Abstract
Hybrid geographies, ‘naturecultures’, and post-environmental arguments commonly caution against material essentialism, and typically eschew primordial grounds as foundations for ethics. Attenuating such claims, the following paper argues that, nevertheless, ethical grounds are functions of pre-human material givens. Further, the paper explores how we are temporally bound through these more-than-human processes and agencies. Decay is highlighted as one such ontological process that necessarily privileges itself as a matter of human and ethical concern. To argue this position, two island imaginaries are juxtaposed. By contrasting their materialities of plastic and humus, the paper proposes attending to a processual ground immanent to ethical concern. Desert islands, primordial materials of the immemorial (humus), are contrasted to a built island space proposed to be made from pelagic waste (plastic). The contrast reveals that some ontological processes are always already privileged by materialities temporally subtending specifically human spatio-temporal horizons. The argument invites contemporary hybrid geographies to attend to how spatial materialities are also agentially wrought by temporal processes that shape the emergent objects and trajectories of our thought. It concludes with the claim that an ethical basis lies in attuning to human immanence within more-than-human geo-capacities. Good to think with, islands can be performative materials for this ethical attunement.
Planet 2.0. (Adventure Ecology, 2010) Turning and turning in the widening gyre . . . (W.B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’) There are already islands where the stench announces this ending. (Michel Serres, 2011: 70)
Introduction
Asserting the impossibility of categorical boundaries around human and non-human entities has become commonplace in human geographies, cultural no less than environmental, social, political, and economic. Indeed, it is now de rigueur to acknowledge the need not to essentialize matter as ontologically fixed, 1 and debates from ‘the ontological turn’ are now central to contemporary cultural and political geographies. 2 Geographical declarations of hybridity and relationality owe their provenance to wider ontological assertions about the inescapable topological entanglement of environments. 3 Since it is difficult, if not impossible, to say where bodies begin and end, doing so is read importantly as politically and epistemologically situated. Hybrid materialisms have thus provoked arguments, among numerous others, about human and non-human agency, 4 the delineation and performative production of space and landscape, 5 and the interdigitation of culture and environments. 6
‘Naturecultures’ and related approaches can be traced through conceptual genealogies stemming at least from Spinoza’s placing of humans as functions of natura naturans (‘naturing Nature’). Spinoza argued that we are part of a single, active, self-causing, and productive whole whose predicates lie in always already generative, creative, and heterogeneous happenings outside of which human cognition does not stand. 7 Post-humanist ontologies, drawing from Spinoza’s legacy through Deleuze, Guattari, Whitehead, Latour, and others, extend an affirmative account of material imbrication to politicize complex, vibrant connections immanent within worldly becoming. 8 By wresting the moral locum from anthropocentric bias and dispersing agency through flattened assemblages of matter, these agendas locate cognitive emergence in processes that have no isolatable subject, and ‘within which things acquire the capacity to cause effects’. 9 One consequence is, as Serres has forcefully put it, the inescapability of our planetary transience or tenancy. 10 Our ethical responsibility, therefore, is to our peculiarly human situation within, and transversal movement across, diverse temporally bounded material processes. The task is not one of securing pretences to permanence or exceptionality; these latter are but mythic chimeras. Concentrated in recent years, these empirically rich and theoretically complex demands open ethical and political deliberation to both the always already many that constitutes social life, 11 and to creative ethico-political responses to the plurivocality of being and matter. 12
Yet, while diverse progress has been made in developing nuanced, materially specific, and thoroughly contextual accounts, there is a tendency, as Clark has recently argued, 13 to under-appreciate, ironically, precisely the force of those more-than-human agencies within whose material processes human thought is co-implicate. One of the reasons for this reticence is a worry over essentializing grounds. The argument goes that, if we discriminate among more and less important facets of ‘natureculture’ assemblages, then we unjustifiably privilege some things over others. Hybrid ‘natureculture’ descriptions query ontological and epistemic privilege precisely to ‘question the limits and meaning of the human and the human capacity to control the world’. 14 Identifying privileged grounds, it is thought, might lead to dangerous claims of rootedness, dubious naturalized nostalgias, unwarranted socio-natural exclusions, or simply continuing destructive anthropocentrisms. It is also noted, however, that the worry over grounds has two consequences. Either, it ‘lets humans off the ethical hook’, 15 or it is unable to be clear about what may provide the basis for ethical approaches to questions of building better dwelling. 16 Hybrid agendas, then, continue to be vexed by ethical questions of how we are to live in shared worlds, and what should guide the assembly of our living collectivities. 17 For Clark, Diprose, and others, the ‘tenacious disavowal of the grounding function of nature is itself as much a part of the problem as it is a solution’. 18
The following paper situates a response to hybrid geography’s worry about grounds. I argue that an ethical basis for hybrid geographical ontologies does lie in grounds. But, these ethical bases emerge holistically from material processes themselves (immanence) 19 and are the very ontological grounds by which things are recognized and valued as living. Grounds, defined here as the material and processual conditions of emergence, are not static essences, but essential, open and always already changing processes necessary for the contingent constitution of human thought as such. Further, in so far as life and the capacity to cultivate the potentiality of things as part of our cultural and ecological interconnections are valued, so such processes and capacities are creatively fostered, and thus privileged as changing means or grounds.
We do this all the time. We value life over death. And, when we do value death, we value it in so far as a specific death cultivates creative potential in an ongoing community of active relations (an assemblage). For example, we celebrate the death of a particular person in light of their inspiration and vitality for the continuity and affirmation of others’ lives. More prosaically, we value compost for its capacity to nurture new life. In contrast, we despair of death, as in the case of war, when creative potential and flourishing continuity are foreclosed. What is important to note in the above examples is how the inescapable horizon or processes of continuity that a specific death portends acts as processual grounds or a basis by which worlds of significance are valued, preserved, and privileged. Such valuing, in so far as it is arguably peculiar to human concern, is the work of ethics. 20
The following account foregrounds one material process, decay, as an ontological ground for a post-humanist ethics. 21 My argument privileges decay as a temporal and material action. Such privileging stems not solely from an epistemic adjudication, but from the recognition that decay is a deep process that is ontologically central to the constitution of life and its continuity as a matter of concern for humans and non-humans alike. Decay is an immanent and autochthonous process necessary for thinking, and thus ethics. Its privileging as a material basis comes simply from the recognition of its processuality as an inescapable ontological condition. I argue that ethical grounds, then, are not matters only of rationally adjudicated epistemic privilege, but simply of ontological orientation to processes from which we are always already emergent, and only hence, ethically concerned. In a sense, our ethical demand is made for us by agencies before and outside our limited human constitution.
