Case
Orientalism is inevitable
Hübinette- 03’ – Tobias Hübinette, orientalist expert- has written many scholarly articles relating
orientalism and Western Dominance (“Orientalism Past and Present”, 9/7/03, Available at:
http://www.tobias hubinette.se/orientalism.pd, accessed: 7/28/2014)
Since the end of the 1970s, most academic institutions in the West have more or less accepted the
critique on classical orientalism and tried to distance themselves from their predecessors. Instead, it
is in the form of popular orientalism that the discourse has managed to survive in the West as a romantic and colonial nostalgia reproduced
in arts, movies and literature. This kind of popular orientalism is for example extremely well-represented in commercials here in Sweden. So
finally there is a time to ask ourselves- is
there a way out of orientalism , and can we imagine a world beyond
orientalism? can we imagine a world beyond orientalism? Well, my personal guess is that orientalism will always exist
in one or another form as long as the West has hegemonic power. Orientalism is strongly
intertwined with the Western self-image to such an extant that if orientalism goes, then
Western world power or even the West itself must also go. And isn´t that what we are seeing today, a slow
but unstoppable power shift from the West towards East Asia with China and Japan in the forefront, maybe also South Asia with India as a
leading nation, while the academic world itself is undergoing of a rapid Asianization, giving way to a more or less higher competence of
higher diaspora Asians in the subjects involved.
2: ocean decentering shell
Links
Endorsing “flows” and “nomads” without examining their SPECIFICITY
disregards the actual differences between types of ocean crossing. The
OUTSIDE and ESCAPE of the ocean actually PROPS UP power relations. It solves
better to view the OCEAN ITSELF as the outside, not the pirate hero
Steinberg 9
Steinberg, Philip E. "Sovereignty, territory, and the mapping of mobility: A view from the outside."
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99.3 (2009): 467-495.Professor of Political
Geography at Durham University in the UK
9/94 – 5/96 Ph.D., Clark University, Worcester, MA. Major: Geography. Dissertation: Capitalism,
Modernity, and the Territorial Construction of Ocean Space. Supervisory committee: J. Richard
Peet (chair), Roger Kasperson, David Angel, Janice Thomson, Robert Vitalis. 9/90 – 5/94 M.A.,
Clark University, Worcester, MA. Major: Geography. 9/83 – 5/87 B.A., Oberlin College, Oberlin,
OH. Major: Politics / Third World Studies.
Whereas some early works in this genre tended toward what Cresswell (2006) critiques as
a celebratory “nomadic metaphysics,” more sophisticated, empirically based studies
generally have emphasized that individuals’ practices of mobility vary and are not
necessarily liberatory; the experience of the jetsetter is very different from that of the refugee
(K. Mitchell 1997; Ong 1998). Furthermore, these scholars assert that one must draw a distinction
between individuals who engage in cultural mobility (e.g., postcolonial individuals who occupy
identity positions “between” worlds) and those who engage in geographical mobility (e.g.,
refugees, migrants, members of diasporas, or border crossers who physically move between
worlds or occupy borderland locations). Not all physical acts of movement involve the
transgression of identity categories , and, conversely, hybrid identities can emerge in
place. Indeed, it seems likely that the conflation of these two kinds of mobility facilitates
short-sighted celebrations of the “nomad” as an inherently liberatory figure . 2 One reason
these two forms of border crossing are so often conflated is that we see mobility against the
normative portrayal of the world as timelessly and naturally divided into bordered units: sovereign,
territorial states that define the scope of governance and nations. From such a perspective,
any act of border crossing is inherently disruptive. To achieve distance from this
normative worldview, the aforementioned scholars of critical borderland and migration studies
typically focus on individuals and communities that break the mold by living in, between, or across
borders. Although I am broadly sympathetic with this literature, in this article I take a different
approach: I argue that to place border crossing in context we need to first rethink the
assumed position of the sovereign, territorial state as the fundamental
sociogeographic entity the borders of which are being crossed. To do this, I seek to trace the
history by which the sovereign state, as the idealized negation of mobility, has been
represented as the universal geopolitical “reality.” Tracing the history of the territorial
state is hardly an original project: The genesis of the modern, sovereign, territorial state has been
well documented, as reviewed later. The emergence of the modern state, however, is almost
always told as a history of constructing insides: of drawing boundary lines and governing the
space within. Such a story inadvertently reproduces the modern notion of the bounded,
homogenous, state-society unit that is regularly critiqued by borderland and migration scholars,
even as it denaturalizes these sociospatial formations’ histories. In contrast, in this article I seek
to narrate the origin of the modern state ideal by tracing the construction of its outsides. This
project has been taken up by many in the critical geopolitics movement (e.g., ́ O Tuathail 1996;
