A text to be discussed in a reading circle at Bioart Society seemed currently relevant and inspiring despite being already ten years old, that is ” Weathering: Climate Change and the ‘Thick Time’ of Transcorporeality” by Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker. I have been so focused on plants and trees that I have not read much about broader issues. I remember participating with the paper “Working with the Weather”, in PSi #22, (Performance Studies international) Performance Climates, University of Melbourne, 6-9.7.2016. The text was later published as “Performing with the Weather” in Global Performance Studies Issue 1.2.2018 Performance Climates. I wish I had read this text about weathering back then.
 
Interestingly Neimanis and Walker justify their mixing of climate and weather by trying to bring the idea of climate change closer to embodied experience. And of course their key concept, weathering, needs that mixture for relevance. Weathering means ageing, in Finnish ‘vanheneminen’, while to weather means to change in colour or form over a period of time because of the effects of sun, wind, or other weather conditions but also to deal successfully with a difficult situation. In Finnish the verbs include both ‘rapautua’ and ‘selvitä’. A relevant combination; as Neimanis and Walker write: “Like these trees, we are all, each of us, weathering.” (Neimanis & Walker 2014, 559). What I liked especially about the text was the discussion and further development of the concept trans-corporeality proposed by Stacy Alaimo, which I have found useful, because it emphasises the constant exchanges taking place between all kinds of bodies.
 
They write about transcorporeal weathering and emphasise the temporal and processual aspects of trans-corporeality and note that “attention to the subtle differences among relations of contiguity, continuity, immersion, and co-constitution also helps clarify weathering in terms of Barad’s concept of intra-action.” (Neimanis & Walker 2014, 565) They further state: “Nuanced this way — as incorporation that engenders differences that matter, rather than contiguity or immersion — transcorporeal relations reveal the enactments of weathering.” (Neimanis & Walker 2014, 566) Moreover, “a felt sense of our mutual weathering demands that we think about time.” (Ibid).
 
When speaking of transcorporeal temporalities they note that “our human bodies are contractions of climate, and concurrently that climate is a contraction of our bodies (and others’)” (Neimanis & Walker 2014, 570). They stress that “to recognize this co-laboring is also to engender a new temporal imaginary of climate change, where climates and weather are not something we pass through (in a linear progression of time) or sustain (in an impossible denial of time), but are rather a time that we weather together.” (Ibid). They note that “the passive habits of contraction take place at the cellular, organic, and inorganic levels” and quote Deleuze: “What we call wheat is a contraction of the earth and humidity…. What organism is not made of elements and cases of repetition, of contemplated and contracted water, nitrogen, carbon, chlorides and sulphates,thereby intertwining all the habits of which it is composed?” (Deleuze 1994, 75 quoted in Neimanis & Walker 2014, 571). Moreover, they problematise the notion of an open future and the ‘new’. “How do we think of a future that is ‘open and uncontained by the past and present’ (Grosz 2004, 75)?” when “transcorporeal temporality means that everything has a trace, an echo, a past.” (Ibid).
 
Neimanis and Walker propose responsivity as responsibility to form a way towards a politics of possibilities: “A new climate change imaginary—one of transcorporeal temporality—can engender what Barad refers to as a ‘politics of possibilities,’ that is, ‘ways of responsibly imagining and intervening in’ the entanglements of which we are a part” (Barad 2007, 246, quoted in Neimanis & Walker 2014, 572). They are aware of the limitations, though: “As Grosz writes, ‘concepts’ —like the notion of weathering we propose — ‘do not solve problems that events generate for us,’ but ‘they enable us to surround ourselves with possibilities for being otherwise’ Grosz 2012, 14 quoted in Neimanis & Walker 2014, 572).” And they do return to the trees as well when noting that we cannot selectively get rid of only some parts of the past “for just as the rings of the tree are a material record of years of soil conditions, patterns of rain and drought, our bodies are records of the pharmaceuticals we pump into our waterways; increases in skin cancer are contractions of our carbon emissions. These records, memories, and intensities are indications of our ‘insurgent vulnerabilities’: we are responsive to the weather, as it is to us.” (Neimanis & Walker 2014, 573)
 
In the epilogue they note that the weather is always changing and there is nothing wrong with that. “Perhaps climate change — as a concept that we ostensibly find so hard to feel — is really about speed. About the danger of outpacing, outracing ourselves.” (Ibid). Without that last comment such a “relaxed” attitude to the climate crises and our seeming impossibility to do anything about it would feel rather strange today. The notion of weathering is nevertheless useful and appealing, perhaps also dangerous, because it assumes that we can somehow simply wait and “weather the storm”.
 
 
 
Neimanis, Astrida & Rachel Loewen Walker. 2014. Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality. Hypatia vol. 29, no. 3 (Summer 2014) 558-575.
 
Their references quoted here:
Alaimo, Stacy. 2008. Trans-corporeal feminisms and the ethical space of nature. In Material feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and repetition. New York: Columbia University Press.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. Nick of time: Politics, evolution, and the untimely. Durham, N.C. , and London:Duke University Press.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2012. The future of feminist theory: Dreams for new knowledges? In Undutiful daughters: New directions in feminist thought and practice, ed. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Fanny S€oderb€ack. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.