My argument affirms three things. First, there is a reflexive value to the ontological processes of transient grounds. Second, attention to these grounds is a responsibility demanded of us from a radically more-than-human material temporality that constitutes human experience. And third, we are always already part of a material ‘response-ability’ (whether we attend to it is another matter) exemplified, in this instance, by the building processes of decay. 22 The paper’s aim is to suggest that, through the context of two materially distinct and juxtaposed geographical imaginaries, the figure of a material process outside of and before human presence configures for us an authorial ground. We are always already being authored by processes beyond but a part of us. Our ethical responsibility is to listen to these voices. Experientially manifest, at least in one instance as decay, this temporal ground constitutes for humans an ontological, and thus political, means for reflexive reckoning. Attending to the limits of this reckoning can afford a careful and generous motivation for new relations of self-cultivation (ethics). 23 I argue that while we need conceptually to preserve the flexibility of ontological categories, grounding these categories entails acknowledging that the generating vitality of the social is itself a product of specific ontologies that are privileged for us by material processes before and beyond us. In processual ontology lies material flexibility, but also the necessary grounds to imagine and affirm hybrid assemblies of life.
To make the argument, the paper thinks with two contrasting island imaginaries. These imaginaries, one plastic and one ‘pre-plastic’, are juxtaposed in terms of their material specificities. Plastic, and its non-degradability, is the feature that characterizes the first, and is contrasted to a subtending ontology of pre-human materiality in the second island imaginary. The first, Recycled Island, is a proposed built space that promises to overcome the environmental problem of non-degradable oceanic plastic with a technical solution. I interpret Recycled Island as a doomed modernist symbol of the now myopic cultural narrative that attempts to balance capitalist growth with environmental control. The second island imaginary to which the first is juxtaposed is the desert island. Desert islands are invoked, through recourse to Deleuze, 24 as pre-human materialities that perform, through precisely their archaic material geo-presence, grounding ontological processes that pre-figure and so constitute the germinal hybridities of life. I contrast the two island imaginaries to argue that each invokes different ontological assumptions about grounds for shared living (ethics). The first continues a modernist hubris that technical solutions will prevail over ecological problems. The second, unabashedly somewhat Romantic, 25 argues that some ‘pre-’ and ‘more-than-human’ material processes are ontologically more fundamental, and thus ethically prior to material technicity. The implication of the argument’s ontological juxtaposition is simply that if environmental sustainability discourses are to be effective, they must attend to fundamental processual grounds as ethico-material bases for collective living. They cannot attempt to overcome, through technicity, more-than-human ontological limits.
The analysis proceeds as follows. I first present Recycled Island as a self-styled answer to the intransigencies of pelagic plastics in the Pacific Gyre. It is then compared to its material predicate, the desert island, a pre-human, geo-material presencing prior to human thought. While material differences between so-called natural spaces and cultural or built spaces are commonly foregrounded through what appears to be a juxtaposition of kind, I argue, following Whitehead, that differences in kind are, for holistic and flattened ontologies, differences of degree. 26 Each of the seemingly different island matters possesses a shared chthonic, 27 or what Harrison terms, ‘humic grounds’. 28 On the basis of this shared ground, I proceed to an ontological politics that advocates attunement to these more fundamental material processes. The paper concludes with the suggestion that attending to humic and chthonic processes is simply a matter of orienting ethical bases to more-than-human grounds. Of their own vitality quite outside mere human concerns, these processes privilege themselves as demands for human, ethical response. In large part, we do not have much choice about ethical grounds. They are set for us by the ontological conditions immanent to thought.
Let’s begin, then, on an island and in the belly of an albatross. A dead albatross.
Intransigent plasticity
Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom – and there is no longer any land. (Nietzsche, The Gay Science)
The Gyre
A man with a camera stands over the rotting carcass of a young albatross. The chick, and thousands like it, died in the nesting grounds of Midway Atoll, a tiny marine sanctuary of sand and coral in the midst of the North Pacific, nearly 2000 miles from the nearest continental land mass. An image is framed in the viewfinder and the shutter pressed. Amidst disappearing flesh, feathers, and bone, the photo focuses on a mass of brightly coloured plastics resting where once the bird’s intestines kept them hidden. Most of the plastic pieces are small unidentifiable fragments. Others are recognizable: a baby-blue cigarette lighter; part of a black hair comb; a red bottle cap; a dented, still white, ping-pong ball. Fed by its parents who returned from soaring out over a vast polluted ocean where food and plastic were indiscernible, the chick starved to death. Indigestible matter successively clogged its alimentary tract.
Chris Jordan’s evocative photographs, which make up his 2009 project ‘Midway: Message from the Gyre’ 29 document the effects of what has come to be termed the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’. The Garbage Patch is an enormous collection of epipelagic flotsam accruing in the circular currents of the Pacific Gyre north of the Hawaiian Archipelago. 30 Estimated at one hundred million tons in floating mass, although precise figures are difficult, 31 the mostly non-biodegradable waste in the North Pacific Gyre coagulates in suspended animation. To animal perception, it fatally mimics food. Carrier bags look like jelly fish. Nurdles, or small, pre-production plastic pellets, sometimes called ‘mermaid’s tears’ resemble fish eggs. 32 Styrofoam nodules are algae-like. Epibiotic crusted netting is plant-like.
