship
movement, no one says there are too many trees on the planet.
But they do say that there are too many humans, way too many
humans.
The new kind of habitation that Reynolds has termed “bio-
tecture” looks to trees and their solarity for inspiration, as he
told me when I spent the day interviewing him at his Taos, New
Mexico Earthship Academy. Reynolds has been building his
entirely off the grid earth-ships for the last forty-five years, first
in Taos and then all over the world.
The biotecture communities that Reynolds and Academy
alumni build are called “pockets of freedom” by their proud
residents. Freed from the infrastructure that damages the earth,
occupants claim membership in a movement that is about not
just stopping global warming but actively reversing it. By repur-
posing garbage into building materials and developing innova-

271
solarities

Fig. 1. “Biotecture House.” Photograph courtesy of Kevin E. Kirby.

tive design, the earth-ships, in Reynolds’s words, are “building

vessels that enhance the planet we live on,” and that ultimately
ensure that humankind will be able to “live forever on planet
earth.”
The self-proclaimed garbage warrior looks at the earth
from the vantage point of a visitor rather than an inhabitant.
He described this transformation to me as a euphoric process
that spanned about six months and involved a radical change
of habitation. Living entirely alone in the northern New Mexico
wilderness. Building a makeshift shelter out of the materials he
found in the environment. Eating only what he could forage or
kill. Reynolds’s experiment in self-reliance draws from a long
tradition hearkening back to Henry David Thoreau, but only to
make a radical departure. Rather than glorifying the environ-
ment as a romantic landscape, the garbage warrior gradually
adopted an alien perspective on planet earth. For a newcomer
to earth, the sharp distinctions that humans make between
refuse and resources would seem arbitrary. Why are old cans
and bottles garbage but trees are highly prized building materi-

272
 tires

Fig. 2. “EarthShip Academy.” Photograph courtesy of Kevin E. Kirby.

als? Reynolds sees his surroundings like an alien would. And in

the process, new opportunities lock into focus.
When he looks at piles of old tires, for example, he doesn’t
see unsightly garbage like many of us would. Instead he sees
“resources, natural resources.” “Tires grow here,” he told me.
“They are indigenous to the entire planet. I can always find tires.
There is no place I can go where I don’t find tires.” Which fits
right in with his plan. “I’m after a design that can work all over
the planet and materials that are available all over the planet.”
But endemic to this design is the perspective of the alien, who
perceives garbage that is made out of carbon black as a resource
for off the grid habitation.
Made out of carbon black that draws from the sun, tires are
the wheel on which the world’s global warming turns. Tires are
about 30 percent carbon black, the sooty agent produced by par-
tially burning fossil fuels. Responsible for warming the earth,
absorbing sunlight and heating the atmosphere, carbon black is
“grown” from the earth but, unlike the trees that Reynolds emu-
lates, does not contribute to the earth’s wellbeing. And so we

273
solarities

might assume that he would not see the same life-giving prop-
erties in tires that he does in trees. But quite the contrary. Tires
are the biggest and the single most ubiquitous natural resource
that Reynolds sees when he looks at the planet like an outsider
would, easily dwarfing bottles and cans. I asked Reynolds what
he was going to do when he runs out of tires, and he just laughed
like I was crazy. His answer: “We’ll cross that bridge if we ever
get there — right now I see mountains of tires everywhere.”
And so, it comes as no surprise that the earth-ships’ most
fundamental and prevalent building material would be old tires,
pulled out of local dumps and landfills or taken directly off the
hands of used car repair shops. The anatomy of a tire is pre-
dominantly carbon black, which comprises 70 percent of a tire’s
composition. And that is because carbon black helps conduct
heat away from the tread and belt area of the tire, reducing ther-
mal damage and increasing tire life. So it makes sense that the
man who takes inspiration from a tree would also see the ther-
mal mass potential of tires differently. For the Earthship Acad-
emy, old tires filled by hand with compacted dirt create the ideal
building block that stabilizes heating and cooling and remains
wonderfully resistant to deterioration by the elements.
Each tire is filled on the building site, one person shoveling
dirt in by hand while another person compacts the dirt with a
sledgehammer while slowly walking around the tire to keep the
dirt evenly dispersed. It’s a painstaking process that seems to
hearken back to pre-industrial times except for the fact of the
tire itself.
These tires then become the single most important and prev-
alent material for biotecture’s thermal mass construction plan.
Repurposed and weighing hundreds of pounds, they become
building blocks for every earth-ship wall. More tires, used as
“squishies,” are not filled with soil but wedged like grout between
gaps in building construction to further tighten up space and
make earth-ships more energy efficient.
Relying entirely on natural energy sources, the earth-ship
design as a passive solar shelter uses thermal mass principles:
the earth-filled tire walls soak up heat from the sun each day

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 tires

Fig. 3. “Thermal Mass Construction.” Photograph courtesy of Kevin

E. Kirby.

and then radiate that heat within the shelter at night. The ther-
mal performance of each earth-ship is thus a dynamic balance
between solar heat gain and the tire walls’ ability to collect, store,
and transport that heat evenly to minimize indoor temperature
fluctuation. When working optimally the tire walls create inte-
rior climates that are California-like in their uniform comfort
and lack of temperature variability, despite outdoor daily tem-
perature ranges that vary widely.
As a result, each earth-ship becomes an Edenic ecosystem
in which temperature change is largely absent. The earth-ships’
domestic solarity gives warmth from the sun a new connota-
tion, associated in residents’ minds with feelings of comfort,
protection, freedom, and sustenance. Built out of the carbon-
black rich tires that have warmed the earth, these domiciles
reconstitute elemental solarity from the alien’s perspective. Tire
replaces tree as a building material with the capacity to right the
sunlight absorbing wrongs of its past life.
Not surprisingly, earth-ship communities are popping up all
over the place: Haiti, South Africa, Australia, Argentina, Uru-

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solarities

guay, France, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, Estonia, the

Czech Republic, Belgium, Portugal, and the list goes on. Reyn-
olds says that he goes places where the regulation and rules
against fully off the grid building are less stringent and where
the demand is greater.
He recently developed an earth-ship app to encourage com-
munities to build their own brand-compliant ships without
Academy teams present. For under ten dollars you get a set of
construction drawings which you take to get a building permit.
There is also a materials list and how-to manual. The idea is to
“get it out there cheap and easy” so that more and more commu-
nities will populate the planet and begin collectively to change
the environmental collision course we seem to be on. Reynolds
described his global plan as being “like a virus — we are going
around the world sneezing and its catching.” Of course, he
couldn’t know that within months the world would be brought
to a grinding halt by a virus and that humans would be shelter-
ing in place, only some of them insulated and comforted by tires
with many more suddenly un-tired as long commutes became a
thing of the past.
Still, Reynolds doesn’t imagine a world without cars and the
tires that are his most important building material. In fact, he
places a Tesla in the garage of every model earth-ship unit he
opens to show people that they can live in an earth-ship and still
drive to town for a taco and margarita without blowing their
carbon footprint.
But it’s a far cry from his own ride, which is a 1976 Mercedes
with a driver-side door made out of a repurposed refrigerator
part. The smell of French fries and smoke hung in the desert
air as he got out to shake my hand and apologize for being late
to our interview. He’d had to fill up his tank at the local burger
joint which sells him their used grease on the cheap. He laughed
admitting that “it’s not the solution for everybody.” But, then
again, he is the garbage warrior.

