READING
WRITING
WATERS
Dissolving the anthropocene in expressive waters
Max Litjens
10524525
rMA Cultural Analysis Thesis
June 2020
Supervisor: Dr. Marija Cetinic
Second Reader: Dr. Niall Martin
On front page: Maartje Fliervoet. Waveness (scan of original by anonymous participant). 2019. 12,7 cm x 17,6 cm. Sloterplas water on fibre-based photo paper. Collection: de Appel archive.
CONTENTS
FLATNESS UNDERWHELMS 3.
A MATTER-FLOW (TO A PEOPLE TO COME) 11.
DISSOLVING A TERRESTRIAL BIAS 18.
SATURATING STAINS 23.
GATHERING THREADS 28.
A HYDRO-LOGIC 33.
PLANETARY FLOWS (AWAY FROM A LOCAL AND GLOBAL) 37.
WATERY TERRITORIES 41.
INDETERMINATE WATERS 47.
DEBAUCHING 51.
WORKS CITED 53.
FLATNESS UNDERWHELMS
, I realize while walking into the exhibition. Two sheets of photo-sensitive barite paper and a series of woven fabrics show colorful cartographies of two-dimensional aqueous shapes. The barite papers hanging on the wall, and the fabrics layered on a low table, display a dense stillness, impenetrable to the distanced eye. Cross-sections of long gone waters now form flat terrestrial landforms. The large windows encircling the staircase, which functions as exhibition space forWaveness (2019), bring in a natural light that blends with the pastel-watercolor palette of
the objects. But the space, which is part of arts center De Appel in Amsterdam, also has a kind of aridity to it; humid weather is held outside and sensations are entirely without the glistening, dripping or flowing one would expect from an exhibition that involves water. Pastel-dry is what the space feels like upon entering, with only the aqueous shapes hinting at some kind of watery presence.
Maartje Fliervoet. Waveness. De Appel. 2019. Dimensions variable. Prints on wool, jacquard wovens, platform, photogrammes, glass showcases, wooden cilinders. Photo: Mirjam Linschooten.
On the surface, there is little to be found. As I start to drift between the shapes and colors on the barite paper, they start to exhibit topographical features, resembling something like a height-map. More intensely colored purple shapes start to rise up while softer pink and lilac fields blend into a background. Lines become contour-lines and separate fields of color so that a landscape relief is mapped. Mapping practices are built on the premise that spatial information can be communicated. Traits are selected, characteristics are generalized and complexity is reduced in order to communicate information. Shapes, lines and colors serve as properties and measures that facilitate a landform interpretation produced in terms of an external frame of reference. And once literate in this syntax, a map starts to point to a reality outside. A terrestrial reality, that is, in which the mapped terrain remains more or less in place. Which makes the flux-like substance of water – its always flowing, saturating and gathering further – defying definitive mapping.
But the shapes and colors of Waveness are not a map, and so rely on a different reading practice. Some of the aqueous forms were produced by artist Maartje Fliervoet, who poured North Sea water over photosensitive barite paper. The paper, direct sunlight and water plus its components like sand, salt and micro-organisms it carried, started to interact and draw shapes and colors. Artistic intentions fade, as the artist was there just to set a matter-flow in motion. During 24H West, a neighborhood festival partly held in De Appel, communities from Amsterdam Nieuw-West participated in the same process of pouring, now with water from the Sloterplas. From all of these watery imprints, two made with North-sea water by Fliervoet and 4 made with Sloterplas water by participants, were scanned, digitally adjusted and woven into Jacquard fabrics. The Sloterplas and North Sea waters were thus provided a frame to flow through, allowing them to become expressive themselves. Although not in its liquid state, water is present through an expressiveness of its material traits produced by its material interaction set in motion by the artists. This
problematic of the presence of water is what wells up first from the exhibition space. If water, to us, is what it becomes through the many material and discursive ways it is expressed to us, then where do the waters of Waveness fit in?
In day to day life, water comes to us in manifold ways: in an intimacy as it enters, flows through and leaves our bodies on to water other bodies of water; in an appealing
opaqueness emanating from the hiding surfaces of ponds, rivers, and seas; in a scarcity when longed for summer rains stay out; or in a hostility when waters turn increasingly toxic or rise to threatening heights in times of ecological crisis. So waters figure worlds in a multiplicity of ways: rivers carve out their way in a landscape; water molecules transform organisms in
their interaction; and hydrological movements – precipitation, evapotranspiration and runoff – altering the atmosphere. And these qualities and movements carve out a space in the human imagination too. Gaston Bachelard finds in matter a poetic source that infuses the imagination. A material imagination that finds in water a “type of intimacy” that is very different from the kind suggested by the “depths” of rock (Water and Dreams 6). A being dedicated to water, we read in Bachelard, is a being in flux: She or “he dies every minute; something of his substance is constantly falling away” (ibid). Water, far from being an inert substance, let alone a mere resource or utility, is a dynamic entity that infuses ways of thinking and being. Our knowing the world is matter-mediated, Elemental Ecocriticism scholars Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert write, through a kind of “intimacy of substance, force, flesh, trope, plot, and weather” (Elemental Ecocriticism 11).
In this piece of writing, I propose to approach this “inherently creative, motile and experimental” material vibrancy as a kind of expressive force that is abroad in the world (ibid). With expression I do not mean the kind coming to us from communicational models that assume an interiority, conjuring up the image of self-governing, reflective individuals who can convey their inner thoughts at will to a public of likewise sovereign subjects. There is rather, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari suggest, a “self movement of expressive
qualities” (A Thousand Plateaus 317). Expression is a continual, tensile stretching, always on the move and engrossed in its own course. Although congealing into form, adopting forms as its temporary host, expression is always overspilling and furthering its forms. A theory of expression that takes to heart processes of formation rather than forms, the emerging instead of the emerged, thus includes a radical openness to conditions for new emergence. Struck by the force of expression (encountering a body of water or an artwork) leads to a modification, not an incarnation of an already formed system: expression’s immediate effect is a differing. 1
Like the above-mentioned presences, or forms of expressions of water, Waveness, too, brings into the world a specific figuration of water’s expressive force. All of these forms of expression contribute to what water does in the world, and so how it moves us. To speak from my own locality, what initially led me wanting to think with water was the questioning which role the Dutch waters have played in the production of my own sense of existing. Growing up and living for most of my life in the Netherlands, a country infamous for its proximity to water, one might expect that the centuries-long struggle to keep these low-lying lands safe from invading waters instills in ways of being particularly watery traits, whatever
For more detailed discussion on expression, see the introduction to Brian Massumi’s A Shock to Thought (2002).
these might be. But this was an impossible claim to make. Perhaps it was even the opposite that felt to be more accurate. As if the nationalistic and environmental narratives part of the Dutch struggle with water resulted in a working water out, towards a place where it could flow on the far side of dikes and dunes. Water was striated out of “our”, or “my” territory, so that a Dutch desert provided the grounds for existence to unfold upon. In other words, perhaps centuries of water management performed a limiting function on the lively expressivity of water?
