Preface: The Impossible Interior
In this issue, Limn tells climate stories from the inside out.
We’ve become accustomed to telling stories about the climate from the outside.
Glaciers melt, oceans acidify, sea levels rise, systems fail, and peasants become refugees. These are the predictable figures of climate change—a shorthand through which we make sense of a shared experience of threat and loss. We also think about climate solutions from the exterior. Mitigating emissions, climate-proofing crops, erecting solar panels and windmills.
But what happens when we shift our perspective? What if we think of climate change from inside cells, bodies, buildings, and systems?
This issue of Limn takes the interior as a counterintuitive starting point for thinking about planetary change. Our proposition: Thinking from the interior fundamentally shifts how we understand our warming world and, crucially, the stories we tell about it.
The house is perhaps the paradigmatic interior. Feminist scholars have long pointed out that the home mediates between the interior and exterior. Work inside the household props up all the economic and political activity that goes on outside. Extreme weather and shifting access to resources like drinking water have only made this situation more acute. This means that climate change exacerbates the class, caste, gender, and racial divisions of labor that have long been lodged in the home. For many, home is not a refuge from the ravages of climate crisis. Home is its front line.
What stories might we tell from other interiors? The mind, the body, the underground, the greenhouse, the warehouse, the refrigerator, and the football stadium all turn out to be apt lenses for unsettling our view of climate change. They might even change the way we imagine challenges, responses, and justice in its midst.
Over the long twentieth century, the modernist drive to create new kinds of interiors—from space suits to air-conditioned rooms to Biosphere 2—helped give shape to the very idea of a “climate.” Not yet three decades into the twenty-first century, novel interior designs—from underground carbon capture, to zero-carbon cities, to aquaponic greenhouses—are being positioned as tools for planetary survival. Consider the automobile, an interior that serves as a second home to many people around the world. That interior is being rethought amid the shift from internal combustion engines to high-capacity batteries built with rare earth elements. Troublingly, the replacement of gas-guzzlers with battery-powered vehicles seems to require a return to many of the same interior projects that fueled capitalist expansion and environmental crisis—the mine, the aquifer, the landfill. As always, new interiors are formed in relation to the exterior. Interiors, then, are never discrete or isolated. They are always nested, scaled, in dialogue with one another.
Interiors are good to think with, but they are also good to think from. A view of the Anthropocene from inside buildings, technical systems, homes, organisms, and body-minds can challenge the norms of community and immunity, expansion and defense, that have guided projects of capitalist accumulation, empire-making, healing, and, indeed, ecology itself. But we also see the interior as a platform for designing climate futures—as much a container as a space of imaginative and critical possibility.
How then to understand the relationship between climate and interior space? The contributors to Limn 12 explore a range of different interiors. However, read together, some core principles emerge:
1. Porosity is both a feature and a bug
of the interior.
Envelopes, bubbles, thresholds, membranes, filters. Across this issue, the terms authors and their interlocutors use to name the separation of inside from outside all have in common a sense of fragility and ephemerality. For the scientist seeking to model climate change, the inability to make a model discrete becomes a challenge both of materials and social relations. The model cannot keep reality from intervening in it. But porosity can also be constructive. Consider the brick. Its solidity connotes permanence, yet as hard as the brick might seem, it is a malleable form—one that might engender new ways of imagining the inside and outside. Broadening our frame of reference, we might then think of aquifers. Aquifers are where water is stored inside the Earth, yet they only exist thanks to the permeability of soils and bedrock.
2. The work of the interior is one of conditioning.
In one sense, conditioning means regulating what goes inside and what gets cast outside. High-efficiency air conditioners contain compressors that automatically adjust their intensity based on indoor conditions, condensing warm air and sending it back as cool air. Cheaper, old-school compressors just run full blast until they hit the thermostat’s target, then shut off. This is why they emit so much heat into the exterior. These technologies condition the relationship between inside and outside. But conditioning also means setting the terms by which the interior is defined. Such terms may be aesthetic; they are also often biophysical. When employers refuse to take up the costs of conditioning industrial spaces, workers’ bodies must adapt—or else.
3. Interiors are spaces of both
knowledge-making and occlusion.
Many of the interiors featured in this issue are models for a larger exterior world. This means that thinking of the climate through the interior translates the goings on inside to those outside, with all the potential pitfalls of oversimplification that entails. Is the anxiety you’re feeling a result of climate change, or is that anxiety climate change itself? Can the ecology of the deep ocean be replicated inside a plastic bag hung from the side of a dock? Axiomatically, interiors are about sealing people and things off from the outside, but interiorization is never just about protection. Interiorization hides enduring systems of patriarchy and segregation.
When we turn our attention to the interior, the familiar ways of knowing and interacting with the climate—mitigating, adapting, even observing—start to lose their purchase. The interior is where secrets are buried, where waste is trapped, where suffering is hidden away, where knowledge is both power and threat. Attention to interiors shows us that despite the temptation in social science to identify singular causal drivers for social suffering, or for social action, those drivers (heat, pharmaceuticals, mold, mosquitoes) never work alone. Interiors are not so much containers as they are points of dense convergence—never stable, always leaky. Approaching climate interiors by considering their porosity, their conditioning, and their affordances and occlusions opens new spaces of possibility.
So, we invite you to step inside Limn 12—but don’t get too comfortable. These interiors are full of surprises. ⦿