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 21

Seaweed

Sarah Besky

Across the globe, as air temperatures steadily climb, so too do

ocean temperatures. This rise is particularly acute in northern
New England. Temperatures in the Gulf of Maine have risen
nearly 2º Fahrenheit in the past century. This might not sound
like much, in the past fifteen years, temperatures there have
increased seven times more than in other parts of the world.
This change is visualized in stark images: maps of dark and
darker shades of red indicating heat intensity.1 These images
elicit imaginaries of the sun’s rays literally cooking the near
shore. In response to the warming gulf, once-plentiful species,
lobsters most prominent among them, are moving to colder
northern waters. With fewer and fewer lobsters to catch, lob-
ster fishing in southern New England is no longer financially
viable. Those still making a living off of the ocean must find
different species to exploit. As New England fisheries collapse,
seaweed — less finicky, it seems, about warming waters — offers
a hopeful alternative.

1 Michael Carlowicz, “Watery Heatwave Cooks the Gulf of Maine,” NASA’s

Global Climate Change, September 12, 2018, https://climate.nasa.gov/
news/2798/watery-heatwave-cooks-the-gulf-of-maine/.

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solarities

This turn from harvesting sea animals to harvesting sea veg-

etables is not unique to New England. From Maine to Mada-
gascar, seaweed has been touted as a feed additive for cows to
decrease methane emissions. It has been lauded as a biofuel, a
superfood, and a carbon sink. Toothpaste and ice cream manu-
facturers use carrageenan to thicken their wares. Parents try to
pass off snack packs of nori to their children as a substitute for
potato chips. Major oil and gas companies are experimenting
with microalgae as a cheap and renewable fuel source. Seaweeds
of all shapes and sizes are being put to a dizzying array of uses
and have become a cornerstone of the “green economy.” Sea-
weed’s slimy green potentiality makes it seem like a uniquely
redeeming substance in an era of climate disaster. Seaweed is
heralded by its proponents as a “low-input” form of food pro-
duction, unlike its “high-input” terrestrial counterparts, which
need water and fertilizers (often, an alarmingly large amount
of both), along with a stratified labor process that moves plants
from seed to plate. Seaweed just needs a bit of sunlight. The
adoption of seaweed as a tool for healing the ocean and creat-
ing sustainable “green jobs” is shining a new light (forgive my
solaripun) on regional political economies across the world.
Seaweed photosynthesizes, but don’t call it a “plant.” It’s algae.
Algae lack the vascular systems and root structures of land
plants. The life of algae, when compared to plants, however, is
far more complicated than the mere lack of plant-like qualities.
Without roots to keep it in place, seaweed is prevented from
floating away by a “holdfast,” a root-like bundle that attaches
to anything from rocks to boats to mollusks to floating ropes.
While wild seaweed attaches to a variety of surfaces, farmed
seaweed holds fast to long ropes (a proxy for those hard sur-
faces), which are strung under the surface of the water.
Seaweeds, then, hold fast underwater, but they need the sun.
Some seaweeds have little air-filled pockets that allow them rise
to towards the surface to catch more of the sun’s rays. Capital
is thus accumulated in an elemental relationship between air,
water, and sun.

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 seaweed

The seaweed’s holdfast is a biological response to solar-

ity — an effort to remain in place while striving for sunlight. It is
a tenacious structure that is also highly mobile. The term hold-
fast is etymologically kin to the nautical expression “Avast!” or
“hold fast,” the order to remain in place while the seas gnash the
ship. Seaweed itself, then, is a kind of holdfast. It allows a coastal
economy to hold fast to the settler-colonial logics that fueled
commercial fishing, extending them to the optimistic new fron-
tier of “restorative ocean farming.”2
The sun places some limits on seaweed’s expansion. Sea-
weed’s need to photosynthesize shapes where and how it can
grow. Seaweeds develop in such dramatic ways across their life
cycles that different forms of the same algae have been mistak-
enly classified as distinct species. Algae range from one-celled
phytoplankton to 100-foot long Giant Kelp. When we talk about
“seaweed,” we usually mean those larger varieties that can be
seen with the naked eye.
Much seaweed is not only edible but highly nutritious. From
the coasts of China, Japan, and Korea to Maritime Canada, sea-
weeds have long been part of people’s diets. Cookbooks and
websites extoll the health benefits of eating seaweed from its
mineral-rich qualities to its ability to act as an appetite suppres-
sant. Popular accounts of the burgeoning industry ask, “is kelp
the new kale?”3
Rockweed isn’t one of those seaweeds that you’ll find in the
newest hipster grocery market. At least, you aren’t likely to see
“rockweed” on the food label. Rockweed is the stinky stuff that
crunches under your feet on the shore at low tide. Bitter and
slightly off-putting, rockweed is instead harvested for other
commercial applications. Around Maine, it is used locally to
pack lobsters and as a garden fertilizer, for which some harvest-

2 Bren Smith, Eat Like a Fish: My Adventures as a Fisherman Turned

Restorative Ocean Farmer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019).
3 Nicola Twilley, Cynthia Graber, and Gastropod, “Kelp Is the New Kale,”
The Atlantic, September 13, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/
archive/2016/09/gastropod-seaweed/499760/.

279
solarities

ers claim they can yield about 20 USD a bushel (or 1000 USD
a wet ton). It also appears in pet and livestock feed. Chemical
extraction removes “alginate,” a compound used to thicken pro-
cessed foods, cosmetics, and even paint.
Rockweed is also an ecology unto itself. Growing out from
their holdfasts as they float toward the sun, clumps of rockweed
create shady, cool canopies to create a home for a host of ocean
life. Rockweed grows in the intertidal zone along the New Eng-
land coast. These rockweed canopies ebb and flow with the tide,
but the air-filled bladders ensure that even when the tide is at
its highest, the plant can photosynthesize. In Maine, common
law governing the intertidal zone derives from Massachusetts
Bay Colony ordinances that permitted English settlers to move
through the zone for purposes of navigation, fishing, or com-
merce. This means that the collection of any marine species
from the intertidal zone is permissible, as long as the person
doing the collecting is mobile, generally navigating a small boat,
never affixing themselves to the rocky bottom.
Lunarity may govern the tides, but solarity governs how
humans create value from tidal cycles. Or perhaps more accu-
rately, changing coastal economies reframe the sun and the
objects of its light into new forms of value and property. Those
who can’t make a living fishing any longer can, theoretically,
harvest rockweed for sale. This has made the intertidal zone a
new sort of commons, but not everyone is happy about this.
In Washington County, Maine, a remote rural coastal area,
an active contingent of waterfront property owners filed a law-
suit in opposition to wild rockweed harvesting.4 In a recent rul-
ing, the state of Maine sided with the landowners (Kenneth W.
Ross et al., vs. Acadian Seaplants, Ltd., ME 45 [2019]). Settler
property regimes sought to make a commons, but only for set-
tlers themselves, out of the intertidal zone — , that part of the

4 Christopher Burns, “Maine’s Top Court Rules You Can’t Pick Seaweed
without a Property Owner’s Permission,” Bangor Daily News, March 28,
2019, https://www.bangordailynews.com/2019/03/28/news/maines-top-
court-sides-with-property-owners-in-dispute-over-rockweed-harvesting/.