Campbell 1998; Sharp 2001), but for these scholars the outside against which the
discourse of the state as a naturally bounded entity is juxtaposed typically is the
space of other peoples (whom statist discourses often represent as less civilized) or other
states (which frequently are represented as naturally antagonistic). These studies go a long way
toward explaining how an individual state’s ideology is produced, but they fail to interrogate
how the normative discourse of the generic, idealized state as an internal space
with governance, unity, stasis, fixity, and society—the state idea (Abrams 1988; T. Mitchell 1999;
Painter 2006)—is buttressed by its juxtaposition against an even more fundamental
outside: an asocial world of disorder beyond the state system . Echoing Schmitt’s (2006a)
argument that the power of the individual sovereign is rooted in the sovereign’s ability to exclude
individuals from its protection (see also Agamben 1998), I suggest that the rise of the concept
of sovereignty historically was interwoven with the designation of certain spaces
as beyond the sovereign state’s organizational limits. In this article, following a further
elaboration of this perspective on state territoriality, sovereignty, and mobility, I sketch out this
alternative history of the modern state by tracing changes in cartographic
representations of the state system’s paradigmatic outside—the world-ocean —during the
era when the territorial state was becoming formalized as a European, and
subsequently global, norm.
they say “ocean as freedom “ (piracy, lines of
flight)
Constructing the ocean as the OUTSIDE of the modern nation-state is CRUCIAL
to sustaining and forming it. They REVERSE the dichotomy, but still ENGAGE
the foundational LAND/SEA binary
Steinberg 9
Steinberg, Philip E. "Sovereignty, territory, and the mapping of mobility: A view from the outside."
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99.3 (2009): 467-495.Professor of Political
Geography at Durham University in the UK
9/94 – 5/96 Ph.D., Clark University, Worcester, MA. Major: Geography. Dissertation: Capitalism,
Modernity, and the Territorial Construction of Ocean Space. Supervisory committee: J. Richard
Peet (chair), Roger Kasperson, David Angel, Janice Thomson, Robert Vitalis. 9/90 – 5/94 M.A.,
Clark University, Worcester, MA. Major: Geography. 9/83 – 5/87 B.A., Oberlin College, Oberlin,
OH. Major: Politics / Third World Studies.
A key concept here, as stressed by Sahlins (1989), is that the rise of the territorial state is
characterized not simply by the construction of its bounded territory as a homogenous
administrative zone (as Sahlins charges that Alli ` es [1980] and Gottman [1973] emphasize), but
that the territorial state constructs its space as a differentiated set of points that
are amenable to being plotted (and thus manipulated and rationalized) against an abstract
spatial grid (see also T. Mitchell 1991). Historically, the development of technologies and
institutions for performing cadastral mapping and land surveying stand out as mechanisms
through which the state has achieved a “bird’s-eye” view over territory as a means toward
achieving social control over people (Bohannan 1964; Kain and Baigent 1992; Vandergeest and
Peluso 1995; Edney 1997; Scott 1998; Biggs 1999). Thus, Biggs (1999) locates the origins of the
territorial state in national surveying efforts of the seventeenth century. As surveyors mapped
royal domains, they graphically noted each village’s affiliation. What had been thought of as a
personal relationship came to be expressed as a territorial relationship, and, at the same time,
surveyors imposed a grid of abstract space over the domain to facilitate mapping. Eventually,
these two phenomena associated with surveying converged in an example of what Pickles (2003)
calls “overcoding”: The abstract, geometric space of the map came to define the
livedin space of the state, and the territorial relationship between land and sovereign came
to be seen as predicating the personal relationship between individual and sovereign. Other
scholars have further illustrated the relationship between the way that we hierarchically map
space and the way that we hierarchically organize social relationships. Knowledge of space is a
crucial tool for control, and the technologies of mapping (and the underlying assumptions about
society and space that enable modern mapping), joined with hierarchical systems for drawing
lines and assigning names, play a crucial role in constructing instruments of sovereign domination
(Akerman 1984, 1995; Carter 1987; Buisseret 1992; Ryan 1996; Edney 1997; Brotton 1998;
Burnett 2000; Craib 2000; H ̈ akli 2001; Harley 2001; Pickles 2003; Jacob 2006). 4 In short, these
scholars emphasize the key role that the ordering of space plays in the construction of state
territoriality. This is an important advance over a perspective that simply looks at the bounding of
space, but, as Strandsbjerg (2008) notes, these scholars of the cartographic origins of modern
state sovereignty still tend to analyze the state as an isolated unit. Given that the modern
institution of sovereignty necessarily exists within a system of sovereign units, a study of the
modern state (or a story of its origins) that works only from the perspective of the inward-looking
aspect of sovereignty cannot be complete. As Taylor (1995) asserts, the starting point of political
geography (and political history) must be a theory of the states rather than a theory of the state.
