The Anthropocene is seen by many scholars across the sciences and the humanities as a tool for political action. Yet the validation process for this term appears to be extremely conservative. According to geologists’ leading efforts to formalize the term, signals need to petrify in stratigraphic sequences in order to become candidates to mark the start of the Anthropocene. I argue that this emphasis results from a fossilized view of becoming, where time is seen as a punctuated accumulation of solid (...) surfaces that are accessible only in retrospect. I show that this petrified view of change relates to a tendency to divorce earth and sky, which currently divides the practices of humanities scholars and geologists, as well as those of earth system scientists and stratigraphers collaborating on the formalization of the Anthropocene. Challenging this tendency, I conclude, requires opening up earth’s history to the more-than-solid flows of environmental change. (shrink)

A tension between solidity and fluidity tends to divide the sciences and the humanities along lines that define what is hard and soft in knowledge. This divide relates to similar dichotomies, between exteriority and interiority, material and spiritual, homogeneity and heterogeneity, matter and form, all of which have been partially mapped in Western thinking onto a traditional separation between earth and sky. Yet particular forms of knowledge sit uneasily within these tensions, a paradigmatic example of which is an understanding of (...) solids as ‘viscous fluids’. This article explores the concept of viscosity, attending to how it has impacted on understandings of matter, as well as broader social and cultural issues. It does so, particularly, by looking into the scientific study of ice, a material that has historically been regarded as solidfluid, to argue that life and sociality remain possible only in so far as matter that is viscid allows solid and fluid states to mingle. (shrink)

Archaeology, like most sciences that rely on stratigraphic excavation for studying the past, tends to conceptualize this past as lying deep underneath the ground. Accordingly, chronologies tend to be depicted as a movement from bottom to top, which contrast with sciences that illustrate the passage of time horizontally. By paying attention to the development of the visual language of disciplines that follow stratigraphy, I show how chronologies get entangled with other temporalities, particularly those of writing. Relying on recent ethnographic work (...) with archaeologists, the analysis reveals that excavation emerges as a double vertical movement of downward destruction and upward reconstruction that coincides with a systematic dissociation of time and space that has important effects for the understanding of the formation of sites. I conclude by looking at some of the implications of this dissociation for contemporary theoretical discussions, particularly those that emerged after the phenomenological push to horizontalize the discipline. Challenging this dissociation, I argue that the conceptualization of time in science should be understood as a process that depends on the body and unfolds in movement. (shrink)

This issue opens an inquiry into the tension between solidity and fluidity. This tension is ingrained in the Western intellectual tradition and informs theoretical debates across the sciences and humanities. In physics, solid is one phase of matter, alongside liquid, gas and plasma. This, however, assumes all matter to be particulate. Reversing the relation between statics and dynamics, we argue to the contrary, that matter exists as continuous flux. It is both solid and fluid. What difference would it make were (...) we to start from our inescapable participation in a world of solid fluids? Is solid fluidity a condition of being in the midst of things, or of intermediacy on a solid-fluid continuum? Does the world appear fluid in the process of its formation, but solid when you look back on things already formed? Here we open new paths for theorizing matter and meaning at a time of ecological crisis. (shrink)

In our discussions around the theme of solid fluids, we often resort to everyday words, many of them of ancient derivation and rich in association. We have decided to make a list of some of the words that come up most often – barring those that already figure as the principal characters of individual contributions – and to distribute among ourselves the task of writing a sort of mini-biography for each. The resulting lexicon with 19 entries, ranging from ‘cloud’ and (...) ‘concrete’ to ‘wave’ and ‘wood’, serves as a conclusion to the collection as a whole. (shrink)