Why Cohen and Duckert move towards to elements is because they, too, sense how its expressive force is subjugated to an active and recurring forgetting. Matter turned from a dynamic entity into an objectified resource reservoir that served commodity capitalism well, while leading to environmental degradation (5). In contemporary cultures, undergirded by logics of efficiency, profit and progress, water, too, is often deemed a passive “resource” subjugated to containment, commodification and instrumentalization. And when its lively flows are captured, when managed especially well, when not contested or when threats of rising and toxic waters sediment into stillness, water is often forgotten, as if not part of our terrestrial existence. Even when rising sea levels, plastic and acid oceans, toxic rivers, melting ice-caps, groundwater depletion, worsening weathering events, desertification remind us of the enormous role that water, in all its abundance, lack or composition, plays in the anthropocene drama. Moreover, such problems tied to water are repeatedly coming to us via news stories or scientific data in which water figures as an abstract substance detached from phenomenological experience. No matter how important, the scientific modeling and mediated stories do come at a price. Many have noted how the abstraction of climate change, the elements or water, brings the risk of relating to these phenomena as externalized facts (see Horn 2018, Linton 2010 or Neimanis and Walker 2014). By abstracting water to an externalized matters of fact (a temperature, acidity or plasticity), it is compelled to an existence in the background.
And in times that have been called the anthropocene, in which the geologic
dimension prevails, while “Humans” are promoted to the level of a geological force, it is this aqueous reality that tends to lose even more ground. Although the anthropocene thesis did lead to new and rich ways of thinking about the connection between modes of living and the material reality these are tied to (see Yusoff and Clark 2017 and Grosz 2012), it is this
geologic imaginary that installs a figuration of existence in times of ecological collapse in which the geologic cements the hydrologic. Such is an orientation towards the ground that Melody Jue calls a “terrestrial bias”. (Wild Blue Media 12) A figuration of reality, in other
words, through an environmental imagination that is situated terrestrially. And so, in times where water is an intense site and agent in shaping current and future planetary conditions, while the prevailing geologic anthropocene narrative tends to obscure or abstract these hydrological forces, I want to turn to the expressivity of waters as a way to find alternative modes of ecological engagements.
So one of the motifs that runs throughout this thesis is bringing an expressivity of water to the foreground. Which I want to do by participating in a conversation with
Waveness. Art, as I will come to argue, holds the potential to tap into the expressive force of
water, to render it sensible and even intensify it. In thinking with an expressivity of water, I want to explore how expressions of water can lead to the construction of a different sense of existence. Water, I believe, is more than a threat. It can precipitate new modes of ecological engagement. The crux of the matter is that water provides conditions from which a thinking otherwise about how we are embedded within dynamic environments and the planetary processes that shape them can emerge. This is driven by the belief that the material qualities that emanate from water – gathering and unknowability rather than separating and
intelligibility – are crucial for thinking current environmental dynamics. Following from this is the desire to think with water as a way to resist both the prevailing geologic imaginary and the tendency for abstraction that both pervade the anthropocene.
Doing so, there are a number of currents that this thesis attempts to further, on which a few comments are in place. By thinking with water I position myself in relation to ongoing debates on how to think with the earth’s hydrosphere gathered under the umbrella of the “blue humanities” or the “oceanic-” or “hydrological turn.” In her introduction on hydro-criticism, Laura Winkiel writes how these turns have been well underway, with blurry origins that can be dated back to diverse works as Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean
and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II (1949), Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), or to “oral and written work by
Indigenous and other intellectuals from the Caribbean, Oceania, Africa, and
elsewhere.” (2019: 1) Equally diverse is the contemporary work done within these turns. In relation to the ocean, Rachel Carson’s seminal book The Sea around Us (1951) exalts the sea as the origin of evolutionary life that surges through terrestrial bodies by which it offers a space to think broad and non-human communities of descent. Stefan Helmreich’s Alien
Ocean (2009) finds in microbial seas conditions that expand our understanding of life forms
that, in turn, become a way to question forms of life. Stacy Alaimo, too, is concerned with envisioning the ocean as intertwined with human life forms. In her book Exposed:
Environmental Politics in Posthuman Times (2016), she works towards an oceanic sense of
trans-corporeality, suggesting that we coevolve with the oceans by being attentive to the ways we are always already a part of, rather than separate from our material surroundings. In a different way, Jue makes a conceptual dive into the ocean as an environment in which different environmental conditions put pressure on questions of epistemological and technological nature. Where these oceanic dwellings understand the seas around us as a space to think with or from, work done in the hydrological turn does so with water as a substance. For instance, the collection Thinking with Water (2013), compiled by Astrida Neimanis, Cecilia Chen and Janine MacLeod, brings water to the forefront in the
engagement with eco-political concerns. They suggest sensing the presence of water in all aspects of our life as a way to find more “inclusive politics and an invigorated practice of cultural theory” (5). My approach to water, however, relies on a different approach than most of the scholarship done in the blue humanities. Engaging with an expressivity of water, I hope to contribute to this range of scholarship a sense of how to restore a vivacity to
matters over which we have imposed an imagined anthropogenic sovereignty. When no longer the homogenous and inert waters in the background, but bringing its expressivity in to the foreground, I belief that water comes to matter differently.
This brings me to the last current I am attempting to further. Which lingers on the problem of how the production of a sense of existence can be approached as emerging from, with and through the environments we are dwelling in. One way to approach the current ecological crisis is to understand it as a crisis of subjectivity; of the relation between specific modes of existence and the material environment these are embedded in. Following such logic, we have in the past decades witnessed a call, coming from a variety of disciplines, to rethink the relation between the earth and subjectivity (see Latour, 2007; Protevi, 2013; Serres: 1995; Sloterdijk, 2009; Yusoff and Clark, 2007; Zalasiewicz et al., 2011). By locating the emergence of subjectivity, or what I will come to refer to by “existential territories”, in relation to the expressivity of our material environment means to approach the ecological crisis as a crisis of subjectivity. Guattari, in his short but compelling book The Three
Ecologies (1989), writes that under capitalism it is “the relationship between subjectivity and
its exteriority – be it social, animal, vegetable or cosmic – that is compromised” (19). What this means for us is that, rather than relying on the discursive and linguistic, I explore water’s aesthetic dimension – its expressivity in the broad sense – as providing the
conditions for opening up the relation between subjectivity and its exteriority. As the title of Guattari’s work, however, suggests, answers cannot come from one domain only but have to
take into account the social, mental and environmental as sites of struggle. The move to expressivity I am attempting to make is thus only a part of the problem.