In a similar vein, geographies and histories of territoriality (or the ordering of space)
must examine not just the “emptiable” and “fillable” space constructed inside the
territories of sovereign states but also the spaces on the outside that are designated
as not being amenable to this organization of space. Otherwise, any study of state
territoriality risks falling into the “territorial trap” wherein states are viewed as
internally coherent units, existing ontologically prior to the overall ordering of the state
system, and wherein cross-border processes can be viewed only as “international relations”
among these preexisting states (Agnew 1994; see also Sparke 2005). I am asserting here that
the same “mapping” of space that permits (and is expressed by) the surveying of a national
border to define an inside also defines an outside by making possible the conceptualization of a
world of equivalent states existing next to each other in relative space. Indeed, for Walker (1993)
and Bartelson (1995), the discursive and material division of the world into insides and outsides is
perhaps the fundamental act of sovereignty. The outside is not simply the residual space
remaining after declaring an inside. If that is the prevailing image of the outside, it is an image
that is itself constructed in tandem with the construction of a particular image of the inside. For
instance, the discourse of “containment” that prevailed during the Cold War was based on the
idea of the state as a container set against a potentially threatening environment, even though
this environment (or outside) was itself the territory of other sovereign states that were
constructing similar discourses about themselves and their neighbors (Chilton 1996). Similarly,
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the dominant image of the ocean as an
“outside” beyond the universe of state-civilizations provided a pretext for banning all social
actors operating from this outside space . Yet this representation of the ocean was itself
a construction of, and within, a system: The idealization of the ocean as the
ultimate outside, beyond civilization , bolstered the construction of the rest of the world —
the universe of territorial states— as sovereign insides (Thomson 1994; Steinberg 2001). At the
global scale, this division of the world into “insides” that matter and “outsides” that
serve to facilitate development of the “insides” typically is achieved through reference to
geophysical properties. In particular, the division of the world into fundamental
elements—land and sea—is viewed as the originary act of the modern sociospatial order (Schmitt 2006b). Connery thus directs attention specifically to changing
representations of the sea as a means toward understanding the political division and
appropriation of land: “The triumph of a particular oceanic signification is
coterminous with the universalization of land concepts, a signification that, thanks
to the liquid element itself, leaves no borders, furrows, or markings” (Connery 2001,
177).
Endorsing the ocean as an EXTERNAL space feeds into the idea of oceans as the
outside of sovereign governmentality – this REINFORCES contemporary power
systems
Steinberg 9
Steinberg, Philip E. "Sovereignty, territory, and the mapping of mobility: A view from the outside."
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99.3 (2009): 467-495.Professor of Political
Geography at Durham University in the UK
9/94 – 5/96 Ph.D., Clark University, Worcester, MA. Major: Geography. Dissertation: Capitalism,
Modernity, and the Territorial Construction of Ocean Space. Supervisory committee: J. Richard
Peet (chair), Roger Kasperson, David Angel, Janice Thomson, Robert Vitalis. 9/90 – 5/94 M.A.,
Clark University, Worcester, MA. Major: Geography. 9/83 – 5/87 B.A., Oberlin College, Oberlin,
OH. Major: Politics / Third World Studies.
