BODIES OF WATER
ASTRIDA G. NEIMANIS
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
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DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
GRADUATE PROGRAM IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT
YORK UNIVERSITY
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This dissertation is an interdisciplinary exploration of the relational ontology and ethics suggested by our bodies of water. I argue that our primarily watery constitution is more than "biological fact," and is instead a fecund site for thinking through the matter and meaning of embodiment. To undertake this exploration, in chapter one I develop an embodied phenomenological practice called "rhizo-phenomenology," which emerges between Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and Gilles Deleuze's rhizomatics. I illustrate how our bodies of water dismantle the ontological privilege of the discrete, individual human body, even as that seemingly discrete body needs to be acknowledged and accounted for. In chapter two, I further rework ontological understandings of embodiment through my proposal of the onto-logic of "amniotics." This bodily way of being emerges through a rhizo-phenomenological reading of Luce Irigaray's writing on watery bodies. The onto-logic of amniotics elucidates how bodies are interpermeated with, gestational of and (sexually) differentiated from one another. In chapter three I extend this onto-logic to other-than-human bodies by exploring evolutionary biology from a "molecular" perspective. Here I highlight what evolution can teach us about
"naturecultures" and about sexual differentiation in relation to water. In chapter four these evolutionary explorations are extended into a rhizo-phenomenological study of becoming-cetacean, where I focus on how water serves as a topographical differentiator between various animal bodies, and in particular, human and whale bodies. In chapter five I lay out the ethological ethics made possible by this new understanding of bodies. I
iv extend my analysis of naturecultural evolutions to examine hydrotechnologies as bodies of water with which we are also intertwined. Such technologization need not be denounced, but should be considered according to an onto-logic of amniotics. I propose that the cultivation of a radically embodied water commons can better support this onto- logic than the guarantee of the human right to water. Ultimately, a study of our bodies of water not only suggests new ontological paradigms, but also opens to an ethics of interbeing, i.e., an ethics of interpermeation with, gestation of and differentiation from the multitudinous other watery bodies with whom we share this planet.
v BODIES OF WATER TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract iv
INTRODUCTION We Live as Watery Bodies in a Watery World 1
I. What is a Body of Water? 1 II. Approaches, Confluences 15 III. The Chapters to Come 43
CHAPTER ONE Bodies of Water as Rhizo-Phenomena: In Theory and Practice 54
I. Introduction: Thinking About/As Bodies 54 II. How to Think (About) A Body of Water 65 (a) Molar Coagulations and Molecular Undercurrents 66 (b) Bodies of Water as Actual, Virtual and Intensive 80 III. How to Think (As) a Body of Water 87 (a) Intuiting the Molecular Body of Water 93 (b) "Sci-Phi" 99 (c) Description, "Symptomatology" and Becoming-Language 114 IV. Conclusion: Towards an Ethics oflnterbeing 121
CHAPTER TWO An Onto-Logic of Amniotics: Gestational, Interpermeating, Differenc/tiating 129
I. Introduction: Hydrological Cycles 129 II. Irigaray as Rhizomatic Phenomenologist 136 III. Water, Ambiguity and Sexual Difference 150 IV. (Sexual) Difference and Repetition 162 V. Sexual Difference, Sexual Reproduction and the Gestational 167 VI. The Onto-Logic of Amniotics 184
VI CHAPTER THREE Fishy Beginnings: Molecular Evolutionism and the Potentiality of Human Embodiment 199
I. Introduction: Fishy Beginnings 199 II. Evolution Stories 202 (a) Life on Land and Its Watery Debts 203 (b) "Molecular Evolutionism" 211 III. Fishy Beginnings, Or What Evolution Stories Can Teach Us About the Onto-Logic of Amniotics 224 (a) Gestation, Differenc/tiation and our Fishy Beginnings 224 (b) Go Fish: On Sex, Eggs and Evolution 233 (c) Interpermeation, Gestation and the Hydrological Highway 249 IV. Conclusions, or: What can Evolution Teach us About an Ethics of Interbeing? 258
CHAPTER FOUR Becoming-Cetacean: Whale-Bodiedness and Water, At the Borders of the Liveable 267
I. Introduction: Moving Below the Surface 267 II. Molecularity and Our Watery Animal Becomings 274 III. (Making) Whale Tracks 285 IV. Whale Encounters, Adrift at Sea 291 V. Upon and Within a Whale 301 VI. Conclusions, Aspirations, at the Borders of the Liveable 314
CHAPTER FIVE Listening, Responding: Water Crises, Common Bodies and an Ethics of Interbeing 320
I. Introduction: Amniotics and Ethological Ethics 320 II. Hydrotechnological Involutions 337 III. New Hydrological Technologies and Amniotic Imbalance 350 IV. On How to Respond 361 (a) The Human Right to Water. 363 (b) Water in Common 375 V. From No-Bodies to Common Bodies 380 VI. Conclusion: Who Has Standing to Be Heard? 391
vn CLOSURES, OPENINGS 399
NOTES 415
BIBLIOGRAPHY 468
Vlll INTRODUCTION
We Live as Watery Bodies in a Watery World
I. What is a Body of Water?
Perhaps there is a glass of water on the table beside you. You pick it up, take a sip. This water will feed your blood and nourish your muscles, cradle your organs in safe proximity, and serve as vital conduit and communicator between your furthest flung bodily outposts. As this water enters you, it will also transform you in subtle or more significant ways. This water will carry you from thirst to satiation, and it will provide the necessary lubrication for all of your bodily morphogenetic endeavours: movement, growth, desire, relinquishment. But this glass of water will not remain yours for long.
This water will inevitably leave you, spreading across your skin when you sweat, rolling down your cheeks when you cry, and expressing your ecstasy when you love. It will begin its journey back to the earth, or the sky, or the filtration plant, the next time you go to the bathroom. And, in all of these leave-takings, this water will carry small meanings and materialities of you with it. Which of your emotions will pass through your uterine membrane to the life that gestates within you? Which of your senses will become more acute as you trade slobbery kisses with your canine companion? Which of your thoughts will be registered and tracked by a pod of echolocating sperm whales deep below the surface and miles away, as you take a quick dip off the side of the boat to wake your
1 body? Which of your movements will be absorbed by the scratchy underbrush and the buzzing insects as you deliberately and determinedly trudge up the rocky path towards the summit, with your own perspiration hovering as a cloud of effort and potential around you? Indeed, this all begs the question: who, or what, is this "you"? Without this water you would not exist. You are a body of water.
Just as you have taken this water from some other (animal, vegetable, geophysical, meteorological) body of water on this planet, you in turn will quite literally pass your water on to another body, and that body will enfold your watery traces within its own, transposing and translating them anew. In each passage, exchange or enfolding of this same glass of water, your body expresses an interconnection with other bodies of water, at the same time as these intervals of transcorporeality recognize the membrane of differentiation between your bodies as well. And, at the hinges of these membranes, a question always vibrates: what responsibility, what response, is called out in this zone of relationality?
In the chapters and pages that follow, my principal aim is to contribute to our thinking on embodiment, and specifically, to address how our constitution as primarily watery bodies (that is, materially comprised primarily of water) is significant, meaningful and productive. The first questions posed by this dissertation are thus: what are our bodies of water? What does it mean to be a "body of water?" I ask these questions in order to see how, by thinking about our bodies as watery choreographies, we might come to understand the notion of "the body" in a new, or more nuanced, way. Indeed, as the
2 above description suggests, water is not only incorporated by our bodies, but shapes and sustains our bodies and extends them into meaningful imbrications with the world. This description belies the understanding of "bodies" that we have inherited from the modern
Western metaphysical tradition, which generally asks us to view our bodies as stopping at our skin, and somehow separate from the world. We have been taught to understand ourselves, and our bodies, as relatively discrete beings. This belief is fuelled both by our ocularcentric epistemological paradigms (we "see" our bodies as discrete in space, and therefore believe that we are) as well as our on-going tradition of individualistic humanism, which places primacy on the individual, and understands everything from capacities, to identity, to rights, to citizenship as individualized, and as attributes of individual bodies. In the first place then, thinking about our bodies of water invites us to think about bodies as always extending beyond their immediate location. We are invited to perceive "ourselves" less as discrete entities, and more as nodes within a complex choreography of watery-bodiedness. Our watery bodies express modalities of embodiment beneath or beyond what our eyes can generally see; their embeddedness in the world leaks, seethes and sponges in ways that defy a body's presumable limits. In this sense, my project can be situated within recent, primarily feminist, scholarship on embodiment that seeks to challenge the seemingly discrete edges of "body" and "world,"1 and in these pages, I wish to explore further how our bodies of water uncover the hinge between "body" and "world" in a way that demands an understanding of these terms as coimbricated and interdependent, both materially and discursively. While bodies and
3 their worlds are not undifferentiated, each engages the other in a relation that is porous and mutually determining. Thinking about our bodies of water demands that we understand this porosity and material-discursive interpermeation as more than metaphor, and rather as a situated, lived experience.
In fact, if there is a figure or an operation that can best gather the various streams of enquiry and conversations I engage in this project, this might be the figure of the hinge or the pivot. Both are in-between operations that are movements themselves, and not merely passive locations. The hinge or pivot challenges the binaristic separation between presumed opposites or incompossibles upon which much of the Western metaphysical tradition is built, but this challenge does not take the form of melding two sides into an undifferentiated mass. Rather, the hinge enacts a zone of relationality, bringing two (or more) terms into a necessary co-imbrication. Each side retains its intelligibility, but this intelligibility depends upon an other side and upon the hinge that allows passage between, but never collapse of, the positions. The sides held together by the pivot or hinge work upon each other, shape each other, and through their interplay introduce new lines of flight, new bodies, new affects. The hinge is not a place-holder, but a fecund zone of creativity. In the first place then, I am curious about how exploring our bodies of water enacts a relationship between the fleshy body and the watery world in which we live, in a way that will ask us to rethink not only embodiment, but also our relationship to the world in which we reside. This rethinking of embodiment I take up primarily in relation to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment, but also Deleuze's
4 rhizomatic understanding of bodies, deeply influenced by Spinoza. Here, then, another pivot already emerges: between phenomenology and Deleuzian rhizomatics, as two bodies of thought often read as incompatible. I will return to this problematic in more detail below, where I will also comment more extensively on the confluences of my work with those of other scholars and intellectual traditions.
But even if this project can be situated as examining a body's relation to the world, the very challenge to this binary already demands that we go further. If the world is not dichotomously organized into what is "self and what surrounds "self," then already we must think of the world as a congeries of bodies, of which we are just one expression. We have already glimpsed some of the ways in which as bodies of water, our bodies are neither stable, nor discrete, nor containable. But importantly, in our leaky porosity we are co-implicated not only with a watery world, but with a watery world that is comprised of multitudes of watery bodies, all different yet all intertwined. Our bodies of water both receive water from other bodies, and also bequeath their own water as further gifts and relinquishments. Our human bodies of water are thus hardly cordoned off in their unique humanity, but rather partake in a watery web of bodies which are not only human, but animal, vegetable, geological, technological, meteorological. My project here is thus also an explicit contribution to a school of inquiry broadly recognized as posthumanism. While no coherent or definitive definition of posthumanism can be offered, as it shows up in various (and sometimes contradictory) guises, broadly speaking this intellectual project seeks to decentre humanism, and the human subject, from its
5 place of ontological and epistemological privilege. Above all, perhaps posthumanism is a way to think about otherness which tries to problematize the privileged position of self.
This problematization has certainly shown up in posthumanist studies as animal otherness, environmental or ecological otherness, and technological otherness (all of which I comment on again below), and my dissertation will also look to see how rethinking our embodiment in relation to bodies of water implicates us but also differentiates us from such watery others. Yet posthumanism also addresses a human otherness, for it is clear that the category of "human" has been carefully gated and guarded through the history of Western thought, denying access to certain human bodies on account of their sex, their race, their ethnicity, their sexuality, their ability, their age, their class or social status. I wonder, in these pages, how thinking about our watery bodiedness might also inaugurate a way of thinking about our human-bodied relatedness in new ways, according to revised ontological paradigms grounded in our experience of watery interbeing. In particular I wonder about our interconnectedness as sexually different bodies, as animal bodies, as technologized bodies. As bodies of water, we can no longer hold onto the myth of separation from our others, human or otherwise. They cycle through us, as we through them. Yet again, as bodies of water we live out a relation to our others that does not erode or efface our difference. Instead, our wateriness enacts a relation of interpermeation that simultaneously sustains the inability ever to know our other fully; We share water with our others in drips, in traces, in vestigial foldings. And so once more we are asked to consider our bodies of water as illuminating the pivot
6 between our selves and our others. As bodies of water, we are hardly separate, but nor are we undifferentiated. Our watery co-imbrications choreograph these relations as intervals of difference and interpermeation, rather than as binaristic breaks.
Posthumanism is moreover a site of inquiry where the circumscription of the category "human" can be challenged by paying attention to those modes of human- bodied living that we have long denied as threatening or inconceivable, and thus "less than human." A posthumanist view allows us to reclaim such bodily expressions, and thus we can further expand and problematize what we think it means to be human. Such problematizations play out in theories of the abject body, the monstrous body, the cyborg body, and the prosthetic body in relation to our inorganic extensions, our technological implants, and our morphological gaps or deviations. But they also play out in our embarrassing leakages, our needy sponginess, our visceral transfer stations, and our various other molecular dispersals and seemingly imperceptible micro-modalities of living that once again deny our stable boundedness as bodies.2 While not every body has known the limit experience of radical prosthetic extension, every living body is a body of water. Hence, as I seek to demonstrate, bodies of water are an important and accessible site for reconsidering how every body holds a radical potential for pushing the bounds of our inherited and unwavering humanistic sense of body-self. As such, another hinge is introduced: the hinge between what I will describe in more detail in chapter one, following Deleuze and Guattari, as the "molar" body and the "molecular" body. While the molar body adheres to some conception of a subject as sufficiently coherent to take
7 up various human projects, the molecular body disturbs, disrupts and disperses this molarity in various sub- and trans-epidermal subterfuges, as it enters into bodily assemblages both more concentrated and more expanded than the presumably bounded human body. Such molecularity is no less human, and no less integral to our lived experience. In this dissertation I not only seek to rethink embodiment at the hinge of these two bodies, but I also hope to offer an example of doing philosophy—that is, thinking embodiment—from the very location of this hinge. I return to this point below.
These molecular wanderings bring us ever closer to the biological workings of our watery bodies. Indeed, exploring our bodies of water also demands that we think seriously about the materiality of our lived bodies. Physiologically speaking, approximately two thirds of what we know as our human bodies is comprised of water.
But as I have already intimated, this biological situation has implications far beyond our physiological functioning. Our bodies have social or political meaning not in spite of their wateriness, but rather because of and through their watery constitution: water animates our limbs, expresses our emotions, enables our reproductive proliferation. Our bodies of water open up to and intertwine with the other bodies of water with whom we share this planet, including those bodies in which we bathe, from which we drink, into which we excrete, which grace our gardens and constitute our multitudinous companion species.3 Our bodies of water are necessarily inaugurated into a relationship with the rest of the earth's water that is neither "merely" biological nor only social or cultural. Our own bodies thus reveal to us the problem with thinking about embodiment according to
8 any reductive dichotomization of water, or bodies, as "natural" or "cultural." While the
60 to 90 per cent of ourselves that is comprised of water is undoubtedly biological, we nonetheless live our bodies of water as brimming with metaphysical, economic, cultural and otherwise semiotic potentiality. The "nature" of our bodily water is meaningful and meaning-making, just as the porosity, fluidity and leakiness of our selves are no mere metaphors. Or put otherwise, this physiological functioning is deeply imbricated in a web of social, political, ethical and philosophical meaning and effects. We live our bodies of water. How we live them, why, where and when we have come to live them, and with what and with whom this living of them is entwined, is all meaningful. Thinking the materiality of our bodies in such direct and explicit ways thus elucidates a further hinge between the traditional binaries of nature and culture, or the natural and the social. Our bodies of water ask that we give up on any understanding of embodiment as a purely discursive construct, while biologically reductive explanations of embodiment are similarly inadequate. Our bodies of water, to borrow a term from Donna Haraway which
I will continue to employ throughout this dissertation, are an expression of
"natureculture"4—neither purely natural nor purely cultural, nor an undifferentiated muddle that eliminates the meaningfulness of either term. Instead our bodies of water are an inextricable interweaving of both natural matter and cultural meaning, and they can only be adequately intelligible through a similar interweaving of knowledges concerned with both the natural and the cultural. Concomitantly, another interstice opens up between natural scientific understandings of bodies and their traditionally incompossible
9 philosophical counterpart. The former purportedly concerns itself with our flesh, blood and bones, and the latter with our more cerebral expressions, yet to think our bodies of water in depth and with care requires us to experience these bodies according to more than one story. Hence another hinge I explore in the following pages is the one between biological stories about our bodies, and philosophical ones. I propose that the transdisciplinary space in-between is a fecund one that can further unsediment what we think we know about our bodies. My dissertation can thus also be located within the broader emergent tradition of new materialism, or neo-materialism, meaning that loose grouping of intellectual projects that seek to dismantle the binaries traditionally upheld between scientific and philosophical or critical disciplines of the humanities, in a reinterrogation of the "nature" of things that proposes that matter does indeed matter.
Again, I will return to a discussion of neo-materialism below.
So far, then, we see how attention to our bodies of water underscores four key departures from conventional thinking about bodies in a post-Enlightenment Western philosophical tradition: as bodies of water, we are not discrete within our world; as bodies of water we are mutually imbricated with other bodies of water of all kinds, according to varying intervals of interpermeation and differentiation; as bodies of water we live not only as coherent human bodies, but also in our micro-human and more-than- human expressions; and finally, as bodies of water we express a necessary comingling of natural-biological bodies and social-philosophical bodies. But a fifth aspect of embodiment also presents itself here. As all of these propositions highlight, bodies of
10 water are above all relational. They exist in a context of other bodies, affected by other bodies, and affecting other bodies. If we are willing to allow that our bodies of water beg a reconsideration of an ontology of bodies, then we have already arrived at the question of ethics. To affect, to be affected, is never neutral. To ask "what can a body do?" is already to ask an ethical question.
In fact, the question at the core of this dissertation is quite straightforward. In an oft-invoked paraphrase of Deleuze and Guattari, who in turn paraphrase Baruch Spinoza,
I want to know what our bodies can do. I want to know how our bodies can be called upon as a resource for understanding and action that can open possibilities for us to live differently as bodies, with other bodies to whom we are intimately connected but with whom we may seem to have little in common. But unlike others who have asked this question, I begin this interrogation as a body of water. Our bodies of water, I propose, are a good place from which to begin thinking about what our bodies can do not as stable or discrete actors, but as nodes or knots within the complex watery passages that constitute not only our material world, but our social, political, economic and cultural worlds as well. But just because our bodies of water reveal a different onto-logic of bodies—one that is interconnected, materially indebted, potentially resourceful, and necessarily naturecultural—this does not mean that we, as human bodies of water, are necessarily adept at cultivating or nurturing this way of being in a sustainable, ethical or joyful way.
As feminist philosopher Nancy Tuana has put it, "[i]t is easier to posit an ontology than to practice it" (209). I return to Tuana's challenge more explicitly in chapter five, but for
11 now I simply wish to flag this challenge as the spectre that haunts all of my efforts to think about, and as, a body of water in these pages. Once we recognize that our bodies are not actually what we once thought them to be, what are we to do with this recognition?
How can we begin to cultivate a new way of living these bodies, necessarily caught up in this great web of watery interbeing? With what power does this imbue us? With what responsibilities are we laden?
So just as we may now move to ask about how that glass of water from which we drink might affect our own embodiment, both materially and meaningfully, we similarly should be asking about how the ways in which we take up this water, and the circumstances under which we pass it on will in turn act on and affect our web of interbeing. If you pour this glass of water from one of those ubiquitous and disposable plastic containers, how does your watery body connect to the farmer in Australia, or
Syria, suicided by thirst, or to the lush green circus called Las Vegas in the middle of a
North American desert? If you gift this water back to the sewers, the harbour and eventually the sea, replete with your own pharmaceutical molecular traces, what sort of gifts are you giving to the watery bodies that live below these surfaces? (As artist- educator Natalie Jeremijenko once remarked, there isn't a fish in New York City's
Hudson River that's depressed.5) And again, how will these passages come back in turn to affect you? Which of your emotions will be dammed when this water is converted into hydroelectric power, displacing the farming families along its riverbanks? Which of your senses will dry up as this water is relentlessly extracted from its centuries-old home in an
12 underground aquifer? Which of your thoughts will be polluted by the waste dumped into this water in order to brew Coca Cola or refine crude oil? Which of your movements will be squeezed from the earth, along with this water, so that they may be bottled and sold by those who claim its ownership? For this reason, although the question with which I begin this dissertation begins is "What is the meaning of our bodies of water?" more questions follow immediately on its heels: How can a deeper understanding of this meaning help us cultivate an ethics of interbeing? What can we learn from our bodies of water about living ethically among other bodies, and how can we, as bodies, activate such a potential for living?
The final hinge that I seek to enact in this dissertation is thus between the ontological and the ethical. Once we have given up on the separateness of things, of bodies, there is no longer any "first philosophy." We are left instead with bodies in relation to one another, always affecting and being affected; bodies, whose very operations of relation are already begging an ethical question. The question is not only
"What can a body do?" but "What can we, as bodies, do with our bodies that can do?"
To ask "What is a body of water?" and "What does it mean?" is to stumble into ethics, to realize that it was already always there.
Just as bodies of water disrupt a discrete and dichotomous separation between body and world, human bodies and more-than-human bodies, nature and culture and natural science and philosophy, so too do they disturb such discreteness between ontology and ethics. But in proposing all of these challenges to our traditional binary
13 oppositional relations, I wish to reiterate that I do not seek to invert these terms, nor do away with them. I rather wish to pry open the potential of the hinge, or the pivot, that holds these terms in inextricable relation. The border-zones and the in-between are always the most fecund spaces. As Deleuze and Guattari remind us, everything happens in the in-between; more significant than "starting and finishing" is "proceeding from the middle, through the middle, coming and going." (1987: 25). "The middle is by no means an average;" they write, "on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed" (1987: 25).
These hinges, pivots, and in-between zones are teeming with potential. By focusing my attentions here in various ways throughout these chapters, I hope to show that our bodies of water are exceptionally valuable things to think about, to think with, to think as.
While I have already begun to note how this thinking might fit into broader intellectual traditions and bodies of thought, I wish to turn now to situate my project within this scholarship more explicitly and highlight how I see Bodies of Water as a complement to or deepening of this rich and diverse intellectual inheritance. While in many cases my offerings in this project might be understood as illustrations of the theoretical propositions already made by the intellectual parties whose company I seek here to join, in other ways, I argue, the body of water serves as a small eddy, whirlpool or other material turbulence within these theories. Water, as both a material force/substance and a "thing to think with," is notoriously unruly, unpredictable, and tends to operate according to physico-theoretical principles of its own.6 Yet at the same time water is vital, imperative and absolutely necessary to us as both thinking bodies and living bodies.
14 Therefore, in these pages I wish to suggest above all that we should carefully consider what we stand to learn from our bodies of water, even if it upsets or disrupts (with a tidal wave or only a tiny ripple) what we think we know about our bodies, their operations of relation, and what they can do.
II. Approaches, Confluences
Indeed, as the following chapters will establish and detail, our bodies of water have much to teach us about bodies, and the ways in which the varied passages between them—at various levels and various speeds, and against various expressions of resistance—enact a way of understanding the "being" of bodies primarily in terms of their mutually imbricated becomings. Theoretical bodies, or bodies of thought, are no less susceptible to this logic of differentiated relations that in turn cultivate new bodies. Our theories and ideas certainly do not come from nowhere; they are rather gestated by the thought of others, whose work is taken up by and enfolded into our own in explicit and deliberate but also implicit and even unintentional ways. Our own intellectual projects might be concerted efforts to extend, nuance or reject the projects that precede us, but they equally might emerge in lateral resonances or unexpected convergences with projects we did not intend to engage, but whose thought has nonetheless infected us via subterranean channels of connection. The "results" of our projects are thus similarly networked. While we may contribute deliberately to a certain trajectory of scholarship, our work may be taken up in unexpected ways and plugged into conversations we may
15 not have anticipated. Such networks of relations are particularly intricate in projects such as my own that are resolutely interdisciplinary.
It is thus particularly challenging, if not outright disingenuous, to list the intellectual debts of my project with brevity or concision. Any account will always be partial, localized and limited by whichever attunements I may consciously or subconsciously foreground at the time of the account. Yet at the same time I want to attempt some version of a map that could outline this particular project's debts, convergences and resonances in relation to the bodies of thought that interpermeate and inform it, and that might extend it beyond my initial intentions.
Those initial intentions, as I note above, concerned finding a way to contribute to theories of embodiment. Having recognized the many ways in which our watery bodies challenge our thinking about embodiment and the onto-logics and ethics that accompany this thought, I still needed to find a method or practice of thinking about bodies that could adequately unfold and develop these insights and challenges. Moreover, this challenge required a philosophical practice that would allow itself to be led by the lived experience of watery bodiedness, and not only theoretical and textual guides. I was thus initially drawn to the phenomenological tradition, and particularly the embodied phenomenology of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology (while itself a metastable body with a shifting perimeter and fringe variations) is an answer to Edmund
Husserl's call to "go back to the things themselves," in order to study things as we experience them. Because of its concern for meaning distilled from our lived experiences,
16 phenomenology seemed a potentially fecund way in which to ask questions about how we live our bodies of water, and the meaning of these experiences. But moreover, as I describe in greater detail in chapter one, Merleau-Ponty's embodied phenomenology is a particularly apt starting point for this sort of exploration because as a phenomenology of embodiment not only does it give us tools to pay attention to the lived embodied experience of being a body of water as a philosophically significant site of investigation, but as an embodied phenomenological practice it also reminds us that we can only know anything at all through or thanks to our bodies. In other words, our bodies are not only an object of philosophical reflection, but also its agent. Hence, one of Merleau-Ponty's key contributions to my approach to this project was the leverage it gave me to think about embodiment in a way that already radically undermines a subject-object binary opposition. The body I am theorizing is inextricably bound up in the body that theorizes.
As already noted, the way in which such mutual imbrications destabilize and disturb our well-worn binaristic paradigms is a key theme of this dissertation, which I attempt to fold into the practice of its writing as well.
But, as I explain thoroughly in chapter one, phenomenology on its own did not seem quite enough. Although Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology certainly pushes the boundaries of the philosophical tradition he inherits, it arguably remains on the far side of a humanist phenomenology. In order to push this humanism beyond its limit, I turn to the
"rhizomatics" of Gilles Deleuze (alone and in his co-authored work with Felix Guattari), in part because of the philosophical break from humanism that Deleuze advocates and
17 enacts. But this posthumanism was certainly not the only attractive aspect of rhizomatics.
While Deleuze and Guattari admit that the term "rhizomatics" is a "precarious and pragmatic framework" without strict definition (1987: 22, 24), rhizomatics nonetheless gathers certain conceptual threads that seem particularly appropriate for thinking about bodies of water. For Deleuze and Guattari, the figure of the rhizome is the apposite
(rather than the opposite) of the tree. While the tree fixes an order, the rhizome connects at any point to any other. The rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections and thus eludes the strong teleological direction of the growth of the tree (1987: 4-7). Instead of an arborescent reliance on unity, the rhizome espouses multiplicity, open-endedness and interconnectivity (7-8).While the rhizome's lines of flight may produce a sort of break or rupture, a territory is never entirely left behind, as "these lines always tie back to one another" (9). Moreover, "the rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo" (25). And in between things, the rhizome is always moving, vibrating, producing. The figure of the rhizome thus translates into a philosophical tool for Deleuze and Guattari that is both ontological and pragmatic. As ontological, it already introduces the notion that "things themselves" are never discretely bounded, and are rather intense choreographies of actuality and virtuality, moving at faster or slower speeds (I return to these ontological commitments in chapter one). But, as a pragmatic figure, the rhizome also introduces a mode of thinking about these "things."
"Don't go for the root," they tell us, but "follow the canal" (17). Follow "a logic of the
AND," for this operator of relations "carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb
18 'to be'" (25). Rhizomatics demands a thinking in-between (between disciplines, between concepts, between philosophers) so that the productivity of relationality might erupt. As such, rhizomatics is a challenge to both our inherited ontological paradigms and our modes of thinking (which undoubtedly are inextricably intertwined).
As a result, this dissertation is not only phenomenological, but what I have come to call rhizo-phenomenological. In chapter one I thus also clarify this term and mode of inquiry in depth, and demonstrate how rhizo-phenomenology can enfold Deleuzian understandings of the rhizomatic, actual, virtual and intensive aspects of bodies into a theory of lived embodiment. As noted above, another key set of terms taken up by
Deleuzian rhizomatics and upon which I draw is the paired notion of the "molar" and the
"molecular." We have already glimpsed how bodies of water defy containment, gestate other bodies, and enter into choreographies or assemblages that both disturb boundaries and effect new bodies. In chapter one, I draw on these insights to suggest the notion of
"lived molecularity" as a key aspect of our lived embodiment. Yet, at the same time, the body, even as a body of water, also maintains some degree of metastability and its own set of capacities, i.e. a "lived molarity." A rhizo-phenomenological understanding of bodies thus enables me to focus specifically on this pivot or hinge zone, between where we sediment and solidify into the stable humans we have been taught to be, and where we dissolve and disperse through our various watery gifts, thefts and relinquishments.
Deleuzian rhizomatics, with its encouragement to readers to enter into becomings, also complements Merleau-Ponty's mentorship in thinking as a body, and helps teach us to
19 think specifically as bodies of water, with all of our latent watery potential and continually enacted lines of flight. Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze thus serve as my principal theoretical guides, insofar as they both agree to step aside and let embodiment itself come through as a guide. And, while the work of other "rhizo-phenomenologists" (in my appraisal) finds a way into the pages that follow, these references serve primarily as inspiration or clarification of my positions. Again, because rhizo-phenomenology is indeed a call to "go back to the things themselves" as the main source of ideas, in this dissertation I do not undertake to negotiate the theoretical positions of other related thinkers as my primary task, although in some places this is productive.
Yet, while my initial aim in this dissertation was to rethink embodiment through our bodies of water, this exercise inevitably took me to much larger questions. As I remarked above, bodies of water are an exceptionally fecund zone of confluence not only for the material proliferating life force of water itself, but for bodies of thought, some of which have often remained discrete or only tangentially related within our accustomed intellectual disciplinary frameworks: ontologies of human embodiment, thinking about other animals, theorizing sexual difference, environmental ethics, thinking through human rights and other humanist political models of justice, theorizing "natural" disasters, posthumanist ethics, evolutionary biology and other scientific perspectives on all of the above. Again, because of the way in which they serve as this zone of confluence, bodies of water emerge as an excellent "thing" to think with. Hence, although this project primarily explores embodiment from a rhizo-phenomenological perspective,
20 it also inevitably resonates with other bodies of thought that take up the questions posed by the body of water not just about embodiment, but about the broader ontological and ethical issues that find confluence upon and within these bodies. Such questions include:
How should we theorize embodiment? What is the relation between phenomenology and rhizomatics? How does thinking about sexual difference disturb our sedimented ontologies? How can the hegemony of the liberal individualistic subject be displaced?
How can we ethically cultivate a relationship to an other? Who or what might this other be? How can the enduring binary of "nature" and "culture" be interrupted? How can the materiality of bodies or things in the world be reclaimed as meaningful? What modes of living might best be able to address our current ecological crises? How can philosophy help us engage practical problems? My dissertation engages all of these questions with lesser or greater prominence, and as a result also serves itself as a confluence into and out of which other intellectual projects might flow. I would like to pause now to remark on these intellectual confluences in more detail, as I acknowledge my debts but also highlight how I see Bodies of Water as a distinct contribution within this unfolding scholarly history.
In the first place, and as I noted above, rhizo-phenomenology should also be situated in what has been loosely called "neo-materialism"—an emergent continental philosophical tradition of the past several decades whose most notable theorists, in addition to Deleuze and Guattari, include Bruno Latour, Manuel DeLanda, Isabelle
Stengers, Umberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Brian Massumi and others. Although
21 I do not purport to propose an authoritative or coherent definition of neo-materialism here, works that could be categorized as such would include those that generally adhere to the following postulates: (1) They espouse a refusal to see "nature" and "culture" as dichotomous, and reject any notion of the natural as inert, static and baldly given; (2)
They seem to take a step back from the late twentieth-century hegemony of textual discourse, and while the insights of the so-called "linguistic turn" in contemporary theory are not outright rejected, these new discourses are tempered with a reevaluation of the significance of the materiality of things and the world; and (3) They display a growing interest in the interpermeating transdisciplinarity of science and philosophy or cultural studies, and thus neo-materialists may also situate themselves within what is often called science and technology studies.7 Given this trend, the surging popularity of Deleuzian studies, with its commitment to the notion of "radical immanence" and to articulating a philosophy that could be adequate to the science of our time,8 is hardly surprising.
Nonetheless, my project and my rhizo-phenomenological approach in particular are in some ways distinct within this larger neo-materialist tradition, primarily in that I deploy an explicitly phenomenological method that takes experience of things themselves as the primary authority on and source of any conclusions I might reach. In this sense, my dissertation is an attempt to do theory more than it is a reflection on theory, although the latter provides a valuable buttress to the former. Secondly, I draw on the phenomenological tradition and Merleau-Ponty specifically to reconsider our traditional ontological notions of body-subjects and the others and the world with which they are
22 intertwined. With the exception of the recent developments in the emergent fields of
"cognitive phenomenology" and "naturalized phenomenology," both of which draw on cognitive scientific findings as a source for phenomenological explorations of life, neo- materialist positions most often disregard phenomenology as still too wedded to a humanist tradition.9 But as I push beyond a more traditional (humanistic) phenomenological approach by drawing on Deleuzian concepts to provide an extended and nuanced account of the "things" that I "go back to," the resonances of my project with certain strands of neo-materialist thought are clearly illuminated. Indeed, one key contribution of neo-materialism has been its impulse to rethink "things," what they are and what they can do. Perhaps most notable among neo-materialism here is actor- network theory, proposed by Michel Callon and developed and popularized primarily by
Bruno Latour. Actor-network theory is concerned with positing a new ontology of things, such that no thing is stable, discrete or ultimately passive. These "actants," as such things are called according to this theory, may indeed be humans or societies, but also and especially non-human "things." Actants within actor-network theory are understood as the source of any action, and explicitly are not to be understood in terms of human agency. In other words, all things "do" something, yet not according to the model of the human actor. Ontologically speaking, actants are "hybrids" or "quasi-objects" (here,
Latour calls explicitly on the work of Michel Serres), which are at once "much more social, much more fabricated, much more collective than the 'hard' parts of nature" as well as "much more real, nonhuman and objective than those shapeless screens [of
23 discursive representation] on which society [...] needed to be 'projected' (Latour 1993:
55). These hybrids thus resonate strongly with my descriptions of our bodies of water, as
Latour describes hybrids as precisely "in between" (1993: 55) nature and culture. Actor- network theory, according to Latour (1997), also gets rid of the distinctions of close and far, up and down, local and global, inside and outside, and instead replaces such mapping tools with the network to which there is no "outside" and in which everything is local.
Ultimately actor-network theory gives us valuable tools for understanding the material- discursive nature of things as above all relational.
Yet, while the resonances of my own project with actor-network theory are quite strong, and I clearly share with the proponents of actor-network theory the conviction that a full understanding of "things" remains inadequate unless we consider the way in which a thing's materiality, sociality and semioticity are simultaneously networked, my approach to the body of water also highlights certain aspects of bodies for which I do not believe actor-network theory, in its theoretical explications, adequately accounts. In the first place, actor-network theory is precisely that—a theory, or a way of understanding the world—while rhizo-phenomenology is both a theory and a practice, which asks that we "do theory" in ways adequate to the theory we are expounding. Latour, I would argue, challenges the ontology of things without sufficiently reworking the means of that challenge. This is not true for all theorists writing about things in the ways expounded by actor-network theory. Michel Serres, for example, to whom Latour acknowledges a significant intellectual debt, stretches and plies the theoretical machine in resistance to
24 traditional ways of doing theory that rely on the stability, transparency and consistency of concepts. For example, in The Parasite (2007), Serres weaves together the materiality of the parasite as a biological entity, its social enactment of "noise" in the translation of messages, and the myth and cultural history of its manifestations in a complex, rhizomatic, multilayered text, which directly tells us far less than it demonstrates through its unfolding how the parasite can serve as an illuminating figuration of relational ontologies. Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical practice is in many ways similar. While
I make no claims here to emulate or equal Serres or Deleuze and Guattari in my own writing, I share their conviction that a new ontology of things demands a new way of doing or writing philosophy of those things. Rhizo-phenomenology, as a theory and writing practice (which I outline in more detail in chapter one), offers such an opening.
Secondly, while Latour explicitly acknowledges Deleuze's understanding of things in his articulation of an actor-network onto-logic, Latour focuses on the thought- image of the rhizome and pays far less attention to the virtual as a key element of an ontology of things, or bodies. Indeed, actor-networks "act"; they are the "source of any action," Latour tells us, but from where is this force of action drawn? From other connections extending from the network, Latour tells us. But the virtuality, or the latent potentiality within any body is not adequately acknowledged. As I explain in chapter one,
Deleuze provides us with a "realist" theory that includes within the real the virtual, or the ephemeral cloud of potentiality that hovers around and is folded into any body, even if this virtuality is never actualized. This virtuality can be tapped into, contacted, amplified,
25 and above all it highlights what Deleuze refers to as differentiation, or the internal becoming-different of bodies, as a significant force (I further unfold this concept in the following chapters). As I tease out throughout this dissertation, the virtual is also closely linked to the gestational potential of bodies, whereby our own materiality is passed on, gifted, in order to allow an other to be. In their relations, gestational bodies gift bodies-to- come with traces of their virtuality, which the bodies-to-come in turn fold into the materiality of their bodies as vestigial virtual traces. All this is to say that in my accounts of our bodies of water, the proliferation of bodies within networks is not simply a change brought on thanks to a rechoreography of relations or through new "association"
(Latour's term). Bodies themselves are materially reconstituted through their virtual latency and thanks to the gestational gifts of their others. Watery bodily relations are not just association but the gift of and a debt to an other, in clearly material terms. While my proposals here are not explicitly refuted in actor-network theory, this theory nonetheless enacts a certain forgetting of these necessary aspects of a relational ontology which I seek to make explicit in this project. My emphasis on the gestational potential of bodies connects as well to a third way in which Bodies of Water extends beyond actor-network theory. While actor-network theory is explicitly concerned with relations between things as an ontological starting point, by levelling a distinction between human agency and the acting of hybrids, I worry that the specificity of human bodies, and their particular capacity to affect other bodies, may not be adequately accounted for. As I noted above, one of the key revelations of paying close attention to our lived experience as bodies of
26 water is the necessary pivot that emerges between ontology and ethics. Yet with actor- network theory, it seems as though this relational ontology disowns its conjoined twin of
"ethics" just as the conditions of its possibility are established. Again, one strength of rhizo-phenomenology is its insistence that lived experience must be accounted for as we map out these ontologies. To take up an omniscient mapmaker's perspective may be temporarily helpful if it helps us desist from our humanistic position of privilege, but it is dangerous if it threatens to disembed and ultimately disembody the mapmaker's historical and contextual insertion within actor-networks. As embodied, embedded human beings, we still experience things as near and far, inside and outside, local and global, even if this is only part of the story. But if we sacrifice these aspects of lived experience to the smooth space of the actor-network, our understanding of things will relinquish the value and weight of our individually and collectively lived histories and geographies. And to do so would impoverish the ethical potential of "doing" these new ontologies.
Latour's is not the only attempt to rethink "things." Andrew Pickering (1995) posits a similar naturecultural relational ontology in his figuration of the "mangle," while
Bill Brown's articulation of "thing theory," drawing on Michel Serres and in the tradition of Gaston Bachelard, calls for a "new materialism" that would take "objects for granted only in order to grant them their potency—to show how they organize our private and public affection" (Brown 2001: 7). For Pickering, like Latour, things are in a constant state of becoming and emergence in a difficult tugging between materiality and
27 semiotics; for Brown, like Latour, things are not controlled by us, but rather act upon us.
For all three, the material world has real agency. My resonances with and departures from these other theories of the material world thus replay those I enumerated in regards to
Latour. Karen Barad's theory of agential realism (1998, 2003) and her proposals regarding the "intra-action" of matter and discourse again echo similar themes. Yet
Barad's insistence on the historical and cultural situatedness of these intra-actions and of the bodies caught up therein, as well as her attention to their political and ethical effects, appeal more strongly than other "thing theories" to my own desire to ask not only after a new ontology, but to ask about what that ontology can open up in terms of an ethics of interbeing.
Yet, even as I articulate certain confluences with and departures from my own rhizo-phenomenological approach in these various new materialist theories of "things," it is also important to underline that my particular choice of "thing"—that is water, and our bodies of water—is also significant here. In many ways, watery bodies serve as a test- case for all of these theories. As I noted above, water is the very unruly cousin of other things. It "acts" according to its own unique chemistry and physics, and it defies neat categorization into ontological categories. Water is a shape-shifter, both matter and force.
It travels through things enacting a specific gestational relationship, but unlike vitamin C or trace minerals, it also comprises grand things in their own right. Oceans, weather, dammed reservoirs, are things that cannot even be thought except as water, while human, other animal and vegetable bodies cannot live without water. So while my claims in
28 these pages in many ways resonate with the principles of actor-network theory, thing theory, and agential realism, thinking with the body of water pushes these queries into uncharted territory. In the end, water, and watery bodies, do not have much patience for
"theories." For example, social and ecological anthropologist Julie Cruikshank unwittingly demonstrates how the unruliness of watery bodies can complicate actor- network theory's focus on the "activity" of things in her book Do Glaciers Listen?
(2005), where she explores the meaning of glaciers for the various communities that live with them and "study" them. Her research reveals that many indigenous accounts of glaciers do indeed configure these bodies of water as actors, as sentient beings, as actively participating in the creation of local knowledges and "histories of the present," as
Michel Foucault would say (Cruikshank, 3-5). But what is interesting about Cruikshank's analysis, and what distinguishes it from actor-network theory, is the fact that she leaves the issue of the agency of glaciers as an open question, one that she acknowledges is "less straightforward than it may seem at first" (4). The complexities of this question acknowledge the ways in which storytelling, scientific narrative and local history (which, in a sense, are all interchangeable terms) frame the conditions under which the question is asked in the first place. For Cruikshank, it seems the importance lies less in determining
"the" answer to the question "do glaciers listen?" and more in cultivating practices in which we "listen for different stories" (259). Strangely, the glaciers themselves, rather than providing an answer to Cruikshank's question, seem in fact to be asking the question in the first place. By listening for the "different stories," at least we hear the question.
29 Cruikshank's enacted version of thing theory is thus appealing because it really isn't a theory at all, but rather a practice of listening and responding between bodies where no body is fully active nor totally passive. Meaning rather emerges in the reverberations between bodies. Activity requires a passivity, a letting be, just as this letting be requires an active openness to the other. In thinking watery bodies as "things," it appears that the binary dichotomy of activity and passivity is yet another set of terms that requires not inversion, but transvaluation.
This is not to say that neo-materialist theories such as actor-network theory are unhelpful or wrong, and all the less so because I do not have a better coherent "theory" here to offer in their stead. But in these chapters I do want to see how a deep description of our bodies of water might implicitly rumble through these theories, exposing some cracks or creating new fissures. As a type of phenomenological practice, my rhizo- phenomenology of our bodies of water does not seek to provide "the" explanation of the world; it seeks only to describe certain aspects of how bodies live in the world in careful, rhizomatic depth, to see what this might desediment or disturb, and to see what sort of productive openings might emerge as a result. Thinking about the way in which bodies of water live in this world, I propose, might be a key for taking some of these neo- materialist projects further or deeper. According to Susan Hekman (2008), the current efforts of various thinkers (she names Barad, Hacking, Haraway, Latour and Pickering, amongst others) to formulate a neo-materialist theory that can counter the notion of social constructionism without succumbing to a representational realism all are "in some sense
30 incomplete"; their conceptions include "gaps" (92). Yet, as Hekman rightly points out, these efforts are struggling to define a new ontological-epistemological paradigm, suitably revolutionary, and hence a struggle towards coherent articulation should hardly be surprising. My hope is that my chapters might contribute something to this struggle in sketching out one potential aspect of this paradigm in clearer detail.
Moreover, I have noted that a new relational ontological paradigm is necessarily ethical as well, and that among those positing new theories of "things," Barad stands out in her foregrounding of this necessity. Unsurprisingly, Barad is not only a new materialist scholar, but a feminist one as well. Other feminist "new materialists" take up this inclusion of an ethics of difference, and an attention to the embodied and embedded situation of any intra-actions with even greater urgency. For example, Donna Haraway,
Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz are all feminist neo-materialist thinkers who serve as both explicit and implicit contributors to my dissertation's rhizo-phenomenological experiments. Braidotti's call to do philosophy as "embedded and embodied nomadism"
(2002: 260) or "enfleshed and embodied materialism" (2002: 5) resonates particularly strongly with my own intents as a rhizo-phenomenologist,10 while Grosz's recent explications on the relationship between nature and culture,11 Braidotti's understanding of the "figuration,"12 and Haraway's articulation of "natureculrure" and "material- semiotic knots" all deeply inform how I think about water, and our bodies of water, in these pages. As feminist scholars deeply committed to a rethinking of ontology precisely because it offers openings to rethinking and remaking our ethical relations to our
31 multitudinous others, Haraway, Braidotti and Grosz provide compelling models of an ethical and political new materialism which I hope might locate reverberations in my own explorations in Bodies of Water.
Nor do I think it a coincidence that some of these leading figures of feminist neo- materialism have for decades been at the vanguard of rethinking embodiment in general, long before the term "neo-materialism" took hold. For example, Elizabeth Grosz's
Volatile Bodies (1994) is still often invoked as a primary source for mapping theories of embodiment, particularly in its attempt to negotiate different approaches to both the discursivity and materiality of bodies. In this sense, my project's situation within an emergent neo-materialist tradition is distinctly overlapping with its contextualization within recent, primarily feminist, scholarship on embodiment that seeks to negotiate these seemingly competing understandings of embodiment. Indeed, my rhizo- phenomenological methodology owes an implicit debt to feminist thinking about bodies, even if the specific questions which I pursue therewith are not always related explicitly to sexual difference. I could only begin thinking about the questions I raise in this dissertation because of my years of training in feminist inquiry and epistemologies that taught me not only the political importance of thinking about difference, but also the value and ethics of finding connection across those differences, as well as the crucial role that our materially embodied situatedness plays in both of these endeavours. Feminist theories have made it their business to struggle with these issues, and have made incredible headway in coming up with sophisticated answers that refuse the binary
32 oppositional choices presented by the Western philosophical tradition of thinking about bodies. After all, late twentieth century attempts (including my own) to divide feminist theories on embodiment between the "biological essentialist" camp (where the natural materiality of bodies apparently sought to reify some female essence) and the
"poststructuralist" camp (whereby women and the feminine as material entities were apparently altogether fictitious) in retrospect seem somewhat disingenuous, and better labelled as sedimentations of hegemonic discourse. While proponents of both positions' extremes likely existed, a reflection back on texts that were often thought of as
"representative" of each reveals an uncomfortable and untenable fit with either extreme.
The arguments of Luce Irigaray, for example, and her commitment to the materiality of women's bodies, now appear far less "essentialist" to me than they did fifteen years ago, and instead offer a very complex theory of virtual difference, in many ways resonant with
Deleuze.15 On the other hand, in the nineties I read Judith Butler's Gender Trouble
(1990) as a kind of poster child for a poststructuralist performativity that saw the fleshy matter of bodies as (at best) tabula rasa, primed for cultural inscription, or (more likely) conjured up altogether out of the thin air of discourse. Yet, rereading Butler now, I am embarrassed by my surprise at her insistence that gender identity is "never fully artificial or arbitrary" but indeed crucially linked to bodies (1990: 147).16 But of course, none of this should surprise me, for feminist theorists have always understood that matter does indeed matter, but that the relationship between fleshy bodies and effects of power is complex and mutually determined. While the past thirty years (at least) of feminist theory
33 has reached various and conflicting conclusions about the relationships between matter and power, knowledge and meaning, I do not believe it too brash of a generalization to state that most of the body of contemporary feminist theory on embodiment has in some way been an experiment in neo-materialism, if that means most basically a critical negotiation of the relationship between bodies as matter and meaning.17
I also situate my work particularly at the pivot of those feminist scholars drawing on Merleau-Ponty (such as Helen Fielding, Vicky Kirby, Sonia Kruks, Gail Weiss, Iris
Marion Young) and those drawing on Deleuze (such as, again, Rosi Braidotti and
Elizabeth Grosz, but also Claire Colebrook and Tamsin Lorraine, as well as Dorothea
Olkowski, who draws on both). I view Bodies of Water as undertaking a similar task to the work of many of those scholars just mentioned, in deploying the insights of Merleau-
Ponty and/or Deleuze, albeit critically, to forge tools for developing new ontological and ethical understandings not only of sexual difference, but also of how to live our embodiment ethically among our multitudinous others. Finally, Luce Irigaray deserves particular mention as a key figure among the feminist "neo-materialists" I engage in this work. I largely devote my discussion in chapter two to Irigaray's writing on watery bodies, and there I read her work as a key hinge between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty in terms of working out the ontological proposition that our bodies of water offer us. Like the other feminist thinkers I mention, Irigaray in particular implores me to understand the matter of bodies and the material figures of water as more than metaphor. Indeed, as
Irigaray notes, focusing on the metaphorical aspects of conditions such as drought, while
34 neglecting their real material impact, "leads to a lot of mortifying wanderings" (2002a:
58). Irigaray and these other feminist thinkers ask me to appreciate the ways in which nature is never purely "natural" just as "culture" and "meaning" are never divorced from material implications, and to recognize how science can be a teacher, albeit one whose authority we should challenge as well. Perhaps the concerted move I make here to deploy a specifically rhizo-phenomenological practice distinguishes me from these other significant contributions. Yet, I do not suggest that my work marks a radical departure from any of the feminist scholars I have noted in these paragraphs—new materialist, phenomenological, Deleuzian, or some combination. These feminist writers insist that bodies do indeed matter, and thus encourage me to look more closely at the ways in which the watery materiality of bodies can serve as a guide to questioning the intellectual paradigms I have inherited. I do however hope that my project might present a specific interweaving of some of their various contributions. This interweaving shows itself more implicitly than explicitly through these pages. These feminist voices continue to chatter in the background of my explorations, sustaining and nourishing my efforts, although in places I do draw them more directly into dialogue.
Moreover, just as these feminist explorations of embodiment can in some ways be understood as neo-materialist, some of them also already lead us into posthumanism, creating a zone of confluence where the decentring of the male, phallogocentric subject flows into the need to desist from humanism and its ontological privilege more generally.
Posthumanism, as I have already noted, is less of a distinct or singular approach, and in
35 fact can even offer rather contradictory agendas, with a dystopic fear of the loss of humanity at the hands of the more-than-human on one hand, but on the other a (more or less cautious yet curious) exploration of the potential of the more-than-human for teaching us how to live otherwise, and even better. It is certainly within the latter strain that I situate my project, and hence share many resonances with that version of posthumanism's loose collection of responses to a humanistic tradition deemed inadequate to life. While Deleuze and Guattari are certainly often mentioned as part of this intellectual stream, in this project I also explicitly draw on Donna Haraway's work as a specifically feminist version of this contemporary movement of thought. Haraway's most widely cited contribution to an emergent posthumanist tradition is her "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" (1985), which explores (among other things) how our technologized bodies need not be feared, and can be looked upon rather as a productive hybridity and a specifically feminist welcoming extension into otherness as a response to our changing worldscapes. And, although Bodies of Water, with its ecological overtones, may seem antithetical to cyborg thought and prosthetic posthumanism, my project in some less obvious ways continues this tradition of posthumanist thought. If we refuse to see the technological as opposite and separate to the natural (a position I clarify in chapter five), then a space opens up to consider the resonances between thinking about both our watery and cybernetic or technological extensivity and intensivity as evoking similar onto-logics, or ways of being; both dismantle the discreteness of the human body, both imbricate bodies at (potentially) molecular levels, both can participate in the proliferation of other
36 life. Elizabeth Grosz, for example, in a chapter on prosthetics from her recent book, Time
Travels (2005), argues that prosthetics "both confirm an already existing bodily organization and generate new bodily capacities" (152). She thus counters a humanistic version of embodiment as discrete and decided with a posthuman notion of a body that through prosthetic extension can always be expanded and transformed.18 Moreover, both the cyborg or prosthetic body and the body of water present us with complex questions regarding identity, connectivity and difference. For example, in an essay on prosthetics as ethics, Joanna Zylinska argues that prosthetics can and should be conceptualized not as instances of self-possession and autonomy, but as "an articulation of connections between the self and its others" (216). She posits the prosthesis as an "ethical figure of hospitality" that can welcome "an absolute and incalculable alterity that challenges and threatens the concept of the bounded self (217). My explorations of our bodies of water are not intended to counter such insights generated by a cyborg or prosthetic posthumanism with technophobic appeals to our "natural" connectedness, but rather to complement what could be called the onto-logic of prostheses or cyborgs with an onto-logic of amniotics, a position I introduce in chapter two and continue to develop primarily in chapters three and five. These different logics of bodily being and becoming are not mutually exclusive; they rather show up different specific movements, rhythms and relations of the co- implication of bodies. These different specificities can deepen our understanding of embodiment in their own, complementary ways.19 Moreover, because I reject a view of the natural and the technological as mutually exclusive, the onto-logics of prostheses and
37 amniotics could also be read in specific lived experiences as superimposed, for example, by considering the way in which the "disposable" water bottle appears as the ubiquitous accessory of the contemporary western "active lifestyle," but this will wait for another
20 project.
More obviously, however, my project finds resonances with Haraway's more recent developments of posthumanist thought, particularly in her theorizations of our co- evolution and companion speciesism (2003), which I take up directly in chapters three and four. In these chapters, where I focus on our watery imbrications with and difference from our animal others, I also thus find confluence with a growing body of scholarship on animal ethics and our relation to other animals more generally. My own starting point for foraying into these discussions is Deleuze and Guattari's proposals of becoming-animal in relation to our watery interconnectedness with other bodies, and I did not begin this dissertation with any explicit intention to contribute to the field of animal studies.
However, as this project has unfolded, animal otherness and our relations to watery animal bodies has staked out a significant place in my work. More in retrospect than in intent, then, I now note the resonances of my work with posthumanist scholars concerned with animals. Alphonso Lingis's work is one example that I explicitly take up as a helpful means of fleshing out my own rhizo-phenomenological approach to exploring our animal otherness, but the conclusions I come to are also resonant with those of some other key thinkers, namely Derrida (2002, 2003) and Wolfe (2003a, 2003b, 2007). I share with these thinkers the desire to find a way to articulate, in Derrida's phrase "the animal that
38 therefore I am" while at the same time refusing to homogenize all animality into an undifferentiated (or insignificantly differentiated) way of being, or similarly, to see human animality as the only significantly different way of being. This project also finds resonance with some phenomenological explorations of animal being, including Merleau-
Ponty's own lectures on our interanimality in his Nature lectures, and more contemporary uptakes of this work by Ted Toadvine (2007) and Kelly Oliver (2007), for example. I hope that my ontological explorations of our bodies of water might offer further tools for being able to acknowledge both interconnection and difference that sustains our interanimality within an ethics of interbeing.
The posthumanist resonance in certain ecologically- or environmentally-located projects also reverberates in these chapters. But again, as in the case of animal ethics, the germ of my project did not stem from engagement with environmental philosophies, so if
I either refute or support some of these positions, it is mostly accidentally, or thanks to a subterranean confluence of ideas. Nonetheless, my work clearly shares many resonances with aspects of this body of scholarship, and so the various ways in which my project might be considered as another stratum of articulation to be read alongside some strands of ecological or environmental thought deserves at least some provisional commentary.
Some readers, for instance, will notice certain parallels in this work with deep ecology, first expounded by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. A more recent articulation of deep ecology found in Neil Evernden's The Natural Alien offers particularly strong resonances with many of the claims I make in this dissertation: that the "environment"
39 (including the watery world) is not outside of us, but in us and through us; that to address some of our "environmental crises" will demand a rethinking of our ontological paradigms, and a particular consideration of our relationality. While Evernden makes extensive reference to post-Husserlian phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty in particular in order to help articulate an appropriate relation between humans and the so-called natural world (and thus we also share phenomenological reverberations), some of his claims also seem to anticipate the Deleuzian ontology I introduce in these pages.
Evernden notes, for example, that "an individual is not a thing at all, but a sequence of ways of relating ... Concentration on those relationships, and on relationship in general, clearly constitutes a substantial alteration in our way of understanding the individual"
(133). Evernden also aptly reminds us that no detailed prescription of "action" can be offered in regard to our environmental crises, for "to recommend action is to presume an end, and we do not have one" (142); we instead can only begin with a "new story" to provide an opening to alter both us and our actions (141). In many ways, as will become clear, my dissertation offers similar conclusions in my suggestions for cultivating an ethics of interbeing. While Evernden's words still hold a powerful resonance almost three decades after he wrote them, I also hope that rethinking our embeddedness within the "environment" (watery or otherwise) as not only molar actors but molecularly dispersed becomings with a virtual potentiality might fruitfully augment the approaches to environmental crises suggested by deep ecologists. Evernden's work is also particularly helpful in laying out the problems with our ocularcentrism, or as he puts it,
40 "the despotism of the eye," that conceals too much in terms of our intercorporeal relations. While I do not draw this point out very explicitly in the following chapters, I also see my project as contributing to the meaningful exploration and deeper articulation of modes of embodiment that help us know the world through more than vision; our watery molecular bodies can and do forge intercorporeal relations that challenge what we think we know according to our despotic eyes. But even as my exploration of bodily molecularity seems resonant with a deep ecological approach, I am cautious of Evernden and deep ecology's general disdain for technology and a scientific worldview which is seen as ultimately impoverishing our relation to the natural world. In particular, Evernden rejects as helpful scientific knowledge that might help us better understand our bodily molecularity (see Evernden 18). Moreover, deep ecology poses some vexing problems in its insistence on an absolute bioegalitarianism, and its seeming lack of mechanisms to articulate and deal with differences among expressions of life.22
Yet Evernden's work also serves as a pivot between deep ecology and eco- phenomenology, which also shares resonances with my project. Eco-phenomenology, as an emergent stream of phenomenology that explicitly tries to rid phenomenology of its humanist predilections, would in fact be a very close relative to my articulation of "rhizo- phenomenology." Both explicitly seek to interrogate "the things themselves" only insofar as those things are understood primarily in the context of the "relationalities of worldly engagement" (Wood 213). I would also be pleased if I were to emulate the nuanced consideration in some eco-phenomenological work for not only our connectedness to
41 "nature," but our difference from/within it as well. Eco-phenomenology also resonates strongly with my assertion in this dissertation that such difference is at some level ultimately unknowable, thus highlighting the paradoxical "impossibility" of any phenomenology we undertake. 24 Eco-phenomenology does not explicitly include the virtual dimension of embodied being that I consider here to be a crucial aspect of rhizo- phenomenology. Yet, because I read this insight back into Merleau-Ponty via Deleuze in chapter one, I do not think that eco-phenomenology and rhizo-phenomenology are incompatible on these grounds. Both approach a similar problem with similar objectives in mind, but begin from somewhat different locations.25
I wish again to stress, however, that even as I align myself with these posthumanist projects, there is also an important hangover of "humanism" within my project. This is not a humanism that seeks ontological privilege for the human, but one which is not ready to surrender the specificity, meaningfulness and significance of the human to either an egalitarian levelling of all embodied ways of being, or to a nihilistic hopelessness and contempt of the human. I necessarily write this work from the position of a human body, and I think it is crucial not to shirk from this particular situatedness.
The potential of the human body to affect and be affected by other bodies must be explicitly acknowledged in order to both take responsibility for our actions as human bodies, and also in a gesture of affirmative joy and hope for the possibility of ethical interbeing. Perhaps in these ways my project here takes a step back from some of the more radical posthumanist projects that wish only to talk about the need to proliferate
42 life, with little practical attention to the quality, situatedness and specificity of the life it proliferates. In highlighting the notion of gestationality throughout this project, I hope to draw more attention to the ideas of response and responsibility, and the need to perpetually negotiate the effects of any response to an other body that we undertake. In writing this dissertation I have realized that this particular pivot between these versions of posthumanism and humanism is a particularly precarious one to tread, especially as we attempt to draw some sort of conclusions in terms of our ethical relations to other bodies.
But, as I make more explicit in chapter five, this is an in-between we must continue grappling with, even if our results are never entirely satisfactory.
III. The Chapters to Come
As noted several times above, a deeper articulation of my practical approach to this project, and of the understanding of bodies I develop here, can be found in chapter one, "Bodies of Water as Rhizo-Phenomena: In Theory and Practice." Here, I detail the philosophical theory and practice that I call "rhizo-phenomenology," which, as I have remarked, emerges at the hinge of Merleau-Pontian embodied phenomenology and
Deleuzian rhizomatics. The first half of chapter one is dedicated to explicating both
Merleau-Ponty's theory of embodiment and Deleuze's ontology of bodies, in a way that locates their resonances and provides a way of thinking about bodies that is adequate to our lived experience as bodies of water. Key here, as noted, are the notions of bodily molecularity and bodily molarity, both as modes of lived embodiment, which I argue can
43 also be understood as a pivot between the philosophies of Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty that brings these into a productive relation. The hinge between lived molarity and lived molecularity serves as the threshold or the door that negotiates and facilitates these differentiations and interpermeations of human bodies and the other-than-human bodies of water with which they are intertwined.
