Carsten Wergin

Thinking Through the Seas and Oceans. Towards Transculturality Beyond the Human 

This paper explores the fragility and endurance of maritime societies as sources of modest forms of biocultural hope in the face of human-made environmental degradation. The term society is used here to describe what emerges from the ongoing ‘becoming-with’ of diverse human and more-than-human actors in transcultural entanglement. Meanwhile, the paper draws on the seas and oceans as ‘theory machines’ to significantly broaden the notion of transculturality beyond the human (Helmreich 2011).

Such ‘multispecies’ maritime societies can be termed traditionally fragile (Kirksey 2014). They have been and continue to be heavily impacted on by diverse geopolitical, economic, and ecological forces. However, the hypothesis put forward in this paper is that the resilience they continue to display against such forces – from colonial regimes, rising sea levels and oil spills, to the corporate empires of late liberalism – suggests maritime societies as particularly suitable for research into more ‘cosmopolitical’ means of engagement with the world (Stengers 2005).

To come to terms with those forms of engagement, this paper approaches maritime societies through the seas and oceans. It sets out from diverse ‘ruptures’ caused by, among others, geo-maritime facts (tidal movements, currents, straits), migratory animals, as much as confrontations between Indigenous knowledge traditions, Western law, science and technology. I will argue that the survival of maritime societies depends to a significant extend on the creative use of and engagement with such ruptures. While the alternative scenarios they invoke go as far as to embrace the ‘toxic’, since what might be toxic for late liberalism can carry hope for those who are at their existential limits (Povinelli 2016: 27).

In light of the predicament of the Anthropocene, maritime societies thus have the potential to offer new tools and categories that are desperately needed to envision onto-epistemic partnerships that had been foreclosed by the overemphasis on human-centred progress and development. This is particularly pertinent in the rising conflicts between resource industries on the one and preservation initiatives on the other. As the paper will highlight, these conflicts have activated new and situated eco-critical debates about the future of the seas and oceans.

Karen Barad’s notion of ‘agental realism’ is helpful here (Barad 2007). It moves the attention away from problems that result from (mis)representations of an allegedly independent reality towards, “the real consequences, interventions, creative possibilities, and responsibilities of intra-acting within and as part of the world” (Barad 2007: 37). This proposition aligns her with other eco- and anticolonial feminist scholars who emphasise what is in place, rather than the assumptions made of it (Neimanis 2015, Spivak 2003, Todd 2016). Along these lines, I conclude by proposing some interdisciplinary analytical categories that are to help highlight processes of world-making in more ‘diplomatic’ ways (Latour 2013).

Works cited
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Engtanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
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Helmreich, S. (2011) Nature/Culture/Seawater. American Anthropologist 113: 132–144.
Kirksey, E. (ed., 2014) The Multispecies Salon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Latour, B. (2013) An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge, Mass.: CUP.
Neimanis, A. (2015) No Representation without Colonisation? (Or, Nature Represents Itself). Somatechnics 5.2: 135-153.
Spivak, G. (2003) Death of a Discipline, New York: Columbia University Press.
Stengers, I. (2005) “The Cosmopolitical Proposal.” In: Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, edited by B. Latour and P. Weibel. Cambridge: MIT Press, 994-1003.
Plumwood, V. (2009) Nature in the Active Voice. Australian Humanities Review 46: 113-129.
Povinelli, E. (2016) Geontologies: a requiem to late liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Todd, Z. (2016) An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism. Journal of Historical Sociology 29.1: 4-22.