Salt: Fragments from the History of a Medium

Abstract

This essay explores histories of common salt, sodium chloride, using concepts and methods from media theory. It contributes to research on media and environment and the general ‘material turn’ taken across the Humanities. I conceive of salt as what Peters calls an ‘elemental’ medium so as to show, first, the imbrication of naturally-occurring substances in the operations and supply chains of digital culture. Second, the many lives salt has lived materially, in techniques of survival and exchange, and metaphorically, in cultural expression, complicate conventional understandings of media. In showing how salt performs three functions, processing, storage, and transfer, which Kittler ascribed to technical and symbolic media, I argue for a more expansive use of ‘mediation’ as a bridge concept that speaks to matters of nature and culture, Arts and Science, and to account for deep histories of extraction and economy that shape digital culture and global supply chains.

Elemental worlds: Specificities, exposures, alchemies

“…As Nicole Starosielski suggests, one of the most significant dimensions of a turn to the elements is that it involves the ‘investigation of media’s material and conditioning substrates’ (Starosielski, 2016: 1). Elements – from silicon to sodium (Young, 2020) to copper (Grappi and Neilson, 2019) to helium – are critical to the composition of devices and technologies as part of the geology of media (Parikka, 2015). The processes of extraction and refinement that facilitate this as complex, contested and far from clean are revealed, for instance, in what Starosielski (2016) calls the ‘thermocultures of media’.…”

Infrastructural Unrest

“…Its regional politics are organized primarily around the geopolitics and political ecology of the specific resources that each region supplies. These resources result from colonial appetites and the provision of staple goods, themselves "integral to the infrastructure and logistics" (Young, 2020) of North America. It has become increasingly clarifying and helpful for me to read the history and present of colonial governance of the "Canadian" portion of Turtle Island (an indigenous name for Earth or North America) as having created a nation that is, through and through, infrastructural.…”