In chapter one I also examine how rhizo-phenomenology can elucidate the practice of thinking as a body of water. In other words, I also explore the philosophical practice of rhizo-phenomenology itself as a mode of becoming. Here I sketch out three important rhizo-phenomenological strategies. First, while again acknowledging the necessity of molar subjectivity, I explain how one can actually tap into the molecularity of our bodies of water through a practice akin to phenomenological intuiting. Secondly, I discuss rhizo-phenomenology's proactive transdisciplinary strategy of folding scientific narratives into philosophical ones, where I demonstrate how scientific and philosophical
"stories" can complement one another and create a richer description of embodied experience by pushing us beyond our molar subjectified perspectives of "lived embodiment." I conclude the second half of chapter one by specifically taking up the question of descriptive practice. I suggest that rhizo-phenomenological description deploys a certain practice of language in order to desediment our coagulated understanding of things, but to access this language requires an attempt to speak most directly as a body of water, situated at the hinge of lived molarity and lived molecularity.
Finally, at the close of chapter one I begin to anticipate how, in coming to grips with
44 what our bodies of water are—that is, how they express an onto-logic of connectedness with and also difference from other bodies of water—we are also positioned to be able to call upon our molar-molecular bodies of water to respond ethically to other bodies of water, and to cultivate an ethics of interbeing, or the cultivation of modes of living that can proliferate life within what I call an "onto-logic of amniotics."
The explicit development of this onto-logic of amniotics is the focus of chapter two, "An Onto-Logic of Amniotics: Gestational, Interpermeating, Differenc/tiating."
While it is clear that water traverses, permeates, gestates and sustains our biological bodies, in chapter two I seek to articulate more clearly the ways in which water's biological workings reverberate in an important philosophical proposition—in an onto- logic—that helps us rethink our dominant binaristic and compartmentalized ontological foundations. I explore this onto-logic through a rhizo-phenomenological engagement with our bodies of water, based on our lived experience as a body of water. To build up this rhizo-phenomenology, I turn to the philosophy of Luce Irigaray. Irigaray's work, predominantly in Marine Lover ofFriedrich Nietzsche, suggests not only the ways in which watery bodies can help us rethink our ontologies of embodiment, but also how such a reconsideration might be intertwined with a rethinking of sexual difference.
While Irigaray's reading of water remains my primary textual anchor here, chapter two also furthers my rhizo-phenomenological theorization of bodies in chapter one by reading Irigaray's work both through and alongside Deleuzian and Merleau-
Pontian theories of bodies. For example, I draw explicitly on Deleuze's conceptual
45 apparatus of difference and repetition and Merleau-Ponty's ontology of chiasm and the flesh in order to push Irigaray's thought further up against its own limits. This allows me to distil what I see as a key contribution of her work, that is, her insistence on the primacy of gestationality, which is vital for the onto-logic of amniotics. But moreover, by inviting these three philosophers into a watery, embodied intimacy, I suggest that we can develop a complex and nuanced understanding of sexual difference as the differentiated force of gestational desire that holds its own virtuality, and thus can never be fully known in advance. Finally, although my focus in chapter two is on our human bodies of water, the very term "amniotics," linked to the zoological category of "amniote," suggests that the onto-logic of amniotics can apply to other-than-human bodies of water as well. In the final section of this chapter, then, I suggest how the implications of amniotics extend beyond the realm of the human, or even the amniote, into the complex network of watery interbeing of which we are a part. These suggestions will set up my explorations in the second half of this dissertation.
Chapter three, "Fishy Beginnings: Molecular Evolutionism and the Potentiality of
Human Embodiment" begins this exploration of watery relations beyond the human by recasting the onto-logic of amniotics through the lens of evolutionary theory. In this chapter I examine the ways in which evolution can help us understand what it means to be a body of water, and how a deepened understanding of our watery embodiment can open up to an ethics of interbeing. In this chapter I undertake two related tasks towards these ends. First, I explore how evolutionary science and the descriptions it gives us can
46 deepen our appreciation of the onto-logic of amniotics I laid out in the previous chapter.
This exploration begins by describing the ways in which water is vital for the evolution of bodies, and then moves on to map the theoretical terrain of what I call here "molecular evolutionism"—a certain deployment of evolution stories by various contemporary critical thinkers in their own theoretical work. This deployment, I suggest, moves beyond dominant sociobiological understandings of Darwinian evolution and instead espouses a view of evolution as a multiplicity of processes and movements (rather than a "grand narrative"); it seeks to challenge the discrete ordering and teleological "success" of further evolved species, and similarly undoes the binaristic distinction of "nature" and
"culture" as separable forces; and lastly, I argue, a "molecular evolutionist" approach offers a nuanced and complex view of "origins." This final point leads into a detailed account of the ways in which an alternative account of evolution deepens our understanding of the overlapping cycles of gestation, (sexual) difference and interpermeation that our bodies of water reveal as an onto-logic of amniotics. As we will see, this deeper account opens to understanding this onto-logic as illuminating not only a way of being for human bodies, but for more-than-human bodies and the web of intercorporeality and interbeing that gathers and distributes these diverse bodies as well.
The following chapter, "Becoming-Cetacean: Whale-Bodiedness and Water, at the Borders of the Liveable" picks up on the insights of chapter three, but takes them forward in a more embodied way. Evolution stories can offer us openings that help us think about our fishy beginnings in ways that deepen our understanding of the onto-logic
47 of amniotics, but, as I propose in chapter one, in this dissertation I aim not only to think about bodies of water, but to think as one as well. In chapter four, then, I propose that we can contact the watery traces of our virtual fishy beginnings in order to learn something deeper about our meaning and potentiality as human bodies of water, and the difference of other bodies of water. In other words, I suggest here that evolutionary knowledge should reconfigure not only the ways we understand our embodiment cognitively, but also the ways in which we experience it at the molecular level. One such experience, I argue, is illuminated in Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "becoming-animal." In the first half of chapter four I thus revisit the notion of bodily molecularity and explore it in the context of "becoming-animal," and I show how our "fishy beginnings" are experienced, rhizo-phenomenologically, by and through our own watery embodiment. In the second half of the chapter, I then turn to describe our lived experiences of becoming-animal through the example of becoming-cetacean. To do so, I draw on various descriptions of whale encounters, including Jacques-Yves Cousteau's accounts of his oceanographic expeditions in the 1960s, and Niki Caro's film Whale Rider. While these accounts certainly highlight our bodily interpermeations with our "strange kin," the whales, they also move to an account of the ultimate unknowability of our watery others. However, rather than negating the experience of becoming-animal, I argue, this "beyond" that marks human difference from an other animal kin is an integral aspect of becoming- animal. Despite the ways in which we are mutually imbricated with other bodies of water through evolutionary time and space, a deep understanding of our difference is
48 nonetheless necessary if we are to have any hope of ethically negotiating our own role, as molar-molecular bodies within a watery web of other watery bodies.
One specific differentiator I focus on in chapter four is our topographical relation to water. We are not only bodies of water, but equally importantly, bodies in water, in various ways. Our bodies develop certain capacities in a co-evolution with the territory they inhabit, and I thus argue that an understanding of our differentiations must take our watery situatedness into account. While chapter three foregrounds the ways in which water facilitates our interpermeations, chapter four more explicitly attends to the way in which water is also an extensive force that creates for bodies certain possibilities for life.
In doing so, I explore Deleuze's suggestion that our evolutions and involutions require living at "the borders of the liveable," and how the molecular contact of becoming-animal requires that we venture to these borders which, for our human bodies, begin at the water's edge. While these border zones necessarily disrupt our comfortable bodily habits, these tensions, torsions and effort provide an opening to learn to live differently, and to learn to live with difference.
In my dissertation's final chapter, "Listening, Responding: Water Crises,
Common Bodies and an Ethics of Interbeing," I gather the various threads I have strewn throughout the preceding chapters that suggest the ethical implications of the onto-logic of our watery bodies. I begin by laying out how the various projects of Merleau-Ponty,
Deleuze and Irigaray might be interwoven in an affirmative ethics of interbeing. Such an ethics is best understood as an ethological ethics, or ethics of relations based upon a
49 body's potential to affect and be affected by other bodies. It cannot posit a categorical imperative, but rather asks us to listen and respond attentively and specifically to the various bodies of water with whom we share this watery world. Cultivating such an ethics demands that we listen to the other bodies of water with whom we are co- imbricated, and respond in a way that would safeguard the precarious onto-logic of our watery being, while also opening to the proliferation of life, different from our own.
Moreover, I examine the possibility of such an ethics specifically in the context of the current localized and globalized crises that are transforming our planet's geophysical bodies of water. Drawing upon my evolutionary explorations in chapters three and four, I reject a dichotomy between "natural" and "technological" bodies of water, but instead examine our new hydrotechnologies in terms of their ability to cultivate an onto-logic of amniotics. Again, I reimpart the importance of considering our "molar" human responsibility in relation to our water crises and our implication in the rechoreography of the planet's geophysical bodies of water.
In the chapter's second half I turn to explore two ecopolitical responses to our water crises, namely the advocacy of the human right to water, and the call for the cultivation of a global water commons. In this brief examination I elucidate how our response to our water crises demands an attentive listening to bodies of water that would allow their intercorporeal affective capacities to come into focus. By considering our ecopolitical possibilities according to the extent to which these might either support or challenge the onto-logic of amniotics, I suggest that we can better cultivate an ethics of
50 interbeing. But I also stress that this cultivation should not be mistaken for a blanket call to preserve our bodies of water exactly as they are, guarded from any forces of change, for we already have seen that transformation, passage, and differentiation are integral aspects of any body of water. Water is itself a force of change. Instead, our strategies should nurture the proliferation of life, within the context of an attentive listening to the specificity of that life. In the end, I suggest that the cultivation of a global water commons according to an onto-logic of amniotics also enables a radicalization of other enterprises seeking to establish new global commons. By acknowledging the potential of our own bodies of water, and their imbrications in a "commons" of watery bodies with whom we ostensibly have nothing "in common," we can activate the life-affirming and proliferating force of our own watery-fleshy selves in the service of such global ethical- political projects. An ethics of interbeing must be an ethics committed to a creative virtual potential yet-to-come, never fully knowable. An ethics of interbeing must always remain open to being surprised by what a body can do.
51 Stepping from the shower I notice a bead of water collected on my forearm, and watch as it meanders slowly between the follicles of hair before joining up with two or three other drops, only to then let go, as if reluctantly, from the skin that has guided its journey.
And as two, perhaps three, drops pool together on the lower outer cusp of my forearm, several inches below my elbow (that one place on my bodily surface that still has a vague recollection of the skin of my youth), I think about the relation between those drops of water and the bulk beneath the surface across which they have travelled. I remember reading somewhere that at least two thirds of each cell in my body is water, but of how, at the time, this biology lesson meant little to me. But now I wonder about this water— where it comes from, where it goes, how it comes to be this supreme contortionist- chameleon, both filling out my flesh and then receding from view such that one hardly notices it's there. When it does make its presence felt—in a nervous sweat, in a menstrual visitation, in an outflow of tears at exactly the wrong time, in a pressing need to urinate— these leaks and flows are embarrassing, annoying. They almost seem quiet betrayals to the on-going business of being a body.
The next day I stay under the stream of water for five, perhaps seven, minutes longer than necessary, and wonder about the allure of this sensation, this situation. The sounds of the
52 house are blocked out by the rush of water past my ears, my eyes closed, and yet all of my tactility lit up, glowing. The water streams down the bony watercourse that is my shoulders, my scapula, the dip below my thoracic spine. It reaches the swell of flesh over which it should tumble in a veritable cataract to the basin of the tub, but instead the water clings to the contours of my legs, preferring a much less dignified descent of fits and starts that ends in a graceless dribble between my toes. Again, is it the water that prefers not to let go, or my flesh that wants so desperately to hang on? What is the difference? Am I really all that compartmentalized within this diver's suit of flesh?
53 CHAPTER ONE
Bodies of Water as Rhizo-Phenomena: In Theory and Practice
"I have no means of knowing the human body other than that of living it. "
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962: 108)
I. Introduction: Thinking About/As Bodies
We live as bodies of water. But, as such, we are not on the one hand embodied
(with all of the philosophical and ontological investments such a position brings with it) while on the other hand primarily constituted of water (with all of the attendant biological, chemical and physiological implications). Rather we are both of these things necessarily at once, and we live at the site of exponential meaning that emerges where embodiment meets water. Water permeates our bodies, but our bodies also permeate the vast and intricate choreography of water that comprises our greater world. While water is commonly understood as the condition of possibility for life generally and embodiment in particular, embodiment is also necessary for water. Water can only be an abstract chemical formula in theory, for if it wants to live, then it must take up an expression in some body, and human embodiment is one of these particular expressions. The "body of water" as a philosophical concept thus has much to teach us about the philosophical meaning of our embodiment, as it insists that such meaning also consider the materiality
54 of the body and the biological aspect this necessarily entails. At the same time, thinking about "the body of water" also facilitates a deepened understanding of our interbeing with natural, political, economic and social worlds, for the body of water, we know, is never contained discretely within our fleshy selves but rather interpermeates and is implicated in other bodies of all kinds.
Yet, dominant philosophical modes of thinking about what a (human) body is, how a body lives and is lived, and how a body relates to other bodies (human, animal, vegetable, social, political, inorganic, elemental, molecular) resist an adequate exploration of these connections. If indeed the "body of water" is a particularly fecund site of theoretical inquiry, there exists a paucity of philosophical practices that might appropriately enfold critical explorations of human embodiment as a metaphysical and cultural phenomenon with our knowledge of the body's material, biological modes of living. To further connect these inquiries into embodiment with current ecological, political and sociological discourses around water as a natural resource is a greater challenge still. So before moving on to explore what the body of water might teach us about the ontological and ethical investments of embodiment, it seems necessary to address the question of how: How can we think about the body of water in a way adequate to its implications? What theoretical frameworks can enable an exploration of our human bodies of water as interpermeating choreographies at once natural, at once cultural, at once singularly different in their human expressions, at once connected in and through other watery bodies in a shared world?
55 In this chapter I will thus propose one means of getting to this how in what I call
"rhizo-phenomenology." This is a mode of philosophical inquiry that owes its main theoretical debts to the late twentieth century rhizomatics of Gilles Deleuze (writing both on his own and together with Felix Guattari), and the philosophy of embodiment of
French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Indeed, the description of our watery bodies that permeate this dissertation's early pages have already afforded us a glimpse of how the becoming-theory between embodied phenomenology and Deleuzian rhizomatics can serve as a fecund space for an investigation of the body of water: On the one hand, we need to describe our bodies of water as we live them. This requires bracketing the sediment of theoretical discourse around these bodies (as solely biological, or discretely philosophical, for example) and paying attention instead to the lived experience of watery embodiment. As we learn from Merleau-Ponty, embodied attention and a struggle to articulate in language what our bodies reveal to us about the world are cornerstones of a phenomenological practice that can loosen what we know and open to what we do not.
Merleau-Ponty's embodied phenomenology further teaches us that we only have a world because we live as bodies that know the world as an extension of the body's ways of being. Hence what we can know about things resides neither in a transcendent platonic realm of ideals, nor solely in our solipsistic imaginings, but rather emerges in-between, through an embodied, lived experience of these things that is necessarily somewhere, sometime, somehow. We can understand bodies of water, then, because our thinking selves and bodies of water are mutually imbricated in the world. But equally
56 significantly, we can understand bodies of water because our bodies—watery, fleshy and otherwise—are key resources for coming to such an understanding. Our bodies of water, in the context of an embodied phenomenological practice, emerge as both the agent and object of our theoretical grapplings. In short, then, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology offers us three important theoretical leads for the exploration of our bodies of water: attention to the body as a lived phenomenon whose meaning emerges in our contact with the world; tapping into one's lived bodily experience as a mode of philosophical practice; and description of the "thing itself as not a merely denotative exercise, but rather as a means of creative-critical act.
Yet on the other hand, many dimensions of how bodies of water are lived can be illuminated by Deleuzian rhizomatics in ways that push Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology up against its limits. Against the (teleological, rooted) tree model of thought that characterizes much of critical theory following Hegel, Deleuze offers a rhizomatic model—one of connection, unanticipated direction, and multiplicity, with no privileged centre; a model where becoming trumps being, and relations, movements and pragmatics are the important moments for analysis. Deleuzian rhizomatics thus amplifies certain aspects of Merleau-Ponty's theory of embodiment in several important ways, and translates it into a paradigm that can more successfully escape the humanistic language to which Merleau-Ponty is largely wed. First, in rhizomatics the notion of embodiment is radically democratized to remove the ontological privilege of a human subject. The thought-image of the rhizome reveals how we as human bodies do not sit atop and apart
57 from the menagerie of the material world. We are instead consistently pulled out of our place of human ontological privilege by our rhizomatic connections to other bodies with whom we share a radical immanence. Accordingly, rhizomatics understands all bodies as vectors and intersections of the myriad forces and energies that compose these bodies, and connect them to other bodies. The second key point about bodies, then, is that they are not discrete in space and time, but rhizomatic and interconnected. However, despite this interpermeation, Deleuzian rhizomatics offers a sophisticated theory of difference, whereby bodies are not variations of the same or representations of some original. Rather, according to Deleuze, each body is a singularity, with an internal difference. The third important aspect of bodies is thus that their differentiation is foregrounded by privileging not what bodies are, but what they become, and their processes of individuation and differenc/tiation.26 Every body is composed of speeds and slownesses, and is therefore defined by its thresholds of changeability rather than by a static essence, or some discretely bounded, impermeable ideal of interiority. Finally, bodies can be understood as both rhizomatic and differenc/tiated because of a Deleuzian ontology that understands bodies as not only actual, but virtual and intensive as well. To understand bodies as becoming requires a recognition not only of their metastability in certain actualized choreographies of force and matter, but also of their virtuality, or the potential they hold that might or might not be actualized. The becoming of bodies also requires recognition that the intensive, or morphogenetic processes that work to deterritorialize and reterritorialize bodies, are just as real as the bodies (temporarily, ephemerally)
58 produced. "What is," for a Deleuzian ontology, is inseparable from how it is, how it has come to be and how it might be in some unknowable future. For Deleuzian rhizomatics, then, the body of water loosely holds together those aspects of the body of water that are already actualized and differentiated (intracellular fluid, urine, saliva, and so on), as well as those that seem to escape thought (the sensation that evokes tears, or the disappearance that causes thirst, for example). As a rhizomatic body, moreover, the body of water always extends beyond its specific spatio-temporal instances of capture.
In this chapter my objective is thus to further clarify the aspects of both Merleau-
Ponty's embodied phenomenology and Deleuzian rhizomatics that facilitate my exploration of our bodies of water. Part of this work entails building a theoretical workshop in which this exploration can take place, and which is amenable to both the projects of Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty. This requires me to articulate the ways in which
I see a meaningful continuity between Merleau-Ponty's focus on the relevance of lived human embodiment as both object of thought and agent of thinking, and Deleuze's radical amendments to an ontology of bodies in the first place. As I will argue, despite the differences in their respective philosophies, each body of work resonates with and is complementary of the other in important ways that facilitate thinking about bodies of water. I call this thought-workshop rhizo-phenomenology.
In the first half of this chapter I outline how rhizo-phenomenology allows me to think about bodies of water, as I ask what and how the body of water as rhizo- phenomenon is. Here I first take up the questions of subjectivity and lived embodiment,
59 and clarify how rhizo-phenomenology allows me to negotiate thinking about the human body of water as necessarily subjectified, or molar, but also as molecular (Deleuzian terms which I unpack below). As I explain, lived molecularity operates on a different plane than lived molar subjectivity, although both are indeed embodied (and necessary).
Bodily molecularity as a mode of lived embodiment, I argue, is a key moment of becoming-philosophy between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty. I explain how this lived molecularity enables the potential interpermeation of bodies across their differences, such as we see in bodies of water, both human and other-than-human. Although the central focus of this dissertation is the human body of water, a rhizo-phenomenological approach reminds us that this particular body of water cannot be understood as discrete from the other bodies of water with which it is intertwined. The hinge between lived molarity and lived molecularity serves as the threshold or the door that negotiates and facilitates these differentiations and interpermeations of bodies. In the first half of this chapter I also clarify how rhizo-phenomenology can enfold Deleuzian understandings of the rhizomatic, actual, virtual and intensive aspects of bodies into a theory of lived molecular embodiment.
In the second half of the chapter, I turn to examine how rhizo-phenomenology offers a theoretical ground for thinking as a body of water. Here, I investigate the philosophical practice of rhizo-phenomenology itself as a mode of becoming. I outline three important considerations or strategies that I employ in this dissertation, and which are specifically "rhizo-phenomenological." First, while acknowledging again the
60 necessity of molar subjectivity, I return to the notion of lived molecularity and explain how one can actually tap into the molecularity of our bodies of water through a practice akin to phenomenological intuiting. I argue that this practice, although beginning from one's own body, can escape the solipsistic subjectivism that Deleuze and some of his commentators assume is an inevitability of phenomenological practice. The second aspect of a rhizo-phenomenological method I outline is its proactive transdisciplinarity, or "transnarrativity," particularly in terms of scientific and philosophical modes of inquiry. Both practices of science and practices of philosophy offer us narratives that facilitate our understanding of ourselves and our relation to our world, but each set of practices often considers the other as an impoverished, less accurate or otherwise limited understanding. In this dissertation I would like to demonstrate how scientific and philosophical narratives can in fact complement one another and create a richer description of embodied experience. Specifically, I argue that scientific stories can serve as helpful conduits to again move us beyond our molar subjectified perspectives.
Moreover, scientific narratives can help us understand how the "nature," or material- biological aspects of our bodies of water do indeed matter and contribute to the meaningfulness of our bodies. While such perspectives are evident in rhizomatics, their inclusion in phenomenological descriptions of lived embodiment requires some clarification. The perspectives offered by science stories, I thus argue, do not reveal something disconnected from lived experience, but rather provide one vector for experiencing our embodiment from the vantage point of less comfortable temporal and
61 spatial scales. While science stories in themselves inevitably "molarize" the stuff of life in their own ways, the insights offered by scientific modes of inquiry can help us think differently about what our lived experience might entail, and about the sorts of relations that are inaugurated by our bodies of water. In short, science stories can be a helpful aid for tapping into the molecularizing of our bodies, once we have come to understand this molecularization as a dis-organ-ization or disturbance of our sedimented understanding of our bodies/selves. I end the second half of this chapter by turning to the question of description. While description is evidently a key practice for phenomenology, it is less clear that this is the case for Deleuzian rhizomatics. I argue, however, that those
Deleuzian concepts I draw on in my understanding of bodies of water as rhizo- phenomena are based on Deleuze's own desedimented description of how these bodies are lived. Deleuze does not offer us some speculative fiction, but rather an alternative account of how we live as bodies which is real precisely because it is a description, closely related to Deleuze's notion of "symptomatology." In these final pages I also take up the way in which rhizo-phenomenological description demands a certain language use in order to desediment our coagulated understanding of things. To access this language requires an attempt to speak most directly as a body of water, perched on the hinge between lived molarity and lived molecularity. Moreover, as will become clear in the final chapter of this dissertation, I want to argue that honing an ability to speak from this location is also what can facilitate an ethical listening to other bodies of water. As I will suggest, in coming to grips with the what our bodies of water are—that is, how they
62 express an onto-logic of connectedness with and also difference from other bodies of water—we are also put in a position to be able to call upon our molar-molecular bodies of water to respond ethically to other bodies of water, and to cultivate an ethics of interbeing. This cultivation demands that we listen to the other bodies of water with whom we are co-imbricated, and respond in a way that would safeguard the precarious onto-logic of our relations, while also opening to the proliferation of life, different from our own. In short, then, to locate oneself on the hinge between one's molarity and molecularity, as a body of water, is not just a philosophical exercise that can teach us something about our ontological situation; this is also an opening to "doing" this ontological proposition as an ethical practice. If we can locate this hinge as a means of speaking, we can also use this location as a pivot, from which we can also listen, and respond.
Rhizo-phenomenology, I thus argue, is one practice that can help facilitate an understanding of embodiment that can negotiate the various implications of being a body of water. In making this rhizo-phenomenological proposition, however, I do not claim that the theoretical terrain articulated between Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze is an obvious or easy fit. In fact, Deleuze (again, both alone and together with Guattari) is critical of the phenomenological tradition. For example, in What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari critique both phenomenology in general for failing to produce concepts (149) and
Merleau-Ponty's notion of the flesh, specifically, as still too wedded to the solipsistic human subject (178-179). This criticism of phenomenology for reinstating the dative
63 between being and the plane of immanence—that is, for turning "pure immanence" into
"immanence to a subject"—is articulated elsewhere in What is Philosophy? (46-47) and is already foreshadowed in Empiricism and Subjectivity (87). Difference and Repetition, moreover, presents the related criticism of phenomenology's inability to admit difference as difference into its philosophy (51-52).28 Unsurprisingly, then, many of Deleuze's most prominent contemporary commentators support these assessments of phenomenology's stumbling blocks,29 even as a resurging interest in phenomenology seems to be returning to this tradition, and in many cases the work of Merleau-Ponty specifically. At the same time, contemporary Merleau-Ponty scholars increasingly note resonances of his work with Deleuzian rhizomatics, and its anticipation thereof. In this chapter I do not intend, however, to dismiss the important divergences between phenomenology and rhizomatics. Rather, I seek to work through these tensions in order to articulate the resonances, anticipations and complementarities. In doing so, I hope to carve out a space where aspects of both can be brought together for a specific purpose— that is, to facilitate an exploration of our bodies of water that can accommodate my lived experience as such a body that in so many ways defies our traditional modes of thinking about bodies, and that also unlocks, in various ways, the latent potential of what a body
"can do."
64 II. How to Think (About) A Body of Water
Both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze offer us important resources for thinking about bodies. In many ways, Merleau-Ponty's primary gift to philosophy is a reconsideration of embodiment. The sum of Merleau-Ponty's oeuvre offers a detailed theory of embodiment that goes back to the body itself to learn about the existential relation we have to our bodies. He discovers that the body is not something we "have," but is rather something we inescapably are. In fact, as Merleau-Ponty so convincingly argues, consciousness and being—two of those lofty metaphysical questions much adored by philosophers—can't escape the body, even if they wanted to. Merleau-Ponty's work is a radical refusal of any separation between "mind" and "body" on the one hand, and between body as object and body as subject, on the other. The result is, in the words of Renaud Barbaras, "a radical revision of the body's ontological sense" (2004: xxiii). Deleuze, on the other hand, offers us an ontology or a cosmology that interrupts traditional thinking on embodiment in the ways I have already mentioned above: bodies are not only actual, but virtual and intensive, and they are expressed on at least two registers or planes at once: the molar and the molecular, or the plane of organization and the plane of immanence.31 This collection of theoretical tools, offered by both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, helps us map out an understanding of lived embodiment that is adequate to our bodies of water. This mapping is what I turn to now.
65 a) Molar Coagulations and Molecular Undercurrents
As noted above, one of Deleuze's principal quarrels with phenomenology and
Merleau-Ponty is the seeming reliance on a human subjectivity to translate things in the world into meaningful being. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty espouses a decidedly humanist perspective, as he posits human consciousness as the central pivot for understanding the world.32 For Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology requires a description of the world as "we live it" even if things and the world are '"already there' before reflection begins" (1962: vii). But while the notion of the knowing human subject seems to ground phenomenology, Deleuzian rhizomatics is better known for its posthumanism. Human subjectivity, claims Deleuze in his critique of Western metaphysics, places Man at the centre of the world where he bestows meaning according to his own human scale and perspective. Yet such a world has no centre, according to Deleuzian rhizomatics, and human scale is a view from only one particular milieu. For example, tectonic plates may move positively quickly, by all geological accounts, and molecules may be positively huge from a subatomic perspective, yet human-scaled subjectivity perceives these as still, and imperceptible. For Deleuze, any meaning bestowed from the vantage point of the human is thus never transcendent in itself (as purported by classical phenomenologists) but only a version of Urdoxa—some grand opinion of the Major Man. So the question remains: How can such investments be brought into a productive relationship with the problematization of human subjectivity that Deleuzian rhizomatics demands?
66 I would like to argue that this particular phenomenological inadequacy only holds if human understanding is limited to subjectified understanding—that is, to what a subjectified body can know or think. Deleuze's criticism seems to assume that the knowledge elicited by a phenomenological thinking human body is the same thing as what is revealed to a phenomenological thinking subject. But subject and body are neither synonymous terms, nor entirely discrete. I propose that in order to understand what it means to be a body of water, we must consider carefully these two terms—subject and body—in a way that results neither in their uncritical elision, nor in some quasi-Cartesian definitive separation.
Deleuzian rhizomatics has been known for its criticism of the metaphysical tradition of individualistic humanism, and of a human subject whose perspective is totalizing. Yet despite his criticism of the hegemony of human subjectivity, Deleuze nonetheless acknowledges subjectivity as one expression, or one "capture," of bodies. In
Deleuzian rhizomatics, a body is any whole that is composed of parts that enter into a specific and characteristic composition with each other, and that has specific and characteristic thresholds for being affected by other bodies. These thresholds are what individuate a body.33 A body, for Deleuze, is thus defined primarily by what it "can do" and what can be done to it, while still maintaining the body's metastability as a whole.
The human body, as a certain type of composition that can be affected by other bodies in specific ways, is one type of body. Human bodies are specific intensive and extensive choreographies of force and matter. And this, for Deleuze, is one important moment
67 where the humanistic tradition breaks down. Because human bodies share the same means of individuation as all other sorts of bodies, human bodies are denied any ontological privilege. Processes of subjectification, however, are one of the specific forces at play in the composition of human bodies; subjectification is a force according to which a human body shifts from the plane of consistency or immanence (made up of flows of unformed elements) to the plane of organization (where totality and unification take hold). This shifting between planes is important because, first, it acknowledges that subjectivity is a part of human bodies, even if it does not grant them ontological privilege, and secondly, it highlights an important element of Deleuze's philosophy that insists on the coexistence of these planes or strata, whereby they continually deterritorialize and reterritorialize one another.
Deleuze and Guattari's oft-cited concept of the Body without Organs (BwO) helps clarify how the interaction of human bodies upon these two planes results in both subjectified bodies and disorganizing bodies, but as neither synonymous nor oppositionally separable terms. My own human body of water serves as a helpful illustration here: As a human body, I am somewhat organized, with seemingly discrete borders and boundaries. My skin gives the illusion of a hermetic seal, and in fact keeps my viscera mostly from view, and thus from my explicit attention. This body can be thought of as my subjectified body that coagulates upon the plane of organization. From my human-subject point of view, this body appears to me as whole, separate, and organized. But my human body of water tells another story. My body of water sloshes
68 and leaks, excretes and perspires. Its depths gurgle and erupt to send important messages to that other, subjectified body of mine. My body of water requires copious amounts of watery intake to replenish the water lost in my visceral effluence, and functions on micro- levels I can barely fathom. Moreover, as a repository of "biological water," my body of water plugs into macro-systems and enters transversal assemblages that are similarly discombobulating. This body of water is Deleuze and Guattari's Body without Organs, even though it is a veritable chaosmos of organicity, for the organism and its organization, rather than the organ, is the enemy of the BwO. Such eruptions, interruptions and extensions by my body of water thwart my subjectified sense of my organized organism at every turn.
This subversive and destabilizing becoming is the "body" for which Deleuzian rhizomatics is best known. Yet although Deleuze and Guattari admonish their reader to
"make [them] self a Body without Organs" in order to counter the hegemonic subjectifying processes of the organism, Deleuze and Guattari also remind us that "the
BwO is not 'before' the organism; it is adjacent to it and is continually in the process of constructing itself (1987: 164). Importantly, even though the watery BwO thwarts the organized body, the organism is very much dependent on these watery events for its continued expression. So again, even though we speak here of two planes, they are not separable, but superimposed, interpermeating, and codependent. The BwO should then be understood as the territory on which the sedimenting construction of the organized body takes place (1987: 159), but also as the force of desire that seeks to desediment
69 these same accumulations and coagulations of subjectivity. The Body without Organs is that aspect of the body that is not subjectified, signified, organized, but it is not something other than the subjectified body. The BwO is rather another expression of a common body. Subjectivity and the BwO exist simultaneously, even though strictly speaking, subjectivity occupies the plane of organization, while the BwO occupies the plane of immanence or consistency. Both planes continuously interrupt and intersect with one another, and both are expressions of the human body; the human body could not survive without this double articulation. Deleuze and Guattari remind us that completely
"destratifying" or annihilating the plane of organization is risky; "You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it" (1987: 160).
So while we know that subjectification is one of the key points of a humanistic tradition with which Deleuze takes issue, to question the ontological and epistemological privilege of the human subject is not the same thing as denying human subjectivity altogether. The human body may not be better, or smarter, or any more enduring than other bodies (and it is certainly nothing without the watery, messy organicity sloshing below its surfaces), but it is invested in certain contemporary configurations of power and capture that need to be accounted for. While bodies are not only subjects, subjectification is an inescapable part of these configurations, as it plays a key role in setting those thresholds of affectability that characterize the human body.36
70 One set of terms that Deleuze and Guattari offer in another context but which can help us understand how Deleuzian rhizomatics negotiates the relation of subjectivity to the human body is that of the molar and the molecular^ The molar refers to the whole, the spatial or temporal aggregate unrelated to its processes of movement and transformation. The molar body is thus the organized, subjectified body. The molecular, on the other hand, is the microscopic, the destabilization through movements of the parts or pieces. The sloshing and gurgling, the intake and effluence, the micro-processes of cellular dehydration and rehydration, the assemblages entered into with other bodies of water beyond the human body, thus all play out as the molecular body. While these molecularities link up and are meaningful within a molar human choreography, in themselves there is nothing "human as subjectified" about them. In other words, even as the human body is certainly molecular on many levels, subjectivity can be understood as primarily molar—as a totalizing aggregate of force and matter.38 Molar subjectivity is the work of the organized organism, despite the subterranean molecularity that infuses the human body at every turn, for example in the deterritorialization by the watery Body without Organs. Eventually and consistently, the molar reasserts its force.
This understanding of the body as both molar and molecular is crucial in terms of an exploration of our bodies of water that is adequate to their expressions. Our understanding of ourselves as human bodies tends towards a molar conception of the self, but unless we consider the ways in which we are molecular as well, the wateriness of our bodies makes little sense. We have just seen how Deleuzian rhizomatics negotiates this:
71 the molecularity of our BwO can account for micro-scale hydraulics upon which our bodies depend, as well as for the oozing, leaking, absorbing and fluvial ways in which our bodies' molar subjectivity is disrupted. But now we must turn to see whether
Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology can offer a similar understanding of a body as more than subjectified, as a Deleuzian criticism claims.
Undeniably, Merleau-Ponty makes extended reference to subjectivity and what he calls consciousness, particularly in Phenomenology of Perception. As Merleau-Ponty so bluntly puts it, "I am the absolute source; ... All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from some experience of the world" (1962: viii - ix). Moreover, he describes his work in this text as
"a study of the advent of being to consciousness" (1962: 61). What I would like to propose, however, is that the subjectivity or consciousness of which Merleau-Ponty speaks is not exactly the same molar process of subjectivization that Deleuze admonishes, and that the disorganized, molecular body that belongs to the plane of immanence is a key aspect of Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the body as well.
Significantly, when Merleau-Ponty speaks of consciousness, this is always an embodied consciousness. When he writes that "I cannot conceive myself as nothing but a bit of the world" (1962: viii), he is referring to his embodied self. This body, for Merleau-
Ponty, is not simply another lump of worldly matter. Or, more accurately put, this body is not merely another lump of worldly matter - because it is ambiguous in its ontology as both object and consciousness itself (a "seen" and a "seer"). The phenomenological body
72 is more than just brute matter since this body allows things to be meaningful to us in the first place. In other words, consciousness and the human subjectivity it inaugurates are inseparable from embodiment. This inseparability is significant because it asks us to shift the commonly perceived terms of the disagreement between phenomenology and rhizomatics. Here, it is not some free-floating human subjectivity that is in question, but a subjectivity that can only be enacted materially, in embodiment. If human subjectivity is at the centre of the world for phenomenologists, then at least for Merleau-Ponty, this subjectivity is a body that is necessarily embedded in the world. This understanding of subjectivity as embodied and embedded creates a resonance with Deleuze in terms of understanding subjectivity not as disembodied, but as part of the material forces and processes of embodiment. But this still begs the question: Is the body a strictly molar, unified and subjectified entity for Merleau-Ponty?
There is no doubt that Merleau-Ponty speaks of the unity of the body, but significantly, this unity is always "implicit and vague" (1962: 198). The body, as
Merleau-Ponty teaches us, is not an unthinking material mass directed by an all-powerful mind, soul or other homunculus, but rather a loosely held-together choreography of ways that we are in the world. Consciousness, according to Merleau-Ponty, emerges from our various bodily modalities - perception, affectivity, motility, and viscerality, in addition to cognition (the rational, analytical, categorizing, and sometimes linguistic body).39 The cognitive body expresses itself on what Deleuze would call the plane of organization. Our cognitive bodies are our molar bodies—this is where and how our subjectivities organize,
73 coagulate and sediment. Our other bodily modalities—perception, affectivity, motility and viscerality—however, can be considered our molecular modes of embodiment. Of course, our molecular bodies of water also undergo processes of organization or molarization, for example, when our weeping affective bodies are totalized under the sign of "hysteria" or "depression," or when the chronic hunger or thirst of our visceral bodies is subjectivized as "poor," "third-world" or "homeless." But our non-cognitive bodies are always erupting and disrupting the discipline they are subjected to in unpredictable ways. The watery molecularity of our visceral bodies, for example, can disrupt our totalized subjectivities in the face of fear. At such moments, the welling up of water through a mixture of our affective and visceral bodies can result in the sudden and unexpected elimination of this water in tears, urination and defecation.40 Such eruptions are often beyond the control of the cognitive body or the disciplining processes to which the visceral body is subjected. "Excuse the outburst," we say after a tearful breakdown.
"How unlike me," we apologize. We consider involuntary flushes of urine and excrement a sign of our animality, rather than associated with our (totalized, molar) humanity.
Similarly, an insufficiency in one's body of water, expressed through a pressing thirst, can easily disorient projects of subjectification. Thirst refracts me, forces me to lose my focus. I cannot concentrate on the words on the page, or keep my thoughts trained in some teleological direction. My throat searches for some forgotten cache of saliva and the incessant attempts to swallow distract me. "What did you say? What was that again?"
74 The want of my body of water disorganizes me and the projects of my cognitive, molar self. In extreme dehydration, the cognitive or molar body may altogether recede.
Importantly, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of our multi-modal embodiment shows us that these examples of what Deleuze would call the molecular body are lived.
Such experiences expand what we understand by "lived experience" and reveal how bodies live on many levels that escape the capture of molar unity and molar subjectivity.
The phenomenological notion of lived embodiment is thus not limited to the experiences of the cognitive body and the molar subject. While human subjectivity enjoys a correlate in a molar body, human embodiment, according to Merleau-Ponty, is also comprised of molecular interactions with the world that are enacted through the perceptual, motor, affective and visceral modalities of living. Although these various modalities hang together in this "implicit and vague unity" of which Merleau-Ponty speaks, this unity is constantly interrupted and disrupted by our molecular bodies, as Deleuzian rhizomatics has already shown us. Hence we already have a sense in Merleau-Ponty of the disorganization of the body through its multi-modality, despite his own focus on the body's "unity." Moreover, we see how consciousness and subjectivity for Merleau-Ponty are not expressed only through our cognitive, organizing, molar modes. Our subjectivity, for Merleau-Ponty, is expressed molecularly as well. This molecularity is evidenced in the body becoming-perceptual, becoming-motor, becoming-affective, becoming-visceral in ways that start to question this same unity, or the body's molar organization. So for example, when Leonard Lawlor (1998) refers to Deleuze's criticism of Merleau-Ponty for
75 positing a "subject" who draws "resemblances out of perceptions, listening to the sense murmured by things" (Lawlor 1998: 16), perhaps we should consider whether this criticism is entirely valid, for Merleau-Ponty's subject is not only the molarized, totalized subject of the cognitive body. When a molecular body or molecular subjectivity listens to the sense murmured by things, instead of drawing "resemblances" she may indeed achieve "wonder in the face of the world" (Merleau-Ponty 1962: xiii)—that desedimenting experience that can shift and undo our commonplace understanding of things. The practice of this molecular "listening" will be discussed further in section III below.
Above, we saw how even Deleuze's understanding of the human body requires that we retain a modicum of molar subjectivity amidst its disorganizing molecularity. But here, rethinking the body's molecularity through the work of Merleau-Ponty opens up to a further possibility for subjectivity. Might the humanist subjectivity of phenomenology be recast as a "molecular subjectivity," that is, as unified just enough to be an agent of philosophical practice, but also sufficiently disorganized to launch itself onto and disperse itself through other strata? In-between Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, then, emerges an embodied subjectivity both molar and molecular, or perhaps a subjectivity that hinges and pivots between the molar and the molecular, and in this tugging in- between, the body continues to become.
This sense of lived molecularity that resonates across and through the work of both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty thus presents a potent challenge to the notion of the
76 body, and even the subject, as only molar. These accounts thus help us explain the micro-processes of our watery bodies that are certainly lived, but subvert or disrupt our bodily organization. We mentioned tears, urination, and thirst as three such processes.
But what of our urine as it makes its way to a filtration plant, which is another sort of body of water altogether? Or what of the water that we must take from some other body of water to satiate our thirst? Our understanding of our body needs also to account for the ways in which our watery molecularity extends beyond our bodies, and incorporates the water of other bodies, in an intricate mesh of interpermeation.
Indeed, our various molecular modalities engage in nuptials that extend the body beyond its discrete molar bounds in a variety of micro-becomings: while our viscerality is part of that "loosely unified" human body assemblage, it is also part of a beverage- becoming-urine-becoming-filtration plant assemblage, or an aquifer-becoming- commodity-becoming-sated thirst assemblage, both of which extend far beyond the molar body and also contribute to its disorganization. Rhizomes, we learn from Deleuze and
Guattari, are molecular lines that map out a multiplicity, a nomadic cluster or pack of elements whose normal or ordered identities are reterritorialized by the rhizome; lines of flight are those molecular lines that carry the elements or assemblage off in an unanticipated direction entirely (1987: 505). So the water that enters us, traverses us and escapes us in both mundane and unexpected ways comprises our watery bodies' lines of flight and rhizomatic pathways that extend its molecularity beyond a discrete time-space.
77 While the rhizome and lines-of-flight concepts here are Deleuzian, these are assemblages that Merleau-Ponty acknowledges as well. As he notes in Phenomenology of
Perception, the phenomenological body is "always something other than what it is;" it is
"never hermetically sealed" (1962: 198). In other words, the body is open and permeable, permeated. For Merleau-Ponty, the same operations that enact the embodied consciousness are those that will guarantee that the body is never a static or stable entity, for what it learns from its engagement in the world at the same time "transforms" the body. It is through contact with the world that the body learns how to engage the world, and knowledge of this world comes from this engagement that is literally an intertwining of self and world. Every moment of contact is an opportunity to draw on the habitual body and reshape it, and in this way the body always exceeds its perceived spatio- temporal bounds. For Merleau-Ponty, too, then, the body "is" largely what it "can do" and this potential is continually metamorphosing. This notion of the body's being in latency is further developed in his posthumously published work, the Visible and the
Invisible (1968), where Merleau-Ponty moves to articulate an ontology of chiasm and the flesh. According to this ontology, all bodies participate in an elemental being, and thus also in each other. The flesh, in Merleau-Ponty's words is an "interconnective tissue" and a "mesh" or a "web" that interimplicates bodies. The flesh is a "generality of being" into which the body extends and therein intertwines with other bodies in the world (1968:
149). The flesh is what facilitates the passing of us into other things, and of other things into us (1968: 123). Here, the body is again understood as an intertwining with the world
78 whereby the body's "routes" (rhizomes or lines of flight, Deleuze might say) or extensions into the world join body and world in an assemblage.
And again, we see this chiasmic assemblage-extension readily in the body of water, and the various macro and micro hydrological cycles of which it partakes. The meteorological hydrological cycle constantly replenishes the earth's supply of fresh water that we must drink in order to live. In drinking, we intensify the hydrological cycle by bringing it inside our own bodies. Here, water moves through another cycle of ingestion, replenishment, flushing and elimination. Both interconnected processes illustrate the rhizomatic routes of water that comprise the human body, but also extend it. Our watery bodies become a pack or a nomadic assemblage enmeshed in the hydrological cycle. In this rhizomatic reading of embodied phenomenology, the body is thus again always
"becoming-body." The becoming is in the very permeability of bodies that are never only the molar structures they appear to be from a humanist perspective. Bodies become at the pivot where the molarized subject hinges with the molecular disorganization of the discrete or bounded body. Bodies bleed into one another consistently betraying their tendency towards organization. And significantly, these rhizomatic extensions of the body are again clearly lived. Deleuze's concept of the rhizome and the lines of flight which map a network of bodies is no speculative fiction, but rather a description of our lived experience. The rhizomatic body is thus another example of our how our bodily molecularity expresses itself across or beneath its molecular tendencies. The rhizomatic body is not antithetical to "lived embodiment," but rather a mode of bodily becoming on
79 which our bodies in fact depend, as Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the habitual becoming-body and his ontology of the flesh suggest.41
(b) Bodies of Water as Actual, Virtual and Intensive
Although we, as bodies of water, are molecular, and although we are connected in this molecularity to other bodies of water through our rhizomes and lines of flight, this interconnection or interpermeation does not collapse all bodies into a uniform or undifferentiated mass, nor into a series of identical types of bodies. Bodies still differenc/tiate themselves and are differentiated from each other through their thresholds of affectability, as we discussed above.42 What holds a body—including our human bodies of water— together as a body, and what differenc/tiates it, can be described in terms of the Deleuzian concepts of the actual, the virtual and the intensive. These are dimensions of our becoming-bodies of water, which, like our rhizomatic molecularity, facilitate an exploration of these same bodies. While the terms are all Deleuzian, as I will demonstrate below, these concepts too can be understood as aspects of our lived molar- molecularity.
A Deleuzian ontological schema, which is comprised of the actual, the virtual and the intensive,43 invites us to rethink things in terms of discrete identities, and hence challenges our understanding of the "things" we might "go back to" in any phenomenological practice. The actual consists of stratified bodies whose intensive processes have slowed down enough or paused so that a state of material equilibrium is
80 achieved—or at least seems to be achieved from our human-scaled perspective. These actuals are what we most readily identify as "things in the world." In the case of the body of water, the actual or individual is that same 60-90% of fluid that seemingly perdures in and as you, in a relatively tangible and pin-pointable way. But things, according to
Deleuze also partake of virtuality, or that "indeterminate cloud" that surrounds and coexists with actualities as their could-have-been's and might-become's.44 Virtuality is the zone of potentiality from which actualities are extracted. In a Deleuzian ontology, virtuality can be expressed as an infinitive verb (for example, one virtual of a tree is "to green") (Deleuze 1990: 21). The virtuality of our bodies' watery constitution thus becomes "to water." Or, not to confuse it with garden-tending (although that would not be an altogether bad metaphor), we might think of our bodily water's virtuality as "to flow" or "to gestate," "to nourish," "to hydrate," "to transform" or "to flush."45 Finally, these becomings are enacted by way of the intensive. These are the morphogenetic processes that inaugurate the becoming-organized and becoming-disorganized of things.
These are the operators of relations and connections that produce choreographies of consistency among actualities in time and/or space—such as packs of wolves, the evolution of species, or social systems. The intensive are forces or energies or drives that are not secondary to things, but which themselves are ontological. The hydrological cycle of precipitation, transpiration, evaporation and condensation is a primary example of water's intensive operations, whereby through an intensive movement the body itself is changed.46 In terms of our bodies of water, we have already glimpsed how this
81 hydrological cycle is incorporated within our bodies in various ways. Only because of water's metamorphosis in and through our bodies can nutrients become body, can body become waste, can we grow and change at all, for example, as our infant-body becomes our child-body, our girl-body becomes our woman-body, and so on. Our bodies of water are thus not only transformed through these processes (infant-watery body to girl-watery body to woman-watery body), but our watery bodies also in part enact these transformations. Our bodies of water transport nutrients, cushion our organs so that they may safely stretch and expand, facilitate a flushing of blood in menstruation, or produce the amniotic fluid which transforms us into a maternal body. This double articulation of the body of water as both "the transformed" or actualized and the agent of transformation is particularly important if we are to understand what it means to be a body of water and how it expresses what I call an onto-logic of amniotics—a question I will take up explicitly and in-depth in the following chapter. For now, however, it is important simply to note that a Deleuzian ontology helps us even to think this possibility.
When these three aspects of Deleuze's ontology—the actual, the virtual and the intensive—are accommodated, we are met not with a material thing that has its ideal form in some transcendent realm, but rather with an organizing and disorganizing material mixture that functions according to speeds and pauses. Everything is moving, at one speed or another. Things do not stay in position, but operate on different planes, or on different registers, continually reconfiguring their territory and thus "themselves."
82 Things, including our bodies of water, are never fully what they might become, or might have been.
Again, this understanding of things finds a resonance rather than a contradiction in the work of Merleau-Ponty. Close attention to Merleau-Ponty's work in both
Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible reveals that for him, things, including bodies, are in fact always in the process of an accomplishment that never arrives or that is never intrinsically fulfilled. His investigation into the phenomenon of the constancy of things reveals that such constancy is not an ideal or innate property, but a coalescence of relationships that involve movement, time, matter, and the capacities of the human body (1962: 313-317). In other words this constancy is a composition, an assemblage of relative equilibrium. Like Deleuze's actual, Merleau-Ponty's body can only even enjoy a sort of metastability—i.e., the "loose unification" we mentioned above.
The being of the body, according to Merleau-Ponty, also partakes in something similar to what Deleuze calls the virtual. In the Visible and Invisible, Merleau-Ponty explores the
"invisible of the visible," which does not refer to the empirical sense of vision as much as
it seeks to articulate "a possibility, a latency" (133) inherent in things. Merleau-Ponty
also calls this invisibility "flesh." This is the potentiality of which our actualized body is
"a very remarkable variant" (136). In other words, the body as we know it is not fully
given, but is but one of many potential expressions of embodiment. This understanding is
already foreshadowed in Phenomenology of Perception*1 Although as some have argued,
Merleau-Ponty's metaphysical commitments cannot go so far as to accommodate the full
83 Deleuzian sense of the virtual because the experience of the flesh still relies on a subjectification of the "toucher/touched" assemblage (i.e., phenomenological knowledge is still garnered from a subject's point of view),48 perhaps my work above to describe how Merleau-Ponty's subject can also be molecular and thus disorganized or
"desubjectivized" in a Deleuzian sense can mitigate this criticism. In any case, in
Merleau-Ponty's notion of invisibility and the flesh, we nonetheless find certain resonances (if not coincidence) with a Deleuzian virtual that will help us account for the ways in which our bodies of water hold a potential that may or may not be expressed.
Again, the meaning of this potentiality will be taken up and explored in the subsequent chapters of this dissertation, particularly in chapter two where I explore the body of water's gestational potentiality.
A final related point here concerns the question of essence in phenomenology.
Although things have an "essence" that phenomenology moves towards articulating, this is an essence that only ever holds things together loosely; it has little to do with that static, categorical and sometimes biologically deterministic essence often reviled in post- phenomenological thinking. Essence, according to Merleau-Ponty, is provisional. It will eventually shift and change. But the loose, underlying structure that holds a thing together also gives it "meaning." This is not a meaning that consciousness invents and puts there, but nor is it a petrified ideal. Meaning for Merleau-Ponty emerges from the intermundane space (I'intermonde) where bodies meet and overlap with the world and each other (1968: 48-49). This intermundane space is then further developed by Merleau-
84 Ponty in the context of the flesh and chiasm—that interconnective web that we discussed above. An important aspect of the chiasm and the flesh is that they lie latent in-between bodies and the world, or in this intermundane space. In this space, flesh is a "pregnancy"
(Merleau-Ponty 1968: 149) that keeps the meaning of this relation between bodies and world, and thus of bodies themselves, open. Moreover, the chiasm is an interval that both connects and differentiates. The perdurance of this interval "does not mean that there was a fusion or coinciding of body and world; "on the contrary, this occurs because a sort of dehiscence opens my body in two, and because between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping or encroachment, so that we may say that the things pass into us, as well as we into the things" (1968: 123).
So perhaps in the intermundial zone of the chiasm we can also find resonance with
Deleuze's notion of the intensive, which also happens in-between: although the chiasm interconnects bodies, as an interval it also allows for their differentiation. As an interval, it keeps meaning open—in other words, open to the intensive processes of the in-between that can work on the body's "loose unity" to change its thresholds of affectability.
And perhaps here we could begin to articulate the sense of meaning of our human bodies of water that my rhizo-phenomenology seeks to investigate. Although we need to acknowledge and account for the ways in which our human bodies of water defy their own molar boundaries, subvert their own organization and extend out into the world of other watery bodies, we also need to be able to understand the "this-ness" of the specifically human body of water. In both Merleau-Ponty's articulation of the interval
85 located in the chiasm, and in Deleuze's notion of the intensive, we are given two tools to help us articulate how a specifically human body of water can be meaningful. What are its thresholds of affectability? In other words, what sort of responsibilities does it incorporate? What are its potentialities for inaugurating an ethics of inter-being? But even as this chiasmic interval or intensive morphogenetic processes differentiate the human body, they also both insist that any this-ness that loosely and provisionally holds a body together is always embedded in the context of that body's relations. For both Merleau-
Ponty and Deleuze, an adequate understanding of the ontology of bodies is utterly dependent upon relations between bodies, the passages that connect bodies both spatially and temporally, the ways in which bodies affect other bodies and thus their meaning. The meaning of our bodies of water is always emerging out of the ways our bodies of water have evolved—biologically, culturally, ethically. This meaning will continue to metamorphose along with those bodies and will never be separated out from the material articulations and rhizomatic extensions of those same bodies. Further exploration of these notions of differenc/tiation in the necessary context of interpermeation will be taken up in chapters two, three and four, where I discuss the onto-logic of our bodies of water, both human and other- or more-than-human, in more detail. But again, for now I am flagging the theoretical terrain upon which it is possible to even think our human bodies according to this seeming contradiction. Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty together provide us a way of thinking bodies as meaningful that is adequate to our bodies of water, in that the intensive, or the interval, insists on connection while also holding on to difference.
86 The tools offered us by Deleuze's intensive and Merleau-Ponty's interval can then be added to the other theoretical tools we have already discussed above: the body of water as lived molecularity that necessarily also retains some degree of its molar subjectivity; the body of water as neither static nor ideal "thing in itself," but rather as rhizomatic coagulation of forces that expresses actuality and virtuality, or a flesh that is pregnant with potentiality. Thinking about our human bodies of water is thus greatly facilitated by the rhizo-phenomenological understanding of bodies that we can come to by articulating the resonances between Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze's theories of bodies.
This theoretical workshop, as we have already begun to see, can allow us to think about our bodies of water in ways that accommodate the various micro-processes and macro- assemblages of these bodies, while at the same time insisting that in all of these theoretical offerings, our bodies of water are still above all lived.
However, these propositions also insert an interesting complexity into the question of how to think about bodies of water. If we do indeed, above all else, live them, then surely we not only think about bodies of water, but as bodies of water as well. The question of the body of water as not only the object, but as the agent of philosophical inquiry, is the issue to which I now turn.
III. How to Think (As) a Body of Water
As both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty remind us, our molar subjectivity, or the cognitive, categorizing and organizing understanding of our selves, is not something we
87 can do away with, despite the rhizomatic and leaky potentiality of our chiasmic bodies of water. For example, even though Deleuze and Guattari implore us to "keep moving, even in place, never stop moving, motionless voyage, desubjectification..." (1987: 159), they simultaneously warn us of the danger of total and reckless desubjectification ("Is it not necessary to retain a minimum of strata, a minimum of forms and functions, a minimal subject from which to extract materials, affects and assemblages?" [1987: 270] they ask).
For Deleuze and Guattari, maintaining this modicum of subjectification guards against the risks of destratifying too wildly, which will lead only to annihilation and death. We recall that a body, for Deleuze, is necessarily doubly articulated as molar and molecular in order to be a body at all. Merleau-Ponty, too, reminds us that there is indeed a "unity and identity of the body as a synergetic totality" that enables consciousness to comprehend the world and make sense of what we encounter in a synthesized way, across and through all of our various bodily modalities (1962: 317), without which our experience of the world would be fragmented and largely incomprehensible. In other words, for both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, acknowledging the necessity of some organizing subjectivity has practical implications for human projects, such as "doing philosophy." So, if my objective in this dissertation is to perform a philosophical investigation of bodies of water—a decidedly human enterprise— , then I will have to begin from some notion of "organization" and "articulating my body," such as one accomplishes through molar subjectivity. As Protevi has written in regards to Deleuze's position on the organizing tendency towards subjectification, "this utility is primarily [...]
88 a resting point for further experimentation" (2005: 195). The subjectified human body as an agent of philosophical practice may be one of these necessary pauses. (Even Gilles and Felix signed their names.)
But while being "organized" allows a certain type of categorizing and synthesizing philosophical practice, in this dissertation I am also looking for a way to allow the concomitant molecular and disorganizing aspects of my body of water to inform that practice. To access those aspects of the body of water that may seem too distant from our own human scales of space and time, or too ephemeral in their virtuality for me to fathom, requires a becoming-molecular as philosophical practice. With rhizo- phenomenology, I propose that I need to get beyond or under those expressions of matter that conform most comfortably to my human-centred scale (i.e., whereby I partake in subjectivity, limited in time and space by the speed at which my human imagination can travel) and instead tap into my watery matter on a different level. Only by accessing this place of disorganization can I allow not only my actual, organized body to "think," but also the molecular, virtual and intensive dimensions of my body of water to be resources for my philosophical practice. I need to access my molecular consciousness, and do philosophy from there. I want to ask: How can I think not only about bodies of water, but as a body of water?
Undoubtedly, this raises the question: how does one "become-molecular"?
According to Deleuze and Guattari, becomings are not enacted on demand. We cannot sit down at our computers and command ourselves: "Okay, between grading papers and
89 dinner, I have about an hour to become-molecular." As Deleuze and Guattari teach us, becomings are "unnatural participations" (1987: 258) of two bodies or elements. While both participants in these becomings are "in no way the same thing, ... Being expresses them both in a single meaning in a language that is no longer words, in a matter that is no longer that of forms, in an affectability that is no longer that of subjects" (1987: 258).
Becoming is already happening in the ontological intensive zone or block between things. Such becomings are in fact resonant with Merleau-Ponty's notion of chiasm.
Chiasm, we noted above, is an intertwining between two entities, yet one that neither results in their complete fusion nor maintains their absolute discreteness. Chiasm, like the becoming in-between, is the ontological operation that guarantees no subjectified perspective is hegemonic. It enacts an ontological complicity between a "self and an
"other," but according to neither's privileged terms. But chiasm, as that web that criss crosses through the interconnective tissue of the flesh, Merleau-Ponty reminds us, invites a participation of all things, all bodies, and the world. So by bringing Merleau-Ponty's chiasm into conversation with Deleuze's becomings, we are invited to consider how such
"participations" may in fact be ubiquitous, in spite of their "unnaturalness." In other words, by virtue of all bodies' intensive and material imbrications, becomings are everywhere; they are by no means rare. They persist and perdure on the plane of immanence or plane of consistency which our molar subjectivities prefer not to acknowledge, but in which we are nonetheless participants. So, if becomings are,
90 according to both Deleuze and Guattari and Merleau-Ponty, always already there, the question remains: how can we call on these as the basis of a philosophical practice?
Importantly, we need to remember that "becomings" for Deleuze and Guattari are of two kinds. There are those that do indeed perdure on the plane of immanence, as mentioned. These are our rhizomatic becomings that always compose our messy interpermeated life, and which are akin to what Merleau-Ponty describes as the intertwinings of the flesh. But becoming, for Deleuze and Guattari is also an exhortation, or a prescription. "Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don't sow, grow offshoots!"
(1987: 24). In other words, becoming is also a creative undertaking, an act of desubjectification or demolarization into which we can urge ourselves to enter. But because we never in fact "become" (subjectively speaking) that with which we become, the action of these solicited becomings is largely the creation of a new perspective, a shift in our molecular organization, an opening up to an interpermeation we would rather deny. In these "active" becomings, then, a certain dimension of our lived experience is contacted and amplified. These two terms—contact and amplification—are key to understanding becoming-molecular as philosophical practice; both terms dwell in the precarious liminality between the always already and the creative event. Both work to shift our relationship between our molar and molecular bodies, as we bring these molecularities to our surfaces. So, as with so many of Deleuze and Guattari's double concepts, these two "kinds" of becomings are neither antithetical nor separate, but rather express a double articulation of becoming on two different planes: the first becoming
91 persists on the plane of immanence, while the second "active" becoming requires contact with something usually foreign to our molar understanding of ourselves. In this contact, a molecular experience of lived embodiment can be captured—if only momentarily and ephemerally—upon the plane of organization by our molar, philosophizing selves. The perduring and the active becomings are not distinct from one another, but rather express a movement between our molar and molecular selves.
