An Oceanic Acid Trip
forming planetary immersion
Megan Hayes
11748389
University of Amsterdam
rMA Cultural Analysis Thesis
June 2019
Supervisor: Dr. Timothy Yaczo
Second Reader: Dr. Jeff Diamanti
Contents
Introduction:
Descent
___
1.
Chapter 1:
The Shell Dissolve
___
7.
Chapter 2:
Slippery Fish
__
23.
Conclusion:
Dissolutions
__
40.
Descent
Having plummeted from the boat, dragged down in a blur of diving weights and theunfamiliar, I suddenly found myself with a racing heart twelve metres below the surface of the water. The most immediate intensity was the recognition that air was now at a
distance, both in space and time. Never before had I been so encompassed by a body of water, and it was an introduction to a flood of new pressures, sensations, and anxieties. But the medium of the water became familiar soon enough, and having settled into the idea of breathing from a scuba tank it was a relief to notice that the seasickness had now abated after a choppy two-hour boat ride from Townsville, now being held by water rather than racing across its surface. Breathing easy let my focus start seeping out beyond turbulent insides and into the dancing light, differently malleable than in the air, and the reef began to absorb me: fish and giant clams and brilliantly coloured corals all around, this floating world feeling like a vibrant scene of life.
This memory of immersion is what I have to hold onto of the underwater world of Lodestone Reef, since the lovely German boys I met on my dive never sent me their GoPro footage. Lodestone Reef is one of the 2,900 reefs that make up the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Far North Queensland, Australia, which in its entirety spans the equivalent of 70 million football fields. So stunning was the experience, is the memory, that I forgot to sense that the reef was dying. When I came back up to the surface I was nothing but gush about the beauty of it all, to which David, my accompanying dive master, responded with “that’s so nice to hear.” Beautiful is not how the reef is described so much these days: most often it’s “sad”. Baby coral in Australia's Great Barrier Reef have declined by 89% due to mass bleaching in 2016 and 2017 (Hughes 387). Not being attuned to the conditions of the underwater, I had not detected the shifts in its landscape, temperature or acidity. But these shifting conditions were what had taken me to Townsville in the first place; to meet with three scientists working to study and protect the reef, and to immerse my body within it.
A number of indigenous groups, including the Wulgurukaba, Bindal, Girrugubba,
Warakamai and Nawagi, were living in the Townsville area before being settlers violently dispossessed them in 1864, and the city has since grown to become the largest urban
centre of Far North Queensland (Townsville City Council). Over a lunch of fish cakes in the canteen of the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), Dr. Joy Smith told me that these days nearly everybody living in Townsville is either a doctor, a marine biologist, or in the military; a strange nexus of disparate forms of caring about life. The city is the closest regional centre to the proposed Adani thermal coal mine, slated to become the largest coal mine in Australia. The posters I saw lining the streets of Townsville’s centre during my humid four day visit in January were vehement in both support and opposition for the mine—the need for jobs in an area of high unemployment versus our future; our children; our planet—a fight made all the more disquieting set against so much dead coral, quietly gathering layers of algae just offshore. And just when I was feeling as though Townsville was an intense conjuncture in which to be gripped by the planetary tangle of life, death, and crisis of the present, Townsville flooded. At the beginning of February, two weeks after my visit, a monsoon and slow moving tropical low converged by the coast and resulted in record rainfall which, amplified by the mismanagement of dams, devastated the region (Smee). The official death toll was six, although this excludes the
approximately 300,000 cows that died on surrounding cattle stations, as well as unknown numbers of less economically quantifiable creatures. The drama of the floods, the mine, and the infamous bleaching of the reef are expressive of planetary force in loud,
inundating volumes. The volume at which ocean acidification unfolds requires other kinds of attunement.
Turning to acid
Chemically, an acid is a compound that releases hydrogen ions (H+) when dissolved in
water. Acidity is measured by way of the pH scale, at the other end of which lies base. Danish chemist Søren Peter Lauritz Sørensen invented the pH scale in 1909, a range of 1–14 that is based on a logarithmic formula, (log10[H+]), which means that movement
along the scale is exponential. Anything with a pH of less than 7.0 is acidic: the average apple, for instance, has a pH of 3.0, whereas sulphuric (battery) acid has a pH of just 1.0. The pH of human blood must remain within a relatively narrow range of 7.35-7.45 in order to sustain life (Bettelheim et al. 160). The pH of the ocean, by contrast, is currently sitting at 8.1, having fallen from what had been a relatively stable 8.2 since the beginning of the industrial era. Given the logarithmic nature of pH, this drop represents a 25 percent increase in acidity over the past two centuries, thanks to the ocean’s function as a giant sponge for the capture and storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the atmosphere
by the burning of fossil fuels, and to find “a comparable acidification event requires setting our time machine in reverse, going back 55 million years” (Ogden 328).
One cannot immediately see OA, or sense it unmediated. A body needs to be immersed over a vast period of time in the ocean to detect this changing chemical environment. It doesn’t immediately manifest in spectacular event-form, like the coral bleaching that results from rising temperatures (although it does impair the coral’s ability to recover from bleaching), nor is it as easy to conceptually and materially isolate and address as an issue like plastic pollution, but the slow, seeping unfolding of this ambient chemistry nonetheless holds all that is tangled in the ocean. Along with being less visible, it is less immediately destructive to marine life than other stressors such as pollution, deep sea mining, and temperature rise, and less apparent as cause for immediate human concern than the issue of sea level rise. Internationally, OA remains unregulated by significant environmental bodies like the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in large part because it remains unclear how to do so, as pH is geographically variable but also the only unit by which to measure acidification (Meyer).
OA is a research area still in its infancy. As Peter G. Brewer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) explains in “A short history of ocean acidification science in the 20th century,” knowledge of OA first became possible in 1909 with Sørensen’s creation of the pH scale. The first major study into CO2-induced climate change and
ocean chemistry took place in 1938, and by the mid-twentieth century specialists were well aware of the gradual acidification taking place in the oceans as the result of the huge amount atmospheric CO2 that it absorbs, approximately 1 million tons of fossil fuel CO2
per hour, which accounts for nearly 30 percent of atmospheric CO2. This was not
appreciated by the grater scientific community for much of the twentieth century, but in the lead up to the first “Ocean in a High CO2 World” meeting, held in Paris in 2004,
papers started to accumulate attempting to quantify oceanic CO2, and finally knowledge
began to congeal around the phrase ocean acidification (Brewer 7411). Whilst much of the scientific focus throughout the 20th century concerning was geared toward the
process of oceanic CO2 uptake as a positive buffer against climate change, it would take
until the late 1980s for OA’s harmful effects on marine life to become a matter of concern. Such concern was still only present to a small extent in the first IPCC Scientific
Assessment published in 1990, and it wasn’t until the publication of the IPCC Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage in 2002 that these matters were
rigorously addressed. When the phrase “ocean acidification” came into usage in 2003 it became an idea with which to monitor and track; a narrative and aesthetic story; and a metric by which other oceanic stressors can be measured.