But, unlike plants, algae, fish eggs, or jelly fish, synthetic non-biodegradable plastic debris does not decay by biotic means. By slow processes of abrasion and photolysis, such plastics only break down into smaller and smaller pieces, which simply accumulate over time and at increasing rates. 33 It is contested just how long plastics remain un-integrated as mineralized elements into biotic eco-systems. But, it is generally agreed that the range is, depending on the type of plastic, from several decades to many thousands of years. 34 Some even argue that ‘all of the conventional plastics ever made remain unmineralised either as whole items or as fragments’. 35 Given that plastics have only been in production for roughly the last 100 years, in mass production for some 60 years, and that long-term studies on their amalgamation into the biosphere are moot, it is unclear how these materials will persist and what their long-term effects will be.
In-corporation
In the short term (i.e. in the life cycles of individual organisms), persistent polymerized particulates interrupt food chain interrelationships, from microscopic zooplankton and suspension filter feeders, to fish and aerial sea life like the albatross. Food, by definition, is the material capacity of a host’s horizons of life, its futurity. To eat means to transform what is not one’s body into what composes one’s body. 36 Eating simply is the merging of one’s life with the death of another (plant or animal) in a co-mingling ‘topology of intimacy and affectivity’ that confounds conventions of space and scale. 37 The transformation of the other, through decay, and into oneself is a ‘deep identity more profound than any sentimental identification . . . [It] is the reality of becoming’. 38 Yet, the vast majority of neustonic, coastal, and sea-bed plastics do not become enfolded into the horizons of other lifeworlds or vitalities. Whether they choke or otherwise preclude the possibility of life, they simply disassemble into smaller and smaller parts, which, if not remaining physically inassimilable, break down further to be absorbed molecularly as potentially toxic intracellular components. 39
What is significant, then, about the marine litter is ‘the relative difference their variable materialities make to other actors with whom contact is made’ in the ocean, and indeed, the wider world. 40 It is not that the plastics are inert (far from it – they killed the bird and present an ongoing problem to all kinds of sea-life), nor that plastics themselves are necessarily bad (again far from it – our modern lives are immeasurably better, more diverse, and manifestly abled because of them), but that as litter, their interactions pose material, and thus political and cultural, questions and demands for us. What do we do with their perceived intransigence? Why do we prefer to deny – or as Serres says, ‘abhor’ – their presence? What does their accumulation in our oceans say of our catastrophic present?
Jordan’s photographs do not detail the specifics of these material and cultural processes. They do, however, raise such questions through visualizing the intimacies of distant death precisely in the apparent juxtaposition of matter. Uncorrupted plastic, as though thrown away yesterday, sits seemingly impassive amidst a decaying mess of rotting feathers and an avian skeleton. The sun bleached spinal column, wing bones, an eye socket and gaping beak speak to how the young bird becomes something else and food for others. Its flesh becomes energy for bacteria and insects. Minerals are taken up by plants. Water and gases evaporate into the atmosphere. The bird’s decay, therefore, is a building, a generative becoming for a creative assemblage of interconnected others. Its nature (phusis) is a generation (genesis). 41 Enfolding through the othernesses of which it is transitively imbricated, the bird’s dissolution evidences decay as ‘a nested maze of interiorities whereby all interiorized horizons or formations are exteriorized in unimaginably twisted ways’. 42 In other words, the decaying bird is transitioning in a process of generative renewal.
But what of the plastic? How do we understand its effects and affects under a relational characterization of its materiality? Are differences of kind differences of degree? Do its features manifest themselves as variables of a single ontological plane? Indeed, some recent relational claims about plastic’s enchantment, agency, and specificity within contextual complexity 43 seem misplaced, ironically re-asserting an anthropomorphism of value, and, in Diprose’s words, also letting humans, with their enabling and destructive inventions, off the hook. How do we ground claims for an ethical sharing of worlds, a sharing denied the albatross, if the hybridity of plastic becomes its own justification? How do we preclude the risk of relativizing material value? Is it possible to assert a non-essential relational materialism, and still privilege certain material processes over others?
I argue it is possible, but that the source of the ontological privilege lies outside human intentionality. Indeed, it lies instead within transitioning processes by which materiality becomes an immanent question for us. One of the more important of these processes is decay itself.
Temporal plasticity
Building time
Clearly, in the instance of plastic meeting fleshy insides, something else is required of our conceptual and political grammars. The seemingly obdurate agency of plastic demands a response. How we respond reveals much about how we approach material difference. So, what of the plastic?
Actively anathema to becoming the basis for building something else via non-human, biotic, or, perhaps even, abiotic processes, plastic remains in undead limbo. One could even make the claim that, at least in this instance, and from the perspective of non-human interests, plastic does not meld with the biotic to produce either a cyborg 44 or a prosthetic. 45 The generative, often human, technicity demanded of such hybridizing interventions that claims to build a continued vitality is missing; assertions regarding the potentiality of hybrid materiality break down. Similarly, claims about flows ‘of relation in which all kinds of unlike things can knock up against each other in all kinds of ways’, 46 or ‘a subtle folding together of the distant and the proximate, the virtual and the material, presence and absence, flow and stasis, into a single ontological plane’ 47 also reveal themselves as somewhat simplistic. Such relational claims might work in the contexts of cities and nations as social objects or forms – from which these examples are drawn – but do they work as wider ontological generalizations of matter?
Indeed, such arguments break down precisely because they essentialize space to the detriment of time. The material space invoked by both the cyborg and city/nation examples is a humanized material space whose anthropocentrism is revealed in the theories’ cleaving to peculiarly human scales of time, and hence value. It is not that the plastic that killed the bird does not change; it does, only very slowly, almost imperceptibly slowly to human onlookers. If we want to characterize spatial flow across topologies in relational geographies, 48 we have to attend to the multiple (human and non-human) temporalities of such flows as temporalities that make possible our capacity for thinking and futurity. Through temporal processes like decay, material potentialities become legacies for other living things and give themselves as privileged, and thus ethically present, grounds.
In the following section, I examine one proposed, if rather fantastical, spatial response to the temporal demands of neustonic 49 plastics. I argue that if we over-emphasize the value of human responses in built, technical spaces, we lose sight of the larger, and far longer than human, temporal complexities necessary for embracing our ontological embeddedness in more-than-human processes.