280
 seaweed

beach between the high and low tide marks. But contemporary
coastal settlement envisions the near shore as a different kind
of resource. These landowners now have the proprietary right
to sun themselves on their private beaches and the proprietary
control of all the rocks and mud in the intertidal zone, including
the seaweed holding fast to those rocks.
Sunlight as warmth and sunlight as photosynthetic process
are legally reframed. The enclosure of the commons, then,
marks a restriction of solarity’s use value. Intertidal space, once
legally framed to serve the needs of settlement, is once again
recast to further the ends of private property. This perhaps fore-
shadows the future of the coastline in Maine, as waterfronts go
from spaces to be worked on and with to spaces to be gazed
upon. After all, the temporal frame for images of the Maine
coast is the “golden hour,” which as photographers know well
is the period just after sunrise or just before sunset. The Wash-
ington County case ruling serves to filter out acts of extraction
from the sun-inflected images of the rocky coastline.
But the market demand for edible seaweed continues to
grow. So too does the conversion of sunlight into profit through
aquatic photosynthesis. Across New England, university coop-
erative extension programs and private entrepreneurs are
paying struggling lobster fishers to retrain as seaweed farm-
ers. Instead of dropping a rope attached to a lobster pot into
the water and pulling it back up again, seaweed farmers cast
their ropes wrapped with algae cultures. Once those cultures
have grown seaweed, they pull the ropes back up again. Sea-
weed farming, then, has been advertised as a means of rescu-
ing lobstermen, the vast majority of whom are white men, from
climate-induced precarity. But first, these fishers need aquacul-
ture leases — to spaces beyond the intertidal zone — to set out
their ropes. The coasts of New England are awash in recently
approved and pending aquaculture permits, further extending
territorial property regimes into the ocean.
Seaweed’s solarity does not just amplify the settler-colonial
extractive logics and ontologies of property. While seaweed

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promises a new salvation for the white male-dominated New

England lobster fishery, development organizations in the
Global South have been supporting seaweed as a means of
women’s empowerment for nearly thirty years. Beginning in
the late 1980s, after the importation of seaweed species from
the Philippines, women in Zanzibar began farming seaweed for
export to the US and Europe where it is rendered into the thick-
ener, carrageenan.5 Here, farming doesn’t require boats. Instead,
women wade knee-deep in the water and tend to seaweed lines
tied between sticks hammered into the ocean floor.
Development and environmental conservation agencies from
the World Bank to The Nature Conservancy have rolled out sea-
weed programs. Development success stories describe pre-algae
farming days on the Muslim-dominated island of Zanzibar,
when women rarely left their houses. Thanks to seaweed, women
are not only out of the house, but they have become financially
independent from their male relatives.6 With seaweed, families
came to be able to afford schooling for their children or more
durable material with which they could construct their houses.
Stories from Madagascar, Indonesia, Mauritius, and the Philip-
pines echo this narrative.7
As demand continues to increase, Indian Ocean water tem-
peratures are also increasing — by an average of 1º Celsius in the
last thirty years. Change is thus afloat in the subtropical sea-
weed industry. Warming waters have affected the seaweed har-
vest, causing long-term lulls in growth and die-off of the more

5 Lucy Ash, “The Crop That Put Women on Top in Zanzibar,” BBC News,
July 3, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-44688104.
6 Ibid., and Jacopo Passotti, “Madagascar: No More Fish? We’ll Farm
Seaweed Instead,” Deutsche Welle, July 25, 2017, https://www.dw.com/en/
madagascar-no-more-fish-well-farm-seaweed-instead/a-39311040.
7 Passotti, “Madagascar”; Imelda Albano, “Small-Scale Women Seaweed
Farmers Ride the Rough Tides of Climate Change,” Mongabay, June 3,
2019, https://news.mongabay.com/2019/06/small-scale-women-seaweed-
farmers-ride-the-rough-tides-of-climate-change/; and Andi Hajramurni,
“Farmers Rake in Profits from Seaweed,” The Jakarta Post, July 23, 2018,
https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2018/07/23/farmers-rake-profits-
seaweed.html.

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 seaweed

lucrative varieties.8 Further, thermal heating has given way to a

form of blue-green algae that gives women harvesters blisters
and rashes.9 Many women have left the industry, but their need
for an income can’t be undone. Here we see an acute, gendered
crisis of work that mirrors what’s going on in New England. In
New England, warming-induced lobster migration has made
seaweed into a viable growth industry and a salvation for jobless
men. But in the Global South, women’s seaweed-fueled empow-
erment may be waning as seaweed goes the way of the lobster.
Both these vulnerabilities can be traced to rising ocean water
temperatures. Today, the most valuable species on Zanzibar that
is flourishing in the sun’s rays is the sunbathing tourist. Women
now sell handicrafts and snacks to them between their shifts on
a beach blanket.10 Sun is a plentiful resource for the seemingly
ever-expanding leisure industry to which unemployed fishers
in New England and seaweed farmers in Zanzibar must turn.
Here an obstacle, there a resource, now a danger, later a com-
fort, solarity catalyzes human relationships to the ocean world
in nonlinear ways.
Even if there is hope in a solar-fueled future, there is a sim-
plistic purity in the sun as a beacon of the green economy. Low
input farming and non-fossil fuel energy are certainly positive
alternatives to the gas guzzling, fertilizer shoveling status quo,
but it is important to consider the continuities across shifts
from “extractive” to “regenerative.” A greener economy, even
if somewhat morally purified or environmentally sustainable,
is still in the game of production. It’s still an economy. Despite
the seeming shininess and newness of solar’s potentiality as an
energy source, the economic grammar on which solar radiation
is transformed into value is quite old. It is still an economy in
which substitutions are being made without attention, perhaps,

8 Karen Coates, “Warming Waters Hurt Zanzibar’s Seaweed, But Women

Farmers Have a Plan,” Christian Science Monitor, May 21, 2018, https://
www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2018/0521/Warming-waters-hurt-
Zanzibar-s-seaweed.-But-women-farmers-have-a-plan.
9 Ash, “The Crop That Put Women on Top in Zanzibar.”
10 Ibid.

283
solarities

to underlying structures of inequality and practices of disposses-

sion. Seaweed for lobster, private space for public, solar power
for fossil fuel. The settler logics of on- and off-shore extraction
appear as “common sense.”11 “Restorative.”
This economic grammar is even generic. Whether it is fur-
thering the reach of settlement or rolled out as part of the devel-
opment logics of “women’s empowerment,” solarity may reveal
contiguities as much as it does novelties. Herein lies my interest
in the holdfast. What is maintained? What is being held fast in
these transitions?
It is not so much the solarity itself, but the relationship peo-
ple have to solarity that reveals the settler colonial economic
logics of the near shore. Holding fast is just one such relation-
ship. On the world’s warming waterfronts, seaweed is not just a
resource. It is a window onto the tension between holding fast
or letting go of gendered forms of work and property, as well as
a faith that there is — somewhere — an economic anchor amid
planetary volatility.

11 Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism

in the American Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2014).

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 seaweed

References

Albano, Imelda. “Small-Scale Women Seaweed Farmers Ride

the Rough Tides of Climate Change.” Mongabay, June 3,
2019. https://news.mongabay.com/2019/06/small-scale-
women-seaweed-farmers-ride-the-rough-tides-of-climate-
change/.
Ash, Lucy. “The Crop That Put Women on Top in Zanzibar.”
BBC News, July 3, 2018. https://www.bbc.com/news/
stories-44688104.
Burns, Christopher. “Maine’s Top Court Rules You Can’t Pick
Seaweed without a Property Owner’s Permission.” Bangor
Daily News, March 28, 2019. https://www.bangordailynews.
com/2019/03/28/news/maines-top-court-sides-with-
property-owners-in-dispute-over-rockweed-harvesting/.
Carlowicz, Michael. “Watery Heatwave Cooks the Gulf of
Maine.” NASA’s Global Climate Change, September 12, 2018.
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2798/watery-heatwave-cooks-
the-gulf-of-maine/.
Coates, Karen J. “Warming Waters Hurt Zanzibar’s Seaweed,
But Women Farmers Have a Plan.” Christian Science
Monitor, May 21, 2018. https://www.csmonitor.com/World/
Africa/2018/0521/Warming-waters-hurt-Zanzibar-s-
seaweed.-But-women-farmers-have-a-plan.
Hajramurni, Andi. “Farmers Rake in Profits from Seaweed.”
The Jakarta Post, July 23, 2018. https://www.thejakartapost.
com/news/2018/07/23/farmers-rake-profits-seaweed.html.
Passotti, Jacopo. “Madagascar: No More Fish? We’ll Farm
Seaweed Instead.” Deutsche Welle, July 25, 2017. https://www.
dw.com/en/madagascar-no-more-fish-well-farm-seaweed-
instead/a-39311040.
Rifkin, Mark. Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday
Colonialism in the American Renaissance. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Smith, Bren. Eat Like a Fish: My Adventures as a Fisherman
Turned Restorative Ocean Farmer. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2019.

