Abstract

A general tension between solid and fluid states persists in the western imagination, which tends to divide the sciences and the humanities, along the lines that define what is hard and soft in knowledge. This divide relates to a number of other similar dichotomies, including those between exteriority and interiority, material and spiritual, homogeneity and heterogeneity, as well as that between matter and form, all of which have been partially mapped on a traditional separation between earth and sky in western thinking. Yet, particular forms of knowledge sit uneasily within the tensions between solids and fluids. A paradigmatic example is an understanding of solids – in the field known as fluid dynamics – as ‘highly viscous fluids’. In such view, solids and fluids are not opposites but moments in a continuum, with the result that all of matter can be classified as viscous. Yet, viscosity is also an essential property of life that allows organisms to mingle and carry on together. Indeed, in a world where solid and fluids states remain fixed in time and space life could not exist. This article explores the viscosity to suggest life remains possible only in so far as matter that is simultaneously solid and fluid allows it to mingle.