Since the nineteenth century, few cartographers or policymakers have dissented from
the dominant view of the ocean as an external space, beyond the world of statesocieties. Although Mahan (1890) and Mackinder (1904) differed greatly in their opinions
regarding the geopolitical significance of the ocean— Mahan saw it as the arena on which global
dominance would continue to be fought, whereas Mackinder felt that its days as a crucial surface
for asserting and projecting force had passed—the perspectives of both geopolitical theorists
rested on an idealization of the sea as an unmanaged and unmanageable surface ... that
resonates with the spatial assumptions that permeate realist theories of
international politics .... As unclaimed and unclaimable “international” space, the worldocean lends itself to being constructed as the space of anarchic competition par
excellence, where ontologically pre-existent and essentially equivalent nation-states do battle in
unbridled competition for global spoils. (Steinberg 2001, 17) In other words , both sides of this
keystone geopolitical debate accepted the construction of the ocean as a
fundamentally external space, a counterpoint to the bounded, terrestrial state
within whose borders the anarchy of global competition was contained. Given the degree to which
this externalization of the ocean has been accepted, it is not surprising that one finds few world
maps today that display the ocean features that were prevalent in the sixteenth, seventeenth, or
eighteenth centuries. By the twentieth century, cartographers had few qualms about making
maps that implied that the ocean was fundamentally external to modern society and its
foundational territorial units (Konvitz 1979). Indeed, it is noteworthy that few modern
“political” world maps depict the political divisions of the ocean—territorial waters,
exclusive economic zones, high seas, and so on—instead portraying an undifferentiated,
featureless space. This is yet another indication of how, by the twentieth century, there was
an accepted distinction between land as the space of sedentarism, civilization, and
politics and the ocean as an external, asocial space across which one simply moved.
k turns ocean freedom
their attempt to construct the sea as “free” only facilitates more of the power
structures they criticize
Steinberg 11
Philip E. Steinberg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Florida State
University. Steinberg, Philip E. Free Sea. In: Legg, Stephen Sovereignty, Spatiality, and Carl
Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos. Routledge; 2011:268-275.
http://philsteinberg.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/nomos-chapter.pdf]/sbhag 7.6.2014
Schmitt's perspective is thus 'postoceanic,' a term that Connery (2001) uses to describe Schmitt's
reference to an era in which the essential divide between land and sea has been superseded by
technology. My usage of this term, while overlapping with Connery's, is somewhat different:
Schmitt's world is not only one in which technology has obliterated the land-sea distinction; it is
also one in which the ocean is fundamentally without substance} Schmitt writes, 'On the waves,
there is nothing but waves' (Schmitt 2003: 42-43). Schmitt's ocean, deprived of all matter, is
reduced to a series of vectors that cycle in endless monotony. Schmitt's ocean not only has no
geography; it has no future. Schmitt's 'postoceanic' perspective is problematic for a number of
reasons. Geophysically, the ocean is anything but an undifferentiated, two-dimensional surface,
even if some of its 'places' are themselves dynamic and mobile (e. g. the paths of currents).
Indeed, historically the social construction of the ocean has involved a series of attempts to know
and name its points, as they vary across space and time, in three dimensions, and this linkage of
state power with naval science continues to this day. Attempts by the United Kingdom, and later
the United States, to construct the ocean as a functionally frictionless surface, an
empty (or 'free') space across which commercial and military ships can move in
contrapuntal opposition to the bounded and ordered territories that fundamentally define land,
have themselves been dependent on efforts to 'know' the sea (Hamblin 2005; Reidy
2008; Rozwadowski 2005). As early as the Papal Bulls of 1492, European powers have been
drawing lines in the ocean in an effort to construct a world in which (certain) European powers
could expand without obstacles. The preservation of the ocean as a 'free' space has
been facilitated by investments in navigational aids, navies, and scientific research,
and each of these investments has added value to the ocean as a material entity with
distinct spaces and natures, requiring and facilitating a conceptualization of the ocean
that is very different from its idealization as a geophysical vortex where there is 'nothing but
waves .' Even as naval powers have asserted that the sea is a fundamentally
placeless void immune from social power, they have eagerly applied their resources to
understanding and, when possible, controlling the forces (whether human,
oceanographic, or meteorological) that might impinge on its idealization as an empty
surface for movement. As Deleuze and Guattari (1988) note, the construction of the ocean
as a smooth space necessarily involves continual efforts at striation. In part, then, the
ongoing involvement of state (and non-state) actors in the construction of the ocean as a set of
places is due to the practical problems inherent in mobilizing resources in and across a relatively
inaccessible and physically hostile environment. Freedom requires polic1ng and mobility
requires fixity, and both of these activities require continual efforts to striate the
ideally smooth ocean. There is, however, another, more profound reason for the
long history of actors asserting power in the ocean in the name of freedom, and this
can be traced to a dialectic within the idealization of the ocean as a 'free' space of
commerce. The ocean emerges as a favored space for facilitating commercial and
territorial expansion because it is a representation of pure distance, and thus it is
idealized as a space that can be annihilated by putatively footloose capital that has
freed itself from the bonds of materiality. From pre-Biblical texts, through Hegel, and on through
nineteenth- century maps, Mackinder, Schmitt, and the fantasies of twenty-first-century finance
capital, the ideal ocean is an absent ocean (Connery 1996, 2001, 2006; Steinberg 1999,
2001, 2009). This idealized annihilation of the ocean might hypothetically be
attainable if the sea truly were 'nothing but waves,' but if it ever were to happen a
crisis would ensue. After all, the annihilation of the ocean would also mean the annihilation of
distance, and this, in turn, would the ideal of the 'free' sea is highly problematic. True 'freedom'
would reveal systemic contradictions, and this presumably would lead to a new
desire to striate ocean-space and rematerialize distance, so that value once again
could be generated by crossing its expanse or extracting its resources. Both of
these subtleties-the practical need for marine freedom to involve exertions of power
and the dialectic within the very idea of marine freedom- are lost on Schmitt. Even as
Schmitt rejects a simple environmental determinist explanation of the division between land and
sea, he subscribes to one in which the two surfaces are on singular but divergent historical paths.