In the remainder of this chapter, then, I will outline three specific strategies that can be employed in order to contact and amplify these molecular modes of bodily- becoming as a necessary complement to the molar thinking subject. First, I will explore the becoming-disorganized of the body according to a sort of phenomenological intuiting;
Second, I will explain how perforating the apparent boundary between phenomenological and scientific discourses can facilitate our becoming-molecular; and third, I will comment on the importance of rhizo-phenomenological description as a writing practice. As I will stress, the contact with and amplification of our bodily becomings, although descriptive, is never a merely reflective process. It is rather an active, creative process that changes the relationship between subjectivity and lived experience. This process in turn can ask us to reconceptualize and actively change not only our ontological investments, but our social, political and ethical investments, too. To conclude this chapter, then, I will highlight the ways in which the theoretical and methodological considerations that I have laid out here are not merely practical considerations to facilitate a certain kind of dissertation research. Acknowledging our necessary molar subjectivity while also tapping
92 into and describing our watery molecularity, I will argue, is moreover the first inauguration of an ethics of interbeing which we can cultivate through this double articulation of our bodies of water. This will serve as a preview for the chapters to follow.
(a) Intuiting the Molecular Body of Water
With rhizo-phenomenology, I propose that by exploring the rhizomatic extensions and intensions of things across space and time and their operations at various levels or registers, our bodies can learn something important about what it means to be a body of water in hopefully unexpected ways. While traditional phenomenological practices may limit these explorations to foregrounding a centripetal movement of investigation, or pulling inwards through a phenomenological reduction that seeks to remove layer after layer, so that we may be "transported to the heart of the matter" where "we find the source" (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 178), rhizo-phenomenology pays attention to the phenomenon's centrifugal movement. In this way rhizo-phenomenology does not attempt to contain the phenomenon but rather welcomes the lines of flight that may take us beyond the boundaries of the molarized phenomenon.
In this welcome, we are brought back to the significance of the intensive. By paying attention to the intensive, a rhizo-phenomenological exploration of our bodies of water can extend or perforate the boundaries of the molarized body, which are always largely artificial, or at least arbitrary and stratum-specific. Attending to the intensive
93 opens the actuality of the thing up to its rhizomes, to the in-betweens and connections to other phenomena in both inter- and intra-corporeal assemblages. As a centrifugal movement, rhizo-phenomenological exploration also acknowledges that the boundaries of what a thing can be are never fully articulable, and always expanding. This unknowability relates to the intensive and the infinite assemblages into which a body may enter, but also to the latent virtual dimension of every body that precedes its actualization.
As we already noted, we certainly live our rhizomatic, virtual or intensive becomings, but at a level or scale that is already disorganizing our molar bodies, moving increasingly into the molecular as their primary mode of expression. The metamorphosis engendered in our visceral body (and likely our affective and even perceptive body) by our molecular thirst, for example, seems to bear little relevance to our molar subjectivity.
By honing our attention to these molecular experiences, I propose we can show up the permeability and precariousness of our organized subject identities. This first strategy therefore suggests that by adapting the technique of phenomenological intuiting, as specifically related to the body's molecular modes of living, we can contact and amplify the becomings-molecular of our bodies of water. Phenomenological intuiting as described by eminent phenomenologist Herbert Spiegelberg is the act of utter concentration on the thing "without becoming so absorbed in it to the point of no longer looking critically"
(1965: 659). In other words it is a remaining open to the wonder of a phenomenon, of bracketing the natural attitude, yet at the same time sensing the phenomenon's contours, limits, movements, speeds. This intuiting demands that we begin not with a theoretical
94 situation, but with a lived one. One can only intuit a phenomenon if it is part of our lived experience.
This technique can be adapted for our rhizo-phenomenological purposes by using it to focus on those modalities of living that move to dis-organ-ize our molar subjectivities: affectivity, perception, motility, viscerality. While all of these modalities are intertwined, they are also in various ways irreducible, as they map distinct strata of the body that do not obey the limits of the body's molar organization. For example, while our viscerality is part of our molar body, it is also part of the aquifer-commodification- water bottle-thirst quenching-urination-waste treatment assemblage. This assemblage extends far beyond the molar body, but also backgrounds other dimensions of the molar- molecular body, such as its affective molecularity. Deleuze and Guattari's suggestion that the body is a longitude and a latitude (1987: 260) can be helpful for understanding this point: While the molar body may be the body's longitude, its various molecular modalities are the body's latitudes that cut through and extend beyond the body's molar organization. Rhizo-phenomenological intuiting asks, then, that we hone in on the workings of the latitudes while bracketing the longitude.
In fact, Merleau-Ponty already provides a sort of precedent for this type of practice. As noted, Merleau-Ponty does not deny that our cognitive bodies help us understand the world. He rather challenges the hegemony of this mode of knowledge by illuminating the other modes of knowing and being our bodies engage in. His own example of "doing phenomenology" in The Phenomenology of Perception shows how
95 being bodily attentive to things themselves—that is, by following their contours and rhythms according to what and how the body senses, feels, moves in their presence—can reveal something more than rational, cognitive analysis, wedded to the "natural attitude," alone might reveal. For example, Merleau-Ponty describes how the experience of tactility reveals how those things we touch are not known "through any synthesis of recognition in the concept" but rather the touching body and specifically the hands "discover" them first, through our tactile motor potentiality. Only afterwards can the cognitive body place the touched object into some synthesizing or organizing category (1962: 316-317). As a result, our touching bodies can also counter the presumptions or assumptions of our
(molarized, thinking) selves. This is not to suggest that what cognitive (or molarizing) analysis reveals is necessarily "false," or that our molecular bodies are unaffected by discourse, language, and other operations of the cognitive body. This is meant to suggest, however, that certain bodily modalities may be better equipped than others to protest operations of organization by which human embodiment sediments into a molar subjectivity, and locate various lines of flight or escape.
Inspired by the example of Merleau-Ponty's own practice, then, we can pay similar attention to the various modalities of our bodies of water by bracketing our natural attitude that necessarily sees them as primarily part of the molar, or longitudinal, body assemblage. This bracketing can remove the comfortable but ultimately misleading discreteness of the molarized body of water and allow us to enter into a becoming- molecular. Our becomings-moving, our becomings-affective, our becomings-perceptive
96 and our becomings-visceral are all vectors for contacting those thresholds of affectability that define us as bodies of water, and for seeking to understand the nature of our relation to other bodies of water in our rhizomes and lines of flight. As phenomenological intuiting teaches us, such investigations need to be contextualized in a lived situation.
Here, we ask questions of the disorganizing body that directly engage their sub-molar capacities: what does the body of water look, feel, or taste like? How do we move according to the various rhythms, speeds of the body of water? How do these movements change when we are excessively lubricated, or excessively thirsty? What affect is elicited in our watery expulsions? How does our viscerality respond to dehydration? Moreover, we ask questions about how the various molecular modes of embodiment might intersect: how does the visceral intake of drinking a glass of water make the body feel? How does a visceral need to expel urine make the body move? What perceptions are heightened or dulled with the body of water's affective outbursts or repressions? For example: I may first become-visceral as I ingest a glass of water and note how the liquid travels through my gastro-intestinal passages. At some point, this attention will become strained, and it will probably seem as though the water has moved into the invisibility of my recessive body. But this invisibility is only a product of our comfortably human scale. Our becoming-visceral needs to push through to a becoming-molecular that is no longer commanded and circumscribed by the molar organization of my body. What happens to that water as it sloshes though my gut, and travels to my body's furthest flung outposts?
This is not just a question of imagination, for if I pay close enough attention, I can indeed
97 sense these journeys and the transformations that ensue. Anything useful or interesting needs to be teased out, poked and prodded, coaxed. Such techniques require perseverance and repetition. Bright flashes of illumination only occur when submersed in close attention, as we allow the various modalities of our body's sub-molar wateriness to speak on their own terms.
Such investigations into our molecular bodies of water can indeed desediment our inherited knowledge about what it means to be a human body, as they map our bodies' various molecular happenings. But my goal is also to learn something about our interbeing with other bodies of water, both human and other-than-human, which means that I have to investigate these "latitudes" specifically as they perforate my body's presumed boundaries. I need to extend the strategy of intuiting so that I can contact and amplify my watery rhizomes and lines of flight. This might require movement through a progression of becomings—first bringing attention to the perceptual body as a pang of thirst grips my mouth, for instance, or to my affective body as my perspiration betrays my unease. Now I need to consider not only what happens to this water intercorporeally, but extra-corporeally as well: What does it gestate, nourish, transform? Where does it go?
What are its lines of flight? Of what assemblages does it become a part? What affects, movements, perceptions or visceral processes accompany these leave-takings and extracorporeal reunions? For example, what happens when my own body of water is submerged in another body of water? What emotions are released? How do my movements, spatial sensitivities or sense of time and weight transform? And, most
98 importantly, with all of these inquiries I need to discern how I "live" these shrinkings, stretchings, shiftings, connectings, as I allow them to well up in my own materiality.
While "lived experience," according to traditional phenomenology may overlook the molecular as a mode of embodiment, we are living according to such becoming- modalities all the time. We just need to tap into them.
(b) "Sci-Phi"
Yet, while the above examples explore how phenomenological intuiting can amplify our attention to our watery molecular becomings, these are becomings that in many ways remain wed to our "actual," albeit sub-molar, bodies of water. While we indeed need to disorganize our habitual bodily discreteness to contact such "latitudinal" becomings, doing so is not really the cause of much struggle or discomfort. If rhizo- phenomenology is to move beyond our actual bodies of water in the attempt to contact their virtuality as well, additional tactics are required. Here, then, I propose that the transdisciplinary use of scientific description within philosophical practice can be one such tactic. To set up the possibilities this strategy can offer, I will first explain how virtuality can be understood not as a dimension of our bodies of water separate from those rhizomatic interconnectivities described above, but rather as an expression of these interconnectivities taken beyond the limit according to which our molar subjectivity can grasp them.
99 Rhizo-phenomenology as a practice seeks to thwart human subjectivity's desire to perceive time, movement, speed, size and distance as scaled to our own molar experience, even where such extension may seem difficult for our modest human perspective to grasp. Certainly, this project in some ways goes against Merleau-Ponty's suggestion of the proximal distance of things. As he outlines in Phenomenology of
Perception, there is an optimal distance between the seer and the seen, or subject and thing, which can achieve an optimal tension between the inner horizon and the outer horizon of the thing, hence optimally revealing the thing in its essence. To increase or decrease this distance would mean that we would begin to lose our grip on things (1962:
302). While Merleau-Ponty discusses this proximity spatially, we could also extend this phenomenological proposal to an optimal temporality: we understand the time of things in reference to our own temporality. A nanosecond may not even seem to "exist" to us, while an interval of a billion years is equally hard to fathom in relation to our own bodies.
Proximal distance is important for Merleau-Ponty, because it expresses a zone of relation between body and thing that allows the various modalities and interpretive capacities of the body to remain optimally (although always loosely) unified. In other words, proximal distance facilitates the cohesion and organization not just of the thing in the world, but of the body as well. But again, the objective of rhizo-phenomenology is to acknowledge our sense of comfort with this proximal distance while at the same time continuing our investigation of a thing beyond this point. With rhizo-phenomenology, I propose that it is precisely when we slip beyond our comfortable proximal distance that our becoming-
100 molecular and bodily disorganization can begin, and from here that we can gain a much better understanding of rhizo-phenomenological meaning.
In the case of our bodies of water, for example, we may perceive the "time" of this water as immediate, synchronised with our own molar human life span. We anticipate that the water that constitutes our body will cease to exist in time with our flesh and its capacity to imagine a past and a future. Yet we know that the water that is on our planet and of our bodies now is the exact same water that has been here since that fortuitous big bang several billion years ago—nothing added, nothing lost. As such, the time of our bodies of water extends beyond our proximal comprehension; this water holds in it a past as remote as that gaseous primordial soup, as well as a future, unforeseeable. Similarly, we most comfortably perceive the "size" of water in relation to our own body's relation to it, as something we drink, in which we bathe, or expel from our systems in relatively predictable (and graspable) quantities. Such fathomings might be what Merleau-Ponty would call our proximal relationship to our bodily water. We might even, with a little more attention, experience the spatial scale of water at the visceral level, as that which irrigates our own bodily systems and carries away our waste.
But what more might we learn about our bodies of water if we could stretch or shrink this proximal relationship? What if we could describe our experience of water at an increasingly molecular level? A rhizo-phenomenological approach suggests that such ancient events, unforeseeable futures, or water too big or too small to easily comprehend, may not necessarily be as distant as one might think. Japanese researcher and thinker
101 Masaru Emoto (2005) takes high speed photographs of water that capture the unique and revealing structures of water crystals at their moment of freezing, just as the water molecules are crystallizing. But his photographs do not result in the mere documentation of a physical process; rather, they reveal the molecular affectivity of water and its capacity to embody emotion. For example, when water in a glass beaker is exposed to the word "happiness," Emoto's photograph reveals a crystal that is symmetrical, delicate, exquisitely balanced and beautiful. When exposed to the word "unhappiness," the crystal appears out of balance and only partially formed. Exposure to different music— melancholy, discordant, joyous, threatening—similarly results in differently affected crystals. This research suggests (amongst other things) that even if water's intensive processes are generally too microscopic to register on our proximal human scale, one dimension of our bodies of water is nonetheless intimately bound up in this barely graspable becoming-affective at the molecular level. Accessing this level is another sort of rhizomatic movement, where the boundaries that must be challenged are not larger than us, but in fact smaller. (Just because a perception zooms in does not mean that it is not still "beyond" or outside of our human perspective.) Rhizo-phenomenology proposes that in blending Merleau-Ponty's lived phenomenology with a Deleuzian sense of rhizomatic spatial and temporal extension, we can still do a phenomenology of our watery bodies' furthest flung traces. Although these molecular workings of our bodies of water may seem speculative, they are in fact very much lived.
102 This manipulation of our proximal relationship to things also brings us back to the question of the virtual—that is, those ephemera which constitute the indeterminate potentialities of a thing that according to Deleuze accompany all of its manifest actualizations. We have already described what some of these virtual dimensions of the body of water might be—to flush, to facilitate, to nourish, to gestate. But the virtual also relates to those unknowable or ungraspable times and spaces that have not been taken up by our bodies of water—those potential routes that our particular bodies of water did not take, but might have, in a prehistoric past, in an unknowable future, or in a body of water that is too near or too far to seem a part of what I consider my actualized body. To express the virtual as an infinitive verb means to locate all of the potential expressions of that verb within one of its actualizations. Of course, then, the virtual is by definition neither fully graspable nor describable, for it persists only as a potentiality, as such unpredictable. But my proposal here is that water may reveal to us the lack of any clear separation between the rhizomatic inter- or intra-corporeal extension of our actual bodies of water, and the virtual dimension of these same bodies. Are the nanoscopic or prehistoric watery expressions of my body actual but ungraspable (by me)? Or are they virtual, precisely because they are ungraspable (by me), and because they seem to me more of a "might have been" than an "is"? My point here is that in a open-closed system such as water, where the materiality of water endlessly cycles and repeats, yet all the while becoming "different" (a point to which I will return in detail in the next chapter), the distinction between "was" and "might have been," or "is" and "could be" becomes
103 blurred. If I share one molecule of water with a tsunami that occurred thousands of years ago on the other side of the world, is that tsunami bound up in my own body of water's virtuality, or its actuality? All bodies of water share an expression of water's infinitive verbs (to flush, to flow, to gestate), but that potentiality is also shot through with molecules of material actuality. The objective here is not to argue with Deleuze's terminology (for Deleuze is certainly no fan of discrete opposites, and would not likely defend any decisive distinction between actuals and virtuals as such). Rather, I mean only to show how by using a framework of lived bodily experience, the distinction between virtual and actual-but-ungraspable may become less important. Both demand a stretching of my comfortable molar scales of spatial and temporal proximity. Both demand a way of tapping into my bodily molecularity that I am arguing is lived, even if our molar, cognizing selves have difficulty grasping these experiences. I am suggesting that through our molecular bodily becomings, in our movements of disorganization and desubjectivation, perhaps we can contact these experiences, even if only ephemerally, several molecularities removed.
But all this still does not quite get us to the "how": How do we grasp the virtual?
How do we map the intensive, or our bodies' rhizomatic lines of flight that extend it beyond our comfortable proximal relation to its parts? How do we contact those molecular aspects of our bodies that continually spiral out from us with centrifugal force with sufficient tenacity to bring them, even if only momentarily, onto our bodies' subjectified, molarized stratum so that they can become part of a philosophical practice?
104 In the previous section we saw how phenomenological intuiting through our non-molar bodily modalities can allow us to disorganize in a way that does not stretch the imagination of our human scales of spatiality and temporality beyond unthinkable limits; however, intuiting the wateriness of our distant pasts, our unknowable futures, or of our body's own microscopic internal seascapes proves a greater challenge.
Yet, as I just suggested, even if it seems to us impossible that we might relate to the slowness of, say, continental drift, or the imperceptibility of, say, genetic drift, we are, materially, related to these phenomena. We have already noted that our watery constitution is intimately connected to life's three billion-year-old primordial soup. This means that by accessing the water that my body lives on a molecular level and doing philosophy from that stratum, I should be able to learn something about my fishy beginnings. Because of the great distance of this soup from the molarized understanding of my own life experience, however, contact may require a helpful nudge in the right direction. Our imaginations, like all aspects of our molar embodiment, are committed creatures of habit, and do not always easily stretch beyond their customary temporal and spatial hangouts. This dilemma creates an opening then for the second strategy I suggest for becoming as philosophical practice: a transdisciplinary becoming between scientific stories and rhizo-phenomenological ones.
Before continuing, however, it is worth pausing momentarily to address what I mean by scientific "stories." In our current Western world, "science" often takes on the status of indisputable truth, and is often presented as the "facts" set against the less
105 reliable "fictions," "speculations" or "interpretations" of non-scientific musings. Over the past decades, however, many scholars of the history and philosophy of science have thoroughly problematized the notion of science's purported "objectivity" and infallible authority.50 But to question the truth or objectivity of scientific knowledge, of course, is not the same as rejecting this knowledge outright as lacking any value. As Abby Lippman has discussed in a different context, yet in terms helpful to our discussion here, to use the word "stories" to describe scientific findings is "not to suggest that what scientists are saying is not true; this may or may not be the case," but rather suggests that scientific study results are akin to the "stories" generated by novelists (or philosophers, for that matter) that present their understanding of the world, necessarily "tamed, shaped and interpreted," and thus hardly inclusive of every story that could be told. As Lippman suggests, "the stories told by scientists, therefore, are as appropriately objects of analysis as are the stories of other writers" (39-40). Similarly, I would like to suggest that scientific knowledge and discourses can be understood as stories that can reveal to us something about ourselves and the world, just as philosophy can. This "something" includes both the perspectives that scientific stories can generate, and also insight into what these stories cannot tell us, or cannot adequately tell us on their own. Because any story only reveals a limited perspective of the world, reading several stories together can open us up not only to several perspectives, but also to the combustive results of their interactions. In-between different stories, or upon their hinges, we can enter into the intensive, creative zone of relation where something new might emerge. This is the
106 argument I made above in terms of Deleuzian rhizomatics and Merleau-Pontian embodied phenomenology, and here I am suggesting a similar combustion takes place when scientific stories are explored alongside rhizo-phenomenological ones.51
Yet, while notable exceptions persist,52 many phenomenologists are critical of the scientific view of things. Merleau-Ponty himself asserts that to go back to the things themselves, in the reliance on phenomenological description over analysis and explanation, is "from the start a foreswearing of science" (1962: viii), even as he engages scientific stories as useful starting points or complements to his own investigations.53
Commonplace understanding of the two discourses might hold that phenomenology is the study of something from the inside, while science is the study of something from the outside. As a result, some conclude phenomenological and scientific approaches are ultimately incompatible. More likely, the relationship between phenomenological discourses and scientific ones is fraught with ambivalence.
Deleuze, on the other hand, keenly embraces scientific knowledge and, indeed, it informs his cosmology in creative and surprising ways. As John Protevi, for example, has written, "We are [...] confronted in Deleuze's works with a radically materialist philosophy that engages all the powers of contemporary physics and biology to analyze and intervene in those sectors of the contemporary global system which gleefully embrace difference and flow" (2001: 2-3). As Protevi rightfully argues, Deleuze's understanding of "bodies" as Nietzschean choreographies of forces allows us to think about the ways bodies operate on different interpermeating registers, which, for example,
107 includes an investigation of the ways in which our biological, chemical or physical bodies interact with our social, political and ethical bodies. Protevi notes that Deleuze's most radical gift to us in terms of thinking bodies is the invitation to move "both 'above' and
'below' the level of the individual as classically conceived in liberal humanism, opening ways to investigate both 'social machines' [...] and the molecular flow of matter (somatic fluids of course—milk, sweat, sperm, urine, blood—but also steel, electricity, concrete) they order into forceful bodies politic" (2001: 3-4). Evidently, Deleuze not only tolerates a scientific perspective, but in fact demands that our philosophy of bodies include it.
However, Protevi also argues that this Deleuzian departure leaves a phenomenological attention to the conditions of possibility in its wake (2001: 2). In other words, if some phenomenologists are sceptical of relying on science to describe lived experience,
Deleuze is sceptical of relying on human lived experience to generate anything other than
Urdoxa.
But I would like to find a nuanced middle ground between both positions by again stressing that becoming-molecular is a modality or stratum of our lived experience. If the findings of some scientific perspectives—such as evolutionary biology, organic chemistry or molecular physics—may seem too abstract, imperceptible or distant for verification through lived embodied experience, this is again a case of the hegemony of a molarized human-centred and human-scaled perception. To assume evolutionary symbioses, or even geological transformation, ozone depletion, or groundwater salination, are not lived in some way in and through the molecularity of our own human
108 bodies either greatly underestimates the actualities and potentialities of our interpermeations, or misunderstands what it means to live.54
Interestingly, despite Merleau-Ponty's distrust of the hegemony of scientific perspectives, he also states that "all my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from some experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless" (1962: viii). This reminder supports my rhizo-phenomenological claim that our becomings-molecular are all part of the realm of lived experience. Relationships and processes that govern the world we inhabit, and which are described by various scientific discourses, are all in some way lived—directly or rhizomatically, intensively, virtually—by us. But when contacting the experience of such findings seems too onerous for our subjectivities struggling to disorganize, scientific stories can be called upon to offer us shortcuts, props and aids for our becomings (although this is by no means to suggest that grasping scientific perspectives is necessarily an "easier" alternative!). I suggest that the overlaying of biological, chemical and physical paradigms onto our more easily accessible experiences not only reconfigures our understanding of "embodiment" and
"the lived," but also makes available to us resources that can help us access our becomings-molecular. Because scientific stories of matter and forces either stretch or shrink our human proximal relation to this matter or these forces, by grappling with such accounts we can nudge ourselves closer to appreciating the virtual dimensions of the matter and forces that we nonetheless live, skimming across, journeying through,
109 gathering up and nestling inside our own lived embodiment. Indeed, what scientific perspectives have to teach me about the mechanics of fluids, the chemical composition of water, the ecological hydrological cycle and the necessity of water for the gestation of all life can certainly help facilitate contact and amplification of my watery molecular becomings. While it may seem that I lose my grip on the water that I drink from a glass as it travels deep into my viscera, scientific description helps me understand the movements and transformations of this water. As such I can hone my ability to experience and describe this becoming-visceral even as it seems to journey beyond my grasp.55 Similarly, while the fleshy buoyancy that cushions my bones has little need for words like intracellular fluid (ICF) and extracellular fluid (ECF) to live the fluvial passages and watery buffer zones that facilitate every movement my body makes, scientific description can nonetheless help me understand the workings of my motor body's water as I bend to lift a book or bump my hip into a chair. Or, stretching my proximal grip on my body of water even further, evolutionary biological description can help me tap into something as distant as my becoming-primordial and the experience of my evolutionary fishy-beginnings. According to scientific accounts, I have inherited a
"mammalian diving reflex" that allows me to dive to depths much greater than most animals, thanks to a marked reduction in heart rate and cardiac output that reduces my body's consumption of oxygen (Morgan 1982: 77). While my body certainly "lives" this science, and is in fact the source of these observations, my own experience of this reflex is greatly enhanced through evolutionary accounts that allow me to extend this
110 experience through space and time and to connect up to bodies seemingly quite distant to my own. My affinities with other marine mammals are amplified, and when I dive now, I can live this relation through the ways in which my own body moves or feels. Such knowledge significantly informs the explorations I undertake of my fishy beginnings and cetacean becomings in chapter four.
Providing an adequate account of my body of water means accounting not only for the actual properties and presentations of our bodies of water according to their own human scale of size and speed, but also for the multiple micro and macro strata on which our bodies operate, in other words, those dimensions which may seem too small or too large, too fast or too slow, too ephemeral or too distant, for us to easily cognize. I have proposed that by overlaying scientific stories upon our phenomenological ones, we can both radically magnify and radically shrink our common sense experience of our bodies of water so that their operation on these micro and macro strata can be contacted, and amplified. But it is crucial to emphasize that this appreciation for scientific accounts is always more than metaphor, when metaphor means merely to draw similarities between disconnected things or events. Although scientific description can be used productively as a metaphor for cultural, social, political or economic lived experiences, this is not my aim in this dissertation. The water that "is" my body is not "like" the hydrological cycle, but is actively engaged in it. The gestational watery habitat is not "represented in or by" my own amniotic fluid, but my body of water enacts various literal expressions of this scientifically corroborated gestationality. My body does not experience dehydration "as"
111 the farmlands of Australia experience drought, but my body's thirst is intimately connected and responsive to the drought of the land. These again are expressions of the materiality of the actual cycling through the intensive, the rhizomatic, the virtual.
Scientific stories, in both their microscopic and macroscopic explanations of watery bodies, do not provide mere metaphors for bodily experience, but rather a different stratum of expression that can be plugged into to help us wrap our cognitive selves around an experience that is too large or small for our cognitive, molarized consciousness.
Nor do I mean to suggest that scientific stories offer irrefutable "facts" that illuminate the "speculations" of philosophy. The ecological workings of the hydrological cycle, the physics of drought, or the biology of reproduction are of course in their own ways molarized accounts of bodies of water that attempt to grasp the molecular workings that continually confound our human perspectives and experiences. (And indeed, one could argue that even to think "water" as having any ontological status at all, within any paradigm—scientific, philosophical or otherwise—is already to molarize it in some way.)
Rather, I mean simply to show that both rhizo-phenomenological and scientific perspectives can illuminate corners of our lived experience that the other cannot. At the same time, nor is the use of scientific description meant as a facile and sloppy translation from one paradigm into another, with little regard for the context in which a scientific description was intended to be meaningful. Daniel Smith notes this caution in terms of
Deleuze's own use of scientific principles:
112 Deleuze is aware of the dangers of invoking scientific propositions outside of their own domain: it is the danger of an arbitrary metaphor or a forced application. "But perhaps these dangers are averted," he writes [...], "if we restrict ourselves to extracting from scientific operators a particular conceptualizable character which itself refers to non-scientific domains, and converges with science without applying it or making it a metaphor." (Smith 1997: xxiv)56
In other words, there are certain convergences in scientific stories and rhizo- phenomenological accounts that can serve as operators of relations that assist us in locating a productive conceptual force in-between paradigms. In a rhizo- phenomenological understanding of the body of water, I locate this "convergence" at the hinge where a molarizing account of bodies of water meets our rhizomatically lived molecularity. It is not as abstract hypothesis that I turn to scientific stories, but rather as a means of describing something which my own molar lived experience has difficulty accessing on its own. The key point here is that the water that is my body is connected to scientific knowledge of water in direct, material ways. The perspective of science can facilitate and gestate the experience of my "becoming water" at the molecular and imperceptible levels, and thus allow me to contact and amplify the rhizomes and virtuals of my body of water, even if they may never be fully known to me. Through this contact and amplification, I am able to bring traces of these lived experiences into my philosophical practice to serve as a teacher and a guide.
Once I, as a molar thinker, can grasp the molecularity of my body, however, my molar body still needs a way to record and convey these experiences, if they are to serve as a philosophical explanation for an audience beyond my own multitude of selves. In the
113 final section of this chapter, then, I turn to examine briefly the notion of rhizo- phenomenological description as a hinge between the body of water's molecular expressions and its molar project of dissertation writing.
(c) Description, "Symptomatology" and Becoming-Language
Becoming-molecular as a philosophical practice is indeed about contacting and amplifying the molecular workings of our bodies of water, but in order to bring these experiences into the zone of philosophical practice, we have to find a language practice that could communicate something useful about them. This brings us to our third technique for amplifying our becomings: rhizo-phenomenological description.
While description is certainly an important cornerstone of any phenomenological method that seeks "to go back to the things themselves," the significance of description for Deleuze is less obvious. Before explaining the practice of rhizo-phenomenological description, then, it serves first to offer a few words about how Deleuzian rhizomatics can also be understood as descriptive, and how this description is a key aspect of some of the
Deleuzian concepts I deploy in this dissertation.
To ask whether the work of Deleuze is descriptive or prescriptive, I would argue, is a false choice. It is both. Certainly, this work is peppered with direct calls to action—
"Don't be one or multiple, be multiplicities!" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 24). "Don't bring out the General in you!" (1987: 25). "Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers" (1987: 161). Such solicitations point to the political impulse in
114 Deleuzian rhizomatics that has been increasingly taken up in contemporary political
57 theory and anti-oppression politics. Yet to view this corpus of work primarily as prescriptive misses the point already noted above: such prescriptions do not intend to do away with the various planes of organization that stratify and organize some status quo
(such as "subjectivity"), but rather they express dismay at the invasive hegemony of such stratification. Even if one is a "multiplicity," one will still also always be "one," in a certain sense. Any "prescriptions" offered are in fact predominantly ways to corral our attention, shift our focus, and invite us to embrace an ontological mode of becoming in which we are already caught up, but which we fail to appreciate, or which we might even actively negate. With our watery becoming-molecular, the prescription at work is to attune ourselves to these becomings—to contact and amplify them—so that we might learn something from them about our own embodiment and about our dominant ontological paradigms and concepts of subjectivity. For this reason we cannot really appreciate the critical element of rhizomatics without considering the ways in which it is significantly descriptive.
In fact, precisely because rhizomatic description is a thick description of life, I read some aspects of Deleuzian rhizomatics as a radical or "rhizomatic" phenomenology.
Despite its focused attention on the transformations of and relations between things that occur at the surface, part of what this philosophy offers us in the end are deep and complex descriptions of life, far deeper, in fact, than most traditional phenomenologies.
This depth or thickness arises from Deleuze's expanded understanding of the ontological
115 status of the "things" he is describing, which I have already outlined above. "What is," for a Deleuzian ontology, is inseparable from how it is, how it might have been and how it might be. But because of this departure from the Western metaphysics it has inherited, in order to describe these "things" (which are in fact always becomings, or movements, or the facilitators of becomings and movements) Deleuzian rhizomatics must deploy concepts and vocabulary (i.e., the "actual," the "virtual," the "intensive" which territorialize and deterritorialize "planes of organization" and "planes of consistency") that a traditional phenomenological lexicon (i.e., "things" in the "world") cannot offer.
Deleuze's ontological terms are not a speculative fiction or a hypothesis or theoretical model, but rather descriptions of the real.
To suggest that Deleuzian rhizomatics is in some way a deep description of the real (albeit a "reality" that departs significantly from our traditional Western metaphysics) resonates with Deleuze's own categorization of some aspects of his work as
"symptomatology." As Daniel Smith (1997, 2005) expands in his discussions of
Deleuze's symptomatology, writers and artists, like doctors and clinicians, can engage in the practice of symptomatology in their descriptions of symptoms that manifest themselves in the "conditions" they are studying. Only after the description of such symptoms, and their careful, contextualized consideration, can a diagnosis be arrived at.
This, for Deleuze, is concept-creation in philosophy (Smith 2005: 183). I thus argue that many of Deleuze's concepts—such as the rhizome and becoming-molecular, as we have described here, but also becoming-animal to which I will return in chapter four in greater
116 depth—are necessarily based on a symptomatology, or attentive description, of the real.
The concept of the rhizome can only emerge after or as the real interpermeations and lines of flight of a body are mapped; becoming-molecular as a concept can be articulated only after or as its micro-operations are described. Neither concept is a speculative
fiction; both are lived, both are experienced, and hence both are verifiable by us, as bodies, if we can dis-organize sufficiently to establish contact.58 Here I do not mean to suggest that Deleuze's work is only descriptive. As I note above, the prescriptive aspect of his work is widely acknowledged. But I do mean to suggest that this prescription does not contradict the description. By describing a radical ontological amendment to our thought, their work invites us to change the way we categorize the world, which in fact changes everything. Do not the descriptions of our watery molecular becomings in this chapter already invite you to deconstruct the thick wall built around your own discrete human subjectivity? Like all of the other co-imbricated terms we have discussed in relation to Deleuze, description and prescription are shown up as mutually implicated aspects of a common body—of work, in this case.
For a philosophical project, however, this description must take the form of a philosophically intelligible language. While there is a tremendous range of styles that may come into play here, philosophy nonetheless demands language. For example, a collection of my perspiration and tears, presented in a plastic Aquafina water bottle, would probably be an inappropriate form for a dissertation, although it may say a lot more about the ethics of interbeing of watery bodies that I may manage within these
117 pages. To be adequate to the experience of bodies of water, I propose that this descriptive
language requires an intimate connection to the body it expresses. This can be facilitated by a rhizo-phenomenological descriptive practice.
Such a practice is, in the first place, a symbiotic becoming between the body-
becoming-molecular, and the language practice itself. This means that while writing requires a becoming-molecular, it is also through the act of writing that this becoming takes place. Description here is thus never a "mere" denotative practice, but an active,
intensive one. Embodied phenomenologist Samuel Mallin has referred to similar phenomenological writing techniques as "thinking with a pen."59 This terminology highlights the fact that such writing is not a recording that represents experiences, but is rather an embodied mode of thinking that can focus our attention on how various bodily
modalities experience a situation in a way that purely cognitive or distanced "thinking"
(without a pen) cannot. Such focusing, in the context of rhizo-phenomenology, is an
intensive operation itself, in that it is a reconfiguration of bodily forces. It is a stretching
and contorting of our molar, categorizing and orderly linguistic bodies into our molecular
zones, and contacting something there through language. It relies on the becoming-
molecular of our body via its perceptive, affective, motor and visceral modes, in order to
"think" and use language in this embodied way.
This specific practice of description requires the engagement of what Merleau-
Ponty would call first-order or originary language, in that it takes common words and
asks them to speak in a way that throws their sedimented meanings into question and
118 illuminates phenomena unexpectedly. Although we must use words, it is a question of mining language's potentiality for an expression that might be adequate to the rhizo- phenomenon, even if those words could never claim to represent fully the molecularity or virtuality of the experience. Merleau-Ponty's notion of first order language in many ways resonates with Deleuze's understanding of minor language that stammers, or stutters in a way that destabilises stratified language.61 While both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze's concepts of language come with their own philosophical baggage, both are "bending the resources of constituted language to some fresh usage" (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 389), both are "trigger[ing] uncontrollable movements" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 106) in the sedimented, or major, language. These language practices are creative, intensive. By overlaying Deleuze's minor language with Merleau-Ponty's practice of phenomenological description, the possibility of a rhizo-phenomenological language emerges that does not simply chart or trace one's becomings-molecular, but in fact is actively engaged therein. To use a rudimentary example, to describe my body of water as
"flowing" is already to contradict the notion of my body as a container with impermeable edges. This mere description asks it to become instead porous, less than solid, more molecular. Moreover, in order to describe my body of water as flowing, I must experience it as such. The very act of flexing, recoiling, grasping towards and around such a language engages an intensive operation that demands, at the same time as it activates, our molecular becomings. In extended rhizo-phenomenological description, it is not only the words themselves, but their relations, their rhythms, their cadences, their
119 silences, that can work to create a new language that can interrupt our sedimented perception of certain words, phrases and other operations of language.
This symbiotic becoming between the molecular body and rhizo- phenomenological description is neither easy nor automatic, and requires learning and perseverance. It is nonetheless the type of description in which I seek to ground the writing of this dissertation, and that presents itself throughout the following chapters as a sort of "fascia" to this body of work. Fascia, a connective tissue, is the packing material of the body. It envelopes the muscles, bones and joints and holds us together. It supports the body structure and gives us our shape. In providing protection and autonomy for the individual muscles and viscera, it also connects these separate entities and establishes spatial relations. Containing the chemical agent collagen, this tissue is capable of changing from fluid to solid, and solid to fluid, in response to the forces acting on it.
Fascia, like all our body's tissue, is primarily composed of water.
The following chapters of this dissertation are by no means made up entirely of such rhizo-phenomenological descriptions of the body of water. In part, this dissertation is comprised of other descriptions of our watery bodies that I consider to be in many ways rhizo-phenomenological, such as those by Irigaray and Lingis, and even those of scientists such as Carl Zimmer and Jacques Cousteau. Other portions of this dissertation engage in the necessary analysis of various thinkers' positions on certain aspects of bodies, water, or other issues that I take up here to support my investigations. This writing involves clarification of concepts—both those of others on which I rely, as well
120 as my own which I introduce in these pages. These analyses and explications are not always phenomenological, but instead map the academic terrain with which my dissertation engages, and which it seeks to stake out. Yet in all of these different methodological intertwinings, my dissertation always comes back to the body of water itself to verify anything I might conclude. It returns to these fascia—my own descriptions of being a body of water—to provide this dissertation's soft architecture. Between the theory and the references and the necessary academic groundwork, this dissertation still aims to find a place for the body of water to speak most directly from itself, even if primarily between the lines.
IV. Conclusion: Towards an Ethics of Interbeing
We have seen throughout this chapter how the philosophical theories and practices of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze can help us understand the body of water as both the object and the subject of thought. But before we move on to describe and theorize our bodies of water in more detail, we can begin to contemplate the ways in which this acknowledgement of the body of water's necessary molar-molecularity is not only a question of understanding this body ontologically, nor only of developing an embodied philosophical practice. While these are key questions that I take up in the following chapters, and while they are illuminating in their own right, these questions are also part of the larger aim of this dissertation, which is to consider what a body of water "can do."
As already noted in the introductory chapter, thinking ontologically about what the body
121 of water is quickly opens up the question of "what a body can do," in the doubly articulated sense of having a capacity to affect other bodies, but also as holding considerable potential as an ethical resource. In closing this chapter, then, I want to provide a preliminary articulation of how this relationship between a new understanding of embodiment, specifically as a molar-molecular choreography of watery matter and force, and an opening towards an ethical practice of embodiment might emerge.
While we must acknowledge human subjectivity as one organizing force of human bodies, we have already noted that these same bodies are also more than molar subjectivity: in their molecularity they are radically material, tend towards destratification, and connect to and through other bodies in ways that forcibly challenge any notion of the human body as discrete, transcendent, privileged. Yet while the molar and molecular are two different registers, perhaps even counteracting one another, we have also already noted that the molecular, rhizomatic materiality of the human body is not something separate from the force of molar subjectification that we must maintain in some small way, even as we challenge it. Indeed, while the subjectified human body is indeed a convenient "resting place" from which to engage in philosophical practice, the refusal to abandon one's molarity is not only a question of philosophical convenience or expedience. To ignore or discount the molar subjectivity of the human body as one of the organizing forces that holds this rhizomatic composition together, even tenuously, in a certain milieu, would mean that we would also have to ignore or discount those many ways in which the molar or subjectified body acts upon other bodies in specific ways. (A
122 body, remember, is defined not only by its capacity to be affected, but also by its capacity to affect.) For example, even the briefest of glances in the direction of our world's water- related ecological crises, inextricably linked to our other human projects of dam building,
factory fishing, and the theft, capture and sale of ancient aquifer stores as privately owned
commodities (to name only a few), should impart the urgency of acknowledging how the projects of our human molar subjectivity affect other bodies of water in the world. Even if the molarized subject-body is only one moment of capture within the various orchestrations of force and matter that compose the human body, and even if the molarized subject-body offers a perspective of what it means to be a human body that is only circumscribed and partial, holding onto this molar subjectivity is also an ethical question of accountability. Only by beginning philosophy from the place of acknowledgement of our human embodied subjectivity can we also adequately acknowledge the role that we, as human subjects, have had in precipitating these
ecological crises. Recognizing molar subjectivity as one specific organization of material
forces is not only convenient if we want to "do philosophy," but such a recognition is in
fact an ethical imperative. We have already noted that even Deleuze reminds us of the necessity of holding on to some part of our molar subjectivity, or otherwise risk
annihilation. To destratify completely would also be a denial of the responsibility that
comes with our specific human molarity. To move too radically now towards a rejection
of the molar human subject may mean that we are letting her off the hook too quickly.
Our molar subjectivity needs to take responsibility for the ways our human bodies affect
123 other bodies in the course of their human-subject endeavours, such as the various ecologically disastrous projects just mentioned.
But our molecular bodies ensure that taking this responsibility is not merely "the right thing to do," in some abstract moral sense. Our molecular bodies provide the material connections that serve as a point of entry for the inauguration of an ethics of interbeing. Our human bodies are materially composed of water in ways that inextricably link our human bodies to other bodies, such as those that compose the hydrological cycle, weather patterns or glacial melt. This physiological fact of our bodies' elemental constitution is not irrelevant to our processes of subjectification: our human-subject projects—dam building, industrial fishing, etc.—may be dreamt up and executed by our molar subject-bodies, but their effects are materially lived by our molecular bodies, and all of the other bodies of water to which we are connected. These catastrophes of our making are not outside of us, but quite literally burrowing and cycling through us. Even if it may seem as though our molarized, discrete human bodies have little connection with, say, the Peace River in northern British Columbia which is currently slated for a multi- million dollar hydro-electric dam project, this separateness is immediately shown up as a sham if we allow our molecular bodies to be brought into an intimate proximity with this body of water—that is, if we shrink the proximal distance that our molar bodies prefer we keep from any experience that elucidates the problematic nature of our efficiency- maximizing economic pursuits. This unaccustomed intimacy will illuminate not only our physiological connection to the water of that river that slakes our thirst or washes our
124 flesh, but also the interpermeation of our perceptual bodies with the roaring rush of a river flowing unimpeded along its course, and the engagement of our motor bodies walking along the uneven and surprising riverbank terrain that the planned hydrotechnological endeavour will radically reterritorialize. While our molar subjectivities may have got us into the mess that is the current precarious state of our world's water resources, perhaps only in paying attention to our molecular becomings can we ensure the continued becoming of both our own bodies—whose stakes in these disasters are certainly heightened for all of our molecular materiality—and the other bodies we have so callously affected.
In other words, while acknowledging our molar and molecular watery bodies may in the first place facilitate the theoretical and methodological explorations I undertake in these pages, I do believe the stakes are far more significant. As I suggest most prominently in chapter five, understanding what it means to be a body of water, ontologically, can open up to the cultivation of ethical practices that can negotiate the interbeing of different bodies of water in our world. As we have already begun to see, to be a body of water means that we must address our interrelationality with other bodies— how they affect us, and how we affect them—but it also means that our bodies "can do" different things upon different strata. While our molecular bodies disperse and connect, our molar bodies corral and control. If we acknowledge that we are not only molar subjects, discrete in our epidermal divers' suits, but also molecular flows, teeming with traces and anticipations of other bodies, and if we can find a way to access and amplify a
125 way of living at the hinge of these strata, then, as I will continue to argue, we will not only gain deeper insight into the ontology of life as a body of water, but we will also open ourselves to an ethics of interbeing with the many other bodies of water with whom we share this planet. How we might do so, more specifically, will be the subject of subsequent chapters.
126 (It is as though) There is another person inside of me. Connected, but not. How can it be that a being with whom I share the highest degree of intimacy possible, a being that is folded into my own flesh, can be the most other? How can self and other so completely overlap, yet maintain such an unbridgeable distance?
I can no longer remember what it felt like to be without you, without this. Can I say that in the interim I've developed new habits, if each "habit" is ephemeral, itself changing with each repetition—necessitated by the shifting weight of you? I should have noted the days, the days when I first felt you move, the days when I noticed my own change of movement... Was I adjusting myself, or were you moving me? Ourworlds collided but I no longer remember when. What was me, what was you?
This body, heaving and squirming before my eyes, seems so strange. Yet at the same time
I am it, this feeling within my gut. A body that both endogenously and exogenously exceeds its own bounds. This in/visibility haunts me. The books all tell you what to expect. What to Expect When You're Expecting. But what sort of farce is this? Do we really lull ourselves with the notion that we can expect, be prepared, know in advance?
Do you really believe you can tell where, anticipate how, it will grow? Give up the illusion and join the round, round dance.
127 / lie on my back and watch the ripples across my belly. The lumps move and the bumps change, the shifting desert sands and the rolling ocean waves. The phenomenological body morphs. My organ/ization, surely, is shifting. I can no longer anticipate my own reactions, my own capacities, my own practices (what is "my own"?), a body that is always already beyond its own presumed perimeter. A body which, like it or not, is infiltrated. Chiasmic. I proceed with caution. But what means "caution " when your subjectivity is undone?
Bones shift. Muscles stretch. Blood surges and swells. Skin expands and lungs shrink.
This metamorphosis is no metaphor. And where is its beginning, where will be its end?
These questions are only small vanities, an ego searching for any rocky outcrop it can cling to.
Where do we differentiate?
These days I can feel toes between my ribs.
I sometimes wonder about the fact that you are swimming in waters that are me. Or: me- for-now, anyways.
128 CHAPTER TWO
An Onto-Logic of Amniotics:
Gestational, Interpermeating, Differenc/tiating
I. Introduction: Hydrological Cycles
Our bodies share an affinity for being in water that should hardly come as a surprise: 60-90 percent of our bodies is constituted of water, and about the same percentage of the earth's surface is wet and blue. Water infiltrates and inhabits the vapour we breathe, the land we till, the animal and vegetable others with whom we share this planet. As embodied beings, we are, primarily, bodies of water in a watery world.
Yet, as we have begun to explore in the previous chapter, our bodies of water are neither stagnant, nor separate, nor compartmentalized. These bodies are rather deeply imbricated in the intricate movements of water that create and sustain life on our planet.
These movements are no secret to us. We all feel these movements viscerally, in the superabundance, acute paucity, or mere banality of the rain, sleet and snow that dominate our weather reports; we have all learned of the cycles of transpiration, evaporation, and condensation that these precipitous movements plug into. However, while many of us may understand such traversals and transformations of water upon the Earth according to a highschool science classroom's version of one overarching hydrological cycle, this water is in fact engaged in a multiplicity of complex and co-implicated cycles, about
129 which more nuanced stories can be told. Within that overarching hydrological cycle water moves neither at a uniform speed nor as a coherent mass, but rather is differentiated, in space and in time, at every stage of the process. For example, following precipitation, some water will soak into the ground, replenishing the surface soil for several months before reentering the cycle, while other water will penetrate deeper, where it may remain in subterranean aquifers for thousands of years. Yet other precipitation will forego such percolation and infiltration altogether. At the same time as some water penetrates the ground, and some water evaporates almost immediately back into the heavens, a third flow of precipitation opts instead for a quick getaway, running along the Earth's surface towards rivers, lakes and seas where it may finally take a breather, perhaps for a hundred years, or only several days. Other surface water will remain frozen on mountain tops for months, or alternatively trapped in glaciers for decades. And this still does not account for smaller yet immensely significant amounts of surface water that are absorbed by living beings. Such biospheric water is in turn inaugurated into its own complex series of hydrological cycles, perhaps in the transpiration processes of plants, or in the gestational and sustaining systems to which animals, including we humans, are critically indebted. And these biological processes are in turn maintained by their own choreographies of watery movements. For humans, these movements include the collection and expulsion of maternal amniotic waters, the absorption and circulation of water within our gestating bodies, and the flow and flush of waters in the various bodily fluids that intercoporeally sustain our bodies—all of which
130 plug into the biological and meteorological cycles of water that extracorporeally nourish our bodies.
In these multiple and overlapping cycles we thus begin to sense a relation to water that is twofold: first, water facilitates and gestates our human being, and second, water connects us through various complex movements and cycles to other bodies and beings in various exchanges, gifts, thefts, and forsakings. This connection may be immediate and direct, or delayed and removed, but it nonetheless reveals itself as a thread of interpermeation and commonality that facilitates our interbeing. After all, water is both finite and inexhaustible; our planet neither gains nor relinquishes the water it harbours, but only witnesses its continual reorganization, redistribution, relocation. This means that the water that temporarily comprises and sustains us brings with it a history that is at least
3.9 billion years old and will continue far beyond the span of our own lifetimes. Yet this also means that just as our bodies find a thread of commonality and connection in and through this closed system of water, we are constantly confronted by difference—the different rates, speeds, pathways, and bodily expressions that water takes on. In fact water can only serve as a connector because it expresses difference. Through the continued expression of watery difference, life proliferates, transforms and complexifies.
This "closed" system is hence not really that closed.
In one sense, these are the facts that comprise the stories of biology. The importance of water for the gestation, maintenance and proliferation of life is not news to any contemporary scientist. But as I will argue in this chapter, water's biological
131 workings reverberate in an important philosophical proposition—in an onto-logic—that helps us rethink our dominant understandings of ontology that privileges a static and separated way of being. In these pages I explore this onto-logic through a rhizo- phenomenological engagement with our bodies of water, based on the understanding of these bodies that I have already developed in chapter one. To build up this rhizo- phenomenology, however, I also look to the work of other philosophers who have already proposed alternate ways of conceptualizing our ways of being. Primarily, my focus here is on Luce Irigaray, well-known as a philosopher of sexual difference, but also as a philosopher of the fluid, of the elements, of the fluid and elemental becomings of sexual difference. In this chapter I explore the meaning of water in Irigaray's work, predominantly Marine Lover ofFriedrich Nietzsche, in order to pry open further the relation between being in water and being of water. Irigaray's philosophy, and her own descriptions of our bodies of water, leads me to ask: How might our being of/in water inform our understanding of the ontological? What are we to make of our passages as bodies of water from one body of water (a sea, a womb), to other bodies of water (a water-saturated world)? And, in all of these bodies of water, where is (sexual) difference?
Using Irigaray's reading of water as inspiration, I seek to further describe the connections and slippages between the topological and ontological relationships in which bodies of water are imbricated. As noted above, understanding these necessary relations of our bodies of water leads me to propose an onto-logic. I call this particular onto-logic
"amniotics." An onto-logic is a common way of being that is expressed across a
132 difference of beings. As opposed to the way in which "ontology" might be traditionally understood, an onto-logic does not propose to solve the question of "Being," nor does it purport to reveal or describe all of being's facets or potential expressions. Like a template, an onto-logic can rather highlight something that helps us understand a common how, where, when and thanks to whom that certain seemingly disparate beings share. The onto-logic of amniotics does not suggest that all bodies of water are the same in terms of their being, but rather that bodies of water share a connected way of being because they are bodies of water. Amniotics suggests that this way of being involves the proliferating cycles of gestation, differenc/tiation and interpermeation which I will describe in detail below.
Moreover, it should be stressed that the onto-logic of amniotics is suggested by bodies of water themselves. As an onto-logic, amniotics is not a theory that I am trying to apply to bodies, but rather a radically material, immanent expression of life for which I am seeking an adequate philosophical formulation. This is why I use a rhizo- phenomenological approach to tease it out. Exploring our bodies of water through the notion of a materially grounded onto-logic allows me to overlay the biological with the ethical and political in order to more carefully tease out the ways in which the natural is expressed through the cultural, and the cultural indebted to the natural. Through the onto- logic of amniotics, I am able to sketch out one way in which the matter of our watery bodies does indeed "matter." Deeper insight into this "mattering" can be gained by more explicitly thinking through the more-than-biological meaning of the hydrological cycles
133 in which our bodies of water participate. In this chapter, I propose to deepen this insight
in terms of how the onto-logic of amniotics plays out, first, in our human bodies of water.
However, as is evident from the very language I use—"amniotics"—this is an onto-logic that applies to bodies of water beyond and other than the human. In the final section of this chapter, then, I will suggest how the implications of amniotics extend beyond the realm of the human, or even the amniote. These suggestions will set up my explorations in the second half of this dissertation.
While Irigaray's reading of water remains my primary textual anchor in this chapter, I also seek to read her work both through and alongside the Deleuzian and
Merleau-Pontian understanding of bodies I have already begun to explore in the previous chapter. In the first place, the notion of the rhizo-phenomenological body (as always materially embedded while remaining an indeterminate site of potentiality and
interpermeation) will provide a useful theoretical framework for coming to grips with how Irigaray herself understands bodies. My appreciation of the ways in which Irigaray is
a rhizo-phenomenologist does not erase the differences between her own philosophy and that of either Deleuze or Merleau-Ponty, but will rather open a space for seeing her
descriptions of female bodily morphology as neither reductively essentialist nor as merely rhetorical device. Moreover, in reading Irigaray on water, I will push her
descriptions up against both a Deleuzian philosophy of becoming that is grounded in
difference and repetition, and the ontological interpermeation and chiasm of bodies
developed by Merleau-Ponty. In doing so I will be able to focus on Irigaray's key
134 contribution to developing an onto-logic of amniotics, which I propose here is her insistence on the primacy of the gestational through the materially specific figuration of fluid, watery bodies. But moreover, I will be able to open this figuration to a deeper and more complex reading, which will concomitantly demand a nuanced reading of the role of sexual difference in the onto-logic of amniotics. In fact, I will suggest that according to such an onto-logic, we are moreover invited to explore a way through an impasse in contemporary philosophical debates that often pits an Irigarayan understanding of bodies as irreducibly (sexually) different against a Deleuzian or Merleau-Pontian understanding of bodies that foregrounds their interpermeation and perpetual material exchange (in spite of sexual difference, if such difference is even acknowledged in such accounts). After considering the meaning of our bodies of water according to the onto-logic of amniotics,
I will propose an understanding of embodiment not as either interpermeating the other or different from the other, but rather as necessarily and always both. In this way, my exploration of Irigaray's philosophy in this chapter also deepens and nuances the rhizo- phenomenological understanding of bodies I outlined in the previous chapter. I will also suggest that a close reading of Irigaray's texts that speak most directly from the body reveals an understanding of sexual difference that is less dualistic than some readings of her work suggest. By reading sexual difference through the onto-logic of amniotics, we can understand sexual difference as the differentiated force of gestational desire, always bound up in a repetition of difference that can never be fully known in advance. The onto-logic of amniotics, as I will explore in this chapter, thus gives us a framework for
135 paying attention to our bodies of water, and to learning from them something about our own differentiation, gestationality and interpermeation as humans implicated in social, political, ecological, technological and ethical networks of interbeing.
II. Irigaray as Rhizomatic Phenomenologist
In order to lay out the ways in which Irigaray's work contributes to the elaboration of an onto-logic of our bodies of water, it serves first to map her philosophy upon the terrain of thinking about bodies, and water, in the first place. The work of Luce
Irigaray has been amongst the most influential, and challenging, in contemporary thought. To think with Irigaray, on her terms, we need to undo our comfortable paradigms of analysis and commit to the openness and risk her way of thought demands.
This is what is demanded by two of her key contributions to contemporary theory
(feminist and otherwise). These are, first, being as irreducibly (sexually) different; and second, being as a material becoming. As I will clarify, these two concepts are not discrete; rather, each is the condition of possibility of the other. Moreover, their explication will suggest a third key concept offered in Irigaray's work-gestationality- which will become a pivotal notion for this chapter.
Irigaray maintains consistently throughout her oeuvre that being is prefigured by an irreducible sexual difference. According to Irigaray, sexual difference is thus not only epistemological, representing two different ways of knowing, but ontological: sexual difference is always already here as a precondition for being. Our way of being is always
136 sexually differentiated; we can not exist except as an accomplishment of sexual difference. Such difference, contends Irigaray, is "the condition of presence" (2002b:
171). Moreover, this is a difference that is spiritual, but also always material. It is based in the material reality of sexuate bodies, yet these bodies are different even prior to genitality—that is, this difference precedes and prefigures anatomically different male and female bodies (1985b: 142). In Irigaray's words this difference is "insurmountable," and "unsurpassable": "the most universal and irreducible difference ... is the one that exists between the genders" (2002a: 98). In order to fully understand her concept of sexual difference, however, one must also work through the very specific (and challenging) way that Irigaray conceptualizes this "difference." It is a difference as difference, where the feminine and masculine are qualitatively different, rather than different by degree. The masculine and feminine each has its own logic, its own paradigm, that in some way will always remain unknowable to the other. Only once we understand difference outside of a specular or comparative framework (that is difference in itself, rather than difference from), will we be able to live sexual difference as difference, rather than as a feminine mimesis of or consumption by the masculine.
Yet, Irigaray contends that because of the phallogocentrism that has dominated philosophy and language since Plato and before, we have yet to experience sexual difference as difference; thus it is yet to come. This introduces the second key concept
Irigaray offers us: being as a material becoming. "Sexual difference," states Irigaray, once we allow it to be as difference "would constitute the horizon of worlds more fecund
137 than any known to date - at least in the West" (1993a: 5). This difference that is the
"condition of presence" is also the "source of becoming" (2002b: 171). Hence being, for
Irigaray, is always in process. Being, whatever it is, is always something more, always
something in addition. This excess is not only spatial in terms of its concealedness, but
also temporal: it belongs to a future that we have yet to encounter. In this Irigaray is
following other thinkers in the post-Hegelian tradition that seeks to challenge the hegemony of a stable or a priori fully knowable being. Her particular contribution to this
development is her persistent grounding of this becoming in the material reality of sexual
difference.
Already, then, we are in a position to begin mapping the ways in which Irigaray's thought both overlaps with and challenges the ontological propositions of both Deleuze
and Merleau-Ponty. For instance, while Irigaray agrees with Merleau-Ponty that an understanding of inter subjectivity must look to the prediscursive tactile, perceptual and
otherwise embodied paths of connection that are inaugurated in the encounter with an
other, she nonetheless challenges his ontology of chiasm and the flesh on other grounds:
she reads Merleau-Ponty's notion of reversibility, upon which his ontology of the flesh
rests, as subsumption of difference into the same, in such a way that difference is effaced.
Irigaray insists instead that intersubjective reversibility respect the interval between two
that can maintain sexual difference as irreducible difference. In other words, she refuses
to allow an embodied interconnectivity to erase the moment of difference. For Irigaray,
there are twos that can never be one. At the same time, Irigaray's philosophy resonates
138 with a Deleuzian ontology conditioned on difference as difference. To think such a difference, which has been Deleuze's project as well, requires freeing ourselves from the idea of difference as mediated by identity, opposition, analogy or resemblance—four
"shackles" which form the foundation of a longstanding philosophy of the same, of representation (see Deleuze 1994: 29-30). This requires, then, in Deleuze's terms an understanding not only of differentiation (between bodies) but also differenciation
(internal to a body), which is a position that Irigaray certainly supports in her championing of a difference that is yet to come, and that must be understood on its own terms. However, Irigaray also objects to the Deleuzian position by insisting that this difference be specifically sexual. This is connected to Irigaray's insistence that differenc/tiation (although she does not use this term) is no virgin birth: it must occur at the meeting of two (I will return to this point below). While Irigaray does not explicitly confront Deleuze by name in her writings, she undoubtedly has his work in mind when she expresses great scepticism about "multiplicities," "desiring machines," and "the body without organs" that, in her view, threaten effacement and appropriation of feminine pleasure and desire (1985b: 140-141). For Irigaray, then, "to be" is always to become as materially embodied and sexually different.
The specific ways in which Irigaray's philosophy differs from that of both
Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze thus leads us to suggest a third key contribution of her work.
Irigaray's insistence on sexual difference as a necessary foundation for any ontological revision opens up to the concept of the gestational, which in Irigaray most often presents
139 itself as the feminine-maternal. For Irigaray, understanding the fecundity of sexual difference means that the question of the maternal must also be addressed as that which allows any other being to be. It is a facilitative, gifting force that is not abstract, but located in and as concrete bodies of sexual difference (as Braidotti reminds us, the root of
"materialism" is "mater" [2002: 23]). Irigaray's objective in recuperating the maternal is thus two-fold: on the one hand, she (rightly) sees how without acknowledging the gestational, phallogocentric ontologies hold no water (a figure of speech whose significance, we shall see, will soon become far less figurative); they would seemingly come from no place, indebted to no one, which is quite clearly not the case. But reminding us of the maternal is not only a calling to task of phallogocentric philosophy, but secondly, an affirmation of women's own potential. Irigaray presents intrauterine space as a place of fecundity that can empower and enable women to proliferate beyond the confines of their representation in phallogocentrism (1993c). Through a necessarily material and concrete gestational maternal, sexual difference will be able to realize its difference as difference. Here, then, we finally see how this third key concept of gestationality in fact underpins and draws together the first two concepts of sexual difference and materiality; Irigaray's three key contributions become inextricably entwined.
In order to develop the intertwining of these concepts, Irigaray offers a philosophy of embodiment that weaves around and through a philosophy of the elemental. As such, her philosophy includes descriptions of various body-morphological
140 and elemental entities. Notably, these include women's genital lips, mucous, womb and intrauterine space, placenta, amniotic fluid, saliva, and the sea and water more generally.
Through these figurations Irigaray is able to impart a sense of the feminine that is material, fluid, gestational, different. Moreover and importantly, between her attention to the "elements" on the one hand, and her attention to the distinctly feminine morphological body, on the other, a certain slippage emerges. The image of mucus, for example, can be mapped both according to a female morphology and a mechanics of elemental fluids. As such, her work implicitly asks: What is the relation of the body to the elemental? What is the relation of the elemental to sexual difference—a difference that is fundamentally material yet never fully knowable in advance?
