Introducing Solid Fluids

Abstract

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.

Informationsströme in digitalen Kulturen

“…Gugerli 2012) sowie die Kanalisierung (Mersch 2013;Schmidt 2015), weiter auch »Rhythmen« (Sutherland 2013, 18;Tiqqun 2010, 93) und »Sand« (Volkart 2006, 20). Neben deren engerem Bezug auf das als strömend beschriebene Informationsgeschehen beziehe ich mich auch nicht in einem weiter gefassten Sinne auf Metaphern und Konzepte der Reibungen (Tsing 2004), Turbulenzen und Wirbel (Echterhölter et al 2009), der stehenden Gewässer (Behnstedt et al 2007) oder des Festen (Ingold/Simonetti 2022;vgl. Assmann 1991).…”

Ethnographer as creation: A Whiteheadian interpretation of the ethnographic subject

“…Ingold and Simonetti (2022: 17–18) have recently argued that, for Whitehead, process and stability are also a matter of perspective. Our Western perspective is one where we look at things from the outside and often, too, in hindsight.…”

Title Corals, Geo-Sociality, and Anthropocene Dwelling

“…(Clark & Syzersynski, 2020: 4) The Anthropocene therefore foregrounds deceptively dynamic qualities of the world, prompting a re-evaluation of 'fixed' conceptual attachments to linear and solid-state Western modernist logics, urging attunement to ineffaceable uncertainty, volatility and flux. Far from static, the world has a deceptively 'solid-fluid' constitution (Ingold & Simonetti, 2021), always in a state of perpetual becoming: neither solid nor fluid, but rather solidbecoming-fluid or fluid-becoming-solid (Serres, 2018). The recent stable climatic period of the Holocene is merely a brief intermission within the planet's mercurial chronology, yet geological changes are obfuscated by such large timescales.…”