An oceanic turn has also been underway beyond the sciences, evident in the
appearance of the “Ocean Space” pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale, and in the rise of theoretical work being gathered until the umbrella of what Steve Mentz in 2009 dubbed the “blue humanities.” It is a turn that has been under way for some time, Laura Winkiel writes in the introduction to the recent special issue of English Language Notes on “Hydro-criticism,” although the task of pinning down origins is inevitably tricky, argues Astrida Neimanis, one prominent figure in this sea of thought. “Just like bodies of water, stories are rarely autochthonous; they usually begin in many places at once, with many unspoken debts” (Neimanis 8). Without pinning the oceanic turn to any singular event, Winkiel considers many threads that come together to form a larger knotting of thought, such as Fernand Braudel’s 1946 publication of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean
World in the Age of Phillip II, Paul Gilroy’s 1993 The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, and the work—both written and oral—by “Indigenous and other
intellectuals from the Caribbean, Oceania, Africa, and elsewhere (Winkiel 1). To this list could be added Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, which marked a turning point in thinking the ocean between science and poetics in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as marking out the first breaths of the contemporary environmental movement. Carson’s book was published just five years prior to the invention of the standardised shipping container in 1956, and the two cultural imaginaries of the ocean that each invite—a vast interior of scientific and poetic wonder that remains something of an unfathomable eden; or a glossy gridded surface facilitating global transport and trade—linger as two
dominant poles from which the ocean has been regarded since.
“No longer relegated to aqua nullius,” Elizabeth DeLoughrey writes in her essay
“Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene,” “the ocean is now understood in terms of its agency, its anthropogenic pollution and acidity, and its interspecies ontologies— all of which suggest that climate change is shaping new oceanic imaginaries” (34). The work coming out of this turn seeks to figure the seas as something other than passive
backdrop or conduit, instead dwelling in both surfaces and depths of planetary resources and relations. Thinkers like DeLoughrey are offering a significant contribution of thought in in-between spaces; scientific exploration, colonial and military histories (and
contemporaries) together with humanist and Indigenous accounts. The space of new materialism in which Stacy Alaimo is working dethrones the human and explores theoretical modes of understanding all bodies as constituted by myriad material flows and forces of the world. In tracing swirls of waste and toxicity, Alaimo calls for submerged perspectives, and in doing so gets wet the feminist epistemology of Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges. Scientific knowledge is also threaded through the interspecies anthropology of Stefan Helmreich, whose work hurls around inhuman scale both spatial and temporal as he explores a world of microbial oceanography radically
reconceptualising the forms and histories of life. Astrida Neimanis is amongst those trying to think within the space of the ocean in the hopes of warping the confines of terrestrial epistemological limits. The feminist posthuman phenomenology she details in her book
Bodies of Water is a recognition of the fundamental wetness of embodiment, interrupting
ideas of the human body as individually coherent in possession of a firm perimeter: that is, the liberal humanist subject. To round out this greatly truncated list, Melody Jue and many more ecologically oriented media theorists are thinking about how the medium of water can shift both consciousness and the critical practices of the humanities.
Situating the dive
This thesis seeks to dwell in the volume of ocean acidification, to find some modes of attunement. It will move between figurations and moments of trying to make sense of this chemical shift by holding onto the many expressions of acid. Acid evokes a rich, and at times aggressive, assembly of sensuous responses; it tastes sour, turns litmus red,
neutralises alkalis, and can dissolve certain metals. One particular acid with the chemical compound C20H26N2O has hallucinogenic properties so profound it spawned an entire
subculture of psychedelia. To render acidic is to change state, regardless of the particular expression of acid being employed (be that corrosion, psychedelia, or chemical shift). This altered state is a material transformation, a rearrangement of worldly coordinates, by way of matter and relation. Employing what Paul Rekret, in reference to Mark Fischer’s unfinished project Acid Communism, describes as the “textual promiscuity” of acid, this thesis takes advantage of its categorical looseness. The acidifying ocean is both analytic and object, read closely by way of its encounter with multiple bodies in the space of the ocean. In his notes for Acid Communism Fischer detailed the theoretical affordance of acid as, following Michel Foucault, a rupture of “the stark impossibility of thinking that”
(K-Punk 766). Because what is it to comprehend the presence, scale, and uncertainty of climate change if not a profoundly mind-altering experience?
Chapter one, The Shell Dissolve, begins with Stacy Alaimo’s worrying at the grand abstraction and disembodied vision that comes with the implied universal subject of the Anthropocene. Instead of such zooming out, Alaimo calls for a zoom—or rather, a dive— in, thinking in terms of intimate immersion over detached spectacle, and does so herself by approaching the shells already dissolving in acidifying waters through the concept of the “ecodelic.” Holding onto Alaimo’s concept work this chapter will enter the world of David Attenborough to explore the trippy temporalities and aesthetics that unfold between the ecological mediations that the lab, Blue Planet II, and the shells themselves afford. Chapter two will depart from the shell and turn instead to fish, Slippery Fish, that flop between the lab, field, screen, and mind. It will think the different modes in which fish come to be known by way of mediation, figuration, and immersion; fish that form between the disciplinary and planetary landscapes that comprise OA’s many matters of concern. Both chapters are trying to grab hold of evasive objects; disappearing shell, a slippery fish, but the ungraspable form of an acidifying ocean would seem to necessitate such modes of encounter for its analysis.
1
THE
SHELL
My drop into acid
The invitation extended by Stacy Alaimo to think OA in “ecodelic” terms, as offered in her essay “Your Shell on Acid: Material Immersion, Anthropocene Dissolves,” is my first recollection of being seized by, and lingering in thoughts of, the shifting chemistry of the seas. Alaimo’s text opened a space in which to consider the trippiness that is the seeping permeation of acid in and around oceanic bodies, reconfiguring them in myriad ways. This space of thought gave me permission to stretch out from acid as a conceptual pivot on into its various operations, in order to consider the multiple implications of life
immersed. Carbonic acid (H2CO3) became tangled in my consciousness, and aroused
what has become a prolonged exercise in attentiveness and care regarding its marine diffusion.At stake in Alaimo’s essay is an interrogation of exactly who—and what—the “anthro” of the “Anthropocene” is meant to be. This interrogation aims to puts pressure on the problematically universal subject position implied, and to consider how the
anthropocene may enlist “all too familiar formulations, epistemologies, and defensive maneuvers— modes of knowing and being that are utterly incapable of adequately responding to the complexities of the anthropocene itself” (Exposed 143). Alaimo is taking issue here with the human as the kind of abstract, perspectiveless geologic force as figured in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s pivotal 2009 essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” in which the biological and geological agency of the human, Alaimo argues, abstracts them from living and non-living trans-corporeal networks that flow in multiple and messy ways, like the colossal anthropogenic output of carbon that simultaneously entangles the nominally discrete fields of chemistry, biology, and geology.