Yet the extensive body of feminist commentary on Irigaray's work reveals the difficulty of addressing these questions. Although commentators (e.g. Braidotti [2003],
Shildrick [1997], Stone [2003]) note that the days of criticizing Irigaray's attention to female bodily morphology as naive biological essentialism, whereby women are defined by their anatomies, have thankfully passed, feminist theorists still disagree about how best to conceptualize Irigaray's project. Alternatives to biological essentialism have suggested that the use of female bodily morphology in Irigaray is instead a clever rhetorical strategy, that is, either synecdoche or catachresis that does not really equate woman with her anatomy (Gallop 1998), or similarly, as a "strategic essentialism" (e.g.
Whitford [1991], Braidotti [2003], Butler [1993]) that offers a resymbolization of the female body. A similar approach is adopted by Lorraine, who suggests some of Irigaray's
141 more "sloganistic" proclamations on feminine bodies should be read as tactical interventions (1999: 93). Yet, while these readings of Irigaray certainly do not deny that the materiality of feminine bodies does indeed matter, the mattering of that matter, in its sexual specificity, is not quite fully accounted for. In calling attention to women's material bodily difference as primarily rhetorical, strategic or tactical, it seems that one acknowledges the difference of feminine embodiment only reluctantly, for effect, without true commitment. Relegated to such a position, how can materiality be fully embraced as a teacher and a guide?66 Still, other readings that shift to focus instead on the materiality of women in Irigaray's work encounter their own difficulties. Naomi Schor (1994), for example, suggests that the foundation of Irigaray's claims regarding the fluid materiality of the feminine body is not actually biological essentialism, but rather a reference to the world of science and physics in particular. ("Science," writes Schor, "is Irigaray's fetish"
[70], referring in particular to science that tells the stories of unstable, dissipative properties instead of mechanics of solids.) But although Schor shifts reception of Irigaray in a key direction that allows a more subtle consideration of the "real" dynamic of the fluid elemental, she does not satisfactorily connect this back to Irigaray's invocation of female physiology as enjoying a particular relation to the fluid. In fact, she suggests that the problem with the antiessentialist critique of Irigaray is its inability to "carefully separate] out what belongs to the body and what to the world of matter" (69), hence curiously relegating the matter of the body—that is, a body that matters—beyond the terms of her discussion altogether. Alison Stone's (2003) recent work on Irigaray also
142 privileges a materialist reading, but maintains that Irigaray's realism relies on an explicit disregard of science. Stone argues that Irigaray's later work (from the mid-1980's onwards) in particular should be understood as a realist essentialism that sees sexual difference as undeniably materially real and fundamental, and that the cogency of
Irigaray's argument stems from Irigaray's reliance on a realist (but non-scientific) theory of nature as similarly always sexually dimorphic and bipolar. However, just how "real" this essentialism is becomes suspect as Stone also demonstrates how for Irigaray, the sexual difference of nature should be understood only in a "highly attenuated sense" (63): nature's dimorphism cannot be understood as specifically sexual, she argues, but rather as the rhythm and exchange between interdependent poles. Stone thus leaves us with a justification of a material sexual difference that relies on analogy and parallel structure, in
Stone's words. This approach again begs the question of how then the materiality of the elemental truly matters, beyond metaphor, to the matter of bodies.
Certainly, this struggle to understand Irigaray's position has yielded many exceptionally productive responses that continue to insist on the importance of Irigaray's insights for broader philosophical discussions of bodies, ontology and difference. For example, Stone's reading contributes in key ways to thinking through the connection between Irigaray's elemental and the bodily-morphological, as we will see below.
Similarly, although Braidotti reads Irigaray's work as a strategic re-essentializing of the feminine body, this does not negate her astute analysis of Irigaray in relation to the corpus of Deleuze, which has also been extremely valuable to me in thinking through
143 these questions. But at the same time, the greatly diverse proposals put forth by Irigaray's most astute readers clearly show that the precise means of integrating the seemingly competing tendencies in her work is neither straightforward nor simple. How can one
speak of an a priori "real" difference of the feminine body without invoking the spectre
of essentialism? How can one speak of a woman-to-come if the matter of her different physiology is "real," that is, in some way determinate? As some critics remark, part of the challenge is to rethink our commitment to understanding of the body, materialism and even essence as static, inert matter. This is partly what Stone is up to in her appraisal of
Irigaray's "realist essentialism," while other commentators, such as Kirby (1997: 69-81),
Fielding (2000), and Weiss (1999), also all suggest (in their own ways) that essentialism, when read through the phenomenological experience of the body, posits a female body or morphology that is far from determinate, stable, or reductively biologized. In this same vein Shildrick (1997), foreshadowing some of Grosz's (2004, 2005) more recent appraisals of Irigaray's work, notes that a key element of Irigaray's strategy is dismantling the nature/culture dichotomy
that positions the biological as static, ahistorical and determinate, and culture as representative of development and change. Against the convention, what her work stresses consistently is that culture also demands - indeed, depends on - constant repetition and sameness, while the biological is inherently interactive and dynamic. (177)
While Shildrick here uses the more narrow term "biological," it is not difficult to imagine how her reading can open up to a more general understanding of the properties of the non-human—the natural, the organic, the chemical, the meteorological, the
144 cosmological. Other commentators such as Braidotti (2000, 2002, 2003, 2006b), Grosz
(2004, 2005), Lorraine (1999) and Olkowski (2000), drawing on Deleuze, suggest an understanding of the feminine body in Irigaray's thought as at least in part "virtual," enfolding both a history and an unknowability. All of these positions suggest that the open-ended becoming-ness of bodies does not have to contradict their material sexual difference, and some of these positions are particularly helpful in their suggestion that the elemental, the natural, the material may be key to understanding this reconciliation.
Inspired and guided in part by these thinkers, I agree that the integration of bodily materiality (as more than metaphor or strategy), on the one hand, and the force of becoming on the other, is not only possible but that such an integration is necessary to provide an accurate account of the life of our fleshy matter. This conviction is also grounded in my understanding of Irigaray's attention to our bodies of water (that is, her overlapping attention to both sexually different bodies and to the fluid elemental) as a rhizomatic phenomenology. In the previous chapter I have already provided a general account of rhizo-phenomenology as an enfolding of Merleau-Pontian phenomenological description with Deleuzian cosmology, and how it can help us understand our bodies of water. Appreciating Irigaray's attention to the elemental-bodily morphological as similarly rhizo-phenomenological entails then, first, understanding Irigaray's work as a mode of phenomenological description that does indeed treat material phenomena as more than metaphor. I propose that in her work she does invite us to "go back to the things themselves." She is concerned with the materiality of bodies and being-in-the-
145 world, and takes great care to describe the difference of bodies, or the elemental properties thereof, as actually experienced. For example, in her essay "The Way of
Breath" (2002b), Irigaray discusses feminine breath and masculine breath as actual physiological and cultural bodily engagements. She turns her attention to the ways in which we breathe and through description of these processes, she seeks to discern what they might mean. Moreover, this is a prime example of the overlaying of the elemental
(air) with the body as sexually different, a practice already begun in her reading of breath in The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (1999). Her descriptions of experiences such as breath bracket to the extent possible the phallogocentric sediment that has accrued upon our common understanding of these experiences, in the attempt to reveal something that has been concealed by our habitual ways and our "natural attitude," as phenomenologists would say. Furthermore, like Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray insists that our bodies are our best teachers in terms of finding the means for scraping away at this sediment. She tells us, for example, that "our body, right here, right now, gives us a very different certainty. Truth is necessary for those who are so distanced from their body that they have forgotten it" (1985b: 214). She insists that one "pay attention" to oneself,
"without letting convention, or habit, distract you" (1985b: 206), and that this requires "a certain recourse... to the phenomenological method." (2000: 156). And again, if
Irigaray's analysis is indeed metaphorical at some levels (for a metaphor, too, can be a creative encounter between bodies that evokes a feeling of wonder and strangeness), it is never merely metaphorical, as it always remains connected to the materiality of the
146 phenomena she describes. To invoke again the example of breathing, when Irigaray suggests that woman engenders with her breath, and shares her breath even before she shares the nourishment of her body (2002a: 80), this is a true description of woman's bodily experience, even as it opens to a broader metaphorical or metonymical significance. Although breath is indeed a critical theme in Irigaray's philosophy, in the following pages I will suggest that she engages in similar phenomenological accounts of our bodies of water.
But while Irigaray does indeed describe woman as she is throughout her corpus of work, she also insists that "woman" is always an open question. She is also, necessarily, yet to come. This is why I read Irigaray's work as not just a phenomenology, but as a rhizomatic phenomenology—a description of our material situation that at the same time acknowledges this situation as an ephemeral composition. The rhizomatic aspects of
Irigaray's descriptions show themselves in two ways. First, as already noted above, despite Irigaray's rejection of Deleuzian thought, there is indeed a strong resonance between her descriptions of feminine embodiment and Deleuze's concepts of the actual and the virtual—a conceptual framework that can help us understand how even as virtual
Irigaray's woman is nonetheless real. Woman is both woman as we know her and woman in her potentiality. Even as virtual, however, woman is still connected to her fleshy materiality. Virtuality is not a wide open "anything goes," but rather the cloud of indetermination that hovers around an actual (Deleuze and Parnet 148). In other words, the virtuality of woman is the potentiality latent in her embodiment. The virtual is neither
147 predictable nor guaranteed, but it is still intimately connected to that fleshy materiality, even if it is not, and may never be, actualized. We see such an understanding of woman, for example, in Irigaray's insistence that the question "what is a woman?" cannot be answered (1985b: 120), even if we can describe or map her current situation. This understanding is similarly evident in Irigaray's conviction that an exploration of sexual difference is a practice of questions rather than answers (1985b: 119), for to describe the virtual that is nonetheless real requires a method that is similarly indeterminate and open- ended. Appreciating Irigaray's descriptions of women as actual/virtual, then, opens a path for admitting the indeterminacy of feminine embodiment while also remaining resolutely committed to its materiality.
This commitment is further strengthened as we turn to the second way in which
Irigaray's phenomenology can be understood as rhizomatic. I propose that as a specifically rhizomatic phenomenologist Irigaray not only provides deep descriptions of the way our bodies are in the world, but at the same time follows the rhizomes that travel between and through the phenomena she describes. The mechanics of fluids, as Irigaray elaborates, reveals an interconnection between bodies and suggests intimate passages between our human bodies and other bodies—animal, vegetable, elemental, cosmological. As bodies of porosity, we are in constant contact with our surroundings. In some instances, these connections of our human bodies with other natural bodies do indeed seem metaphorical—these are Irigaray's descriptions of the way that sexual difference of bodies is mirrored in (rather than contiguous with) the nature of weather,
148 plants, animals, and the elemental more generally that Stone (2003) analyzes in Irigaray's work. But if we are going to find an adequate way of understanding how the fluidity is a property of bodies and of the elements, we need to understand the relationship between human bodies and other natural bodies as one of material imbrication and real interpermeation. I propose that Irigaray also suggests such a position in her claims that our human bodies are neither impermeable nor discrete ("A body becomes a prison when it contracts into a whole... When a line is drawn around it, its territory mapped out"
[1992: 17]); These material interpermeations of bodies in relations of passage, gift and debt are even more clear in other places in her oeuvre where she invokes our not only symbolic but also material connection to the elements. She writes, for example, that "we are made up these elements [air, water, fire , and earth] and we live them" (1993c: 57), and reminds us that the gift of breath comes not only from human bodies but from vegetable bodies as well (2002a: 51). I will develop this argument more fully in connection to water in my reading of Irigaray's Marine Lover ofFriedrich Nietzsche, below. As this reading will more clearly show, Irigaray's descriptions reveal that we can be taken up in the rhythms and nourishing flows of the world only because we are materially embodied. And only because we are embedded in these flows can we become, can we express as well the promise of our virtuality. In other words, as I will demonstrate as this chapter and the ensuing ones unfold, our interpermeation as bodies of water is inseparable from the gestational, life-proliferating and differenc/tiating force that our bodies of water hold, enfolded within them, as virtual, watery traces.
149 So it is as rhizomatic phenomenology that I will read Irigaray's descriptions of our bodies of water. To read her work as rhizo-phenomenology opens a space for mapping the overlap and slippage between the elemental and the bodily-morphological in her work as the material interpermeation of bodies, rather than as mere metaphor. Such a reading also allows for an appreciation of Irigaray's attention to the specific materiality of bodies as the very condition of their unknowability and indeterminate potential.
Finally, in understanding the actuality and virtuality of the bodily-morphological as part of the interpermeating materiality of life, we will also be in a better position to make sense of Irigaray's insistence on sexual difference, specifically as it relates to the gestational. In short, reading Irigaray's descriptions of our bodies of water as rhizo- phenomenological will facilitate the elaboration of the onto-logic of amniotics that I described above—that is, a logic of being that illuminates the simultaneous gestationality, interpermeation and difference of bodies of water. Irigaray thus becomes an inspiration for thinking through our imbrications as bodies of water within the movements and transformations of water within our world as more than biological truism.
III. Water, Ambiguity and Sexual Difference
As noted above, a key element of Irigaray's descriptions of both the elemental and the bodily-morphological is the notion of fluidity. Arguably, fluidity is the clearest way in which Irigaray links her elemental philosophy and philosophy of sexual difference into a cogent theoretical position. Some commentators (e.g. Caldwell [2002], Olkowski
150 [2000]) thus focus on the seeming dichotomy that Irigaray installs between the fluid feminine and the static, solidified masculine. This attention is hardly surprising, as
Irigaray's writings on fluidity do indeed point us most squarely in this direction. For example, in her essay entitled "The Mechanics of Fluids" (1985b), Irigaray's focus is on the "flowing" and "fluctuating" woman (112), while in other texts, she again accentuates the feminine who describes her body as "fluid and ever mobile," and "secreting a flow"
(1992: 25, 15). This close association of the fluid and the feminine plays out in a variety of implications: woman's bodies are fluid, both figuratively in their non-subsumability into a masculine paradigm, and literally in their fluvial mucous and their placental and amniotic flows. Hence, the feminine cannot be known as feminine (as sexual difference) within a phallogocentric logic because this logic is predicated on rigid and static forms, solid truth and knowable entities. Because the real properties of fluids cannot be accommodated within phallogocentrism, neither can the reality of women and the feminine. And, because this difference cannot be accommodated, the feminine and its attributes are relegated to a lesser or subordinate position than the masculine norm, at the same time as the feminine remains the necessary mirror for the masculine, reflecting back his stable subjectivity. In Irigaray's words, "Every body of water becomes a mirror"
(1985a: 237). This would in part account for women's primarily subordinate position in western societies, according to Irigaray. But at the same time as the fluidity of the feminine keeps women outside of hegemonic ontology, this fluidity is also what we need to embrace, posits Irigaray, if we are going to be able to move towards a future of sexual
151 difference that serves as a mutually loving and respectful source of fecundity, creativity and support for both the masculine and the feminine. While on the one hand, the fluid passing between the two sides (two lips) of the woman engenders her continual becoming, this passage of fluid between "me" (feminine) and "you" (masculine) is also
crucial for the mutual sustenance of both sexes (1992: 15). The fluid can engender positive sexual difference and hold the masculine and the feminine in a respectful relationship that evades comparison and subordination.
Subsequently, if the fluid is to be necessary for a fruitful and fecund relation of
sexual difference, clearly the fluid must also have a distinct relation to the masculine.
Sexual difference according to Irigaray's own logic cannot be cultivated by women alone, because the very basis of sexual difference is a positive (rather than comparative or
subordinating) relation between others. I therefore propose that Irigaray's position on the
fluidity of bodies is in fact far more complex and fecund than suggested by the apparent
focus of her own writings on fluidity and the feminine, and those interpretations of her work that focus exclusively on the relation between fluidity and the feminine. What
Irigaray's position in fact offers is an opening to an onto-logic of life more generally.
This more nuanced position, I argue, is revealed through a close rhizo-phenomenological reading of her most watery text, Marine Lover ofFriedrich Nietzsche (1991).
In this text, any notion of water in Irigaray as compartmentalized, or assigned to one discrete position or meaning, is subtly yet clearly problematized. Marine Lover is an
"amorous dialogue" between the textual avatars (presumably) of Irigaray and Nietzsche.
152 In it, Irigaray describes the watery element that Nietzsche disavows, despite his great insights into matter, life, the body, and the need to overcome and transvalue what has been inherited. Irigaray illuminates how Nietzsche's conception of eternal return betrays a fear and terror of the watery element to which his birth is nonetheless indebted, and how, because of this fear and disavowal, the eternal return will never be able to return difference as difference. By refusing to admit the feminine watery abyss from which he has come, it can only ever be the self-same that will be continually reborn for Nietzsche.
This leads only to entropy, claims Irigaray, and death. Alternatively, Irigaray calls for the fluvial gestational feminine—that which is different from the self-same—to engender creative reproduction of something new. Without it we are left with only a mimetic copying of the same.70
In this text, as in others, Irigaray invokes multiple "feminines" that operate on different strata. We encounter women as beings-in-the-present, but we also encounter a woman-in-the-future, whom we do not yet know and who is to come. In other words, the text describes both an actual woman—that is, the specular woman of Nietzsche's eternal return who is refused admittance into his "echonomy" (Lorraine 1999: 66), as well as a virtual woman, the woman demanding a different potentiality than the possibility offered her by the eternal return of the self-same. We also encounter some sense of a "first woman," a maternal primordial feminine who engenders and gestates both the actual and the virtual. In Irigaray's original French text, of course, this connection is highlighted by the homonymic relation between "mer" (sea) and "mere" (mother). The multiple
153 "feminine" is then fractured through the multiple ways in which the fluid, water, and the sea figure in Marine Lover, as these move between descriptions of waters that are feminine, waters in which the feminine lives, and womb-like waters both feminine and maternal. The feminine is the rapturous sea that moves about endlessly (13); she is the maternal waters out of which the Overman and the masculine are born, and whose depths they now fear (e.g. 52, 67), yet she is also the fluid woman whom man uses, unacknowledged, for sustenance, and whom he attempts to solidify in his image. So on the one hand, we see how Irigaray uses the figuration of the fluid to mark off the qualitative difference of the feminine. While in man's world, "it is always hot, dry and hard" (13), the feminine sea is multiple, flowing, gestating, sustaining.
Yet, on the other hand, while water is primarily associated here with the feminine, water is undeniably a part of the masculine as well, even in his fearful forgetfulness. In these pages we also glimpse how the masculine variously emerges from the water, is afraid of and repulsed by the water, depends physiologically upon water, and is returned to the water. While clearly, the masculine comes from and is indebted to the forgotten sea/the fluid feminine, no clear moment of separation of the masculine from his immemorial waters, and no clear renunciation of his watery beginnings is offered, for the masculine returns there too; as phallogocentric fisherman (48), as a drowning man engulfed by waters he cannot ever escape (66-67), as a swimmer-to-come once he stops resisting the flow (37). The sea is both danger and saviour, a threat and a buoy. And to complicate the watery figuration further, the narrator describes the masculine as not only
154 in, but of water, too. She acknowledges the saliva in his mouth that enables him to speak, even as it/she is forgotten once speech is underway (37), and asks, "Where have you drawn what flows out of you?" (38). In other words, while it is the sea to which the masculine must return for sustenance, this is a sustenance that not only immerses him, but permeates him as well, an incorporated and intimate aspect of his bodily being. Even when he would prefer to "freeze rather than flow" (33), the watery element is still a part of the masculine, despite its tendency to solidification.72
And how could it not be? Irigaray describes our bodily fluidity as we experience it. The masculine, too, experiences life as a composition of blood, bile, tears, saliva, perspiration, ejaculate, urine, and breathy vapour. The masculine, too, flows with and interpermeates the elements. Alphonso Lingis, for example, has richly described the economies of male fluids and their connection to, rather than discrete separation from, both the fluid feminine and the wet of the vegetable or geological strata. He describes breast milk, penile ejaculate, the sap of the aerial roots hanging from the trunks of the pandanus as all part of the Sambia economies of fluids that both organize their social relations but also materially account for the proliferation of the life and vitality of their culture.73 The beauty of Lingis's phenomenology reminds us that water is an intrinsic aspect of not only female but male embodiment as well. No matter what disavowal is enacted, water comprises and is required of all life. Water is necessary for maintaining our cell structure, for facilitating necessary chemical reactions in the body, for physically transporting nutrients and oxygen through the body, and for enabling waste elimination.
155 We drink, we move, we urinate - salivate, ejaculate, perspire. Intake, movement, output.
Men are in fact usually even more watery than women, since women generally have a higher percentage of body fat than men. Whether masculine or feminine, we are all in debt to this water, for it is only because of it that we move, we grow, we live, we have a body at all. Irigaray's descriptions also subtly remind us of these necessities.
Moreover, as in her descriptions of a fluid feminine, Irigaray's descriptions of a fluid masculine are both actual, in their physiological necessity, and virtual, in their potentiality. Just as in her essay, "Mechanics of Fluids," Irigaray considers the fluid potentiality of sperm that has been coopted and reified in a logic of solids (1985b: 113), in Marine Lover her descriptions of a frozen and solidified masculine implicitly ponder the masculine's fluidity-in-the-future: What might water mean for the ethical and political potentiality of the masculine, Irigaray leads us to wonder, if it were to be acknowledged rather than disavowed and feared? So, while Irigaray's references to the watery masculine in Marine Lover are not as prominent as the connection of the fluid to the feminine, and while we must, following Irigaray, always pay attention to the difference of feminine and masculine watery singularities (which I will discuss in greater detail below), masculine fluidity cannot be discounted. While what Irigaray's interlocutor thinks he fears is drowning, Irigaray reminds him—quietly, almost imperceptibly—that what he should really fear is thirst.
Such thirst, Irigaray moreover suggests, can only be slaked through a meeting of the sexual difference. "Between you and me, me and you," Marine Lover's narrator
156 hence laments, "you want me to make a dam" (1991: 56). This dam would halt the flow of water between the masculine and feminine, the flow that is vital, Irigaray suggests, both for the maintenance of sexual difference in a respectful relation, and also for the continued fecundity, development and growth of both. Sexual difference needs to be facilitated, gestated by the fluid.
Hence water as this connector, as this generative flow of fecundity, leads us to consider a third role or place of the fluid revealed in Marine Lover. For Irigaray, not only are the masculine and the feminine both of water, but water also comprises the watery gestational element that conditions these sexually different beings in the first place. In
Marine Lover, the sea engenders both the feminine and the masculine; out of the sea they both emerge. Of course, this "third" body of water—the gestational—is not exactly a
"third," for it distinctly overlaps with the feminine fluid, and comprises one of the manifestations of the feminine fluid which we described above. We note that the gestational sea that Irigaray describes is always feminine. Moreover, we also note that the sea and the maternal womb are both described by Irigaray as abyssal, unknowable depths, a bottom that "has never been sounded" (60-61). While on the one hand this unknowability gestures towards the "mystery" (40) or inability to contain or definitively represent the feminine, these abyssal depths, as the beginning of difference, also elucidate a similar resistance to definitive representation of the watery elemental. Irigaray, for example, asks her interlocutor in Marine Lover whether his "most dangerous beyond" is not in fact "the unexplored reaches of the farthest ocean" (38), and notes that these
157 abyssal, unknowable depths are also "that dark home where you began to be" (57). Hence
Irigaray asks us to consider our bodies' watery origins as both maternal womb and watery element more generally.74 In both cases, our watery beginnings will never be fully or definitively revealed. As Irigaray has commented, we do not see our first beginnings in our amniotic habitat,75 and the moment at which this watery world passes from the realm of the concealed to the realm of the revealed for us will always be ambiguous. Our own amniotic experiences, or what we could even imagine of them, highlight this necessary obfuscation. Where does the maternal body end, and the amniotic body begin? Even in an age of digital imaging and other new obstetrical technologies, what is the quality of any
"knowledge" we gain? Does an ultrasonic image tell us anything about the phenomenology of being held, rocked, protected, and gestated in this liquid elemental?
About this fluvial relation of interpermeation and differentiation? Similarly, we know that the deepest reaches of the Pacific, for example, in their darkness, in their inaccessibility, are less known to us than the moon. Even film footage of these depths gathered in bionic submersibles can only illuminate with their spotlights one small patch of this darkness at a time. What could stitching these moments together in some ocular patchwork reveal?
Again, nothing definitive, for as the next moment is revealed, the first is already becoming different. There is no way of illuminating, fully or definitively, this material abyss. Over 60% of the earth is covered by ocean more than a mile deep, which makes it by far the largest habitat on earth; yet, what lies beneath the surface of our oceans remains largely unknown. As far as we know, humans have never witnessed a living
158 giant squid within its own habitat. New species are discovered on almost every dive, and these dives are currently only capable of bringing submersibles approximately half-way into this deep.76 We might ask, what countless other forms of life might exist in such an abyss, beyond even the limits of our imagination?
Yet while this unknowability evokes a certain slippage between the feminine maternal womb and the sea more generally, it also gives us a clue to the fact that gestation may be about more than the actual feminine-maternal. Like the depths of the sea, the maternal origin always in some way eludes us. If we are tracing a genealogy, it is one with no definitive starting point, no clear beginning of beginnings. Origins are obscured, diffuse and multiple. As such, gestation cannot be reduced to a known and knowable single instance in an actualized female womb. Although Irigaray makes clear in Marine Lover (and elsewhere) the undeniable relation between the maternal and the gestational, the sea is not simply a metaphor for the female mother or the womb, and following from this, the gestational in Marine Lover cannot be read as a simple overlap with the maternal-feminine. I would like to argue that Irigaray's descriptions of the watery element in Marine Lover in fact point to the necessity of thinking through the relation between the feminine and the gestational in a more complex and nuanced way.
For example, near the end of this essay the narrator rhetorically asks, "Where does difference begin? Where is it (elle)? Where am I?... How can one master that dark place where you find birth? Where you begin to be" (67). With these questions, Irigaray infers that difference begins in the sea: I (the feminine) begin in the sea; you (the masculine)
159 begin in the sea; and difference/it (elle) also begins in the sea. Irigaray thus seems to be suggesting that while the gestational is feminine, the copula in this formulation does not invoke a reciprocal symmetry; the gestational is more (and perhaps less) than the many manifestations of the feminine that Irigaray describes. And this observation in turn brings us back to the flows of water between the feminine and masculine that we noted above.
As Irigaray has elsewhere noted, the fecundity of gestation is not limited simply to the moment of birth, but is rather an ongoing regeneration (e.g. 1993a: 5; 1993b: 15: 2002b:
128). This is why, as cited above, the narrator of Marine Lover laments the move to erect a dam between "me" and "you": the gestational is also a connecting flow between the two sexes which ensures their mutual sustenance and proliferation.
So through her descriptions of our bodies of water in Marine Lover Irigaray invites us to think more deeply about these bodies, their difference in relation to their rhizomatic interconnectivity, and their gestational capacities alongside the obfuscation of any definitive origin or starting point. We are furthermore invited to consider how water is the element that crucially underpins these relations: As we are created and gestate in an amniotic sac, nutrients are delivered to us by water that enables us to gestate and grow.
Our waste is removed by similar waterways, and we are protected from external harm by our amniotic waters, waters that are not disembodied or neutral but are themselves in a body of water, a body that is specifically a maternal one.77 How is our experience outside of our amniotic beginnings any different? Water continues to be our buffer, our vital conduit, our universal solvent, our gestational medium. The maternal waters in which we
160 as bodies are created and nurtured are a part of the greater element of water which continues to sustain us, protect us, and nurture us, both extra- and intercorporeally, after we emerge from these wombs. We might understand this passage as one from a smaller womb to a larger one, or from one tiny sea to a greater one. Yet this is a passage of neither severance nor separation, but rather one of diffusion, evaporation, condensation, incorporation... We are created in water, we gestate in water, we are born into an atmosphere of the same water although more diffuse, we take in water, we harbour it, it sustains and protects us, it leaves us... at the same time as we are always, to some extent, in it. The passage from body of water to body of water (always as body of water) is never synecdochal or metaphoric, but rather radically material. This cycle, which is actually multiple spiralling, overlapping and interconnected cycles that pass through multiple strata, is always moving to take up its next repetition. At the same time, then, these passages are never linear or discrete: through our watery passages we are connected in and through other beings, and our difference is sustained by these same passages. The watery condition of being literally flows into, out of, and from, beings themselves in a multiplicitous hydrological cycle of becomings—becomings of gestation, interpermeation and differentiation.
Marine Lover thus suggests to us how water becomes not only the expression of sexual difference—that which comprises and sustains both the feminine and the masculine—but also the gestational medium for both. Water is both what we are and why we are, where we have come from. This gestational medium, however, is not a simple
161 origin, but a connecting force that flows through and between expressions of sexual
difference. Water engenders sexual difference not only as a one-time womb, but in the
continual gestational exchange between the sexes. We thus are finally in a position to see how Irigaray's descriptions of our bodies of water suggest the onto-logic that I sketched
out at the beginning of this chapter: as bodies of water we are inaugurated into a radically material relation of interbeing that is gestational, interpermeating and differentiated.
However, in order to appreciate this onto-logic in more detail, and in order to see how the
gestational, as I suggested above, may inhabit a more complex relation to the feminine- maternal than the actual necessity of sexual reproduction seems to posit, I want to turn now to read Irigaray's descriptions of our bodies of water through and beside Deleuze's
concept of difference and repetition and Merleau-Ponty's concepts of chiasm and the
flesh.
IV. (Sexual) Difference and Repetition
For Irigaray, then, difference begins in the gestational watery elemental. But our bodies of water also tell us that this "beginning" is already always part of overlapping and interconnected cycles of repetition: we know that water on the earth is finite. Except for perhaps some minute amounts of vapour that may enter our atmosphere from the cosmos, all the water that is here, on, in and hovering above our planet, has always been here. Each watery singularity has been somewhere, sometime before. Yet, while the
162 water that moves through these cycles is always "the same," it is by no means undifferentiated. What repeats is always difference.
That this suggestion of the difference and repetition of our bodies of water should
emerge from a reading of Irigaray's love letter to Nietzsche is hardly surprising. Marine
Lover expounds, as we recall, Irigaray's critique of Nietzsche's concept of the eternal return, whereby in his elision of the feminine, the masculine philosopher enacts a
forgetting of where he came from and his condition of being in the first place. As a result, all that can return is the self-same.78 In place of this, Irigaray seeks to articulate a repetition through the gestational that allows difference to be safeguarded. She seeks to articulate the repetition of difference.
However, read alongside Irigaray's philosophical commitments to the unknowability of sexual difference - that is, its perpetual yet-to-come - the entire notion that difference could repeat as anything other than "itself or the self-same may seem jarring. Does not the very notion of unknowability suggest something that has never been before, something unfamiliar and surprising, while repetition indeed suggests the return of the same? Certainly, this is our commonplace understanding of repetition according to representational logic, yet this is precisely the return that Irigaray criticizes in Nietzsche.
In order to resolve this seeming incompossibility, I propose that we turn to Deleuze, who similarly seeks to challenge the logic of representation. By briefly examining Deleuze's philosophy on difference and repetition in itself, then in relation to our bodies of water, and finally alongside Irigaray's insistence on sexual difference, we are able to gain a
163 better understanding of how the repetition of difference not only accommodates but in fact necessitates the safeguarding of a never fully knowable difference.
In the first place it is worth noting that Deleuze's theory of difference and repetition is heavily indebted to his reading of Nietzsche's eternal return (see Deleuze,
1994 and 2002). According to Deleuze, the eternal return is a question of selection among differences. The eternal return is a dissolution of identity and representation and instead is the affirmation of difference. Freed from representational logic, the only thing that can truly return is the will to power, or the force of differentiation. Hence Deleuze develops his philosophy of difference and repetition from his reading of Nietzsche's eternal return.
As Deleuze teaches us, our common understanding of repetition leads us to conceptualize repetition primarily in terms of the identical. Or: What repeats is the "same," only at a different time, perhaps in a different place. What such an understanding of "bare repetition" conceals is the way in which, through distribution and this very temporal displacement, difference is all that could ever truly repeat. Repetition produces a spatial and temporal force of differing-from-itself (e.g. Deleuze 1994: 220), whereby differenciation—that is, an internal, intensive force of differing—can emerge.79 This leads directly into Deleuze's challenge of our commonplace understanding of difference, which we normally posit in terms of an original that would provide the basis for what is
(oppositionally, analogically, comparatively) different (1994: xiv; 28-29). As such, difference is only ever thought secondarily and negatively as a "not-this." Deleuze rather challenges us to think difference in itself by ungrounding the notion of the privileged
164 model that would mediate difference. Through repetition, difference is selected and distributed, again, always differing from itself. Accordingly, there is nothing that unifies
"the different" except its repetition or force of becoming or capacity to produce (28,41).
For Deleuze, then, the eternal return is necessarily the eternal return of the different (41-
42; 241-244).
In Deleuze's terms, the hydrological cycle we described as multiple in terms of its strata (the maternal amniotic waters, the waters within the gestating body, the waters that intercorporeally sustain the body, the waters that extracorporeally nourish the body, etc) might be understood better as a "system of simulacra." Deleuze describes such systems as constituent of series that communicate through their differences, and display linkages and internal resonances; "None is either opposed or analogous to another. Each is constituted by differences, and communicates with the others through differences of differences"
(1994: 278). Among these various series, because there is no original that enjoys a privilege over others (278), origin remains an open question, as "the sole origin is difference" (125). In terms of water, then, these moments or expressions of water (what gestates us, what sustains us, what surrounds and connects us) all coexist. The fluidity of water holds the was, is, and yet-to-come together in its materiality. This means we can understand water as not only engendering difference (as the "was"), but also as its expression (the "is") and its potential (the "yet-to-come").
But importantly, because a differentiating movement is always at work, water, in its "eternal return" is never the self-same. Rather it takes up singular expressions—
165 evaporation, condensation, precipitation, transpiration; the water I drink, the water that carries nutrients to my foetal body, the water that cushions my body as I bump into a chair, the water that protects the body within my body (which in itself is its own singular body of water); the water we excrete and expel, and which returns, always differing, becoming different, to other strata—ebbing, dripping, raining, flushing. As mentioned, our planet produces no water in addition to that which was always already here, yet it is not in spite of, but rather because of water's closed system that the difference of water continues to generate itself, to differenc/tiate itself. At the same time, however, it is only the actuality of water that is a "closed system." Because of water's latent virtual dimension, the potentiality of water's expressions can never be fully known; Because water is always becoming (drawing on its latent virtual potential), it is always seeking out differenc/tiation. In this sense, water is also always an "open system" as well.80 And let there be no mistake about this differentiation: While scientific procedures can tell us the most intimate specificities of any sample of water, we don't require recourse to laboratories to tell us how my womb is different, how your tears are different, how the
Pacific ocean, the mud on my shoes, the drops of fog that are collected by nets in the mountains of Chile to quench the thirst of bodies on her arid coastal plains, how all this water is different. Even, or particularly, as it repeats.
166 V. Sexual Difference, Sexual Reproduction and the Gestational
Despite their different readings of Nietzsche's eternal return, both Deleuze's and
Irigaray's accounts of difference and repetition map onto these descriptions of the difference and repetition of water in such a way as to move further toward the explication of the onto-logic of amniotics. Both readings resonate in their rejection of representational logic, and in their insistence on the creative force of repetition to produce something different—something yet to come and never fully knowable in advance. Yet, what Irigaray explicitly draws our attention to, both in Marine Lover and her oeuvre more broadly, and what Deleuze's theory at first glance seems to leave out, is the place of sexual difference. I propose that Irigaray can be read as highlighting sexual difference in relation to our bodies of water within the movement of difference and repetition in three ways, each leading progressively deeper into understanding the onto-logic of amniotics I seek to illuminate in this chapter. As we will see, however, this deepening relies not only on Irigaray's contribution, but also on its reading alongside the thought of key interlocutors.
In the first place, as mentioned above, just because all water is repetition, this does not mean that water is undifferentiated, and sexual difference is one way in which the differentiation is manifest. For example, while watery ejaculate is both feminine and masculine, this ejaculate is not the "same," neither in semiotic nor discursive terms, nor in physiological terms. Lingis's descriptions of the fluid economies of the Sambia, for example, highlight the semiotic differences in masculine and feminine fluids and astutely
167 lead us through the ways in which such semiotic differences significantly affect the material lives of the Sambia. Lingis argues, for instance, that while for contemporary
Westerners body fluids flow "quite outside of, and beneath, our political economy," for the Sambia, vital fluids fundamentally constitute social relations: male-fluid transactions distinguish kin from non-kin, and male fluid is not individual but drawn from a collective male-fluid pool, transacted between men. Women's breast milk is also derived from this male-fluid, and her menstrual blood is a threatening sign of superabundance (Lingis
1994: 140-143). Irigaray, too, notes the differing material-semiotic meaning of masculine and feminine waters in her differing descriptions thereof in Marine Lover, but unlike
Lingis, she posits that these fluid semiotics are very much a part of our Western social and political economies. Whereas feminine waters tend to flow and connect, masculine waters tend to freeze, harden and evaporate. These qualities and processes, she argues, certainly link the sedimentation of phallogocentrism and the necessary disavowal of the feminine discussed at the beginning of the previous section. While on the one hand
Irigaray's descriptions do lend themselves to metaphoric interpretations, they are certainly grounded in material reality: As Irigaray describes, women's genital mucous remains fluid in its continuous passage between her two lips; On the other hand, men's semen, if not passed on to another living body, becomes sticky until hard. Alison Stone picks up on these differences between masculine and feminine fluidity in Irigaray's work, and argues that while both the feminine and the masculine are comprised of fluid, for
Irigaray the key is that these fluids take up distinct rhythms in each (Stone 63-64). In
168 other words, although the feminine and the masculine are both of/in water, their water moves and thus means differently.81 Deleuze's concept of the intensive, and the ontological significance of intensive morphogenetic processes I described in the previous chapter, gives us further insight into the significance of this difference. As Deleuze teaches us, bodies are defined by their speeds and slownesses, their capacity to affect and be affected, rather than by their brute matter (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 257, 260).82
Accordingly, the intensive is an ontological quality; what something "is" depends on its capacity to affect and be affected, on its movements and processes, and rhythms, of becoming. Thus the differing rhythms of masculine and feminine fluidity can be read not as a mere adverbial difference that are irrelevant to their fundamental being; conversely, a difference in rhythms can indicate an ontological difference. The intensive, as a morphogenetic process of transformation, can make the "same" matter mean differently through a change in rhythm—whereby, of course, the matter does not really remain the same at all. Irigaray's descriptions of our bodies of water draw attention to the ways in which the interplay of difference between feminine intensive fluidity and masculine intensive fluidity results in distinct patterns of difference and repetition which in turn lead to the forgetting and the elision of the feminine. In order to address this, the specificity of feminine and masculine bodies of water and their differing rhythms (i.e., the different rhythms according to which their wateriness is expressed) she argues, must be acknowledged.
169 One of the specific rhythms and movements of feminine fluidity that Irigaray highlights is her cyclical menstruation and gestational capacity. This leads us to the second important way in which Irigaray connects our bodies of water to sexual difference, which is the specific maternal gestational waters of the feminine. While all water is gestational in the sense that it is facilitative (that is, every instance of water enables an-other, a different one, because of these material cycles of difference and repetition), feminine maternal waters are gestational in a very specific sense. As humans we not only require water to become at all, but we require one specific singularization, one specific moment of water for this: we require a watery gestational medium of the feminine-maternal that is not possible without sexual difference. Despite all of our new reproductive technologies, our life still requires a certain feminine water, a certain gestational medium, to elaborate itself.83 Only because of sexual difference can our hydrological cycles of difference and repetition continue. So not only does Irigaray remind us of the material-semiotic difference of masculine and feminine fluidity, but she also crucially highlights that one specific singular instance of feminine fluidity—the maternal-gestational—as a necessary moment without which the interconnected cycles of difference and repetition would cease to be.
But a small pause is called for here, before moving on to the third way of considering sexual difference in relation to difference and repetition. Interestingly, both
Stone (2003) and Braidotti (2002, 2003, 2006b) have argued that a distinct split can be detected in Irigaray's oeuvre between her earlier and later bodies of work. One of the
170 deficiencies, argues Braidotti, in Irigaray's more recent work is its distinct heterosexism and deepened reification of a binary, dualistic sexuality. Not only does this entrenchment provide no careful consideration of bodies that do not align simply with either of the
sexual poles that Irigaray presents, but Irigaray's position also treads upon dubious ground in concomitantly arguing for the primacy of sexual difference amongst other expressions of difference. While defending the coherence of Irigaray's philosophy, Stone posits that Irigaray's conception of sexual duality in her later work is based on a concept of nature as intrinsically rhythmically dualistic, and as such, nature demands that humans fulfil their calling in cultivating and deepening their ontological sexual difference. The validity of Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference, notes Stone, thus depends on one's willingness to accept Irigaray's (admittedly and explicitly non-scientific, according to
Stone) philosophy of nature. Given these important criticisms, how are we to understand the first two ways in which sexual difference might play out in relation to the difference and repetition of our bodies of water, which I have outlined above? In highlighting how the feminine differs from the masculine fluid, and how one actualization of the feminine fluid holds a certain primacy, do not these two proposals also enact a gesture towards an entrenchment of sexual difference as binaristic, materially reified and comparative? Even though, according to Irigaray, both feminine and even masculine waters hold a virtuality in respect to their own position (that is, feminine waters may be virtual, just as masculine waters can hold a dimension of the "yet-to-come"), the virtuality of sexual difference itself would appear to have no place at all. Put simply, sexual difference itself in respect
171 to the relation between the sexes, seems an actualized, sedimented relation through-and-
through. Hence, while I maintain that the first two suggestions of how sexual difference proliferates and repeats through our bodies of water are illuminating and productive,
these two proposals come up against a critical limit and as such cannot alone ground the
onto-logic of amniotics. This onto-logic, as I suggested at the outset of this chapter,
demands not only the difference and gestationality of bodies of water, but their necessary
interpermeation as well, and each of these aspects must open to becomings that can never be fully known in advance. So we need instead to find a way to think about the sexual
difference of our bodies of water beyond the dichotomous chasm that Irigaray's
descriptions seem to suggest.84 But I propose that the germ of such a way of thinking can nonetheless be found in Irigaray's rhizo-phenomenological descriptions, even if some of her own pronouncements on sexual difference (particularly in her later work) seem to
contravene this notion. In other words, despite the validity of Stone and Braidotti's
criticisms here, I do not believe they should overshadow the incredibly fecund insights
into sexual difference that a careful and nuanced reading of Irigaray's more rhizo- phenomenological descriptions of our bodies of water can offer (and I will return below
to comment on how Irigaray's shift in rhetorical style and stance may have contributed to
this conceptual vulnerability in her later works). To tease out these insights Irigaray
offers us, let us return to her evocations of the gestational body of water, but read them
again alongside Deleuze, and this time, Merleau-Ponty as well. Here, the third way of understanding sexual difference in relation to our bodies of water will be able to emerge.
172 As we just noted above, the feminine-maternal is required for the gestation of difference for the simple reason that as humans, we reproduce sexually. Our first
experiences of gestation are within the feminine-maternal womb, as Irigaray repeatedly describes. Sexual reproduction, it would therefore seem, is the repetition that engenders difference. Alphonso Lingis, in his exploration of our elemental bodies notes this crucial point as well, writing that sexual reproduction "is not the reinstatement of the same, but the repetition that engenders the different." He continues,
[T]he reproductive libido is engendered by earth's need to produce that gratuity and superabundance which individuals are, and to produce unending mutations of vegetative life so that something would survive 'were the earth to be frozen to a block of ice, or burned by the sun to a desert of stone.'(1994: 201)85
Most tellingly, sexual reproduction for Lingis is a force of production, a source of unending mutations and of superabundant difference. But this sexual reproduction does not seem to rely on sexual duality as the necessary engine. This "sexual reproduction" is not synonymous with the "sexual reproduction" that we learn about in biology class, i.e., the formation of a new individual via the union of a male gamete and a female gamete. In
Lingis's description here, there is nothing that insists that "sexual" necessarily means
"male or female dimorphic bodies" or that "reproduction" necessarily means biological reproduction. Sexual reproduction is rather described by Lingis as an elemental force, and as such, prior to or in excess of sexually dimorphic human bodies. Lingis's work has been criticized for positing a male body as the norm for sexual bodies (despite his productive efforts to theorize sexuality as force), and thus this passage could be read as
173 yet another forgetting of the kind that Irigaray criticizes in Nietzsche. However, I suggest that in linking sexual reproduction to an elemental force of superabundant production,
Lingis does not betray an omission or elision but rather an opening to a deeper understanding of sexual reproduction and gestationality. What if sexual reproduction were more inclusively thought of as the meeting of at least two bodies of difference in order to proliferate further life? What if gestationality were more inclusively thought of as the giving over of one's own materiality for this proliferation of further life, different to one's own?87 As noted in a footnote to the above passage, Lingis learns about this aspect of sexual reproduction from Deleuze. Hence, I want to propose that although at the beginning of this chapter we noted that Irigaray's philosophy offers an attention to the materiality of sexual difference that seems to be absent in Deleuze, the (albeit negligible) attention that Deleuze does pay to the issue of sexual difference and sexual reproduction in particular turns out to be very productive in teasing out the deeper understanding of gestationality and sexual difference we are seeking. Let us then turn now again to
Deleuze to examine more closely his lesson to Lingis.
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze provides more extended clues to the way that sexual reproduction—that is, sexual difference as the differentiating force of repetition—is not necessarily a question of sexual duality or dimorphism. As Deleuze notes, sexual differentiation turns around individual difference, and not vice-versa (1994:
249). Sexed reproduction, for Deleuze, is linked to his conception of embryology.
According to Deleuze's explication, the embryonic egg or larva is not a less-
174 differentiated blob that becomes increasingly more differentiated as it progresses, but rather the egg is the virtual subject; the egg holds all the potential only a fraction of which will ever be actualized in the subject: "Every embryo is a chimera, capable or functioning as a sketch and of living that which is unliveable for the adult of every species" (250) and "there are systematic vital movements, torsions and drifts, that only the embryo can sustain" (118). In other words, the virtual precedes the actual, and the virtual is always in excess of the actual, despite being materially tied to it. Sexual reproduction is an actualization of the virtual potential held by egg. Because the egg is already part of the interpermeating cycles of difference and repetition, this egg is already sexually differentiated. But—and this is the key point—as egg, sexual difference is at the threshold of the virtual. This is not the same as saying (as Irigaray claims) that the feminine is virtual, as is the masculine. To think sexual difference itself 'as virtual does not tie us to sexual duality and dimorphism, but nor (crucially) does it efface sexual difference altogether. Sexual difference is rather in excess of this actualized dimorphism required for sexual reproduction. We do not (and should not, as Braidotti reminds us) do away with sexual difference, but we should be wary of pinning down too precisely what it is, what potential it holds, what it means.
Moreover, despite Braidotti's criticisms of Irigaray's later work, and despite
Stone's suggestion that the difference in rhythm between masculine and feminine fluidity does indeed support a dualistic view of sex connected to a dualistic view of nature, I propose that Irigaray's attention to difference in rhythm in fact gestures towards the
175 virtuality of sexual difference, rather than its reified dualism. Rhythm is undoubtedly intimately tied to the materiality of bodies, but rhythm also offers a powerful way of understanding bodily materiality beyond criticisms of biological essentialism. As Deleuze and Guattari teach us, rhythm is always in-between, a differenc/tiator of milieus, and as
such every beginning is always marked by rhythm (1987: 313, 329). Rhythm is one way of referring to the intensive, i.e., that which choreographs bodies and enacts difference, as we already noted above. Rhythm itself (and not a specific meter or cadence) can be read in this sense as gestational. If the marker of sexual difference, as Stone suggests, is rhythm, then perhaps the dualism of Irigaray is not so reified after all. What if the feminine rhythms and masculine rhythms that Irigaray describes are not so much what categorically separates the sexes, but rather suggest an interrelation that is not fixed?
Deleuze's understanding of rhythm as an intensive, morphogenetic force suggests that the terms it holds in relation (here, the masculine and the feminine) can be affected by this force. They are not stable, for the in-between is no simple copula. The in-between is not subservient to the terms on either side, but rather, the terms are identifiable as such because of the force and rhythm of the in-between. Irigaray, in fact, makes a similar argument for the force of the fluid as refusing to be simply appropriated by the terms between which it flows (1985b: 109).88 Can we imagine, then, that the rhythms of difference that Irigaray describes might necessarily open to new choreographies, unimagined rearrangements, between two or more expressions of sexual difference?
Although sexual difference is currently actualized according to a dominantly dimorphic
176 system, understanding the dimorphism as a result of sexual difference's rhythms, rather than as sexual difference itself, means that there is still hope for sexual difference that is not tied to a reified binaristic truth.
To think sexual difference itself as virtual also opens us up to a deeper consideration of the gestational. The gestational depends then on sexual difference, but a difference of rhythms, offerees, of ways of being, that may or may not align with sexual dimorphism. Hence, although Irigaray's later work does indeed seem to argue for the primacy of this duality, her descriptions of the watery gestational in Marine Lover nonetheless invites us to consider sexual difference itself as virtual, and therefore gestationality as more than reproduction by sexually dimorphic bodies. We recall, for example, her descriptions of the watery flow between the sexes and her insistence on the necessity of co-creation in repetition and difference. The flow between two is necessary, according to Irigaray, to safeguard difference. This is not only the flow within woman herself, but the flow between others of (sexual) difference: "Where have you drawn what flows out of you?" she asks (1991: 38). In fact, while Deleuze's description of the larval subject provides the opening to rethinking sexual difference and gestation as virtual, it is
Irigaray who insists most adamantly that gestationality is a co-creation between at least two. Gestationality is the rhythm in-between, whether that in-between be intra- or intercorporeal. Deleuze, after all, bases his theory on the image of a rather lonely and singular egg. Lorraine (1999), too, has noted this nuanced difference: while "Deleuze's images of a line of flight and the highly populated desert are oddly solipsistic," she
177 argues, Irigaray on the other hand, insists on incorporating "the participatory communion of mutually constitutive creativity"; Irigaray's version envisages a becoming dependent on the encounter of at least two, in which not only one's own subject is transformed, but one "also attends to how her line of flight implicates and forms a web with the lines of flight of others" in an act of co-gestation (163-164). As Lorraine notes, "it may be that
Deleuze takes such mutual implication of lines of flight for granted" (164), and indeed, his broader cosmology of interpermeating radical materialism certainly supports this view. But Irigaray's careful attention to what both facilitates and thwarts the flows between two not only makes this mutual imbrication clear, but foregrounds gestationality in-between two or more as an ineluctable condition of the proliferation of difference.
Thus, while both Deleuze and Irigaray contribute significantly to developing a deeper understanding of sexual difference and gestation, only by reading them alongside one another can we appreciate the full extent of these refigurations. Significantly, we might even say that the notion of gestation—as requiring the participation of at least two sexually different others, whose sexual difference is virtual rather than dualistic—is similarly gestated between Irigaray and Deleuze, rather than emerging as the virgin birth of one or the other.
But if gestation requires not two but at least two, then a third can always be added. Hence on the point of the in-between, a reading of Irigaray's work alongside
Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the flesh deepens the notion of gestationality even further.
While Irigaray has indeed criticized Merleau-Ponty's notion of the flesh as presuming a
178 symmetrical reversibility that would subsume the relation of two under the logic of the one, a careful reading of Merleau-Ponty shows that this is not the case. For Merleau-
Ponty the "flesh" is indeed a virtuality in the way we have just described above in relation to Deleuze's egg: the flesh is a "possibility, a latency" (1968: 133) that holds the yet-to-come difference latent within itself (1968: 136). And moreover, despite Irigaray's criticisms, Merleau-Ponty is very clear that although the self holds difference within its embodiment (as Merleau-Ponty describes, "there is already a kind of presence of other people within me" [1982-83: 56]), the intertwining of self and other that takes place through the medium of the flesh does not result in a reassembled synthesis (1968: 155); the intertwining never reaches coincidence (1968: 147). In other words, the difference remains never fully knowable, unable to be assimilated or dissolved into the self.
Moreover, Merleau-Ponty takes pains to point out that this intertwining can only be facilitated by a co-intertwining. The proliferation of difference thus can only occur because of the flesh that requires more than oneself. Significantly then, for Merleau-
Ponty the difference that the flesh holds latent requires "at least two" as Irigaray would say. This difference cannot simply present itself, but requires the intertwining of others to call it out (and thus for Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray, as for Deleuze, internal differenciation must always be differenc/ritation). As Vicky Kirby (2006) has recently argued, Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the flesh is in fact an exceptionally fecund theory of gestationality. She astutely reads Merleau-Ponty's theorization of the flesh's ability to disperse itself as "maternity," but as a maternity that depends on the difference of others
179 (the "twins of my flesh") that exist at both a proximity (in their interpermeation through the flesh) and a distance (in their maintenance of their otherness) (Kirby 2006: 135). For
Kirby, this is why Merleau-Ponty's theory of the flesh is in fact richer than Irigaray's conception of maternity, for Irigaray's defence of the maternal appears to Kirby as a
"pure virgin birth." Kirby explains: "Irigaray's understanding of maternity is that it gives but is not itself given because it is the given: it is not parented or constituted by anything other than itself (140). Here, Kirby reads in Irigaray a feminine that has no need for a masculine, that has no need for the reversible co-gestationality that Kirby finds in
Merleau-Ponty.
I certainly agree with Kirby that Merleau-Ponty, like Deleuze, can help us deepen an understanding of gestationality. Merleau-Ponty's theory is particularly rich in his focus on the necessity of interpermeation and intertwining through a common medium
(the flesh) in order to continually proliferate. However, as I have already suggested above, Irigaray's position on maternity is not quite as immaculate as Kirby would have it.
I do not dispute Kirby's readings of Irigaray's specific critique of Merleau-Ponty, but I suggest that this critique needs to be nuanced by Irigaray's descriptions of gestationality as an on-going process between two, and as one that cannot be reduced to reproduction.
As noted at the end of section III above, Irigaray does gesture at various points throughout her oeuvre towards gestation as continuing beyond the moment of sexual reproduction. She writes, for example, "The sexes regenerate one another aside from any question of [biological] reproduction" (1993b: 15). In other words, despite her focus on
180 maternal gestationality, Irigaray does acknowledge the reciprocity of gestation between the sexes; they regenerate one another. Secondly and more significantly, as we already noted above, we need to pay attention to how Irigaray's descriptions of our bodies of water in Marine Lover also suggest a more complex reading of gestationality. Here, these bodies owe any fecundity and becoming to a flow between two; these bodies depend upon and are connected to a maternal-gestational sea, but one whose own origins are obscure, whose depths have never been plumbed. The moment of maternal gestation in
Marine Lover does not in fact assert an originary primacy over all the others, but rather is embedded in interpermeating cycles of differentiation, where any origin already belongs to repetition. As these descriptions lead us to ask: Even if we establish an individual origin within one specific womb, what is the origin of that watery womb? And the water that nourished and protected and cleansed that origin in turn? Again, in Marine Lover the only origin is difference, hence "Where does difference begin?" (1991: 67) is necessarily a question, not an assertion.89 This connects directly to my proposal that Irigaray's most insightful offerings on sexual difference emerge in a rhetorical strategy of questioning, as such questions are likely the most faithful description of sexual difference in actuality/virtuality. I will return to Irigaray's strategy of questioning below.
Moreover, despite Merleau-Ponty's invocation of a flesh that is indeed
"elemental" (1968: 139-140) and "concrete" (147), and despite even his exceptionally
"fleshy" terminology, the maternity and gestationality he proffers seem strangely disembodied philosophical concepts. And unsurprisingly, it follows that Kirby's reading
181 approaches the notion of "maternity" in Merleau-Ponty as highly metaphorical, such as in her reading of perception as conception (Kirby 2006: 134). But in Marine Lover Irigaray brings us back to our sexually different bodies, and back to our bodies of/in water as materially embedded knots of virtuality and actuality. While Merleau-Ponty's flesh is concrete but "not matter" (1968: 146-147), Irigaray reminds us, in her descriptions of our bodies of water, that this element is not outside of life, but carried and choreographed by it, composed of it, at every instance. Water, and the difference that water gestates, always matters. For example, her descriptions of the watery gestational sea reveal a distinctly
fleshy and material gestational element, despite the fact that this "origin" is at the same time always obscured and never fully knowable. As Irigaray notes, "Before coming into the light, life is already living. It is germinating long before it responds to your sun's rays" (1991: 61). Life is already always happening in water; what conditions us is itself always already shot through by life. Here Irigaray insists on a gestational medium that is never unimplicated in/by life. This is a doubly articulated "life force," for not only does it
"force" (gestate or engender) "life," but it is also a "force" that is teeming with "life."
This seeming "preontological" is one that endures, one that always, necessarily inhabits us: if we can talk about a primordial gestational element at all, it is one that we (literally) in-corp-orate, one of which we always carry traces, continue to be sustained by. The obscurity of our gestational chiasm, for Irigaray, is woven into our very material bodies of water. Furthermore, Irigaray's insistence here on the materiality of the gestational that we carry with us, that is always teeming with life before "responding to your sun's rays,"
182 helps clarify my claim that the virtual and actual are always intimately, and materially, bound up in one another. The virtual is not a limitless "anything-goes" but a latency inseparable from a material actuality. Irigaray's descriptions of our bodies of water thus capture their undeniable materiality and embeddedness in relations of interpermeation, differentiation and gestation in a way that Merleau-Ponty's ontology only theoretically posits, despite his rich and evocative descriptions of other aspects of our lived experience. Although some of her theoretical writings may lead us to alternate conclusions, I would like to argue that Irigaray's rhizo-phenomenological descriptions of the body cannot keep the force of that body's materiality and virtuality at bay. When she writes most directly through the body of water, the dualisms and disconnects that may pepper her more theoretical writings seem literally to dissipate, blurred by the fluidity that escapes such categorical capture. And, as noted in the introduction to this chapter,
Irigaray's style of description through the positing of questions (rather than making pronouncements) moreover rejects this capture. Irigaray's turn away from such ambiguous description and embrace of a more philosophically traditional style of pronouncement in some of her later works certainly fuel the criticisms by commentators such as Braidotti and Stone that I note above, which question the seeming reification of a dualistic sexual binary in some of Irigaray's texts. My proposal here, however, is that in returning to the body itself and describing it, Irigaray is able to offer her most fecund theoretical position.
183 So in the end, gestationality emerges here as certainly connected to sexual difference, but because this difference enfolds virtuality into its materiality, it holds no guarantees for what, where, how, or when this difference might become. Sexual difference remains an open question. As a close reading of Irigaray reveals, although thinking through the maternal-feminine is necessary in our current social, cultural and political epoch, her theory nonetheless leaves room for a deeper and less determinate understanding of gestationality, as revealed in our bodies of water and their gestational cycles of difference and repetition. While Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty certainly help us articulate and deepen the onto-logic suggested by Irigaray's descriptions, Irigaray keeps this onto-logic most intimately attached to our material bodies of water, and the lessons they can teach us (sometimes in spite of our cognitive, theoretical or rational commitments). Through Irigaray's descriptions of our sexually different bodies of water, and through the theoretical amplifications that both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty can lend to those descriptions, then, we are finally in a position to more fully articulate the onto- logic of amniotics that our bodies of water suggest.
VI. The Onto-Logic of Amniotics
An amnion is the innermost membrane that encloses the embryo of a mammal, bird or reptile (animals otherwise known as amniotes), and it contains the amniotic fluid that surrounds the gestating fetuses of these amniotes. In other words, the amnion facilitates the watery world necessary for the gestation of all life for those creatures who
184 have left that water in favour of a terrestrial habitat (even if, in the case of some of these beings, like whales, they have since returned to the sea - a journey which I will examine
more closely in the fourth chapter). The amnion literally establishes the watery
environment, the fluid gestational habitat, necessary for the proliferation of life. It also
establishes a separation between one body and its gestating other, but this is not a
definitive separation; the amnion is a membrane that facilitates and in fact demands the
interpermeation and passage of life-proliferating matter and force. This understanding of
the amnion and its purpose, location and relations, when placed in the context of
Irigaray's descriptions of our bodies of water, hence suggests an onto-logic of
"amniotics." As we have already noted, this onto-logic proposes that the watery element
be understood in three inalienable ways: first, as facilitative, gestational and
differentiating, second, as also the material accomplishment of this differentiation, and
third, as interconnecting and interpermeating, all at the same time. Amniotics asserts a
relation to water that is at once of, in, and between, while at the same time requiring a
force of becoming. Let me describe this ontological proposition in more detail.
Western metaphysics' longstanding disavowal of its debt to what allows being to be in the first place (the maternal, the feminine, the other, the natural) is no longer a
secret; revealing this is certainly a large part of Irigaray's project in Marine Lover and
other texts. As a result of this disavowal, feminists and other philosophers in the margins
of canonized Western metaphysics have proposed various reconceptualizations of
ontology to account for this disappearing act. This accounting has sometimes meant
185 circumscribing "the ontological" as specifically phallogocentric (or otherwise hegemonic), and bringing to light what lies outside of such limited/ing ways of being.
Indeed, this move seems to be at work in Irigaray's texts where she notes that woman is yet-to-come, since she has never yet been allowed "to be" on her own terms. But another competing tendency emerges in Irigaray's work, whereby rather than limiting what can be gathered by "the ontological," the category is instead exploded. This is how I read her descriptions of water and their suggestion of the onto-logic of amniotics. Here in Irigaray, the ontological is no longer circumscribed to highlight its own hegemonic limits, but is rather pushed back several steps to cast a much wider net—a net that, like all nets, is porous.