In this sense the scope of this thesis is limited. It does not provide strategies to halt the carbon economy or offer pathways for direct action. There are also limitations to its theoretical situatedness. Speaking about the emergence of subjectivity from an aesthetic scope, in which water provides conditions for being otherwise, is limited in the sense that struggles are often located elsewhere. However, I believe that writing against the world as commodification and objectification is a complementary aid to activism or the pressing struggles to be fought in relation to the ecological crisis like racism and inequality. What I do hope to offer then, are some openings for alternative ways of knowing and being in which the material world is no longer the passive resource, nor the social construction but rather an intense site of life and an active agent that in the end interacts with and changes the other elements in the mix.
To relate thinking to the material environment it emerges from, with and through is repeated in the form of this thesis too. Writing about the saturating and gathering qualities of water, I attempted to let this piece of writing be more a matter of connecting and relating than of separating or dissecting. To do so this thesis consists of ten shorter sections that more or less flow over and into one another. They gather in companioning materials while wavering between objects and concepts. The idea here is to refrain from having a mold to pour in, or imposing a rigid form upon the process of writing, and instead keep formal proximity to the dialogue between objects, concepts, and thoughts. A central motif that pervades this thesis is that to connect or relate to a materiality in flux means a constant renegotiation of operations or forms. Hence I chose to let form follow function. This is driven, too, by the recurring motif to unground thought from its terrestrial milieu in which a stable ground provides foundational and stable conditions for thought to emerge from. Again, I follow Jue in her call to be attentive to the normative grounded starting point, lingering within academic writing too, that takes the standpoint of the observer as being on top of the surface of the earth (12). Rather than imposing form, or providing a structure that separates the matter discussed into clearly outlined chapters, I attempted to allow these matters to gather and saturate itself.
The last point to be addressed in relation to form is that I believe that thought itself is in fact very much in place in a watery environment. Where a ground provides stability and fixity, water brings an environment in which things never stay what they are. As Neimanis writes: “just like bodies of water, stories are rarely autochthonous; they usually begin in
many places at once, with many unspoken debts” (Bodies of Water 8). In the process of writing this thesis, every thought, concept or object I plunged into was already on the way to becoming something else, overspilling its forms, as it came into existence through its many relations with other thoughts, concepts or objects. And so the objects dealt with, the
concepts and ideas provided by other writers and figurations emerging from my own
situatedness in this world were in the process of writing ultimately inseparable. Of course, I have tried to be accurate, and this first section provides some much needed introductory and explanatory notes. But the watery form I chose might cloud clarity, as I am sure there will be gaps, paths left untaken and questions unanswered. But what I hope arises from the form of this thesis is that its reading experience resonates with the processual traits of thinking and writing, that it sparks some thoughts on what form academic writing can take and offer some openings towards forms of writing attentive to the watery world we are dwelling.
In what is to come I will continue my conversation with Waveness. First, I will explore the matter-flow from which the shapes and forms expressed in Waveness are
produced, because it is in this becoming expressive that I find the conditions to start to think with a watery logic. To tend to a matter-flow, as I will argue, changes our relation towards materiality, infusing our existential territories with processual and furthering qualities. Shifting towards a matter-flow of water unmoors us from some of the (discursive) weight lingering in the terrestrial bias and contemporary figurations of water. No longer on stable ground, I move to the materiality of the works exhibited in Waveness. Through its saturating and gathering processes, the matter-flow produces material-semiotic concepts that take their conceptual productivity from their worldly materiality. What follows is an attempt to trace the matter-flow and the material-semiotic traits produced by it into something I will call a hydro-logic. In this latter part of this thesis, I will explore some openings on new modes of ecological engagement a hydro-logic might offer. Openings that are tied to the prevailing geologic figurations of the anthropocene, connected problematics of scale and imaginaries of damaged landscapes. Problems, in other words, that are central to the anthropocene but can be encountered differently with water.
A MATTER-FLOW (TO A PEOPLE TO
COME)
saturates the barite paper. Instead of measures and properties, the shapes and colors are expressions of the forces and movements of the material reactions that gave rise to them: darker sections turn into islands of concentrated watery movement that left the barite paper fully saturated; a surrounding lighter patch expresses a softer impregnation with a liquid line as its outer limit; some color fields exceed thresholds and stretch out all the way to tip off the paper; paler patches are produced by the discoloring effects of directsunlight; and small specks hint at residual elements like sand still present in the water. In these material expressions, the initial failed flat reading evaporates so that we start to
inhabit a soft surface composed of gathering movements that flow, impregnate, saturate and discolorate. Every shape and color expresses a singular material interaction. There must
Maartje Fliervoet. Waveness (detail). De Appel. 2019. Dimensions variable. Fibre based seawater
have been a turbulence, a whirling downpour of water plunging from up high pressing down onto the paper. A ceaseless production of matter, of nature, that operates according to its own immanent logic. Such is a material articulation of, what Neimanis calls, a “nature writing itself” (Nature Represents Itself” 180). A writing that relies on a reading practice in which the productivity of matter itself does more work than the imposing of discursive meanings. In what is to come I will dive into this matter-flow, the reading practice it calls for and the implications this brings for our relation with water.
To turn to a matter-flow is a way to question the processes at work in the formation of our relation to our material surroundings. The articulation of water in the barite paper is an event in which aqueous and non-aqueous bodies not only transforms the matter of its interacting phenomena, but also the ways in which they are rendered meaningful. “Water is what we make of it,” writes Jamie Linton in a somewhat provocative manner, urging us to think about what water actually means to us. Rather than treating water as a scientific abstraction, he wants us to linger on the idea that water is more than a cluster of molecules or a functional resource. Critiqued is what he calls a “modern” understanding of water that understands it through a scientific abstraction (What is Water 14). No longer the
homogenous and essential chemical compound H2O – a figuration that robs water of its social and cultural context – Linton proffers up the idea that water, at any point in history, is what it becomes through the interplay between the material flows of water and its social and cultural understandings. This as a way to recognize that things become what they are in the relationality that emerges “through an overall process of mutual becoming” (ibid 27). For Linton, this means that water must be understood in the relationality between its material flowing and the social and cultural forms that emerge from and with it. In other words, what water is, if we follow Linton, cannot be disentangled from how we imaginatively produce it.
If we posit Linton’s relationality alongside the waters of Waveness we start to notice its problematic emerge. Because, approaching the matter-flow expressed in the barite paper, we are confronted first with the difficulty to read its “nature writing itself” as an artwork representing nature. From simply letting nature write itself follows first that a whole variety of reading practices that rely on intentionality followed by beauty and the sublime turn fruitless. In this sense, the matter-flow in Waveness can be read as a way to destabilize the dichotomy between on the one hand a represented and there to be consumed nature, and on the other the active consumer or renderer. In fact, I would suggest that Waveness relies on a reading practice that reverses the movement that goes from the human mind that imposes
its form and meanings onto the world, to a movement that constructs from the productive capacities of matter new fields of references.