To summon the necessary pressure for her interrogation, Alaimo plunges her new materialist analytic of trans-corporeality into the deep. Once underwater—where
alternative modes of navigation are necessary and the field of vision radically shifts—the subject position of the anthropocene becomes complicated and asks to be inhabited differently, thought alongside lifeforms and processes strangely absent in dominant figurations of this shifting epoch. “Prevalent visual depictions of the Anthropocene,” Alaimo argues, “emphasize the colossal scale of anthropogenic impact by zooming out— up and away from the planet” (Exposed 145). In these figurations there is a glaring
absence of the agencies, trajectories, and geographies of climate refugees, toxicity, nonhuman lives and extinctions. “The already iconic images of the Anthropocene ask nothing from the human spectator; they make no claim; they neither involve nor
implore” (Exposed 145). Trans-corporeality is a conceptual framework that counters such abstraction, contesting “the master subject of Western humanist individualism, who
imagines himself as transcendent, disembodied, and removed from the world he surveys” (Alaimo The Posthuman Glossary 435). The trans-corporeal subject emerges from within the substances, systems, becomings, histories, and violences of the world, reckoning with intermingled biological, chemical, and climatic processes, and thinking, even, “as the stuff of the world” (Exposed 169).
Alaimo’s environmentalist project of new materialism is indebted to a vast archive of feminist reconceptualisations of matter, such as gender theorist Judith Butler’s analysis of embodiment; the feminist science and technology studies of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad; and the posthumanism of Rosi Braidotti, all of which congeal around an
“insistence that the human body is, simultaneously, a political, ontological, and
epistemological site” (Alaimo “Thinking as the stuff” 16). As one of the founding executive committee members of the Modern Language Association (MLA) forum on ecocriticism, Alaimo is also thinking in a tradition of ecocriticism that emerged in 1980s by way of the environmental movement that had started to gather twenty years prior in the wake of Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us and, eleven years later, Silent Spring. At its core, ecocriticism is interested in thinking the convergences of culture and environment in between the arts and sciences, and grew out of the idea that “human culture is
connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it” (Glotfelty and Fromm xix). Alaimo is situated in what has been distinguished as the second wave of ecocriticism, which veers from the first wave’s focus on nature writing as both object of study and meaningful practice of ‘giving voice’ to nature, instead questioning the binary distinctions of human/nonhuman and nature/culture, thus complicating what had been understood as “environment” altogether (Gerrard 5). Alaimo’s thinking is then not so much interested in thinking with the literary about nature, as it is a poetic thinking from within a nature
inseparable from all worldly material, building languages and modes in which to think as a trans-corporeal subject always already immersed in the flows and forces of a larger material world.
In a generative offering of such a thinking as the stuff of the world, Alaimo turns to the acidifying seas, what she terms “the liquid index of the Anthropocene,” which have been largely ignored amidst more dominant terrestrial figurations of anthropogenic climate change (Exposed 143). Arguably the most commonly encountered figuration of OA, be
that images encountered in news articles, artworks, or try-at-home experiments, is that of the dissolving shells, such as David Littschwager’s widely used photograph of Pteropods over forty-five days of exposure to conditions that simulate the year 2100 (under the IPCC IS92a business-as-usual CO2 emissions scenario) (Littschwager). The increasing
quantities of CO2 being absorbed by the ocean, diffusing as carbonic acid, decreases
the available carbonate ions in the water, slowly dissolving the calcium carbonate structures of shells. In Alaimo’s analysis, the multitude of images depicting the dissolve that feature empty shells, with their hollow forms absent of life and their trippy
“mesmerising rotations” and “hypnotic rolling,” are an invitation to an imaginary “ecodelic” inhabitation of their disappearing form (Exposed 166), wrapping the viewer into a specific (and precarious) perspective. This turn to the “ecodelic” is made via Richard Doyle who, in Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere, names it as a moment of insightful dissolution between the human self and the world, entailing “the sudden and absolute conviction that the psychonaut is involved in a densely
interconnected ecosystem for which contemporary tactics of human identity are
insufficient” (20). Stretching oneself into this ecodelic moment of imagined inhabitation is “to contemplate our own “shells”—or bodily and psychic boundaries—on acid,”
suggesting “something akin to a psychedelic experience,” Alaimo writes (Exposed 165). It is a dissolve with which “intrepid viewers may dis/identify,” simultaneously enfolding into the space of the missing creature, and “contemplating the dissolution of boundaries that shore up human exceptionalism, imagining this particular creature’s life and how
extinction will ripple through the seas” (Exposed 166). The intimate encounter with these dissolving shells, in contrast to the grand and detached spectacle of anthropogenically altered landscapes, becomes precisely the space for thinking the immersed, enmeshed subject of trans-corporeality.
The permeation and restructuring that is the experience of dissolution between self and outside world can, in the case of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), have visionary potential, helping to open up spaces of thought and modes of being outside of those all too familiar formulations, epistemologies, and defensive manoeuvres to which Alaimo refers. The feeling of connectedness that is the hallmark of an LSD experience, by way of rupturing what had been understood as a sovereign subject, would seem a readymade frame for engaging an environmental consciousness. Such a trans-corporeal swirling of what had been a bounded individual into a “landscape of uncertainty” (Exposed 112) is precisely this expression of acidic potential that is evoked by the ecodelic. Teetering
between this acid and the carbonic sort, Alaimo invites her reader to open their mind to a complex biogeochemical tangle that they are immersed within. Western cultural
associations with acid do, however, have their baggage; a psychedelic hangover of platitudes and navel-gazing, and a transcendence at odds with the obstinate materiality of Alaimo’s project. For Alaimo, such transcendent escape into cosmic ethereal expanse —something akin to that abstract blissful oneness coined by Romain Rolland in a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud as the “oceanic feeling” (Saarinen 196)—is to abandon those inescapably submerged. Moreover, even the acidic rupture of LSD is not necessarily a welcome one, like the experience of a “bad trip.” The ecodelic, hovering in what could be a bad trip of oceanic proportions, must not transcend but descend: turning away from
David Littschwager, Limaciina helicina antartica Pteropod shell, 31 March—15 May 2007
elevated and disembodied perspectives in pursuit of the feminist objectivity of situated knowledges, and diving into, and accompanying, the messes and complexities, in a practice something like what Donna Haraway calls “staying with the trouble.”
A microdose as quasi-event
To think the event of OA in the terms of another kind of acidic operation, the immediate imperceptibility of the slowly acidifying ocean could be framed as analogous to the
microdose: the consumption of a quantity of LSD so small as to have its effects unfold at a sub-perceptual level. The effects of microdosing LSD are felt only by way of their drawn out accumulations; instead of experiencing a precise rupture of the given, it is a slow and subtle shift into an altered state without a localised event object. The chemical shift
occurs “below technologically unmediated human modes of perception” which are also the words used by Elizabeth Povinelli to describe the “quasi-event,” an emergent concept within her project of crafting an anthropology of the otherwise (Geontologies 136). The quasi-event is the scale at which a series of accumulated condensations and
coordinations unfold in late liberalism, pressuring certain forms of life and nonlife “that are at odds with dominant, and dominating, modes of being” (Povinelli “Routes/Worlds”). The forms of harm of the quasi-event are “more grudging and corrosive… a form of occurring that never punctures the horizon of the here and now and there and then and yet forms the basis of forms of existence to stay in place or alter their place” (Geontologies 21). Rather than having precise coordinates, the quasi-event unfurls somewhere “below the changes perceptible to the human eye and touch” (Geontologies 75), inhabitation within its non-arrival demanding effort, endurance, such as when the saturation horizon for calcium carbonate structures is silently crossed and the dissolve begins (IGBP 17).