The physical binary of environmental determinist thought is replaced with a social binary that is
no less rigid: Land is the space of territorialization while the sea is the space of deterritorialization.
The division of space into fixed categories is thus naturalized, establishing a foundation for
classical geopolitical thinking, whether it be the thallocentric perspective of Mahan or the
'postoceanic' perspective of Schmitt and Mackinder.
Representations are key to determining our approach to the ocean – EVEN
THOUGH we reject metaphoric reductionism
Steinberg 14
Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean,
“mediterranean metaphors: t ravel, t ranslation and o ceanic i maginaries in the ‘New
Mediterraneans’ of the Arctic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and the c aribbean”
Professor of Political Geography at Durham University in the UK
9/94 – 5/96 Ph.D., Clark University, Worcester, MA. Major: Geography. Dissertation: Capitalism,
Modernity, and the Territorial Construction of Ocean Space. Supervisory committee: J. Richard
Peet (chair), Roger Kasperson, David Angel, Janice Thomson, Robert Vitalis. 9/90 – 5/94 M.A.,
Clark University, Worcester, MA. Major: Geography. 9/83 – 5/87 B.A., Oberlin College, Oberlin,
OH. Major: Politics / Third World Studies.
Oceans are ‘known’ in many different ways. As the chapters of this book reveal,
scientists, sailors, surfers, passengers and divers all have their own perspectives on the ocean as
a fluvial, dynamic arena of human and non-human biota, of minerals and molecules, of affects
and ideologies. But what of the perspective from beyond the sea? Does that even need to be
considered in this book? After all. this is a book that emphasizes effect and experience in a
resolutely material sea. Do we need to provide a forum here for those who view the ocean simply
as a surface in the middle - whether as a space to be crossed, or plundered, or ignored, or as a
space that merely divides or connects? I answer this with an emphatic ‘ves.’ For better or
worse, our perceptions of the ocean arc structured not just by the tactile
experiences that we have with its liquid element but by the stories that we tell about the
sea including the simplified stories of functionality or the non-stories of absence. Narrated
understandings, even if not derived from sensor.' experience, contribute to the ocean
assemblage. Indeed, as the paradigmatic space of the sublime - where emotional
understanding exists on a plane removed from cognition - the ocean derives much of its
power from the reproduction of its image, including by those who never come in contact
with, or sail across, its waters. Like a map (Del Casino and Hannah 2006, Kitchin and Dodge
2007), an ocean is more-than-represcntational. It is continually reconstructed through our
encounters, but as we engage the sea our experiences are performed and internalized
through articulations with pre-existing imaginaries. To be clear , this call for taking
imagined oceans seriously should not be seen as an endorsement of a perspective wherein
the ocean is reduced to a metaphor a signifier for cultural hybridity or global commerce or any
of the other social processes that the ocean has been made to stand for in recent work in literary,
cultural and historical studies. Indeed, elsewhere I specifically reject this perspective (Steinberg
2012, see also Blum 2010 ). But images of the ocean do matter , not because they exist apart
from, or after, our interaction with the material sea but because they contribute to that
interaction and, thereby, to its social (and more-than-social) construction. To that end.
this chapter focuses on one specific imagined ocean - the Mediterranean - and how its image has
been applied to construct meanings and practices in other maritime regions.