Water, as simultaneously that which gestates beings, that which is gestated as difference, and that which interpermeates and connects beings, seems to be able to teach us something about such an exploded understanding of the ontological. The first key aspect of differentiating amniotics suggests that water, in all of its repetitions—and in
fact because of its force that insists it repeat—is facilitative, gestational. Each moment of water will inevitably give itself over to the elaboration of something different, something new. This movement of difference and repetition could be understood as a sort of
"amniotics," then, because of its gestational and facilitative capacity (we all begin as
"bodies in water"). This illuminates the first important step towards an explosion of the ontological as it moves to include not only the "what is" but the condition of possibility
186 of that becoming being in the first place. Thinking about our bodies of water asks that the
ontological be broadened to encompass the gestational as well.
On this understanding, this gestational element may seem primordial because it
precedes that to which it gives life. But—and this point is crucial—the gestational
element is woven into the very fabric of the life that is gestated. This brings us to the
second pivotal aspect of the onto-logic of our bodies of water: As bodies of water, we
carry our gestational element with us, always, beyond the gestational habitat, and return it
there in a series of differentiating maneuvers. While we are "of water, in the gestational
sense (i.e., we emerge from it), we are also always "of water, in the material,
constitutive sense (i.e., we are comprised of it). Water can thus illuminate a way of being
that is, on the one hand, derived from the disavowed gestational element that allows it
even to be in the first place, but on the other, requires that the gestational medium persevere and be plugged into these same material beings. Moreover, because we
continue to carry this gestational element with us, so too do we continue to carry this
gestational capacity: gestation continues and perseveres, beyond any notion of "origin."
Irigaray illuminates this, for example, in her description of life as "already happening" in
the gestational element, as noted above. There is no "first origin"; rather, the potentiality
of life is already there in the gestational, and the gestational perseveres in the gestated.
At the same time, according to these particular amniotics, what is ontological is
always becoming different. Every repetition enacts a differenc/tiation. Because the larva
gestates in a watery element, it can undergo torsions and movements, it can express a
187 virtuality, as Deleuze says, that only the embryonic or larval subject could withstand.
This virtuality is then actualized as necessarily different: there is no pre-programming, but rather a selection of difference from the virtual. As a result the gestated are not reproductions or eternal returns of the self-same, but always necessarily different because of their specific material manifestations. So, while it is from water that we emerge, more importantly, it is because of this watery gestation that we can emerge as different. And this differentiating moment further differentiates and repeats throughout becoming bodies of water.
Moreover, the onto-logic of amniotics highlights how sexual difference cannot be quietly excused from our attempts to learn something about the ontological from our bodies of water. As Irigaray herself has noted, sexual difference is "the most radical difference and the one most necessary to the life and culture of the human species" (1992:
3, my emphasis). Yet, what of other-than-human, more-than-human, even yet-to-be- human life? Understanding the onto-logic suggested by our bodies of water does not undermine the key importance of sexual difference in the proliferation of our human life, but it does allow us to imagine other possibilities as well. This onto-logic, in its deepening of our understanding of the gestational, enables us to plug Irigaray's thought into a plane of life that begins before and extends beyond the human. It can suggest to us an examination of both our "was"—our evolutionary beginnings, watery and fishy, as well as our "yet to come"—our futures that hold no guarantee for any stable sexual dimorphism. This will require rethinking sexual difference apart from sexual dimorphism
188 or duality, as we have begun to do above, and also a further exploration of how the gestational, if expanded beyond the human species that is the focus of Irigaray's attention, refuses a synonymous or entirely overlapping relation to the feminine-maternal.
Again, this is suggested in Irigaray's references to a gestational element that continues to be carried, as water, within the differentiated-gestated, and the on-going process of gestation that is required for maintaining the fecundity of sexual difference.
Gestationality in these ways expresses a clearly virtual dimension; it cannot be reduced to the actuality of biological sexual reproduction, anymore than sexual difference could be reduced to sexual duality or dimorphism. The ways in which water as gestational inaugurates us into relations beyond the limits of human sexual difference, and the significance of these relations, will be taken up in the next chapters more explicitly.
The third aspect of the onto-logic of amniotics is the interpermeation and connectivity that are required by bodies of water for their gestation and differentiation.
Because of the repetition of water, even the singular and differentiated expressions it gestates are nonetheless connected to one another by way of their materiality. The amnion, we recall, is a permeable and regulating membrane. Water flows from one body to another in various passages of exchange and distribution. Significantly, the onto-logic of amniotics thus helps us reconcile Irigaray's criticisms of a Merleau-Pontian ontology of chiasm and flesh with the important insights of connectedness and interpermeation that his ontology offers. Not unlike the intersubjective relations Merleau-Ponty proposes in his ontology of chiasm and flesh, the material flow and exchange of water as an
189 ontological proposition does indeed connect bodies. But as amniotics, the inter- and
intracorporeal hydrological cycles that this ontological relation partakes of do not insist on a symmetrical reciprocity that might lead to the annihilation of difference, which is in part Irigaray's quarrel with Merleau-Ponty. In the amniotic relation, the membrane that
separates the gestational body from the proliferating body of repetition and difference is not a divisive barrier, but rather an interval of passage: the amnion is solid enough to
differentiate, but permeable enough to facilitate exchange. Furthermore, this
interpermeation is never symmetrically reciprocal. The water that one body gives up through gestation and facilitation of another watery being is never directly or
symmetrically returned. Such debt is only repaid through the diffuse operations of
difference and repetition. The amniotic interval thus establishes a relation of gift, debt, relinquishment and response. The very asymmetry of these relations is what accounts for the necessary difference between the two bodies, and the active proliferation of life that
accompanies their relation. As such, gestation is always part of an asymmetrical relation of gift that therefore sustains difference at the same time as it participates in material
interpermeation. Lastly, then, our bodies of water ask us to consider how the ontological
expresses a multiplicity of being that extends into and through other beings in an intricate
and intimate network of interbeing, while never collapsing this interconnectedness into an undifferentiated mass. The onto-logic of amniotics reveals a body that rejects discrete individualism, but whose difference is also safeguarded.
190 Importantly, while understanding our bodies of water according to these three aspects of amniotics certainly borrows insights from biological narratives of the amnion, my proposal here is primarily a philosophical one, even as it moves upon the pivot between these two narratives. As noted at the outset of this chapter, biologists will hardly be surprised by this suggestion that bodies are gestated in, constituted of and connected by water. Yet, as the above descriptions of bodies of/in water show, water is that which engenders our simultaneous being/becoming not only as physiological bodies, but as meaningful bodies—as (always ephemeral) subjects that compose themselves in ethical, social, and political relations too. Moreover, the water that we are both of and in is intimately connected to our ontological situation as bodies of (sexual) difference. Irigaray has already shown us this in the different singularizations that water may take up in feminine and masculine bodies, the different ways in which the potential of these fluids realizes itself (or not), and most importantly, the cultural, social and political consequences of the different meanings that these different movements or rhythms engender. But Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty both help us think further about sexual difference in itself as virtual, as always holding a latent fecundity that is called out only in our interpermeation with watery others. Hence rethinking our bodies of water as more than a physiological truism moreover opens a way for acknowledging how we might also be connected across sexual difference, as I argue Irigaray's rhizomatic phenomenology, alongside Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, subtly suggests. Reading our bodies of water through these three thinkers helps us articulate the onto-logic of amniotics, according to
191 which the interpermeation of bodies and their necessary difference is no longer a contradiction. Water both connects us, and makes us different. As water we are connected, we are different. Our difference is not undermined but in fact engendered by the water that we also always carry with us, that we relinquish, share, exchange, gift, receive.
But as an onto-logic, amniotics does not solve the question of being, or claim what being is, definitively. Amniotics can rather highlight something that helps us understand a common how, where, when and thanks to whom that certain seemingly disparate beings share. In the case of amniotics, the beings in question are bodies of water in all their diversity. While the amnion is a specific biological-physiological entity,
"amniotics" is a way of being, becoming and relating. As mentioned above, the "amnion" technically belongs to a specific group of animals, but the onto-logic suggested by this amniotic relationship reveals the commonality of watery bodies, amniote or otherwise.
These bodies include human and other-than-human animals, plant life, fungi, bacteria and protoctists, as well as elemental and geophysical bodies of water. And, as we shall see in chapter five, this onto-logic also holds for some geophysical bodies of water that have been technologized, or radically transformed through technology. In short, the onto-logic of amniotics can be applied to any material-semiotic choreography primarily composed of water, and human bodies are but one, albeit one particular and philosophically significant, example among these watery bodies. As an onto-logic, amniotics does not suggest that all of these bodies of water are the same in terms of their being, but rather
192 that bodies of water share a connected way of being because they are bodies of water. I propose that by understanding our bodies of water in their sexual difference—as gestational, differenc/tiated and interpermeating—however, can also open to further considerations, beyond sexual difference, of how we live with, are connected to and facilitated by other life. As such, this connection perdures not only in our interhuman relations, but extends and expands them into the vast network of interbeing.
In chapter three, I will turn to explore how our understanding of this onto-logic of amniotics can in fact be expanded and deepened by paying attention to other-than-human bodies of water, specifically by drawing on evolutionary stories about the proliferation of life and what they can teach us about amniotics. In this chapter, I will also further complexify how we might understand sexual reproduction and gestationality beyond the human, and certainly beyond a flawed insistence on stable and discrete sexual dimorphism of bodies. Thereafter, in the final two chapters of this dissertation, I will turn to investigate how understanding our bodies of water according to an onto-logic of amniotics can also help us think about how to cultivate an ethics of interbeing. That is, I wonder how understanding watery bodies as interpermeating, different and also gestational or proliferative of life might teach us something about how to "do" this onto- logic, or safeguard it as part of an ethical practice. I ask how deepening our understanding of human embodiment as partaking in an onto-logic of amniotics might condition new explorations of the connections between our embodiment and our engagement with our watery others in this watery world. I wonder how an onto-logic of
193 amniotics might open up the space for considering the capacity of our specifically human bodies to affect and be affected by other bodies of water, and what sort of responsibility that places before us. What, I ask, does amniotics teach us about the ethical potentiality of
our specifically human bodies of water? In chapter four I explore these questions through
a rhizo-phenomenological exploration of our connection to (and difference from) our
animal others in the experience of becoming-cetacean. This consideration of the relation between a human body of water and a whale-other leads into chapter five, where I most
explicitly ask what an ethics of interbeing is, how it is related to the onto-logic of
amniotics and what sort of modes of living we need to cultivate if we are going to sustain
such an ethics and "do" the onto-logic of amniotics.
While the question of sexual difference may not seem integral to my
investigations in chapters four and five, I want to stress that I can only begin to undertake these investigations because in this current chapter and the following one I gain
considerable insight into the question of difference, and its relation to gestationality and
interpermeation, precisely because I pose the question of sexual difference. In other words, perhaps I do agree with Irigaray that sexual difference is "the question of our time," but not because she posits some sort of priority of gender inequality over racial
inequality, or other manifestations of bodily difference. Rather, I agree because my
descriptions of watery bodies in these two chapters show up how complex the question of
sexual difference indeed is, and that grappling with this complexity can be a key to understanding the relation between bodies of difference more generally. Sexual
194 difference presents us with a difference that is materially actualized in bodies, but holds a powerful latent potentiality as well, that we cannot begin to fathom. This potentiality, or virtuality, as I have elucidated above, is enfolded not only in each expression of difference, but in the relational system of difference itself. Not only do we have no idea yet of what a woman, or a man, can do; we have no idea of what sexual difference might be, or what it might do. But we do know that the interpermeation of difference, in an amniotic relation that can nonetheless safeguard difference, can proliferate life in expressions that we could never have imagined. Thinking about sexual difference through our bodies of water insists that we think about the relation between different bodies as gestational itself. To put it otherwise, even if attention to sexually different bodies seems to fade from prominence in chapters four and five, where I move more explicitly to think about how we can live ethically as bodies of water that are both interpermeating and differentiated, I maintain that I can only move from thinking about an onto-logic of amniotics to thinking about its ethical implications because I have grappled with the question of sexual difference. Sexual difference will remain folded into my explorations of an ethics of interbeing, gestating this thought, even if it is not explicitly visible at the surface.
So while in concluding the chapter at hand I am not proposing a fully developed
"new ontology," I am wondering about what water might teach us about the ontological.
As the above explorations have shown, water does indeed have much to teach us about not only what it means to "be" a body of water, but to be with, to be in, and to become.
195 Irigaray's descriptions of our bodies of water constitute one starting point for these musings, and by drawing on both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, I am able to build on these suggestions and propose a certain onto-logic, or one means of understanding our complex and never fully knowable ways of being. This onto-logic of amniotics suggests itself as we pay attention to our bodies of water, and which will in turn ground my explorations of our interbeing with other bodies of water in the chapters that follow.
196 / am floating in Lake Nyasa, just barely below the surface. I am curled in a ball, bobbing
gently in the underwater waves as blue and yellow fish swim by. A sea snake pauses not far off, suspended and spiralling. I am holding my breath, but surely I am still breathing?
It is breath that fills me. I am cradled, it is light, and I owe this to the water and to my
breath. I am trying to hold onto this grace for as long as possible, this special form of
breath, hovering between inspiration and expiration. These are minutes that feel like
days. Is this a memory of my fishy beginnings?
There is an undeniable allure of swimming naked, and especially in the dark, when the
water is warm, just so. Anyone who has been skinny dipping recognizes that the appeal
lies not (only) in the flouting of propriety, nor (only) in some lascivious thrill, but in the
capacity, just for a while, to dissipate. Without the Berlin Wall of a bathing suit, I am no
longer an individual, individuated, discrete in space. Below the surface my body
disperses, and the outline that holds my organs in place begins to blur. My inability to judge how long I have been holding my breath betrays at the same time my body's loss of
its grip on a location in time. I am neither old nor young, although I may indeed be
ancient. Where does my perspiration go, my saliva, my ejaculate, my tears? It is as
though my body were touching everything; my body is everywhere. Past, present, future.
In these soupy waters I cannot imagine longing to be held, desiring another's touch,
197 mourning the absence of a body in a space on a bed that is already growing cold,
because in these waters, such affects seem at best speculative possibilities that my current
diffuse matter can perhaps hypothesize, but not really understand, in any deep somatic
way; to be like this—water in water—is to know only contact, connection, as a default.
I wonder if fish would feel this way on land—their perceptual tactility overwhelmingly
magnified? All that is solid melts into water.
I watch as small, almost imperceptible bubbles escape from my various orifices, and
make their way without need of a map to the surface. They know where they are going,
these stealthy reminders that I do not actually belong here, traitors to my terrestrial
affinities. This dissipated dwelling only ever a temporary "now."
And a fish out of water, I remember, just suffocates, and dies.
198 CHAPTER THREE
Fishy Beginnings: Molecular Evolutionism and the
Potentiality of Human Embodiment
"Our ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull, and undoubtedly was an hermaphrodite! Here is a pleasant genealogy for mankind. " - Charles Darwin in a letter to Thomas Huxley
"The oceans are where life was born and the salty fluid that courses through our veins is a reminder of our aqueous origins." - David Suzuki
"When the seas dried, the primitive Fish left its associated milieu to explore land, forced to 'stand on its own legs,' now carrying water on the inside, in the amniotic membranes protecting the embryo. " - Deleuze and Guattari
I. Introduction: Fishy Beginnings
We are rather fishy, we humans. We pretty much swam our way here, if not on
the outside, then at least on the inside. We are all still, necessarily, treading water. As the
above three epigraphs, by a naturalist-cum-evolutionary biologist, an environmentalist,
and a pair of philosophers, highlight, we are intimately linked to our evolutionary
beginnings through water. Our being as bodies of water has been facilitated by water,
that is, by other bodies of water that have preceded us.
In this chapter I want to examine the ways in which evolution can help us
understand what it means to be a body of water, what kinds of operations connect,
199 differentiate and proliferate bodies of water, and what these bodies of water can do. This chapter undertakes two related tasks towards these ends. First, I explore how "evolution stories" can deepen our appreciation of the onto-logic of amniotics I laid out in the previous chapter. This exploration begins below in section II with a description of the ways in which water is vital for the evolution of bodies, and focuses on the way in which different bodies have had to negotiate their relation to their (more or less) watery topographies, as some fish left the sea and took up residence on dry land. Here I also draw specifically on the McMenamins' theory of "Hypersea" as the extension of the sea onto land, but through hypermarine (rather than marine) bodily innovations and relations. The ways in which evolutionary stories are folded into Irigaray's reading of
Nietzsche, which I discussed in the previous chapter, are also relevant here, as they not only provide a bridge between these two chapters, but they also further illustrate how the transnarrativity of scientific and philosophical stories can lead to a richer understanding of our embodiment and its watery implications.
In the third section of this chapter I move on to map the theoretical terrain of what
I am calling here "molecular evolutionism"—a certain deployment of evolution stories by various contemporary critical thinkers in their own theoretical work. This deployment, I suggest, moves beyond sociobiological misconceptions of Darwinian evolution as a
"grand narrative" and instead espouses a view of evolution as a multiplicity of processes and movements; it seeks to challenge popular misunderstandings of evolutionary processes as consisting of discrete ordering and teleological "success" of further evolved
200 species, and similarly undoes the binaristic distinction of "nature" and "culture" as separable forces; and lastly, I argue, a "molecular evolutionist" approach offers a nuanced and complex view of "origins." This reconfiguration of origins leads into the fourth section of the chapter which provides a detailed recounting of the ways in which alternative evolution stories deepen our understanding of the overlapping cycles of gestation, (sexual) difference and interpermeation that our bodies of water reveal as an onto-logic of amniotics. As we will see, this deeper account invites us to consider this onto-logic as illuminating not only a way of being for human bodies, but for more-than- human bodies within the web of intercorporeality and interbeing that gathers and distributes these diverse bodies. This illumination is in part achieved through an interweaving of the philosophical deployment of evolution stories, such as found in the work of Deleuze and Grosz, with scientific descriptions of evolutionary processes, such as found in the McMenamins' account of Hypersea and Roughgarden's research on sexual difference among other-than-human animals. In the concluding section of the chapter, I reflect on the ethical potentiality of our evolutionary watery imbrications with other animals, and the logics according to which these imbrications can proliferate other life. I propose that evolution stories can teach us not only something about where we have come from, but also about the significance and potential of our watery embodiment for further cultivating an ethics of interbeing among watery bodies in our watery world.
201 II. Evolution Stories
In chapter one, I introduced the idea that we might engage a sort of transdisciplinarity or transnarrativity between scientific thought on the one hand, and philosophical or critical thought on the other. I suggested there that we might understand scientific knowledge and discourses as "stories" that can reveal to us something about ourselves and the world, just as philosophy can. Neither perspective could ever tell us everything, although one—in this case, scientific stories—might activate or illuminate something in the other—in this case, philosophical offerings. Certainly, tropes from the natural scientific world can be used productively to help develop philosophical or theoretical concepts, and arguably, this is what I am up to in my development of
"amniotics" as an ontological concept. But while such figurative applications can indeed be philosophically fecund, my specific suggestion here, in respect to "evolution stories," is that a transnarrativity of stories can be about more than trope or metaphor. In some cases, as I propose to demonstrate with evolution stories, scientific narratives can show up something about the materiality of bodies, about their materially lived experience, situation and relations, that helps us more deeply understand the philosophical significance of those same bodies. The ontological operations of bodily becoming I discuss below are not "like" evolutionary operations of becoming; rather, the latter illuminate the former in surprising and suggestive ways. Because any story only reveals a limited perspective of the world, in reading several stories overlaid upon one another
202 we can discover at their hinges a creative zone of relation where something new might emerge. With this understanding of "story" in mind, let us now turn to evolutionary stories and how they might deepen or augment my proposal of intercorporeal relations and becoming as an onto-logic of amniotics.
(a) Life on Land and Its Watery Debts
All biological life—animals, plants, and fungi, as well as protoctists (single-celled organisms including slime molds and some simple algae) and monera (the simplest forms of life such as blue-green algae and bacteria)—is dependent on the existence of water.
This is why our home planet is, from what we know so far, unique within our own solar system, and also why discoveries such as ice on Mars carry with them such monumental implications (Whitehouse 2002). Right back to the first signs of life on earth at least 3.9 billion years ago, when small organic proteins likely interacted with their habitat to produce the first bacterial life forms, water has been necessary for the gestation of all living beings. Our earliest ancestors were all apparently water babies, squirming, scuttling or swimming around their respective watery worlds.
Yet, between 380 and 360 million years ago, a "fabulous shape-shifting" occurred, in the words of evolutionary biologist Carl Zimmer. A certain lineage offish decided to evolve legs and feet, lose their gills, hook their aortas, and venture onto dry land (Zimmer 5). As Zimmer describes in his detailed account of this terrestrial invasion, countless changes had to occur in the bodies of these animals in order for such a major
203 transformation to occur; this was not an overnight phenomenon, but rather a macroevolutionary process94 that lasted over 100 million years. After musing on an underwater encounter between a snapper (a fish who never left the sea), himself (who is descended from tetrapods who left the sea perhaps 360 million years ago) and a dolphin
(whose ancestors left the sea, only to return there about 30 million years ago), Zimmer remarks, "We three animals live in separate countries divided by a fatal boundary." He is referring here to the boundary between air and water, two elements which Zimmer notes are so different "that you might as well be comparing life on two different planets" (6).
But at the same time, Zimmer also concedes that the three participants in this underwater encounter are not "complete strangers" (4). In their fundamental difference, he nonetheless catalogues their undeniable similarities: all have skulls and spines, muscles and eyes, and the embryos of each all share a strikingly similar pot-bellied, hunchbacked appearance. But their most important connection is water: not only did water facilitate the being of all three, but this facilitation is a debt from which none can escape.
The water that gave us life is also the water that we in turn carry with us, in us.
We have literally in-corp-orated this water, as Deleuze and Guattari remark in the epigraph above; the evolutionary emergence of terrestrial life depended upon this.
Folding our watery habitat inside of us as we invaded dry land was crucial if we were to survive outside of the sea. Scientists Mark and Dianna McMenamin have described the new environment enabled by this enfolding as "Hypersea," that is, the interconnected system of terrestrial life that nonetheless has extended the sea and taken it along for the
204 ride. The McMenamins elaborate the fascinating process to which Deleuze and Guattari allude: "The land biota represents not simply life from the sea, but a variation of the sea itself. Acting over evolutionary time as a rising tide, the land biota literally carries the sea and its distinctive solutes over the surface of the land, into some of the driest environments on Earth" (25). While we have already noted in previous chapters that our own human bodies are approximately three-quarters water, even life forms evolved to survive in the driest of conditions, such as desert plants, are still 50 percent water.
Moving to a new terrestrial address meant that evolving life had to invent creative means for dealing with the threat of desiccation. One of these inventions was the amniotic egg, which kept amniote embryos perpetually in water thanks to their hard, calcium-rich shells. (This liquid insurance replaced the jelly encasing that surrounded fish and amphibian eggs, necessarily laid and gestated in a watery habitat in order to survive).95
Other innovations included the various salt and water uptake mechanisms that guaranteed sufficient quantities of both substances, for while aquatic animals were constantly immersed in water and appropriate amounts of saline, terrestrial animals had to actively seek these out. Such mechanisms ranged from the infiltration of the porous oral and anal surfaces of terrestrial woodlice (Little 204), to the dew-collecting innovations of a certain
Namibian desert beetle who, when fogs are dense, scuttles to the top of a sand dune, stands with its head down and belly up, and drinks the water that condenses on and then flows down its body toward its mouth (Little 205). Yet other specific innovations involved the production of tough skin (to prevent excessive water loss), absorptive
205 intestines (to allow water in), big lungs (to replace oxygen intake through water), and tears (to keep exposed eyes moist and allow vision to become acute) (Zimmer 109). All of these adaptations, of course, involve a negotiation of our bodies specifically in relation to their watery topography. But a final innovation reveals the role of water in these watery adaptations as not only a tool for self-survival, but as a mechanism for the gestation and further proliferation of other life, too. This innovation is what the
McMenamins, as I noted above, call Hypersea. The McMenamins elaborate: on land, the life sustenance that was passively accessible in a marine environment has to be actively facilitated through increasingly complex networks dependent on symbiosis, physical connection and proximity. In Hypersea, life nests within other life on land like sets of
Russian dolls. Or, one species visits another, bequeathing to it new species who seek out new routes of fluid fecundity in a novel other-species internal habitat. Without the sea to serve as a prime communicator and facilitator, life on land needed to chart its own watercourses—most available in the watery tissues and body fluids of other life forms.
The Hypersea theory in many ways complements microbiologist Lynn Margulis's theories of endosymbiosis, which argue that the driving force of evolution is in fact symbiotic relationships between organisms of often different phyla or kingdoms.96 While
Margulis's work is gaining popularity both among scientists and philosophers interested
Q7 in ontologies of life and the interaction of difference, the Hypersea theory foregrounds the role and necessity of watery habitats and conduits in these symbiotic relations.
Science fiction writer and essayist Ursula LeGuin was right when she speculated that the
206 first tool in our evolutionary history was not a weapon, but a carrier bag. Indeed, these carrier bags were the bodies of terrestrial beings themselves, for in order for life on land to flourish, organisms had to become not only a watery gestational element for their own individual descendents, but a hospitable watery habitat in which altogether different species could dwell either permanently or temporarily. As the McMenamins remark,
"Hypersea host species [had to] actively create, rather than passively inhabit, a fluid medium" (19). Hypersea establishes "webs of physical intimacy and fluid exchange," which the McMenamins convincingly argue are not exceptional, but in fact a dominant feature of land-based life (15-19). Through these webs, life proliferates and differentiates
Zimmer presents a similar take on our bodies as the original carrier bag, when he asks,
"have we [humans] really come all that far from Acanthostega [a 3 63-million year old semi-aquatic tetrapod] in its Greenland stream? The difference is that we sometimes no longer go to the water; we bring it to us. The usual nominees for human achievement include things like words and blades. I say: plumbing" (116).
Water, the ultimate recyclable, has not only facilitated and sustained life through our evolutionary history, but is evidently deeply implicated in life's perpetual innovation and differenc/tiation. We are bodies of water in both the gestational and constitutive sense; we are both interconnected and differentiated across our evolutionary becomings because we are bodies of water, but as bodies of water we not only embody our evolutionary differenc/tiation, but actively produce and support it. Life began in the sea, some life moved onto land, and then some, again, returned to the sea. Although beings in
207 each of these three topographical relations to water all share a watery constitution, the terrestrial invasion and subsequent forsaking of solid ground also mark an important point of differenc/tiation between bodies in water. What is the philosophical meaning of these topological and topographical shifts, of the physiological reorganizations that accompanied them, and how do these processes allow us to more deeply understand the onto-logic of amniotics we worked out in the previous chapter?
The well-documented role of water in our evolutionary ontology can in fact further expand the conclusions we just reached in chapter two's examination of Luce
Irigaray's attention to watery embodiment in Marine Lover. There, my reading of Luce
Irigaray's descriptions of our bodies of water opened up to my proposal of an onto-logic of amniotics. This onto-logic, I suggested, revealed a way of being that bodies of water share, whereby they are simultaneously gestational, (sexually) diffenc/tiating, and interpermeating. We saw how, as bodies of water, we rely both on water for our continued proliferation, but that we, as bodies of water, also always carry traces of this proliferating life force within us. Water inevitably interconnects and interpermeates life, but also necessarily differentiates life's expressions in interconnecting cycles of difference and repetition. Only because we live as bodies of water are we simultaneously interconnected in our gift and debt to one another, yet also always different, specific and other. Sexual difference is the primary concern of Irigaray's text, but we also saw, through a reading of her text alongside Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, how sexual
208 difference can itself be thought as virtual, with a latent potential that does not necessarily insist on our current sexual dimorphism for its continued creative force.
Yet, while Irigaray concentrates on our debt to a sexually different watery element that is embodied in an unacknowledged feminine maternal, her work also opens up to the exploration of an evolutionary debt to our more primordial gestational waters.
In fact, a careful reading of Marine Lover reveals evolutionary musings swimming in its undercurrents as well. While Irigaray maintains a productive ambivalence around any discrete identity of her interlocutor in the text (is he Nietzsche the man? Nietzsche the philosopher? Western philosophers or even philosophy more generally? the masculine and its phallogocentric investments?), she nonetheless makes explicit reference to
Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Zarathustra's penchant for terrestrial companions, bridges, solid ground and lofty heights." One of Irigaray's aims here is to reveal Nietzsche's disavowal of the watery element, and her direct references to
Nietzsche's text elucidate this case rather convincingly. But what is this water that
Nietzsche/Zarathustra fears, forgets, denies? In her mention of her interlocutor's
"forgetfulness of [his] birth" (1991: 12), Irigaray's narrator alludes not only to his singular debt to maternal waters, but also to his amnesiac lapse regarding his evolutionary debt: He knows not "if [he is] descended from a monkey or a worm or if [he] might even be some cross between plant and ghost" (1991: 12). This connection to evolution is something that Irigaray explicitly takes from Nietzsche's text and Zarathustra's own invocation of the evolutionary ancestry to which the townspeople he addresses are
209 indebted. Irigaray notes, however, that Zarathustra's emergence from the sea as he drags his body ashore (Nietzsche 1982: 123) and his immediate disavowal of these beginnings as he pledges his allegiance and commitment to the earth (Nietzsche 1982:
125) reveal the continuity of his forgetting: just as he forgets his watery maternal gestational element, so too does he disavow his watery evolutionary gestational element.101
Granted, these invocations of an evolutionary debt are subtle in both Irigaray and
Nietzsche's respective texts. And certainly I do not aim to make any claims for either
Nietzsche or Irigaray as "evolutionists." Nietzsche in fact appears to have been no great admirer of Darwinian evolutionary theory as it was presented to him, and in fact the allusions Zarathustra makes to the evolutionary ancestry of the townspeople can be read most convincingly as a derogatory snub of their herd-like existence.102 Meanwhile,
Irigaray appears to have given little attention to evolutionary thought, apart from subtle allusions such as those found in Marine Lover. Direct reference to Darwinian thought in her work is rather uncomplimentary.103 My highlighting of these references to our evolutionary debts is thus rather an invitation to consider the potential connection between an evolutionary process of becoming, and the meaning of our bodies of/in water.
I wish to draw attention to the temporal movement of repetition, gift and debt, bound up in the materiality of the body and its potential, that animates both thinkers' work, and consider what this movement might teach us about our bodies of water, and our embodiment more generally. If, as Irigaray suggests, Nietzsche has forgotten how our
210 evolutionary beginnings implicate us as bodies of water, perhaps we, in our ongoing forays into the ontological, political and ethical import of our own embodiment, have forgotten this too. What might a remembering, an acknowledgement or an exploration of our fishy beginnings reveal to us?
(b) "Molecular Evolutionism "
As evolutionary stories themselves remind us, our evolutionary past, whether more or less distant, is what gives our current embodied situation any meaning at all. In a recent article, phenomenologist Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (2007) discusses at length the
"surprising" fact that evolutionary biology and continental philosophy have not formed much of a relationship. Without taking into account the evolutionary continuities of the embodiment which so fascinates them, she notes, phenomenologists forgo any sense of history; "They pretend as if we all just got here - bees, chimpanzees, and what have you, which is by no means the case" (334). She claims that attention to evolutionary scientific knowledge provides this history.104 Yet Sheets-Johnstone's criticism is not entirely founded. Indeed, evolutionary theory has been of interest to continental philosophy, albeit in a marginalized way, and perhaps rarely according to the phenomenological application that Sheets-Johnstone advocates. As we already noted above, Nietzsche, as arguably one of the most significant ancestors of contemporary critical theory, was certainly influenced by evolutionary thought, which infiltrated his own philosophy in some key, albeit ambiguous, ways. 5 Henri Bergson's work Creative Evolution (first
211 published in France in 1907) is an even more direct connector of continental philosophy to the biological sciences and evolutionary theories.106 These thinkers are joined no less by Merleau-Ponty,107 Deleuze and Guattari,108 and more recent theorists such as Keith
Ansell Pearson, Robert O'Toole,109 Giorgio Agamben and Manuel DeLanda,110 as well as feminist thinkers such as Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti.111 By no means am I suggesting that these thinkers present a unified view of evolution, nor that each thinker uses its insights in the same ways (nor, of course, that these are the only philosophers or critical thinkers to make forays into evolutionary science), but importantly, they share an interest in exploring how evolutionary science might enrich and deepen philosophical thinking. Evolution is thus not so much their object of study as it is a co-traveller on their philosophical journeys. All of these thinkers read evolution stories in ways that pose challenges to dominant popular and simplistic understandings of evolution as relegated to a discrete biological realm whereby species teleologically
"improve" over time, and whereby the principle of "survival of the fittest" prevails. Any loose alliance that these thinkers share in terms of thinking about evolution could perhaps best be mapped as something theoretically akin to "genetic drift":112 while we could track the descent of philosophical-evolutionary explorations through various progressions, any vertical lineages are disrupted by symbiotic transfer between heterogeneous lines of thought, mutations, and random disruptions. The differences that such thinkers reveal in their deployment of evolutionary theory, even across their commonality, should underline the fact that the evolutions stories do not speak in a
212 univocal voice, but rather signify many—even competing—"facts." Within the story of evolution, from both a scientific and a philosophical perspective, many interwoven, overlapping and conflicting stories persist, most of which are themselves continuously evolving. Put another way, "[t]he attempt to develop a general theory of evolutionary systems is entirely dependent on the kinds of problems being set up" (Ansell Pearson
1997: 182).113
The problem that I am setting up here, of course, is how understanding our evolution as bodies of water might help us understand what it means to be a human body, and how we might live as such bodies ethically with the human and other-than-human bodies with whom we share this earth. The stories of evolution that I find most helpful to my exploration of this problem, then, are those that elucidate how our watery bodily materiality is implicated in our ontological meaning and ethical potential as bodies. In gathering these stories, I began to group them loosely under the notion of what I am here calling "molecular evolutionist" stories. This term, however, requires some further clarification before I move on to discuss how the notion of molecular evolutionism helps us understand the onto-logic of amniotics in more detail.
In their discussion of the important contributions of Darwin to their own cosmology, Deleuze and Guattari invoke the term "molecular Darwinism." As they report, "molecular Darwinism" was the name given by Monod to developments in contemporary biochemistry (1987: 49). Deleuze and Guattari use this term in specific reference to the necessary substitution of "molecular populations and microbiological
213 rates" for "types" and "degrees" as points of reference for mapping evolutionary change.
Types and degrees insinuate predetermined and essential "norms" for the individuals belonging to a set group, and divergence from this norm is thus measured by degree. By invoking the idea of molecular populations, however, individual variation is revealed as the only real constant, and, rather than degrees of difference from a norm, rates of divergence become paramount. "Molecular Darwinism" hence on the one hand denotes a certain microbiological approach to evolution that desists from the hegemony of ideal types and norms. But seizing hold of the term "molecular" cannot be a mere coincidence, and Deleuze and Guattari are surely here begging consideration of the resonances with the terms "molecular" and "molar" which they elaborate more generally in A Thousand
Plateaus. As we know, Deleuze and Guattari use the "molecular" to refer to micropolitical flows, micropercepts and other mutant assemblages that thwart and disrupt molar organizations (1987: 213-222; see also chapter one of this dissertation). An intentional slippage thus inserts itself between the seemingly narrowly scientific idea of a
"molecular Darwinism" based on biochemistry, and a mutant Darwinism more generally that thwarts and disrupts conventional readings and applications of Darwinian thought, even as it must run alongside the "molar" version of Darwinism. This broader understanding of "molecular Darwinism" is surely what both O'Toole and Ansell
Pearson have in mind when they invoke the term in their work, in reference to Deleuze and Guattari's thought: O'Toole invokes the term in his call for a "dynamic molecular
Darwinianism" that is required to account for the non-linearity at work in evolutionary
214 processes (164); meanwhile, Ansell Pearson uses the term "molecular Darwinism" to characterize the work of Deleuze and Guattari more generally in "their utilization of population thinking in modern biology with its attack on typological essentialism"
(183).114Haraway, moreover, while making no explicit reference to Deleuze and
Guattari, too invokes the "molecular record" that is left by evolutionary symbiotic transfers between beings (2003: 2), and refers to their "molecular differences" (2004a:
298). She enfolds tales of molecular evolution into the explorations of her own kinships that are made up of "the florid machinic, organic, and textual entities with which we share the earth and our flesh" (2004b: 2). For Haraway, like Deleuze and Guattari, there is a productive slippage in these multiple invocations of the "molecular," such as we see in the overlap between its use as a scientific level of analysis, and as a substratum of lived experience that is stealthy, dis-organ-ized and often unfortunately overlooked in favour of molarized stories and explanations.
I would like in part to co-opt a version of this figuration of the "molecular" as a useful cross-cutting shorthand to describe how I am invoking evolutionary thought in this chapter. My use of the phrase "molecular evolutionism" has obvious and intentional resonances with the contemporary term "molecular evolution," i.e., that specific subspecies of contemporary evolutionary biology that is particularly interested in evolution at the level of DNA. However, in invoking Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical use of the "molecular," I extend this term beyond a subset of scientific knowledge to include the "molecularity" of evolutionary stories more broadly. For me,
215 "molecular evolutionism" both incorporates the materiality of the scientific concept, whereby processes of interaction and change occur at a molecular level, but also presents a subversive figuration whereby alternative stories of evolution seek to interrupt and disorganize popular hegemonic or molar tellings of these tales.
The molecular evolutionist stories that I draw on here include five key premises.
First, this position includes the work of thinkers attracted by various maverick, marginalized or unconventional stories of evolution, or simply those aspects of more conventional stories that have been lost or underemphasized in evolutionary theory's contemporary sociobiological applications. The ideas included here all in some way explicitly counter the most prevalent popular (and mistaken) view of evolution and
Darwinism over the last century as a ruthless teleological process of linear, filial descent, accompanied by the "survival of the fittest." For example, Merleau-Ponty counters this view by underlining the problematic nature of assuming that evolution always begins with the simplest and evolves to greater complexity; "We do not find either less numerous or simpler types by going back in the history of the earth" (2003: 260), he writes, and cites fish as a particularly telling example of this. Molecular evolutionist stories do not see evolution as the product of a grand design of transparent improvement, but rather focus on how evolutionary processes involve great complexity in the coming together of disparate interacting forces that cannot be known in advance. Another example can be found in rethinking "natural selection," or, as Grosz claims, in returning to a view of natural selection that is more in line with Darwin's intentions. Such a view
216 sees natural selection not as some transparent notion of fitness, but rather as a complex set of two parallel processes—one, a force of "internal dynamism within living beings," and the other, the assertion of external forces and influences (Grosz, 2004: 97-98). Both experience "random crossing" and "interference" with one another such that any sense of teleology is undermined. Or, molecular evolutionism might pay more attention to randomness, and the effect of chance, both in terms of individual variation and external force (e.g., Grosz, [2004: 92] or Deleuze and Guattari [1987: 54]), which again serves to undo the notion of evolutionary change as unfolding according to a predictable pattern.
Furthermore, the notion of symbiotic transfer, as already introduced above in terms of
Hypersea, deflects the hegemony of the descent by filiation theory that sociobiological stories of evolution espouse, and offers instead more complex theories of lateral mixing, cross-species contamination and viroid life (e.g., Deleuze and Guattari [1987: 234-235],
Ansell Pearson [1997: 187-189] and O'Toole [164], Haraway [2003: 2, 8-9]).
Secondly, molecular evolutionist stories reject the view that any evolution story can convincingly and discretely order the world into distinct species and types of beings as reified forms. Thinkers I include in this loose grouping all agree that the notion of
"species" is to some extent arbitrary. In this rejection of essentialized type, all thus contribute to a micropolitics of evolutionary antiessentialism.115 Such convictions are furthered again by endosymbiotic theories that challenge any model of evolution as strictly or necessarily genealogical. And again, when attention to natural selection focuses not on the "ideal type" that subsequently differentiates and thus "veers" from
217 some "norm," but rather acknowledges a "molecular population" where individual variation is in fact the only constant, this evolution story becomes molecular as well.
Third, while molecular evolutionist theorists may each focus on one aspect or mechanism of evolution as key, the idea of molecular evolutionism does not posit any single mechanism of evolution, any one story, as sufficient on its own as a hegemonic explanatory theory. Not all evolutionary change can be explained, for example, by either symbiotic horizontal interaction as in the case of the wasp and the orchid,116 or by natural selection as in the case of the selection for and adaptation of the amniotic egg. Similarly, even though molecular evolution "proper," as a branch of evolutionary science, focuses on evolution at the level of the genotype, this attention should not come at the cost of neglecting other stories that stress evolution at the level of phenotype. Nor can the influence of social and ecological interactions be neglected in favour of genetic heredity.
Rather than choosing sides, scientists in the emerging fields of "evo-devo" and developmental systems theory are increasingly recognizing phenotypical and genotypical study, or environmental and intrinsic factor analysis, as complementary.117 If the parallel reading of various evolutionary theories teaches us anything, it is that life evolves according to a multiplicity of processes, interconnected, certainly, but by no means uniformly sourced or directed.
The fourth point about molecular evolutionist perspectives concerns their criticism of the nature/culture dichotomy and the popular hegemonic view that evolution is strictly a biological process. Nature and culture are not the same thing, but nor can they
218 be understood in isolation from each other. Molecular evolutionism espouses that the natural and the cultural, the organic and the inorganic, the biological and the technological, are connected by complex historical continuities, to the point that any moment of discrete separation between the pairs becomes impossible. Nature and culture are not dichotomous entities, and the former is certainly not the brute or inert matter that is inscribed or made meaningful by the latter. While the various thinkers whom I have grouped together under the rubric of "molecular evolutionism" generally support this view, each finesses this point in their own way. Merleau-Ponty, drawing on the theories of Baltic German biosemiologist Jakob von Uexkull (who also serves as an inspiration for Deleuze and Guattari), clarifies this mutual imbrication by understanding the biological processes of human and other animals as always giving themselves over to culture. In nature there is always the beginning of culture for Merleau-Ponty, just as culture is nature's inseparable further elaboration.118 Grosz similarly refuses to understand culture as a mere additive to static, inert natural bodies, but expresses herself in a more contemporary language than Merleau-Ponty: "We need to understand not only how culture inscribes bodies," she writes, "but more urgently, what these bodies are such that inscription is possible, what it is in the nature of bodies, in biological evolution, that opens them up to cultural transcription, social immersion, and production, that is, to political, cultural and conceptual evolution" (2004: 2). Elsewhere, Grosz elegantly characterizes the relationship between culture and nature thus: "Culture, in all its permutations remains indebted to its particularities and must be understood as the gift of
219 nature, its increasing elaboration and complication through the efforts of life to transform itself (2004: 47). Understanding culture as a complexification, an elaboration, and a gift of nature eliminates the sense of a dichotomy or discrete separation between them.
Deleuze and Guattari, however, seem keen to push this mutual imbrication even further, ultimately proposing the idea of evolution in terms of technics (a move picked up explicitly by both Ansell Pearson and O'Toole). For Deleuze and Guattari, evolution occurs upon a plane that does not differentiate between the biosphere and the noosphere, or between the natural and the artificial (1987: 69), but is rather a matter for all machinic assemblages upon the plane of consistency. This is a plane where the most disparate of things comingle: "a semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron crashes into a language, a black hole captures a genetic message, a crystallization produces a passion, the wasp and the orchid cross a letter..." (1987: 69).
Interestingly, in the cases of all of these thinkers, we see the language of semiotics acknowledged, but in various ways transformed and "re-materialized," such that life itself does things, rather than merely presenting itself to be "read." 119
Moreover, while Deleuze's suggestions here might tempt one to conclude that his position does away with any distinction at all between the natural and the cultural, this would be a misreading. "Nature" and "culture" are molar entities that persist alongside their molecular disruption in evolutionary processes—a disruption that continuously reterritorializes what we consider either natural or cultural. Donna Haraway offers, to my mind, the most nuanced and helpful position on the matter, that makes this point clear.
220 For Haraway, the technological and the cultural are always imbricated in the natural, as evidenced in her insistence on the deployment of the term "natureculture(s)." In place of a dichotomy Haraway proposes that all "beings that matter" are products of complex and varied formative histories. In one formulation specifically related to evolution, Haraway writes: "There is no border where evolution ends and history begins, where genes stop and environment takes up, where culture rules and nature submits, or vice versa. Instead, there are turtles upon turtles of naturecultures all the way down. Every being that matters is a congeries of its formative histories - all of them..." (2004b: 2). So while nature and culture are constantly interfering with one another, their meaningfulness is also dependent on their histories—and one such history is their semiotic, epistemological and ontological history of separation within academic scholarship. To understand nature and culture as mutually imbricated in a complex co-evolution, one must also acknowledge their molar identities as separate. Deleuze and Guattari and Haraway as well underline this in their similar understandings of how the apparent order of nature-becoming-culture can be reversed. While Deleuze and Guattari note how "cultural or technical phenomena
[can provide] a fertile soil, a good soup, for the development of insects, bacteria, germs or even particles" (1987: 69), Haraway insists on the coevolution of machines and organisms, where technological advance provides a fertile ground for new sorts of organisms. If nature and culture were simply an undifferentiated mass, then such
"reversal" would not be intelligible. We cannot thus eliminate some notion of their
221 respective molar identities, but at the same time, we must understand any process of evolution as necessarily a co-evolution of nature and culture.
Inspired by these thinkers, then, my understanding of "molecular evolutionism" includes this implicated co-evolution of natureculture, whereby evolution is a creative force that complexifies and elaborates the relation between natural and cultural processes.
I will return to some implications of this in terms of inorganic evolution of technologized bodies of water in this dissertation's final chapter, but here I offer this fourth aspect of molecular evolutionism in some detail, as it will be a key consideration in thinking about how evolution deepens our understanding of the interpermeation of bodies of water.
The fifth idea that holds together the notion of "molecular evolutionism" is the question of origins. According to Sheets-Johnstone (2007), phenomenology and evolutionary biology both share a common "pursuit of origins" (328). While indeed the question of origin is of interest to the molecular evolutionist notion I am gathering here, I configure this question in a way much different from what Sheets-Johnstone has in mind.
Origins in both evolutionary biology and phenomenology, for Sheets-Johnstone, are about "getting to the bottom of things human" (329). In both cases, she posits the existence of "originals" (beings, meanings) that have traceable lineages (330). But from a molecular evolutionist perspective, in place of an "origin" that is some sort of prime mover, or "original" being (or original matter, or elemental property) from which subsequent beings are derived and/or progressively improved, we are instead asked to think about origin as a multitudinous condition of possibility that facilitates another
222 variation or differentiation. This notion echoes in fact through all of the ideas we have already mentioned above: the mixture of internal and external forces begs the question of
"origin," just as Hypersea and other symbiotic evolutionary processes do not posit two origins in the place of one, but rather scramble the notion of origin entirely. At the same time, however, to question origin is not the same as doing away with history, or refusing to acknowledge the debts of our becomings. I certainly agree with Haraway when she writes, "[T]his"—that is, all this talk about evolution, molecular or otherwise—"is all about origin stories" (2004a: 316). Evolution, in many ways, is about what Haraway calls
"relational ontology, in which histories matter; i.e. are material, meaningful, processual, emergent, and constitutive" (2004a: 307). In other words, my rejection of Sheets-
Johnstone's version of the "pursuit of origins" is not a rejection of the historical continuities she also stresses. Rather, I ask only for caution when we invoke this term.
Historical continuities are vitally important, and indeed, there seems little point in writing a chapter about our watery evolution without paying them close attention. But in a rhizo- phenomenological understanding of beings, how can we separate out the "what," from the "how," the "where," the "when"? Any sense of origin can only emerge in the combustion of these factors. Moreover, as we already asked in our discussion of
Irigaray's bodies of water in the previous chapter, what is the origin of any watery womb that gestates us, and of the womb that gestated that origin, and the origin of that origin, in turn? Everything comes from somewhere, sometime, some body, although that body may be radically other, and radically dispersed. In other words, to commit to a notion of a
223 definitive and singular origin erases the necessity of gestationality as an "always has been something/somewhere else already" (to suggest a twist on our post-structuralist theoretical penchant for the "always already"). Here, my suggestion of a molecular evolutionist perspective is already edging into a discussion of how this understanding of evolution stories might deepen the onto-logic of amniotics as a certain mode of being revealed by bodies of water. Let us turn now to examine these implications more directly.
III. Fishy Beginnings, Or What Evolution Stories Can Teach Us About the Onto-
Logic of Amniotics
Understanding our bodies of water as imbricated within these molecular stories of evolution, I argue, adds another rich layer to the articulation of amniotics as a mode of being for bodies of water. To begin, we can see how the complexification of the question of "origin" in a molecular evolutionist view gives us another entrance into understanding how our bodies of water live according to a logic of gestation and differenc/tiation.
(a) Gestation, Differenc/tiation and our Fishy Beginnings
In the previous chapter, we began to articulate the ways in which our bodies of water are gestational of other bodies, or: as bodies of water we are facilitative of being, and live as a watery gestational force and milieu necessary for other beings to become, and be, at all. This exploration was linked to the maternal gestational womb, but we suggested that the question of "origin" could not stop here. We commented on how
224 water, as a cycle that is closed in its actuality but open in its virtuality, requires the invention of difference necessarily through repetition, and thus how gestation and differenc/tiation were intimately tied up in one another. Now I am suggesting that evolutionary thought helps us understand this cycle with an even greater depth of materiality, as we learn from evolution that indeed, all life begins in water, is gestated by an other who is a watery being. At the individual level, this gestational body might be the gestating water of the maternal human/mammalian womb, or other inventive means that have evolved to facilitate watery gestation—the non-mammalian amnion of birds and reptiles, for example, or the water-permeable eggs offish and amphibians, swaddled necessarily within a larger watery environment. But evolution asks us to expand our understanding of what a watery gestational environment can be even further: how might entire lines of fish themselves, or amphibians, reptiles and other tetrapods be considered themselves as gestational watery "wombs"? Over time, they have served as the watery environment necessary for the gestation and differenc/tiation of new species altogether.
These are the watery bodies from which we are born, in a very material sense.
Evolutionary theory thus invites us to broaden our understanding of gestation, moving out from the individual maternal or otherwise bodily gestational environment to include gestation according to a larger temporal and spatial scale.
Elizabeth Grosz, in her recent work exploring the connections between Darwinian evolutionary theory and feminist politics, too notes the connection between our maternal beginnings and our evolutionary beginnings. "We have forgotten where we have come
225 from," she writes, but "[t]his is a double forgetting: of the elements through which all living things are born and live, a cosmological element; and of the specific body, indeed a chain of bodies, from which we come, a genealogical or maternal element" (2004: 2). In fact, the debts to which Grosz alludes here are three: first, to our material constitution that we too often forget to acknowledge in our ontological musings, but without which we could not be at all; second, to the specific maternal individual body that gestates us, which was arguably the primary focus of Irigaray's descriptions in Marine Lover; but thirdly, to the evolutionary bodies beyond our specific maternal gestational habitat. While
Grosz does not mention water here, thinking about water as the thread that ties these debts together grounds Grosz's argument in an undeniably lived materiality. We are of water, both in the constitutional sense and the gestational sense, but the nature of gestation is now itself bifurcated through the specific maternal body and the collective history of bodies that through their own being have allowed the possibility of other, new being.
Yet despite her attention to the implications of our forgetfulness, Grosz carefully avoids referring to these debts as origins. These debts are indeed "where we have come from," they are "chainfs] of bodies" and "elements through which all living things are born and live," but they are not causes or prime movers. My close reading of Irigaray's response to Nietzsche in Marine Lover above shows indeed how Irigaray corroborates what Grosz suggests—that evolutionary and maternal becomings are intimately bound up in one another. But my reading of Irigaray also takes this suggestion a step further, in
226 proposing that our bodies of water strikingly and undeniably embody the way in which these two facilitative, gestational processes are materially connected. While Irigaray stresses the primacy of the maternal debt of sexual difference, her own subtle allusions to our fishy beginnings create an opening for us to consider how a molecular evolutionist debt interacts with our linear genealogical gestational processes at the individual level.
Our bodies of water do not force a choice between a genealogical maternal debt and an evolutionary debt, but instead are a material expression of the intimate imbrication of these two gestational processes. The further doubling of or slippage between the maternal/specific and the evolutionary debt expressed in the chain of bodies that proceeds us is important to stress, moreover, because although Grosz focuses in her work on the
Darwinian story of evolutionary, genealogical descent of species through processes of natural selection, we have already seen above that this is not the only story of evolution for which we need to account. The issue of lateral evolution, or symbiogenesis such as we see in Hypersea, for example, further complicates the notion of evolution, and thus warns us against blurring the specific maternal body of gestation too facilely into a gestational chain of bodies that is only a selected and descended genealogical/evolutionary one. I will return to the question of how symbiogenesis further fleshes out the gestational aspect of amniotics below, in my discussion of interpermeation. But first I want to follow Grosz's suggestions regarding evolution and origins further still, for even an evolutionary model of selection and descent adds
227 important insight to our understanding of gestation and differenc/tiation as part of the onto-logic of amniotics.
Further in her discussion on Darwin, Grosz notes, "[t]he origin [of species] can be nothing but difference!" (2004: 21). Grosz arrives at this conclusion from a nuanced reading of Darwin's desire to articulate a science adequate to the (non-teleological, unpredictable, indeterminate) reality of life itself. She notes (as do many other readers of
Darwin, she points out) that in The Origin of Species, Darwin in fact never posits what
"the" origin might be. Instead, he produces a theory of descent with modification that is not predicated on distinct groups or identities of species, but rather considers, as Grosz puts it, "how any provisional unity and cohesion derives from the oscillations and vacillations of difference" (21). Difference itself can be the only basis for the production and proliferation of difference. Grosz elaborates further:
Life "began." This origin, as much fable as strategic assumption, is not only obscure, conceivable only through abstract reconstruction or speculative genealogy, but is in a certain sense impossible to understand as a locatable or knowable entity, a definite point in time, a single chemical reaction, for it is an origin "that is not one" that is always already implicated in multiplicity or difference, in a constellation of transformations, an event that imperceptibly affects everything. (2004: 26).
The understanding of origin elaborated here by Grosz reflects the parallel myth within even in the most contemporary circles of evolutionary science that concurs that the precise origin of life remains to be determined.122 On the one hand, the obscurity of these origins is like Irigaray's sea that we explored in chapter two, where it figured as an
"origin" whose depths cannot be definitively plumbed. Life's beginnings teem below the
228 surface, but they cannot be pinpointed or isolated. But on the other hand, this obscurity of life's beginnings also gestures towards the virtuality of gestational difference: while this origin story is only reconstructive or speculative, the proverbial primordial soup as the seemingly "original" watery gestational environment in any case would require a differenciation—that is, some intensive shift in material choreography such that the limits of affectability of this water were dramatically altered.123 This "origin," then, must have already been a multiplicity, as Grosz notes—that is, a virtuality that contained far more than it would elaborate in the first phases of actualization. The materiality of water, of course, in all of its fluidity, internal intensity, imbrication in and with other particulate matter and bodies, helps us understand the idea of origin as multiplicity in a distinctly material, and not only theoretical, way.
Moreover, the notion of multiplicitous origins returns us to the onto-logic of amniotics, and Deleuze's theory of difference and repetition that helped us to think about water as a gestational medium and force, but without any prime or original "gestator."
Returning to this theory now, but enfolding it with the evolution stories Deleuze himself calls on, allows us to again deepen our understanding of the inseparability of gestation and differenc/tiation as part of our watery onto-logic.
In chapter two, we briefly examined Deleuze's notion of embryology, and the virtual "egg" or larval subject as virtual: if the egg further differenciates itself in actualization (that is, undergoes an internal process of further elaboration through intensive processes), this points to the fact that the egg holds an unknown latency, a
229 potentiality for expression that may never be expressed. If we now go back to examine these passages in Deleuze more closely, we discover a nuanced interweaving of a molecularized version of Darwinian evolution as a theoretical double to embryology and the larval subject. In Difference and Repetition (118-119, 214-217, 248-250), embryology is overlaid with theories of embryogenesis and evolutionary biology to help expound the notion of the larval subject. This is the potential subject, or subject-to-come, subject who is yet to be differenciated, who, once subjectivized, will still always remain a process under construction. These same evolutionary and embryological theories, moreover, are again picked up by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (46-47). In these passages, Deleuze refers implicitly to biologist Ernst Haeckel's 1866 claims that
"ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."124 In this theory that remained popular in evolutionary circles for decades, Haeckel asserted that in the growth of a human embryo one could see a miniaturized mirroring of phylogeny, or the evolutionary history of species. This theory thus posited a teleological version of evolution, whereby development from amoeba, to invertebrate, eventually to tetrapod human was the destined course of progress. Deleuze, however, skilfully points out the problems with assuming that morphogenetic development is predetermined in ontogenic recapitulation, as Haeckel would have it. Deleuze instead insists that evolution does not move from a more general possibility to a less general realization, as in the undefined embryo that develops more individuality as it progresses, or the simple amoeba that accrues more advanced and individualized traits as it evolves up through species. Instead, evolution
230 unfolds from virtuality to actuality. The embryo "lives the unliveable," in Deleuze's words. As we already noted in chapter two, Deleuze points out that the embryo holds all the potentiality that would rip an adult apart, and draws on the example of a tortoise whose anterior member and neck can contort in ways that would kill us (Deleuze 1994:
215; Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 47). In order to grow from larva to adult, the adult must select what it can withstand. While Deleuze agrees that evolutionary differenc/tiation is
"progressive and serial," as recapitulationists would suggest, the movement is neither predetermined nor inevitable, and moves through a qualitative difference that changes the kind of body in question altogether. The limits of affectability of the body are changed so much that the adult cannot be considered a more developed variation, but rather a difference in kind. In other words, what the "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" theory does not account for is the intensive, or the morphogenetic processes and movements that actualize the latent virtuality of the embryo.125
This criticism of the recapitulationist theory also links to Deleuze's implicit criticisms of contemporary evolutionary genetics in these same passages from Difference and Repetition. Interestingly, while Haeckel's theory was eventually debunked in the
1920s with myriad examples of animals that defied the theory, versions of the recapitulationist theory were picked up in contemporary evolutionary genetics that claimed the morphogenetic development of a species is programmed, so to speak, in their
DNA. Deleuze, however, again resists any explanation of evolution as teleological or something that can be fully anticipated, for such explanations cannot account for the
231 unknowable potentiality of the virtual. Nor can such explanations account for extensive morphogenetic forces or those transformatory meetings with forces external to the body.
He states, "[a] living being is not only defined genetically, by the dynamisms which determine its internal milieu, but also ecologically, by the external movements which preside over its distribution with extensity" (1994: 216). This is what Deleuze calls the
"double differenciation"—intensive and extensive—which like embryonic development is guided by intensive processes whose result cannot be known in advance. Deleuze insists that evolution of species, and the development of an embryo, are about the kinetics of larval subjectivity. These kinetics are staged at multiple levels, in interior and external space-times, that in turn connect and relate to other beings in space and time (1994: 216-
217). Actualization is not a given, but rather an active result of the forces of selection and differenciation. This reading of evolution is quite close to Darwin's own, despite the fact that Darwin's work certainly mutated and shifted in the ways it was interpreted and taken up by others, such as Haeckel, through the years. The "survival of the divergent," which is key to Deleuze's theory of difference and repetition, is a gift of Darwinian evolutionary theory.
This gift, moreover, deepens our understanding of the connection between gestation and differenc/tiation in the onto-logic of amniotics. Bodies gestate not only other bodies, and other species, but in this gestation insist that these gestated bodies differenc/tiate themselves from their gestational bodies, even as they remain indebted and connected to them through their recycled materiality. Evolution, like embryology, does
232 not map a predetermined course where the "more evolved" species (or adults) simply add complexity on to the "less evolved" ones (or larvae). Both map a process whereby one body gestates another, who selects (or is gifted) something from the virtual potentiality teeming below the surface of the gestational (m)other's materiality. And again, this latency is the material gift of yet another body, who has gestated the gestator, in a cycle of repetition and differenc/tiation that has no determined origin.
But once more the question of sexual difference breathes below the surface, too: in the productive slippage that we locate here between maternal/specific gestation and evolutionary gestation, how does the question of sexual difference figure?
(b) Go Fish: On Sex, Eggs and Evolution
We recall that in chapter two, a productive cross-fertilization of Irigaray's descriptions of our gestational bodies of water, Deleuze's theory of difference and repetition (understood through the virtuality of the embryo) and Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the flesh, opened to a nuanced understanding of the necessity of sexual difference for gestation and the concomitant differenc/tiation of bodies: while the actuality of sexual dimorphism (that is, the existence of male and female bodies) may be one expression of sexual difference that can facilitate the further gestation and differenc/tiation of bodies, this must be carefully distinguished from the virtuality of sexual difference, from sexual difference itself as a larval body, as an egg, that holds potentiality we cannot yet imagine. If the egg further differenciates itself in actualization
233 (that is, undergoes an internal process of further elaboration through intensive processes),
this points to the fact that even actualized sexual difference (e.g., sexual dimorphism in bodies) is but one elaboration of an unknown latency, a potentiality for expression beyond this dimorphism. Deleuze connects such an understanding of sexual difference
again to a molecularized reading of Darwin. He agrees that sexual difference is indeed
one of the "three great biological differenciations" (the other two being differenciation of
species and differenciation of organic parts), but makes it clear that all three
differenciations "turn around individual difference, and not vice versa" (1994: 249).