Recycled Island
One recent response to the threat of pelagic plastics has been the suggestion to make it into something else. ‘Recycled Island’ is the speculative design of Rotterdam-based WHIM Architects. 50 The artificial island, were it to be built, would turn the estimated 100 million tonnes of plastic flotsam in the Pacific Gyre into a 10,000 km2, self-sustaining urban-island habitation. 51 ‘Recycled Island’ mobilizes the rhetoric of islophilic promise to respond to the obdurate mess of neustonic plastic through the potential to make a habitable built space from the otherwise lethal matter. These promises are revealed in the experimental project’s self-described goals: to change the character of the plastic waste from garbage to building material; to render the resulting island habitable; to add economic value to the ocean surface by creating land and property; to provide a potential habitat for displaced climate refugees; and, to create an innovative, mixed-use urban environment, which acts as an exemplary, sustainable, self sufficient, green living habitat. 52
Recycled Island evidently exists as a speculative architectural fantasy. Although a very real research project supported by the Stimuleringsfonds voor Architectuur (Netherlands Architecture Fund), complete with concept descriptions, use justifications, a prototype design, and drawings, the island only exists as a virtual product in an interactive online environment (www.whim.nl and www.RecycledIsland.com). In doing so, it participates in a noted and important feature of recent artificial island grammars, that of spectacular attraction through iconic, if also virtual, social promise. As with similar real, imagined, and virtually articulated artificial islands, Recycled Island’s power as a cultural sign and geographical space lies in its virtuality. 53 Preposterous or not, what is important about this imaginary fantasy is that it repeats an actual cultural discourse of paradisiacal renewal, ostensibly through the model of the malleable, desert island.
Desert islands, as we know, have long articulated themselves as tropes for constructing utopic promise, as well as isolating threat, or experimental possibility; desert islands – islands generally – are paradoxical spaces, and it is in their contradictory character that their creative potential is seen to lie. Open to human habitation as, ostensibly, blank slates, they are often seen to offer themselves as neutral spaces for the design of human futures beyond the continentally bound restrictions or perceived failures. 54 Desert islands, then, are metaphors of island-ness stripped bare. They are geo-models cum metaphors for imaginary productions of place, and entirely fictional universes – though no less culturally important arbiters – of possibility. Think, for instance, of Charles Avery’s epic and ongoing artistic project, The Islanders; 55 or, of mythical places always already beyond the horizon (e.g. Frisland); or, simply, previous unknowns, quickly rendered known (e.g. Aotearoa-New Zealand); or the more recent chimeras in the Persian Gulf. In each case, they are material figures, surfaces, and sometimes solutions with which we learn to think, and afterwards to populate. Their beckoning cultural agency invokes logics of second origin, at once artistic, economic, and political.
Recycled Island might, however, like certain other of its artificial cousins, also go one step further. While desert islands are symbols of opportunity and potential paradise, they are most often invoked through the doubled polarity of paradise and prison. In such veins Robinsonades achieved their lasting legacy. 56 Recycled Island imagines an island space beyond the metaphors of prison and loneliness. In the environmental sustainability rhetoric now so familiar as cultural and increasingly economic imperative, Recycled Island articulates only opportunity and eco-salvation. The island’s reclaimed and recycled materiality itself, at least in its imagined capacity, becomes a material release from the destructive prison of pelagic plastic. Insular material prison becomes vibrant eco-social and economic promise.
Spatial technicity
The cultural trope of Recycled Island’s particular islographic imaginary (there are many interrelated island imaginaries) enrols familiar modernist genealogies of built space as enclosure and subsequent mastery. By blending the modern technical power of spectacular built space with age-old mythic signs of the island as reprieve and renewal, the Recycled Island imaginary evokes deep-seated cultural narratives of the human possibility to overcome adversity through technical facility. Islands and their stories have often been read as promissory spaces. Narratives of islandness keen to emphasize human management, renewal, and reprieve have long been co-extensive with the geographical emergence of island objects themselves. 57 Recent artificial island objects have only exacerbated and heightened these often contradictory and well-worn spatial grammars of spectacular promise, exclusive remove and renewed technicity. 58 Recycled Island, as a virtual project, brings together these narratives to offer itself as a kind of response to the actual difficulties posed by the plastic gyre and what its un-generative, un-incorporable reveals of our late modern condition.
At first blush, we might think that the island promise presented by the WHIM architects and engineers is a creative, ecologically attentive response to the troubling problem of ‘plastic oceans’. Whether practical or feasible – or not – the imaginary artificial island made of recycled waste is certainly a promissory space wherein the capitalist-industrial fantasy of sustainability 59 is preserved by speculative assurances of engineered progress. Recycled Island, and my attention to it, could be dismissed as such, as a trifle, an insignificant, rather silly folly that does not amount, geographically or socially, to much. But, such responses underestimate the power that the circulation of these fantastical signs wields. Virtual proposals resonate wider cultural assemblages and imaginaries of modernity and technicity, economies of growth, developmental panaceas, sustainability, and human adaptability.
Recycled Island is a small part of the wider ‘resonance machine’ 60 of technical adaptability to the otherwise ‘obdurate facts of mortality, time . . . ’ and waste. 61 A sign that reverberates through past human capacities, the Recycled Island imaginary infiltrates perceptions of waste and pollution with cultural inflections of solvability. At the same time, it denies the inevitability of decay and ruin to occlude failing conditions of capitalist production, over-consumption, impossible economies of growth, and limits to material inter-dependence. It is an element of what Connolly calls an ‘abstract machine’, 62 and resonates within a broad cultural application of scientific will to harness and overcome the problem of waste as a reflection of decay and death. Not unlike recent geo-engineering initiatives to address anthropogenic climate change through technical means like reflective atmospheric particulates, carbon capture and storage, ocean seeding, or engineered plant surfaces, 63 Recycled Island qua built space invokes a human technical response as panacea to dangerous social and ecological problems (pollution, rising sea levels, eco-refugees, land value, and sustainable cities). It certainly also harkens to similar recent initiatives that draw attention to the oceanic problem of waste plastic. The WHIM proposal, and its extensive media coverage 64 highlights smaller scale progenitors to the project. For example, a small island habitation in the Caribbean made of recycled plastic water bottles has spawned a global, if very niche, interest in building islands from recycled waste called the Spiral Island Network. 65 A second progenitor revealingly puts the problem more starkly. A much publicized crossing of the Pacific in 2010 by ‘Plastiki’, a 60 ft catamaran made of discarded water bottles (the name is a 21st century play on Thor Heyerdahl’s ‘Kon-Tiki expedition) heralds itself as a ‘compelling and pioneering expedition . . . needed . . . not only to inform, but also [to] captivate, activate and educate the world that waste is fundamentally inefficient design’. 66 This is a remarkable claim, and should not be passed over lightly. Remarkably, the ontological inevitability of waste and decay, within this framework, itself has become, for these ‘Planet 2.0’ 67 initiatives, a modern design issue! Like its real precursor, Plastiki, Recycled Island also promotes itself through a narrative of socio-technical hubris that attempts to overcome even the problem of waste.