Povinelli’s quasi-event joins in dialogue with other conceptualisations of this kind of
protracted temporality such as Rob Nixon’s “slow violence." It is a gradual and out of sight violence of delayed destruction, dispersed across time and space, attritional and typically not thought of as violence at all. Violence, according to Nixon, is customarily conceived of as an immediately available event, explosive and spectacular in space, erupting into instant sensational visibility. Given the significant presence of multiple slow violences pressing upon lifeforms and forms of life across the planet, Nixon contends that ways must be found to
“engage with a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of
temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence” (Slow Violence 2).
The “unspectacular” temporality within which OA unfolds means that its lack of sensational form receives unequal attention, for which there are inevitable
representational challenges (Slow Violence 7). The dilemma of dramatising the quasi-event of slow violence was already confronted by Carson in Silent Spring, in what she termed the “death by indirection” of biomagnification and toxic drift (32). This difficulty of figuration was handled by Carson in turning to narrative vocabulary: “a shadow that is no less ominous because it is formless and obscure” (188). This is indeed a challenge for the representation of climate change en masse, but particularly acute in the case of OA as opposed to the more spectacular tipping point of temperature that induces an event like coral bleaching.
Trippy temporalities of the dissolve
In the final episode of Sir David Attenborough’s 2017 series Blue Planet II—the follow up to the enormously popular The Blue Planet, a show that sixteen years prior gave publicly visible access to great expanses of the deep seas for the first time—the seasoned broadcaster finally addressed the pressures being faced by marine lives and ecosystems. After surveying a number of environments and attending to plastics
pollution, overfishing, and rising sea temperatures, Attenborough turns to the changing chemistry of the oceans. Whereas the rest of the hour long episode is predominantly immersed in lively ecosystems, in turning to OA Attenborough enters the laboratory. The scene cuts from the stark white corals of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, where the viewer has just borne witness to the glaring results of the 2016-2017 bleaching events, to an equally stark concrete expanse, sparingly dotted with neat grass rectangles and a few palms. Holding to this space whilst Attenborough passes through, the frame then cuts to a water tank dotted with several coral specimens, into which a human hand plunges. “Research is revealing how the fundamental chemistry of the ocean is changing”
Attenborough narrates, as Professor Chris Langdon appears on screen, plucking out an individual branch of coral from the tank. Langdon inspects the coral with his bare hands and eyes, but whether there is in fact something to see remains a mystery. As a
Professor Langdon then fills a tank with dilute acid. The two small LEDs spotlighting the five shells produce a dramatic mise en scène within the small tank, in which we see the shells, suddenly submerged under an acidic solution of some kind, begin to bubble around their edges in a fizzling disintegration of form.
The speeding up of the shells demise is something of a cinematic dissolve through time. The cinematic dissolve is traditionally “used within the continuity system primarily to suggest a change in location or time – or to suggest a flashback or dream
sequence” (Columbia Film Glossary), in this context becoming something like a chemical time lapse. The recurrence of the time lapse in climate discourse, as observed by Jeff Diamanti in his introductory remarks at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis’ 2019
Climate Realism symposium, matters greatly for how we recognise the multiple scales—
both temporal and spatial—that climate change names and threatens. “The time lapse gathers to a point of reference, makes synchronic the diachronic realities of data, hence making visible something like the scales of climate implied but not verifiable by
weather” (Diamanti).
The shell sequence in “Our Blue Planet” is representative only of the fact of their dissolve, of their becoming ghost. Despite the implicit objectivity that is evoked by this scene being situated within the laboratory, this image of shells dissolving is something of a creative
depiction, that making visible of data. In seconds, the viewer bears witness to what is predicted will happen in forty-five days.
“Whereas the human alterations of the geophysical landmasses of the planet can be portrayed as a spectacle,” Alaimo writes, “the warming and acidifying oceans, like the atmospheric levels of CO2, cannot be directly portrayed in images but must be
scientifically captured and creatively depicted” (Exposed 161). The decisions made in framing and editing the multitude of images comprising Blue Planet II tell particular stories, and assemble both active and latent narratives of nature, culture, and human responsibility to both. But when I was at the reef, it seemed that every conversation would turn to adaptation. The various pressures on the reef demonstrate how non-linear time is —there simply isn’t an ocean of 2100 that we can drop an organism or an ecosystem into for observation. This conjectural nature of the future was clear in the tour Smith gave me of AIMS’ SeaSimulator, a marine research aquarium facility comprised of 3.6 million litres
of seawater, in which corals are observed as they grow in dozens of potential future water conditions. As the pH drops and the temperature rises, some things will thrive, and some will die. Branching, finger-y corals such as the staghorn are highly sensitive, whereas the boulder corals are quite unflappable. The future into which Blue Planet II plunges these shells, given the abstraction of their forms from the complex ecological entanglements through space and time, is a fiction.
As the two men on screen watch this becoming solution of shells, Attenborough asks “surely this is not happening in the ocean now, right now?” Whilst Professor Langdon assures him that “what we’re seeing here is more dramatic than what’s happening in the ocean,” it also is what is happening in the ocean, on an unmediated temporal scale. Turning one’s thoughts to the ocean throws up a whole host of trippy relations to time . 1
Life operates at different speeds between the strata of the water column, moving much slower in the cold, dark waters of the benthic zone than the light and life filled epipelagic zone at the surface. Outside of this scene, the movements of the episode “Our Blue Planet” shift focus between the shores and the surface waters, where extinction looms— due to accelerating practices like overfishing—even for creatures whom, like the orca, have populated the oceans over vast expanses of deep time. The camera’s vertical descent threads yet more concerns that yank one between temporal scales, dropping from the quotidian surface to the unfamiliarity of the deep, where the Mariana trench mingles together a scene comprised of recent accumulations of plastic now polluting the deepest place on earth; creatures whose bodies and lives are shaped by the dark density of their milieu; and the smallest units of the microbial seas, undetectable to human eyes, who, as Stefan Helmreich shows throughout Alien Ocean, are radically altering the understanding of genetics and warping the linear progression of evolutionary time. This descent drags one into a flurry of temporalities, reckoning simultaneously with deep time and its cyclical nature; the altered temporalities of bodies across space; the
accelerationism of the present and the various crises pressing one into anticipatory futures, exposure to something in the future tense.
The paradoxical immersion into, and simultaneous unfathomablility of, the body of the ocean, is precisely the dialectic invoked by Gayatri Spivak in her concept of “planetarity.” It is a relation to the world of shifted scale and orientation, one not predicated on the
Analogously, the very crux of the aesthetic experience of acid is, for Mark Fischer, “a particular
1
place of the human capitalist and colonial agent of a gridded globe, but rather enmeshed with and subject to planetary forces. Spivak writes:
“If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities, alterity remains underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away — and thus to think of it is already to transgress, for, in spite of our forays into what we render through metaphor, differently, as outer and inner space, it
remains that what is above and beyond our own reach is not continuous with us as it is not, indeed, specifically discontinuous” (“Planetarity” 292).
