The spectre of “the elements” currently haunts the environmental humanities: this quasi-intuitive idea seems well on its way to replace Raymond Williams’ lamented word “Nature”.[1] Indeed, if “Nature” problematically relies on an essentialist dualist framework,[2] and even “environment” arguably seems to refer to that what surrounds the human, one of the allures of the turn to the elemental is that the notion fundamentally challenges our received epistemic framework: the elements can be said to provoke an “ex-centric” imagination, drawing our attention outward, to nonhuman matter, while never completely abandoning their being-grounded in direct, sensible experience. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert aptly point out, the elements function as a “threshold concept” ‘beyond which the posthuman awaits. They are the outside that is already within, the very stuff of cosmos, home, body, and story.’[3]
The elements therefore seem ideal media for critical posthumanism, as they cover a wide scope of environmental ideas. In one sense, the elements are concrete, natural things: that is, on a material level, they are always and everywhere—either as directly experienced or perhaps remaining unsensed. On another level, this concrete notion of the elements also informs various metaphysical frameworks. For instance, earth figures in many an Indigenous ontology, while Māori Pasifika cosmogonies suggest water as their originary matter. Here, the merely material sense of the elements folds onto a proto-conceptual layer that includes ideas of foundational, metaphysical substances that nonetheless remain grounded in concrete experience.[4] Since modernity, moreover, this metaphysical layer gives way to yet another layer: the even more intangible foundations of a scientific understanding of the world, as ‘abstract entities that cannot be touched or seen’, where elements virtually exist only as mathematical concepts.[5] Indeed, at least since Mendeleev, this conceptual framework refers to more invisible ‘microscopic’ elements of the Periodic Table (identified by atomic numbers, which are perfect Platonic ideas) that no longer refer to a concrete experience on a ‘macroscopic’ scale.[6] Thus, these more abstract, chemical connotations completely divorce the elements from their concrete, intuitive sense accessible in daily life—which is arguably the primary appeal for the notion of the ‘elements’ to serve as a replacement for ‘Nature’ in the environmental humanities.
Combining these various senses (in short: matter, ideas, and concepts),[7] the elements point us to an incredible range of powerful meanings—from first philosophy and concrete stories of the world’s origin, to foundational material substances and abstract chemistry—while remaining so ostensibly self-evident and intuitive that they remain ‘part of our phenomenal experience and lifeworld as places and forces.’[8] These layers of materiality and meaning are hard to separate, for when designating something as “elemental” a certain slippage appears between matter, ideas, and concepts, simultaneously hinting at more abstract notions while also relying on the sheer concreteness of the material elements. This is what I call the elemental paradox: the power of the elements relies on that dynamic “tension” opened up between the more abstract foundations of the universe, and their manifestation in concrete, tangible form.[9] More precisely , however, the seeming contradiction lies in the fact that the figure of the elements reducesthe complexity of the intangible building blocks of the natural world to merely self-evident, “intuitive” elements, and yet one cannot articulate this self-evidentiary intuition that animates the elemental. Hence, as with all paradoxes, this contradiction is not without complications.
(i) The Elemental as Post-Natural Idea
First the good news. Clearly, the elements can contribute much to critical posthumanism by superseding the now discarded notion of “Nature”. By at least the 1980s, the concept of “Nature” had received significant criticism from various avenues, with several environmentalists claiming “Nature” to be ‘dead’ or having ‘ended.’[10] As philosopher of the elements David Macauley (“Place”, p. 189) points out, the ‘amorphous and contested concept [“Nature”] often leads us to a thicket of epistemological, ontological, political, and metaphysical problems.’ So, in what can be called the “post-natural” moment in the humanities,[11] an elemental framework seems to offer an opportune alternative: adopting an elemental perspective requires a re-thinking of the human’s place in the cosmos. As Melody Jue claims in relation to elemental environments, ‘specific thought forms emerge in relation to different environments, and […] these environments are significant for how we form questions about the world.’[12]
Jue’s research on the “elemental medium” of seawater provides a good illustration. Her methodology of deep-sea diving destabilises the feminist epistemological concept of “standpoint theory”: after all, under water, there is no fixed, stable perspective. This reflection indicates how, above water, all standpoints are necessarily grounded—what Jue calls fittingly, humanities’ ‘terrestrial bias’ (p. 11). Jue’s thinking through the medium of seawater thus urges the need to critically reflect on how disciplinary knowledge in the humanities is simultaneously situated and bound by our life on land. What’s important here is not merely the recognition that we are evidently terrestrial beings but, more profoundly, the elemental idea that our thinking inescapably takes shape in relation to an environment: no thinking takes place outside the elements! Hence, more fundamentally, the upshot of Jue’s argument entails acknowledging that each philosophical orientation is radically grounded in a specifically elemental milieu in which human life irrevocably takes shape.[13]
Elemental contributions like Jue’s emphasise that the old and neat separation of “Nature” and “human” need revising. As Astrida Neimanis reminds us (referencing Luce Irigaray), human bodies are ‘elemental bodies’.[14] This is why the elements figure as a threshold concept, mediating yet complicating this very distinction. Here, the crucial point is that elements are ‘the perceivable foundations of which worlds are composed’ (Cohen and Duckert, p. 13), with the word “composed” being understood here not simply as a compounding of the various material elements that are part of our daily lives and therefore grounded in our phenomenological experience (e.g., water that sustains our life), but as also encompassing the ideas and concepts mentioned above. “Composed” simultaneously refers to various other layers of the elemental, such as more abstract ideas of cosmogenic matter that are still grounded in experience (e.g., human evolution is traced back to aquatic life forms; water continuously enters the earth’s atmosphere), up to, more problematically, concepts that are typically beyond sheer experience (i.e., the distinct elements of the periodic table).