Deleuze and Guattari argue precisely against an understanding of matter that takes transcendental or ideated forms as a principle of production. Similar to Linton, their materialist philosophy suggests that one cannot account for the existence of forms from intelligible essences or models of ideation. But where Linton seeks a relationality from which forms emerge, Deleuze and Guattari are after a model of the genesis of forms (these forms can be geological, but also biological or cultural) that takes root in the formative processes operating from immanence. Under critique here is the matter-form, or hylomorphic model, that assumes a fixed form from which essential properties can be deduced (A Thousand
Plateaus 408). A model that deems matter as homogenous. Such is an understanding of
rigid laws that assure a model’s coherence so that meaning or forms can be smoothly
imposed on it. In line with the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, Deleuze and Guattari argue that this leaves out the active and affective dimension of matter for which they turn to the “energetic, molecular dimension” operating beneath forms (ibid 409). This matter-flow, or 2
what Deleuze and Guattari also call the “Machinic Phylum”, is a “space unto itself that deploys its materiality through matter” (ibid 408). Matter is here understood as having an indeterminate dimension that is in constant movement and flux. A dimension of pure deterritorialized productivity that underwrites the production of forms. Or rather, forms are a deduction from the matter-flow by extracting singularities and traits of expression from it, congealing a matter in flux into temporary forms. When the imperative to read for
intentionality and the represented is left behind, we sense in the barite paper a proximity to this matter-flow. It is the process of extraction from pure, deterritorialized productivity that is expressed in the barite paper. This takes us from a rendering reading on the lookout for aesthetic representation to one attentive to the expression of a material process of
production.
The reason for this shift to the deterritorialized matter-flow can be found in its resistance to categories like recognition, resemblance and identification (O’Sullivan and Zepke 2). Such categories that restrict the emergence of a difference, that bind life by
This incessant production is what ultimately undergirds a Deleuzo-Guattarian ontology. A production that is “at
2
work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. […] Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative” (Anti Oedipus 11). Their model affords a single mode of articulating the complex production of reality in which there is no distinction between nature and the human. A machine is simply defined by the connections it can make. They write: “man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other—not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc.); rather they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product.” (ibid: 15) Machinic-production overtakes all idealistic categories in its move away from cultural and linguistic constructivism and their accompanied concern with representation, the symbolic and psychic reality. It is a production that it real and material operating from immanence.
organizing, stratifying or territorializing it by congealing it into the recognizable, resembling and intelligible forms, are what Deleuze and Guattari wage their philosophy against. The 3
question that arises then, as Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepke write, is “how to maintain the production of the new while resisting the gravity of the circle of recognition and its representations?” (1). The relational model offered by Linton, in this sense, overlooks that which escapes quantifiable relations; the virtual or indeterminate qualities. Where a relationality relies on the interplay between a material reality and the social and cultural forms that render it intelligible, Deleuze and Guattari urge us to become more attentive to the productivity of a matter in flux because it is in here that the emergence of the new is still out in the open. Being attentive to these processual capacities, the reading of Waveness becomes one in which the matter-flow rendered visible turns into a source of affirmation that provides the conditions from which a different understanding of our relation to water can be produced.
If we ask how this affirmation comes into existence, Deleuze and Guattari write how the matter-flow can be followed (A Thousand Plateaus 409). As an example they provide the practice of metallurgy. Artisans who work with melted metal have to surrender to, and follow a matter-flow that overspills the material itself, and as such the forms imposed on it. After metal is forged or molded its matter-flow makes it undergo processes of
decarbonations and undulations so that its form never remains what it is. To prevent this from happening, metal must be quenched (rapidly cooled at a low temperature) after it has been forged in order to obtain certain material properties. Over time, however, rusting processes again produce new materializations. And at any point a metallurgist has the option to melt the metal and reuse it by again following its matter-flow (ibid 410-411). In other words, what metallurgy exposes is the self-organizing and productive capacity of matter. The crux here is that to follow a matter-flow demands a continuous development of operations by repeatedly connecting to a materiality in flux. What this exposes for us is that a reading practice attentive to material forces incorporates the potential for a more dynamic relation towards these matters. Rather than imposing form and being done with, material forces
A short note on “life” is in place here. Because for Deleuze and Guattari, “life” is not the life that belongs to a subject,
3
it is not situated in organized forms like an organism. Life is an impersonal, pre-individual and chaotic force, referred to by the indefinite “a life” rather than “the life” of someone or something. The concept of “A Life” is expressed most powerfully in Deleuze’s last essay Immanence: A Life. As the title suggests, it is immanence that is A Life. And this immanence, as Deleuze writes, is not an “immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life”. Again, the point here is to refrain from enclosing life in an organized form. A life is carried in every moment a subject or object is actualized, but it keeps on carrying. It does not have moments (or forms) of itself but corresponds to them and carries them away. Whereas to take life out of a biological understanding might seem limiting, it is in fact a way to imbue everything with a sense of liveliness. Liveliness not in the sense that everything is alive or organic but liveliness that manifests in the self-organizing capabilities at work everywhere. The life in question is inorganic, germinal and intensive.
encourage a more processual encounter that is always coming into being. However, the relation between a spectator encountering an artwork and an artisan working hands-on relies on a different modality. Which brings us to the relation between art and the matter-flow.
Where the artisan follows, art turns expressive, or renders sensible. In her book
Chaos, Territory, Art (2008), Elizabeth Grosz builds on a Deleuzo-Guattarian ontology to
note how art draws or extracts qualities from the chaotic forces of the earth and cosmos in order to render them sensible and intensive (8). At its most provocative, Grosz offers a kind of “geoaesthetics” in which art forms an extraction from, and intensification of the
expressive force of the matter-flow. In Grosz’s terms, art has nothing to do with cultural accomplishment, consumption of beauty or a reflection on society. She rather initiates an understanding of art as an engagement with the cosmic, biologic and geologic forces that are antecedent to sensible affiliations (“Geopower” 972). Art, as Grosz puts it elsewhere,
“teaches us of the forces that will overrun us, that made us and will unmake us” (Becoming
Undone 190). An intensification of forces like the effects of sunlight reflected on water or the
convulsion working on a body rendered visible in a painting. Hence Grosz’s statement that art “enables matter to become expressive, to not just satisfy but also to intensify—to resonate and become more than itself” (Chaos, Territory, Art 4). In a strange gesture this roots art not in the creativity of humans but rather in the incessant expressivity of nature. As it taps into the forces of the earth, art has the potential to unearth, or deterritorialize and
repurposes these forces. A repurposing that, in the case of Waveness, unmoors sticky anthropocentric understandings that render these forces intelligible. Because, as Waveness provides a material frame for the matter-flow of water to intensify itself, the question “what is water?” is encountered first from its material forces rather than from its discursive
meanings in which it is embedded.