Darwin's great novelty, argues Deleuze, was "that of inaugurating the thought of
individual difference." As Deleuze puts it, "the leitmotiv of The Origin of Species is: we
do not know what individual difference is capable of!" (1994: 248). Although Deleuze
does not explicitly put it this way, the implication here is that Darwin's theory of sexual
selection (a key point of which is the selection of difference across sexually different bodies and the recombination of difference in an ever proliferating unfolding of new life)
must be overlaid with his theory of individual difference. Sexual differenciation is again, then, understood as a selection from a virtual materiality held latent in the gestational
individual. It is not a mere "reproduction" or replication in some mimetic sense, but
rather one actualization of a virtual difference whose expressions can never be fully known in advance. Deleuze, then, invites us to consider how evolution can help us think
about sexual difference as desirable (for indeed, as Darwin argued, sexual differentiation
is a key force in continued evolution and the proliferation of life), but at the same, as
234 never fully unfolded or disclosed. Sexual difference remains evolution's, and life's, open question that will not go away.
Elizabeth Grosz has also brought a molecularized reading of Darwinian theory to bear on the question of sexual difference. In her recent books Nick of Time (2004) and
Time Travels (2005), Grosz seizes directly on the suggestion that sexual difference is necessary for the proliferation of life, and in fact claims that sexual difference is ontological—that is, sexual difference is not "a" key force of differentiation, but in fact the key force, and the irreducible condition for life. According to Grosz, "Darwin provides an ironic and indirect confirmation of the Irigarayan postulation of the irreducibility, indeed, ineliminability, of sexual difference [...] He makes sexual difference one of the ontological characteristics of life itself, not merely a detail, a feature that will pass" (2004: 31). Grosz points out how, according to Darwin, sexual differentiation must have occurred before the intricate splitting of species into plants and animals and before there was much detailed differentiation between animal species.
Hence the variation introduced with sexual differentiation is responsible for the subsequent explosion of different life. Similar to the argument I have made above regarding an understanding of sexual difference as virtual (like Deleuze's larva or egg),
Grosz too emphasizes that this sexual difference upon which the proliferation of life depends is "not a measurable, definable difference between given entities with their own characteristics but an incalculable difference." According to Grosz this is a "difference which, in the future, will have been expressed, will have articulated itself (2004: 67).
235 This insistence on sexual difference as virtual is a key component of Grosz's argument, in fact, despite her continued reference to sexual dimorphism (which would be, as we have noted, actualized sexual difference in already differentiated bodies) as an engine for life. On my reading, this seeming conflation in Grosz's work is a difficulty that requires more attention than she gives it. However, if we can set this difficulty aside for the moment, we can instead appreciate how Grosz's bringing together Darwinian theory, questions of sexual difference, and an understanding of difference as virtual helps us further flesh out the role of sexual difference in evolutionary gestational bodies.126
Although from a molar, anthropocentric perspective, sexed reproduction requires the meeting of two sexually dimorphic bodies in the form of a male and female, evolution stories help us understand that the key to life's proliferation thanks to sexual difference resides not in the meeting of male and female, but in the crossing of difference that expresses a life-proliferating capacity in at least two ways (i.e., this crossing is not necessarily tied to male and female binaristic bodies). Despite Grosz's repeated references to "bifurcation" and "dimorphism," her most valuable reading of Darwin emerges in her emphasis on the notion of pairing across difference: "[Sexual selection] is a mechanism that ensures exponentially increasing variability, that necessitates that the heritable structure from each individual is different from that of each of its parents while in some respects resembling them both" (2004: 69). To put this in the terms of my project here, pairing across sexual difference seems one particularly well-suited
236 mechanism for expressing an onto-logic of amniotics, where gestation, differenc/tiation and interpermeation all hold.
Interestingly, Grosz acknowledges that even though hermaphroditic beings can reproduce singly, this means of reproduction does not produce the same proliferation of life. Deleuze in fact offers a similar sentiment, noting that "sexed reproduction [...] accelerates the movement of the unfolding of actualisation by individualization" (1994:
250, my emphasis). However, Grosz also notes that even self-fertilization of hermaphrodites usually involves "a crossing or interchange between two hermaphroditic individuals" (2005: 69). While Grosz seems to include this aside as a compulsory nod towards one of the potential scientific gaps in her theoretical deployment of Darwin, I would argue that the most interesting opening to thinking about sexual difference comes from this and other interspersed challenges she admits towards the hegemony of the sexual dimorphism she otherwise champions. For example, she also acknowledges that
"sexual division, with its correspondingly different reproductive capacities and morphological variations, entails potentially ever more divergent morphological structures" (2005: 70). I take this to mean that the types and expressions of difference that may still be actualized from the pre-individualized egg of sexual difference are far from exhausted - a sentiment that we can infer from other nuanced admissions in Grosz's work, such as her prediction that although sexual difference will not go away, it will likely be complexified, elaborated and developed further into an unknown future (2005:
67). Although Grosz (strangely) does not seem to acknowledge this fact, one very
237 exciting implication of her work for thinking about sexual difference and evolution is this: if sexual dimorphism burst onto the evolutionary scene as an ingenious way of proliferating life, there is nothing to prevent further mechanisms for expressing sexual difference from likewise emerging. Pointing to this unknown future of sexual difference should elucidate sexual dimorphism as a precedent for unknowable developments, rather than insurance against them (as Grosz seems to claim in other passages of her text). The point then, again, is not to deny the role of sexual dimorphism as an important moment in the proliferation of life, but rather to be careful to acknowledge this dimorphism as an already actualized expression of sexual difference. If evolution stories beg anything of us, it should be an extreme scepticism of narratives that posit any sort of teleological grand narrative for how life will continue to proliferate in the future.
And of course, in many ways, that future is already here. In her study on evolution and sexuality in Evolution's Rainbow (2004), evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden has produced an impressive catalogue of the ways in which the existence of species in
"two nonreducible sexually reproducing forms," as Grosz puts it, is complicated and complexified. Roughgarden concurs that sexual reproduction does indeed produce a
"more balanced portfolio of genes" to ensure better long-term survival than nonsexual means of reproduction, such as budding, fragmentation and parthenogenesis (5), but emphasizes that even sexual reproduction is far from binaristic. As Roughgarden notes, while sex—that is, gamete size—may be (almost, although not entirely universally) binaristic among sexually reproducing species, there is no corresponding binary in body
238 type (i.e., dimorphism), behaviour and life story (26). This is to say that the map of sexual reproduction defies a tidy division into two sides, where bodies and behaviours of one type would line up neatly and binaristically against the bodies and behaviours of the other type. What we see are indeed various mechanisms of proliferating life through the intersection of at least two kinds of difference, but how this difference is expressed and enacted is extremely diverse. For example, Roughgarden notes that "all-female animal species are found among most major groups of vertebrates," such as the all female- geckoes of Hawaii (16), and some species, such as grasshoppers, bees and turkeys, include two kinds of females: those who reproduce sexually and those who do not (16-
17). In species where sexual reproduction does take place, Roughgarden systematically shatters many of our presumptions of stable dimorphic bodies and behaviours: in perhaps half of the animal kingdom, bodies are most commonly either both male and female at the same or at different times in the animal's lifespan128; in many species males rather than females gestate eggs deposited in or on their bodies by females, and physically give birth to them or disperse them into the world;129 in many species, males and females show no difference in chromosomes;130 in many species males and females are virtually indistinguishable in appearance, while in species with two or more male forms, one male form might resemble the female while others do not;131 females of certain species have penis-like structures, and some males have milk-producing mammary glands; and finally—sexual power and gendered behaviour do not line up neatly along male and female lines in the ways our dominant (heteronormative) stories of gender and sexuality
239 would like us to believe.133 The point of this catalogue is not to state that because such complications of the expressions of sexual difference occur in some species that all of our understandings of human sexual dimorphism are wrong, or that these complex
expressions are necessarily appropriate for humans (although many, of course, are). To do so would be to ignore the important this-ness of each animal, including the human,
and the ways in which this this-ness opens up certain possibilities for interbeing. Indeed, our capacities to affect and be affected, including our sexual capacities, are what hold us together as metastable bodies. The point here is rather to show that if we are going to
claim a significant place for sexual difference in our evolution stories, then we must be careful to understand the ways in which sexual difference is virtual, never fully knowable, and always open to new possibilities and recombinations. If we appreciate this virtuality, then including gestation and differenc/tiation within an onto-logic of amniotics does not prematurely circumscribe the ways in which bodies may express these movements, but nor is sexual difference relegated to the position of add-on or
afterthought. As Roughgarden notes, despite disagreements among scientists as to why
sexual reproduction is good over the long term, there is nonetheless general agreement that the purpose of sexual difference is not reproduction as such, since asexual species are perfectly capable of reproducing (18). Roughgarden shares the view of those scientists who affirm that sexual reproduction is positive because it generates increasingly greater
diversity in species, and diversity is itself life-proliferating (a view which echoes Grosz's and Deleuze's claims, noted above). But in espousing this view, it would behoove us to
240 question any strict insistence on a view of sexual difference as necessarily binaristic and dimorphic. We do not know what life, or evolution, has in store for our future. Evolution stories show us how gestation and differenc/tiation benefit greatly from sexual difference, and they may even require it, but only if we understand this difference as no more than an embodied meeting across different modes of life-proliferation. The morphologies, behaviours, and stories attached to these modes will always remain an open question.
Moreover, Roughgarden's evolution stories also show us, as mentioned, that sexual difference is not the only means of proliferating life. Clonal reproduction, although failing to produce the same diversity of sexual reproduction, is not necessarily void of any production of variation. Clonal species can accumulate diversity through mutation, brought on by changes in the social, ecological or physical environments of a species, or the species may themselves come from multiple origins (Roughgarden 17-18).
This brings us back to the external factors that are important forces for evolution, and also leads us towards a deeper discussion of interpermeation as the third important movement for an onto-logic of amniotics. As we have just seen, both gestation and differenc/tiation are facilitated by sexual difference, if by this we mean the crossing of difference, the crossing of at least two different modes of proliferating life. Clonal reproduction and, as we will see, symbiogenesis, both invite us to open up our understanding of this "crossing of difference" even further. Interpermeation becomes inextricably bound up in gestation/differenc/tiation, as the crossing of difference may imply a crossing not only between different bodies within one species, but also between
241 bodies of different species, and even different kingdoms or types of life. But before moving on to see how interpermeation rounds out our discussion of evolution stories as deepening our understanding of amniotics, we first need to collect some of these thoughts on evolution, gestation/differenc/tiation and sexual difference and bring them back to the materiality of our bodies of water, specifically. This will lead us directly into our discussion on interpermeation.
The question is: Why is the larva, the egg, or the embryo capable of the torsions that Deleuze suggests? Or, if the proliferation of life requires the crossing of difference, what enables this crossing in the first place? Both Grosz and Roughgarden help us understand Deleuze's suggestion of the virtuality of sexual difference, and difference in general, in concrete and material terms. While we may be tempted to read Deleuze's use of figurations such as the egg, the larva, or the embryo as metaphors, situating his theory on difference within various molecular evolution stories reminds us that this logic of repeating materiality, whose meaning and expressions are proliferated through complex processes of gestation and difference, is not only a theoretical brain-teaser. Our bodies live out this logic on both micro- and macro-scales. In fact, despite Deleuze's disdain for phenomenology and his suspicion of lived experience as capable of producing concepts, he nonetheless explicitly specifies that "the high level of generality [that the virtual holds latent] has nothing to do with an abstract taxonomic concept since it is, as such, lived by the embryo" (1994: 249, emphasis in original). The lived materiality of our watery bodies, held as they are, as eggs, on the threshold between virtuality and actualization, on
242 the threshold between a gestational body and a (different but interpermeated) gestated body, show these concepts to be no speculative fictions, even if they are indeed "stories."
We live them, and our predecessor bodies, both actualized and virtual, live them too.
And, because we live these processes not as disembodied ideas, but as material bodies, the morphogenetic properties of those bodies matter. It matters, therefore, that these bodies are bodies of water. Water is the communicator and conduit that ensures that the crossing of difference becomes an interpermeation, a gift, a material exchange. The onto- logic of amniotics is not just a neat theory I thought up, but is rather something I glean from rhizo-phenomenological close attention to the way our watery materiality expresses itself, and the way in which such expression is tied to that watery materiality in an inalienable way.
Moreover, an embryo is capable of certain torsions and movements because it is not only of water, but in water. While Deleuze takes great pains to stress the importance of intensive morphogenetic transformation, these rechoreographies could only happen in a materially fluid environment. And perhaps here, we see again how Deleuze and Irigaray meet each other: Irigaray notes that our hegemonic sciences ignore the mechanics of fluids, for example, their ability to exert pressure through the walls of a "solid" (1985b:
111), while Deleuze laments that our hegemonic ontologies ignore the intensive. But both arguments overlap in the gestational potential of watery worlds: the mechanics of fluids are what enable intensive morphogenetic transformations in our bodies of water. When we overlay accounts of watery embryonic gestation with these stories of evolution, life's
243 billions-of-years-old soupy beginnings become more than interesting historical factoid; these beginnings instead suggest that our difference as beings is cultivated in connection to the specific topographical relations to water in which we find ourselves. Water is facilitative not only as an intensive morphogenetic element within bodies, but also as an extensive or external force that creates for bodies certain possibilities for life.
Unsurprisingly then, Roughgarden also notes that many variations on hermaphrodism are found in the oceans, among fish, marine mammals and other sea life.
Most marine invertebrates, such as barnacles, snails, starfish, fan worms and sea anemones are hermaphroditic, as are a large proportion of coral reef fish, including most species of wrasses, parrot fish, and large groupers, and some species of damselfish, angelfish, gobies, porgies, emperors, soapfishes, dottybacks, moray eels and various deep-sea fish as well (30-31). These fish may be male and female at different times in their life, they may crisscross their sex (changing from male to female and back again, depending on circumstance), or they may be male and female simultaneously (31-35).
These phenomena give Roughgarden cause to wonder: what might it be about marine environments that would favour these different trends of expression of sexual difference?
Roughgarden further notes that certain expressions of sex role complexity are often found in the sea, such as the example of the female seahorse who places her eggs in the male seahorse's pouch; the male is then responsible for the gestation and "delivery" of the young. Similarly, in some species of pipefish, the embryos are attached to the male's underside for gestation (45). Many, many other marine species display various forms of
244 parental care of embryos, such as watching over and nourishing eggs on a sea floor or lake bottom, or even storing eggs in their cheeks (45). Whales and dolphins (known, along with porpoises, as cetaceans) are another example of the complexification of sexual dimorphism in bodies. As Roughgarden elaborates, according to common biology,
"male" dolphins and whales are described as having no external genitals, but rather a pair of testes located within their body cavity. The penis is found in a "genital slit" that
(unless erect) is covered by flaps, and male cetaceans have no scrotum (40). The purpose for this architecture is hydrodynamic streamlining, but not without some cost: to store the gonads inside the body also requires innovative circulatory rerouting in order to keep the gonads cool enough to remain fertile (Zimmer 123). Roughgarden notes, however, that the rechoreographies required to maintain this genital architecture, although "normal" in dolphins, would be considered a very exceptional intersex morphology in humans. She wonders if "perhaps cetaceans are on their evolutionary way to the state that hermaphroditic fish have already attained" (41). Roughgarden's musings hence again lead us to ask: why might the sea be so much more accommodating—and even facilitative of—diverse actualizations of sexual difference than life, and human life in particular, on land?
Roughgarden does not offer an answer to this question, nor does any other scientific theory of which I am aware (although Hypersea, as we shall see shortly, provides some suggestive directions). But Roughgarden's question alone is sufficient to help us deepen our understanding of what our bodies of water can teach us about
245 movements of gestation, difference and interpermeation. In the first place, we need to remember that the sea is itself a body of water. Perhaps the great diversity of sexual difference there points again to the virtuality teeming below the surface of this gestational body. The unknowability of the sea's teeming life as virtual is no mere metaphor, although in our reading of Irigaray's Marine Lover in the previous chapter it might have rang that way. The topography of the sea creates possibilities for life of which we, as terrestrial beings, may have little inkling or understanding. But even as our virtual expressions, these possibilities for life are still materially connected to us; these many forms of difference offer concrete lived examples (not metaphors) of the larvae to which we are connected evolutionarily, but have not actualized. The egg or larva is thus best understood as on the precipice between virtuality and actuality, materially connected to but not fully articulated in our own actualized embodiment. These larvae are those material expressions that our bodies are not, but could have been, or might even still become. Larvae may be capable of such expressions precisely because their topographical relation to water is different to ours. These are our potentialities that, because of their watery habitat, can withstand "vital movements, torsions and drifts"
(Deleuze 1994: 118) that our own human actualized bodies could never sustain.
("Breathing" water is the most obvious impossible torsion that comes to mind, although our own human capacity to hold our breath below the surface for several minutes,134 or to survive the first few moments of life in water without "breath"135 should testify to our own virtuality, folded within the actuality of our bodies.) These fishy larval subjects are
246 embryos in the wide watery womb of the sea. As I mentioned above, Deleuze claims that the difference between what the embryo and the adult can withstand does not refer to a difference in generality, but rather a difference in kind (1994: 215). This point again causes me to wonder, alongside Roughgarden: Could our topographical relation to water be a key moment for thinking about our ontological relation to water?
But importantly, the water of these embryos, so different from us "adults," also flows from us to them, and back again. Our watery materiality already suggests that we are connected and interpermeated across even differences of kind in bodies. This means that our virtuals which dwell in our fishy embryonic beginnings are in part quite literally enfolded into our flesh in expressly material ways. Evolutionarily speaking, our ancestors were certainly capable of torsions and movements that we would never be capable of, but because we carry this water with us, rather than leaving it behind, we carry traces of the force of larval bodies and their potentiality with us: we as bodies of water, as entire species of bodies of water, become larval subjects for the unknown to follow. The movements, torsions and drifts that only our larvae can withstand exist as a dimension of us nonetheless, as that which expresses part of our meaning as human bodies, whose expression is located nowhere other than on or in our actualized bodies, but which nonetheless bears no resemblance to our bodies. These bodies of/in water that populate our fishy beginnings, so seemingly distant from us (in a temporal and/or spatial sense), are materially connected to us, and carried forth in our actuality, in spite of being virtual.
And again, here, we see how the actual-but-distant and the virtual-as-unactualized are
247 blurred in the material interconnectivity of our bodies of water, and the double articulation of water as both external-gestational and folded into us as intensive- morphogenetic. Is the fish a virtuality of the human, holding potentialities of us latent within? Or are we both actualizations of some virtuality that preceded us both? What comes first: the fish or the egg? Evolution stories, I argue, suggest that this question is a red herring. Our fishy beginnings, presented here as virtual expressions of our own modes of living, thus invite us to consider what we can learn from them—about how to live differently, how to live difference differently, but also about the sorts of innovations we may have to expressly cultivate to safeguard both difference and interpermeation in view of our terrestrial, human specificities as bodies of water.
Life began in the sea. Our bodies have been engaged in various retellings of this
"origin" story ever since. And, only if we appreciate that we are gestational and differenc/tiated because we are bodies of water will we be able to see more clearly the potential for interbeing that is open to us. I have proposed that bodies of water—human, other animal, and even topographical bodies such as the sea itself—are imbricated in these movements of gestation and differenc/tiation. Water allows us to (and in fact insists that we) maintain our difference, but at the same time asks that we gift this water over to new expressions and new proliferations of life. But as we have already intimated several times here, gestation and differenc/tiation also require the concomitant movement of interpermeation. In order for differentiation and gestation to proliferate life, a crossing of
248 different bodies is necessary. This crossing, as we shall see, is similarly dependent on water.
(c) Interpermeation, Gestation and the Hydrological Highway
As mentioned above, Deleuze's interest in Darwin's theory of individuation and differentiation in Difference and Repetition followed him to A Thousand Plateaus. In this later book, coauthored with Guattari, however, the authors' molecular evolutionist interest is most directly taken up in their exploration of symbiogenesis, or lateral becomings as evolution stories that can help us desist from our human-centric views of our discrete and superior existence, and thus teach us something about ontology. This type of "non-linear" evolution is also described by Deleuze and Guattari as "aparallel evolution," after French zoologist and critic of Darwin, Remy Chauvin. "Aparallel evolution," as the name suggests, rejects the "tree" model of descent and adopts instead the anti-genealogical figure of the rhizome. Here, evolution involves the mutual contagion "of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with each other" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 10-11). This is a viral evolution, whereby viruses ask dissimilar beings to connect up in unpredictable and non-teleological rhizomes. Aparallel, non linear or symbiotic evolution (preferably called "involution," because of its creative force that causes dissolution of form [1987: 238-9]) is closely linked to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "becomings," which we already began to explore in chapter one, in relation to our bodily becomings and becomings-molecular. A becoming, we will recall, is the zone
249 of combustion between its two sides; it is produced in the middle. Although both sides of the becoming are drawn in and affected, one does not "really" become the other (1987:
238). Examples used by Deleuze and Guattari to illustrate how evolution can function according to such becomings include the meeting of the wasp and the orchid, as already mentioned ("There is a block of becoming that snaps up the wasp and the orchid, but from which no wasp-orchid could ever descend" [1987: 238]), and the cat and the baboon, held in alliance by a type C virus (1987: 11, 238).136
The notion of aparallel evolution, or lateral evolutionary becomings, is instrumental in deepening our understanding not only of how the onto-logic of amniotics demands interpermeation, but also of how interpermeation is the necessary companion to gestation and differenc/tiation which, in turn, deepens our understanding of those movements as well. A return to the theory of Hypersea, as a clear example of the symbiotic, lateral process of evolution through the meeting of non-filiated beings, is a good place to further these explorations. This theory, developed by Mark and Dianna
McMenamin, as previously noted, argues that all life on land is "animated water," or an extension of the sea—i.e. that "folding inside" of a watery habitat that Deleuze and
Guattari tellingly evoke in one of the epigraphs to this chapter. Hypersea thus results in the vast interconnected terrestrial network of life that is comprised of microscopic organisms, fungi and plants, as well as the animals—both human and otherwise—most of which we too facilely assume live discretely in terrestrial space. The incredibly diverse
"orgy" of life on land, the McMenamins argue, is likely thanks to this physically intimate
250 interpermeation of land biota that needed to be established in order for life to survive and proliferate. Hypersea thus provides a helpful illustration of how our bodies of water demand interpermeation in their evolutionary journeys. In a marine habitat, the life- proliferating attributes of water can be accessed passively—we noted this already in terms offish and amphibian eggs, which require only a jelly-like coating to hold the gestating being loosely inside, while water can constantly serve as a nutrient-delivery and waste removal system to the embryo. However, the proliferation of life on land demanded that this exterior habitat permeate the interior in a way unnecessary in the sea.
The fish egg thus becomes the amniote egg (and the terrestrial mammalian body, for that matter), which needs to invent means for safeguarding the water inside to guarantee the necessary milieu for gestation. But in Hypersea, lateral communication (and not just individual gestation) also requires that new media of connection be invented, in order to guarantee survival on dry land. As the McMenamins put it:
Organisms, which are all primarily water, can interact at arm's length, so to speak, only in water. On land, direct physical connections become essential. Overall, terrestrial organisms had to build for themselves structures and components that could perform the environmental services that marine organisms can take for granted. (4)
For example, while marine animals commonly receive nourishment through filter- feeding, "few animals can filter food from the air" (184). Similarly, breathing on land presented another new problem: while carbon dioxide removal is not a problem for animals in seawater, in air, first skins, and then lungs, needed to learn to breathe (186-
187). But both of these innovations created their own problems in land animals—
251 problems which, the McMenamins argue, are solved by those same "direct physical connections" between species "which have absolutely nothing to do with each other," as
Deleuze and Guattari would say. As the McMenamins argue, to be a part of Hypersea, "a living organism must actively direct a flow of nutrient-rich fluids or be intimately associated with one that does" (4). In order to survive and proliferate life further, species thus engage in various fluid exchanges that betray their "filiative" boundaries. For example, arthropods (likely the first terrestrial animals) invited fungi and other microbes into their bellies to help them digest plant matter; "Indeed, a large living millipede is a virtual walking eco-system of gut-associated organisms," while "such a level of gut diversity is unknown in the sea" (199). Or consider the case of the pentasome, an internal parasite of land vertebrates, with the following life story:
(Pentasomes) attach to the host tissue by a row of hooks on their heads and feed on the blood and tissue fluids in the lungs and air passages of the host. (...) Pentasomes typically have two hosts during their life cycles. Male and female pentasomes mate within the final (or definitive) hosts. Their eggs pass out through the host's saliva, mucus secretions, and feces; the eggs are eaten by intermediate hosts, which can be fish, amphibians, small reptiles, small mammals, or insects. Inside their intermediate hosts, the pentasome eggs hatch into four- to six-legged larvae. The larval form bores through the gut of the intermediate host and enters vital organs, where it feeds and grows. When the intermediate hosts (possibly weakened by the infection of the parasite) are captured and eaten by a predator, such as a snake, the predator becomes the final host. The young pentasomes attach to the nasal passages and lungs of the predator and complete their life cycle. (200-201)
While there is speculation about the precise evolutionary history of pentasomes, the
McMenamins argue that the internal, watery habitat of land animals, and the network of direct physical connection that the pentasome was required to invent on land, ensured this
252 particular species', and associated species', further terrestrial proliferation. As they put it,
"the body fluids of land vertebrates ended up serving as an evolutionarily important reservoir of Hypersea" that "makes a significant contribution to the total species diversity of organisms on land" (204). In other words, in symbiotic evolutionary processes, water is essential not only for the ongoing sustenance of any organism, but also as the conduit of interpermeation that engenders invention.
If stories of millipedes and parasites seem rather distant from our human lived experience, they shouldn't. We, too, establish direct physical connections through the lateral transfer of fluid. Such a becoming comes to mind when we read Donna Haraway's description of the co-evolution taking place between herself and her dog, Cayenne
Pepper, through the "transfections" borne in her dog's saliva-laden kisses. "Ms. Cayenne
Pepper continues to colonize all my cells—a sure case of what the biologist Lynn
Margulis calls symbiogenesis," writes Haraway. "I bet if you checked our DNA, you'd find some odd transfections between us. Her saliva must have viral vectors; her darter- tongue kisses are irresistible" (2004a: 295). While it may seem as though Haraway uses the idea of symbiogenesis, or lateral evolution, metaphorically here, her point is in fact that the "transfection" of companion species, such as humans and (in this case) dogs, must also be considered examples of evolution—no less than the orchid and the wasp, or the millipede and the cocktail party in its belly. The co-evolution of dogs and humans,
Haraway asserts, is now well-documented, even if no "one story" of this co-evolution reigns supreme. This, however, is a co-evolution in the broadest sense, not limited only to
253 biology. Cultural patterns, disease, environmental factors, faculty for speech, as well as relationships of love, all, argue Haraway, contribute in a very material way to the
evolution of species, and thus to the co-evolution of species in relation to one another.137
The transfer of saliva may be biochemically significant, but the transfer of affect that
accompanies it is no less significant in evolutionary terms. The kisses that Haraway
exchanges with Ms. Cayenne Pepper are no less a becoming, no less a reconfiguration of the potential for the further development of both humans and dogs. "Blood ties"—or
shall we say our fluvial interpermeations?—are just as valid, and just as potent, on the
affective level as they are on the strictly biological or physiological one.
But although the interpermeation of water in our lateral transfections is important
in terms of establishing a life-proliferating conduit, this interpermeation is equally
important in terms of deepening our understanding of gestation. In both types of
Hypersea transference—namely, those where watery fluid is passed between and thus provides a physical connector between seemingly discrete bodies, as well as those where these physical connections are established through the nesting of one species within the watery body of another—this interpermeation of water is also gestational, and also
facilitative of an even more different difference. In Hypersea, we see not only how the water that comprises us extends in and through other beings, but how this extension
facilitates the gestation and proliferation of others—that is, not only of our own
"descendants" in whom we may have a molar vested interest, but also of entirely
different and "distant" species. For example, it is quite likely that the Cretaceous dinosaur
254 Baryonyx walked facilitated the proliferation of the pentasome parasite on land by ingesting, but not digesting, its marine-dwelling ancestor attached to the of the dinosaur's fishy prey (McMenamin & McMenamin 209). The watery body of the dinosaur thus gestates an other life, with which she has nothing in common, and through this gestation allows for a more radical differenc/tiation of life. She gestates the differenc/tiation not only of her own repeated, filiative offspring, but also of an other body of water who will nonetheless carry traces of that dinosaur to its next host body. As we remarked in the previous chapter, the interrelations of our bodies of water thus help expand our understanding of gestationality, which comes to refer both to the experience of a life growing within a mammalian womb or other amnion, but also more generally to the giving over of one's own materiality for this proliferation of further life, different to one's own. Our fluvial interpermeations can facilitate such a material gift. From the perspective of the pentasome, we might refer to such relations as "parasitical" (with all of the concomitant connotations). However, if we include the perspective of the dinosaur, these relations are certainly gestational as well.138
Moreover, while the necessity of interpermeation to facilitate gestation and differenc/tiation is perhaps obvious in terms of such symbiotic evolution, this necessity also asks us to rethink the gestation of new species in evolution by selection and descent, as well as the process of individual maternal gestation, in terms of interpermeation as well. Obviously, maternal gestation and sexual reproduction require interpermeation, in the form of fertilization, to generate and proliferate life.139 But evolution by selection and
255 descent also requires transfections and interpermeations in order to generate and proliferate life. Evolutionary descent, as we saw, requires not only internal differenciation, but the parallel force of extensive factors—chance encounters, aleatory points and strange serendipities. If there were no exogenous factors, no accidental encounters, no organisms that were just in the right place at the right time, much evolutionary change would likely never have occurred. Evolutionary descent in fact requires "unnatural nuptials" for much of its business. For example, the evolution of complex life might not have been possible without the alien meeting of anaerobic bacteria and oxygen, resulting in a becoming-aerobic; had green algae never entered into a strange encounter with sunlight, the becoming of land biota might not have occurred; the river dolphin's unnatural nuptials with saltwater similarly spurned the becoming of deep sea cetaceans. While becomings between beings "of totally different scales and kingdoms" may be far more exciting, the processes of evolution by selection and descent rely on a confrontation with that which is strange, even if this strangeness is at a molecular level. And, again, water is often (but not always) the mediator, or carrier-bag for these molecular transfections. Theories of lateral symbioses illustrate how the
"crossing of difference" necessary for gestation may involve bodies of difference species, even different forms of life, but other means of evolution do not discount this possibility, and may in fact thrive under its influence as well.
Interpermeation necessarily accompanies gestation, because gestation can never be a complete forsaking; its gifts are never entirely given. At the same time, then, as I
256 noted above, the gestated body never leaves her gestational habitat entirely behind. The differenc/tiated always carries a trace of her history, her indebtedness, enfolded in her own materiality. While on the one hand, the symbiotic interpermeation of "beings that have nothing in common" substantiates Deleuze and Guattari's claim that aparallel evolution has "nothing to do with filiation," on the other hand, it shows just the opposite.
We are, in fact, engaged in all sorts of unnatural kinships all the time. The beings with whom we have nothing in common are nonetheless connected to us, materially, and by entering into further gestational relationships or interpermeation, we can facilitate the further gestation and proliferation of other life. Moreover, the relationship between interpermeation and gestation can help us understand the way in which differenciation must also come into play here. Both lateral symbioses and gestation of species call on an exchange of water, but these exchanges are not symmetrical. Just as in the amniotic relation, where the membrane that separates the gestational body from the proliferating body of repetition and difference is an interval of passage whose flows in and out do not mirror each other, in evolutionary gestation the interpermeations seek out those directions, pathways, gifts, relinquishings and responses that will proliferate life. The very asymmetry of these relations and quests is what accounts for the necessary difference between the gestator and the gestated bodies, even as they remain materially interpermeated. Interpermeation never reduces bodies of water to indifference, but rather quite the opposite: it serves as our difference's safeguard.
257 IV: Conclusions, or: What can Evolution Teach us About an Ethics of Interbeing?
The examples we have described above invite us to consider how, through an interpermeation of our bodies of water, we can gestate and further proliferate life.
Moreover, both Hypersea and Donna Haraway's lateral becoming-dog show us how our understanding of interpermeation is also deepened by molecular evolutionism's reconfiguration of our kinships. If the water of our bodies is gestational not only for our own species' nascent elaborations, but also for the elaboration of species and forms of life indeed quite other to us, how does this ask us to reimagine our own responsibilities within a context of interbeing? It seems as though evolution can teach us about the importance of allowing an other to be as a radically material ethical position. While
Irigaray's descriptions of bodies of water in chapter two allowed us to begin articulating this, an evolutionary perspective imbues the cycles of gestation, difference, repetition and interpermeation that played out there with a specific material history.
For example, Hypersea suggests that as bodies of water we have the responsibility for the facilitation of entire worlds of life, undetectable by our molar subjectivities. Like the millipede, we are host to entire ecosystems, if not burrowed in our flesh or swimming in our rivers, then by extension, through our watery interpermeations with these other bodies and the bodies they harbour. But even as such worlds may live in or through us at the molecular level, our bodies of water also facilitate the opening up of our molar subjectivities towards this responsibility. Because our bodies of water are both molar and molecular at the same time, water can serve as a vital conduit not only of nutrients or
258 even affect, but of ethics and responsibility. We all live in a fragile web of interbeing whereby our survival and proliferation is dependent not only on "tolerance" or "letting one be," but on an active facilitation of intimacy, on a willingness to gestate another, perhaps not even of one's "own kind." An ethical call is inseparable from our materiality.
How might such an ethics, in which we are asked to sustain the onto-logic of amniotics, while drawing upon our molar-molecular materiality in order to proliferate other life, play out? What would it ask of us?
But in moving to consider what such interpermeating relations can teach us about our embodied potential for an ethics of interbeing, we must exercise caution. Again, let's take some examples from Hypersea to illustrate this necessity. We have already seen how the Hypersea theory shows up the countless ways in which bodies of water serve as productive, beneficial and necessary gestators of other life. The McMenamins in fact describe the "ultimate hypermarine community" as consisting of:
... a woody vascular plant, healthy and strong, but with lichenized animals and parasitic epiphytes in its branches and, for symmetry's sake, mycorrhized animals and colorless, parasitic plants attached to its roots. Hyperparasitic fungi cling to and penetrate both the fungi above ground and the mycorrhizal fungi below ground [...]. Metabolites from any one component flow freely between the living links in the system, and although at first glance many members of the consortium appear to be best with a heavy burden of hangers-on, in fact most of the parasites and especially the mycorrhizae make beneficial contributions to the core plant, contributions that tend to encourage perpetuation of the system as a whole. (233)140
Moreover, we have already discussed how Hypermarine communities such as these are not that far-fetched in terms of human bodies of water. As the McMenamins argue, our
259 human "bays and inlets of Hypersea" are host to many non-pathogenic parasites, such as the Demodicidae mite that lives in human hair follicles around nose and eyes (243), who play an integral role in the inter- and intra-corporeal habitats we host fully or in part.
Haraway, too, notes that "human gut tissue cannot develop normally without colonization by its bacterial flora" (2003: 32) which contributes importantly to the co-evolving histories of both humans and bacteria and, we should add, the potential life forms both hold latent.
But at the same time, our human gestation of other life cannot be naively posited as always beneficial for our own bodies, or even for the other bodies we gestate. Take for example the case of a six-year old orthodox Jewish boy who was stricken with seizure, rushed to hospital and diagnosed as having two Taenia solium-ox pork tapeworm-cysts in his brain, despite the fact that pork was never consumed by him or around him
(McMenamin and McMenamin 242-243). As it turns out, the boy was infected by tapeworm eggs deposited in the family's food by a housekeeper from Central America, the unwitting Hypermarine host to the tapeworm parasite. Luckily, the parasite was easily treated, but nonetheless, it is probably safe to assume that the boy would have rather foregone this particular interpermeation and service of gestation. Other invasive and less benign parasites include the parasitic flatworm that causes shistosomiasis
(McMenamin and McMenamin 244), and both the potentially deadly AIDS pathogen and
Marburg virus that are likely results of interspecies transfer of Hypersea fluid (249).
260 In fact, while examples like the rise and spread of HIV/AIDS point to the very real material effects of Hypermarine interspecies symbiosis and interpermeation in general (effects which are no less political, social, cultural and economic), they also highlight the difficulty of prescribing a program of behaviour or bodily being that would necessarily result in an ethics mutually beneficial for all bodies of water. One size hardly fits all. These ethics are not a categorical prescription for action. To my mind, the answer to this dilemma is not as facile as insisting on the decentring of a human subject perspective to such an extreme bioegalitarianism where "allowing the other of the AIDS virus to be," for example, should be considered an act of gestational ethics. Maybe this betrays an unwillingness to let go sufficiently of my own humanist sympathies, but perhaps further reflection on the onto-logic of amniotics can provide a better response to this dilemma.
The onto-logic of amniotics, as we have increasingly seen, reveals an interconnected balance between the processes of gestation (allowing another to be), differenc/tiation (the continued proliferation and growth both of oneself, and of others facilitated through gestation), and interpermeation (our necessary extensions and connections that are materially expressed through water, and which enable both gestation and differenc/tiation). These three aspects of the onto-logic do not exist separately, but are all expressed in a simultaneous material relation. Evolution stories, and the lived experiences of our bodies of water therein, I argue, can teach us that the balance of these relations is key. Perhaps not all bodies of water nourish or sustain this same relation, and
261 instead stretch this balanced onto-logic to an untenable limit. Interpermeation can create an opening or possibility of this ethics, but never its guarantee. l The way in which this lesson applies not only to various animal bodies of water, but also to geophysical and technological bodies of water will be the subject of further exploration in chapter five.
But there is another, subsequent, lesson to learn here, as well. Although interpermeation facilitates differenc/tiation, interpermeation does not trump difference.
Interpermeation and connectivity cannot overshadow the movement of difference, and the this-ness of specific bodies of water. Although our diffusion through Hypersea, or through our genealogical gifts and debts, opens us up to our responsibility towards beings with whom we perhaps have nothing in common, our various evolution stories also remind us that our own difference matters, and difference of others matters, too.
Moreover, this cannot be simply a question of differenciating our human selves from other life, for nor are our others an undifferentiated mass of matter. We must be more attentive to the difference of their difference, too, and to their own this-ness and way of being in the world. Their histories, and their latent potentialities matter a great deal, if we are going to nurture an ethics of interbeing. It matters to us if we host a dust mite, or HIV.
And it matters to a hungry bear if she meets a gun-toting human, or a salmon. The amniotic relation that can condition an ethics of interbeing is not a bipolar, bidirectional flow between humans and all other-than-human animals. As our descriptions of bodies of water keep imparting, this is a complex and interimplicated web of (re)cycling gestation, differenc/tiation and interpermeation. The layers of debt and gift expand and contract,
262 fold inside one another and constantly reinvent themselves. To enact an ethics of interbeing, then, requires reopening to this ethics in every interpermeation, in every molecular encounter. We need to ask: Who are you, this the body of water that is before me, of me, responsible for me, but also through me and thanks to me? How, where, and when are you as a body of water? What is your difference, and where are our moments of interpermeation? What will you teach me about myself, and what will I learn about you?
How can learning about our gestation of one another, our difference and our interpermeation allow me to be ethical to you, specifically? How can / allow you to be?
In the following chapter, I will begin to pose these questions to our "strange kin," the whales. By examining the Deleuzian notion of "becoming-cetacean" through our evolution stories, our specific relation to our watery milieu, and our latent virtuality in which we carry watery traces of our distant kin, I hope to offer more guidance on how the onto-logic of amniotics can help us negotiate our ontological and ethical relations to those bodies of water with whom we supposedly have "nothing in common."
263 As we leave the port, gliding by the ferry terminal, the sun is still warm on my bare shoulders and my legs slowly begin to take on the movement of the waves. The rhythms of my body gather the rhythms of their new situation. I enter a relation with this larger body
of water through my capacity to move, and its capacity to move me. My body ingests the molecular salts that hover here at the surface, and my skin accumulates a damp and sticky film, as though its insides were insidiously seeping through towards their outside.
As the landmass that launched us recedes and eventually disappears, my sense of proximal distance to the terrestrial ground that usually anchors me also dissipates, and my body gropes for new ways to recognize itself in the context of its world. With nothing much to see but the endless waves, the hegemony of the visible falters and instead my
body offers me more valuable tools: a sense of balance in the bull's eye of my body,
isometric muscular dexterity to maintain it, an epidermal thermometer to record the rapidly changing temperatures, a sense of smell that perceives the morphing molecular composition of the air to which my meagre eyes are certainly oblivious.
But soon we are half-way to The Basin, and the breeze intensifies, pulling away any
lingering heat from the now seemingly more distant sun. Soon gusts of wind whip around
the hull to travel inland. Out here Nova Scotia hovers somewhere in the future, New
Brunswick already a memory. It has taken us an hour to get here; the captain cuts the
264 motor. We wait. Not much time passes before she again tells us that joke—how a more
appropriate term for what we are doing is whale-waiting, not whale-watching.
When we at last see a fluke in the distance—and a blow!—we are all at once drunken
ants, scuttling over theforedeck, port to starboard and back again, each of us hoping for
the elusive thrill of being the first one to sight a new animal. The rocking rhythm in my gut is replaced by an urgent pang, a desperate angst over missing something. We are
aware that we are witnessing one of the most endangered species of cetacean in its
natural habitat. We are aware that in ten years, or even five, the waiting part might have
completely usurped the watching part.
We have been in The Basin for about twenty, maybe thirty minutes. I'm still keen to spot
another blow, but I am surprised to note that I am looking now more out of obligation to
an idea than in anticipation of any meaningful encounter. My mind thinks I should feel
elation, but my fingers are frozen, my neck stiff and my patience struggling. Quite frankly
I'm bored, and I'm ashamed to admit it. Am I not supposed to be feeling a sense of profound gratitude, admiration and awe towards these wondrous creatures—and all the
more so for their waning presence in these seas? I am so close to them. Where is my sense of interpermeation, or contact with my fishy beginnings?
265 The ship's deck all of a sudden seems glaringly terrestrial, a portable landmass to feel solid and steady below my feet. Standing here, binoculars stuck to face, I am not only dominated by my eyes, but reduced to them. Contact takes the form of a checkmark in a
book. I look out into the choppy, freezing water and I know that for all of my rhapsodizing about being water in water, I am not that close to these whales at all. Just about the last place I want to be is in that water, with those whales. From the surface these whales are but grey streaks of bulk, barely but necessarily visible between the greyish black of the breaking waves.
266 CHAPTER FOUR
Becoming-Cetacean: Whale-Bodiedness and Water,
At the Borders of the Liveable
I. Introduction: Moving Below the Surface
Many of us came out of the water, but some of us returned. Dry land was not all it was cracked up to be. The bulkiness, the weight, the cumbersome lumbering of dragging all this flesh around behind us, our buoyancies constantly thwarted, proved too unbearable for some bodies. Over 55 million years ago, some of us—whales, dolphins, porpoises—mutated into a cetaceous state, and even if it meant holding our breath for hours, for days, we would learn these tricks. Anything to return to our fishy beginnings.
But I wonder: Is this just another evolutionary story, or is this an experience of my own fishy beginnings, folded within my own watery flesh?
As we saw in the preceding chapter, evolution stories can provide us with knowledge that serves as a door onto new lines of exploration and inquiry, new ways of approaching problems and configuring meaning. These stories also provide footholds for exploring the rhizomatic connections of our molecular materiality—that is, those continuities to which Maxine Sheets-Johnstone alludes in her call for continental philosophers to pay attention to evolutionary science, the "forgetting" of where we come from that Grosz seeks to redress, and the material situatedness or embeddedness that both
267 Haraway and Braidotti insist upon, which we explored in the first section of chapter three. Such openings and footholds include: that all living beings require water for their
gestation; that all living matter is composed primarily of water; that sexual difference is a particularly rich means for proliferating life, but that the actualization of this difference
can and does take many forms; that with the terrestrial invasion of life this watery
gestation and watery embodiment demanded various inventions, such as the amniotic
egg, the tetrapod skin, big lungs and Hypermarine physical imbrications; that even in the absence of reproductive gestation, symbiogenesis calls on water to facilitate its transfections. Evolution stories can thus inaugurate new ways of thinking about our watery human embodiment, both in terms of our own specifically human capacity as bodies to affect and be affected by other bodies, as well as our historical and lateral
continuities with other-than-human bodies of water. Stories like these pull us out of the
limited and limiting comfort of our general human perspective and invite us to consider what we can learn when our perspective is stretched, shrunk, or dispersed. Evolution
stories challenge the "loose unity" of our human embodiment in order to see where our
own embodied molecularities, tugging at the limits of this unity, might fly.
Our evolution stories remind us with material urgency, moreover, that this proliferation of our molecular watery bodies does not only occur in space, but in time as well. The primordial soup from which we have all sprung still works its way through us
and our environments, as it seeks out new expressions in difference and repetition. As bodies of water we inevitably carry traces of bodies of water long past, just as we
268 incorporate the potential of bodies of water yet to come. Evolutionary perspectives help us understand our fishy beginnings as not only our actual historical continuities, but also as all of the potentialities that traced other evolutionary pathways through other watery bodies, but which nonetheless remain our virtual larvae, still folded into us, even as they differ in kind from our actualized bodies. These "fishy beginnings" include those first expressions of watery life themselves and their many proliferations that followed: marine invertebrates that still dwell in many ways unchanged in the deepest depths of the oceans; the multiplicities of fish that still populate the seas as well as those who ventured onto dry land; and those tetrapods who eventually returned to their watery habitats, temporarily or
(so far) permanently. From an evolutionary perspective, not only is water a gestational habitat, but all of the life forms that evolution has experimented with along the way are gestational too—that is, these life forms are facilitative of new life forms, as parts of a process whereby each new proliferation or singularization introduces a shift or a change for all potential outcomes. Because evolution is not teleological, each movement and every passage, each selection that distributes difference in a new way, each symbiotic transfer or random drift or environmental factor that favours some expression of life over another—these all unfold a constantly shifting network of potentialities.
But moreover, because we incorporate watery traces of these virtual fishy beginnings into ourselves, I propose that we can contact them, molecularly, to learn something deeper about our meaning and potentiality as human bodies of water, and the difference of other bodies of water. In other words, evolutionary knowledge should
269 reconfigure not only the ways we understand our embodiment cognitively, but also the ways in which we experience it at the molecular level. From a rhizo-phenomenological perspective, evolution stories can enable our establishment of connection, through our molecular modes of embodiment, to a material past or potentiality that is still accessible to our fleshy ways of being. Deep insight is gleaned not from reproducing the "facts" of
scientists, but from striving, through the materiality of our molecular consciousness, to
find a bodily empathy with this knowledge, and discern how this is meaningful. This
empathy is a sort of mutual "verification," but one premised on a resonance of
microperceptions rather than on agreement between representations of molar forms. For
example, if we look at a drawing of the marine life composed of corals, trilobites, worms
and other bottom-dwelling marine animals of the early Cambrian period some 600 million year ago, the sensations and movements of this aquatic biota do not make sense to us because we have cognitively processed the information conveyed by the artist; they make sense to us because our molecular bodies are still connected in non-cognitive ways to these forms of life. As Alphonso Lingis describes our human bodies, "they are coral reefs full of polyps, sponges, gorgonians, and free-swimming macrophages continually
stirred by monsoon climates of moist air, blood, and biles" (2000: 28). While Lingis's
language here, just as Suzuki's equation of our blood to seawater in the second epigraph to chapter three, takes part of its power from metaphor, neither description is mere metaphor. Or rather, if it is on some level a metaphor, this metaphor is only effective because it calls out a material resonance within us with that experience. If we were not
270 molecularly in touch with these experiences, the metaphor would hold no sway. We can verify this bodily empathy because we have enfolded the materiality of our watery bodies' virtuals inside us. We are materially connected to them, even though these larvae differ from us in kind.
My first task in this chapter is thus to show how our "fishy beginnings" are experienced, rhizo-phenomenologically, by and through our own watery embodiment. In the following pages I therefore revisit the notion of molecularity that I described as a mode of embodiment in chapter one, and I consider more specifically how accessing this mode of embodiment can serve as a door through which we can contact the virtuality of our embodied water and its most distant rhizomatic connections. This contact, I argue, can be understood in the context of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "becoming- animal," which I exemplify in rhizo-phenomenological descriptions of "becoming- cetacean." To lead into these descriptions, I first recount one story of cetacean evolution advocated primarily by Elaine Morgan in order to provide another opening through which we can consider our imbrications with our "strange kin," the whales.
When I then turn to describe our lived experiences of becoming-cetacean, however, the accounts I give (drawn from a variety of whale encounters) move perhaps surprisingly from a focus on our interpermeations to an account of the ultimate unknowability of our watery others. But rather than negating the experience of becoming- animal, I argue, this "beyond" is an integral aspect of becoming-animal. While becoming-animal brings us into a zone of relation, it does not (and should not) effect a
271 total disclosure of or coincidence with an other. Rather, becoming-animal asks us to
sojourn at edges of what we can withstand, so that we might learn something about both
ourselves and our animal others. Despite our interpermeation with other bodies of water
through evolutionary time and space, a deep understanding of our difference is
nonetheless necessary if we have any hope of ethically negotiating our own role within an
interimbricated web of watery bodies. Becoming-animal (perhaps counter-intuitively) helps safeguard this differentiation and an acknowledgement thereof.
Moreover, although the virtual potentiality of human embodiment is opened up through an investigation of our "companion speciesism" with marine mammals, I
conclude that our lived experience of becoming-cetacean also illuminates the importance
of the difference of specifically human bodies in terms of our topographical relation to water. Our bodies, as we have been stressing all along, are not discrete entities, but are
always embedded, and their meaning cannot be extracted and isolated from this context.
This embedding is historical, cultural, political, economic, but also topographical. Our bodies develop certain capacities in a co-evolution with the space they are in. An understanding of our differenciations, I thus argue, is closely linked to the fact that not all bodies of water are in water in the same way. We saw in the previous chapter the way in which water facilitates our interpermeations, but we also began to articulate there the way
in which water as a topographical force enables the cultivation of specific bodily
capacities. As I suggested, water is facilitative not only as an intensive morphogenetic
element within bodies, but also as an extensive or external force that creates for bodies
272 certain possibilities for life. In this present chapter, then, I want to carry these suggestions forward more explicitly by using rhizo-phenomenological descriptions of our interspecies imbrications and differentiations to examine water as a topography that demands and upholds our differentiation, but which for the same reasons also offers an opening to connect across and through this liminal zone. The situating of bodies in relation to water is never static, and certainly our bodies can learn to morph their own capacities to affect and be affected in relation to a watery topography. But such transformations are seldom easy, and often come at a cost, with a risk, and are fraught with uncertainty. Such transformations—evolutions, involutions—require sojourn at "the borders of the liveable." In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze invokes this phrase, "the borders of the liveable," to help illustrate the process of evolution that he argues moves from a virtual subject (the egg or larva) to actualization. I pick up on this phrase here as a means of bringing together the idea of our embodied virtuality, our evolutionary connectedness across species, becoming-cetacean and the proliferation of new modes of life. As I illustrate, the molecular contact of becoming-animal requires that we venture to the borders of the liveable that are materially determined by our bodily capacities in relation to water. While these border zones necessarily disrupt our comfortable bodily habits, this very disruption provides an opening to learn to live differently, and to learn to live with difference.
As I conclude in the closing pages of this chapter, this opening means that becoming-cetacean is not only a disruption of an ontology of embodiment, nor even only
273 a process of connecting and amplifying our own evolutionary virtuality; becoming- cetacean also constitutes a threshold of ethical response. It is an ethical call to negotiate our interbeing with other bodies on this planet. We have an obligation to meet our others and acknowledge the unknowability of their otherness, to gestate the proliferation of life other than our own, even as the molecularity of our different bodies intertwines. But to respond to this call we first need to hear it, and thus we are again called below the surface, to the borders of the liveable.
II. Molecularity and Our Watery Animal Becomings
Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming-animal, I will first argue, provides a useful bridge for bringing together two ways in which evolution stories can help us understand the onto-logic of amniotics. First, an understanding of becoming-animal as a concept can help describe and map our evolutionary fishy beginnings in terms of their actual/virtual connections to our own bodies of water, but secondly, understanding how we live becoming-animal as a process can also assist us in contacting and amplifying our molecularly lived connections to our fishy beginnings.
Becoming-animal is a specific form of the molecular becomings I described in chapter one and of the symbiotic becomings described in chapter three. Like all other becomings, becoming-animal produces nothing but itself—that is, the becoming itself is real. This is why, according to Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-animal must not be confused with the totemic or archetypal deployment of animals in order to represent or
274 explain human behaviour, nor with any other way in which a human-becoming-animal is used as a metaphor or symbol for something else (1987: 235-237). Although an
identification with an animal or the imitation of an animal can inform the process of becoming-animal, of paramount importance for Deleuze and Guattari is that the becoming-animal itself be real (1987: 238).
Yet at the same time, a human does not "really" or literally become an animal
such that no human would remain. For example, if you "become dog" by barking,
Deleuze and Guattari tell us, it is not the identitarian concept—the molar or "signified" dog—that you become. Rather, if barking is "done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog" (275). The dog inside you wells up. Your barking brings your molecules into contact with the canine. In fact, like all other molecular becomings, becoming-animal is communicative and contagious (272-275). It works according to a logic of infection, whereby human molecularity and animal molecularity collide in each other's zones of proximity. Two bodies encounter each other, resulting in a productive contamination whereby something new can emerge. Even though humans do not "really" become animals, a block of becoming forms between the human and animal, where their molecularities mix—this is what is "real." In this sense, becoming-animal is never a teleological process, where human has a goal to "be" ultimately animal. Becoming-animal is instead part of a spectrum of becomings, and as
such is always a multiplicity. It continually transforms itself along a string of other multiplicities, according to those thresholds or doors that the becoming encounters (249).
275 Whatever the animal or human "becomes," this is not the accomplishment of the becoming as a final destination, but rather one of these doors or thresholds that can open to a further becoming. And moreover, becoming-animal is always a double movement: it affects the animal as much as the human (305). Becoming itself is a third term—an interval—that exerts this transformative force. It is a force of relation. We recall from my discussions in chapter one the ways in which the Deleuzian understanding of the intensive and Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the chiasm both introduce the notion of interval that serves as both a conduit for interconnection, and also a membrane that insists upon differentiation. These same concepts apply in becoming-animal.
Deleuze and Guattari's notion of becoming-animal is thus useful for understanding our evolutionary becomings in two important ways. On the one hand, becoming-animal is a relation. It articulates the "always-already" material-molecular flows between bodies that can account for both their differenciation and interconnection.
The mapping of evolutionary flows between bodies through processes of individuation and symbiogenesis, as we explored in the previous chapter, is thus one way of understanding becoming-animal. Even though Deleuze and Guattari explicitly state that becoming-animal is not an evolutionary descent, but rather an "involution" of
"contagion," as we already discussed in chapter three, a molecular evolutionist reading of
Darwinian descent as individuation, such as Deleuze provides in Difference and
Repetition, can also be appreciated as a sort of becoming-animal in terms of the intensive forces that must work upon the embryo or larva in order for it to differenciate, or to
276 become. On the other hand, however, becoming-animal can also be a process whereby we
not only map these connections through our evolutionary stories, but rather activate them
through a molecular comixing. This is where the transformatory potential of becoming-
animal is strongest. Our molecular minglings serve as an opening or threshold to
destratification, desedimentation and desubjectification of our molar selves, and of our
molar understandings of the animals with whom we "become."
And again, I argue, that like other Deleuzian concepts we have discussed (for
example, the torsions and movements of the embryonic egg), the transformation
engendered by becoming-animal is necessarily lived. "To emit a molecular dog" means to
access some mode of our molecular embodiment—a growling hunger within our
viscerality, a dejected whimper in our affectivity, even if such growls or whimpers are never actually emitted. Such molecularity extends beyond or below our cognitive,
rational, subjectified modes of living and connects to the molecularity of the barking dog.
This is no alchemy, for the becoming happens in between. There is no ultimate
coincidence of man and dog; difference is retained and even facilitated by the becoming.
But this event is nonetheless lived by our molecular bodies, despite interpretations of
Deleuzian rhizomatics that might suggest otherwise (see chapter one).
And again, a turn towards the embodied phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty helps
clarify the way in which becoming-animal can be understood in terms of lived
experience. Despite Deleuze's concern that phenomenology remains wed to a solipsistic humanism, we can in fact locate in Merleau-Ponty explicit reference to the
277 intercorporeity of human and other-than-human animals that arguably circumvents the problem of human ontological privilege or exceptionalism. Notably, in the Nature lectures, as part of his broader lifework of producing a phenomenology of lived embodiment, Merleau-Ponty argues for the "strange kinship" (271) shared by humans and (other) animals on the basis of their common lived embodiment, and not on the basis of evolution //"this evolution is understood as teleological completion and descent into the human. Like a Deleuzian becoming-animal, Merleau-Ponty argues "that the relation between the human and animality is not a hierarchical relation, but lateral, an overcoming that does not abolish kinship" (268, my emphasis). We can learn something about human embodiment from these "strange kinships," argues Merleau-Ponty, because our bodies share modes of living, modes of embodiment, with other animal bodies. He calls this an "interanimality" or an "intercorporeity in the biosphere with all animality"
(268). And, just as Deleuze notes that the human does not "really" become the barking dog, Merleau-Ponty underlines the point that even in her interanimality, the human also remains "properly human" (268). Such "strange kinships" that we live do not come at the expense of our lived differentiation.142
We live this concept of becoming-animal, or interanimality, in our own flesh, blood and bones and, as I will argue, most certainly in our bodies of water. Moreover, as
I argued in chapter one, our experiences of lived embodiment, such as our becomings- animal, can be more deeply understood through rhizo-phenomenological description.
Alphonso Lingis has already begun to describe various ways in which becoming-animal
278 enriches a phenomenological understanding of our own embodiment. In his book
Dangerous Emotions, Lingis discusses two specific modes of human embodiment in terms of human-animal symbioses. The first of these is our affective bodies. Animal emotions, Lingis suggests, make our feelings intelligible; seeing our emotions in animals affirms their reality (35). He describes, for example, how "it is when we see [...] the mother elephant carrying her calf in grief for three days that we believe in the reality of maternal love" and "[i]t is the bull in the corrida that convinces us of the natural reality of fearlessness" (36). Yet, while I agree with Lingis's positing of an intercorporeal connective affectivity between human and other animals, I dispute his emphasis of the ocular vector ("it is when we see...'"). Becoming-animal as lived experience here requires the solicitation of a molecular affective connection, which might be facilitated by seeing, but it can similarly come from listening to the animal weep or rage, or from feeling her body's shudders or tremors beneath our tentative hand. In fact, the very moving beyond a primarily ocularcentric relation to our animal others and the opening of our other embodied molecular vectors should deepen the experience of becoming animal, as it disrupts (for seeing humans at least) our most comfortable and sedimented ways of knowing ourselves in relation to others and the world.143 For these reasons Lingis's descriptions of our becoming-animal through an engagement of our motile bodies are more convincing. He suggests that our motor bodies engage in a symbiosis with animals: we ebb and flow with the rhythms and speeds of animal movements, which in turn initiate our own movements. We "become animal" as "our legs plod with elephantine
279 torpor," or "as our hands swing with penguin vivacity, our fingers drum with nuthatch insistence" (29). He notes that while human subjects live under the illusion of goal- oriented movement, most of our movements are not purposive at all, but rather are called out of us by the simple animal urge to move. Both our emotions and our movements are a response to the animal, vegetable, meteorological emotions and movements of which we are a part. Such assertions resonate strongly with Merleau-Ponty's descriptions of intercorporeity and interanimality whereby both human and other animal being are variant "folds within the world's flesh" (Toadvine 2007: 52).
Becoming-animal, for Lingis, however, is equally Deleuzian, as he emphasizes this experience as a reverberation through our bodily molecularity. As Lingis writes, we find animal affectivity and movement so mesmerizing because what is fascinated in us are our inherent "multiplicities." For Lingis, these multiplicities are expressed equally in the "the pulses of solar energy momentarily held and refracted in our crystalline cells" and "the microorganic movements and intensities in the currents of our inner coral reefs"
(2000: 28). Our molecularity—not as metaphor, not as scientific reduction, not as speculation, but rather as a modality of our lived embodiment—is the underlying enabler of these symbiotic motions and emotions. Lingis's phenomenology of the myriad ways in which we "become animal" stresses that these becomings are the amplification of an event the potential of which we already hold, as part of our molecular embodiment. If becoming animal is ever "triggered" by the actual presence of the animal (as both
Deleuze and Guattari, and Merleau-Ponty, would agree), Lingis insists this is not because
280 we want to imitate, but because this animal is an evocation, a beckoning, or even an agent
of combustion with our own molecularity. This swarming, this intensity from which our bodies are made, is what is called forth in such encounters. Lingis's work thus provides a helpful bridge for connecting the molecularity of becoming-animal that Deleuze and
Guattari describe to the lived human embodiment that Merleau-Ponty theorizes in his descriptions of the body's various interconnected modalities, his ontology of the chiasm, and his concepts of "interanimality" and "intercorporeity."144
Lingis describes for us how animals call something out of us, something often hidden by the cognitive, rational, concrete, inorganic overload of our Western existence.