(ii) Defining the Elemental: Two Problems
The elements, in short, mediate abstract nature in a concrete form. To render this in Kantian terms, abstract concepts (such as that water is composed of H2O) exist principally as theoretical ideas: they are beyond direct experience and therefore belong to the noumenal (intelligible) realm. Alternatively, concrete, tangible elements (such as the water we drink) belong to the sensible experience of the phenomenal world.[15] Now, while it seems obvious that phenomena belonging to concrete elements like fire can help intuit or inspire more abstract thoughts of the noumenal world, the critical tension in the elemental paradox is fuelled by the reverse “intuition”, where the abstraction of the noumenal realm is used to back up the concreteness of the material world—even though one cannot experience the noumenal realm.[16] The elemental paradox relies on this very tension between the abstract and the concrete: it solicits a counter-intuitive thinking that, as the root of the word paradox suggests, goes beyond or outside (“para”) thought (the verb dokein, “to think”).[17] In other words, the power of the notion of the elemental relies on the assumption that this “intuitive” relation between the various senses of the elements is, well, self-evident, without explaining the tension between the abstract and the concrete. As I will now show, this is why when tasked with conveying what makes the elements “intuitive”, the powerful tension at times also gives way to ambiguity.
At least two specific problems arise when capturing this aspect of the elements. Firstly, there seems to be little agreement just how encompassing the elemental framework is: since the word conflates concrete material with abstract metaphysical ideas and chemical concepts, there can be little agreement about what is included and excluded. For instance, to some the elements refer primarily to specific quantities or combinations of cosmogenic matter: from, say, the five phases of classical Chinese thought, to the four elements of Ancient Greek philosophy, or indeed various other cosmologies—yet, the periodic table holds up to 120 elements.[18] So, counting the number of elements in one cosmology (intuitive to one) results in a discounting of other elements in other ontologies (self-evident to another). Additionally, in one context the framework of the elemental may include synthetic elements (as diverse as plastics and ‘petroculture’ of the energy humanities),[19] while elements also mediate infrastructures and partake in media environments.[20] Finally, in other contexts, the elemental may even be understood in a rudimentary, introductory sense (as in elementary school), thus downplaying the ecocritical and material connotations that seem so important to others’ use of the term.[21] Clearly, these are all elements, but some are manifestly more elemental than others.[22]
The second problem is more fundamental: although deemed intuitive and self-evident, one simply cannot define the elements. For instance, in their introduction to Elemental Ecocriticism, Cohen and Duckert write that ‘elements are never easy’ (p. 7) and partially ascribe this complexity to Empedocles’ dynamics of love and strife—the idea that the elements resist definition because in all their manifestations, and every time in different ways, they are always in the process of transformation.[23] Also Timothy Morton, in the same volume, describes the elements as a ‘weird’ realm, twisting like a slippery Möbius strip: for Morton, ‘an element is a -ness, a quality’ (i.e., rather than a substance) which does not let itself be resolutely identified.[24] Others even explicitly argue that the elements should not be defined—perhaps no one voices this as explicitly as Nicole Starosielski, who suggests that ‘it is critical to remember that the elements are neither essential nor foundational’.[25] On this take, at best the elements are conceived as encompassing, all-inclusive, and universal; at worst, they are simply left undefined.