Materio-temporal grounds
It is clear that the Recycled Island’s imaginary participates in a long cultural history of promissory modernism. Becoming something else through building is, perhaps, the central problematic for modernity. On the one hand, we find ourselves immersed within immutable processes of the material world. On the other hand, we are able to shape matter, and are shaped by it, so as to build means to address human concerns. Doing so in a sustained way, which maximizes the capacities afforded by immutability, while also universally minimizing the effects of injustice, inequality, ugliness, and ignorance, has been the focus of western, modern rationalism since, at least, the Enlightenment. Such principles ostensibly underwrite modern technology, institutions, social structures, and cultural representations.
Yet, at the root of the problematic of becoming through building – development, broadly defined – lies an ontological material bind. Becoming is a process, and beings are fluid. Decay, the always already becoming of things into one another in a vast vernacular of object fluidity, 68 is the condition for the possibility of building. Things fall apart, crumble into ruin, degrade, are corruptible, and are the means to building. But modernity seeks to overcome the problem of natural, material, transience by building ostensibly timeless spaces beyond the vagaries of history in new and uncorrupted spaces for the formal exercise of governmental permanence and aspiration. Cities like Abuja, St. Petersburg, Chandigarh, Brasilia, Canberra and Dubai sit as actual exemplars of this hubris alongside more imaginary, but equally built, and, perhaps, more influential edifices, like Le Corbusier’s Radiant City and Plan Voisin; Frank Lloyd-Wright’s Broadacre; or Buckminster Fuller’s floating Triton City. All, like Recycled Island, are social machines – what Fuller called, ‘mechanical organics’ 69 – for overcoming limitation in the promises, removed from the intransigencies of natural matter, of living better and longer.
One rhetorical effect of built and imagined spaces like Brasilia, Triton City, or Recycled Island is their didacticism. Whether in an actual material presence, or an imagined absent presence to come, each aims to edify. In doing so, however, each essentializes matter in a particular way. The consequence is that humans need to enact their ethical will to either eliminate artificial matter, or transform the dumb potential of natural matter to human future and present social goods. 70 In light of this critique, Recycled Island can be seen to edify a space wherein plastic is rendered anathema to natural, ethically significant matter, but which, through human ingenuity can transform the excessive space of the ocean surface to worthy potential. In both cases, the ethical locus rests in a peculiarly human capacity to preserve significant, natural matter, and to solve its limitations and incapacities so as to improve human potential. Humans, thus, are constructed as the sole locus of ethical agency.
Hawkins’ caution chimes with a series of claims in relational materialism about ethical agency. Like Whatmore, Grosz, Braun, and others, her concern aims to ‘suggest that different associations make present different material qualities and affects, and this contestability of matter is fundamentally implicated in ethical deliberations’. 71 The worry is that when we do not accord diversity to materiality, and when we do not recognize how disparate effects produce differing contexts and situations, we erroneously reduce the contingent and active capacities of objects. The result is that we privilege some kinds of matter over others, essentialize non-essential material capacities, reify supposed moral certainties, and ultimately re-assert the human as the sovereign source of change. 72 Such assertions deny that ontologies distribute agencies as part of their material complexity. Instead, Hawkins argues, we need to recognize ‘that there are multiple sites of agency in the world’ 73 so as to generate new associations, politics and ethics. The trouble with such arguments, as I have intimated at the beginning, is that they leave us unable to discriminate between better and worse forms of building shared worlds. Not doing so lets us off the ethical hook and precludes grounds for basing ethical claims.
In the context of Recycled Island as a response to plastic oceans, an important question emerges which, it appears, conventional hybrid geographies are unable or unwilling to answer: is it representative of a creative spatial politics, new consumptive ethics, or basis for sharing worlds? My answer would be a resounding, no. In light of Recycled Island as a figment of an architectural fantasist’s imagination, my judgement is perhaps meaningless. But, in light of the artificial island as part of a larger ‘abstract machine’ whose general approach to consumption and ecological sustainability is lauded in a repetition of technical panaceas to ongoing catastrophe, the claim might have more purchase.
Recycled Island manifests cultural exhaustion. It simply mobilizes an ethic of ecological responsibility through a familiar islophilic and human centred lens, which leaves the production, consumption and waste assemblage of plastics’ own emergence un-thought. Our capacity to recognize the ontological privileges that predicate our own possibility are denied. By neglecting the material immanence necessary for thinking its very possibility, Recycled Island, like many similar capitalist sustainability fantasies, ignores its own ontological conditions (spatial and temporal) in favour of an ethos of denial. Worse, a hybrid geography risks celebrating heterogeneity at the expense of critical intervention.
In the next section I focus on the crux of my argument. Rather than worry about essentializing matter, and so seek to preserve the multiplicity of objects, we need to recognize the privilege of those ontological processes that are already the spatiotemporal grounds for becoming. Doing so preserves material multiplicity, while also furnishing us with the necessary capacity to distinguish processes that are always already privileged for us in our inescapable natural contract. 74 In order to illustrate how a material immanence subtending the possibility of Recycled Island and that constitutes a relational deep ground is effaced by the modernist, technical imaginary of the space itself, I turn to another narrative of islands.
