ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the ways that Smithson's art attunes the spectator to the flows of earthly matter to reimagine the human as a geological subject. In this chapter, Smithson's artistic meditations on and mediations of the deep geological past and future will be understood as an antecedent to Quentin Meillassoux's speculative realist theory of the arche-fossil. The provocation of the arche-fossil is that it posits a speculative reality that is utterly anterior or ulterior to the existence of human thought, and thus raises the unthinkable idea of a universe without us. The chapter thus reimagines the elemental mediums of Smithson's Spiral Jetty as arche-fossils that become catalysts for cosmic speculations on the cycles of evolutionary formation and entropic dissolution. Drawing together the philosophy and fiction of Georges Bataille, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, J.G. Ballard and Jules Verne, this chapter explores how the entropic reverberations of Spiral Jetty reintegrate the human into the oceanic and magmatic flows of the earth, returning them to the quiescence of the inorganic.