Accordingly, elemental thinkers suggest substituting the despised dichotomy of “Nature” (as something outside the human) with the complexity of the elements, for as matter, as idea, and as concept they offer a more dynamic characterisation of the flux-like material-conceptual foundations of our world. Yet, what is gained from replacing “Nature” with the elements comes at a cost: the “intuitive” notion of the elements risks gradually losing its distinctive clarity. In avoiding the reductionist fallacy of essentialisingelemental matter, it seems to me that a progressively widening range of meanings results in an open-ended ontology. If anythingqualifies as an element, and if it is fundamentally impossible to define what makes the elemental “elementary”, does this then not yield to an imprecise catch-all term—and, perhaps, even risk jeopardising the seemingly self-evident framework altogether?
(iii) A Leap of Imagination
I concur that there is little gained by narrowly defining the elements. Therefore, to avoid “fixing” the elemental in neat, narrow definitions, I would like to speculate, by way of a conclusion, on some of the ways and modes in which the concept could be recast.
Earlier, I said that the elemental paradox is animated by a tension between the abstract, noumenal layer and the concrete, phenomenal experience: i.e., abstract nature in concrete form, with the link between the two realms remaining unresolved. At this point it might be fruitful to think of elements as concrete metaphors.[26] On the one hand, this describes a process, since much of our conceptual thinking, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson point out, is inherently metaphorical: it always captures one aspect of a thing in terms of another.[27] For Lakoff and Johnson, conceptual metaphors are among ‘our most important tools for trying to comprehend partially what cannot be comprehended totally’ (p.193). This process captures well what I have described above as the tension that propels the elemental paradox: it suggests a dynamic “leap of imagination” between the noumenal and the phenomenal realm, or the abstract and the concrete, that transfers concepts and ideas in elemental matter. On the other hand, elements are always concrete things: the imagination is grounded in material things. Hence why I insist on adding “concrete” to Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor.
Secondly, this dynamic relation can be further developed, I suggest, by adopting a shift in register: from “elements” to “elemental”. Such a seemingly small move is important, as it resolves some of the most urgent issues of definition. For instance, this open category avoids ontologically prioritising any cosmological framework. This is critical, for the European model of four elements (i.e., earth, water, fire, and air) is, inadvertently, still taken as the universal metaphysical standard in much of humanities scholarship.[28] Additionally, a turn from elements to the elemental simultaneously releases us from the problematic conundrum of “counting” the elements (four? five? three?) while, in principle, also creating room for various material ontologies. As such, “the elemental” enables comparative or cross-cultural critiques without requiring one to develop an overarching elemental ontology.
Furthermore, adopting such a shift brings with it a subtle but important philosophical change: from noun to adjective. That is, it steers away from the idea of elements as quasi-Aristotelean substances (i.e., as well-defined but “essential” objects) and, instead, refers to relational properties. In principle, this too helps further accommodate a global variety of ontological models; but, more importantly for critical posthumanism, as a relational term it insists on re-thinking the human from the limits—at the threshold—mediating between the nonhuman and the human.[29] This could be thought of as what Macaulay (Elemental Philosophy, pp. 324-5) describes as a phenomenological shift to the ‘aesthetic and affective details’, hence as concerned with a sensitivity to the experienceof the elemental appearance and form. It’s worth noting that I take aesthetics here as part of a political ordering—i.e., comprising a particular regime of distributing the sensible world.[30] Through its concrete metaphors, the elements enable a re-thinking of precisely this ontological threshold: the elemental paradox embodies the very edge where human and nonhuman matter entwine.
[1] See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Revised Ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 219-224: p. 219. In the remainder of this text, I will capitalise and provide scare quotes to “Nature”.
[2] See Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993).
[3] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, in “Introduction: Eleven Principles of the Elements”, Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire, eds. Cohen and Duckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), pp. 1-26: p. 13.
[4] For instance, how in Ancient Mediterranean philosophy since Thales, the world is constructed out of a single element. For an overview, see David Macauley, Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire and Water as Elemental Ideas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).
[5] Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, and Jonathan Simon, “Atoms or Elements”, in Chemistry: The Impure Science. 2nd edn (London: Imperial College Press, 2012), pp.155-73: p. 160.
[6] Eric R. Scerri proposes this distinction in: “The Many Questions Raised by the Dual Concept of ‘Element’”, in What Is a Chemical Element? A Collection of Essays by Chemists, Philosophers, Historians, and Educators, ed. by Eric R. Scerri and Elena Ghibaudi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 5-31.
[7] Matter, ideas, and concepts are merely indicating the spectrum for analytic purposes; as I argue below, my intention is not to prescribe a strictly normative definition of these.
[8] David Macauley, “The Place of the Elements and the Elements of Place: Aristotelian Contributions to Environmental Thought”, in: Ethics, Place & Environment, 9 (2006), 187-206: p. 189.
