Steve Connor and Esther Leslie
Cold World (2009), characterises our planet as ‘this frozen constellation … the world voided of both human warmth and metaphysical comfort’. The association of coldness with deadness, numbness, blockage, ahistorical unshifting permanence, has a long history, as does its counterpart, the assumption that vitality is hot-blooded and sunny. This course traces some of the ways in which historical, political, philosophical and aesthetic mobilisations of coldness have accented it as a negative, a minus from everything, but also seeks out odd moments of surprising reversal - the transient beauty of a snow crystal, the vigours of a chilly shower, the animation and historicity of an ice core. Bringing together sociology, film, psychoanalysis, history of science and aesthetics, this course will ask whether coldness has fundamentally changed its value and meaning in a warming world. It will be a response to the provocation articulated by by Michel Serres in The Natural Contract: ‘global history enters culture; global culture enters history: this is something utterly new in philosophy’,
1 Catching Cold
The ambivalence of coldness focuses on the body. On the one hand, there is an almost universal revulsion against cold, with the widely-spread fear of draughts and the belief that exposure to cold causes debility and sickness (in the medieval and early modern diet books, vegetables were despised as being dangerously ‘cold’ foods). Both Greek and Nordic conceptions of Hell represented it as cold and shadowy. But the rise of hydrotherapy during the eighteenth century suggests the opposite, that cold might in fact be bracing and sanative. This developed into a global thermopolitics, in which civilisation and industry came to be identified with the was identified with the cold of northerly peoples and heat was associated with sloth and indolence.
Reading
John Floyer, Psychrolousia: Or, the History of Cold-Bathing: Both Ancient and Modern (London: W. and J. Innys, 1722). Online at http://www.archive.org/details/psychrolousiaor00bayngoog
Captain Richardson, Fourteen Years’ Experience of Cold Water: Its Uses and Abuses (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1857) Available through Blackboard and Moodle.
Ellsworth Huntington, Civilization and Climate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1913) Online at http://www.archive.org/details/civilizationand00huntgoog
2. Refrigeration: Ice-Cream and Space-Time
Michel Serres has suggested that art, architecture, culture, communication equate to the injunction ‘Keep me warm’. But the demand for coolness is at least as important in the history of architecture and in relations of power. Labour is hot, luxury is cool. This class will investigate the reconfiguration of labour, desire and space-time brought about by the development of means of industrial and domestic refrigeration at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as the history of air conditioning in architecture.
Reading
Roger Thévenot, A History of Refrigeration (Paris: International Institute of Refrigeration, 1979)
Susanne Freidberg, Fresh: A Perishable History (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap, 2009). (The link is to the opening sections made available by Google Books)
Lisa Heschong, Thermal Delight in Architecture (Cambridge, MA And London: MIT Press, 1979). (The link is to the opening section made available by Google Books)
Refrigeration and Ventilation of Cities, Southern Quarterly Review. 1 (1842), 413-446
‘Ice—How Much of It Is Used, and Where It Comes From’, Debow’s Review, 19 (1855), 709-712
3. Absolute Zero
This class will investigate the scientific efforts to attain absolute zero temperatures, and the use of the extraordinary physical properties of supercooled materials. We will follow through the science-fiction fantasy of immortality through deep freezing, embodied in the myth of Walt Disney in his coffin of liquid nitrogen.
Reading
Alvin Snider, ‘Hard Frost 1684’, in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 8 (2008), 2 (2008), 8-32 (available via Project Muse)
W.T. Gordon, ‘The Vocabulary of Cryonics’, American Speech, 50, (1975), 132-135 (available via JSTOR)
Robert Ettinger, Youniverse: Toward a Self-Centered Philosophy of Immortalism and Cryonics (Boca raton, FL: Universal Publishers, 2009). (The link is to selections made available by Google Books).
Further Reading
Tom Schactman Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). (The link is to selections made available by Google Books).
Ralph G. Scurlock, History and Origins of Cryogenics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
4. Ends of the Earth
This class will explore what Eric Wilson calls the ‘spiritual history of ice’, from the final chase of the monster across the frozen wastes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, through the history of polar expeditions, to the development of winter sports and the Nazi cult of the mountain and myth of Ultima Thule as the wellspring of the Aryan race.
Reading
Richard Sale, To the Ends of the Earth: The History of Polar Exploration (London: HarperCollins, 2002).
Eric Wilson, The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). (The link is to the first 32 pages made available by Google Books).
This can be combined with a later essay by Eric Wilson, ‘Thoreau, Crystallography, and the Science of the Transparent’, Studies in Romanticism, 43 (2004), 99-117 (available via JSTOR)
Screening - 25th October, 2-4.30, Dale Room, Wellcome Collection
Arnold Fanck, Der Heilige Berg - The Holy Mountain (1926) and SOS Iceberg (1933)
Further Reading
Detlev Rose, Die Thule-Gesellschaft: Legende, Mythos, Wirklichkeit (Tübingen: Grabert, 1994)
On Google Books there is some of Joscelyn Goodwin’s ‘pop’ study, Arktos, The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival. At the very least, read Chapter 4, The Aryan Myth
Nancy P. Nenno, ‘Projections on Blank Space: Landscape, Nationality, and Identity in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg’, German Quarterly, 69 (1996), 305-321 (available via JSTOR)
Eric Rentschler, ‘Mountains and Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm’, New German Critique, 51, (1990), 137-161 (available via JSTOR)
Kathryn Yusoff, ‘Biopolitical Economies and the Political Aesthetics of Climate Change’, Theory, Culture, Society, 27 (2010), 73-99. Available in Birkbeck’s E-Journals repository
Interview with Kathryn Yussoff
5. A Kind of Alaska
Ernst Haeckel proposed in 1900 that it might be possible, by lowering of temperature and increase of pressure, to produce ‘soul-snow’. The twentieth century saw the development of a new kind of personal style, of coldness and reserve. This class will investigate the psychological dimensions of coolness and coldness, following through the process in which an urban pathology of coldness develops into an ethic and aesthetic of ‘coolness’.
Reading
Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)
Hans Christian Anderson, ‘The Snow Queen’
Walter M. Gallichan, Sexual Apathy and Coldness in Women (London: Laurie, 1927)
Gilles Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 9-138
Dick Pountain, Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude (London: Reaktion, 2000). (The link is to selections made available by Google Books).
6. Freezeframe: Arts of Ice
This class will explore the uses of ice and coldness in visual representation, relating the rendering of coldness to McLuhan’s distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘’cold’ media. The class will centre on David Buckland’s Cape Farewell project, which has organised seven expeditions by artists and scientists to the Arctic since 2003.
Reading
Rachel Weiss, ‘Antarctica and Concepts of Order: Two Installations’, Leonardo, 17 (1984), 95-99 (available via JSTOR)
Life Magazine, 24 May, 1954, ‘Arctic Artists’, on GOOGLE BOOKS
Marshall McLuhan, ‘Media, Hot and Cold’, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 22-32
Screening - 1st November, 2-4.00, Dale Room, Wellcome Collection
Werner Herzog, Encounters at the End of the World(2007)
Further Reading
Russell A. Potter, Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818-1875 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007)
Andy Goldsworthy, Ice and Snow Drawings: 1990–1992 (Edinburgh: FruitMarket, 1992).
———————-, Midsummer Snowballs (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001)
Websites
Jean de Pomereu
Forecast Factory
Anne Brodie
Cape Farewell: The Cultural Response to Climate Chnage
Screening: Art From the Arctic, dir. David Hinton (BBC4, 2006)