Instrumentalization of the ocean undergirds modernity, racism, slavery,
ecological collapse and ongoing systems of colonial brutality
Jacques 12
Environmental Governance: Power and Knowledge in a Local-Global World, ed Gabriela Kütting,
Ronnie Lipschutz
Peter Jacques, Ph.D. Department of Political Science University of Central Florida
Education Ph.D., Political Science, Northern Arizona University, 2003, with distinction. Masters in
Public Administration (M.P.A.), environmental policy focus, Northern Arizona University, 2000.
B.A., Philosophy, Montana State University, with honors, 1993. B.A., Film and Theater Arts,
Montana State University, with honors,1993
Natural law here is important to the construction of power also, because it normalizes a specific
ontology as infallible. Thus, I have argued that it was not that Grotius made the ocean open for all
to use that set up matrices of world power and marine crises, but rather it was what he made it
open for that became so disastrous. Even after the open pool regime is closed, the purpose
remains the same— instrumental enterprise —and closing mare liberum fails to change the
essential place that the World Ocean holds in the minds of technocratic elite of
the modern nation-state. During modernity, such violence is unaccountable to the
living spaces of the World Ocean whether as the source of life, a home, an organism, an
integrated part in the universe that creates identity, or other purpose, because what had been
“as common once as light and air” had been bound in logos that precludes noninstrumental ontologies and converts the oceans into a global water closet and
avenue to other lockers, just like South Africa became for Grotius’ Netherlands. Where mare
liberum originates a few years after the Dutch East India Company, the Dutch colonial seeds are
soon thereafter spread to South Africa in 1652. One space on the ocean became the same
as any other in its function and purpose. Thus, with a natural law of European privileged
trade and accumulation via a World Ocean, all other purposes, histories, and geographies
are erased or shrouded. See, for example, Hegel's view on Africa as a subject of such
globalization that is only possible after social relations and human-ocean relations are
commodified and open up the world to barbaric subjugation : Africa is not interesting from
the point of view of its own history. ... Man [in Africa] is in a state of barbarism and savagery
which is preventing him from being an integral part of civilization. ... [Africa] is the country of gold
which closed in on itself, the country of infancy, beyond the daylight of conscious history,
wrapped in the blackness of night.
Of course the “blackness of night” appears to be a crude reference to skin color , and
blackness equating the undeveloped, the empty, and the savage. Colonizing the “heart of
darkness” then is rationalized by erasing geography through the sea, making
European development the end of history, and replacing other purposc(s) with a singular global
purpose of free access to the rest of the worlds spaces and homes as naturalized right. Such
erasure connects Grotius to Stephen Biko—where Biko led Black South Africans to see
“blackness of their skin” as the cause of their collective oppression and articulate a Black
Consciousness to reinstate not just political power in the face of Apartheid (apartness), but to
reinstate pre-colonial South African purposes and ontologies (sec Abdi 1999). Colonial and
neo-colonial periods expunge the meanings of the local connection of inlet to stars of
the South Pacific, or the organic functions of a living water . Perhaps this is the most
powerful reducer of modernity where all life and home is made to serve one
master, making the habitation of multiple “overseas” spaces (see Luke, this volume) less
palpable because there is no perceptible loss of purpose or function to the then colonial and now
globalized “Northern” minds. Enterprise, use, and free access to habitat and home
underlies the structure of contemporary political order, which means that this very
order must maintain a hegemonic hold on ontological notions of not just the
ocean or of social relations, but of all-inclusive ecology (human and non-human) itself.
Plumwood agrees that a main explanation for how the rationalist culture of the west
has been able to expand and conquer other cultures as well as nature was that it
has long lacked their respectbased constraints on the use of nature—a thought that
puts the “success” of the west in a rather different and more dangerous light. (Plumwood 2002:
117) The success is “more” dangerous because it leads in a boomerang effect back
to the West where ecological collapse presses hard on the doors of the West
threatening broad social collapse, and the West will not be immune regardless of how
remote it tries to make itself. Nonetheless, without the Grotian or Scldenian ocean, the
colonial nations could not have gone across the sea to siphon off resources, and
ultimately create the structure of a world capitalist system we now live in. Imagine the
power of the current core states, such as those in the G-8, without a colonial legacy to found their
current power, and through this image we can imagine a counterfactual position for the
modem power of the sea. Certainly, this power of the sea was not lost on Alfred Thayer
Mahan, who knew that control of the ocean was a prerequisite for extending national and imperial
power . Control the sea, control the world . was his modem contribution. In order to control the
sea, it has to be something ontologically that can be controlled, such as the “heap of matter
that Nature could not bring to perfection.”
