Weathering Ambivalences

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.