What evidences from this exploration of the matter-flow is that it is here, more than in the discursive understandings of water, that the potential for new ways of thinking and living with water resides. Through its expressiveness, water achieves an autonomy so that it becomes an active agent in the construction of what Guattari calls “existential
territories” (Chaosmosis 13). The concept is a way to understand the production of a sense of existing as the effect of moving through an aesthetic field or an affective space, taking as its principle of production the aesthetic and embodied experience of being in the world. Becky Parry describes it as a “relational experience of mind, body and environment […] the feeling
that our human bodies are somewhere” (Mapping Place, Affect and Futures 101). This can 4
again be understood in terms of a principle of production from which forms (subjectivities) are produced. Subjectivity, though, is here not understood in terms of a transcendental unity, the individualized self, interiority or consciousness, but rather as the effect (rather than the cause) of exterior processes. In other words, it is a question of how subjectivity is formed from experience. This is a process that produces from the unfixed and chaotic forces of the world (that Guattari refers to with “chaosmosis”) affective spaces that, for a time, set the dynamic processes of subject formation off in new directions (O’Sullivan 257).
The emphasis on affective experience evidences how it is in aesthetic processes that Guattari finds the potential for new existential territories to emerge. And though the
“aesthetic machine”, as he calls it, is in no way the privilege of art, Guattari does sense that it is art that “takes the aesthetic capacity to invent mutant co-ordinates to extremes and
engenders unprecedented, unforeseen and unthinkable quantities of being” (Chaosmosis 106). Returning to Waveness, we can trace how the expressivity that emerges from the 5
aesthetic rendering of water’s forces can produce new kinds of existential territories.
Waveness creates an affective space in which water is present in its material force rather
than its discursive weight, allowing the production of new ways of ecological engagement. And this is a strange and unfamiliar practice. The fluid and flux-like qualities of water, that make it resistant to being congealed into physical form, are also resistant to be captured within social and cultural forms. Which is perhaps why water is a substance especially prone to processes of abstraction and imposition. Linton’s concept of “modern water” highlights how, through scientific discourse that treated water as a homogenous substance and reducing it to an invariant essence, it was made invisible. By bringing back an expressivity of water, Waveness, refuse to settle for the abstract renderings of water in its contemporary figurations. Doing so, and this is what we will turn to next, Waveness suggests that intensifying material expressions of water, bringing these to the forefront of our
perception, is a way to dissolve the externalizing social and cultural understandings coming to us in contemporary times of ecological crisis. And this sets us up to be moved into
different, more processual and dynamic ways of relating to our environments. The terrestrial
Existential Territories can be understood as the schizo-analytic counterpart of identity. Guattari himself describes it
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as the production of a sense of existing through “the body proper, the self, the maternal body, lived space, refrains of the mother tongue, familiar faces, family lore, ethnicity . . . .” (Chaosmosis 95). It is a collection of non-discursive, intensive, affective processes of subject formation, that emerge from the experience of the body, the self, the family, space, technologies etc.
Guattari identifies how global capitalism privileges this mode of production too. But where capitalist processes’ main
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concern is the constraining into predictable and recognizable forms, art holds the potential to undermine and overthrow dominant redundancies (see: Maria Hynes 1938-1939).
unfamiliarity experienced when encountering the works when walking into the exhibition morphs into an encounter composed not of landform interpretations or topographic information, but of watery traits and forces so that, through water, Waveness starts to “confer a sense and alterity to a subset of the perceived world” (Chaosmosis 131). It can provide the conditions for “a new existential support” (ibid), or what Deleuze and Guattari call, “a people to come” as the correlate of creation (What is Philosophy 108). “A people to come” not in the sense of some future ideal kind of a social body but as processes that set the creation of existential territories off into new directions. This is a becoming stranger to oneself, “to one’s language and nation”, in order to become something different (ibid 110). And the national(istic) language through which Waveness’ waters have to navigate are, as we will see, especially rigid. Suggested then, is that one way to proceed is letting an expressivity of water be an active agent in the production of our existential territories. Before we turn to the specifics of this expressivity, I want to ask, if Waveness even unmoors sticky
DISSOLVING A TERRESTRIAL BIAS
is a way to bring back externalized and abstract waters. With the forces of the earth pulling us down, dragging our orientation towards the ground, we lose sight of water’s vital and flux-like qualities. Qualities that cannot be reconciled with terrestrial existence. In order to be inhabitable, the land needs to get rid of water’s incessant flowing. And so, water is worked out to a place where it flows out of sight, prone to be imposed upon with discursivefigurations that are insensitive to its expressive force—figurations that surround the waters of Waveness too. Rephrasing the question “what is water?” into “what is water at this point in time and space?”, or, “where does this idea about water come from?” leads to recognizing that the waters of Waveness cannot be disentangled from current ideas about and ways of living with water. By using water from the Sloterplas and the North Sea, Waveness
surrounds itself with the social and cultural understandings that infuse these waters with meaning. In what is to come, I will explore what discursive burdens, along with the
figurations of water coming to us in times of the anthropocene, Waveness is moving away from.
The Sloterplas is a freshwater lake that was created between 1948 and 1956 and is part of the in 1632 empoldered Slootermeer polder. Urban Geography scholar Cordula Rooijendijk describes how in the 17th century, the Zuiderzee (now the IJsselmeer), due to its connections with a number of lakes in Noord Holland, ate away land with every tidal cycle and storm surge. To keep the water out, a wave of land reclamation changed the Dutch landscape. Given advances in a wide array of domains and techniques, together with civil, political and economic interests, every opportunity to expand terrestrial existence was seized (Waterwolven 113-148). Between 1610 and 1635, 9 lakes in Noord-Holland, including the Slootermeer, were reclaimed from the invading “waterwolf”. It is this history that is a part of a dominant narrative that emphasizes the close relationship between the Dutch and their waters. Whatever the story is, either that of land-reclamation, Frysian mound-building, flooding the land to keep the Spanish army out, contemporary projects like Room for the River or the sand motor or (globally exported) solutions to increasingly complex water problems due to climate change, water is allegedly in the DNA of the Dutch.
The North Sea water brings a complex cultural history too. Environmental
Humanities scholar Katie Ritson, when considering how the North Sea and its surrounding lowlands figure in the human imagination, describes how for centuries-long the slow flux of tides and movements of silt and sandbanks moved in close dialogue with human ingenuity.
