New
Materialism

The Metal Ages have never ended, late modernity is just another stratum in the continuum of humans' entwinement with copper, bronze, iron and other metallic earths. A computer chip contains more than 60 elements, out of 83 stable (nonradioactive) elements (Rohrig, 2015). Most of them are irreplaceable, at least on our planet (Graedel et al., 2013). Elements forged through nuclear reactions of stars and supernovae, millions of years of interplanetary "nonlinear history" (De Landa, 1997), gathered through mineralisations, are compressed into chips that run calculations in nanoseconds. And not only societies, for human bodies to begin with are "walking, talking minerals" (Margulis & Sagan, in Bennett, 2010, p. 11). As a species-being, humans, but also animals and vegetals are entangled with "metallic lives" (Bennett, 2010, p. 52-61). Yet, in the current technocapitalist socius, the dynamics of these intimate dependencies are at present comprehensively black-boxed, offshored, outsourced; and contribute to severe 'forcings' upon the earth.

The immense processing power of the Technosphere (Haff, 2014) is grounded in tentacular regimes of supply chains that root into what Jason Moore has called "Cheap Natures" (2015), embracing the planet geographically as well as cutting into the deep past and future. A zig-zagging yet continuous line runs from mines to electronic waste, enormous piles are fed by orders of magnitude in dumpsites, unevenly distributed, with peaks in Africa and China [1]. Exploration is under way in the North and in the South, in a quest to offset the declining ore grades, the focus shifts onto 'urban mining' as well to recircuit vast amounts of ICT devices which are "left to gather dust in the drawers" (Nichols, 2015). Mineral mining that underpins ICT is an elephant in almost every room, the result of trans-species intersectional pressures upon environmental and social ecologies. Wars are led for critical metals (one of most dramatic examples are the so-called 'coltan wars' in the Congo), tailing ponds of mineral mines spill out into surrounding waterways (among many, a disastrous spill into the surrounding lakes from zinc mine tailings in Talvivaara, Finland in 2012-3 and a massive chemical spill from a copper mine in Mexico, 2014), children are enslaved and exploited (World Vision, 2013), and, finally, electronic and electrical waste is dumped in China, Africa, Chile, and elsewhere. If we extend the notion of 'conflict' beyond war to include other forms of violence, the question arises whether there is such a thing as a 'conflict-free mineral' and, by extension, a piece of Information & Communication Technology at all? Naomi Klein's formula "keep it in the ground" (2014) thus extends to many more bodies beyond oil and shale gas. Speed of digital technology is in unfortunate ways correlated to the extent and profundity of "slow violence" (Nixon, 2013).

Through and beyond the materiality of minerals, the workings of ICT companies are also discursively correlated to the mining industry. For example, the 'mining' of data, or rather how we are mined for data. Beyond semiotic correspondence, mining data is a linear extension or transposition of a logic that begins with the digging of the earths. On the human end, internet users' activity is a resource, to be extracted, smelted (into datasets), sold, moulded into services, and resold to the same or different users. Contrary to the limits of resource ecologies, one of the reasons for the immense financial success of IT has been an ideology that there are no boundaries to data growth. "Users will share more and more", thus goes 'Zuckerberg's Law' (Hansell, 2008). There is no material nor semiotic discontinuum between data and mineral mining, they are part of a unique extractivist mind-set, akin to what Brett Bloom calls "petro-subjectivity" (2015). Extraction is hard-wired into the most mundane daily intra-actions with ICT devices and beyond. To further trouble who/what is the subject of mining, recent developments in bio-mining mobilise microbes, that is, life, in the process (Labban, 2014). We might ask, if metallic capacities or affects have inspired and fuelled operations of capitalist/imperialist appropriation by extraction, are there alternative modes to entangle with metallic earths, and, more broadly, with nonlife, outside of the apparatuses of extraction and accumulation?