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solarities

Twilley, Nicola, Cynthia Graber, and Gastropod. “Kelp Is

the New Kale.” The Atlantic, September 13, 2016. https://
www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/09/gastropod-
seaweed/499760/.

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 22

Black Atlantis

Amelia Moore

“The process of transmutation is what I am most interested

in—from living entity to an object rich and strange whose
natural home is the seabed, and which can withstand the
elements underwater. This transition from living entity
to corpse to the riches of the sea—pearls and coral—is an
anthropocenic moment dissolving the human into nature,
the living into something fossilized, but as an uneasy and
radioactive fossilization.”
— S. Ayesha Hameed, “Black Atlantis: Three Songs”1

The Bahamas is an archipelagic nation on the western edge

of the Caribbean. This region is my favorite place to consider
solarity. These islands and seas speak with radiant energy. They
tell us what is happening not because they are canaries in the
coalmine of a dying world, but because they are intensely inven-
tive sites of living, relating, and becoming. But sometimes their
stories are hard to discern. That is because Bahamian stories are

1 S. Ayesha Hameed, “Black Atlantis: Three Songs,” in Forensis: The Archi-

tecture of Public Truth, ed. Forensic Architecture (Berlin: Sternberg Press,
2014), 712–18.

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solarities

anti-disciplinary, requiring so much more than isolated under-

standings of island geology, marine biology, cultural studies, or
history alone. This is a Bahamian story that begins with the sun
before passing through the sea and near-shore coral reefs.
Imaginaries of the sun abound in the contemporary Carib-
bean. In The Bahamas, they are a large part of the corporate
branding of the archipelago as a tourism destination for Euro-
American travelers. You are certainly familiar with the brand-
ing of sun-sand-sea, also well known as “paradise discourse.”2
Some of you have consumed these sun-drenched imaginaries
on your own vacations or in your own travel fantasies. You may
be less familiar with the sun produced within the rhetorics of
climate mitigation science.3 In The Bahamas, the ubiquitous sun
has also become an emblem of photovoltaic solar power that
can save the island nation from impending sea level rise and
fossil fueled mass destruction.
These solar visions are interconnected. Sun-sand-sea mass
tourism imaginaries appear to “naturally” uphold arguments
about solar power as a techno fix for anthropogenic global
warming. I have heard people in The Bahamas say, “the sun is
a renewable resource we have in spades.” But connections that
might at first appear to be common sense, upon inspection,
prove to be linked through industries built on neocolonial and
neoliberal foreign investment in the Bahamian economy, an
economy that is frequently characterized as in desperate need of
development and as lucrative in terms of offering a substantive
return on private investment. Both the tourism and renewable
energy industries are selling the Bahamian sun. This is the sun
you have to buy as a branded commodity in international mar-
kets for sustainable travel. The colonization of the Caribbean
sun is a fact that we largely take for granted.

2 Ian Strachan, Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglo-
phone Caribbean (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002).
3 See Myles Lennon, “Postcarbon Amnesia: Toward a Recognition of Racial
Grief in Renewable Energy Futures,” Science, Technology, and Human
Values 45, no. 5 (2020): 934–62.

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 black atlantis

Because this is a volume on solarity as a form of material

relationality stemming from the sun as the source of plan-
etary energy, I want to explore how more expansive relational
thinking about the sun might extend our story. Solarity, when
enmeshed with complimentary forms of relational thinking,
might lead us down a different path. In some instances, the sun
in The Bahamas is not just a brand to be sold and consumed or a
“natural resource” to be exploited, sustainably or unsustainably.
Solarity can instead be understood as an ethic and as an escape
from the overdetermining colonial and supremacist orderings
of the world. In my head, solarity hesitantly meshes with Black
feminist conceptions of history, power, being, and becoming.
Solarity can then, following Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, participate
with Black studies in “rethinking ontology: our being, fleshy
materiality, and the nature of what exists and what we can claim
to know about existence.”4 Solarity, when allied to this mode
of creatively thinking otherwise, can help us to imagine against
“colonial mode(s) of aesthetico-affective-cognition.”5
For example, solarity can and should encompass vast swaths
of spatial, temporal, material, and political interaction. Can
we hold all this together in our minds? Solarity might be able
to help render tangible the relationship between radiant sub-
tropical sunlight, the extensive shallow seas of the Caribbean
region, the evolution of coral reefs dependent on symbiotic rela-
tionships with photosynthetic life forms, the emergence of sand
from reef ecosystems that renew and breakdown coral skeletons
over millennia creating dunes, beaches, and even the limestone
substance of the Bahamian islands themselves,6 islands that
were once home to Indigenous populations of migrating peo-
ple such as Lucayans, Arawaks, and Caribs who witnessed the
arrival of Columbus in 1492 and experienced the subsequent

4 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an

Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 1.
5 Ibid., 126.
6 See Vanessa Agard-Jones, “What the Sands Remember,” GLQ: A Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies 18, no. 2 (2012): 325–46.

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solarities

imposed violence of European imperial and colonial seaports

and plantations. These islands also become home to so many
members of the African diaspora via strategic and violent kid-
napping to uphold the sun-sand-sea economies of the colonial
and then neocolonial eras, economies that contributed their
own small but significant part to what we now understand to
be global warming, sea level rise, and mass coral death. These
processes lead to the twenty-first century solutions of renewable
energy transition, sustainable tourism, and even coral restora-
tion ventures.
Coral restoration in The Bahamas is the specific focus for the
rest of my story. Coral restoration is assumed to be an obvious
good, but solarity shines a different light on this trend. I now see
most coral restoration ventures as a manifestation of colonial-
corporate sun, but I also see some ventures as experiments that
might embody a potentially liberatory form of solarity.
Here are three brief examples of coral restoration as a mani-
festation of colonial-corporate sun:

Coral Vita: Coral Vita is a young company on the island of

Grand Bahama, “founded” by two graduates of Yale Univer-
sity’s environmental masters program who see themselves
as entrepreneurs in the global blue economy. Their business
plan is, first, to grow large numbers of micro-fragmented
“super coral” (coral adapted to extreme heat conditions) in
fields of nursery tanks on the island and, second, to sell those
coral fragments to various clients who want to create coral
restoration projects around the region for various reasons.
The Coral Vita website explains that potential clients include
“resorts and eco-tourism operators,” “governments and ma-
rine park managers,” “damage repair and mitigation bank-
ing,” “other restoration organizations,” “concerned citizens
and communities,” and “corporations and foundations.”7

7 “Restoring Our World’s Dying Coral Reefs,” Coral Vita, n.d., https://www.
coralvita.co/.