[9] See Sasha Engelmann and Derek P. McCormack, “Elemental Worlds: Specificities, Exposures, Alchemies”, Progress in Human Geography, 45 (2021), 1419-39: p. 1419, https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132520987301.
[10] See respectively, Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper One, [1980] 2020); Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, Revised and updated edition, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003). See also Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature (Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
[11] I pick up the idea of post-natural environmental philosophy from Steven Vogel’s lucid Thinking Like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature (Cambridge, USA: MIT Press, 2015).
[12] Melody Jue, Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), p. 3.
[13] My wordplay is informed by phenomenological philosophy of e.g., Hannah Arendt, Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Levinas.
[14] Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), p. 77.
[15] Cf. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, with Selections from the Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. by Gary Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1997] 2004), §30. For my subsequent contrast between concepts and intuition, cf. ibid., pp. 161ff.
[16] Gaston Bachelard struggled with this issue in the early 1930s, before he developed his renowned poetics of material imagination (between 1938-61); he resolved this by turning to set theory—i.e., the mathematical construction of reality. See “Noumena and Astrophysics”, in: Angelaki, 10 [1931-2] (2005), 73-78, https://doi.org/10.1080/09697250500417225.
[17] See “Paradox”, in Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paradox.
[18] Macauley gives a good overview of these in Elemental Philosophy; while focused on Western metaphysics, he also insightfully discusses other models (pp. 74-81).
[19] This broader approach is exemplified by the ‘Elements’-series of Duke University Press (2018-), edited by Stacy Alaimo and Nicole Starosielski. The most sustained attempt at defining the elements in this series is Reactivating the Elements: Chemistry, Ecology, Practice, eds. Dimitris Papadopoulos, María Puig de la Bellacasa, and Natasha Myers (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021); on petroculture in this series, see Cara New Daggett, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); see also Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Country (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[20] Leading scholar here is John Durham Peters, The Marvellous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 2015). For a critical appraisal of this latter approach, see Ludo de Roo, “Mediating the Elemental: An Immaterialist Ethics for Ecomaterialist Media Theory”, in: New Review of Film and Television Studies, 22 (2024), 608-28, https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2024.2342212.
[21] An even more encompassing approach is taken by the Cambridge University Press’ ‘Elements’-series, which publishes short volumes in about every academic discipline, with most topics outside critical posthumanism and the environmental humanities.
[22] That is, there seems to be some broadly shared foundational quality between these various elements, but it would be difficult to define this aspect. For example, since some are not even material, one cannot define the elements as foundational substances.
[23] This idea fits with the correlational model of Ancient Chinese philosophy, where each of the five agents is a “phase” transitioning from one to the next: i.e., there is no “essential” foundation. Cf. Richard J. Smith, Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing (I Ching, or Classics of Changes) and Its Evolution in China (Charlottesville: University of Virginnia Press, 2008).
[24] Timothy Morton, ‘Elementality’, in Elemental Ecocriticism, ed. by Cohen and Duckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), pp. 271-85; p. 279, p. 271.
[25] Starosielski, “The Elements of Media Studies”, in: Media+Environment, 1 (2019),https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.10780, n.p.
[26] There is much overlap here with Cohen and Duckert’s notion of ‘matterphor’, by which they describe elements as ‘metaphor magnets’ (pp. 10-1) in the way elements mingle word and worlds, matter and narrative. Unfortunately, I afford insufficient space to do justice to these ideas.
[27] Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: The University of Chicago University Press, [1980] 2003), p. 5. Also consider the etymology of the word, with Medieval French deriving “metaphor” from the Ancient Greek meta- + pherein, meaning “to transfer”; hence metaphors “carry over” from one domain to another. Cf. “Metaphor”, in Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/metaphor.
[28] Compare, besides e.g., Bachelard and Macauley, authors as diverse as: Gary Genosko, “Four Elements”, in: Posthuman Glossary, ed. by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), pp. 167-9; Michel Serres, Biogea (Minneapolis: Univocal, [2010] 2012); and Gernot Böhme & Hartmut Böhme, Feuer, Wasser, Erde, Luft: Ein Kulturgeschichte Der Elemente (München: Beck, 1996).
[29] Besides the other elemental examples discussed here, research in anthropology and geology comes to mind; e.g. Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); and Kathryn Yusoff, “Geologic Subjects: Nonhuman Origins, Geomorphic Aesthetics and the Art of Becoming Inhuman”, in: Cultural Geographies, 23 (2015), 383-407, https://doi:10.1177/1474474014545301.
[30] For the political idea of aesthetic order, see Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. by Steve Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010).