Because land travel was limited, water routes were the main routes for communication and transport between regions so that the river delta flowing in, and the North Sea itself,
functioned as a central thoroughfare (Ritson 3). Environmental History scholar Greg
Bankoff suggests how the need to respond to the low-level flux of natural forces that shaped these land and waterscapes, led to a commitment to finding ways of accommodating to a dynamic environment (Bankoff 4). This meant “adapting to its rhythms, learning to live with its risks, taming the worst of its excesses and exploiting its resources for their own wellbeing and prosperity” (ibid). Ritson conceives this variability and vulnerability part of inhabiting these landscapes as valuable in contemporary contexts of ecological crises as they can serve as a “barometer for sensitivity” to changing environmental conditions (9). At the same time though, she identifies how with the rise of industrialized societies, dependence on and ways of living with these fluxing conditions ebbed away as land and air routes started to figure space more prominently (3). And this reterritorialization on land and air resulted in a shift in social and political actors. Local ways of knowing and living in proximity to water eroded as the nation-state was elevated to the central unit of political and economic development. Coastal areas turned into peripheries, national economies took an interest in the seabed and offshore fossil fuel extraction came to be embedded in globalized markets (Ritson 4-5). Land reclamation, too, ceased, as the struggle to maintain existing lands alone, under the
influence of climate change, was met with increasing difficulties. What this very condensed and selective inquiry points to is how the unstable and dynamic frontiers between land and water became increasingly striated by national and global, political and economic interests. It is in this reconfiguration that a highly instrumental and engineered version of the Dutch hydrosocial history took shape. Developmental Studies scholar Chris Büscher
identifies how, in recent decades, a rich and complex hydro-history became truncated to a water imaginary that serves political and economic ends (823). With the Dutch state as a key driver, supported by a range of public entities and non-profit organizations (like water boards, municipal water departments, knowledge institutes and NGO’s), private companies (like drinking water, engineering and consultancy firms that are more often than not
operating globally) and individual agents like the king of the Netherlands, a performative hydrosocial imaginary was created. A narrative centralized around the successes of efficiently managing water in an otherwise dangerous and unpredictable delta. Büscher identifies how this process, of what he terms “imagineering”, is a combination of a selective semiotic “storyline” supported by a material reality of, among others, the Dutch Delta Works (826). Importantly, this imaginary serves specific political and economic needs, as it is
driven by the interests to maintain a competitive strength in the world market for water-related projects, has to lead to the participation of Dutch companies in large delta projects (such as in Jakarta, the Mekong Delta or Beira) and yield political leverage (827). In such an imaginary, water figures as an abstract and dematerialized substance that merely needs to transmit a semiotics of a substance managed and brought under control. Something that can only be established through advanced forms of knowledges, techniques and infrastructures. Figuring water as an abstract and to be controlled substance leads to a weakening of hydrosocial relations. Recall the implications accompanying the abstraction we encountered earlier in Linton’s concept “modern water”. Linton goes on to argue that, when abstracting and externalizing water, relations that would otherwise bind people to specific watery places weaken or deterritorialize (What is Water 18). And as relations weaken, water is devitalized to an any-place-wherever as it flows anywhere but in “our” place. Linton cites how
philosopher Bernard Kalaora conceives of such a deterritorialization as a
“déresponsabilisation” that emphasizes how responsibility for the waters around us is exteriorized to a group of experts (ibid). Anthropologist Veronica Strang makes a similar point by suggesting how the dematerialization of water denies the locality of environmental relations, which erodes water’s medial potential to make individuals identify with a place and the human and non-human agents that dwell in it (Strang 149).
Under the threat of ecological collapse, Neimanis senses how these abstract
figurations have only been amplified, as water is either the result of our attempts to control it (with dikes and canals), or an out of control substance in need to be controlled (in the form of storms, floods) (Bodies of Water 161). Neimanis furthers Linton’s modern waters into, what she calls, “Anthropocene waters”. An equally abstract figuration that in times of ecological crisis is accompanied by a visual image of a “giant tsunami that washes equally over us all” (ibid 168). In such an imaginary that brings a sense of unavoidability, even leading to passivity, Neimanis continues to ask “what is left to be done?” (ibid). In a global context, these undifferentiated waters that are everywhere and nowhere become so abstract as to become meaningless. Moreover, this is a figuration that situated bodies can hardly relate to. Or as Neimanis writes, “‘Water in the Anthropocene pulls out too far; we lose our embodied grip altogether; we are situated nowhere” (ibid 162). Evoking Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges, Neimanis here advocates the need for an embodied perspective that notices the entangled relations between bodies and water.
Another way to read these eroding hydro relations is as a strengthening of terrestrial ones—favoring stable lands over unpredictable waters. Rather than thinking water from its
own logic, it must conform to ways of thinking that emerged from and are there to maintain terrestrial existence. Its flowing flux controlled, its risks and threats managed and rendered abstract, water is kept out of terrestrial existence. Which means confronting water from the cognitive milieu of the earth. This terrestrial bias coming from Jue is perhaps to be expected, as we simply do not survive in water as we do on land. Bound by gravity and living our daily lives on the ground, it is these conditions that we are most familiar with. However, Jue argues how throughout Western philosophy and critical theory this has led to a taking the ground as a default environment for thought to take shape in (Wild Blue Media 12, see also René ten Bos 2014). Which has implications for the ways we speak about and orient to the world (ibid 11). Jue lists a number of examples that take the ground as a locus of stability and a foundation for knowledge: Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus”, for example, takes the ground as guaranteeing the correctness of sedimented practices, ensuring their
constancy over time (12); the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl positions earth-bound conditions as those from which all other conceptions of space are derived (ibid); and the bias also surfaces in ways of speaking that equate the ground with stability or evidence (think of the “grounds to make a claim”, “well-grounded individuals” or “being grounded in” etc.) (11). As evidences from the subtitle of her book, Thinking through Seawater, Jue wants to shift milieus while being sensitive to what these altering environmental conditions do to theory and conceptions of media (ibid 14). In other words, her “milieu specific analyses”, urges to be attentive to how environments inform thinking and writing.
René ten Bos comes to a similar conclusion in his attempt to write a history of philosophy from the perspective of water. Ending his project with the philosophy of Michel Serres, a thinker who according to Ten Bos most compellingly resist the idea that we have to get on land before we are able to think, he lingers on Serres’ call to relate ways of thinking to the spaces in which it takes place (287). Serres, so we read, urges philosophers to choose a watery milieu in which everything is crooked, tendentious, bowing, concave or convex over a terrestrial one composed of points, straight lines and rectangular fields (ibid). It is this 6
land-formed straightness that has infected thinking to the extent that anything not corresponding to it is considered invalid. In his book on a renewed atomism, a physics in which everything flows as opposed to being solid, Serres quite tellingly states that to understand the irregular and non-linear “we must give up the general framework of solid mechanics. It is that of our modern world, its very technicality and its speculation” (The
This can also be read in terms of hard versus soft. Philosopher Steven Connor has argued how it is possible to read
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the entirety of Serres’ work in terms of these opposing terms, in which the hard, repeatedly, has to make place for the soft. (see Conner 2009)
Birth of Physics 7). Shortly after he evokes how in the Mediterranean, at the time of
Lucreatius, processes of declination that hydraulics encountered where inscribed “in the framework of another mechanics, another science than that of fluids”—that of solid
mechanics. It is this grabbing hold of the terrestrial conditions, by limiting itself to points, lines and planes, when, according to Serres, we lose contact with the world (ten Bos
286-287). And in times where the ecological disconnect has been proven a harmful relation, one way to proceed is letting ways of thinking and living emerge from, with and through the environments from which it has been disconnected. Environments in which there simply is a lot of water.