The plasticity of desert islands
Deleuze
Mackay has recently written that the ‘perennial poetry’ of islands emerges from an elemental and mythical vitality that emanates outside of, and before, thought. 75 Deleuze called this immanent source, metaphorically, ‘the desert island’. 76 In an early essay written in 1953, Deleuze outlined how the desert island figures a relational ground to the geographical imaginaries that follow. Within Deleuze’s account, Recycled Island, a dynamic and promissory space of human becoming and redemption (at least for the particular problems of oceanic plastic waste, refugees, and primitive accumulation), exemplifies a logic that itself derives from, and reproduces, an underlying geo-morphological presence prior to thought. The very possibility of Recycled Island as an artificial island is dependent on a grounding vitality, the force of whose presence are the processes of its pre-human materialities. The significance of its difference for what emerges as Recycled Island is temporality rather than spatiality. Deleuze wrote that ‘island’s are . . . from before . . . humankind . . . In the ideal of the beginning anew there is something that precedes the beginning itself, that takes it up to deepen it and delay it in the passage of time’. ‘The desert island’, he continues, ‘is the material of this something immemorial’. 77 The desert island ‘is . . . the origin, radical and absolute’, 78 a ground, literal and figurative, implicated from – that is, woven through – a more-than-human matter necessary for thinking about the problem of the future.
Because it is uninhabited and a place without and before people, the desert island is, for Deleuze, an emblematic place of the concurrent and vital forces that generate both originary myths and the very material horizons of human building and possibility. 79 Its radical spatial and material otherness speaks of an anterior temporality beyond and before humans, but within whose forces humans are predicated. It is both place and stuff (soil, sand, rock, plants, etc.) suggestive of temporalities of creative difference and repetition because it is a bounded, yet porous, platform or slate for habitation and futurity. Of course, the very vitality and materiality of desert islands are the conditions within and through which habitation is conceivable. The point for Deleuze, however, is that this vitality is radically distinct and prior to human understanding. As such, the desert island, whose forces, changes, transitions, and becomings are utterly indifferent to human concern, is performative of the processes whose energetic and material flows subtend and make possible the same human concern. Our responsibility, for Deleuze, is to understand ourselves as irrevocable products within these elemental processes, and to be culturally and politically creative within their dynamic and open-ended remit. The ontological is the ethical and the ethical is the ontological. 80
The essay on desert islands presaged by almost a decade Deleuze’s later work where, in Difference and Repetition, and later with Guattari in Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus, the earth is conceived as a generative unfolding of multiple difference within whose means capacities for production, generation, and renewal (i.e. repetition) emerge as energetic and material flows. 81 Early on, the desert island is recognized by Deleuze as a material and thus textual sign for the immanently creative ground subtending human concerns for territory, population, and related political concepts. Given from whence they speak, that is, before language, politics, and human thought, desert islands are singularities, only later mythologically grounded, through which we may return to a pre-philosophical, uncreated (but open and creative), prototypical movement of materiality. Deleuze calls this ‘the collective soul’. 82 Desert islands, then, are representative of where one begins again from within what the ‘desert island’ as material process gifts as agency for what follows, including thought. It is then a porous, relational presence subtending and pre-existing human politics and culture.
What is important here is the recognition that the island as representative of ‘common soul’ or ground is given to us. Generative vitality lies outside of, and before, thought. Indeed, its material convolutions are the conditions for the capacity of creative response, and only as such is it recognizable as given. Deleuze does not speak in his essay of decay, but he does emphasize time and the subtending material temporalities, the vitalities and generativities, which constitute human means. Human thought, then, is posited as a secondary phenomenon to the primary ‘élan that produces the island’. 83 Human presence, as our fated bird might attest, ‘in fact spoils its desertedness’. 84
Pre-human pre-hension
There is, thus, on the part of Deleuze, a distinct privileging of earthly forces as productive sources. To pretend that some material processes are not essential or privileged, as some relational materialists are wont to do, ironically re-asserts a human privilege to valuation that quite deliberately occludes and denies the pre-human grounds that act as ‘meta-strata’ 85 for our action. The worry about essentialism and material privilege, however, should not be seen as a worry about anthropocentrism, precisely because these privileging processes are outside of and before human agency. Indeed, they are agencies that subtend and make possible our own agency. As I have been suggesting throughout, decay is one of the most present of such given processes, 86 and one we would do well to return to and privilege, culturally and politically, as essential. Indeed, the depth of their presence is the condition of our own emergence and experience of thrown-ness. 87
Unlike those who argue for a relational ontology that recognizes the specific, pluri-vocal, and adaptive potential of ‘multiple sites of agency’ 88 that so preclude us from privileging one type of material process over others, there is merit in recognizing the privilege of some processes. Materiality might, in part, be reducible to the ontological relations that constitute its formation. What is the point of emphasizing a single ontological plane wherein space and matter emerge as performative entanglements of specific, temporally bound relations, if we cannot at the same time recognize, in our shifting declarations of objects, their transience? Not only is it advantageous to recognize matter as reducible to relations, but the threat of a human-centred essentialism is removed in the recognition that the choice of privilege is taken from our hands. As transient subjects enmeshed and entangled in material processes of becoming, we are subject to processes and grounds that precede and thus bind us. Our responsibility should thus be to this binding rather than to fruitlessly attempting to overcome the bonds that connect us to the world. 89
Chthonic attunement
What is given is what I call a ‘chthonic’ ground, and it is predicated through the process of decay. Chthonic attunement seeks to attend to the vitalities that speak both to the powers that send up fruits and bounteous blessings from below, as well as those putrefactions of the grave; indeed, they are the same thing. In either case, of course, vitalities of life are vital as transformative processes of immanent return and difference making that we call decay or putrefaction. As Negarestani writes, decay is ‘an irresolute process of building that potentiates architectures which, whilst infinitely open to new syntheses and transformations, cannot undergo complete annulment or return to their original form’.