Shifting thought from the containable whole of the globe to the alterity of the planet is not necessarily a shift in scale so much as a state change; a move from that which is
available to thought to that which necessarily exceeds it; and unthinkability to the tune of the panic that flips one inside out when trying to reckon with the expanse of the universe. The trippy temporalities evoked by OA materialise at the sub-perceptual, which demands thinking in a mode of something like planetarity to sense it out, though not pin it down. Whereas the globe is a homogenous and abstract ball covered in lines—produced by the convergence of multinational finance, media, and information technology—planetarity is radical alterity. An appropriate mode for contemplating an acid trip on a planetary scale.
Lab aesthetics
As the two men watch the dissolve play out, Attenborough seeks to orient himself and the viewers to the specific chemical textures of the shell dissolving event he is witnessing by asking how much more acidic the solution poured onto the shells is than the present day seas. “This is more concentrated than the pH of the ocean,” Langdon responds, “but it accelerates the process so we can see something visually.” That the increased
concentration accelerates the process to grant immediate visual access is offered as explanation enough. What is of fundamental concern, then, is an aesthetic encounter with a dramatic (but necessarily speculative) conclusion of what is actually unfolding in real time as a necessarily undramatic quasi-event. The inference is that the chemical and temporal specificity of OA is secondary, and that the focus of this encounter is to relay a mood of OA in something reminiscent of an artist’s impression, but it is within the context of the scientific laboratory—a context, one would imagine, in which precision matters above all—that this impression is rendered.
The presumption of veracity in any photographic image has long been contested by photographic theory; to borrow the words of Susan Sontag, ”the camera's rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses…only that which narrates can make us understand” (On Photography 23). What is implicitly understood in the narrative of Blue
Planet II’s sequence of images is an appeal to another kind of truth claim; that of the
purity of the scientific laboratory. This scene could, in theory, have been filmed at one of many natural marine seeps, like the setting of Sally Ingleton’s 2014 Acid Ocean, which tracks the experimental research of Dr. Katharina Fabricius and other researchers at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) as they test out possible effects of OA over time on coral polyps. At these seep sites the release of CO2 from volcanic vents in the sea
floor offer CO2 gradients, equating to something like a time machine into future high CO2
conditions—trippy time rearing once more—providing natural test sites for scientists to study OA. Acid Ocean is very much a study of experimentation amongst variables in the unknown, of the complexities of nature as process, and as a consequence the work at the seeps is slow, inconclusive, and recursive. The narrative that unfolds at the seeps, as seen in Ingleton’s film, concerns the mess and conjecture of experimental science as process; in stark contrast to the sterility of the lab. The Blue Planet II scene could also have been filmed in the colder waters of the Antarctic that already absorb greater
concentrations carbon dioxide, or on the West Coast of the United States where upwelling and ocean currents have been creating highly acidic waters for years (NOAA). Indeed, the scene could technically have been filmed anywhere in the ocean because the drop in pH is ubiquitous (albeit variable), but the issue with all of these possibilities is that it remains a quasi-event: some effect of OA would technically be visible, but on a scale not immediately sensible to the human observer, and not directly mediated in manner to which a human might be attuned (unlike, perhaps, the experience of marine creatures immersed in acid).
The lab, for Didier Debaise, is the site of the third of the gestures he outlines as being the operations of ‘the moderns’ that invents “nature” as a concept. In his book Nature as
Event, Debaise outlines the three gestures as the bifurcation of nature, which is to say the
violent extraction of all ‘superficial’ elements so that only pure mechanics remain; localisation, or the idea that for something to really exist, it needs precise spatial
coordinates, which becomes a tool for the colonisation of the other; and reification, that the pure event can only occur in the laboratory, the space of an objective, universal nature. It is this reification—the laboratory as the making real—that is invoked as
Attenborough walks into the laboratory just as, paradoxically, the scene captured as image becomes fiction. In Debaise’s terms, this reification casts the lab as the space in which nature can truly speak, that it is able to be observed and described. “Nature” is a thing that happens outside of the lab, but can be replicated with greater precision within its purity.
It is true that the laboratory’s sterility affords analysis not possible in the field, especially in the case of something so intricate yet on such a large spatial and temporal scale as OA. “Changing carbon dioxide is one of the hardest parameters to measure,” Dr. Joy Smith told me in Townsville. She explained that temperature, by contrast, is a relatively simple and cheap variable to study, but chemistry is far more technical and thus more difficult to manipulate. This means that the study of OA most often does occur in the lab, where values such as those published in IPCC reports concerning expected conditions at the end of the century get recreated in this setting of what Debaise describes as extreme control. In detailing the ecological considerations of this lab setting, Smith lingered in this question of extreme control. “You need to be sure that you can manipulate ocean
chemistry well,” she told me, “with really good instrumentation and climate control to make sure climate or light aren’t changing in the background. In the lab we know expectations and thresholds”.
The site of tension that I am drawing out here is that such precision is paradoxically besides the point in the encounter between Attenborough, Langdon, and shell. The lab is pure aesthetic within which to affectively encounter the dissolve. A scientific framing that shoots the viewer into a fuzzy time machine of imprecise chemistry. It is a particular and strange experience of the cinematic dissolve between an abstracted present and a speculative future, in which the thing at stake is the material integrity of these calcium carbonate structures. What the viewer experiences, then, watching these shells fizzle away, is loss. A visualisation of the fear and anxiety of what a future in a changing climate portends, a soft gesturing toward the apocalyptic, perhaps in the register of Bill
McKibben’s contention that the Anthropocene can be framed as the global condition of being born into a world that no longer exists (27). But it is not a total loss: these shells after all are not fizzling away into nothingness, rather it is their individual, discrete form which dissolves, their structures dissipating into a dispersed material existence. The limitations of human perspective become apparent in this space—the lab— where such limitations are characteristically muted. The vision of science, as feminist science and
technologies studies (STS) scholar Donna Haraway argues in her landmark 1988 essay
Situated Knowledges, is one that evokes something of a God’s eye view, a devouring,
unrestricted vision “used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere” (SK 581). Haraway’s response to this scientific objectivity is to counter with a feminist one, an insistence “on the embodied nature of all vision,” so as to reclaim the sensory system of that disembodied gaze. The feminist objectivity of situated knowledge is about holding to specific and partial embodiment, rather than “the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility” (582). This relocation into the laboratory invites no greater access to the kind of objectivity of Western cultural narratives which are in actual fact “allegories of the ideologies governing the relations of what we call mind and body, distance and responsibility” (583), but rather is something like an abstract expressionism of an acidic future.
