If ever there was something on the order of a universal thematic for linking disparate peoples, classes, genders, generations, etc., it would have to be the weather. Not for any deeply philosophical reason. No, simply because weather is the very stuff of small talk. It is the paradigmatic subject for idle chit-chat. How the weather has been, what the weather will do and how very inclement and perfectly sublime the weather now is, are all ideal subjects for light social dialogue. Striking up a conversation? Try the weather. At a loss for words or simply bored? Again, the weather. Bit of a stiff knee? Most certainly the weather.

In his Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues, Flaubert writes under the heading weather: 'Eternal topic of conversation. Universal cause of ailments. Always complain of the weather.' It seems what was true in the late 19th century is still true today. At an awkward moment in conversation, who among us has not greeted a turn to the weather like an old friend, and there in the midst of it - tension and anxiety dissipating - relaxed and breathed easy once again. If empty, superficial, and somewhat ignoble, the topic of weather seems to provide a locus of commonality between otherwise alien perspectives. Even if it only does forge the fiction of a social bond, the power of the weather to bridge the problem of difference seems undeniable. Via some undisclosed transition or turn, the weather normalises the most unlikely of relations.

Probing this phenomenon in a critical manner is obviously required. Take the chance encounter between a modern reader, say a surfer to really polarise matters, and the work of the Austrian novelist Robert Musil (1880–1947). The Man Without Qualities, a novel which would become his life's work and which begins with a rather anecdotal reference to the weather, provides an ideal arena for our confrontation. If weather really is the panacea for suturing the problem of difference, surely it can reconcile turn-of-the-century Vienna with the world of Huntington Beach, Upper Trestles, Rincon or the Ranch. The encounter between Musil's disciplined and intellectual writing and the typically single-minded interests of a surfer, offers a way of opening up the weather from merely a locus for verbal interaction - temptingly explained away by any number of pseudo-scientific models for understanding modern anomie (sociology, psychology, etc.) - to the general problematics of interpretation or reading.

The well-known passage that opens Musil's The Man Without Qualities begins: 'A barometric low hung over the Atlantic. It moved eastward toward a high pressure over Russia without as yet showing any indication to bypass this high in a northerly direction. The isotheres and isotherms were functioning as they should.' For today's surfer reading Musil, a low pressure system hanging over the Atlantic and moving in an easterly direction can mean only one thing: big swell in the Bay of Biscay, that is, Hossegor tube-session, frosty barrels in Mundaca, and peeling lefts at Guéthary. In fact, with 'the isotheres and isotherms' all as per usual, we are talking about absolutely legendary conditions on the coast of Northern Spain and South West France. This is neither Wilhelm Von Humboldt's 'wildly turbulent' description of the Bay of Biscay, later championed by Adorno as an exemplary moment of natural beauty because of its faithfulness to historical naïveté, nor that peaceful sea in Kant's complementary description of the sublime: 'a mirror bounded only by the sky'. Rather, it is a cross between the two; a threateningly large, yet clean, glassy and well-spaced sea swell which any storm-tracking surfer with a computer can predict. With a strong high hovering over the continent, a low sitting off the Iberian peninsula, and warm off-shores streaming northward from the Sahara, point breaks from Bilbao to Anglet are pumping. In sum, Europe is going off.

Now, while Musil would have undoubtedly shared the general conviction that Europe was indeed 'going off, his own intentions behind beginning his book with the above passage did not include staging his novel as a surf safari to the Pays Basque. Buoy readings off the Bay of Biscay were not Musil's concern. But this is precisely the point about the weather - why the weather occupies such a prominent place for Musil; why Flaubert bothers to list it in his compendium of bourgeois clichés; or why indeed it serves as a topic for art whatsoever. Like any two strangers forced into a prolonged and uncomfortable proximity, if anything can precipitate relations between Robert Musil and contemporary surfers like 'Ratboy' or Shaun Riley, it is the weather. Antipodes are drawn with an almost gravitational attraction to the weather, precisely because it never fails to provide a shared and ready-made set of interests, understandings, or experiences. The thing is that any one dialogue on the weather is inherently fraught with competing forecasts or variable interpretations. The question of the weather galvanises communities out of the most disparate and irreconcilable terms while difference is stringently maintained. Musilean weather sets into relief a pattern of misunderstanding or misreading that, if limited and local in its forecast, is global in its reach and ramifications.