The problem we encounter here is in what way figurations of the environments we inhabit emerge from the conditions these environments offer. The unfamiliar qualities that are difficult to reconcile with terrestrial conditions, make that water’s expressivity is
captured and transposed into a different frame of reference. Waveness pursues a different logic, turning instead to the expressivity these discursive figurations attempt to nullify. Recall how Grosz takes these chaotic forces that shape and compose worlds – a kind of incessant expressionism – as that which can be rendered visible and intensified by art. In this sense, the works, as we will see next, understand that this expressivity is in itself a way for figurations of water to emerge. Refusing to settle for the abstract renderings of, the economic and political narratives tied to and the terrestrial bias from which contemporary figurations often emerge, Waveness lingers on the side of water’s material traits. Unmooring these heavy discursive burdens, water is no longer approached from a terrestrial standpoint – a dissolving of the terrestrial bias – but urges an encounter attentive to the material forces of water itself. And so, if Waveness, via an aestheticization, taps into waters expressive force, what precisely is intensified?
SATURATING STAINS
emphasize interaction and gathering substances. Stains are a discoloration produced by a foreign matter that has penetrated into or has chemically reacted with another material. A staining substance gets spilled onto a surface, runs its own way, and gets trapped in the fibers, pores and indentations of its accompanying matter. Or else, a molecular or chemical reaction between two substances launch a stain in existence. Stains can only arise through porousness or amenability. Even on the hardest of surfaces stains reveal some degree of susceptibility or softness. And moreover, stains can be found anywhere. Water on a carpet, wine on a piece of clothing, coffee on a desk, paint on a floor, raindrops on a sidewalk. Saturation brings to light a world composed not of hard and resisting surfaces, but of soft and interacting substances.Interaction is what we find when we tend to the materiality through which the stains in the barite paper emerged. Barite paper is a fiber-based photo paper with a layer of barium sulfite. Due to a paper core that is not sealed, the material has a high absorption rate of water and chemicals. In general use one of its disadvantages turns into a crucial material characteristic for Waveness. Because, as a material susceptible to other substances, the
barite paper allows for absorption, saturation and impregnation. There is a softness in the works that evidences when we compare the materiality with that of the artwork Blót 1 (2019) from Dutch artist Marit Westerhuis. The work starts with the same gesture of pouring water, but this time on a slowly tilting metal plate (see above). Sensed is a stark contrast between the fluidity of the drops of water that due to the slow tilting of the metal plate start to merge and split in unpredicted ways, and the cold- and hardness of the metal plate. Almost afloat, as if not touching the metal, the water runs from side to side, bumps into a corner so that small amounts of water seep away each time through the grey rocks. What is left are not the entangled stains of Waveness but a hard, clinical and technological space where substances resist one another—a detached turbulence up until a techno-geo desert waiting to be watered anew. The hardness of Blót 1 suggests a transhumanist world where machines and geologies operate in accordance while resistant to the scarcity and fluidity of water that hints at other life forms. A stark contrast to the softness present in the barite paper and later the Jacquard fabric. It is in this softness that the initial feeling of a terrestrial flatness is completely left behind, as the surface lures us into its thick and saturated matter.
Read any surface for its depth and what one finds are expressions of productive and creative forces; traits of expression of the matter-flow. Long deemed insufficient in acquiring any kind of truth about an object, surface readings are slippery practices. Anthropologist Tim Ingold writes how modernist assumptions that take the true essence of things or persons to be found deep within, have equated surfaces with superficiality (“Surface Textures” 137). In order to come to any kind of valid knowledge, people, objects and social phenomena had to be approached with a healthy dose of distrust so as to peel away the superfluous and misleading layers of meaning. Ingold contests this and looks for ways of reading surfaces (in his case the page and the ground) that do not attempt to pierce through in order to find something hidden beneath, but that take them as sites where meaning is generated. Surfaces become deep-surfaces that are “formed of the forces that operate, constitutively, from the inside out, and erosively from the outside in” (ibid 143).
The resemblance to Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of the genesis of material form is evident here. Ingold, however, is more explicit in his goal, as for him the concern lies in the “restoration of a literate imagination to our experience of inhabiting the earth” (ibid 138). This attentiveness to the environment in which inhabitation is necessarily embedded in forms the cornerstone of his understanding of anthropology. “To join the conversation is to inhabit the world”, Ingold writes (One World Anthropology 158). As an anthropologist, his work offers a myriad of currents to think about the perception of the environment that,
again, does not start from the human mind that imposes its forms and meanings on the world but that takes sustenance in the formative processes of the earth itself from which experience is formed. Back at the surface, Ingold suggests a kind of unlocking of the body of 7
the earth on the page. “Could the page”, he asks,“like the ground, become a zone of
habitation—a zone in which experience and imagination fuse? In this endeavor, I believe, we would come close to the most literal sense of geography as earth writing—a writing that is not about the earth, that does not seek to describe, copy, or represent the earth by means of words, but rather that writes on, with or through the earth, driven by forces analogous to those that move its living inhabitants” (“Surface Textures” 138). For Ingold, reading and writing practices in which experience and the imagination fuse do so through their form rather than their content. When reading scriptures, medieval monks would trace the inscribed lines with their fingers while murmuring the corresponding sounds. A wayfaring kind of reading that pulls a world in by tracing the written lines. Lines that are read as if they were scratches, cuts or carves of animal tracks, splits in wood or plowed furrows that write the land (ibid 139). A contemporary example is given in children’s books where, through onomatopoetic phrases like “swishy-swashy”, “splish, splosh” or “hooo-wooo”, preferably read out loud, the weather affectively reverberates in sound and feeling (ibid 148). To speak with the elements, this is, not about them. What Ingold’s surface textures suggest is how such reading practices make one inhabit a milieu composed of accompanying substances we have to find our way through and with. This is not the detached imagination of an unmarked bystander but one thoroughly imbued with the texture of its environment.
Being attentive to the materiality of Waveness points us in some new directions though, as the objects are constructed from a different kind of earth writing than Ingold speaks of. Although Ingold is attentive to forms of reading and writing (speaking out loud, tracing read lines), his concern with the page as a deep-surface is still committed to a
discursive element. With Waveness we move towards a more direct kind of earth-writing as material forces are itself transformative of reading practices. In the frame provided by
Waveness, materialization processes are aestheticized and intensified by which they become
actively formative of environmental reading practices. Put differently, material processes, rather than restoring, facilitate new orientations towards the world. Saturation, here, turns
Ingold has repeatedly mentioned that the underlying motor behind his work in anthropology was in fact the bringing
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together of the two worlds of humanity and nature. Especially between the academic disciplines and within the discipline of anthropology itself, Ingold identifies a split between the branches of scholars that deal with the human mind and its manifold linguistic, social and cultural products on the one hand, and a branch that deals with the structures and composition of the material world on the other (Perception of the Environment 1). As an
anthropologist, Ingold, however, still holds on to a distinction between the human and the environment and looks for answers mostly by focussing on the interplay between materiality and social and cultural forms. Yet, there is no ontological claim made in which any distinction between the human and nature would vanish.
into something Donna Haraway would call a “material-semiotic node” in which matter and meaning co-shape each-other (When Species Meet 4). This means attributing the conceptual power of saturation to its a worldliness. Whereas Ingold’s logic of restoration relies on discursive practices attentive to worldly processes, Waveness flips the movement and starts from the worldly processes itself. These processes, in turn, infuse a vivacity to an
environment that could otherwise be imagined as passive. I sense here a potential for the emergence of new ways of orientating towards the world because, taking as a starting point the chaotic material forces of the world, rather than the reading practices that need to be in-sync with an experience of these forces, takes as its source of possibility the infinite of material forces. What is thus ultimately suggested by Waveness is that intensifying material processes is a way to establish new ways of orientating towards the world.
