Volumetric Mediation of the Subterranean Mine: Geologic Intimacy in a Taiwan Coal Village

Abstract

This article intersects human geography with media studies to offer a materialist account of the subterranean coal mine. I draw on geographers’ recent turn to volume to reimagine the mine as a volatile space filled with lithic masses, lethal gases, and airborne dusts. I then illustrate that volumetric thinking stands to benefit from media studies, whose sensitivity to the process of mediation unmoors volume from its anchoring in space, and turns it into volumization, a concept that underscores the temporal dimension of volumetric changes including saturation, permeation, and infiltration. Volumization finds instantiation in the subterranean mine, where heat and humidity saturate miners’ bodies while pernicious gases spread imperceptibly; in miners’ lungs, where silica dust accumulates, eventually failing miners’ breathing mechanism; and in the movie theater, where miners’ arduous breaths are technologically channeled as audio volumes resonating in the theatrical space. This last aspect affirms the power of media technology to transmit volume as a shared sensory experience specific to extractive modernity. Mobilizing a variety of materials including film and photography, media theory and feminist geophilosophy, as well as ethnography and oral history with miners in a historical coal town in Taiwan, I conceptualize the mine as a space of volumetric mediation that foregrounds the transcorporeal intimacy between miners and the mine.