Thinking ecologically, mediating biologically
This final episode of Blue Planet II in which the shells appear tells a different story than the one Blue Planet II had been telling prior. The first six episodes of the series unfold according to the typical attentiveness to the rhythms and cycles and wonders of a “nature” that is a homeostatic form distinct from human culture. This nature was in fact able to be contained within human culture as entertainment, its beauty and wonder offering a kind of respite from social and political dramas fundamentally seperate from it. By contrast, episode seven—entitled “Our Blue Planet”—flips this narrative and suddenly culture (the presumed we of the “Our”) is implicated in that same nature to which we bear witness. It is, in fact, the first time in Attenborough’s oeuvre that he explicitly dwells in the issue of climate change, having previously defended his decision not to attend to the anthropogenic degradation of the environments he explored by saying that his are “not ecological programmes” (Wall). The hope was, Attenborough explained, to instead inspire conservationist action through the appreciation of nature’s wonder (ibid). But in the past year Attenborough’s tone has shifted, and his message has become one of the necessity to take action in the midst of environmental crisis. This can be seen in his taking up the "People's Seat" at the 2018 UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland (COP24); in April 2019 with his final show with the BBC, Climate Change: The Facts, and his new Netflix series
Our Planet, in which the opening line of the first episode declares that “for the first time in
that Attenborough has now embraced the “ecological,” making nature thinkable in his programs in the same non-binary terms of Alaimo and fellow second-wave ecocritics.
Ecologies are not bordered, discrete things, but rather processes that converge forces and flows around ever-shifting centres. To think ecologically is to situate the thinking body in an ecological field, being attentive to the myriad materialities running through and around it, constituting it and the thought that emerges in the relation between body and environment. In her introduction to Ecological Thinking, feminist philosopher Lorraine Code articulates an ecological framework of thought as “a revised mode of engagement with knowledge” (5). This mode of thought is precisely not thinking about “the
environment,” since its point is that there is no such isolated thing. Instead, it is thinking from within the logic of ecology, doing so to move away from the humanist universe with “man” at its centre, interrogating and unsettling “the self-certainties of Western capitalism and the epistemologies of mastery it underwrites” (Ecological Thinking 3). Code is guided by the conviction that “theories of knowledge shape and are shaped by dominant social-political imaginaries” (Code 4-5). By opening his vision to less wondrous ecological contingencies, like the manner in which marine bodies are encountering 22 million tons of CO2 absorbed by the oceans from the atmosphere everyday (Smithsonian), it would
appear that Attenborough has indeed become ecological.
The ecological dispersal of the human from the centre of the world affords a more expansive notion of media, too, beyond the traditional media form that Attenborough represents. As John Durham Peters writes in The Marvellous Clouds: Toward A
Philosophy of Elemental Media, contemporary media theory is thinking in terms other than
what is in fact a relatively recent conception of media as limited to “message-bearing institutions such as newspapers, radio, television, and the Internet” (2). The media evoked by Peters includes elemental forces of earth, sky, wind, and weather; a definition of media that was typical until well into the nineteenth century, and that is resurgent in the work of myriad contemporary media theorists such as the “medianatures” of Jussi
Parikka, building on the German media theories of Friedrich Kittler and Wolfgang Ernst, or the milieu-specific philosophy of Melody Jue, following Vilem Flusser. By proposing that “the elemental legacy of the media concept is fully relevant in a time when our most pervasive surrounding environment is technological and nature—from honeybees and dogs to corn and viruses, from the ocean floor to the atmosphere—is drenched with
human manipulation,” Peters brings together the natural and cultural into synthesis around the multivalence of media.
In this way, I want to flip the location of what is understood as media in “Our Blue Planet” from the television program to the shell. Peters argues that “if media are vehicles that carry and communicate meaning, then media theory needs to take nature, the
background to all possible meaning, seriously” (2). It is this same taking seriously that Melody Jue draw upon in her essay “Vampire Squid Media,” which draws on the work of Vilem Flusser to propose a milieu-specificity philosophy that “takes seriously the
conditions of the ocean as a novel and cognitively estranged starting point for
philosophy” (93). Jue reads Flusser’s “Vampyroteuthis Infernalis" as a speculative fiction that takes seriously the media (ink clouds, skin paintings) of the vampire squid,
suggesting a theory “not focused on stable objects or ontology but on the comparative epistemology between human media and vampyroteuthic media” (93). The practice of milieu-specific philosophy that Jue reads from Flusser’s text thinks with the “specific environmental conditions of alterity” that “make visible the assumptions in our terrestrially born concepts and orientations to the world” (94). To consider the shell as doing the work of ecological mediation of its elemental medium of water then, like the vampire squid, “opens a way for elaborating a theory of media that takes seriously the conditions of seawater as a space for communication and relation” (93-4).
The shell’s dissolve mediates what I have been calling the seeping permeation that is the quasi-event of OA. And this seeping, as Steve Mentz writes in his entry to Veer Ecology, “names an ecological truth that all borders must be crossed and all boundaries span.” As a body in acid, its ecodelic aesthetic “makes visible the corrosive force that lurks inside ecologist and activist Barry Commoner’s celebrated “first law of ecology,” in which
“everything is connected to everything else” (Veer 282). Rather than being a mediation of, the shell becomes a mediation between, something like what Helmreich as a “media ecology” (32), that is, a tangle of complex material relationships structured by techniques of perception and communication both human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic. Through the shell dissolve, the materiality of what had been acid’s platitudinal
2
SLIPPERY
FISH
Drunk fish
The striped figures of six young damselfish are fixed, floating still in the frame, captured by the camera lens as they passed by on their journeys through the reef. The caption of the image informs me that these fish, when living in carbon dioxide-rich waters, will “act oddly around predator odours,” in contrast to the behaviour of those fish living in areas with less dissolved CO2. The headline of Meghan Rosen’s May 2014 article in Science
News interprets this odd behaviour with the announcement that “Carbon dioxide makes
fish act drunk.” Rosen was reporting on the findings of a team of scientists at James Cook University (JCU) in Townsville, Australia, whose study, led by Professor Philip Munday and first published in Nature Climate Change a month prior, had found that clownfish,
damselfish, and the endangered cardinalfish were becoming intoxicated by their increasingly acidic environment. Whilst the findings were not the first to illustrate the disorienting effects of ocean acidification on fish, they were the first to show that wild fish 2
exposed to CO2 behave “just as crazy” as those in the lab. Fish that were living near
naturally occurring CO2 seeps had been taken into the lab in order to study their
behaviour in tightly controlled conditions, and were found to be unable to make important olfactory distinctions, even ‘basking’ in “water laced with predator odour” (ibid). Having been living within higher levels of carbonic acid, these fish had developed hearing and learning problems and strange behavioural issues such as pursuing the odour of
predators, with “timid young reef fish” purported to “turn into tipsy little daredevils,” writes Meghan Rosen (11). As marine ecologist Danielle Dixson describes it, “the fish behave kind of like they’re drunk…They’re extra bold and extra aggressive, and they make bad decisions” (ibid).
The language with which Rosen and Dixson interpret the findings of Munday’s study invites another playful encounter with acid’s intoxicating potential, albeit toned down to the terms of a less illicit ‘drunkenness.’ In contrast to the ecodelic reading of the
dissolving shell, the intoxication experienced by the fish in acid is one more chemically intimate to the body; an undoing impossible to contain to the conceptual. The cognitive problems and disorientation experienced by these fish is the build up of carbon dioxide in the blood, resulting in a condition known as hypercapnia which kicks in when the level of carbon dioxide rises above 1000 micro atmospheres (1000 μatm) (Heuer and Grosell
In a 2009 article for Wired, Brandon Keim reported on earlier research, also led by Philip Munday, that had
2
R1078). Once experiencing hypercapnia, the effected animals’ brain function will be impaired, CO2 thus becoming an intoxicant of sorts. The chemoreceptors of the fish
become compromised, interfering with the fishes' sensory interpretation of the world, impairing their ability to seek out mates, food, and home, and to sense out danger. As Rostern Tembo explained it in a recent study of the impact of OA on aquatic organisms, “when chemoreceptors are compromised due to ocean acidification the life of a fish is disoriented and in chaos” (1). As the chemical composition of the environment that the fish are steeped in alters, the increasing acidification becomes an intoxicating milieu within which they are inescapably immersed, their epistemological sovereignty jeopardised.