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 black atlantis

MSC Cruises Ocean Cay: MSC is an international cruise ship

company with origins in the Mediterranean that has leased
an island from the Bahamian government (formerly the site
of an industrial sand mine operation) in order to build a
private island cruise ship destination to host cruise travel-
ers from Florida. The island is now located within a marine
reserve sponsored by MSC. In addition to tourists, the reserve
hosts research partners from the University of Miami and
Nova Southeastern who have signed on with MSC to build
an on-site coral nursery and to develop a coral restoration
model to show their paying guests. This was announced in
2021 as another super-coral-growing program.

Bahamar Resort: Beginning with reef ball deployment right

offshore of their New Providence mega resort in 2014, the
Bahamar multi-hotel complex has been experimenting with
branding coral conservation for several years. Their latest ef-
fort appears to be a partnership with the local ENGO BREEF
in which paying guests of the ultra luxury Rosewood Hotel
can pay a little more to adopt a coral and to take an excur-
sion to snorkel over BREEF’s underwater sculpture garden.
The coral fragments “adopted” by hotel guests will be grown
in BREEF’s own coral nursery to be outplanted around the
sculpture garden over time.

These three examples of colonial-corporate sun (in this case

manifested through coral restoration ventures) all rhetorically
invoke the need to participate in economies of survival amidst a
planetary crisis. They all claim in their public relations materials
to be investing in coral for the future of local people, human-
ity in general, and the sustainability of the global environment.
But these are also all foreign-owned enterprises, their corporate
leaders are all white and mostly male Euro-Americans (when
named or made visible at all), and they are all for-profit compa-
nies even if they leverage non-profit organizations to enhance
their products. These three multinational companies have all

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solarities

very publicly invested in turning coral restoration into a scal-

able business model that they each claim to be “pioneering”
in The Bahamas. The relations evidenced in these examples of
colonial sun are avaricious, colonizing, and extractive. They flat-
ten or erase local and regional history, politics, and place. We
can read them as an extension of petrocultural orientations to
industrial world making. Sun-sand-sea brands, super coral as a
new biotech product, elite-guest excursions, and corporate-cli-
ent choices all work together to keep expanding the blue econ-
omy in a world in which most non-commodified tropical coral
will experience increasingly precarious conditions and highly
uneven outcomes.8 I do not find much hope in these examples.
I do find some imperfect hope in an example that I interpret
as an invitation to reject supremacy in restoration ecology. I
have been following the work of a young Bahamian woman and
marine conservation activist for many years, Nikita Shiel-Rolle.
Nikita has marine science degrees from American and Euro-
pean universities, and she has spent years working on multina-
tional, regional, and national conservation policy development.
She has been a small-island organizer for the United Nations as
well as an environmental educator in The Bahamas. But after
Hurricane Dorian hit the archipelago, eviscerating infrastruc-
ture on two major islands resulting in far too many dead and
missing persons, Nikita has shifted her life mission to focus
on preparing residents of one Bahamian island, Cat Island, to
become professional marine scientists, under the banner of
what she calls “ocean love.”
On Cat Island, you can still find the remnants of slave-hold-
ing plantations in the bush. Some people describe this island as
“the most Bahamian” of all the islands in the country because
islanders famously retained their oral storytelling traditions,
music, and religious practices that tied them to old-world Africa
for many generations. Cat Island is too far from the interna-
tional airport on New Providence to readily attract mass tourist

8 See Terry P. Hughes et al., “Coral Reefs in the Anthropocene,” Nature 546
(2017): 82–90.

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 black atlantis

numbers, and it has no major cruise terminal. And residents

do not typically return to this rural island if they pursue higher
education because stable economic opportunities are few and
far between, primarily having only limited employment in the
small-scale tourism industry or commercial fishing. But Nikita
sees possibility in this quiet place: why shouldn’t local Cat
Islanders become their own experts, fulfilling their own science
diving and submarine ecological assessment needs? She says
that she wants to foster, from the ground up, a community of
ocean guardians who will manage their own marine resources
and who will be skilled in marine consultation as a professional
trade. Coral restoration is on the list of skills she plans to develop
within the Cat Island community.
Nikita told me recently about her attempts at building a coral
nursery on Cat Island. She knew how to set up a pilot stand of
coral trees (submerged vertical scaffolds on which coral frag-
ments are placed in order to grow large enough for out plant-
ing into reef areas) using an essentially DIY system that is low
budget and involves readily available materials. She put a few
trees made from PVC pipe and fishing line in a suitable offshore
location, and she hoped she could engage islanders to assist with
monitoring and maintenance. But the sheer labor required took
her by surprise. Cleaning algae off the attached coral fragments
took many hours a week that she had not budgeted for herself,
and checking on the nursery was a daily task. The trees were
susceptible to storm and wave action, and changes in ocean tem-
perature could wreak havoc on the fragments. Coral died. Trees
disappeared. She was physically and emotionally exhausted by
the endeavor. She had limited funds to hire more people to sup-
port the effort, and her nascent community of ocean guardians
wasn’t large enough or advanced enough to fully take on all the
labor themselves. So she has had to abandon this first attempt at
community coral restoration. She told me all this with a big sigh
when we last saw one another in person. Perhaps she will try
again in the future when the island has a more established group
of local community conservation practitioners.

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solarities

Fig. 1. “Human Coral Hybrids.” Sculpture and photograph by Tamika

Galanis, 2017, used with permission.

I consider this tiny example of Nikita’s attempt at small-scale,

non-commercial coral restoration in Cat Island to be a glimpse
of something like a Black Atlantis, imagined and material-
ized through solarity.9 Unlike the “Blue Economy” which pro-
motes the continued exploration, exploitation, and extraction
of marine resources as an engine of economic development,10 I
intend “Black Atlantis” to refer to an imperfect process by which
marine restoration, in this case via coral reefs, anchors emergent
and resistant materialities of knowing and being in the Carib-
bean. Art helps us to feel the meaning of the concept.
In reference to her work, pictured here, Bahamian artist
Tamika Galanis explains that “Human-Coral Hybrids are a req-
uiem for the invisible: both the Africans forced across the Mid-
dle Passage establishing the Diaspora to the Caribbean and pre-
sent-day-Bahamians.”11 Another example comes from the work
of the American artist Ellen Gallagher. Her Coral Cities (2007)

9 For a brilliant discussion of art, literature, history, and dystopian possibil-

ity for the planet, see Hameed, “Black Atlantis.”
10 See P.G. Patil et al., Toward a Blue Economy: A Promise for Sustainable
Growth in the Caribbean (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016).
11 Tamika Galanis, “Human-Coral Hybrids,” Tamika Galanis, n.d., https://
www.tamikagalanis.com/human-coral-hybrids.

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 black atlantis

and Watery Ecstatic (2004) series depict submarine beings that

merge human and marine life in a fluid, dream-like cosmology
tinged with a sense of mystery. According to Gallagher, these
images “explore the myth of Drexciya, a myth propagated by
an underground Detroit techno outfit of the same name in the
1990s. An Atlantis-like underwater world, Drexciya is popu-
lated by a marine species descended from women and children
who jumped overboard or were thrown from slave ships during
the grueling journey from West Africa to America.”12
I learned of Gallagher’s artwork in Katherine McKittrick’s
book about Black Studies, Dear Science.13 McKittrick muses on
Drexciya and Black creativity as “all at once, resistance, critique,
method-making, praxis, and a site of neurological and physi-
ological experience.”14 She is talking about art and music, but I
have begun to see the Cat Island ocean guardians and Nikita’s
plans for home-grown ocean love as a form of explicitly Black
creativity with living solarity. McKittrick argues that “one thing
black creative praxes do is illuminate narratives of black life
and humanity and, at the same time, create conditions through
which relationality, rebellion, conversation, interdisciplinarity,
and disobedience are fostered.”15 She is looking for those peo-
ple like Nikita who “provide intellectual spaces that define black
humanity outside colonial scripts”16 and “disrupt disciplined
ways of knowing,”17 and she wants to “to honor these voices as
brilliant and intellectual method-making.”18
In my read of the events taking place in the shallow seas around
Cat Island, there is just this kind of radical potential in coral res-
toration experiments. Photosynthesizing solarians — both coral

12 Ellen Gallagher, “Watery Ecstatic Series,” The Broad, n.d., https://www.

thebroad.org/art/ellen-gallagher/watery-ecstatic-series.
13 Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2020).
14 Ibid., 51.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid, 52.
17 Ibid, 56.
18 Ibid, 57.