For Musil the weather is a trope. It does not stand for a shared set of interests, understandings, or experiences, precisely because as a trope it enacts (or is the condition of the possibility of) these categories. With its special connection to the cliche, the trope enjoys a very uncertain, indeed positively cloudy, social existence - the weather can mean one thing for a surfer and quite another for a déclassé intellectual. Nevertheless, misreading the opening of The Man Without Qualities through the optic of a surfer, if not strictly predicted by Musil, is in some general sense accommodated by a structure of expectation that depends on the trope to produce a spectrum of refracted readings. His employment of the trope thrives on and is intended to provoke all manner of mystification and confusion due to framing. In other words, Musil stages his novel as an entirely common meteorological occurrence in order to ensure the systematic misreading of it. But this is not all. Any project founded as such is in the end no different from the host of clichés upon which it is based. Adorno describes this predicament as a 'montage effect' with the irrationalism of common sense left intact. What is crucial to realise is that the trope is plumbed for its special relation to historical process. It is pampered as the moment that figurative language continually represses; the moment when history places limits on what is assumed to be symbolic diction. This unique status afforded the weather achieves two things. First, as I have mentioned, it provides a fertile ground for misreading: the problem of the trope implicates larger problems of interpretation. Tropes like the weather possess an abstract potential for continually contemporising their condition. Second, and more importantly especially in the wake of the interpretative free-for-all apparently advocated above, it throws the ready-made cliché into a historical light. In other words, the surface of things (weather maps included) are openly admitted by the text itself to be untrustworthy.

Obviously enough the average reader, not to mention the modern surfer fitted out with all the latest storm-tracking technology, is in no way equipped to face the tricky and changeable nature of Musilean weather. Especially if it is made to accommodate a variety of weather-casters - Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, formalist, side-walk and water-sport enthusiasts included. How then does one deal with a text that predicts its own misreading, and furthermore prefigures this misreading by recourse to a trope like the weather? Simply put, we need a kind of criticism that is meteorologically aware. By this I do not mean a criticism which is diagnostic in character, one which reads a weather map for its glitches or turbulence. Rather, I am advocating a criticism that is immanent; one which recognises Muselian weather as a function of language. It is therefore attuned to the rhetoric of weather pictures and alert to the fact that conjuring meaning out of the latter involves a blinding action that is constitutive and performed entirely within the mind of the reader. We require a kind of criticism that is sensitive to the atmosphere produced by the weather and ever vigilant with regard to the fictions it in turn produces, as well as how these fictions reflect shifts in the barometric pressure of the current weather. In sum, we need a criticism which is not blind to the knowledge that the production of meaning is structured on a model of sublimation homologous to the evolution of clouds, themselves involved in a constant process of convection from low to high and vice-versa.

We do not have far to look for such a meteorological criticism. Both Walter Benjamin and Mikhail Bakhtin, to take only two examples from the early part of the 20th century, are meteorological critics of the first order. In the 1930s something in the air - undoubtedly a certain scepticism with regard to the false syntheses offered up by the world views of communism and capitalism - contrived to make both writers acutely aware of barometric shifts and their totalising effects on interpretation. Each developed a theory of language (representation, consciousness, etc.) which implicitly accepted the constitutive nature of the ideological. Ultimately, each understood that it was only through the mediation of history that language could assume the sublimated heights appropriate to the truth claims which it deceptively contends are its right. Insofar as a dyad such as the 'allowable' and the 'repressed' marked out discursive limits which were finally ideological, the place occupied by the 'allowable' was, as it were, that of a cloud form or figure rarefied and condensed out of the processes of history. One has only to peruse Benjamin's monumental history of 19th-century Paris, The Arcades Project, to recognise the central role accorded the motif of weather and within this the special significance granted the cloud. In 'Convolute D' (Boredom, Eternal Return), fragment (D2a, 3), for instance, one is mildly taken aback by a puzzling entry reading only: 'On the double meaning of the term "temps" in French.' With his characteristic ease, Benjamin connects the question of weather to that of time. Condensing a host of ruminations within this one idea - the flâneur, boredom, the arcades as urban idyll during sudden weather, the lyric form in Baudelaire, 'eternal return', melancholy and the doctrine of the temperaments - he points to multiple, foreign, and only half-felt modalities that cloud this single declarative statement. This 'world of mist, a cloud world' hangs over each of Benjamin's entries, breathing life into a host of sources - stale clichés, academic notes, literary entries and hackneyed travel writing. Through its mist and against the backdrop of the figure one glimpses a kind of impossible temporal moment which goes to the very crux of our own interest in the weather: a notion of difference continually sheltered by the facade of false synthesis. The specifics of Bakhtin's case are, of course, very different. His focus on the form of the novel and the problem of literary genre sets him clearly apart from Benjamin's thematic and lyric interest in inclement weather. Nevertheless, one finds a similar interest in the ironic or multi-fold nature of the historical fact. There is, too, in Bakhtin's notion of the dialogic, in his concern with the 'total speech act' and in his arguments for the polyphonic novel an attempt to dismantle the problem of symbolic language and idealism more generally. Though he did not share in Benjamin's special interest in the word 'Wolke' or cloud, there is in Bakhtin's notion of the utterance a certain reliance on the same family of metaphors. For Bakhtin, the word itself hangs - between a symbolic 'high' and an allegorical 'low' - between the dream of language's utter transparency and the sobering reality of language as sign. T.J. Clark provides us with a list of Bakhtin's most concise statements on the problem of the word. 'Word is a two-sided act ... half someone else's ... a bridge thrown between myself and another ... overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist.' As with the most banal and empty chatter on the weather the word is always a 'sign of someone else's semantic position', and never 'without its intense sideward glance at someone else's word'. If there is any strategy for targeting Muselian weather in Bahktin and in Benjamin, it is ultimately to be a warning: forgetting that a cloud cannot be read is fatal.