My immediate reaction to this report was a spin of drunken disorder: recollections of recklessness and late nights in high tides giving strange shape to my concerned
daydreams for those fish steeping in intoxicating milieus. My ability to interpret the carbon heavy immersion of these fish as drunkenness hooked and pulled me into empathy with their intoxicated vulnerability, becoming a pivot around which I could consider the unevenness of what Povinelli calls the “embankments” of our existence; the efforts, endurances, quasi-events that (differentially) hold bodies in place. I looked at these six young damselfish and contemplated the laissez-faire attitude they may or may not have acquired in relation to danger (are these the fish of Munday’s study? Are these fish drunk? What is their story?), dependent on the acidic constitution of their environment. I
wondered how much CO2 they might have been exposed to, and to what degree I was
witnessing them bask—unbeknownst to them—in the face of danger. I wondered about the asymmetries of our bodies between our respective milieus: their’s capable of
breathing underwater but also unable to do anything about their exposure to acid. An acid which is the consequence of certain carbon-heavy forms of life that I am able to enjoy.
Another asymmetry lies in the respective abilities of those fish and myself to make sense of their surrounds. These six young damselfish are floating in a medium so familiar to them that Marshall McLuhan would declare water to be the one thing about which they “know exactly nothing” (War and Peace 175). For McLuhan, it is fishes’ total immersion that renders water invisible. But at the same time, that intimacy of immersion enables fish to know it intimately, to have a sensible and meaningful relation to and through it that a chemical shift can disturb. This meaningful relationship between an organism and its
environment-world, is, in the words of early twentieth-century biologist Jakob von Uexküll, its “umwelt,” and while von Uexküll detailed his attempts at representing, or even
sensorially apprehending, the perceptual and experiential umwelt of an organism as "excursions in unknowable worlds” (von Uexküll 54), his work opened the study into biosemiotics through his contention that organisms are in possession of a range of
signifying and sign-searching practices (Helmreich 187). Biosemiotics, a concept initially shaped by the biology of von Uexküll, then finding sharper form through the semiosis of C.S. Pierce, erases the sharp distinction between nature and culture, as there is no divide to be found in the way sign relations are used between different lifeforms. The fishes' drunkenness becomes a conduit to sensing their immersion within the shifting chemical gradient of a milieu. A fish is here understood as having a sensible relation to its
environment by no longer being able to make sense of its environment, its wobbly behaviour indexing—to use Pierce’s term—a lively interior becoming undone.
My own elemental separation from water renders it unknowable in a difference sense, the sense of the recurrent trope of the ocean that Stefan Helmreich as its alien alterity. Marine biology is “haunted by the figure of the alien-a sign of uncertainty about what the sea can tell us about life on Earth and the place of humans in this realm,” alien used here to
“diagnose a scientific, social, and cultural imagination about the sea… and to suggest the limits of representing this sea, for both oceanographers and social scientists” (Helmreich xi). The alien nature of the ocean’s materiality renders its insides as epistemological other; a place quite literally unfathomable. As political ecologist Julian Yates writes in “Wet,” his contribution to a collection of essays published in Elemental Ecocriticism, “I cannot breathe under water (un-enhanced). I am, if you like, medium specific… My rendering of water remains medium specific” (Yates 189). In the case of this intoxicated fish, its
biosemiotic scrambling in acid enables me to make some sense of that acid. In other words, the undoing of the fish is an ecological mediation of OA, rendering oceanic chemistry sensible as their hallucinatory form floats behind my eyelids.
Rosen’s article, published in Science News—the self-described purpose of which is to “treat science as news”—will necessarily pull the seeping quasi-event of OA into a more immediate and punctuating event form. The event in question, rather than being the intoxication of the fish, is a moment of scientific knowledge production, and by returning to Peter Brewer’s “Short history of ocean acidification science” it becomes clear that the possibility of such a relation to these fish situates the reader in a particular moment.
Brewer notes that the lead up to the 2004 “Ocean in a High CO2 World” conference in
Paris saw an explosion in papers published as chemists sought to “quantify the oceanic CO2 system chemistry and reveal the substance of change in the ocean” (7411). This
period saw a shift in oceanic perspective in the context of OA, from one of appreciation for its beneficial accumulation “of some 50% of all fossil fuel CO2 emitted,” to recognition of, and care for, the impacts of this absorption on the marine life within (Brewer 7411). It was a perspectival shift in concern that, as Brewer demonstrates, emerged gradually under the pressure of increasing planetary forces, as climate sciences were increasingly demonstrating, albeit with a perpetual lag between attention paid to atmosphere and ocean. 3
As Latour argues in the introduction to Politics of Nature, “Ecology, as its name indicates, has no direct access to nature as such; it is a “-logy” like all the scientific
disciplines” (Politics of Nature 4). To know nature as ecology is to know it only “through the intermediary of the sciences” (3). Isabelle Stengers calls the knowledge produced by experimental science “the experimental fact,” emergent from an objectivity that depends on “a very particular creative art, their facts closer to “artefacts,” that is, “a fact of art, a human invention” (Cosmopolitics 50). For Stengers, these artefacts reflect the singularity of the history in which they are produced (Cosmopolitics 50), science thus functioning as a deeply contingent system of shaping truths rather than simply discovering them. Highly entangled into the thread of concerns motivating researchers and regulatory bodies at the Great Barrier Reef—ascertained, for instance, in the conversation I had with Philip
Munday, the primary author of the study on which Rosen’s article is reporting—is the desire to pin down the adaptive potential of marine life. Adaptation throws one back into the questions of futurity but, unlike with the shell, in a way that is explicitly attentive to what the specific textures of that future might entail. The drunken fish would seem to reflect the singularity of the history in which it was produced in at least two instances: indexing on the one hand a scientific conjuncture in which the interior lifeworld of a fish
Attention to the role of the ocean in the planetary CO2 balance would focus more keenly in the aftermath of 3
the 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year (IGY). The IGY provided a much needed rebirth of international geophysical science in the aftermath of World War II, and set up a channel for scientific communication in the Cold War years, however was heavily focused on atmospheric CO2 measurements
while ignoring oceanic ones. An important paper by Revelle and Suess published during the IGY
demonstrated the role of the ocean in absorbing fossil fuel CO2 and would become a precursor to greater oceanic awareness in the planetary CO2 balance, with the first International Oceanographic Congress held at the UN in New York in 1959. (Brewer 7413).
matters, whilst on the other an attachment to fishes' ability to manoeuvre into an
anticipated carbon-heavy future, the kind of “optimistic attachment” of Lauren Berlant; an investment in “the world’s continuity” (Cruel Optimism 13). Rosen’s article ends with Dr. Katharina Fabricius expressed wish “that the fish would be able to cope with high levels of carbon dioxide,” but the study found otherwise: having lost “their ability to think straight,” the fish became “mad” (Rosen 11). This shift from intoxication to madness marks a shift into a state more permanent and inescapable, and the intoxication becomes an impairment—a noisy interference, perhaps—for both the fish in water, and for an optimistic orientation toward the future.
