Media Hot and Cold. By Nicole Starosielski

Abstract

To walk into the world of Nicole Starosielski’s Media Hot and Cold is to see familiar shapes with new intensities. From the opening pages, as Starosielski recounts dictating the book in furtive moments on her smartphone as she built a farm, noticing all around her how the environment swayed to temperature, the reader has the sense of being initiated into an experience that the author continues to undergo. Issues of heat and cold appear unbounded, and Starosielski sets the stakes high from the outset: “The most influential messages of the twenty-first century will be sent not through words and images but through heat and cold” (1). Contestations over temperature, coalescing into broad social configurations of thermopolitics and thermopower, will define global geopolitical orders for the coming centuries. Their effects will reach down to the daily lives of all the world’s inhabitants, though unevenly and unequally. Some are already well-known: the slow and uneven violence of climate change; the routine social discipline of temperature scans at airports, schools, and doctors’ offices; and the increasing use of smart thermostats. Some are more covert. Starosielski first and foremost works against the concealments of the nearly unquestioned faith in thermal objectivity, or the notion that temperature is an impartial measure. Temperature is cultural and political, less a standard than a means of standardizing: devices and technologies, to be sure, but also human bodies, as in medical practice. To trace the cultural dimensions of temperature, Starosielski combines a book-level metallurgical approach, which brings together disparate cases from the already excavated historical record into new composites, with a chapter-level genealogical approach to a series of thermal media. The first three chapters focus on specific thermal techniques—the thermostat, which became a site of negotiation over standard temperatures; coldsploitation, which sold the pleasures of feeling cold; and the violent slave-era and post-slavery practice of sweatboxing, in which bodies were subjected to inhuman temperatures with their murders ascribed to “natural causes” (119). While the first half of the book takes a media-theoretical approach to thermal practices, the second half concerns more commonly understood media, such as the heat ray as a form of communications transmission, the infrared camera as a means of subvisual imaging, and the internet as subtended by massive infrastructures of cooling. Established across the chapters is a formal theory of thermal media. Convective media, such as air and water employed in home heating systems, supplant the central role of the wood furnace and are the subject of the book’s opening chapter. Conductive media, involving the direct contact of bodies to thermal sensations or devices to signals of heat, have been revived in recent years for personal comfort devices. Radiant media, lastly, work with electromagnetic waves, such as shortwave radio or infrared radiation, to generate or intensify heat. This last form opens up to one of the book’s most memorable lines about temperature and living bodies: “We are all radiant; we radiate” (139). And indeed, the book itself radiates, with human warmth and scholarly insight.