A becoming of minoritarian metallic ecologies requires deep re(con)figurations of material-discursive relationalities among humans and earths. Alternate perspective to capitalist desires might be provided by metallic animacy, which, in environmental humanities, posits recognising "geologic life" (Yusoff, 2013). In Jane Bennett's vitalism, rocks are "vibrant," endowed with "thing-power" (2010). New materialist and geological turns should be able to explore the minor genealogies of metallic affects through the strata of power-knowledge. Even in European history, stories and philosophies that spoke of liveliness of lithic bodies were widespread across the continent until well into the 16th and 17th century, until early modernity and the advent of the Scientific Revolution (see, Cohen, 2015). These knowledges were persecuted by various disciplinary techniques,including an outright extermination of 'witches', until a mechanistic view of natural realityfinally prevailed (see, Merchant 1980; Federici, 2004). But, the question of nonlife was not finally settled, it runs throughout modernity, as we can observe in the lively disputes around the animacy of liquid crystals (Leslie, 2016). At the current moment the problem of mineral as nonlife reaches a novel intensity. Once again, or before, the problematic surrounding the animacy of earth is closely implicated in survival of entire communities, as we see, for example, in the struggles of Aborigines against settler colonial/extractivist "geontopower" (Povinelli, 2016), and the water and land ontologies of the First Nations agentialised by Standing Rock in North Dakota and the Coast Protectors in British Columbia. With Povinelli, the apparatuses of modernity have been based on Life vs. Death opposition, but what we are witnessing now, in the latter stages of neoliberal capitalism, is the struggle between Life and Nonlife (2016, p. 19). Learning from these histories of oppression and appropriation, extending agency to other-than-humans is a dangerous venturing into the territories where empire and capital reign. Metallic ontologies still belong to subjugated knowledges.

Metal flows and mineral becomings traverse the binary Life/Nonlife, and queer-feminist new materialism dedicated to envisioning climate and multispecies social justice needs to be response-able to these animacies beyond the paradigm of extraction. J.J. Cohen claims that stone induces "queer wonder", activating lines of desire that cross life and its supposed other, and in this Cohen sees a potential for ethico-political "inhuman collaborations", "promiscuously desiring alliance with rocks, texts, forces of nature as with humans living and dead" (2013, p. 154). These ecocritical, as well as creative, practices can be seen as ways of making kin with the inorganic (Bakke, 2017). In a naturalcultural continuum, forging inhuman collaborations would mean re-joining biological and social with the processes of what Robert M. Hazen and his team called "mineral evolution" (Hazen et al., 2008). According to their proposition for an alternative mineralogy, about two thirds of mineral diversity on the planet has come into being directly or indirectly related to biotic processes (ibid.). Life and nonlife have been entangled since the Eoarchean Era (~3.85-3.6 billion years ago) (ibid.).

Metals are endowed with conductivities, mobilities, ductilities that human bodies and minds cannot easily comprehend. Yet, they are present throughout us. If we were to follow Spinoza regarding metals and humans, wemight say we have things in common, and, from there,forming 'common notions', agreeable alliances of these heterogeneous bodies is possible. One of the ways to venture towards a specifically metallic onto-epistemology as well as ethico-polytics is through vegetal and microbial beings. Plants and microbes are deeply involved in transformations of metal from nonlife into life, they have partaken closely in 'mineral evolution', a still ongoing process. In relation to the entanglements of the biosphere, the animal too, has, and always has been a profoundly "geologic subject" (Yusoff, 2014), not a protagonist but a companion and collaborator. Metals are transcorporeal cyborgs that bridge and entangle – materially-discursively – life and nonlife in a shared history and contested present. Metallic common notions however hold possibilities of an open future in un/common. "The earth is transitioning" (Preciado, 2018), so too must geologic subjects.

Notes
1. According to United Nations Environment Programme, the Waste Electric or Electronic Equipment (WEEE) or simply 'e-waste' is the fastest growing material stream of waste on the planet. A 2015 report from the UN University estimates that about 90% of the global e-waste is illegally traded or dumped on the world level (Nichols, 2015). In 2014, 42 million tonnes of e-waste was produced (ibid.).

Images
Fig. 1. mineralizacija, mirko nikolić, Aleksandra Mitovski, Duško Jelen, Marika Troili, Tuomas Laitinen, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Fig. 2. mineralizacija, mirko nikolić, Aleksandra Mitovski, Duško Jelen, Marika Troili, Tuomas Laitinen, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Fig. 3. Bor, Serbia. mirko nikolić, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Fig. 4. mineralizacija, mirko nikolić, Aleksandra Mitovski, Duško Jelen, Marika Troili, Tuomas Laitinen, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Fig. 5. Rudna Glava, Serbia. mirko nikolić, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Synonyms: earth, Gaia, conductor, Technosphere, resistor, capacitor, wire, connector, molecular nomadism, life-nonlife symbiogenesis
Antonyms: life–nonlife, extraction, data mining, capitalism, imperialism, circuit

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