Fish carbon
Like the six young damselfish, the school of unidentified fish that fly over this next bed of coral are fixed, too. Hundreds of their bodies are freeze-framed, held in their watery media, held again inside the edges of the photograph. These fish are known by way of illustrating an article published in October 2018 on The United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) website, entitled “Business unusual: How “fish carbon” stabilizes our climate.” This story, published under UNEP News, reports on a “new concept” of fish carbon that seeks to address the climate change challenge and prevent global
biodiversity loss (UNEP). “Fish carbon” is an over-simplified but accessible term used to describe the carbon interactions of all marine vertebrates that contribute to the oceans’ carbon sequestration, including turtles, sea birds, and mammals. All life on earth is
carbon based, meaning that biomass—the literal flesh and bones—of bodies hold carbon within their form. Carbon builds and sustains life in the form of complex molecules like proteins and DNA; is stored in ancient life and released into the atmosphere from that ancient life in the burning of fossil fuels which, in sustaining certain modes of human life, raises the current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere to 415 parts per million (ppm)
—the highest since atmospheric greenhouse gases were first recorded in 1958, and 100 ppm higher than at any time in 800,000 year time period for which data has been
collected (NOAA). The fixed amount of carbon on Earth and within its atmosphere cycles at different scales of time through rocks and sediments; the ocean; the atmosphere; and organisms, and is activated and reorganised through the rearrangement of matter; fires burning; volcanos erupting; the changing currents and temperatures of ocean water; and the life and death of organisms.
Life in the ocean encounters the cyclical movement of carbon in myriad ways, both through the biochemical composition of bodies and the ambient chemistry of the ocean waters. There are multiple mechanisms being researched under the conceptual umbrella of “fish carbon,” by which these fish provide a pH buffer, such as “biomass carbon,” that is the way in which all living creatures store carbon in their biomass, and “deadfall
carbon” which is to say that the sedimentation of their dead bodies on the ocean floor will retire carbon from the carbon cycle (Martin). The fish I encounter in this news story
emerges as an individual by way of its carbon sequestering capacity, and figures a fish able to serve a purpose that the intoxicated one cannot: a potential resource for an optimistic attachment to the future. The news event of the UNEP’s story is the emergence of fish carbon as a “new concept,” which is to say a conceptual recognition of “the
potential of marine life” in confronting climate change. The bodies of these anonymous fish are lively only insofar as they have a capacity to die; their solid biomass valued as a mitigation strategy against the same ocean acidification that, as we have seen, would
eventually scramble their lively interior. I am drawn into care for this school of fish into the recognition of their necessary protection, because of what their lifeless forms will drag to the ocean floor. I am not invited to care for them as lively beings, but as biomass, a form for regarding the ocean through a pre-2004 gaze.
Slippery objects
The fish I am encountering come in and out of focus differently as they pivot around modes of thought that can be roughly disentangled around 2004. To be more precise, it is not so much the focus as the opacity of the fish that is being fiddled with. These different modes in which its form can be understood as taking shape—dense and carbon-heavy, or transparent, lively, and mad—becomes something of an analytic for making sense of OA in the murky waters of the conjuncture we find ourselves in; a conjuncture threaded together with clarity in the city of Townsville. But I am jumping around between fish singular and plural, imaginary and imaged, intoxicated and carbon-rich. I am holding onto a slippery figure of a fish, some sort of hallucinatory composite, rather than thinking in the company one fleshly creature as per the sort of theoretical work that arises between Donna Haraway and her companion Cayenne Pepper; a Great Pyrenees who is both singular and biophysically proximate to Haraway (SK 583).
Introducing “Hydro-criticism,” Winkiel takes up the alien trope, writing that the partial ways in which this “alien environment” become knowable are necessarily “mediated through language, cameras, scientific instruments, and prostheses,” modes of mediation that Winkiel terms “hydro-imaginaries.” I would argue that the fish of this chapter also belong on that list, captured as data and image, abstracted from multiple living fish, becoming figures of fish that flop around telling stories: scientific, political, affective, ecological. They are, in the words of Jennifer Terry, “creatures that populate the narrative space called ‘nature’,” and as such “are key characters in scientific tales about the past, present, and future. Various tellings of these tales are possible, but they are always shaped by historical, disciplinary, and larger cultural contexts” (185). Given that the central object of concern for this thesis is a slow chemical alteration of a complex milieu comprised of billions of dynamic processes, histories, and constituents, it can only be read through moments of intensified focus. Whilst I would argue that a single drunken damselfish as such is a cultural object in the terms of cultural analysis, mediating an anthropogenically reduced ocean pH—especially in the wake of such binary dissolving
conceptual work as Alaimo’s trans-corporeality and Haraway’s natureculture before her— the analysis of this chapter attends to something other than my own intimate knowledge of a particular fish, like might unfold through thinking with Haraway’s companion species. This concept of companion species, Haraway stresses, is not an abstract idea but
emerges from living, historical interactions. Dogs, her primary theoretical companion,“in their historical complexity, matter here. Dogs are not an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshly material–semiotic presences… not surrogates for theory; they are not here just to think with. They are here to live with” (CSM 5). In contrast, I am considering my relation to a fish given the absence of an actual fish, how it is that I am invited into thinking a fish in acid between a media ecology of a multitude of them.
Susan Leigh Star’s “boundary object” offers helpful theoretical terms for thinking such a slippery fish object. Boundary objects are representational forms that inhabit numerous intersecting social worlds, becoming something of a communicative device between them. As they are shared between different communities, each with its own
understanding of the representation, boundary objects must be “both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites” (Star “Institutional Ecology” 393). It is in these terms that a fish figures thought between various pressures, contours,
possibilities, temporalities, and investments in the space of OA, taking different forms and inviting different modes of encounter between them. Of likely myriad forms that this
boundary object fish takes, I have detailed just two; on the one hand a fish as an object with a reassuring capacity for sequestration, and on the other a lively but vulnerable body on a probable descent into madness. Assuming there is a singular fish imaginary that gathers these forms—what I have been pointing to with the use of a singular hallucinatory fish, built as a composite form—it would certainly richly texture the singularity of the history in which it was produced, as per Stengers’ scientific artefact, which recalls too the work of the object of cultural analysis which, for Mieke Bal, is that of holding “cultural memory in the present” (Practice of Cultural Analysis 5).
To consider the singularity of the history in which it was produced, let’s return for a moment to 2004. As Brewer notes, “the decade 1990-2000 also saw the remarkable transition from the view of ocean CO2 uptake as an unmitigated blessing, to emerging
concern as the full scale of the impacts began to be apparent” (7418). Brewer describes this decade as “a turbulent time,” characterised by fierce debate and the crossing of