ALTERNATIVE – reject approaches that OBSCURE the primacy of oceanic
MATERIALITY. This approach solves anthro-supremacy by “unearthing” our
language
Peters 14
Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean, ed, Peters and Anderson
Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Cardiff University
Dr Kimberley Peters Lecturer in Human Geography BSc (hons) Human Geography and Planning
(Cardiff University) MA Cultural Geography (Royal Holloway, University of London) PhD (Royal
Holloway, University of London)
Moreover, these processes are distinct at sea, where water (and its physical composition) is
concerned. Whatmore notes that the contribution of more-thanhuman approaches is to 'reanimate the missing ‘matter' of landscape, focusing [our] attention on bodily
involvements in the world in which landscapes are co-fabricated between more-than-human
bodies and a lively earth' (2006: 603). However, these ‘involvements’ with the world around
us have focused largely on the ‘matter’ of the terrestrial or ‘earthy’ sphere, rather than
the materialism of the watery world (as indicated and enforced by the use of language:
'landscape' as opposed to ‘seascape’ for example). Yet the sea is not the land, its morethanhuman nature, is fluid. Thus the when considering water worlds, alternative
cocompositions between the physical and social arise. Indeed, the maintenance of the pirate
radio enterprise, a human, sociocultural and political endeavour, relied, oddly, on the ship being
immobile, staying securely anchored in one place. This meant countering the forces of a distinctly
fluid nature. Yet as the vignette demonstrated, the physical motion the forcefulness of the ocean driven by the assembled forcefulness of the wind and gravitational pull - made this maintenance
problematic. The ship was never still: even when anchored, it moved. In the worst cases, the ship
would be cast adrift.9 Life onboard the ship was intrinsically shaped by this fluid nature. As I have
noted elsewhere (2012: 1252-3) ‘[h]umans cannot force power back on to the sea; shaping nature
... they can but harness its qualities, or manipulate [it] to best effect’. In other words, human life is
always subject to the force of the sea. even as we try to lessen those forces. Unlike other more-
than-human natures, when co-composed with human life, the sea sparks particular
outcomes , which alter the relational balance between the social and the physical. Whereas
humans might have greater agency over nature on land, this dynamic alters with the alternative
material composition of the sea (Peters 2012). and accordingly humans are uniquely affected by
it. As the vignette demonstrated, the sea evokes actions and reactions which shapes human
interactions with the water world. The natural environment at sea, resulted in particular sociocultural formations for the crew as they struggled to survive. The sea as a material, more-than-
human nature, must therefore be at the forefront of our understandings as we grapple to
understand human engagements with it. More-than-Human Geographies of the Sea In this
chapter I have followed recent lines of enquiry, driven by a ‘return’ towards a world of 'matter' the very substance of the world around us - (Whatmore 2006: 603) to consider how more-thanhuman material natures are co-fabricated with human existence. Of late, geographers have
become increasingly interested in this co-composition of human and more-than-human worlds
(see for example social and cultural geographies of climate change. Brace and Geoghegan 2010
and responses to natural disasters. Clark 2011). This has followed a recognition that we need to
consider a range of more-than-human or physical attributes which characterize our socio-cultural
world, the groundedness of the earth, animals, plant life, and 'things’ we humans make (from
trainers, to motor cars, to buildings) in order to move away from the bias on understanding human
agency as the dominant agency in the world in which we live (see Whatmore 2006: 603). As
Bennett puts it there are ‘things' in our world which contain their own power, without humans
assigning that power or significance to them (2004:48). As she deftly puts it: 'there is an existence
peculiar to a thing that is irreducible to the thing's imbrication with human subjectivity’ (Bennett
2004: 348). In other words, the more-than-human approach demands we consider the power
of material things; objects, natures, and so on. to avoid the ‘ [ojveremphasis on human
agency’ in composing the world in which we live (Lambert et al. 2006: 482). For Bennett (2004),
Whatmore (2002) and others (Bear and Eden 2008. Clark 2011, Hitchings 2003, Jones 2011 and
Philo and Wilbert 2000) this marks a shift in social and political thought which
considers carefully the vibrancy of the planet - that there is, in Bennett's words, a world
of‘powerful things’ which have dynamism or force without human's assigning them such qualities
(2004: 348). This , as Thrift argues, opens up ‘a different kind of intelligence about the
world' (2004: 60). Such a project (fosters) greater recognition of the agential powers
of natural., things, greater awareness of the dense web of their connections with each other