In the experience of sex, for example, we activate and access the animal body that is in us, that is us, such that in our lustful movements and emotions "the ego loses its focus as center of evaluations, decisions, and initiatives. Our impulses, our passions, are returned to animal irresponsibility" (2000: 38). Here we also glimpse how, like Deleuze, Lingis
emphasizes the critical consequences such amplifications might have for our philosophical paradigms governing subjectivity, embodiment and ontology more generally. Lingis's phenomenology affirms that the idea of a subject-self, discretely bound by the form of its body, is only a temporary fiction. Just because "we" take the
form of "bodies," claims Lingis, we should not assume that this form is what gives us
singularity or individuation. Just as a fog or a swarm, he notes, retains individuality without being a subject, we humans also retain this singularity in our molecular compositions and interactions. As molecular multitudes we certainly pause within
281 subjectivity as a convenient place from which to undertake human subjectified
endeavours, but we should be wary of using this ephemeral cognitive composition as an
ontological justification for superiority or privilege. Hence just as Deleuze and Guattari's
descriptions carry with them both implicit and explicit calls to action ("Make rhizomes!"
"Experiment!"), so does Lingis implore us to learn something from our animal
symbioses: "Let us see through the simple-mindedness that conceives of the activities of
[the body's] parts as functionally integrated and conceives it as a discrete unit of life"
(2000: 28).
Moreover, in Lingis's rhizo-phenomenologies we are introduced to the ways in which our bodies of water, specifically, are significant in terms of both accessing and
activating our various becomings-animal. For example, in describing the ways in which
animal emotions and movements inform our own experiences of eroticism, Lingis notes how our liquid and fluvial viscosity can enable this desubjectification, this activation of
our animal becomings: "Our muscular and vertebrate bodies transubstantiate into ooze,
slime, mammalian sweat, and reptilian secretions, into minute tadpoles and releases of hot moist breath nourishing the floating microorganisms of the night air" (2000: 38).
Without such "mechanics of fluids," as Irigaray would say, this dissolution of barriers and intermingling of bodies could not occur. Our watery bodies can serve as the soupy gestational matter for our material passions, and can invite a mingling of these passions in such a way that the discreteness of our individualized bodies fades. Our watery bodies can violate barriers without dismantling them altogether. And importantly, Lingis's
282 descriptions do not insist that this "intermingling" of bodies is necessarily between one's
own and a sexual partner's. While we can leak beyond the boundaries of our molar bodies, this transubstantiation of bodies into viscous ooze is also a marker of the
mingling of our bodies with those potential bodies of water that we have folded into our
own flesh—those fishy, watery beginnings that we carry with us as material, vestigial potentiality. Our ooze thus also permeates the barrier between our molecular and molar planes, between our subjectivized selves and the various lines of flight that teem below
our own material surfaces. A "solitary" erotic encounter, in other words, is always a
multiplicity. It is (at least) just as doubled, and certainly just as wet.
Lingis's descriptions of our becomings-animal also illuminate the importance of
our watery topographies. Although our wetness can activate our animal becomings, our
relation to water and other watery beings also reminds us of our difference. For example,
Lingis notes how "the tedium of the bodies we had to evolve when we left the ocean"
evokes an empathy for dolphins and whales, who have returned to their watery homes:
A hundred seventy pounds, of salty brine mostly, in an unshapely sack of skin: what a clumsy weight to have to transport out on bony legs! [...] When we return to the ocean, we have to pull a layer of rubber skin over our bodies, strap on a buoyancy compensator, an air tank with regulator and gauges, weight belt, eye mask, and flippers. And then how ludicrous we look when we lurch our bodies equipped with all these prosthetic organs out of the dive shop and wade with flippered feet across the beach till we reach deep water! In the deep, all these supplementary organs make our species-organs non-functional. We abandon our upright posture that we long ago evolved in order to free our hands for grasping, taking, manufacturing and expressing. The swim-strokes we trained into our bodies to move across the surface of the water are useless underwater; we fold our hands under us so as not to stir up the sand in front of our eyes. (32)
283 Lingis, in other words, suggests that our becoming-animal is not necessarily thwarted by differences of watery topography, but rather that this topographical differentiator can only be appreciated because we are also connected. "We can certainly understand the dolphins and the whales" (2000: 32, my emphasis), writes Lingis, in their decision to forgo a terrestrial existence. We only experience the awkward inappropriateness of our human organs for the watery deep because enfolded in our own materiality is the virtual potential to breathe only intermittently, to dive to unimaginable depths, to communicate wordlessly through echoes with our kin, wandering as an "overlapping network linked through a transparent ocean."145 We find an empathy with our strange kin in and through our embodied difference. Zimmer notes that "we think of what we are, what we have become with our souls and words, but we don't think much about what we gave up along the way" (169). In exploring our affective and motor interpermeations with animals and our invention of technological prostheses ostensibly to help bridge the gap between us and them (a point to which I return below), Lingis suggests that even if we don't "think" much about these losses, we certainly grieve them, in both the inadequacies and dormant capacities that materially comprise our watery flesh. Water, as a larger topographical body, situates animal bodies of water in different ways, calling out our specifically differentiated capacities and challenging our deficiencies. Our different capacities in relation to a watery topography do not impermeably contain us in discrete isolation from one another, but they do inaugurate a border beyond which travelling proves fatal. We
284 know that in becoming-animal, to destratify too far results only in annihilation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 270).
In the subsequent sections of this chapter, I want to bring us to this border zone to examine it not only as a threatening precipice, but also as an opening towards living differently, and living with others differently. Ultimately, I wish to show how risking ourselves at the borders of the liveable is necessary to sustain an onto-logic of amniotics, and to engage in the proliferation of other life that this onto-logic asks of us. Before turning to the rhizo-phenomenologies that tease out this proposition, however, I will unfold a brief conversation of cetacean evolution stories in order to generate a broader opening for the subsequent experiences of becoming-cetacean I describe.
III. (Making) Whale Tracks146
When Darwin was writing his theories of evolution, the origin stories of whales were something of a mystery, although he did speculate that a "race of bears" could have conceivably evolved into whales. While his speculations were for the most part laughed right out of subsequent printings of On the Origin of Species,U1 we now think that
Darwin's suggestion was not as ludicrous as it once sounded. As one story tells it, whales are likely descended from a common terrestrial tetrapod ancestor known as the
Mesonychid: a meat-eating wolf-like ungulate that lived about 65 million years ago. But as Zimmer notes, Mesonychids were slightly "anatomically confused," given their environment, diet and job in life. They had a taste for meat, but their stiff back did not let
285 them run down prey. Instead they likely scavenged the bones of others' kills, or snapped with their snouts at turtles and the odd fish in the shallows near their homes. As a result, they soon developed rudimentary swimming abilities, and better teeth for hooking their aquatic prey. Another hot-off-the-presses story tells a slightly different variation: The closest known terrestrial relative to the whale was in fact Indohyus, a fox-sized deer-like land mammal that did not actually like meat at all, and rather spent long amounts of time in the water in order to avoid becoming someone else's dinner. Eventually, with not a lot of other choice at hand, Indohyus developed a taste for fish, and for a more aquatic lifestyle all around.148 In either case, these land-dwellers eventually learned to swim deeper, their legs grew shorter, their feet grew webbing, and they became part of a genealogy of whales. Each of these earliest whales—Pakicetus, Ambulocetus,
Rodhocetus, Takracetus, Gaviocetus, Dalanistes—honed its own specialities. Walking and swimming whales lived side by side. Some persevered, some did not, for reasons which are not altogether clear (recalling, of course, that descent is not teleological, or predictable, or singly-purposed, and is interrupted by all sorts of aleatory points, extrinsic factors and cross-fertilizations). The walkers died out, and by about 40 million years ago, for the first time whales were thriving without any terrestrial outcrop to cling to. They had officially changed their mailing address.
Given their terrestrial sojourn and their mammalian physiology, as Lingis notes, we should hardly be surprised with our empathy for the return of cetaceans to the sea.
While commonplace evolution stories associate us hominids most closely with our
286 primate kin, we in fact share considerable bodily connectivity to whales and other cetaceans.149 We both have lungs that breathe air, and giant brains wrinkled with neocortex. We both function best when our bodies are about 98 degrees Fahrenheit. We both survived infancy on a diet of our mothers' milk. Peel back the blubber of a cetacean's fin and you will see something not unlike our own human hands: five fingers, a wrist, an elbow, a shoulder. We are both social animals. We both gestate our babies within our own watery wombs, and then spend inordinate amounts of time training our young for life without us. In terms of what humans consider smarts, the Brazilian river dolphin leads the cetacean pod as our closest runner-up, with other primates an only somewhat distant second.150
Our own human evolution stories may help explain these affinities with creatures who are in fact more similar to us than they are to fish in an aquarium. In the 1960's, Sir
Alister Hardy offered a theory for the evolution of humans that was subsequently picked up by Elaine Morgan and developed into the so-called "Aquatic Ape theory." As
Morgan's theory suggests, the siren song that beckoned the great whale's return to the sea is folded into the molecularity of our own human watery flesh, as part of our paths not taken. Most commonly accepted theories of human evolution revolve around something called the "Savannah theory," whereby forest-dwelling apes literally "came down from the trees" due to major climatic changes that resulted in the dwindling of the massive
African forests. On the propagating savannah, where a vegetarian diet was more difficult to accommodate, these apes become plains-dwelling hunters. They learned to run on two
287 legs and use tools or weapons. They eventually became "Man." Morgan, however, was sceptical of this theory for more reason than one. Not least by considering more carefully the place of females in the descent from ape to hominid, Morgan began to develop her own evolution story, suggesting that something else needed to explain the differences between humans and existing apes, which seemed strange, given our exceptionally close genetic alliances as primates. These differences include structural differences in our skeletons, muscles, skin and brains; differences in posture and locomotion; differences in social organization; and differences in capacity for speech and intellect. Other not easily explained human departures from our primate kin include a naked foetus, a hairless human adult (who nonetheless maintains a strange wealth of head hair), large deposits of subcutaneous fat, a tendency towards face-to-face copulation, and not least, innate diving reflexes and swimming infants. None of these traits is very ape-like.
Morgan thus tells a different story. During the period of the gap in the human history fossil record, she notes, large swathes of the African continent were flooded by seas. During this time, Morgan hypothesizes, some apes did indeed come down from the trees, but became not hunters of the savannah, but semi-aquatic coastal dwellers. They spent their days diving and swimming, and living along the pebbly shores of these vast bodies of water. Later, when the seas receded, they returned to their former terrestrial address, but remarkably changed for the experience. Perhaps this ape lost its hair, because like the whale, she needed to stay warm in the water, and thus opted instead for a nice cushion of subcutaneous insulation. Perhaps she nonetheless held on to her thick tresses
288 (allowing it in fact to grow thicker during pregnancy) so that her infant would have somewhere to cling while they paddled about together in the sea. Perhaps in water, where scent signals lose their usefulness and subtle visual cues are obscured, this ape needed to find her voice. Perhaps like all other sea mammals, thwarted by gravitational challenges, she developed a tendency to have sex face to face, clinging to her partner. Perhaps while navigating the seas she developed her fine sense of balance in an upright, bipedal position. Perhaps this predilection to stand on her own two feet came instinctively when she first waded, tentatively, into the increasingly deep water.
While thanks to a massive fossil record gap, neither the Aquatic Ape theory nor the Savannah theory can be irrefutably proven, Morgan maintains that the Aquatic Ape theory simply makes more sense. It requires fewer stretches of the imagination, fewer instances of convoluted logic, and in fact could even reside beside the Savannah theory as a gap-stopping complement. While her theories were initially the subject of considerable scorn within the scientific community, more recently evolutionary biologists have been returning to the Aquatic Ape theory with keen interest (while others, of course, remain fervent detractors).151
I suggest that evolution stories in general, and Morgan's account of our aquatic ape history in particular, can serve as a threshold for considering more closely our own interpermeations with our cetacean others, and the various aspects of our own becoming- cetacean. We have already discussed at considerable length in chapter three the ways in which other species prior to us in time in the evolutionary scale of things are in fact
289 bodies of water that allow our own bodies to be; in their material gifts to us they participate in the onto-logic of amniotics whereby they gestate us, promote our own
differenc/tiation, while at the same time remaining materially imbricated with us. We fold traces of their watery materiality into our own watery bodies, as our own virtual watery potential. We literally carry our would-have-been's around as part of our own actuality,
and this molecular interpermeation serves as a zone of potentiality for contact and
amplification of our cetacean becomings. In such becomings, I argue, we can come to understand better our own animal affectivity and movement, as Lingis suggests, at the
same time as this allows us to understand better our own subjectivity, both molar and
molecular. Moreover, as Deleuze and Guattari's notion of becoming-animal proposes, in the contact and amplification of our becoming-cetacean, the whale is no less affected.
What, then, can we learn about whales, in both their similarities to and differences from
our own watery bodies, in our becomings-cetacean? How might this help us move towards an ethics of interbeing with whales and other bodies of water?
Jacques-Yves Cousteau was one among the first oceanographers of the West to
experience whales in their natural habitat. In his accounts of these expeditions from the
late 1960s, we find not only scientific observations, but also rich records of his and his crew's bodily experiences of being with whales, both on the boat and in the water, as well as surprisingly deep and ontologically significant reflections on both human bodied-ness and whale bodied-ness spawned by these encounters. At the same time, Niki Caro's 2003 critically acclaimed film Whale Rider, about the Whangara Maori community in northern
290 New Zealand, offers a subtly resonating account of whale encounters, and the ways in which the lives and bodies of whales and humans may be mutually implicated. Another account of cetacean encounters comes from Carl Zimmer's rich descriptions of the life of whales, on both an individual and evolutionary scale. My own successes and failures at contacting and amplifying my latent whale-bodiedness are subtly woven throughout all of these tales. Together, I propose, these accounts offer different glimpses of becoming- whale and of what these experiences can teach us about embodiment (both whale and human) and its potential for an ethics of interbeing.
IV. Whale Encounters, Adrift at Sea
In A Thousand Plateaus, one of the preeminent examples that Deleuze and
Guattari choose to illustrate the concept of becoming-animal is the figure of Ahab, the mariner from Melville's Moby Dick. Ahab, they claim, enters into a pact with Moby
Dick, whereby the man relinquishes the rhythms of the mariner and enters into the rhythms of the animal, and the two begin their dance of becoming-whale. Ahab, it turns out, becomes the example of relinquishing one's subjectivity too much, as he follows the whale's line of flight into annihilation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 243-245, 248-250).
Tamsin Lorraine elaborates this example in her essay, "Ahab and Becoming-Whale: The
Nomadic Subject in Smooth Space" (2005). In both Deleuze and Guattari's account, as well as Lorraine's commentary, Ahab is described as becoming-animal from the deck of his ship, where he enters into the smooth space of the whale and wide-open sea.
291 In 2008, however, both the practices of whaling and the circumstances that contextualize these practices have radically shifted. Having transformed from the perilous and intimate nineteenth century dance that Melville describes, into a twentieth century industrial-scale business, huge factory ships with bow-mounted canons came perilously close to depleting the oceans' stocks of many cetacean species, such as right whales and blue whales. Commercial whaling was eventually banned by International Whaling
Commission in the 1980s (Glavin 162-164).152 Yet the near-disappearance of whaling has not been matched by the disappearance of an opening, such as Ahab's, for becoming- whale.153 I would like to propose that Jacques-Yves Cousteau's 1960s whale-tracking expeditions can be seen as a more contemporary version of the nineteenth century
Nantucket whalers' expeditions. Like the whalers, Cousteau's crew had no predetermined route, but rather entered into a smooth space governed not by longitude and latitude, but by the movement of the whales, which dictated their own. Both required a melding of the vessel's journey into the molecularity of the whale's (Lorraine 2005: 167; Cousteau 16,
69, 85-86). Moreover, both journeys were perilous. Lorraine, for instance, notes
Melville's careful attention to the risky nature of whaling, where "one false move at any point along the way means death to the men involved," (167), while Cousteau similarly notes that in order to obtain knowledge, it was "necessary for us to tempt fate, to take chances, to run risks" (15). While the whalers marked their days in terms of whales caught, Cousteau's crew's days were marked by whales sighted, tracked, photographed.
But the trading-in of the harpoon for the camera was not the only relevant shift from one
292 experience to the other. As I will argue, in order to become-whale, in order to sufficiently destratify one's human molecularity and amplify the whale-bodied potential within oneself, in order to recognize within this watery co-imbricating virtuality a difference that cannot be fully known, one must venture to "the borders of the liveable" (Deleuze 1994:
118). For Ahab and his fellow whalers, to be in an often unsound wooden boat with no mayday safety net, no GPS signal, no water survival skills and no land in sight, was already to be on the precipice of the liveable. Concomitantly, to be thrown from their vessel, adrift at sea, already meant for the whalers certain annihilation. For Cousteau and his oceanographers, however, with their diving gear, life boats, and radio communications, the meaning of the boat's topography in relation to their human bodily capacities inevitably shifted. The precipice of the liveable came to be located elsewhere.
This precipice, and its meaning, will be the focus of my descriptions below.
Most striking in Jacques Cousteau's accounts of his first whale expeditions in the
1960s that circumnavigated the globe in order to learn about whales in their natural habitat, is the profoundly ambivalent, at times almost contradictory, reaction that he and his crew describe in their encounters with whales. What one first notices in reading these accounts is that in all of the descriptions of the whales that Cousteau records from the vantage point of the pseudo-terrestrial deck of his ship, there is no sense of wonder, pain, desolation or other intense emotion. From the safety and the comfort of the vessel, the whales remain scientific objects for the crew. They are creatures to be observed, photographed, tracked, measured, studied (in ways that would certainly make animal
293 welfare advocates cringe, no less). From the ship, the whales are encountered with relative ease and comfort.
This complacency should not be surprising, for on deck, we are still within our own element, living according to our own structures of human embodiment. From the surface we see only easily cognized pieces of the animal—a sliver of back, a flick of a fluke. "On the surface," writes Cousteau, the whales "were acceptable by human standards, because we could see only a part of their bodies" (38). Their this-ness, their whale-ness, could easily be reduced and computed by our molarized, cognitive faculties without disturbing our comfortable sense of our own human-bodiedness. From the surface, the problem is not that we cannot fathom the life that teems below, but in fact quite the opposite: we can fathom this life, but too easily. We "fathom" it only in a reductive, compartmentalized, objectifying way that fits our own scale, rather than attempting to broach theirs. Contact across our molecularities is elusive. So too, then, is becoming-animal. The topography of the decks of these particular ships is far too comfortable to open to any significant destratification.
But upon entering the whale's own habitat, our bodies locate a key threshold for becoming-whale. "Approaching a whale beneath the surface of the water—that is, while diving—is very different from doing so on the surface," (59) writes Cousteau's son,
Philippe. In fact, as all of Cousteau's crew seem to agree, "the first sight of a whale in the water is terrifying" (39). The body of the whale is so immense, the scale so completely unlike any terrestrial animal encounter, that the divers are overcome with terror. As their
294 descriptions of these terrifying encounters reveal, our embodiment is so completely unhabituated to encounters with such large living beings that we recoil in fright, no doubt brought on by the sheer unfamiliarity of the situation. Adrift in the sea, in an environment
that is the whales' and not ours, that is proportionate to the whales' bulk, speed and
capabilities, and not ours, we have no familiar world in which to anchor our body.
Already our molarized, subjectivized understanding of ourselves is thrown overboard: we
ourselves no longer have a raft, or a subjectivized self, to cling to.
The terror, however, shifts to awe and respect, as one watches the creatures steam through the water with incredible grace, strength and assurance. Having overcome the
initial discombobulation, for example, Philippe Cousteau describes the way his whale
encounters tended to leave him hijacked by the "hydrodynamic perfection of [the
animal's] power, by its invincibility." He describes how the first time he encountered a
grey whale, he jumped immediately into the water with it, forgetting his diving gear, and
landed practically on top of the animal. Philippe cannot clearly convey the experience of being in the water with that whale—it is as though the experience escapes his cognitive,
organizing faculties—but he does know that when he returned to the water with his
artificial organs and mechanical eyes, whatever spell was there had been broken. "I had to worry about the camera, about angles, about my breathing equipment," he recounts; "I
could no longer give myself over entirely to the feeling of admiration. But, for a brief
time there, it had seemed that whale and I had reached a perfect understanding" (59). He
continues: "[W]henever we approach a whale in his own element, without such apparatus
295 and equipment, we experience a feeling of understanding, or sympathy, or empathy" (60).
We recall that Lingis, in describing our empathy for our whale-kin's return to the sea, noted that in order to follow her there we need to don "prosthetic organs" that would
"make our own species-organs non-functional" (2000: 32). Although we do so in the attempt to bridge the distance between our bodily capacities and those of our aquatic others, and thus bring us into closer contact with them, Cousteau's account suggests to us that the attempt to annul our differences also dulls the potential for becoming. Yet, we also know that prosthetics can enhance our bodily capacities, and invite our bodies into new and extended enfoldings with our environments. Prosthetics can be understood as
"an opening up of actions that may not have been possible before, the creation of new bodily behaviours, qualities, or abilities." So why is it that Philippe's "prosthetics" only distance him further from the whale, even as they presumably bring his bodily capacities more in line with the cetacean's? What is it, then, about the connection that
Philippe has to the whale, without these bodily extensions, that has such an effect on him?
I propose that Philippe's embodied descriptions of his relation to the whales suggest to us that in order to become-cetacean, our shared watery embodiment is not enough; the way we are in water is significant too. In order to become-animal, we need water, and the risk it brings, the line of flight straight out of our habituated and comfortable terrestrial spaces. In these watery encounters, as we broach the topographical threshold that separates us from the whales, we can evolve beyond our molarized,
296 subjectivized borders. And, perhaps this is what Deleuze means when he tells us that
"Evolution does not take place in the open air, and only the involuted evolve" (1994:
118). Evolution, which is essentially this pulling and stretching of materiality beyond its molarized metastability, requires a situation that will provoke such a metamorphosis.
Becoming-animal, with its micro-evolutions, or involutions, pulls us beyond the comfort of our sedimented selves, either in terror, or in intense communion and affective exchange. Only here can we open up to the interpermeations that otherwise are blocked by our subjectivized selves. As these accounts reveal to us, technological prosthetics such as cameras or diving equipment only serve as barriers, because they are in fact a stop-gap measure against the encroaching border zones of the liveable. As such, they can impede the exhilaration and sheer wonder of becoming-whale. 55 Philippe achieves becoming- animal by flinging himself into the water, with this gigantic and terrifying creature, despite the risk it brings. Here, "at the borders of the liveable" we can contact our own cetaceous potentiality, even if we can only briefly withstand it, and then only just barely.
In these "barely liveable" zones, we can amplify our whale-ness, their material evolutionary gift to us, enfolded into our own bodies as latent expressions of our own virtuality. In order to open up to these interpermeations, we must put ourselves into a zone of vulnerability, discomfort and unfamiliarity. This is how, and where, an evolution, or an involution, can transpire. We must situate ourselves at these borders of the liveable, where the pressure challenges our lungs and our cognitive grip on ourselves falters. We can only evolve "under conditions beyond which it would entail the death of any well-
297 constituted subject" (Deleuze 1994: 118). Braidotti (2006a) provides a similar analysis of the borders of the liveable in her discussion of becoming-imperceptible as a mode of life.
Here, she argues that becoming to the nth degree means approaching the limit of what our life as Bios (intelligent life) can withstand. Giving ourselves over to Zoe (prediscursive bodily life) requires "accelerations or increased intensities" which cause "intense strain, psychic unrest and nervous tension"—i.e., a discomfort "most humans prefer to avoid"
(139). These accelerations and intensities are what can proliferate life and pull it beyond its status quo. I am suggesting here that for humans, our relation to a watery topography is one particularly intense zone for such accelerations. Despite all of the ways in which we feel a deep affinity for water, and in fact depend on it for life, for our terrestrial bodies the borders of the liveable begin at the water's edge. Here we can contact our becomings- cetacean, but we cannot dwell there too long.
But interestingly, underwater encounters with whales, in Jacques Cousteau's accounts, are based not only on stressing our bodies' physical capabilities in order to attain a deep feeling of connection. In his recollections, Cousteau also frequently notes his feelings of alienation and affective incapacity in the company of these creatures.
"Strangely," he writes, "this observation of whales, interesting as it was, had a depressing effect upon me" (38). He describes our bodily responses thus not only in terms of terror, but alternately as a sense of stupefaction, incredulity and astonishment (38). While some encounters leave one awestruck, others bring only debilitating despondency in an inability to understand these creatures. At times Cousteau is sure that the gulf he feels
298 between himself and the whales is due to their enormity, to the fact that humans and whales are kept apart by such an enormous difference in sheer physical scale. He writes, for example that "we are separated from each other by an impossible gulf, by a too-great disproportion in size." He continues:
I have often felt a sense of bitterness, or rather of impotence, when confronted with the thought that in the final analysis, these marvels of nature are beyond us, beyond our senses, beyond our experience—not because they live in the sea, but because they belong to a race of giants that requires of man an intellectual and emotional flexibility, an understanding, a willingness to break away from traditional concepts, that is perhaps beyond him. (38)
But although Cousteau claims here this impotence and unfathomability is "not because
[the whales] live in the sea" (my emphasis), he notes elsewhere the significance of the fact that the watery habitat in which they reside is theirs, not ours; "We are trying with all the means at our disposal—our launches and zodiacs and divers—to establish contact, to achieve a rapprochement with these marvels of marine life," he writes; "But we are attempting to do so in the sea; and that limitless stretch of water and those great depths are not our natural environment. It is that of the giants we are observing. It was proportionate to their strength, and not to ours" (38).
In other words, in this water, in this environment, any connection can only be temporary. The whales outswim us at their leisure, or dive deeper, swiftly moving beyond the bounds of our perceptual faculties. Their power to escape us constantly, to venture far beyond even the furthest flung borders of our own liveability, leaves us despondent in our inability to ever fully know them. Similarly, despite the interconnection that Philippe and
299 others report on encountering whales in the water, Cousteau laments the fact that their whale movements, their whale gestures, are not meaningful to us, and cannot be interpreted by us in the way that we can understand or interpret the gestures and reactions of terrestrial beings, such as the snarl of a dog or the rattle of a snake. The unfathomability of the whales, in these moments, is directly linked to our ultimate inability to follow them into the depths of their difference, quite literally. Again, the sea, for all of our dependence upon it to nourish us, to gestate us, to proliferate life, is not the world that our bodies know how to inhabit permanently. Despite our overwhelming affinity for water, our desire for contact with water, there is only so much we can bear.
While a science textbook can teach us this, our bodies surely know it, as we stand on the deck, as the wind whips our hair into our mouths, as we wrap our rain slickers around our bodies more tightly.
We may share an onto-logic as bodies of water, but as bodies in water, we are always situated and embedded in a singular way. Our embeddedness, our material situatedness carries with it an ontological significance not because a situation has an inherent or transcendent meaning, but because we are always bodies in relation to other bodies, not only animal, and certainly not only human, but also topographical, geological, elemental, cosmological. Evolution stories remind us that our situatedness unfolds for us the meaning of our own bodies, as it determines our limits of affectability—to affect or be affected. Will we breathe, will we flounder. Will we thrive, or will we disappear.
300 Just because we cannot feel a deep connection or affinity in all of our underwater
encounters with whales, however, does not mean that in this despondency we are not
already perched on a threshold established through our becoming-whale. Cousteau's
accounts of depressing unknowability in fact gesture towards a realization that becoming-
whale is not only an acknowledgement of the affinities felt in our whale encounters, but
also a slamming into the limits of our difference, a border which we would be foolish to
cross. In becoming-whale we must live at the "borders of the liveable;" we must demand
something more of ourselves in a physical, material sense; there is something we must
endure: terror, fear, physical acrobatics, despondence. But to surpass these demands brings annihilation. No becoming-animal results in our really becoming that animal. We
can never know an other fully, in all of their unfathomable depths. Again, we can only
sojourn into our interpermeating zones, at the borders of our liveability, to see what we
might learn about one another: Who are you, this body of water that is before me, of me,
responsible for me, but also through me and thanks to me? What is your difference, and
where are our moments of interpermeation? What will you teach me about myself, and
what will I learn about you? How can / allow you to be?
V. Upon and Within a Whale
Niki Caro's film Whale Rider, in its own depictions of becoming-whale, further
amplifies these observations, and brings us to a deeper level of understanding about our
own latent whale-ness, particularly in terms of becoming-animal as an ethical threshold.
301 As we will see, the latent whale-bodiedness that Pai, the film's main character, contacts
"at the borders of the liveable," not only facilitates her "becoming-cetacean," but also enacts and takes up a specific ethical opening, where the potential of the watery body for gestation and the proliferation of other life is illuminated. While I will more explicitly lay out the relation between an onto-logic of amniotics and an ethics of interbeing in chapter five, the concluding descriptions of the present chapter are meant to begin asking the questions that will set up that discussion: in our various becomings, or in our sojourns at the borders of the liveable, what can our bodies do? And, can part of this doing be an ethical practice? As I already suggested in chapter one, Deleuzian becomings can be understood in two ways. First, these becomings may be an "always-already" that describes the intricate webs of relation in which our bodies are necessarily embedded and in which, in a continuous tension with the forces of other bodies, they continue to become. From an alternate perspective, becoming is a creative act, an explicit project of our molar-molecular selves to shift their own (ontological, ethical, material) situation in relation to the bodies with whom we share a world. My discussions above of the becomings-cetacean of Cousteau and his crew began exploring the second type, but these becomings were "stumbled upon" more than anything else. In turning now to Whale
Rider, I wish to explore how as bodies of water we can more intentionally enter these border zones in the cultivation of an ethical mode of interbeing.
Whale Rider tells the story of a Maori community in North Eastern New Zealand that is threatened by the slow death of their traditional ways. Customarily, the group has
302 granted leadership positions to its first-born males, as it believes them to be descendants of Paikea, a mythical ancestor who was saved from drowning by riding home on the back of a whale. After the grandson of one of the village's elders dies in childbirth, the dead baby's surviving twin sister, Pai, begins to show interest in learning the skills of chiefdom. But, as a girl, Pai is forbidden by her grandfather to study these traditions.
Failing to find any leadership ability in the village boys whom he is instructing, however, the grandfather calls to his ancestors for help. When they do not answer, and the village seems to be falling into increasing depression and despair, Pai, who has been surreptitiously learning traditional warrior skills from her uncle, calls for assistance from the ancestors as well. In response, a pod of right whales washes up one night on the town's beach. Of course, the whales quickly begin to suffocate outside of their oceanic home, and the heartbroken Whangara people seem unable to save them, despite a heroic all-nighter of buckets and wet blankets. The story climaxes as the villagers give up and leave the beach, unaware that Pai (still rebuffed by her grandfather) has gone down to
shore. There, she mounts the back of one of the dying whales and rides it out into the
stormy Aotearoan seas, beckoning the other whales to follow.
In various ways, Whale Rider is a helpful story for illuminating many of the themes we have been discussing in this chapter, and previous ones. The film explores the tug-of-war between past and future. For example, the burden felt by Pai's grandfather
suggests while we carry our ancestors with us, we also bear a responsibility to the next generation. This applies moreover to Pai, and to the other members of the community,
303 who in their own ways seek to preserve the Whangara traditions. But this "responsibility to the future" also demands a gestation of the new, and new interpretations of the traditions that if static, cannot survive. We see this in Pai's efforts as a girl to assume a leadership role, and also in Pai's father's decision to begin a relationship with a European woman and bring their child into the community. Hence the film takes up questions of genealogy and extinction, but also addresses the delicate balance between preservation of the old and proliferation of the new. Pai's father's remark to his daughter, in regard to her fledgling leadership skills—"I know who you were born to be"— is fractured through random events and genealogical disturbances, whereby "who you were born to be" becomes an open question, never decided in advance. Blood ties retain significance while pure lineages and uncontaminated genealogies are problematized; "contamination" becomes a source of further proliferation of cultural and biological life. Moreover, previously established continuities between certain sexually differentiated bodies and their capacities for further life proliferation are challenged, and the potential of sexual difference is reconfigured.
But this reading of the cultural genealogies in Whale Rider does not yet address the force of the whales themselves. From a certain perspective, this story of the threat of cultural extinction could have been told without the whales; the whales do not seem absolutely crucial to the core character drama unfolding. The crisis that precipitates Pai's
"proof of her worth could have just as easily been some human threat or natural disaster—a fire, an accident, a threat to close down the local school. In fact, such crises
304 would have been more "believable," removing the element of magical realism that is introduced when Pai climbs on the back of the largest stranded whale, and rides with her out into the depths. But the whales in this film are not superfluous. Nor, however, are they merely totemic or symbolic creatures that link the contemporary story of the film to the Whangara myth of the whale rider (although this sort of relation is also part of the story). Apart from the symbolism through which the whales in this film can be read, I propose a more rhizo-phenomenological reading in which the whales in this story matter in their fleshy, embodied existence.
When Pai initially decides to leave her village to travel with her father to his home in Germany, she rethinks her departure when, driving along the seaside road, she hears the call of the whales, telling her something important. She does not, at the level of cognitive embodiment, understand her decision to stay. When her father asks her why they need to turn around, Pai simply answers, "We just have to." She feels the pull of the whales in her own watery flesh. Following the beaching of the whales, Pai's aunt weeps for one of the smaller whales who does not survive the long, excruciating night. Yet the aunt's desolation is not only for the magnificent creature who lies now dead on the beach, but for that shard of potentiality within her, within her community, that has died along with that whale. This is not mere symbolism. The whale does not merely "represent" something to the aunt, or to the others, even though the whale holds strong totemic importance within the community. Rather we see, as Lingis writes, the molecular passage of animal emotions. The whales, drawn to a call, or to a promise, are pulled too far away
305 from their gestational grounds, from the territory that can nourish them and give flight to their lumbering bulk, too cumbersome for the land. "A whale out of water," writes
Jacques Cousteau, "even though it is an air breather, dies very quickly. Despite its incredible power, it simply does not have sufficient strength to breathe in the open air"
(47); "A whale aground in the open air, washed up on a beach, is condemned to death. He has not the strength, nor the limbs, to regain the life-giving water. He smothers; and it is his very size and mass that kills him. All of his power, great though it is, is not sufficient to fill his lungs, to move the tons of blubber that cover his body. And he dies of asphyxiation" (44-45).
The whales on Pai's beach are suffocating, although they are breathing the stuff their lungs were meant to breathe. Hence we see the way in which for whale bodies, the primacy of air to enable breath and life is overshadowed by the acute necessity of a watery world to live in. Topography matters. The shocking disappointment of this realization is transmitted to the villagers, not through some cognitive understanding of the scientific fact, but through the helpless bulk of blubber and bones that surround them, an unbearable refutation of the majestic grace of a whale as she swims. Although as human bodies the terrestrial beach is no threat to them, the villagers share with these whales what Merleau-Ponty calls an interanimality, whereby they both partake in the same (watery) flesh of the world. They are both variant folds in the latency of being, and thus can feel an empathy even across their difference. Here, we see our empathy for the whales' journey back out to sea and our own awkward attempts to follow them, as
306 described by Lingis above, reversed. As the whales moan and sigh on the beach, the villagers respond with their sweat, their fatigue, their own numb hands, dragging bucket upon bucket of water from the sea, trying to bring the sea back to the whales. They hold them, caress them, intermix their human wails with the cetacean cries.
On the one hand, the villagers' labours are certainly acts of compassion towards these dying creatures. But the whales are not simply some random animal amidst the generality of animal others. These whales are specific, and connected to the villagers in a
specific relation of kinship, even if this kinship is a "strange" one. In fact, the whales, although undeniably actualized in their own whale-bodies, become Pai's, and the whole community's, virtual bodies of water. The whales' bodies of water are both actualized in their individuated whaleness, but they are also the material virtual expression of the community's ancestral kin, "still watching." When Pai's grandfather "calls to the ancient ones to come help," the whales respond. When Pai notes that her ancestors have ignored her grandfather's summons, but "they heard me," this "they" to which Pai refers is again not human, but whale. Even if her people's evolution stories name Paikea, the whale rider, and not the whales themselves as the ancestor from which Pai has descended in "a long line of chiefs," Pai and her community recognize their "strange kinship" with the whales not as some metaphor, but as a material relation. So the labour of the villagers to stave off the desiccation and suffocation of the cetaceans washed up on their beach is also an attempt to prevent the annihilation of their ancestors, both human and more than human. And again, this notion of "ancestor" is neither symbol nor metaphor, cast upon
307 the whale. Instead the distinction between the human and whale genealogies is blurred, as the whale carries this lineage of chiefs both upon and within its own flesh. This slippage is further invited as the film overlaps Pai and her grandfather's calling to the "ancient ones" with images of the whales gliding through their watery realm. This superimposition of human and whale again illuminates the lateral nature of our interanimality and our animal becomings, even in stories of evolution, genealogy and descent. Whale Rider thus shows up the interpermeation of human animal and whale as a bodily recognition of kin—that is, as the virtual body of something with whom we have nothing in common, gestating and gestated in our own watery flesh.
But this interpermeation is also clearly an opening towards an ethical encounter with otherness, particularly as Pai, too, ventures to the borders of the liveable. When Pai decides to climb onto the back of a stranded whale and swim with it, back out into the stormy seas, she most directly seeks to contact her virruality that passes from the actualized whale into Pai's own watery body. On the back of the whale, in the womb of the sea, Pai experiences what no human could withstand; she undergoes torsions and movements that should tear the actualized human apart. She dives to depths whose pressure should cause her organs to contract, her eardrums to bend inward, her eyes, skin and lungs to squeeze, all beyond tenable human limits. The salt should make her gag, and she would surely draw water into her lungs—so useful on land but woefully unequipped to extract the needed oxygen from the water. Her blood should turn vinegary, her kidneys should burn out, trying to neutralize the acid. Her circulation should break down, as her
308 blood scrambles, panicked, in all the wrong directions. Her heart, unable to get the
oxygen it needs, should stop altogether. And if, perchance, the whale tries to guide her
swiftly to the surface to avoid such a fate, the haste of the ascent should surely kill her, as
her veins bubbled with undissolved nitrogen, blocking up the vessels in her heart and her brain.156 Watching from the shore, as Pai and the whale disappear below the waves, her
family assumes that the young girl is riding to her death. But she is only pushing the borders of the liveable up against their furthest flung limits.
Indeed, the film is ambiguous in terms of the depths to which Pai descends, and
the distance that she travels, on/as whale. And in the end, these depths and distances were
apparently sustainable, as Pai survives, although she requires a long stay in hospital to recover. But in this ambiguity, we again find insight into Deleuze's teachings: "Evolution
does not take place in the open air;" it "can only be experienced at the borders of the
liveable." Only here can we contact and amplify the virtual whale-ness latent in us, and
the potentiality for another way of living that it may offer.157 We mentioned above Rosi
Braidotti's (2006a) similar positing of the risk or intensity elicited by contact with our bodily virtuality, and my reading of Pai upon the whale again resonates strongly with
Braidotti's suggestions. It should also be noted, however, that Braidotti discusses such
experiences of "intense strain, psychic unrest and nervous tension" specifically in the context of ethics, an affirmative ethics that demands not a prescribed action but the
cultivation of a certain mode of living. She argues that the active, empowering force of
Zoe, or prediscursive bodily life, must be pushed to the thresholds of what can be
309 withstood by bodies in order for us to live ethically, intensely. She writes, "It is a
constant challenge for us to rise to the occasion, to catch the wave of life's intensities and
ride it on, exposing the boundaries or limits as we transgress them. [...] To live intensely
and to be alive to the nth degree pushes us to the extreme edge of mortality" (139). This
"living intensely" is not a self-directed experience, however, but aims to live in a way that in pushing up against our own border zones, we are also reconfiguring our relation to
others. I return to outline this ethical mode of living in relation to an ethics of interbeing
in more detail in the next chapter, but for the time being, I am suggesting that Pai is precisely catching this "wave of life's intensities," and riding on it. She does this for the
sake of her community, and no less for the sake of the whales. But perhaps most
significantly, she does this for the sake of the new forms of life that will be proliferated in the village (and perhaps in the sea) as her becoming-whale reconfigures this community's
various relations.
At the same time, it should also be stressed that even before contact with her
virtual animal other, Pai recognizes that the virtuality of this whale, folded into her watery being, is also a marker of gestational difference, whose specificity must be
acknowledged. When Pai herself finally walks towards the dying whale on the beach
(after her uncle, grandparents and other villagers have been overcome with exhaustion,
and are taking their leave) she approaches the near-lifeless mammal tentatively and tenderly, fingering the unique, white barnacle-like encrustations that punctuate the whale's glistening grey skin. According to marine biologists, these rough patches of skin,
310 called callosities, form patterns that are unique to each right whale, and serve as identification markers for tracking and conservation purposes. 5 As Pai runs her tiny fingers along and through these white patches, she is not only expressing her material interpermeation with the whale, but in that same material connection, she is also locating the whale's necessary difference, the whale's distinct paths of individuation. The tracing of these callosities seem to be her way of indeed asking the whale: Who are you, this body of water that is before me, of me, responsible for me, but also through me and thanks to me? What is your difference, and where are our moments of interpermeation?
What will you teach me about myself, and what will I learn about you? How can / allow you to be? Her touch turns to grip, as she also realizes that these rough patches of individuation can serve as her handholds, her footholds, for becoming-whale. As she climbs atop the whale, Pai is also asking how, by allowing that whale to be, she will also replenish her own, her community's, gestational life source.
In trying to account for the extremely high encephalization quotient in cetaceans, scientists first speculated that perhaps this marker of high "intelligence" was connected to the ability of certain cetaceans (odontocetes, or toothed whales) for echolocation.
However, further studies showed that it was not echolocation per se that resulted in such clever odontocetes, since bats, with a similar system of sonar communication are able to run that system "with a brain the weight of a raisin" (Zimmer 224). Zimmer draws on this research to suggest that while echolocation may have laid the groundwork for high cetacean EQs, a more likely direct factor is their complex social choreography. The first
311 living odontocetes (sperm whales and beaked whales) were likely required to coordinate the hunting and feeding practices of some whales (most successful when solitary) with a concomitant need for other whales to care for and mentor their young. As Zimmer puts it, these early whales "had no choice but to organize into pods." Using echolocation as a means of communication, cetacean pods were able to evolve complex gestational units, which in turn may be responsible for their high levels of encephalization. While cetaceans developed sophisticated means of caring for themselves, at the same time they needed to figure out a way of interbeing that would also open to the proliferation of life that would follow them. In Whale Rider, underwater footage shows the right whales swimming under one another, rubbing up against one another, buoying each other with the bulk of their own bodies. Perhaps their return to the sea has left them nostalgic for the intricate Hypersea network of direct physical connectivity that life on land had demanded of them. But at the same time, their reclaimed watery home allows them the opportunity to develop new means of interbeing, of intercorporeity, of which we may know almost nothing, but which is certainly as sophisticated (and likely more so) than our own.
As Zimmer notes, we still have hardly any idea of what cetacean intelligence means, or of what their brain-bodies are capable. Dolphins, for example, in their watery world, where everything touches everything, most likely experience themselves "in" their bodies in a way altogether foreign to us. In their communication through manufactured echolocation visions, their interior and exterior worlds begin to blur, and "our notion of self would be entirely meaningless to them" (Zimmer 134). We do not think that baleen
312 whales can echolocate, but we have no idea what they might perceive or how they might engage their bodies in relations of intercorporeity (Zimmer 134). Cousteau, too, notes that there is so much about cetaceans' tactile sense about which we know almost nothing; their sensory life is undoubtedly complex, but we have barely scratched its surface
(Cousteau 128). But we do know that cetaceans present to us possibilities of intercorporeity that may also be, like so many aspects of cetaceans, folded inside our own watery selves, as virtual vestiges of our evolutionary might-have-been's. In her own becoming-whale, as she fingers the whales' callosities, or as she dives with them to the borders of her own liveable, Pai seems to tap into this complex gestational rhythm of the cetacean. She welcomes this opening as an opportunity to proliferate life for her own people, while at the same time guiding the whales back to sea, saving the lives of animals with whom, we are taught to believe, we have "nothing in common."
We are told that in becoming-animal, the becoming affects the animal no less than the human. But because they will always outswim us, outbreathe us in the water, overpower us with their majestic bulk, perhaps like Cousteau, we must remain a little despondent in our inability ever to know the extent of their becomings. Yet, as the whales heed Pai's call and throw themselves onto the beach, pushing at their own borders of the liveable, or as Pai climbs upon the back of the whale and guides her strange kin back out to sea, or as the whales nuzzle the bellies of the other whales, as everything in that underwater world dissipates to touch everything else, it becomes unclear who is saving whom. Gestation, differenc/tiation, interpermeation.
313 VI. Conclusions, Aspirations, at the Borders of the Liveable
There are some aspects of our fishy beginnings that we will never be able to live.
We can contact these beginnings, but only furtively, only on stolen time. To follow our
virtualities to the depths of their potentiality, we need superpowers, or borrowed organs.
And even still, in the dark, in our submersibles, everything could never be revealed. Yet
our bodies can nonetheless hover, silent and suspended, below the surface, our lungs two
inflated balloons that keep us from sinking. Below the surface, at the borders of the
liveable, perhaps we should not be surprised that, strangely, we have a kind of breath.
Between inspiration and expiration, there is always a small gap—a pause really, where we are breathing neither in, nor out. We are simply hovering, with a suction lock in our
lungs. This is called aspiration. Submerged and suspended, we still, in some way breathe.
We hover here, suspended, between our larvae and our actualizations, as much as we hover between water and air. No, our fishy beginnings are not altogether alien to us. They
can be glimpsed, contacted... aspired to.
To affect or be affected, at the borders of the liveable. It is in these border zones that we can amplify the evolutionary traces of the whale folded into our own virtuality,
and through this amplification we can connect with our animal otherness. Cetaceans are
in many ways a particularly rich expression of our own human bodies' virtuality—they
are our could-have-been, our almost-was, a line of flight from a path that was not, but
might have been, travelled. That might be travelled still. Cetaceans also are illustrative of
314 the slippage between the actual and the virtual that we discussed in chapter one, whereby water as an interpermeating yet also differenc/tiating element of embodiment invites us to consider the slippage between actuals, as individualized bodies of water, and virtuals, as a could-have-been or might-still-be latency. The materiality of water that stretches through all bodies confuses any definitive distinction between these two. While a whale is undoubtedly an actualized individual in its own right, and in many ways distinct from the human, it also holds some sort of latent human-bodiedness, just as we humans hold a latent whale-bodiedness. In our intercorporeal interanimality, we can experience the paradox of both our connection and our differentiation. And it is in our interpermeating zones, at the borders of our liveability, that we become-animal just long enough to listen to what the animal can tell us about our interpermeations, but not long enough ever to know that otherness fully or completely. In this contact, we must also acknowledge our difference. This difference includes the difference, for example, of the whale whom I will never be able to fathom entirely, but also the difference engendered by that whale's situatedness, and her relation to a greater body of water, which is a different relation than
I have to that sea. This greater body of water establishes for us different limits of affectability, and as such is certainly, as we have noted earlier, not only a gestational medium but a gestational force that choreographs our molarity and molecularity in different ways. We are not only bodies of water, but bodies in water, in different ways, as well.
315 I argue that we need to cultivate such liminal dwelling, that we need to in fact seek it out and welcome it—despite its risk and discomfort—so that we can cultivate an ethics of interbeing. This ethics is not a categorical imperative, but rather a practice of listening to our animal others, at the same time as we acknowledge that such listening is facilitated by our material and watery interpermeations. Who are you, we ask, this body of water that is before me, of me, responsible for me, but also through me and thanks to me? What is your difference, and where are our moments of interpermeation? What will you teach me about myself, and what will I learn about you? How can / allow you to be?
An ethics of interbeing requires such listening, but I propose it also requires our response. Enacting an ethics of interbeing, where we might sustain a balance of gestation, differenc/tiation and interpermeation, requires a navigation of our differences as bodies of water, at the same time as we are provoked into response through our interpermeations.
What will we do with the humanness that both connects us to other animals, and sets us apart? Our becoming-cetacean shows us that while we may express whale-bodiedness, this cannot result in the total destratification of our human-bodiedness. We are human subjects because—not in spite of—the molecular embodiment we share with other animals, because although that molecularity connects us, at some point this same molecularity will also exceed us, diving to depths we cannot fathom. Again, we are in water in our own, very human way. The whales, along with all of our other marine ancestors, have gifted us this complicated watery potentiality. But must we not also ask,
316 then, what sort of gifts we have given, or might we give, the whales in return? How will we respond?
This is the final question that I want to take up in this dissertation. In the onto- logic of amniotics, we experience an opening towards an ethics of becoming, of interanimality, of intercorporeity with bodies of water even beyond our strange animal kin—in short, of interbeing. Of being of, with, for and thanks to. We have now glimpsed how this ethics might demand that we more closely consider the ways in which we are gestational for an other, and the ways in which other bodies are gestational for us. We have glimpsed how we need to consider more closely the ways in which, through our intervals of interpermeation, we fold into one another, at the same time as we safeguard differenc/tiation as necessary for the further proliferation of life. But beyond these glimpses, we must now consider what more such an ethics of interbeing might ask of our bodies, what it might ask that our bodies do. How should we call upon our distinctive human-bodiedness to nourish further the conditions of possibility for such an ethics?
How can we situate ourselves at the hinge of our molecular dispersals and our molar gatherings in service of an amniotic relation with other bodies, towards an ethics of interbeing for bodies of water, rather than in limitation thereof? This is what I now move to explore in my final chapter.
317 / recently read that experts have now confirmed the extinction of the Chinese river
dolphin, also known as the baiji. In December 2006, scientists embarked on a final six-
week voyage down the Yangtze in hopes of sighting some remaining representative of the
species, but turned up empty handed. This article also tells me that this dolphin's
departure signals a likely wave of extinctions in other large, freshwater aquatic species.
For example, the finless porpoise of the Yangtze is probably succumbing to a siren song
as I speak.
News of the baiji hits me strangely, and I am haunted by her long, thin beak, her smooth
blueish-white flesh, her surprised and trusting button-eye, staring anachronistically back
at me from my computer screen. Sitting here, in my comfortable chair, miles from the
ocean, I am hardly imperilled, I am hardly pushing the borders of my liveable. But then
why do I feel this strange tug, somewhere around my solar plexus? Grief, I realize, is
another threshold, as is shame. They comprise their own border zones. There is only so
much we can bear.
I am captivated by the face of the baiji. Although it is her existence that is imperilled, she
is the one asking me: Who are you, this body of water that is before me, of me,
responsible for me, but also through me and thanks to me? What is your difference, and
318 where are our moments of interpermeation? What will you teach me about myself, and
what will I learn about you? How can I allow you to be?
I am not sure if what I mourn is the loss of something so like me, or something so
exquisitely different. Slippage. Folding. Vestigial traces.
"It's possible that we missed one or two animals during the search, " one of the
expedition's team members notes, "but we say the baiji is functionally extinct. "
I don't need functional. Instead I see a river dolphin in the now flooded depths of the
Three Gorges Dam, growing like a goldfish as large as the space she is in.
319 CHAPTER FIVE
Listening, Responding: Water Crises, Common Bodies
and an Ethics of Interbeing
I. Introduction: Amniotics and Ethological Ethics
Who are you, this body of water that is before me, of me, responsible for me, but also
through me and thanks to me? What is your difference, and where are our moments of
interpermeation? What will you teach me about myself, and what will I learn about you?
How can I allow you to be?
By listening attentively to the bodies of water that we are, that we become, that
we rhizomatically connect to in our actuality and intensity, that we virtually remember, or
anticipate, at the thresholds of our liveability, we begin to hear the whispers of these
questions all around us, flooding our ears and circulating through our capillaries. These
questions rush rapidly across my skin as my awkward sack of flesh metamorphoses into a
sleek swimming machine, just below the surface of my favourite North Ontario lake, still joyfully free of motorboat traffic. These questions burst forth in a startling gush from my
womb after the doctor inserts a crochet needle-like instrument up between my legs, and
my body gives itself over to the violent rhythm that will usher the next repetition of my
320 human differenc/tiation into the ex-utero world. And these questions drip, drip, drip with a subtle but compelling urgency as the barely parted lips of a loose faucet in the next room quietly demand my attention, despite my best efforts to sleep. And, although some would say that the baiji dolphin, now "functionally extinct," can speak to me only through the distancing and disembodying mediation of my computer screen, this computer screen image is not a disavowal of her life but rather a threshold or a door that can connect me to the virtuality of the baiji, to the traces of her that I hold, enfolded, in my own watery molecularity. By contacting these traces I can learn something about both the baiji and my own watery humanness, and more importantly, about the moments at which we intersect and differentiate. Even if the baiji has been materially "disappeared" from the actual world you and I inhabit, her virtuality still resonates. And these resonances continue to ask these questions.
Yet we do not always hear these questions. As I have attempted to show in this dissertation, we first need to cultivate a practice of listening to them. One such practice, as I have suggested, is rhizo-phenomenology. This is a philosophical approach that begins with an attentive listening to the world we inhabit and also compose in our various watery rhizomatic imbrications. But as I also noted in the first chapter, one of my principal goals in this dissertation must be to translate this attentive listening into responses at several levels. An initial response is expressed in language through the writing practice of rhizo-phenomenology. Rhizo-phenomenological practice is certainly about contacting and amplifying our molecular bodies of water (that is, listening), but it is
321 also about being able to hold onto this (always tenuous) contact long enough to be able to describe it (that is, responding). And, as I have noted, for both Deleuze and Merleau-
Ponty (as much as for Irigaray, Lingis or other rhizo-phenomenologists I call upon in these pages) description should not necessarily be thought as the opposite of prescription, politics, ethics or action. Description is not "merely" denotative, or a representation of some enduring truth. Description of our bodies of water, culled from an attentive listening, can be a form of creative praxis. As we move from the registering of one set of bodily affects to living them through another means of bodily expression, we engage in what Barbara Godard, in her consideration of how Deleuzian rhizomatics reframes our common understandings of translation, has fittingly called a "transcreation" (2000: 61).
Rather than an impoverished regurgitation, or even a "reactive force," rhizo- phenomenological description should be considered as a positive or affirmative force that takes an embodied molecular experience and transposes or translates it onto a plane of language. While the result of this transposition must be understood as a momentary apparatus of capture, this experience-become-language opens in turn to other lines of flight. In other words, while description of the experience can be one initial response to the attentive listening to our bodies of water, this response-as-rhizo-phenomenological- description can open up to other possibilities as well, and thus to further responses.
My proposal throughout these pages has been that one such line of flight is ontological: through attentive description of our bodies of water, these bodies have taught me about what I have come to call an onto-logic of amniotics. Only through a careful
322 listening and the attempt to hold this listening in language am I able to gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which bodies of water are gestating, differentiating (even, and especially, as they repeat), and interpermeating. This concept-creation of "amniotics" in fact resonates with what Deleuze would call an ethological approach to bodies of water. Following Spinoza, Deleuze describes ethology as the study of "the composition of relations or capacities between different things" ("Ethology: Spinoza and Us," 628).159
In other words, the onto-logic of amniotics is at once ontological (that is, concerned with the "being" of bodies of water) and ethological (that is, concerned with the relation between and capacities of specific bodies of water to affect other bodies). The onto-logic of amniotics in fact suggests, following Deleuze and his own muses, that ontology cannot be separated from ethology: to be is to be in relation.160 We have already discussed at length in chapter one how for Deleuze, to be a body means having certain thresholds and capacities to affect and be affected. We are what we are because of the specific relations we enter into and because of what we can do in such becomings. In other words, the onto-logic of amniotics could be understood as onto-ethological.
But the lines of flight opened through an attentive listening can also be followed to other strata. Specifically, how might this attentive listening open towards an ethical response as well? As I suggested at the outset of this dissertation and throughout, a better understanding of how we live as bodies of water, that is, in an amniotic relation to other bodies, can prepare us for an "ethics of interbeing." While this term—"an ethics of interbeing"—is my own, at the same time I can claim no genuine ownership over it, for I
323 have cobbled it together not only from attentive listening to my own body of water, but also from what I have learned from Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray. Each of these thinkers elaborates key operations of relation that in turn resonate in the onto-logic of bodies of water. While we have already discussed the nuances of these three positions
(see chapter two, section V), a brief recollection of their key points helps set the stage for my turn here towards ethics.
For Merleau-Ponty, the key relation is the chiasm—the intertwining or crisscrossing of body and world, or body and body, so that what a body can do is always mutually determined by an other body or world that body meets. Chiasm demands relationality and exchange through a common medium of the "flesh" as a latent potential of being (which in our case is moreover surely watery). Moreover, for Merleau-Ponty, this relation is always enfleshed, embodied, and materially lived. In short, the key operation of relation for Merleau-Ponty is a reciprocal (but never symmetrical) embodied exchange. For Irigaray, the key relation in some ways is also an exchange (both sexes, she argues, must journey out from themselves, to meet the other, and then return), but exchange for Irigaray is also risky; it means the hegemonic self will likely subsume the other. For Irigaray, thus, the operation of passage, or giving over to the other, is paramount. The material passage from the (m)other to the self is what allows one to be in the first place. Finally, the key Deleuzian operations of relations for my purposes here are intensity and differenciation. While alternately showing up as a rhizome, as a becoming, or as an involution, all of these figures highlight Deleuze's emphasis on the relation of a
324 body to its own other that is not discrete but that rather differentiates itself through various morphogenetic operations. This operation also gives prominence to virtuality, or the unknown always yet-to-come which may or may not be actualized, but is the condition of possibility for the actual. For Deleuze, the relation between the actual and the virtual is an always present potentiality that engenders any becoming, and is thus an inalienable dimension of differenciation as a key operation of relation. In short, then, each of these thinkers asks key questions about our relationality as bodies and adamantly maintains that only through certain operations of relations can bodies become intelligible as bodies in the first place.
For Irigaray, the ethical dimension of her ethology is clear: passage will allow us to cultivate ethical relations that safeguard difference at the same time as they allow us to give thanks to the material bodies that allow us to be in the first place. She returns to this assertion throughout her oeuvre, even if at the same time, the focus of ethics for Irigaray is the cultivation of an ethical relation explicitly between the sexes. While Irigaray indeed suggests that the resolution of this particular ethical relation will serve as a sort of Rosetta
Stone for resolving ethical relations more broadly, her work for the most part leaves as an open question how the ethology of sexual relations might be transposed across relations of interbeing more broadly.161 A transposition of Irigaray's thought onto the ethical implications of various relations of becoming beyond a close focus on sexual difference is nonetheless underway, even if rare.162 Interestingly, neither Deleuze nor Merleau-
Ponty explicitly takes up the question of their own "ethics" nor explicitly proposes how
325 an ethics might be constructed from the grounds of their respective ethologies.163
However, the widespread and diverse ways that the oeuvre of each has been taken up by commentators either to tease out the ethics implicit in Deleuze's or Merleau-Ponty's work, or for the express purpose of developing bodies of thought on ethics stemming from the philosophy of either thinker, is remarkable. For example, while Merleau-Ponty may not explicitly present an ethical platform, at the same time scholars have used his work to develop an embodied ethics, and ethics of intersubjectivity and alterity, an environmental or ecological ethics, and a feminist corporeal ethics.164 Similarly,
Deleuze's "ethics" have been the subject of both book-length and more succinct studies, and have been applied in the development of various contemporary ethical platforms more broadly.165 In other words, whether implicitly or explicitly, I submit that each of these authors proposes an ethological ethics, or an ethics of specific relations between bodies—in this case, relations of chiasm, passage and differentiation/intensity.
At the very least, this attention to the "ethics" of all three thinkers' work, either in their own meta-commentary or in the commentaries on their work by others, illuminates a trajectory between the onto-ethological and the ethical that begs further exploration. In these thinkers' descriptions of the onto-ethological relations of bodies, whispers of those questions—how are we differentiated? how do we interpermeate? how might I understand my relation to an other, such that I allow that other to be?—are certainly audible, whether or not they are explicitly asked. But this should come as no great surprise. As feminist thinkers have long been pointing out, relations are always both
326 embodied and embedded, and thus are never neutral. They are rather situated within
various webs and arrangements of power. To present a new understanding of relations between bodies thus always opens up to (even if it does not fulfil) a possibility for new
relations of power, new considerations of how bodies affect and are affected, and the
consequences of such intensities. Again, neither Merleau-Ponty's nor Deleuze's, and
certainly not Irigaray's, careful attention to the onto-logics of relation is merely a
descriptive/denotative exercise. Rather, a consideration of the way in which bodies relate to (become affective towards, gestate, differentiate themselves from, hold the potential
of) other bodies is always an opening towards ethics. Even as each of these thinkers asks these questions with specific relations in mind, my proposal is that their ethologies, or
careful attention to the question of relations in proposing their respective ontologies, lay the grounds for one particular ethics of bodies (for of course, bodies may partake in all
sorts of ethics), that I am calling an ethics of interbeing.
Amniotics, with its ethology of gestationality, differenc/tiation, and
interpermeation, does not suggest a one-to-one correspondence with the key operations of relations that Irigaray, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze each highlight (i.e., passage, chiasm
and differentiation/intensity), but this onto-logic rather gathers and redistributes the key relational movements of these thinkers according to the lived experience of our bodies of water. Within this specific configuration of relation, I thus locate the possibility of an
ethics of interbeing. My proposal is that in becoming attentive to our "onto-ethology" of
amniotics, we also open ourselves towards an ethics of interbeing. As I already described
327 in chapter two, the amniotic interval thus establishes a relation of gift, debt,
relinquishment and response. To acknowledge oneself as a body within an amniotic
relation is already to be asked to respond, in one way or another. In other words, we find
ourselves at another door, or another threshold, where we are asked to respond not only
through description, but through a consideration of the consequences of our relations and
movements, and of our broader actions (or non-actions166) in the world, which will
necessarily engage other bodies of water. Most simply put, for me an ethics of interbeing
would consist in thoughtfully and attentively living, upon this threshold, at the hinge of
our molar and molecular bodies. It requires listening to questions such as those that open
this chapter, but also responding to them in such a way that would affirm and proliferate
life.