295
solarities

and Cat Islanders — might be nurtured together in labor-inten-

sive projects based on non-commodified, non-colonized, non-
corporatized ocean love. This as yet mostly imagined Black Atlan-
tis embodies the ongoing struggle for sovereignty and autonomy
on a changing planet in direct denial of the allure of colonial-
corporate sun. Such rare examples of community-grown and
-centered coral restoration projects are a form of Black ecology,19
and as such they are also an ethic, a movement, and a method for
making solar futures. Right now, such projects are so very hard
to build and maintain, and yet I hope we never lose our ability to
imagine the creation of something more.

Coral

This coral’ s shape echoes the hand

It hollowed. Its

Immediate absence is heavy. As pumice,

As your breast in my cupped palm.

Sea-cold, its nipple rasps like sand,

Its pores, like yours, shone with salt sweat.

Bodies in absence displace their weight,

And your smooth body, like none other,

Creates an exact absence like this stone

Set on a table with a whitening rack

19 See J.T. Roane and Justin Hoseby, “Mapping Black Ecologies,” Current
Research in Digital History 2 (2019), https://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/
v02-05-mapping-black-ecologies/.

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 black atlantis

Of souveniers. It dares my hand

To claim what lovers’ hands have never known:

The nature of the body of another. 20

20 Derek Walcott, “Coral,” in Collected Poems, 1948–1984 (New York: Farrar,

Straus, and Giroux, 1987), 73.

297
solarities

References

Agard-Jones, Vanessa. “What the Sands Remember.” GLQ:

A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18, nos. 2–3 (2012):
325–46. doi: 10.1215/10642684-1472917.
Galanis, Tamika. “Human-Coral Hybrids.” Tamika Galanis,
n.d. https://www.tamikagalanis.com/human-coral-hybrids.
Gallagher, Ellen. “Watery Ecstatic Series.” The Broad, n.d.
https://www.thebroad.org/art/ellen-gallagher/watery-
ecstatic-series.
Hameed, S. Ayesha. “Black Atlantis: Three Songs.” In Forensis:
The Architecture of Public Truth, edited by Forensic
Architecture, 712–18. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014.
Hughes, Terry P., Michele L. Barnes, David R. Bellwood,
Joshua E. Cinner, Graeme S. Cumming, Jeremy B.C.
Jackson, Joanie Kleypas, Ingrid A. van de Leemput, Janice
M. Lough, Tiffany H. Morrison, Stephen R. Palumbi,
Egbert H. van Nes, and Marten Scheffer. “Coral Reefs in
the Anthropocene.” Nature 546 (2017): 82–90. DOI: 10.1038/
nature22901.
Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and
Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York
University Press, 2020.
Lennon, Myles. “Postcarbon Amnesia: Toward a Recognition
of Racial Grief in Renewable Energy Futures.” Science,
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DOI: 10.1177/0162243919900556.
McKittrick, Katherine. Dear Science and Other Stories.
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Patil, P.G., J. Virdin, S.M. Diez, J. Roberts, and A. Singh.
Toward a Blue Economy: A Promise for Sustainable Growth
in the Caribbean. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016.
“Restoring Our World’s Dying Coral Reefs.” Coral Vita, n.d.
https://www.coralvita.co/.
Roane, J.T., and Justin Hoseby. “Mapping Black Ecologies.”
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rrchnm.org/essays/v02-05-mapping-black-ecologies/. DOI:
10.31835/crdh.2019.05.
Strachan, Ian Gregory. Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and
Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2002.
Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems, 1948–1984. New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1987.

299
 Author Biographies

Ian J. Alexander is a writer and educator from Clarion County,

Pennsylvania. He studies the history of the US prison regime,
revolutionary and abolitionist prisoners’ movements, and media
histories. In his research, he approaches media and media tech-
nologies as sites of struggle inside prisons and across prison
walls. By looking at technologies such as radio, television, mail,
digital tablets, telephones, and isolation chambers variously as
tools of oppression, reform, and liberation, his work brings criti-
cal prison studies and abolitionist methods together with media
studies and media history. Ian is currently a visiting lecturer in
the Department of American Studies at Wellesley College.

Gretchen Bakke holds a Heisenberg Position at the Institute for

European Ethnology and the Institute for Human-Environment
Transitions at Humboldt University, Berlin and is a Visiting Fel-
low at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, also
in Berlin. Bakke is the author of The Grid: The Fraying Wires
Between Americans and Our Energy Future (Bloomsbury, 2016),
a 2016 Bill Gates pick, and the ebullient 2020 ethnography The
Likeness: Semblance and Self in Slovene Society. She is currently
conducting research for a cultural history of the end of fossil

301
solarities

fuels in and around the North Sea, leading The Global Mollusc
Project at the Research Institute for Sustainability in Potsdam,
Germany and writing a series of very serious essays, collectively
know as Minor Analytics.

Daniel A. Barber is Professor of Architecture at the University

of Technology Sydney (UTS). His research focuses on environ-
mental dimensions of architecture’s past, present, and future.
More recent publications include Modern Architecture and
Climate: Design before Air Conditioning (Princeton University
Press, 2020), the article “After Comfort” (Log 47, 2019), and
A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in
the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2016). Daniel has held
academic positions and fellowships at Harvard, Penn, Prince-
ton, and Yale, at the Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, the Max
Planck Institute (Berlin), Rachel Carson Centre (Munich), and
most recently as a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for
Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) at the Uni-
versität Heidelberg. He received a 2022–23 Guggenheim Fel-
lowship for his project Thermal Practices. Daniel co-edits Accu-
mulation, an annual dossier of essays on the e-flux architecture
online platform. He is the co-founder of the Current Collective
for Architecture and Environmental History and is on the edi-
torial board of the Journal of Architecture and Fabrications. He
lectures globally, encouraging architects and others to consider
their creative practice in the context of the climate emergency.

Sarah Besky is an anthropologist and Associate Professor in

the Industrial and Labor Relations School at Cornell University.
She is the author of The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice
on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (University of California
Press, 2014) and Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea
(University of California Press, 2020), as well as the co-editor
of How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet
(SAR Press, 2019). Her current research examines the past and
present of small-scale farming in India’s eastern Himalayas.

302
 author biographies

Amanda Boetzkes is Professor of Contemporary Art History

and Theory at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on
the relationship between perception and representation, theo-
ries of consciousness, and ecology. She has analyzed complex
human relationships with the environment through the lens
of aesthetics, patterns of human waste, and the global energy
economy. She is the author of Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary
Art and the Drive to Waste (MIT Press, 2019), The Ethics of Earth
Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and a forthcoming
book titled Ecologicity: Vision and the Planetarity of Art. Co-
edited books include Artworks for Jellyfish (And Other Others)
(Noxious Sector, 2022), Heidegger and the Work of Art History
(Routledge, 2014), and a forthcoming volume on Art’s Real-
ism in the Post-Truth Era (Edinburgh University Press, 2024).
Currently, she is the principal investigator of At the Moraine, a
multi-year, collaborative research project that studies the medi-
ation and representation of global climate change, with a special
focus on Indigenous territories of the circumpolar North.

