Martin Siegler: The Porous Media of Nature
Friday | June 20, 2025 | 10:15-11:00
Lounge in the University Library, Steubenstraße 6, 99423 Weimar
Abstract:
Nature today is increasingly hollowed out by human and technical intervention: large-scale extraction reshapes landscapes, leaving behind abandoned mines, sinkholes, and landfills. Nature no longer appears as a “whole” but as riddled with holes, hollows, tunnels, and cavities. How can we think this “hole earth”? How can we inhabit a holey space? How can we learn to live with holes?
In my talk, I propose the concept of “porosity” for engaging with holey worlds. Porous bodies are always open to and permeated by their surroundings (Tuana 2008; Bennett 2020), resisting clear-cut separations between inside and outside, nature and culture, someting and nothing. From the perspective of porosity, holes are not mere voids or lacks in being, but rather pores as conditions of relationality and mediation. As such, Porosity offers a way of thinking nature beyond the ideal of wholeness, without collapsing into mere negativity.