Take the single voluminous cloud in Tiepolo's The Institution of the Rosary (1738-39), in Santa Maria dei Gesuati, Venice, Undoubtedly there are those who would maintain that the apparently modern set of problems plaguing the question of weather would be dispelled by the charms of this Baroque fresco: not so. Even Tiepolo's towering cumulus resists univocity by inviting a polyphonic forecast. Not only does it spell certain downpour, good sailing, and clear weather ahead, it also speaks to a sort of cloud that Michael Baxandall and Svetlana Alpers (meteorologists) call the 'striated and massive' type, a type not found in nature at all, but one that Tiepolo apparently developed by looking at the work of Paolo Veronese. It is somewhere between the seductiveness of Tiepolo's illusionistic scheme - one accommodating a very complex and variable multi-directional light source - and an insistence that the graceful, arabesque line of his ascending cloud form is as much the inheritance of a taste for nature in 'una maniera Paolesca' that the weather in 18th-century Venice might be glimpsed.

A similar tension between symbolic and allegorical modes is necessary for glimpsing movement in the apparently unrelated, though certainly Baroque, example of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc (1981). Dubbed 'the Berlin Wall' and 'the Iron Curtain' by its detractors 'who', as the leading spokesman put it, 'passionately sought the return of (New York's Federal Plaza) to its original space and openness and serenity' one would passionately like to believe that Serra's site-specific work had indeed scarred and divided a modern Arcadia. True to form, the image of happiness can only be glimpsed through its counterpart: here the aesthetic of administration. In a sense, Serra's monolithic sculpture (eventually destroyed in 1989), reworks the decorative line of the Baroque cloud in terms of a specifically modernist apotheosis. The forces of nature assume the cast of their very impersonal and bureaucratic frame. That most elemental constituent of the modernist office plaza, a steady whistling wind, is here frozen in the elongated rotor which is its habitual trace. In the historical guise of public sculpture, weather as trope - as graceful transition or turn - is translated into steel. In short, the lyrical aspect of Tilted Arc - something continually buried beneath the voluminous accounts of the legal wranglings over the sculpture's removal - must be conceived as always-already conflicted by that statist and bureaucratic record which is its site-specific history. Played by the wind, this 'solid flute' can only call modern herdsmen and women to a place where the open exchange of gifts and conversation in the mid-day sun is clouded, indeed, violently compromised.

Consider as well, Jeff Wall's A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai) (1993). In many ways it can be argued that Wall's work renews once again the trope of weather. Not of course to reduce the present weather to that of yesterday's, nor to equate it to some eternal, or trans-historical order, but to map the abstractness of weather patterns today. Thus, the modernity of A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai) lies in its reworking of an inherited set of visual conventions. By stringing representation between the 'real' and the allegorical, the abstractness of one particular modern moment is glimpsed. Built upon a surmise very much akin to 'the double meaning of the term temps in French', an instant of weather is unfolded in time. And what a complete wonder it is!

Certainly in Tiepolo and Serra there is an hyperbolic and overblown quality to the weather which both forefronts the natural experience and simultaneously resists this temptation by a retreat to the notion of the copy or referent. But here the miracle seems so much closer to hand. One man's body, eye, and leading arm whirling up and around, two others twisting to clutch caps, and another, only billowing drapery with desperate hands, all make it difficult not to be carried away. With the indexical grip of photography at a premium in this large back-lit transparency, it seems that only a wilful reference to the linguistic tradition can destabilise the empathic response to the image and its bodily gestures. In critical dialogue with the mimetic promise of realism, the glowing 'authenticity' of an apparently natural or unmediated experience of weather is necessarily confounded or rendered translucent by nothing less than hammering home the debt to Hokusai.