Stefan Helmreich, in his exploration of saturation as a material-semiotic node, suggests how a visual language of saturation holds the potential for a semiotic of radical openness. Through the use of bright and contrasting color-schemes, saturated maps can convey the materializing presence of, for example, chemicals or temperatures present in the sea. Such a language, he argues, invites an “ocular witnessing” or “participation in suffusing heat” (Helmreich forthcoming). Although the material saturation in the barite paper is an entirely different one than the visualization of a color-scheme in which brightness and intensity transmit information, Helmreich’s account does illuminate a kind of open-ended aspect that comes with saturation. A visual language of saturation does not pre-specify the materiality or agency of all its solutes but incorporates the potential for “polysemy” (ibid). For instance, the meaning of an ocean map saturated in colors can be read differently
depending on the expectations of the viewer. Saturation can thus swerve the reader off in all kinds of directions (ibid). Saturation does interpretive work of its own. Even more in the soaked barite paper, as there is no transmitting of a single message to be deducted from a pre-specified syntax, but rather a heuristic constituted from that which happens in-between the material forces themselves. Where Helmreich sees in the polysemy of saturation the potential for forms of ocular witnessing that might otherwise go unnoticed (acidification or warming waters), the barite paper provides participation in the co-constitutive forces at work in our environments.
In a similar way, Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz write how saturation as a heuristic “can hold many different material and abstract senses together” (forthcoming). As such, it invites us to reflect upon vocabularies that separate and think with discrete objects. In the figure shown above too, what is expressed are composing forces rather than distinct substances. These forces expose processes of transformation, of threshold processes on the verge of changing form. Without stable points to hold on too, there are only thresholds and processes to tap into. As such, the saturated barite paper offers a participation in a dense situation in which co-constituting elements seep into each other. Taking saturation as a heuristic then amounts to a willingness to follow interactions and converges of many processes at the same time. In this sense, finding our way through the forces that gave rise to the barite paper infuses an environmental literacy with a processual nature. One which understands the myriad of interacting elements as co-constitutive of the forms – the situations, problems, contexts – these processes congeal in. This offers some first insights into what a hydro-logic might consist of. Before we come to that, I first want to turn to the Jacquard fabrics as its materiality renders watery forces visible in yet different ways.
GATHERING THREADS
pull forces into a knot and weave in a haptic encounter with the viewer. The woven textures in the Jacquard fabrics, even more than the barite paper, draw the viewer into the matter-flow. Laid-out layered on a low table with small cushions on the floor, the presentation invites to sit down and spend time with the works. Like with the barite paper, here the technique of Jacquard weaving is telling as it uses weaving instead of printing to visualize shapes and colors. By the passing of weft (horizontal) threads over and under warp (vertical) threads, forms are created, form a gathering, while the threads take off on the other side (the colored fringe). Where the barite paper emphasizes swelling and saturating processes working from the inside out, the patchwork of the fabric accentuates gathering processes. Processes that, through the materiality that gathers in the viewer infuse, seep into a hydro-logic.The center section of the fabric shown above, a scanned and adjusted version of a barite paper made with brackish water from the Sloterplas, shows a weaving together of greenish, blueish and grayish threads. Where in the barite paper, such a section blends into a more or less plain colorfield, here, the differently colored threads together weave a field
Maartje Fliervoet. Waveness (detail). De Appel. 2019. Dimensions variable. Prints on wool, jacquard wovens. Photo: Ilya Rabinovic
while remaining distinguishable from each other. But distinguishable only to a degree. Since moving away from the fabric leads to the textures to merge and blend into each other. This amounts to a reading practice constructed by a constant to-ing and fro-ing between
processes of gathering and separating without ever coming at an absolute limit.
The to-ing and fro-ing movements are first established in the optical encounter
between the fabric and viewer. Vision, as Haraway has shown us, has the capacity to distance the knowing subject from the world in the interest of power. Such a vision is driven by the belief of offering an unmediated, “direct, devouring, generative and unrestrictive” view of the world (“Situated Knowledges” 581). Such is a view that retreats into a position that Haraway calls the “view from nowhere” or the “god’s trick”, entirely detached from a situated or embedded position in the world (ibid). As an alternative Haraway posits a feminist vision, a writing of the body that recognizes vision as an active yet always partial perceptual system that builds on translations and specific ways of seeing (ibid 583). Feminist embodiment resists the idea of there being one objective standpoint. Instead, it is insatiably curious about differential positions. Positions that are always partial, but in its partiality offer better
accounts of the world. What Haraway is essentially arguing against here is an
irresponsibility, prefiguring the call present in her later work for a “response-ability”. That 8
is, a situated and embodied perspective that is always embedded and situated within the thick of the world. Haraway’s concern with an epistemological positionality for us points to the dangers present in objectifying vision. Moreover, her suggestion that the idea of
“objective” vision builds on translations and was made possible by technological developments – by which it is tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male
supremacy – recognizes that different modes of perception are encouraged through different aesthetic features. Likewise, art holds the potential to offer alternative perceptual schema’s. 9
Contemporary art scholar Kate Mondloch, for example, coins the term “capsule aesthetics” in relation to new media art as a concept that answers to immersive art installations. Installations that allow the spectator to perceive subjective experience as deeply contingent upon, and in constant process with, material forces (A Capsule Aesthetics page unclear). Mondloch mainly looks for such spectatorship through new technologies that
The term response-ability figures most presently in Staying With the Trouble (2016).
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Written in 1988, Haraway’s examples include “sonography systems, magnetic resonance imaging, artificial
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intelligence-linked graphic manipulation systems, scanning electron microscopes, computed tomography scanners, color-enhancement techniques, satellite surveillance systems, home and office video display terminals, cameras for every purpose […]” (“Situated Knowledges” 581). Drones, developments in artificial intelligence, facial recognition software, CCTV, virtual and augmented reality and observational techniques (that for example include the detection of micro-expressions and/or affective responses) have only contributed to the development of an even larger arsenal of this technological feast.
