The First Page: And Salt the Earth Behind

THE FIRST PAGE

And Salt the Earth Behind: Designerly Violence & the Eugenic Archive

by Soul Miles

13 October 2025

The First Page presents the first page of books that are launched as part of the IAS Book Launch Programme. On 16 October 2025, Soul Miles will present his book And Salt the Earth Behind, in which he critically looks at Eugenics as a ‘design project’ and attempts to offer defensible positions from which we can identify Eugenics in its contemporary guises and disguises and from there, dismantle the grotesque logics at play.

Humanity Becomes a Project
It starts with an evolution that prefigured life itself, evolution that could be said (I’m saying it) to have started greyly, bluntly and as chemistry, not biology, not yet. Beginning nonspecifically. A picture which dissolves in close quarters but realises itself at scale. That bedrock evolutionary logic of gently cohering,
of organising oneself in a fire which refines; in time gives way, indulges itself in the consequence of Darwin, who said ‘looky here’. The natural underside to his observation of evolution by natural selection was the possibility of an artificial selection. The same mechanisms as before but deployed in reverse, which is to say, forwards, with a design in mind. This adhered to acidic and belligerent views of what was an ideal ideal to root and route for; a typically white, cis, able-bodied, wealthy man of some sort of Nordic extraction; and twenty four years after the event of ‘On the Origin of Species‘ Darwins second cousin (a lot is made of this detail) who was also a scientist, one Francis Galton, in an obscure footnote in an 1883 paper coined the term ‘Eugenics‘ to describe this project. Galton’s picture of an underside, his variant, eugenics, came to be perhaps equally defining of the age to come as Darwins idea which it references and perverts.

And so to chart a useful conceit, a tall tale of f@#k how did we get here? f!%k what’s going on? If we were to start, as well might be, by picking a most basic logic, that which from the primordial souply beginning prefigures, envelopes, scaffolds, implies, necessitates all next steps – a good shout might be: evolution. As the playhead marches relentlessly to the right, that which survives, survives. It does.

And Salt the Earth Behind: Designerly Violence & the Eugenic Archive was published in January 2025 by the UCL Prejudice in Power Programme.

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SOUL MILES is Creative Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies and the School for the Creative and Cultural Industries at University College London. He is a writer and designer. His work investigates the inevitable politics of technology and the evitable technologies of politics.

On 16 October 2025 Soul Miles will launch his book And Salt the Earth Behind at the Institute of Advanced Studies. More information.

Lead Image (detail) by Amy Rollo via Unsplash