Confronted by these examples, the work of Olafur Eliasson seems to promise the impossible. In works such as Your natural denudation inverted (1999), Your sun machine (1997) and BeautyYour sun machine. The familiar phenomenon of the sun creeping across the floor is reworked for a preternatural effect. In a sense, a naturalised or normalised relation with the weather is de-natured through the mediation or framing of the gallery. 'Nature', to quote Benjamin, 'bears the imprint of history'; here the imprint of its negation - culture - constitutes or defines the beautiful. The very personal form of address in the work's title is, if anything, a pointed admittance of this. It is the confession of a certain labour or work achieved at the behest of the subject, by the sublime. What work the sublime is actually performing is the crux of the matter. Steven Knapp's reading of the dynamic sublime in Kant is helpful. He

(1996), there is such an overwhelming sense of closeness to the weather one cannot help but suppose that the actuality of weather - the raw terror of it - is finally graspable. If it were not for the incredibly saturated levels of subjective experience that deflect or refract the reading of his work, this danger might be true. In approaching any one of Eliasson's weather works, there is a kind of baffling sense that one is finally in the presence of the thing in itself, and that here again one is confronted by little more than artificial, staged thunder. Consider the wonderfully banal, yet somehow unnerving encounter with a. shaft of sun in

argues that the category underwrites identity by being party to a process that turns the fearful and threatening into the familiar or known. Through an anthropomorphising action we give a face to an otherwise ungraspable phenomenon, making or transforming an abstraction (too vast to conceptualise) into a type of figure - as the etymology of the word personification suggests. Thus in describing the dynamic sublime as a negative moment, Kant revealingly emphasises 'the fact that we must see ourselves safe in order to feel this soul-stirring delight'.

This attempt to experience the confrontation with awe or wonder through the fiction of 'see(ing) ourselves safe' should strike an immediately meteorological chord. In Kant's interest in dissimulation, or the concealment of one's true feeling of threat by that of safety, one should hear an echo of many of my previous remarks on the weather. Evidently, for those caught in the grip of Your sun machine - those contemplative viewers forced over time into avoiding its intense, blinding light by standing back, aside, or otherwise 'seeing (themselves) safe' from the creature which circles them - the transformative labour is in the inscription of a symbolic or nostalgic countenance to the physical phenomenon at hand. The flood of joy which may greet a shaft of sun, or the rush of memories this same tropological structure may conjure up of piano music in the winter garden over tea, are representative of the two poles of any such attempt at making meaning. However one might make sense of the experience, Your sun machine awakens something strange at the heart of our relation with the weather: salvaging a place in the world - or a position vis-à-vis the object - that should remind us that all is not 'true' and 'good' under the sun.

Your natural denudation inverted (1999) offers a more revealing example: the subjective nature of Eliasson's works is here played with a surer hand by forefronting a fictional notion of autobiography. The title, again addressing the viewer or reader, should warn us not to conceive of the work merely as a personification of the artist and his birthplace, Iceland. Undoubtedly, the geyser-like effect produced by an assortment of unconcealed pipes, scaffolding, wood and rubber can be read metonymically, and perhaps profitably, as either a naïve actualisation of the artist's homeland, or a sentimental evocation of rusticity and contact with nature (now) lost. But what really seems to be at stake in this, and Eliasson's other works, is the unearthing of a mimetic structure that has always been at the core of our relatedness to the weather. In a work like Your natural denudation inverted it seems clear that this chiasmic structure is a mirror of colonial or imperial desire. Hanging heavy with the nature of subjective experience this cloud is thick with the inheritance of the Northern Romantic tradition. So thick indeed that condensing humidity in the apparently cold, dry atmosphere cannot but be mistaken for the humidity or temperament of a body possessed of the humour melancholicus, the sublime temperament of Romantic genius. This temperate vision of a far-northerner provides a figure of nature for the inscription of a 'centred' subject. The fact that we are faced by an exaggerated instance of anthropomorphism confirms this as a negative moment or mirror of a more instrumental process. Here as elsewhere, the weather simply crops up as a convenient occasion for the self to hide from the violence involved in positing an ahistorical and natural identity.

All of these moments of inclemency - that of Eliasson's, Wall's, Serra's, Tiepolo's - are, in the final analysis, attributable to a kind of weather that is distinct from its form as both trope and figure. Reading the weather rhetorically as such, disallows a comforting understanding to take precedence, and offers a glimpse of that process of weathering which is history. The tension through which this process can be glimpsed must be continually tracked. As a figuration of the current weather, it incessantly naturalises and renders decorative all new experience on the horizon.

— Shepherd Steiner