Dominic Boyer is an anthropologist, media maker, and envi-

ronmental researcher who teaches at Rice University where he
served as Founding Director of the Center for Energy and Envi-
ronmental Research in the Human Sciences (2013–19). His most
recent books are Energopolitics (Duke Univerity Press, 2019),
which analyzes the politics of wind power development in
Southern Mexico, and Hyposubjects (Open Humanities Press,
2021), an experimental collaboration with Timothy Morton
concerning politics in the Anthropocene. With Cymene Howe,
he made a documentary film about Iceland’s first major glacier
(Okjökull) lost to climate change, Not Ok: A Little Movie about
a Small Glacier at the End of the World (2018). In August 2019,
together with Icelandic collaborators, they installed a memo-
rial to Okjökull’s passing, an event that attracted media atten-
tion from around the world and which caused The Economist to
create their first-ever obituary for a non-human. His next book
is titled No More Fossils (University of Minnesota Press, 2023),

303
solarities

a discussion of fossil fuel fossils and what is to be done about

them.

Cara New Daggett is an Associate Professor in Political Sci-

ence at Virginia Tech and a fellow at the Research Institute for
Sustainability, Potsdam, Germany (2023–2024). Her research
explores energy and ecological politics through a feminist
framework. Her award-winning book, The Birth of Energy: Fos-
sil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2019) investigates how the 19th-century science of
energy informed Anglo-European empires by intesifying racist
and patriarchal labor systems. More recently, her work explores
the intersection of misogyny and intensive energy use, most
notably in petro-masculinity among right-wing movements.
With two colleagues, Christine Labuski and Shannon Bell, she
formed the Mayapple Energy Transition Collective with the
goal of envisioning feminist energy systems. Her work has been
published in journals including Environmental Politics, Millen-
nium: Journal of International Politics, and Energy Research &
Social Science.

Jason De León is a Professor of Anthropology and Chicana, Chi-

cano, and Central American Studies at the University of Califor-
nia, Los Angeles and Executive Director of the Undocumented
Migration Project, a non-profit organization focused on raising
awareness about issues related to clandestine migration and
assisting families of missing migrants searching for their loved
ones. De León is Head Curator of the ongoing global exhibition
“Hostile Terrain 94” and author of The Land of Open Graves:
Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (University of California
Press, 2015). His most recent book Soldiers and Kings: Survival
and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling will be published by
Viking Press in 2024.

Jeff Diamanti is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humani-

ties (Cultural Analysis & Philosophy) at the University of
Amsterdam. In 2016–17 he was the Media@McGill Postdoctoral

304
 author biographies

Fellow in Media and the Environment where he co-convened

the international colloquium on Climate Realism, the results
of which appear in a volume he co-edited, Climate Realism:
The Aesthetics of Weather and Atmosphere in the Anthropo-
cene (Routledge, 2020) and a double issue of Resilience. His
first book, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum: Locat-
ing Terminal Landscapes (Bloomsbury, 2021), tracks the politi-
cal and media ecology of fossil fuels across the extractive and
logistical spaces that connect remote territories like Greenland
to the economies of North America and Western Europe. His
new research, Bloom Ecologies, details the return to natural phi-
losophy in the marine and atmospheric sciences, studying the
interactive dynamics of the cryosphere and hydrosphere in the
North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean. He co-directs the ASCA Politi-
cal Ecologies Seminar with Joost de Bloois, and with Amanda
Boetzkes, he co-organizes “At the Moraine,” an ongoing research
project on the political ecology of glacial retreat in the Arctic.
With Fred Carter, he co-directs the Field­ARTS arts and science
residency in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Kim Förster is an architectural historian, teaching and research-

ing at the University of Manchester as a member of MARG (Man-
chester Architecture Research Group). Having earned his doc-
torate in architecture at ETH Zurich in 2011, he was Associate
Director of Research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture
from 2016 to 2018, where he led the multidisciplinary research
project “Architecture and/for the Environment” as part of the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s “Architecture, Urbanism, and
the Humanities Initiative.” He taught at ETH’s Institute gta, in
the Doctoral Program for the History and Theory of Architec-
ture, and as a visiting professor at EPFL Lausanne. His research
and teaching focus on an environmental, energy, and mate-
rial history, particularly a global history of cement. Förster has
published on environmental topics in Architectural Histories,
Candide, Werk, Bauen + Wohnen; he contributed to the Rout-
ledge Companion to Architecture and Social Engagement (Rout-

305
solarities

ledge, 2018), to Überbau: Produktionsverhältnisse der Architek-

tur im Anthropozän (Universitätsverlag TU Berlin, 2021), and to
Beyond Concrete (Triest Verlag, 2022). A member of the collec-
tive common room, in 2022 Förster co-curated “Disquietude:
Architecture and Energy in Portugal” and co-edited a book with
the same title. Förster edited the “Environmental Histories of
Architecture” series for the CCA (Library Stack, 2022–23).

Described as a “chameleon” by Carlo McCormick in the New

York Times, Ganzeer operates seamlessly between art, design,
and storytelling, creating what he has coined: Concept Pop. His
medium of choice according to Artforum is “a little bit of eve-
rything: stencils, murals, paintings, pamphlets, comics, instal-
lations, and graphic design.” With over forty exhibitions to his
name, Ganzeer’s work has been seen in a wide variety of art
galleries, impromptu spaces, alleyways, and major museums
around the world, such as The Brooklyn Museum in New York,
The Palace of the Arts in Cairo, the Moody Center for the Arts
in Houston, and the V&A in London. Ganzeer’s current projects
include a short story collection titled Times New Human and
a sci-fi graphic novel titled The Solar Grid, an elaborate work-
in-progress which has awarded him a Global Thinker Award
from Foreign Policy in 2016. He has been an artist-in-residence
in Germany, Poland, Jordan, the Netherlands, and Finland, and
has lived extensively in Cairo, New York, Los Angeles, Denver,
and finally Houston — where he is now based.

Mél Hogan is the host of The Data Fix podcast and is the Direc-
tor of the Environmental Media Lab (EML). She is an Associ-
ate Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s
University (Kingston, Ontario). Her research focuses on data
infrastructure, understood from within the contexts of settler-
colonial extractivism, planetary catastrophe, and collective anx-
ieties about the future.

Aster Hoving is a doctoral researcher in Environmental

Humanities with the Greenhouse Center for Environmental

306
 author biographies

Humanities at the University of Stavanger. Her PhD project

“Ocean Energies” investigates how energy companies, scientists,
and artists engage with the ocean’s energies. Previously, Aster
studied at Utrecht University, the University of Amsterdam,
University of California, Berkeley, and New York University.
Her master’s thesis “Elemental Aesthetics” received the Univer-
sity of Amsterdam Faculty of Humanities Thesis Prize 2021 and
in 2023 she was awarded the inaugural British Council Scotland
SGSAH EARTH Scholarship for research at the University of Glas-
gow. Aster’s published work can be found on the website Envi-
ronmental History Now (2021).