and with human bodies. (Bennett 2004: 349) Such an awareness or 'recognition' of the
powers of nature, demands that we. (humans), [t]read lightly upon the earth, both
because things are alive and have value as such and because we should be cautious around
things that have the power to do us harm. (2004: 365-6) The natural more-than-human world,
Bennett reminds us, must be acknowledged. It has an agency, or power, which is often beyond
our control. It can impact and shape our lives (as much as, or more than, we can impose power
upon it, see Hitchings 2003. Peters 2012. Whatmore 2006). However, it is the power
dynamics of more-than-human natures which is called into question when we
consider the fluid materiality of the sea, compared to the earthy solidity' of land. As I have
argued elsewhere (Peters 2012) the specific material and elemental quality- of the sea
itself, its composition of particles, its relation to wider forces of power, means that it becomes a
distinct space for human engagement; one we can move on, in and through; one which itself
moves, and one which shifts states (solid, liquid to air). Human life does not play out in water
worlds in the same way it does on landed worlds (Peters 2012: 1252). As such, looking to the
sea . and the corporeal experiences and sensibilities which are made possible in these
spaces, enables us to grasp new knowledge about the world. I have considered the sea itself
as a more-than-human nature ; a material entity' through which force operates and human
affects are elicited. Through the case study vignette, I have filled the liquid void in geographies of
the seas with the water itself thinking seriously about its composition and the impacts of force on
its structure, which relate to and are co-fabricated with the human worlds on board pirate radio
vessels. Thinking about the events of November 1975 in a more-than-human framework allows
‘greater recognition of the agential power of natural... things’ (Bennett 2004: 34). It has made
possible an examination of how the physical and socio-cultural world interrelate, to unpack the
particular sociospatial outcomes which result when humans engage with the fluid nature of water.
Conclusions In the foreword to this book, Philip Steinberg subverted the 70% statistic often used
to justify' sea-based studies. However, he interestingly noted that one reason this is such a
‘compelling figure' (Steinberg, this collection) is because 70% of the human body is also water.
The much cited 70% then, has significance in both the human and natural world, and shows a
synergy between both human and water worlds. We are, in the words of Margulis and
Sagan, ‘ walking, talking minerals’; walking, talking liquids (1995: 49, in Bennett 2004: 360). It
makes logical sense then, that studies of the water are not marginal to those of human
being and accordingly, one way to think about human geographies of the water worlds is to
take the water itself seriously, and moreover, to think about those water worlds fluidly, as open,
permeable and subject to change; co-constituted and co-fabricated through broader relational
elemental and human assemblages. In this chapter I have explored how the hydrological and
human come together and the affects borne from these forceful combinations through focusing on
the sea itself as a lively; relational, more-than-human materiality. I have demonstrated that
extending more-than-human geographies from the shore, is one way in which human
geographers may begin to take seriously the agency and productivity of the dominant
natural feature in world and its importance in the making of human experience: the water.
However, such a move has depended upon shifts in the discipline which have been directed
towards the ‘processes and excesses of ‘livingness’ in a more than human world' (Whatmore
2006: 604). In other words, to echo Steinberg in the Foreword of this book, scholars are now in
a unique position to examine water worlds because we have the conceptual and theoretical
tools, such as more-than-human approaches, to do so. Yet arguably, as this chapter has shown,
we still need to take these tools to sea . More-than-human approaches have remained
focused on the nexus between landscapes and bodies rather than seascapes and bodies
(Whatmore 2006). The language of the more-than-human then, has been ‘landed', rather than
fluid. In the introduction to this volume, Jon Anderson and I argued for the need to develop a
language which can make fluid worlds comprehensible and ‘known'; a language which might also
be applied more broadly; a fluid ontology for which the water world frames a wider world of
flux , change, rhythm, movement and flow. However, whilst we may now have the tools available
(such as more-than-human approaches) to enable us to start from the water and look outwards,
we are still tasked with doing so. This task ultimately requires us to unearth our language. In
this collection, we have set sail on such task, envisioning a fluid world in which water is
an equally important part of a wider geographical, elemental and corporeal assemblage of
land, air, human and more-than-human life, which is in a constant state of becoming.