90
Decay is a dynamic embodiment that allows objects to manifest their living within processes of incorporation and transformation. Living is the transition manifest as decay and through death: Living things undergo decay . . . because living – whether living on a biological level or not – secures a horizon of interiority whose envelopment must be exteriorized according to the differential rates or gradients that bind the horizon to that which is exterior to it. In other words, if decay is most frequently associated with life, it is because the manifestations of life are all founded on horizons of interiority. All that is interiorized decays.
91
Except, of course, the plastic. Plastic presents itself as an ethical concern for us precisely because it cannot be interiorized within the living horizons of the planetary bird, or similar earthly life processes. It might be able to be interiorized within the life span of a mineralizing object as it will degrade eventually. But, if the ethical demand comes to one as the attention to the problem of planetary life, whether human or more-than-human, then the means by which the ethical demand is a question for thought must necessarily negotiate the fundamental and essential principle for life of interiorization. And this process of interiorization, which is the ground of ethical concern, is a process given to us quite outside human intentionality. Indeed, it is the condition for human action and will. Thus, the ethical privilege and demand comes from outside us, before us, in the ontological process of life as capacity for interiority.
Planetary interiority
It is in this light that we must see plastic and our contemporary, situated responses to it. On the one hand, plastic is most surely chthonic. Formed by re-shaping fossil fuel, itself the solar economy of long dead and decayed organisms, plastic is an extruded, vitrified, reduced and condensed vitality whose formal flexibility makes it so useful and necessary to contemporary life. As I have suggested, the materialities of plastic and pre-human island are not different in kind, but in degree. That is, they are different in time; they are differences repeated. But, on the other hand, plastic presents itself to us as an ethical problem precisely because it foregrounds, in its obduracy and intransigence, the principle of attending to life as interiorization. For what is an ethical response if it does not respect and seek to maintain processes of interiority? It would not be ethics were it not to attend to this fundamental ontological principle that is privileged for us as a matter of being alive. At issue here is not a spatial difference, but the recognition of the difference time makes to living. An ethics that is attuned to the chthonic capacities of matter and its processes, to how interiorization is necessary for living, is one that recognizes a privileging before us and towards the living potentials of things to come, however far in the future. Deleuze saw this represented in the material presence of the desert island. It is one that both recognizes our transience and tenancy among a vast transience of things, and privileges those processes essentialized for us by the dynamic, chthonic grounds through which we, as planetarily bound and living, are manifest and possible.
Robert Pogue Harrison also calls for this necessity in an ethical privileging. He calls it an attunement to the ‘humic’ ground. 92 By ‘humic’ he means much what I mean by ‘chthonic’. Humans, he argues, like all living things, are not a species, but a certain ‘connection with the humus’. 93 Of course, we are not alone in this connection. All living things have a connection with humus. But we have a unique connection, just as an albatross has a unique connection, a beetle, an orchid, a worm, a virus, a plastic bottle, etc. The difference is the unique enfoldment through the humic ground that constitutes life. Death and decay are for him means by which we can attend ethically, culturally, and politically to our given connections. To be ethical is to attend reflexively to our humic grounds, culturally with respect to those who come before and after us, and ecologically with those radically different others who share our planetary transience.
Harrison argues, however, that the penchant within the modern has been to ignore our debts to the chthonic or humic ground exemplified in an attunement to the building of decay. Like Serres, he argues that we have ‘abandoned the bond that connects us to the world, the one that binds the time passing and flowing’ to our human knowledge, language and cultures. 94 Instead, we, as moderns, have engaged in ‘an anxious and even frenzied flight from death’. 95 Not afraid to assert an appeal to the genuine or authentic, he, like Serres, argues for a need to be ‘genuinely modern’, which means not forsaking the places and processes ‘by which our dying can make itself at home’. 96
Harrison continues that this is not only a spatial project, but is more genuinely a spatiotemporal attention to the legacies of our production and their capacity to recognize the animating principles and processes that precede and thus underpin them. 97 Attuning ourselves to these processes, and living creatively in accord with them, rather than fighting against them, as is our modern wont, is the task of ‘a new economy of habitation’, 98 one that would accord to our ethics a deep ground. This ground is given to us as the dynamic material condition of our thought, and thus is the means by which we privilege some actions over others. Taking our measure in light of such privileged processes enables us to build a relational account of generative possibility through an attunement with the chthonic means of our dwelling. This is not a morbid funereal tuning. Quite the opposite. It is a generative, productive, and reflexive attunement that seeks its legitimacy and possibility across maximized horizons of planetary life, and that reads our own human emergence through those signs that precede, subtend, and outlive our own transience. It is a careful attention to nurturing our transience and intermingling with similarly transient interconnections that similarly precede, proceed, and post-cede us. 99 The point is, though, that they are already grounds whether we choose to recognize them as such or not.
The desert island, for Deleuze, was a sign of our genuine ground or authentic bond. What is most important about the desert island is what Deleuze calls its ‘mythological life’, its place within a material immanence that re-emerges as a site for possibility once, as he writes, the catastrophe takes place: ‘It is not enough that everything begin, everything must begin again once the cycle of possible combinations has come to completion.’ 100 I would suggest that, counter-intuitively, Recycled Island and its artificial and built modernist brethren past and present, ostensibly sustainable or not, are not evidence of beginning again, after the catastrophe of ocean pollution, but rather are symptoms of the cycle of possible modern combinations coming to one form of end, especially those combinations that make up a bourgeois capitalism predicated on industrial, extractive growth.
Indeed, such was the basis for Deleuze’s critique of the novel Robinson Crusoe in favour of Michel Tournier’s re-write, Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique. 101 Briefly, his critique of Defoe’s novel runs as follows: ‘The mythic recreation of the world from the very being of the desert island gives way to a reconstruction of everyday bourgeois life based on capital investment’. 102 Recent artificial islands, like those pretences to immortality and anxious flights from death, are, similarly, reconstructions of everyday bourgeois life based on capital investment, par excellence, and are not desert islands as such. For Deleuze, the ecologically attuned vital energy cannot emerge exclusively from the solely rational exercise of human will, but must emerge from the immanent, literal, always beginning again of more-than-human agency from within the limits of its initial pre-conditions (i.e. those material conditions differentially necessary for the emergence of thought). Desert islands thus are metaphorical place holders, or what Conley calls ‘plot points’ 103 for thinking this always already networked possibility. The exercise of technical intention in built form, or even in artificial island form, cannot alone realize a perfectible, sustainable, contained, actualized stasis of isolation. It must attune itself also to ontological grounds that themselves make possible that building. We need thus to push hybridity theses to incorporate the political agencies of the non-human or more-than-human material conditions for island being/becoming, and as such recognize their privileged place for us as agentially predicated grounds.
