The aquatic as elemental excess

Dipping toes into water worlds

As a human geographer interested in moving the discipline towards a ‘hydrologics’ perspective (see Anderson, 2012, 2014), I agree with Chiaroni (2016: 108) in suggesting that now is the time to critically reflect on the:

earth-bound lexicon of continents and grounds, islands, terrains, reference-points and touchstones…[what would happen] if we were to change the element within which we think, and relinquish our parcels of conceptual ground in order to remain open to the element of water and its associated qualities of fluidity?

In ‘The ocean in excess’ paper, the authors extend their own critique of Schmitt (2003 [1950]: 43) who, in their analysis, reduces the ocean to a culturally empty, open and smooth space. As Schmitt puts it, ‘on the waves there is nothing but waves’ (2003 [1950]: 42–43). To counter this reduction, the authors extend their own and others’ work to demonstrate how the ocean exceeds such an apparently narrow dismissal. They argue how the ocean changes its material form (e.g. from saline water to ice, see also Vannini and Taggart, 2014), extends its physical reach beyond ocean basins (e.g. see Jones and Fairclough, 2016) and is primarily involved in the ‘complex interplay of elements and spaces that are embodied in every-shifting, socio-spatial experience’ (Peters and Steinberg, 2019: 305; see also Brown and Humberstone, 2015). However, from these relatively safe anchor points, it could be suggested that Peters and Steinberg substitute Schmitt’s reduction for their own universalising claim – instead of concluding that ‘on the waves there is nothing but waves’, their paper seeks to convince us that (in my own words) ‘on the world there is nothing but ocean’.

Coming to a T-shirt near you: ‘It’s the ocean, stupid’

Through sections which focus on ‘The ocean within’, ‘The ocean beyond’ and ‘The ocean imagined’, the authors contend that the ocean is everywhere. For the authors such conclusions are inescapable and necessary; it is only from this position that it is possible to ‘confront the realities that permeate a relational world of material and subjective co-constitution’ (2019: 304) and conserve this world ‘not as an abstract set of coordinates in within which resources can be found, but as a space of life that we must engage with sustainably and responsibly’ (2019: 300). I would encourage readers to question, firstly, whether the universal claims of this paper are valid; secondly, whether is it necessary to agree with these claims in order to ‘confront’ and ‘conserve’ the world as suggested; and thirdly, whether in practice the authors’ claims may actually divert attention from these desired ends. With these questions in mind, I remain open to be convinced that focusing on the ocean as the primary and dominant event-space of study enables the potential of the arguments which compose them to emerge. When the authors refer to the ‘oceanic’, I wonder whether this is a stronger reference site than, for example, ‘water’. Is the hydro-world (or hydrosphere, or water world, or if we must, ‘blue space’) usefully understood by dissolving it into the saline, the grand and the maritime, with all the geopolitical and social baggage associated with this particular coming together?

As I argued with Lyndsey Stoodley in the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) 2017 conference ¹ if we begin by differentiating watery event-spaces by their elemental co-constitution (molecular composition, salinity, radioactivity, other ‘bodies’), the nature of their body (ocean, sea, lake, estuary, river, durability, ephemerality), their site-specific location (in three dimensions – longitude, latitude, surface/depth, altitude) and their mobile nature (speed, rhythm, duration, cause(s)), this may offer an alternative vocabulary through which to frame what the authors describe as simply ‘oceanic’. Through reducing all to oceanic, the paper comes (too) close to choosing one arbitrary entry point into the hydrological cycle and subsuming that whole cycle to that point of entry. Although the authors and I may share agreement with Ingold (2011) when he concludes: ‘there is no neat divide between the natural, physical properties of one component of the planet and the various forces that course through it’ (Peters and Steinberg, 2019: 296), and I stand with the authors when they state that ‘the ocean…connects…with other substances with which it is in constant, mutual relation’ (2019: 295) (and we may even share agreement with Earth Systems Science as it ‘deprives us of any reason for prioritising one “sphere” (in this case the hydrosphere) over the others, as a foundational entry point for conceiving the integrated earth system’ (2019: 296)), the paper then rips away from these currents by claiming that ‘land, sea, and air…are all extensions of the more-than-wet ocean’ (2019: 297). It seems that despite their protestations, the authors are ‘attempting to simply add new states and spaces to an oceanic essence’ (2019: 295).

To this reader, it remains important to identify how particular ocean spaces (or indeed any specific hydro-spaces) are differentiated from others in terms of how they come together with interconnected elemental features to co-produce the place under consideration (in other words, and for example, it remains important to ask how is this sea now being composed in relation to its submerged and emerging land, aerial energies and solar–lunar shifts?). Through asking this and similar questions, we pause at the moment when Peters and Steinberg ask us to ‘see…the ocean as existing in the coming together of diverse elements’ and resist their urge to ‘see these elements as emanating outward from and refracting back from the ocean so that, in effect, they too are the ocean’ (2019: 294, emphasis in original). This pausing and resisting acknowledges the noun chunks of the modern constitution (which are so often employed in a narrow geological versus hydrological dualism by scholars such as Schmitt (2003 [1950])), and creatively repurposes them to add sophistication and nuance to the particular nature of the coming togethers in different times and places.

This pausing and resisting is important as it also reminds us of the authors’ earlier commitment to appropriate vocabulary and accurate use of language. Here I don’t wish to focus directly on implicit claims that tears are seawater (they may be saline to some extent and so offer a familial resemblance to the sea’s chemical structure) or other similar explicit claims (e.g. Lego [i]s the ocean), but rather on the direct statement that ‘the ocean…generates winds’ (2019: 294). In conventional understandings, wind is not generated by the ocean but by the relational coming together of multiple planetary elements (air and water, and to a less obvious but nevertheless active element – land), and non-planetary forces (the sun and moon ² ). This ‘coming together of diverse elements’ is well articulated in the following quotation from Kotler, with reference to wind-blown waves:

The water that was roaring toward me…started out in some other part of the world, forming when a change in temperature produced a change in pressure. Air’s natural tendency is to move from an area of high pressure to an area of low pressure. We call this movement wind. When wind flickers across the ocean’s surface, it produces small ripples which provide a greater surface area that can then catch more of that blowing wind. Eventually these ripples become larger and larger until they cohere into wavelets and eventually waves. (2006: 23–24)

Concluding: The life aquatic

Despite the need to resist the authors’ urge to accept that all is ocean, Peters and Steinberg’s paper remains instructive in reminding us that a concern with all matters oceanic offers a vital refreshment of our interest with all life, aquatic or otherwise. Citing Serres (1996 [1982]: 13), the authors outline how:

the ocean is ‘not a matter of phenomenology [but] a matter of being itself’. (2019: 18)