All that's liquid

Writing histories of media always entails engaging with a theoretical and methodological question: how should we approach the relationship between the technological and the social? A long-standing debate on the issue has animated the field. Yet this debate has been enriched in recent years by the inclusion of a third pole: the natural, intended also and especially in its material and geological dimension. Ignited by studies in Science and Technology Studies that refuse rigid distinctions between the human and non-human, recent works have signalled a potentially paradigmatic shift in media studies, with Jussi Parikka proposing the study of a 'geology of media' and others, including John Durham Peters, calling for the examination of the ecological and elemental dimensions in historical and theoretical approaches to media and communications.¹

Esther Leslie's book contributes to this emerging niche of research, providing a timely examination of an element, liquid crystals, that relates at the same time to the technological, the scientific, the natural and, Leslie argues, the discursive and the imaginary level as well. The author aims to interrogate to what extent 'forms of physical matter play into the technologies of a particular time - which would include the modes of thinking' (p21). Liquid crystals have become ubiquitous in our societies, from digital watches to computer screens, laptops, and LCD televisions; but have they also become, Leslie asks, an inherent part of the ways in which technologies are thought, represented, and narrated in contemporary societies?

The key contribution of the book, in this regard, lies in how it enters in dialogue with the rich literature in media history that looks at the relationship between technology and the imaginary.² One of the strands of such literature is based on the concept of the 'technological sublime', proposed by Leo Marx in his The Machine in the Garden (1964) and further developed by authors such as David Nye and Vincent Mosco. Yet, while recent explorations of this idea tend to focus on the technological element, Leslie's work reminds us that the concept of the sublime in Kant is inseparable from the question of how human culture sees and imagines the natural realm. This element was present in Leo Marx's work, as he reflected on the awe and wonder inspired by the observation of technological infrastructures that dominate the natural (or we might say, following Leslie, the liquid), such as bridges and dams. Yet, it has become less crucial in recent examinations of the 'digital sublime', as Mosco called it, where the dimension of the natural is secondary if not completely absent. Leslie's observation that many advertising videos of LCD screens take up images of water and snow, whose rendering is facilitated by the technology, is in this sense quite compelling. Such a visual repertoire, she suggests, helps us realise that 'the digital mechanism has an affinity to the liquid and the crystalline' (p208).

Leslie employs a longue durée perspective, which moves from scientific research on liquid crystal in the nineteenth century to lead us on a journey that ends with the ubiquity of screens in our contemporary world. She posits the emergence of 'liquid thought' or 'crystal imagination', promising that this will allow us 'to think about a complex of matter, thought, society, in relation to the late Victorian social world, which is not so distinct from us' (p21). It is in the character of the journey, however, that the book reveals its more problematic and potentially contentious aspect. The story of how liquid crystals were discovered in the late nineteenth century and then applied to technical media in the last decades of the twentieth century mingles, in Leslie's narrative, with an examination of how the boundaries between liquid and solid, ice and water are thematised in art, philosophical thought, literature, and science. Leslie's inventiveness, the curiosity that leads her in transversal connections and detours, becomes however the book's weakness, as we find out that the journey we have embarked upon has become a rather erratic one...