Recycled Island’s imaginary project, and those of its wider resonance, exemplifies a contemporary slippage from the disappearance of unknown territorializations to the truncated agencies of a non-human earth in the form of contemporary junkspace. Immemorial matter, this time in the form of non-putrefiable plastic, a once living solar economy now rendered non-life, chthonically returns, neither living nor dead, in limbo, literally oceanically suspended and inassimable. Ontologically, and thus also politically, there is no distinction between the Plastic Gyre as it is today, and the imaginary Recycled Island were it to be built. The latter is but a cannibalizing form of primitive accumulation.
Conversely, the desert island, a pre-human form, materializes a plane for thinking the mythic pre-human promise through which we might be able to re-form a political ontology of becoming. Recycled Island, on the other hand, mobilizes the imaginary of the island, but through a matter no-longer pre-human. It reveals the absurdity of the modernist pretence of built space, and demands that, were we to re-begin, we would need to think the productive and economic conditions of life from within new complexities of material, and thus vital and thoughtful, processes. Decay is central to thinking this possibility. The once pre-human, petroleum hydrocarbon – decayed, intensified, solar life, now plastic – is simplified into a form devoid of living transformation. It came from life, as all living matter does, but is extruded into a suspended proto-animation of un-dead limbo; it can’t putrefy. If it were to putrefy, truly, that is, to become interiorized into the horizon of another’s planetary living, then it might move beyond the ruin it incarnates. But it doesn’t. It is a zombie matter. Once living, it has become with our myopic interference, now undead. The sea and avian life that ingests it reveals this tragedy. As Nietzsche wrote in The Gay Science, ‘Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom – and there is no longer any land’. 104
Conclusion
There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life’s end is death. (R. Jeffers, ‘The Purse-Seine’, 1937)
So, what are we to do in an age that is quickly seeking to forget the mythic immemorial? What to do when we have become ‘so interconnected, complex and uprooted’ that there are ‘no more desert islands . . . no longer any land’. 105 What are we to do when the generative grammars of thought have become divorced from a collective, deep, mythic, and pre-human, fundamentally material past, when the fruits of human intention have turned bad, when science and critical thought have gnawed away our capacity to recognize the processual grounds of human existence? 106 One, rather exhausted, modernist response is that we reinvent grounds in order, ostensibly, to overcome our ontological limits. We thus build new spaces to start again, to start better. It is in such veins that many so-called ‘sustainable development’ initiatives justify themselves. If they are like Recycled Island, however, these supposedly new geographical islands will not do. Technical solutions that preclude the recognition of the many implicate, immanent grounds that delimit their own possibility, become little other than simply gyrating symptoms of a creative modernist collapse and catastrophe. They thus evidence themselves as the completion of a set of possible material combinations by repeatedly ignoring the constitutive grounds framing our very human material capacities.
Desert islands, mythological, enchanted, and emergent from chthonic agencies to which we are harnessed, do provide, as representative and performative exemplars, some processual means to recognize a metaphorical re-characterization of possible bases for nature-culture ethics. Only, we don’t only need to build islands; rather, we need first to think with them, to think with how they build us, and with their more-than-human relations, assert materiality as grounding processes. It should be noted that such suggestions are not new. In the contemporary environmentalist tradition from Rachel Carson and Robinson Jeffers forward, or back even to the Epicureans or the Stoics, the counsel to live in a balance with the processes of which we are part and product is well known. The point here has not been to supplant such suggestions, but simply to offer desert islands and their assemblages as one among many means to re-cognize our ontological pre-conditions. It has also been to argue that processual grounds always already constitute means for conceptualizing an emergent futurity. Material grounds, conceived as a processual condition, are given frames for thinking as such: ‘The essence of the deserted island is imaginary . . . and not geographical.’ 107
I have argued that one means to humic attunement lies in a critical attention to our affectual experience of temporal processes wherein putrefaction and decay manifest our building conditions for productive and ethically reflexive life. Their demand emanates from an agency that is radically other to our human ken. The temporalized spaces and ontological processes within which we find ourselves primordially thrown are always already privileged simply by dint of life and our capacity to experience and think with it. 108 Ontological temporality is oriented, then, both to its long pre-human provenance, as much as to its post-human capacities; indeed, they are constituents of the same over-arching processual whole. With the junk-space proliferation of zombie matter like non-biodegradable plastics (one could add to plastics the deleterious effects of enriched nuclear materials, for instance, or persistent organic pollutants like DDT, etc.), and the inability to adjudicate its limits, we neglect the temporal grounds of our now gyrating and coagulating, non-interiorizing waste.
Our modernity, a carboniferous efflorescence of stored, solar matter, released in imaginative material possibilities for and of thought, is tens of millions, no, hundreds of millions of years old. By attending to the place of the matter in producing (and not producing) the possibilities for a future, productive and vital politics, can we attune ourselves to the humic emergence of our own thought as always already radically authored. Islands, and fundamentally, their radical relationalities that reveal us as thrown, transient, and minute tenants in an unfathomably colossal ground, can provide a means (but perhaps not the only means) for this attunement.
The take away point for relational and hybrid geographies is that our responsibility to attune ourselves to an ethical economy of nurtured transience and more-then-human agency reveals the ethical need to recognize ontological processes of which we are already a part. These grounds are not static essences of our own making and assertion. They are active grounds from which we emerge as temporally bound constituents. They are, moreover, privileged for us by more-than-human agencies that require us, if we wish to build human futures, to listen culturally, politically, socially, and economically, to the wider material reverberations of which we are inextricably a part. We are, whether we like it or not, processually and ethically bound.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.