Towards an Identity-Oriented Analysis of Weather.

Weather is power. 1 Indeed it is the ultimate power, because it is both legitimate and incontrovertible in the eyes of its subjects. In the submission articulated by the human animal's unquestioning orientation towards the atmospheric conditions that one sees, in undistilled form, the mechanisms involved in the authorization of authority and the consequent loss of self.2 To say one is "under the weather" reveals more about the human condition than one might imagine.

As is the case with submission to authority, humanity's interaction with the Weather, while alienating, also involves a degree of identity-grafting whereby aspects of individual subjectivity are objectified and transferred to the agent of power. Thus in extreme cold the activity of the subject-"freezing"-becomes a description of the weather itself. 3 This process, for which Pierce (1986) coined the problematic term "(me)teorology," is the central concern of this essay.