Cymene Howe is Professor of Anthropology at Rice University

with a longstanding interest in how people and environments
co-create one another. Her field research in the Americas (Nica-
ragua, Mexico, United States) the Arctic (Iceland, Greenland),
and coastal cities (Cape Town and Honolulu) illustrates a widen-
ing field of human imprint on ecosystems. Her current research
focuses on the interconnections between a melting Arctic and
sea level rise in global coastal cities, with an attention to how
water, transformed by a warming world, establishes novel links
between distant places and populations. Her books include
Intimate Activism: The Struggle for Sexual Rights in Postrevolu-
tionary Nicaragua (Duke University Press, 2013) and Ecologics:
Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press,
2019) as well as two edited collections: Anthropocene Unseen: A
Lexicon (punctum books, 2020) and The Johns Hopkins Guide to
Critical and Cultural Theory. She co-produced the documentary
film Not Ok: A Little Movie about a Small Glacier at the End of
the World (2018) and was co-creator of the Okjökull memorial
event in Iceland, the world’s first funeral for a glacier fallen to
climate change.

Tim Ingold is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the

University of Aberdeen. Following 25 years at the University of
Manchester, where he was appointed Max Gluckman Professor
of Social Anthropology in 1995, Ingold moved in 1999 to Aber-

307
solarities

deen, where he established Scotland’s youngest Department of

Anthropology. Ingold has carried out ethnographic fieldwork
among Sámi and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on
comparative questions of environment, technology, and social
organization in the circumpolar North, the role of animals in
human society, issues in human ecology, and evolutionary the-
ory in anthropology, biology, and history. He has gone on to
explore the links between environmental perception and skilled
practice, replacing traditional models of genetic and cultural
transmission with a relational approach focusing on the growth
of bodily skills of perception and action. Ingold’s current inter-
ests lie on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art
and architecture. His recent books include The Perception of the
Environment (Routledge, 2000), Lines (Routledge, 2007), Being
Alive (Routledge, 2011), Making (Routledge, 2013), The Life of
Lines (Routledge, 2015), Anthropology and/as Education (Rout-
ledge, 2018), Anthropology: Why It Matters (Wiley, 2018), Cor-
respondences (Wiley, 2020), and Imagining for Real (Routledge,
2022). Ingold is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal
Society of Edinburgh. In 2022 he was made a CBE for services to
Anthropology.

Bob Johnson is author of Carbon Nation: Fossil Fuels in the

Making of American Culture (University Press of Kansas, 2014)
and Mineral Rites: An Archaeology of the Fossil Economy (Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2019). He is a Professor of History
who has written widely on American culture, theory, and the
environment with his work centered on the double helix of
global warming and social justice. His current book project,
“The Colonial Climate: How We Made (and Un-Made) the
World’s Most Perfect Climate in San Diego, California, 1846–,”
reconsiders the Southern California climate through the lens
of actor-network theory in an effort re-position climate change
as a product of colonial relations. He lives with his family in
San Diego, California, home to the highest concentration of
urban military assets in the world and what local marketers call
“America’s Finest City.”

308
 author biographies

Aylin Kuryel is an Assistant Professor in the Literary and Cul-

tural Analysis department at the University of Amsterdam. Her
research areas are nationalism, image politics, aesthetics/resist-
ance, and politics of emotions. She is the co-editor of Cultural
Activism: Practices, Dilemmas and Possibilities (Rodopi, 2010),
Resistance and Aesthetics in the Age of Global Uprisings (Küresel
Ayaklanmalar Çağında Direniş ve Estetik, Iletisim Press, 2015),
Being Jewish in Turkey: A Dictionary of Experiences (Türkiye’de
Yahudi Olmak: Bir Deneyim Sözlüğü, Iletisim Press, 2017), and
Essays on Boredom (Sıkıntı Üzerine Denemeler, Iletisim Press,
2020). She has been involved in projects as an artist and is work-
ing as a documentary filmmaker. Among her documentaries
are Translating Ulysses (2023), A Defense (2021), CemileSezgin
(2020), The Balcony and Our Dreams (2020), Heads and Tails
(2018), and Welcome Lenin (2016).

Myles Lennon is an environmental anthropologist, Dean’s

Assistant Professor of Environment & Society and Anthropol-
ogy at Brown University, and a former sustainable energy policy
practitioner. His first research project explores the intersectional
dimensions of solar infrastructure in New York City, illuminat-
ing the sensorial and emotional power of renewable energy in a
gentrifying skyline built on racial capitalism and threatened by
climate collapse. He is currently conducting long-term research
on young, Black land stewards’ complex efforts to navigate settler
colonialism and redress white supremacy through land-based
labor in the United States. His research has been supported by
the US National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and
the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Caroline Levander holds an endowed chair in the humanities

at Rice and serves on Rice University’s senior leadership team
as a vice president. As the author of five books and numerous
articles on American cultural history, she has deep expertise on
the long history and politics of American life. Her leadership
portfolio focuses on educational innovation, strategic growth,
new revenue streams, and digital transformation, all with a

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solarities

focus on global impact. Beyond Rice, she serves on numerous

ed tech advisory boards, including the Coursera Council and
2U/EdX Advisory Council, and is Vice Chair of the Fulbright
Association Board of Directors. The ed tech company that she
co-founded in 2020 was acquired by Honor Education in 2022
where she is a senior advisor.

Amelia Moore is an Associate Professor of Marine Affairs at

the University of Rhode Island. She has degrees in Environ-
mental Biology from Columbia University and Sociocultural
Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. Her
research involves the social role of islands in ecological and
environmental knowledge production, and she approaches this
topic through the lens of antiracist, anticolonial, feminist sci-
ence and technology studies, and Black ecologies.

Cristián Simonetti is Associate Professor in Anthropology

at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His work has
concentrated on how bodily gestures and environmental forces
relate to notions of time in science. More recently he has engaged
in collaborations across the sciences, arts, and humanities to
explore the environmental properties of materials relevant to
the Anthropocene. He is the author of Sentient Conceptualiza-
tions: Feeling for Time in the Sciences of the Past (Routledge,
2018), co-editor of Surfaces: Transformations of Body, Materials
and Earth (Routledge, 2020), and co-editor of a special issue of
the journal Theory, Culture & Society entitled “Solid Fluids: New
Approaches to Materials and Meaning” (2022).

Nicole Starosielski, Professor of Media at New York University,

is author or co-editor of over thirty articles and five books on
media, infrastructure, and environments, including The Under-
sea Network (Duke University Press, 2015), Media Hot and Cold
(Duke University Press, 2021), Signal Traffic: Critical Stud-
ies of Media Infrastructure (University of Illinois Press, 2015),
Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environ-

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 author biographies

ment (Routledge, 2016), and Assembly Codes: The Logistics of

Media (Duk University Press, 2021), as well as co-editor of the
“Elements” series at Duke University Press. Starosielski’s most
recent project involves working with the subsea cable indus-
try — which lays the transnational links of the internet — to
make digital infrastructures more sustainable.

Hannah Tollefson is a PhD candidate in Communication Stud-

ies at McGill University. Informed by enviornmental humani-
ties and media and technology studies, her research examines
infrastructure and environment, with a focus on extraction,
logistics, and energy. Her doctoral project is a study of how the
shores and waters of the Salish Sea surrounding the Port of Van-
couver have been constructed, maintained, and contested as a
space of circulation.

Ayesha Vemuri is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies

at McGill University. Her doctoral research lies at the intersec-
tion of climate change, migration, infrastructure, and feminist
science and technology studies. She is interested in the ways
in which experts construct and manage the risk of floods and
migration in the context of climate change in Assam, India.
Her research examines how the management of the river, and
its annual floods, intersects with other key industries in Assam,
including oil and natural gas, sand mining and construction,
conservation, and border management.

Rhys Williams is a senior lecturer in Energy & Environmental

Humanities at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses
on the politics and poetics of infrastructure, energy, and food
futures. He’s recently published in South Atlantic Quarterly,
Open Library of Humanities, and the New Routledge Companion
to Science Fiction.

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