Book Section
The chapter engages the nature–culture divide with the generative ambivalences of weathering in both language and physics. Taking the different uses of the enantiosemic and ambitransitive verb as indicative of the human’s fraught relationship with its environment and itself, it analyses multiple ways in which ‘weathering’ can involve subject–object relations, objectless subject–predicate relations, or even subjectless processes, and proposes to think them with mechanics, thermodynamics, and chaos theory.
Keywords: nature–culture; enantiosemy; ambitransitive verbs; entropy; chaos theory; phase transitions
Title
Weathering Ambivalences
Subtitle
Between Language and Physics
Author(s)
Christoph F. E. Holzhey
Identifier
Description
The chapter engages the nature–culture divide with the generative ambivalences of weathering in both language and physics. Taking the different uses of the enantiosemic and ambitransitive verb as indicative of the human’s fraught relationship with its environment and itself, it analyses multiple ways in which ‘weathering’ can involve subject–object relations, objectless subject–predicate relations, or even subjectless processes, and proposes to think them with mechanics, thermodynamics, and chaos theory.
Is Part Of
Place
Berlin
Publisher
ICI Berlin Press
Date
2020
Subject
nature–culture
enantiosemy
ambitransitive verbs
entropy
chaos theory
phase transitions
Rights
© by the author
Except for images or otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Language
en-GB
page start
3
page end
40
Source
Weathering: Ecologies of Exposure, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 17 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2020), pp. 3–40

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Cite as: Christoph F. E. Holzhey, ‘Weathering Ambivalences: Between Language and Physics’, in Weathering: Ecologies of Exposure, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 17 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2020), pp. 3-40 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-17_02>