But this door or this threshold is only an invitation, and an ethics of interbeing is
never an inevitability. We stand before such thresholds always still embodied and
embedded, always still as a hinge between our molecular dispersals and our molar
imperatives, as a pivot in a convergence of singularities where forces and energies may
overwhelmingly pull us in one direction, or another. Not all responses will support the
further proliferation of an onto-logic of amniotics, or an ethics of interbeing. Moreover, a
second but equally crucial warning must be sounded against mistaking the threshold of
ethics for a categorical imperative or a predetermined program for human moral behaviour. While the ethological ethics that can be learned from both Merleau-Ponty and
Irigaray suggest in their own ways how an ethics of interbeing might resist categorical
328 prescriptions, Deleuze's "virtual ethics" is most explicit on this matter, and thus can be turned to help articulate this particularly key aspect of the ethics I am proposing here.
Indeed, a vital element of Deleuze's ethics is the need to find an ethics that is worthy of the event; ethics for Deleuze means "not to be unworthy of what happens to us" (1990: 149). Indeed, in clarifying Deleuze's ethics for us, Constantine Boundas reminds us that "Deleuze's ethics... attempts to get rid of the transcendental 'ought,' along with its twin bulwarks of duty and obligation" (14). In other words, there is no room for morality or judgement "in the name of transcendental values" (Zourabichvili, quoted in Boundas, 15). As Bogue notes, "the ethical question [...] is not 'What must we do?' but 'What can we do?'" (12).168 Deleuze's ethics honours a prepersonal affirmative force; it is an ethics that means throwing the dice but once, and affirming the outcome
(Bogue 8), in other words, affirming the active force of life. Hence this also means, as
Rosi Braidotti explains, articulating an ethics that would ask us to pursue and actively create "the kind of encounters that are likely to favour an increase in active becomings and avoid those that diminish our potential." Yet to hone such a "pre-personal" ethics does not mean that we must abandon consideration for the role of the human, both molecular and molar, therein. As Braidotti explains, an ethics of becoming can still be
"an intensive ethics based on the shared capacity of humans to feel empathy for, develop affinity with and hence enter in relation with other forces, entities, beings, waves of intensity" (2006a: 139-140). Despite Deleuze's insistence on an ethics that, as Boundas phrases it, "eschews personological coordinates" (15), I maintain that an ethics of
329 interbeing must address the molar subjectivities though which it operates.169 While this ethics certainly taps into a "pre-personal" molecular network of watery force and becoming, ethics are still lived, by bodies. It is too risky to speak of ethics without addressing how molar subjectivities specifically affect and are affected by other bodies.
In other words, if an ethics can help us facilitate active and affirmative modes of life, we have no way of discerning between such forces except by living them. If a "we" is to creep into any discussion of Deleuze's ethics,170 then we must account for this "we" as molar, subjectified and differentiated bodies, at some level, too. This accounting would need to recognize the historically situatedness of any relations, and the unequal ways in which power can be distributed and channelled through bodies in these relations. "We" are never neutral. Indeed, for those of us concerned with the historically situatedness of relations and their material effects/affects, we can never simply stop at the dice throw itself, for that risks annihilation of more kinds than one. We must also affirm that dice throw—in other words, do something with it, find the most appropriate way to respond.
There is surely a thin line to be treaded here, between ignoring material relations and effects of power and fixing those relations in such a way that "what a body can do" would no longer be an open question. But, if a Deleuzian-inspired ethics of interbeing is to matter, this is a line we must nonetheless attempt to tread. We must respond, but carefully. In calling on the onto-logic of amniotics that is simultaneously ethological, materially embodied/embedded, and imbued with virtuality, I hope to illustrate in this chapter that we can cultivate an ethics that is committed both to a mode of existence that
330 is open to futurity, and also to a careful listening to the historically and materially situatedness of bodies.
In short, an ethics of interbeing, if it is to draw on what we have learned from our bodies of water and the onto-ethological ethics of Deleuze, Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty, must be embodied, gestational and also open to a future, never fully known in advance. It cannot work to predetermine that future, but rather must seek to enable a future in which an onto-logic of amniotics can be sustained, in whatever way best responds to an attentive listening to the situation.
For example, such an "etiological" approach to ethics could never in advance separate out those responses that might support this onto-logic from those that might challenge or negate it, simply on the basis of our traditional categories that define bodies of water as either "natural" or "technological/cultural." In other words, a strategy of preservation or conservation of watery bodies that are "natural" cannot be intrinsically favoured over strategies that draw on "technological" or "cultural" bodies and interventions. Instead we need to look to what sorts of relations, and relations of relations, any response might nurture or cultivate. We might ask, for example, how such categorical responses to bodies of water as either "natural" or "technological/cultural" play out in certain ecopolitical discourses that seek to address the various water crises our planet currently faces in guises such as desertification, drought, flooding, pollution and marine ecosystem destruction. In many ecopolitical discourses, bodies of water are indeed often categorized as either "natural" (geophysical bodies of water such as lakes,
331 rivers, or seas, as well as the other-than-human animal bodies and vegetable bodies of water that populate both marine and terrestrial ecosystems) or as "technological/cultural"
(including various manifestations of hydroengineering that more often than not exacerbate our water crises, such as dams or large-scale hydro-diversions). But a third term of categorization often sneaks in here too in the guise of the "human," somehow standing above and apart from both the natural and the technological/cultural. "Human" bodies of water may align either with other "natural" bodies (when victims of water crises) or "technological" bodies (when undertaking or profiting from hydroengineering), but humans' mutual imbrications and implication as actual/virtual bodies of water themselves most often remain unaccounted for. While in the first instance, our capacity to be affected is paramount, in the second, we are purely affecting. In such approaches, our embedded situation as a hinge between the molar and the molecular is lost. This is again why the cultivation of an ethics of interbeing demands attention to both our molarity and molecularity, but as always inextricable from each other.
Again: we first require attentive listening to bodies of water, so that our watery molecularity may be recognized. As molecular bodies, we are never separate or above, but clearly swept up in the eddies, tides and currents of watery molecular life. Yet, at the same time, the (embedded, embodied, situated) haecceity of the human nonetheless needs to be acknowledged within any discussion of ethics. Although as molecular bodies of water we are mutually imbricated in bodies of water of all kinds, we are also molar subjects. While this molarity does not give us any ontological privilege over the
332 molarized lake or the molarized dolphin, our specific human molarity has its own specific thresholds and capacities to be affected by other bodies, and also certainly to affect them.
As molar subjects, we are not only embodied, but embedded, too, in a historical situation that has allowed for the configuration of certain power relations between bodies of water.
While a molarized human body of water knows it will never match the size of a whale, or withstand the pressures of the ocean's depths without prosthetic body parts, or meet the strength of a hurricane or the stealth of a drought, we have certainly gone to amazing lengths to compensate for these inadequacies. For example, our human cultures have engaged in perpetual efforts to rechoreograph our planet's geophysical bodies of water, and in doing so, we are constantly breaching the limits of affectability of other human, other animal and vegetable bodies of water that are entwined with these geophysical bodies. Hence, although an ethics of interbeing must begin by an attentive listening to our watery molecularities, this ethics also demands of us, as molar bodies, further responses, and responsibilities. So again, we find ourselves before a door, or a threshold, listening as molecular bodies, but being asked to respond, with all the weight of our watery molarity.
In this concluding chapter, I would like to examine the above questions specifically in the context of the current localized and globalized crises that are transforming our planet's geophysical bodies of water. The conflict, hardship and ecological stress caused by these water crises are receiving increasing attention and it seems clear that our current efforts to manage our planet's watery bodies are vastly inadequate in many respects. I would therefore like to ask, in this chapter, how the ethics
333 of interbeing, informed by an onto-logic of amniotics, might help us respond to these challenges. This will entail, first, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of
"technics" in order to illustrate how "technological" bodies of water are not a category separate from presumed "natural" bodies of water, but instead that the technologization of bodies should be read as part of all bodies' involutionary/evolutionary becomings.
Here, I focus specifically on the various technologizations of our geophysical watery bodies which, like other living bodies of water, evolve and involve as a result offerees and relations with other bodies. I suggest that we should strive to understand the changes and relations between all bodies of water—be they geophysical, human, other animal, vegetable, meteorological—according to common onto-ethological operations, for only in this way can we cultivate an ethics of interbeing that is free from categorical imperatives and unhelpful distinctions between "technology," "nature," "humans," "animals," etc. I argue that because bodies of water are all connected through an onto-logic of amniotics, we must build an ethics that begins from these common operations of relation, rather than from an a priori reification of discrete categorizations. Yet at the same time, because we are not only molecular bodies, but molarized bodies as well, I am also interested in how our specific human molarity impacts the intensity of certain relations between bodies of water. To begin asking these questions, I turn to two complementary analyses of
Hurricane Katrina as a material-semiotic convergence of singularities. While a great variety of bodies (watery and otherwise) circulated, interacted and culminated in the event known as Hurricane Katrina, human molarity played a specific role in tipping the
334 balance of those relations towards a certain outcome. Without an adequate accounting for the operations of molarized human bodies of water in such a so-called "natural disaster," we will neither fully understand it, nor learn from it. Nor, I argue, will we be able to cultivate an ethics of interbeing.
In the next section of the chapter I look more closely at our planet's various water crises in relation to our "new hydrological technologies," or the involutions and technologizations of various geophysical bodies of water. Here, I am interested in how rhizo-phenomenological description of some of our most recent hydrotechnologies according to an onto-logic of amniotics might help articulate—without a wholesale denouncing of "technology"—why some of these technologizations sustain and promote an ethics of interbeing, while others negate it.171 This again demands consideration of how we, as molar human bodies of water, have contributed to the rechoreography and involution of such geophysical bodies of water in a way that calls into question the onto- logic of amniotics we have been describing in the preceding chapters.
In the second half of this chapter I then turn to an examination of two ecopolitical responses that our molarized human bodies of water have honed to negotiate our relation to geophysical bodies of water and their rechoreography through various hydrotechnologies. First, I explore how our recent call for the explicit recognition of water as a "human right" resists and even contradicts the onto-logic of amniotics that I claim is a condition of possibility for fostering an ethics for watery interbeing, and then I compare and contrast the "rights-based" approach with a second ecopolitical strategy,
335 that of fostering a global water commons. Through this brief examination, I wish to illustrate how the sorts of actions that we take up in response to our world's water crises stand much to gain from an attentive listening to bodies of water that allows their ethology to come into focus. By considering our ecopolitical possibilities according to the extent to which these possibilities might either support or challenge the specific relation between bodies of water that I call amniotics, we can better cultivate an ethics of interbeing. While the actions demanded of us by such as ethics can never be known in advance, any adequate response, I argue, must create an opening through which an amniotic relation might be nurtured and sustained. Again, this is not the same thing as saying that bodies of water must be preserved as they are, guarded from any forces of change. In earlier chapters we have already clearly described the ways in which transformation, passage, and differentiation are integral aspects of any body of water. We must therefore seek to nurture the proliferation of life and the metamorphoses that accompany it. Yet at the same time, an amniotic relation requires an attention to balance between such intensive differenciation and extensive differentiation, on the one hand, and the gestational and interpermeating movements that support it, on the other. Following this examination of both "rights" and "commons" responses in relation to an onto-logic of amniotics, I therefore close by examining how attentive listening to our bodies of water might inform current responses to our changing global situation that call for a "new commons" and "the creation of a new (common) social body." I ask: How does revisiting the notion of "commons" in the context of the onto-logic of our gestating,
336 differenc/tiating and interpermeating bodies of water potentially radicalize our understanding of the "commons" more broadly? What happens if we acknowledge the potential of our own bodies of water, and their imbrications in a "commons" of watery bodies with whom we ostensibly have nothing "in common"? How might listening to our bodies of water help bridge the distance between an ethics of interbeing that is necessarily embodied, and the "response" of the commons, that too often forgets about the life-affirming and proliferating force of our own watery-fleshy selves? These questions lead me back to account for the virtuality of our bodies of water which hold as part of their onto-logic a necessary force of futurity and creation. An ethics of interbeing, cultivated on such a basis, is an ethics committed to a creative virtual potential yet-to- come, never fully knowable. This is an ethics that does not mourn, but rather celebrates the fact, that we still "do not know what a body can do."
II. Hydrotechnological Involutions
It turns out that the ultimate demise of the Yangtze river dolphin, or the baiji, was caused by pollution, boat traffic, and obstructions to the river's flow. Unusually in the recent history of endangered aquatic species, the dolphin's decline was not tied to direct harvesting by humans, but rather to massive human interference in the body of water in which the baiji made their home.172 In fact, in many ways, the Yangtze River has become unrecognizable as the body of water it once was. Instead of a river it is now more like a series of massive stepped reservoirs—a river of fits and starts, if that can be called a river
337 at all. The latest of these steppes is of course atop the Three Gorges Dam, which has swelled the "river" in its midsection to a six-hundred-kilometre reservoir, holding back with tens of billions of dollars worth of materials and labour the water that aches to wash over the 1.5 million hectares of farmland, two major railway lines, and fifteen million human bodies of water that lie just downstream from this concrete cork. 73
While in the previous chapters of this project I have been discussing an onto-logic of amniotics as it pertains to "our" bodies of water, the story of the Yangtze and the baiji brings to the fore the question of what exactly constitutes this common "ours." In the previous chapters, we have already described bodies of water in terms of our own human bodies, and in terms of the animal and vegetable or other "living" bodies to whom we are connected through interpermeating, gestating and differenc/tiating relations. We have also described the ways in which the sea, and the primordial soupy waters from which life arose, are themselves gestating, differenc/tiating and connective bodies of water that proliferate life. In this sense, "our" bodies of water certainly extend to include not only human, other animal and vegetable bodies, but also geophysical bodies of water, and the various meteorological bodies of water (such as rain, fog, snow) that are caught up in the overlapping cycles of difference and repetition that participate in and connect the co- evolutions of these multitudinous bodies.
But the story of the Yangtze and the baiji shows us, moreover, that just as our human evolution is always a naturecultural co-evolution, so too are the earth's geophysical bodies of water perpetually subject to rechoreography and reterritorialization
338 by processes that are not only "natural." These geophysical bodies of water, such as the
oceans, lakes, underground aquifers, reservoirs, springs, streams, rivers, ponds and
glaciers that in fact cover the great majority of the area of the earth's surface, are no more
stable, no more abiding than any other "species" of watery body that we have discussed thus far. Like our own animal bodies, these geophysical bodies of water emerge from the
latent potentialities of other bodies of water that are no less historical, political and technological than they are geological, meteorological and "natural."
In our most recent human history we have witnessed astonishing transformations in our planet's geophysical bodies of water. We have witnessed great lakes such as our own Lake Ontario morph into intricate labyrinths of plumbing extending rhizomatically
far beyond these lakes' seemingly "natural" boundaries; we have seen magnificent, wild rivers such as the Yangtze in China, the Nile in Egypt, the Volga in Russia, and the Peace
River in Canada morph into ostensibly more controllable bodies, perched atop towering concrete dams, at the same time we have seen other rivers, such as the mighty Mississippi below New Orleans and the Rhine of continental Europe, deepened, straightened and presumably "tamed"; we have seen wetlands in southern Florida morph into canals, ditches and drains, or packed up and relocated to well fields, sometimes miles away.174
At the same time, the "ex-sea" that was once the Aral has undergone an almost wholesale diversion into massive canals that hoped to irrigate millions of hectares of Central Asian desert, yet left only rotting ship hulls "beached" on unfathomable swathes of salty sand in
339 its wake.175 It seems as though some geophysical bodies of water, when pushed too far,
like most other bodies, will simply give up the ghost.
Such rechoreographies, moreover, affect not only the physical shape, size or
speed of geophysical bodies of water, but also other qualitative markers of affectability
that rearrange these bodies' relations to the other bodies to whom they are connected. A
lake in Northern Alberta, for example, becomes home to multitudinous toxins, the by product of the nearby Tar Sands oil extraction processes. While this is not a spatial
reterritorialization, the way in which the lake fits into the ecological assemblage it used to
anchor is radically altered.176 Or, an underground aquifer in Southern Ontario morphs
into millions of identical 15 centimetre high cylindrical plastic units of commercial profit.
Here, not only is the aquifer physically and spatially de- and reterritorialized, but the
assemblages into which it enters radically shift: the aquifer is now directed only towards
those interpermeations inextricably connected to the accumulation of private wealth. The
territory left behind, as the aquifer assemblage is redistributed, is radically transformed
geographically, ecologically, economically, socially, culturally. We see how the Yangtze
and its Three Gorges Dam similarly reterritorializes not only its own "body proper," but
the millions of bodies of water that connect into the river: the building of the dam has
displaced no less than one and a half million people that used to live along its banks, not
to mention the billions of animal and vegetable bodies whose relocation was not
apparently warranted. And, thanks to massive pollution caused by industrial run-off, the
Yangtze's exoconsistency is not all that has changed; the seventy percent of China's
340 fisheries catch that used to come from the Yangtze has declined by more than half in the last fifty years, dramatically affecting the river's endoconsistency as well. Meanwhile, the massive retreat of the Aral Sea has meant not only a radical topographical shift (satellite photographs of the area now bear little resemblance to photographs of the same spot taken fifty years ago), but also a rhizomatic channelling of that shift through the animal bodies that populate the Central Asian deserts: salts hover visibly in the air, and throat cancer and other diseases have reached epidemic proportions, while the bio-accumulation of toxins is so great that mammalian mothers have been advised not to breast-feed their babies.177 But the futility of such advisories should be noted, for mother's milk is hardly a child's only fluvial interpermeation with the maternal body of water that gestated her—as one out of every hundred human children born in the region would surely have told us, if they had survived their birth long enough to do so.
Another example: as the water of Hamilton Harbour snakes its way through the plumbing systems of this southern Ontario city, the nodes of interpermeation between the geophysical body of water and the human bodies of water it is meant to serve are altered.
This concentration and re-zoning of bridge points inaugurates a new outlet for the potentiality of economic affect latent in the harbour water, now tunnelling below houses and highways in the Greater Hamilton Area. In 1995, geomorphology and hydroengineering met with politics, and an assemblage based on common use became an assemblage based instead on profit and control under the rubric of "public-private partnerships" and "efficiency models" (an assemblage no less complicated by the fallout
341 of the Enron scandal in which the privatization of Hamilton's water was rhizomatically imbricated). While water privatization may not have changed the physical form of the water moving through those pipes, the potentialities of that water shifted and new thresholds materialized. Within months of privatization, one of these thresholds was breached, as the 182 million litres of untreated human sewage, heavy metals and chemicals that could not be held by the basements in which they first sought refuge spilled into Hamilton harbour and then moved on to Lake Ontario.178 Forces converge, and each shift opens a new door or inaugurates a new threshold for the further deterritorialization of the body of water, and its rearrangement in perpetually morphing assemblages. Each rechoreography that interferes in the body of water's limits of affectability is a hydrotechnological involution.
Indeed, there is no doubt that these becomings are examples of the evolutions described by Deleuze and Guattari and other thinkers that contribute to the paradigm of molecular evolutionism suggested in chapter three. The evolutions, or involutions, of the planet's geophysical bodies of water are no less dramatic than those of the planet's biological life forms. Like the evolutions we discussed in the last two chapters, the transformation of our oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, aquifers, glaciers, ice-caps and various meteorological watery bodies also involve "strange kinships," "unnatural participations," and the interpermeation of difference. None of these deterritorializations and reterritorializations has a single cause, an unsullied lineage or a pin-pointable origin.
While in becoming, one does not "really" become that with whom one enters the block of
342 becoming, these evolutions nonetheless involve differenc/tiations of the matter, force, energy and desire of the participants of these becomings—sometimes up against their limits of affectability, and sometimes beyond them. The latter is what Deleuze and
Guattari refer to as annihilation.
Hurricane Katrina, that meteorological body of water that smashed into the south eastern land extremities of the United States and specifically, the city of New Orleans in
August 2005, was (and still is) most often referred to by the press and the public as a
"natural disaster" in origin at the very least, even if the social, humanitarian, political, economic and health effects of Katrina are now broadly discussed and analyzed. Yet
Katrina herself was a convergence of material-semiotic singularities that gathered up and profoundly participated in the naturecultural involutions and evolutions of various bodies of water, most notably (but hardly limited to) the technologized Mississippi river and the genealogies of the human animal bodies of water that populate(d) the city of New
Orleans. In his haunting analysis of the storm, John Protevi (2006) describes how Katrina as "an elemental and social event" is precisely such a co-evolution of differenciating and differentiated bodies of water. To tell the story of Katrina, Protevi tells us, "would be to tell the story of all of the earth, all of the cosmos," where everything is connected "just beyond the limit when things slow down enough for them to take form" (363-364). To understand Katrina, then:
one must first understand the land, the air, the sun, the river, and the sea; one must understand earth, wind, fire, and water; one must understand geomorphology, meteorology, biology, economics, politics, history. One must understand how
343 they have come together in the past to form, with the peoples of America, Europe, and Africa, the historical patterns of life in Louisiana and New Orleans, the bodies politic of the region, bodies that one must study with political physiology. One needs to understand what those bodies could do and what they could withstand, and how they intersected the event of the storm. (2006: 363)
The Mississippi's rhythm and speed is determined, as Protevi explains, by the singular points comprising her bank and bed. As her Channel was deepened and straightened; as increased commerce and shipping resulted in larger and more prosperous settlements upstream, such as New Orleans; as new settlements demanded construction of increasingly ambitious dykes and levees—the rhythms of the river began to change dramatically. Meanwhile, upon another spatiotemporal plane, bio-energy became sugar cane, and the global heat exchange system became the Gulf Stream, and both became a massive influx of Europeans, who in their turn entered assemblages with the Atlantic slave trade. Switch planes once again, and the Northeast Trade Winds connect with the deep hot water current in the Yucatan channel, gathering massive amounts of energy, before crossing the devastated wetlands in the Mississippi Delta. With no wetlands to slow it down, Katrina heads full force for New Orleans. Here, as Protevi further elaborates, the "man-made" disaster of the hurricane continues to unfold, gathering up these same political, geophysical, meteorological, historical bodies of water that had already been radically reterritorialized, and recasting them all in a unique event of
"political physiology."179 Katrina is a convergence of singularities, a co-evolution of watery bodies that produces a map of interpermeations that can certainly be traced in
344 retrospect, but which in any of its presents holds unknowable potentiality—no teleology, no destiny, no necessary outcome.
In a more recent account of Katrina, feminist philosopher Nancy Tuana also uses
Katrina and the "events of August 2005"180 as a lens through which to rethink the relations between so-called "social" and "natural" forces. In many ways, Tuana's argument is an apt complement to Protevi's, as she too argues for the "urgency of embracing an ontology that rematerializes the social and takes seriously the agency of the natural" (Tuana 188). Like Protevi, she too notes how Katrina "came into being because of a concatenation of phenomena," including not only the meteorological circumstances, but the situation of deforestation and industrialization in the Mississippi Delta, as well as the naturecultural and human geographies of New Orleans itself. She explains how the impossibility of separating the "natural" from the "human-induced" causes of Katrina is
"not only epistemic" (193), but also linked to the inextricable ways in which consumption patterns, technologization, climate change, social beliefs and structures, (living) histories of racism, and topographical morphology are intertwined. None stands as it is, on its own.
Tuana's analysis is another strong indictment of any attempt to divide nature ontologically from culture in a discrete manner. Moreover, Tuana also notes (in ways that resound strongly with my own analysis in these pages)181 the "more intimate level" on which such interactions take place—that is, at the thresholds and in the depths of our own flesh. She describes the "toxic soup" dumps of New Orleans compromised by the great flooding, which leached not only into the city's ground water but through the skin of its
345 inhabitants as well. As a result, she argues, plastics such as polyvinyl chloride have "not only transformed our lives" but they have "also transformed our flesh" (199). Using the example of a plastic bottle of Coke, she describes how the molecular exchanges across the "viscous porosity" of our flesh engage what Deleuze would call morphogenetic intensities, or involutions, in bodies that we may conventionally consider to be separate or discrete. While we might think of the plastic bottle as a product of technology and ourselves as natural beings, Tuana asks us to:
incinerate that bottle and breathe deeply. The components of the bottle have an agency that transforms that naturally occurring flesh of my body into a different material or structure than what occurs in nature. The parts of the plastic become as much a part of my flesh as parts of the Coke that I drank. Once the molecular interaction occurs, there is no divide between nature/culture, natural/artificial. These distinctions, while at times useful, are metaphysically problematic, for there are important migrations between and across these divides that can be occluded by efforts to posit a dualism. (202)
While I would argue (following Haraway, whose work Tuana references in this essay) that even positing any part of our bodies as "naturally occurring in nature" before the intrusion of foreign technologized substances is suspect, Tuana is nonetheless absolutely correct to point to the ways in which our molecular bodies engage in a "viscous porosity" with other bodies that contribute to their evolutions and involutions, and that these processes in turn feed back into all sorts of interimbricated events, such as Katrina.
In other words, involutions or co-evolutions are always naturecultural, and the resultant bodies are as political as they are physical, as sociological as they are biological, as technological as they are "natural." Indeed, in both Protevi and Tuana's detailed
346 accounts of the many overlapping factors that culminated in Katrina, we understand with increasing clarity the need for Deleuze and Guattari to refer to such evolutions as
"technics,"182 or what Ansell-Pearson aptly explains is a "bio-technogenesis" (182). Just as there is no purely biological evolution, there is no purely technological evolution;
"There is no biosphere or noosphere, but everywhere the same Mechanosphere" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 69); all evolutions are rechoreographies of assemblages of parts of all kinds. The essence of evolution lies not in the kind of life that evolves, but in the process of evolution that necessarily requires a gifting of matter and a rearrangement and interpermeation of other bodies, forces, desires. Kevin Kelly, author, researcher and co- founder of Wired magazine, suggests in fact that the "technium," or technological invention, should be considered as the seventh Kingdom of life, alongside the currently accepted six Kingdoms of animals, plants, fungi, protoctists, eubacteria and archea.183 As
Kelly puts it, all forms of life are derived from other forms, and the technium, or the superorganism of technological invention, is another form of life derived mostly from human-animal life; it is an extended phenotype of the human.184 But the technium cannot be comprised of "purely" technological or cultural life forms any more than my own body of water, or yours, could ever be "purely" natural. All technological invention is still gestated from the matter that so called "natural" invention has produced and consistently rechoreographed in her own ways. A swimming pool in Hamilton still channels water from the bay; a hydroelectric dam still requires active imbrications with a
347 river; a plastic portable bottle of Nestle water still takes its contents from an aquifer near you.
But Kelly is certainly correct in reminding us that technologies such as those that
contributed to the event(s) of Katrina are indeed "extensions of our own human phenotype." Moreover, we need to recall that events such as Katrina, or the involutions
and evolutions of a body of water like the Yangtze River, are not massive undifferentiated eddies of interconnectivity. Rather, different forces and flows meet different barriers, and these forces are enabled or challenged in different ways. This is
indeed why Tuana prefers the term "viscous porosity" to fluidity, as it reminds us that while no barrier is impermeable, some flows are resistant to changing form, and that
"there are membranes that effect the interactions" and distinguish between flows (193-
194, 199-200). Hence, as both Protevi and Tuana aptly underline, the role of the molarized human subject in the event of Katrina and the involution of the bodies that she
drew upon for nourishment and left upturned in her wake, should not just fade into some
amorphous blob of "causes." Our molarized subjectivities are of course those same
subjectivities that traffic in humans; that comprise the U.S. Corps of Engineers that in turn determines that levees built to withstand Category 3 hurricanes and one hundred year
floods (Bijker 2007)185 are the maximum allowed in terms of cost-benefit ratios; that
segregate themselves on high ground and low ground according to skin colour, and then protect the high ground from scrutiny with the help of retired Special Ops forces, while other subjectivities are herded into Superdromes for their own "protection"; that promise
348 fewer environmental regulations in New Orleans in order to facilitate the plastics industry; that in 1927 blew up a New Orleans levee in order to save parts of the city from the ravages of flooding at the expense of her poorer districts. While such molarized subjectivities did not "cause" the meteorological body of water we now know as Katrina
(although of course Katrina is an assemblage that includes the Mississippi no less than the storm itself), the meaning of the event(s) of Katrina is unintelligible without acknowledging the specific way in which these molarized human forces intersected with other molecular forces to bring about this tragic involution. Katrina was as much part of the technium—i.e., a technologized extension of our human phenotype—as it was a
"natural disaster."
What the involution/evolution story of the technium also opens up to, then, is a consideration of how hydrotechnologies and their resultant bodies—such as the straightened Mississippi, her drainage-ditched wetlands, or her leveed banks—change the limits of certain bodies of water to affect and be affected, and their capacity to gestate, differenc/tiate and interpermeate within a balanced onto-logic. Furthermore, if technologized bodies are extensions of our human phenotype, then we must also consider the way in which some of these technologized bodies challenge the limits of affectability of others, and how this either opens to or forecloses the potential for an ethics of interbeing. Our human molarity with its capacity to affect is not like all other forces. In acknowledging this we find ourselves once again, standing on a threshold, asking how we might respond.
349 While Katrina was a veritable "event," in the Deleuzian sense, similar naturecultural catastrophes involving our planet's geophysical bodies of water pepper our globe, but few receive the same attention, not least because they are moving in
(comparatively) slow motion, and occurring on the periphery of the Western media's attention. At the same time, other naturecultural involutions of our planet's geophysical watery bodies continue to affirm life, supporting robust ecosystems and the proliferation of new bodies of water. In the following section, then, I undertake a closer consideration of the different ways in which our molarized human subjectivities have contributed to such various watery involutions, and the ways in which such technologizations have supported or challenged the onto-logic of amniotics. Thereafter I will look to our molar responses in light of an ethics of interbeing.
III. New Hydrological Technologies and Amniotic Imbalance
The water crisis our planet is currently facing is, like the hydrological cycle itself, not one coherent crisis but rather a series of overlapping crises that draw from and lead to each other. For example, much popular opinion assumes that the world is running out of water, but this is not the case; the total amount of water on earth is basically unchanged since prehistoric times. But this does not mean we do not have a crisis of supply. As we have already noted, around the globe, on every inhabited continent, streams and rivers run dry, entire lakes are drastically shrinking, and deep and ancient aquifers are being depleted. This water is not entirely "disappearing," however, but being transformed and
350 rerouted, most often in ways that render it unusable for our current human (and many companion species') needs. Importantly, the crisis of supply is intimately linked to the crisis of water quality. Indeed, the question is not so much whether there is enough water to go around, but rather what shape our water is in—both in terms of its physical manifestation (Is it fresh or salty? Frozen or flowing? Where we need it or where we don't?) and in terms of its health (Is it clear or clouded? Disease-free or cholera-ridden?
Home to healthy fish populations, or only crude oil tailings?) And, even if usable water is abundant and healthy, further crises assert themselves in terms of control and management, privatization and profiteering. We need to ask not only whether one has access to water, but who has access to water, and at what cost—financial and otherwise.
While a fraught and tenuous relation to water is certainly nothing new in terms of the evolutionary history of species on this planet, the magnitude, global scale and acceleration of our current crises are unprecedented in human history (DeVilliers 2003:
6-18; Postel 1997: xi-xii). Moreover, although contemporary water thinkers and writers express varying views on the potential of technology to remedy our woes, virtually all nonetheless agree that our current crises have been significantly exacerbated by some of our human technological projects, specifically those that I am here calling our new hydrological technologies.
This choice of phrase—new hydrological technologies (or NHTs as I refer to them below)—should indeed underline the fact that hydrological engineering is nothing new. At least as old as the beaver, hydrological technologies have existed until recently
351 with little adverse impact on our (continuously de- and reterritorializing) planetary ecosystems. In fact, as already suggested, technological bodies of water may also partake in the onto-logic of amniotics I describe in these pages. For example, traditional acequia systems are community-based irrigation technologies. They are part of the ancient legacy of water civilizations, but today can be found in New Mexico and southern Colorado in the United States.186 The word "acequia" is of Arabic origin (reflecting the systems'
Moorish origins), and means "bearer of water" or "that which quenches thirst." These systems are correspondingly simple in design: they are comprised of earthen ditches that move water from a common source (such as a spring or stream) and distribute it though a network of trenches nestled in the fields. They insert themselves unassumingly and undemandingly into the mountain valleys of the arid Southwest. They do not brashly announce their presence, and remain almost unnoticeable until you are practically upon one. They can hardly be detected by the cars that speed past the fields, although the congregations of flora and fauna that acequias generate are often an indexical sign post.
To know them requires contact, watery body to watery body. Their rhythms and speeds match the rhythms and speeds of the landscape they are etched into, and their contours echo the land's own. These contemporary acequias of the American southwest also vividly illustrate the processes of molecular evolutionism as relevant not only to biological bodies of water but to geophysical ones as well, as these ditches also express, in the words of Paula Garcia, "the synthesis of peoples and cultures who have sustained them over the ages" (Garcia 2007). They combine the Moorish tradition inherited by
352 Spain and then carried by the Spaniards across the Atlantic, as well as the agricultural techniques of the Americas. They have adapted to their "New World" locale in order to thrive in a current contemporary context.
These acequias embody the proliferative life force of water: they express the relation of gestation (as soils, plants and animals flourish in the acequia ecosystems), differenc/tiation (through the increased biodiversity that the acequias bring to their territories), repetition (as the sustainability of the long-standing system perseveres although the water flowing through the ditches continually moves on to other, new expressions) and interpermeation (as the meaningful connections between the acequias and the human, other-than-human, vegetable and geological participants in communities such as San Luis are sustained). Importantly, the gestationality of these systems reveals a nurturing of other bodies that are not seemingly integral to the acequia ecosystem assemblage: not only do the ditches channel a source of water for irrigation, but they also proliferate the cultural life of the human bodies that maintain them, in a reciprocal (but asymmetrical) gift. As Garcia reports, contemporary acequias persist in large part because of the spiritual and cultural aspects they hold, as their users espouse a deep
"cultural longing to continue ancestral practices and pass them on to future generations."
And again, these "future generations" are not only the direct descendants of the ancestral acequia cultures, but also newcomers who have randomly and endosymbiotically fused with the acequia territories, and folded these hydrological practices into their own. The interpermeating and gestational networks of the acequias have thus spawned more than
353 food; they have also proliferated an active community politics, not only in the face of mounting pressure to privatize and redistribute the region's water resources, but also in the region's burgeoning local food movement; they have gestated indigenous education programmes, such as Sembrando Semillas project which engages the watery bodies of the community youth in practical learning experiences, with traditional farmers and ranchers serving as mentors; and they provide the condition of possibility for a growing ethics of interbeing that connects the people of the region to their water and their land, and the gifts of these watery bodies to their own. In other words, the acequia systems' watery gifts are folded into the human bodies that receive from them not only hydration, but cultural and spiritual nourishment as well. These human bodies of water pass this nourishment on, in a further proliferation of other life. Hence the acequias also express a virtuality, a larval potentiality. While specific acequias do the actualized work of irrigating fields, the virtuality of the acequia expresses this system's "infinitive" form—
"to acequia" (perhaps to quench, to sustain, to connect)—in a way that gathers up the acequia's past, present and future in a singular potential, gestating body that in any present remains never fully knowable. According to Don Bustos, a New Mexico Acequia
Association board member and farmer, "We are not only defending our water but we are building for the future."187 Material past folds into a multitudinous future.
The drip irrigation systems of Israel, India, Nepal, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin
America (DeVilliers 2003: 387-389; Pearce 2006: 373-376) may not generate the same nested and connected ecosystems of the acequias, but these systems are nonetheless
354 parsimonious in water use, and are extremely judicious in ensuring that their bank of gestational waters is not overtaxed. These irrigation technologies all reveal that the technologization of geophysical bodies of water is not necessarily disruptive of an amniotic onto-logic; hydrotechnology is rather one possible expression of this watery logic. The question we need to ask of such hydrological assemblages is thus not whether or not they are technological, but rather how the pragmatics of the technology interacts with other bodies in their assemblages.188 In other words, technology is not an antithesis to an amniotic onto-logic, and can in fact nourish and sustain this logic in some instances.
Moreover, while these examples of irrigation technologies are tied in direct ways to ancient hydrological practices, not all "new" hydrological technologies are necessarily disruptive of an amniotic relation. Blue roofs (a deliberately watery variation on the theme of "green roofs"), for instance, proliferate as watery garden roofscapes in cities such as Vancouver and Montreal (Rose 2007: 58-60).These technologized bodies of water represent a more contemporary technological evolution, or involution, between built architecture and landscape (waterscape?). While no technical definition of a blue roof exists, the notion involves the technological establishment of some sort of receptacle that could store and use water on the roof, or "fifth facade" of built structures. Yet, the example of watery rooftops brings the notion of pragmatics to the fore once again. The semiotics of "blue roofs" is reliant on their embeddedness: which blue roofs? Where?
Pragmatics demands that we inquire into their difference, and their individuation as particular actualized bodies, but also into the specific assemblages they support, generate
355 or transform. If blue roofs are simply watery rooftops, then we need to ask how a "blue roof," on a hotel in Las Vegas, in the middle of the Nevada desert, that siphons its water from an already critically depleted aquifer in order to fill a massive swimming pool to be enjoyed by an elite, select few, is different from the "blue roof on a three-story walk-up in Montreal, upon which 50% of fallen rain will be retained, thus returning water to the atmosphere and bypassing the city's (overtaxed) sewer system, while also proliferating vegetable life in the midst of a concrete island of urban heat. While the immediate lived experience of sipping a G&T by the pool on the roof of the Marriott Grand Chateau may seem as "life proliferating" as deadheading the purple cone flowers on your rooftop on
Rue Saint-Dominique, what does your molecular subjectivity reveal about these two experiences? As with any body of water, a geophysical or technological body of water can open to an ethics of interbeing only when we engage with its embeddedness, its situated embodiedness. Again, we need to draw on our own molecularity, pay attention, and ask: Who are you, this body of water that is before me? What is your difference, and where are our moments of interpermeation? What will you teach me about myself, and what will I learn about you? This ethics depends on listening, and responding. But our questions are already shifting: It is no longer a question of simply, How can / allow you to be? It seems we need to ask more fully: How can / allow you not just to be, but to be an amniotic body of water, still flowing in the rhythms of this watery onto-logic? How can you spur me on to safeguard that onto-logic, too? Like the swimming pool on the roof of the Grand Chateau Marriott in Las Vegas, many new hydrological technologies, of course, do not express or sustain this relation.
We have already noted above some of the ways in which bodies and their extended assemblages are radically rechoreographed thanks to our human retrofitting of the world's plumbing, but we are now able to examine some of these reterritorializations specifically in light of their relation to an amniotic onto-logic. Many NHTs are indeed stretching this balanced logic of interpermeation, gestation, repetition, and differentiation to untenable limits. For example: Under the influence of some NHTs, if bodies of water can collect enough means to sustain themselves, for their own short-term goals, they have nothing left to gift to gestation; they are unable to sustain the other bodies of water with whom they are interpermeated. This is the evolution story of corporatized water mining by Coca Cola in India, where Coca Cola mines two and seven tenths litres of water from the already critically dry region of Uttar Pradesh in order to produce one litre of product
(Mathiason 2006). Disruptions in water's amniotic onto-logic in the name of Coca Cola operations already have a history in India, namely in the state of Kerala where old hydrotechnologies (local wells) were forced to give way to new ones (a Coca Cola water extraction and operations plant). Just months after the plant began its operations in
Kerala, these local wells began to run dry. Moreover, the water in these wells was so contaminated by sludge that it was unfit for consumption; the sludge could not even be recycled for fertilizer (Rajeev 2005). While in the case of Kerala, local protests succeeded in closing the plant, the fate of the watery bodies in Uttar Pradesh still hangs in
357 the (ever slipping) balance. The massive-scale industrial irrigation technologies that have led to droughts and aquifer depletions in Pakistan, Egypt and Nevada, USA (DeVilliers
2003: 152-158) tell us a similar evolution story, where extinction of these underground bodies of water looms heavy in the shadows.
Or: Under the influence of some NHTs, a body of water's routes of interconnectivity may be so radically rearranged that gestation loses its proliferative, differentiating rhythm. We can trace this evolution story in the building of the monumental dams over the Volga in Russia and the Narmada in India (DeVilliers 2003:
127-151; Roy 2001: 62-86), where, similar to the story of the Yangtze, the mighty flows of these rivers are parceled into ostensibly manageable units. The bodies of water within these rivers, in the form of various critically endangered species of aquatic life, cannot adapt to the deterritorialization of the river's rhythms. And meanwhile, nor can the animal, vegetable, cultural and social life that used to populate these rivers' banks so easily adapt to their new entirely aquatic environments, now submerged beneath stories of water. A similar story can be traced in the Yellow River diversion in China, where, although floods and droughts have always been a part of the Yellow River's assemblage, technological manipulation has pushed this flood/drought balance to untenable limits
(Pearce 2006: 146-166). The river diversions built in order to manage flooding have resulted in massive desiccation of the river basin, and the role that the river used to play in gestating China's breadbasket has similarly morphed and retreated into the pervasive dustbowl. As DeVilliers (2003) notes, the Rhine River, once snaking but now barrelling
358 through northern continental Europe, is the most extreme example of the imbalances caused by a river's technological reterritorializations. He writes:
Although eleven million people still get their drinking water from the Rhine, it is no longer really a river, but an engineered waterway of levees, concrete embankments, locks, flow-control devices, hydro plants, weirs and channels. Once the Rhine meandered over an extensive flood plain; now, cut off from its natural controls, it flows twice as fast as before in a channel up to eight metres deep, dramatically increasing the power of its floods. (142)
Pushed past its own fluvial limits of recognition, the Rhine "River" can no longer pass its own materiality on, in a gift of gestation, without the continual threat of annihilation.
Such grand feats of engineering seek to "bring water to the people" (Pearce 2006: 289-
301) but remain ignorant of the bodies of water they leave behind, or literally in their wake. We have already noted how this evolution story played out on the sandy, salty territory that was once known as the Aral Sea (DeVilliers 2003: 113-126; Young 2006:
183). Meanwhile, back in North America, the story of golf courses, fountains and green lawns in the middle of a south-western US desert that feed one human desire while denying the benefits of this onto-logic to other bodies of water, human or otherwise, will likely have a similar, if somewhat more thirsty, ending (Barlow and Clark 2002: 238;
DeVilliers 2003: 17).
Or: Under the influence of some NHTs, if bodies of water enter a cycle of repetition, these bodies return only as the self-same, in identical, invasive and homogenizing replicas. As we explored in chapter two, Deleuze's theory of difference and repetition (which significantly inspires my own thinking about the onto-logic of
359 amniotics) is particularly aimed at accounting for the notion of repetition, not as simulacra or re-presentation of some pre-existing ideal form, but as difference in itself.
The onto-logic of our bodies of water engages in this differenc/tiation as we gestate and pass on the very materiality of our watery bodies. These passages, however, do not forge replicas of ourselves but rather engage in a further creative proliferation of life. Yet, with so many of our NHTs, we seem to seek homogenization and the disembedded reproduction of formulaic solutions that impose hegemonic watery forms. We can trace such evolution stories (which are really the stories of invasive species) in the way we have straightened out rivers to facilitate shipping lanes, such as on the Mississippi
(Protevi 2006), or in the draining of "swampland" to allow suburban development
(Glennon 2002: 71-86), where the creation of "habitable land" is more about the homogenized habits of comfortable living than a response to the limits of affectability of that land. And of course, the mining and commodification of water to facilitate that ubiquitous plastic bottle far too many of us have ready-to-hand is perhaps the ultimate example of this story of invasive species (Barlow and Clarke 2002: 142-150; Glennon
2003). Not only is water, in the form of commodified bottled water, reduced to a bare repetition, but at the same time its gestational capacity to nourish the communities most intimately connected to that water is depleted as well.
Certainly, even NHTs "proliferate life" in various ways. Mass-scale irrigation creates vegetable bodies where they would not have been otherwise; dams bring water to fields to grow crops; and in both cases these vegetable bodies nurture other animal bodies
360 in turn. But at what cost? At what cost to the proliferating series of gestation, differenc/tiation and interpermeation that are hanging on, if at all, by a mere watery thread? Largely thanks to such NHTs and the trend towards the commodification of water that spurs them on, an estimated 5.5 billion people, or over two-thirds of the world's population will have inadequate access to water by the year 2025 (Shrybman 2007:1). No one has yet undertaken a comprehensive census of the fate of the vegetable, other animal, or geophysical bodies that will be extinguished. In this and many other ways, we are still refusing to listen to the questions that our watery others whisper to us. And as a result of our refusal to listen, our pseudo-responses account only for our own needs as discrete and unconnected human bodies (and for the needs of our most privileged human bodies, at that). As long as we refuse to acknowledge the ways in which our molar but also molecular bodies are engaged in a mutually imbricated onto-logic of amniotics with our watery others, enacting an ethics of interbeing will remain elusive.
IV. On How to Respond
As Nancy Tuana so aptly notes in her study of Hurricane Katrina, "[i]t is easier to posit an ontology than to practice it" (209). In other words, even if we listen attentively to our others, even if we cross an ontological threshold and refuse to see our watery selves as discrete or self-sufficient, even if we acknowledge the gestational and differentiated relations that our bodies of water engage in order to proliferate life, we still might not know how to respond adequately in our actions, our politics, our paradigms.
361 This is not to say that we haven't been responding to our morphing geophysical bodies of water all the time. Such responses take the form of municipal planning, hydroengineering, water rights regimes,189 privatization of water resources, disaster preparedness plans, and other such tools that seek to choreograph our relation to water.
However, many of these responses are (sometimes necessarily) narrow in focus, as they offer only a limited appreciation of the role and meaning of geophysical water in relation to other bodies of water. Attempts have been made, nonetheless, to offer paradigms of response that could embrace the multifaceted ways in which we relate to, rely on and reciprocally affect the bodies of water that comprise the greater womb of the world. In the following sections, I examine two such responses: the call to recognize water as a human right, and the call to support a water commons. The discourses and practices of human rights and commons can be analyzed according to a variety of criteria, for example in terms of their political effectiveness, in terms of practical considerations that can hamper their implementation, or in terms of the ideological frameworks they shore up. Such analysis can occur from a variety of perspectives, most often within political theory, development studies or international relations. My interest here, however, is to examine the extent to which these paradigms are able to cultivate an onto-logic of amniotics, and thus adequately open to an ethics of interbeing. As we will see, each of these responses creates different possibilities for "doing" ontology: while human rights, despite its significant accomplishments in the twentieth century on a variety of fronts, presents significant challenges in terms of introducing any relational ontology between
362 the bodies it addresses, the commons enables thinking in relation and acknowledges the interpermeation of different watery bodies, while remaining open to what those bodies can do.
(a) The Human Right to Water
Water crises, the impact of hydrotechnologies, and the specific responsibility of molar human subjects for responding to the accelerated involutions of the earth's many bodies of water have underlined the need for a paradigm of response that appreciates the unique role that water has in our biological, cultural, social, political and otherwise meaningful lives. Hence we are now hearing an escalating call for the recognition of water as a human right—both as a moral right that should be guaranteed to all humans by virtue of their human nature, and also as a legal right that should be explicitly protected in the steadily expanding machinery of international human rights law. Arguably, because water is a basic human need, it must be concomitantly recognized as a fundamental human right (Gleick 1996; 1998). Moreover, defenders of this position argue that such a move would not only alleviate the burden of the water-poor and those most affected by destructive hydrotechnologies, but also pressure governments as the assumed custodians of water and their populations' well-being to manage our planet's water more thoughtfully, effectively, and equitably. In this sense, the right-to-water paradigm seeks explicitly to acknowledge the role of the molar human in pushing the
363 onto-logic of amniotics to its current brink in so many situations, and the responsibility of the molar human to respond appropriately.
Although the "right to water" is currently not spelled out comprehensively as such in any of the major United Nations treaties or conventions,190 some progress towards this recognition has already been made. Notably, General Comment 15 of the United Nations
Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 2002 recognizes the right to water as the cornerstone for realizing all other human rights. This comment, as well as the legal scholarship of many experts, outlines how the right to water is already implicit in the internationally declared and legally enshrined right to life, right to food, the right to health, right to dignity, among others (Young 2006; Gleick 1998; Scanlon, Casser and
Nemes 2004). Water as necessary to the enjoyment of human rights is also recognized in the constitutional law of over fifty countries, either through an explicit right to safe water or implicitly through the right to a healthy environment (Scanlon, Casser and Nemes
2004: 42-50). South Africa, and more recently Uruguay, are globally distinguished as the only two countries that recognize an explicit right to water in their constitutional law
(Bakker 2007: 438; Young 2006: 64; Scanlon, Casser and Nemes 2004: 50). But despite these positive steps, rights-proponents argue that these efforts need to be consolidated in the explicit recognition of water as a human right in a specific, binding, international treaty. Only this way can general claims be translated into accountability, through specific national means of implementation of such a treaty. Such a treaty, they claim, would be the appropriate "response."
364 Yet while the campaign for the right to water is gaining ground, particularly in international development circles, not all view the promise of the right to water so unequivocally. Some criticisms are lodged less against the right to water specifically, and more at the inefficacy of the international human rights machinery and its dubious enforcement mechanisms more generally. Thus the question is raised as to whether enshrining a more explicit right to water would remedy much in real terms (see Bakker
2007: 438; Young 2006: 64). But the question I would like specifically to ask is: How effectively can the paradigm of human rights sustain and nurture bodies of water as described by the onto-logic of amniotics? How effectively can the paradigm of human rights provide an opening for an ethics of interbeing of watery bodies—particularly between those bodies who seemingly have nothing in common? It is clear that a human rights paradigm is one response to the water crises that our planet's bodies of water currently face, but I wonder: to what extent can this paradigm listen to those bodies in the first place? The intent of the following discussion of the human right to water is not to deny that the discourse of human rights, in certain contexts, is indeed a powerful voice. In fact, the modern human rights machinery was arguably born from the very demand by many "othered bodies" within the contemporary world's social and political apparatuses to be heard. But, we must ask: is human rights a case of selective listening to individual voices of individual bodies? Is human rights able to insert itself in the interstices of those bodies to cultivate an ethics that hinges between their individuality and their interbeing?
365 The first problem with the human right to water concerns the grounding of this right in terms of quantitative "access to a basic water requirement" for each individual
(Gleick 1996; 1998). Because of the widespread conviction among rights-advocates that
"[t]here is enough fresh water on earth to meet all of human needs" (Filmer-Wilson 2005:
229), these advocates insist that the focus must be on equitable management to meet these basic needs. From the standpoint of amniotics, the ethical motivation of such calls cannot be faulted and the question of management indeed requires urgent attention. Yet, this quantifiable basic needs approach raises other questions in relation to the onto-logic of watery bodies. Water, we know, is moving, continuously proliferating in new beings, new forms of life. How can we know how the balance of fresh and salt water might shift in the years to come? How can we know how our human needs might change, grow or transform? Our increasing global population, the increasing sophistication of our hydrological technologies, and the amazing ability of our bodies of water to adapt to unfamiliar circumstances all point to the difficulty of answering such questions. In the
Etosha Pan in northern Namibia, the stark dryness that prevails for most of the year morphs into a lush green oasis for only several months out of twelve. During these months, catfish begin to churn in the muddy waters, gestated by parents that survived the dry season by "burrowing into the mud, living off body fat, and surfacing only to use their peculiar lunglike auxiliary organs to obtain oxygen directly from the air" (DeVillers
2003: 158). Watery bodies are evidently capable of the most amazing innovation. The onto-logic of amniotics similarly reminds us of our bodies' continual differenc/tiation and
366 proliferation through repetition, and of the unknowable virtuality held in that gestational medium. To base the strategy for the future life of our bodies of water on what we know now seems not only short-sighted in temporal terms, but also inadequate to our present situation and the latent potential of our bodies of water.
Similarly, approaching the "right to water" from a basic needs perspective involves a calculation that understands water from a physiological perspective, but cannot appreciate some of the cultural, spiritual or other non-quantifiable dimensions of our reliance on and relation to water. How, for example, could a guaranteed amount of water address the central importance of certain bodies of water to First Nations people? For example, the Echamamish River that "flows-both-ways" has served as a sacred site for the Cree long before the arrival of Europeans in what is now called Manitoba (Canadian
Heritage Rivers Board 2000: 14; Petersen 2006). A human rights platform does not always concern itself with only the measurable provisions of guaranteeing such rights, but the specific rights-based basic needs approach quantifies water independent of its situatedness, its embodiedness, and the assemblages it animates that imbue water with far more than quantifiable use-value. We survive in more ways than one, and our basic water needs are not only physiological. As the onto-logic of amniotics describes to us, our implication within the hydrological cycle is not only biological, but social, ethical, political, and cultural as well.
Other problems with the "human right to water" concern the specific jurisprudence and legal machineries that would be required to guarantee this right, and
367 the ways in which water, as a rhizo-phenomenon, refuses to be contained by these machineries. For example, the contemporary human rights legal machinery is based on the sovereignty of the nation state, whereby nation states are responsible for ensuring protection of human rights within their borders. So the question arises: Even if the international human rights machinery could hold states accountable for what goes on in their territories, how can this machinery address problems that defy the notion of sovereign state boundaries altogether? How can the state, as the ultimately accountable entity for ensuring the right to water to its population, regulate a resource that refuses to be contained? Bodies of water—of all kinds—are not stable or discrete bodies, but bodies that move, flow, become, evaporate, while also interpermeating all other bodies of water.
Guaranteeing water for bodies within an arbitrarily bounded territory defies the logic of water and the onto-logic according to which bodies of water express themselves. Such strategies cannot respond to a relational ontology of leaks and flows.191 A similar problem concerns the interpermeability of the bodies of water to whom this right is addressed. Within the rights paradigm, priority is granted to the individual as the subject of rights. Even in cases (such as the 1986 United Nations Declaration on the Right to
Development) where the rights of "peoples" to natural resources are also foregrounded, human rights jurisprudence nonetheless grants primacy to the discrete individual as the beneficiary of any right (Panikkar 1982; Sengupta 2000: 3). Hence the call for explicitly granting a right to each human individual to water, according to human rights jurisprudence, must prioritize the needs of the thirsty individual before the law at any
368 given time over the needs of the watery web of beings that gestated and sustained that individual, and which she must gestate and sustain in return. Such a prioritization makes no sense: the entire watery web must be sustained if its watery nodes are to flourish.192
The co-implication and inteipermeation of amniotic relations are silenced under the individualistic humanism of human rights jurisprudence.
In chapter three, we also discussed at length the way in which the interpermeation of difference, and sexual difference (as virtual) in particular, was necessary for the proliferation of life in the onto-logic of amniotics. This opens to a further problem in terms of the subject positions established in human rights law, and the philosophy that grounds it. Just as the notion of the discrete individual is a cornerstone for human rights law, this paradigm also rests upon the fundamental principle of non-discrimination.
While "non-discrimination" has never been ultimately fulfilled in the implementation of human rights law,193 it nonetheless remains the key sentiment to which this law aspires.
Indeed, we are apparently all "born free and equal in dignity and rights" (Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1), and our entitlement to these rights is "without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status" (UDHR, Article 2). Yet, the inescapable difference of human beings, and thus their differentiated entitlements cannot be kept out of even the most basic human rights conventions, those otherwise paragons of neoliberal discourse. For example, children clearly are not entitled to "all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration" (UDHR, Article 2), while women and
369 men also have differentiated entitlements based on women's capacity as to carry and bear children.194 In other words, an irresolvable tension is boldly announced in these documents between the equal rights of "all" and the differentiated rights of some. While the drafters of these laws want very badly for all human beings to be equal, the impossibility of this reveals itself under human rights' own roof. Undoubtedly, this tension can in part be explained by the fact that the "all" to whom these documents initially referred was far from "all," but in fact the circumscribed male, white neoliberal individualized subject. He was the standard bearer for these rights, and thus any one occupying a different subject position would require "special treatment." 195 As
Charlesworth, Chinkin and Wright (1991) argue in their influential assessment of international human rights law from a feminist perspective, the different voice of women is inevitably silenced in this arrangement (616). To single women out for "special treatment," as in the case of the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Violence Against Women, or in the gender-specific Articles of the International Bill of Rights, is undoubtedly a necessary step within this masculinist and difference-phobic paradigm. But, this is not to say that the paradigm itself responds near adequately to the question of difference as difference. Without this capacity, a human rights paradigm is hard pressed to accommodate the necessary interpermeation of difference that the onto-logic of amniotics reveals to us. Simply put, it is unable to listen to difference, much less respond to it.
370 Furthermore, although rights-activists stress the notion of duties and responsibilities that are inherent in the concept of rights (e.g., Filmer-Wilson 2005;
Gleick 1998: 499), in practice these responsibilities are not altogether clear (see Young
2006: 64-65). How can ensuring the right of a human population to water simultaneously ensure that our responsibility towards that water is addressed? What if ensuring a right to water means drilling increasingly deeper wells, or plumbing increasingly shallow riverbeds? What of the right to water for industrial or livelihood purposes that result in its pollution or exploitation? How in turn does ensuring that human right affect a body of water's gestational capacity in an (unknowable) future? Moreover, even if responsibility is indeed implicit in human rights jurisprudence, this responsibility is bound by the here and now, that is, by the sovereign territory of the state and the discrete human individual before the law, both contained within their presumably impermeable borders and both understood in their present (knowable) articulation. But bodies of water, in their actuality and gestational virtuality, seep through such borders and show up the inability of the human rights discourse fully to account for them.
Another important criticism described by Bakker (2007) is that there is nothing in the notion of rights that necessarily rejects the privatization, commodification and corporatization of water resources, if a state party feels these to be appropriate means for satisfying the right to water. In fact, as Bakker remarks, the campaign for the right to water has been joined by some very strange bedfellows indeed, including the World
Bank, the World Water Council (viewed by many anti-privatization activists as pro-
371 privatization) and many large multinational corporations advocating for the privatization of water services (Bakker 2007: 439-440). Such "defenders" of the right to water insist that the ends rather than the means are the business of such a right—a business which then can literally become a business. Here, it should not go unremarked that private property was indeed one of the first rights to be considered in the Western evolution of human rights, and the contemporary doctrine of national sovereignty over a nation's own resources continues this tradition.196 In many ways the notion of rights and the claim to private property have always gone hand in hand. Yet the onto-logic of our bodies of water defies the very notion of private property. Our bodies of water are inherently public, common, and shared. So need we not ask whether the human rights tradition could ever be adequate to this onto-logic?
Moreover, nor can the strategy of water as a human right address the ways in which its anthropocentrism denies the onto-logic of amniotics. Bodies of water, as this onto-logic illustrates, are far more than human bodies, but include other animal and vegetable bodies as well. All of these bodies belong to the web of interbeing that gestates water through its multiplicitous series of difference and repetition. These are our co- implicated, naturecultural evolution stories that we discussed in chapters three and four.
But how can granting the right to water to people address the other-than-humans within this web—these other-than-humans that not only depend upon the water we humans replicate and differentiate through both biological and technological processes, but on whom we humans are also dependent for our own gestation, sustenance and
372 proliferation? In other words, this is not just a case of granting equal consideration to the interests of non-human animals, but rather of recognizing that the interests of all bodies of water are co-implicated. Human bodies of water exist only because other-than-human animal bodies of water have gestated us. This symbiotic-evolutionary gestation points to an ethics of interbeing that goes beyond a consideration of different but equally worthy interests. Unfortunately, our current paradigm of human rights is poorly equipped to attend to such onto-ethologies.
Finally, as we have been exploring in this chapter, these "other than human" bodies of water are geophysical bodies as well—the glaciers, oceans, lakes and rivers whose interests are even more radically excluded from consideration under human rights law, and law more generally. We speak of the human right to water, but the geophysical body of water's own right to flow, to gestate, to differentiate, is largely absent from this consideration. In 1972, the US Supreme Court ruled against the Sierra Club in the case of
Sierra Club vs. Morton, and argued that a planned development by the corporation
Mineral King near the Sequoia National Park would not cause sufficient injury to the
Sierra Club to justify revoking the corporation's development permit. 7 According to the law, the Sierra Club did not have "standing" to file for injuries. In his dissenting opinion in the Sierra Club case, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas noted, ironically, that
"[inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes. [...] The ordinary corporation is a 'person' for purposes of the adjudicatory processes" (United States Supreme Court). Douglas
373 wonders, therefore, why the trees, the lakes, and the rivers should not have such a voice, or "standing," before the law as well. He argues:
So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes—fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it. (United States Supreme Court) In this respect US constitutional law differs little from the human rights paradigm under consideration here: both grant to our human bodies a standing, or a voice before the law, that requires our own denial of the ways in which geophysical bodies of water interpermeate us, gestate us, and continue to sustain us. Yet even Douglas acknowledges that it would make little sense, under the law, to actually listen to the river. He says instead that those (humans) who know it most intimately should be allowed to speak on its behalf: "Those inarticulate members of the ecological group cannot speak. But those people who have so frequented the place as to know its values and wonders will be able to speak for the entire ecological community" (United States Supreme Court).
While Douglas's dissenting opinion thus provides a small opening towards an acknowledgement that the watery body of the river in fact interpermeates our own, this opening is but a small crack, a fissure. The river itself cannot be heard by the law, and for this reason, perhaps more than any of the others I have listed, the law is inadequate to an onto-logic of amniotics that demands of us, even in our human this-ness, that we listen to the difference of other bodies of water, so that we may adequately respond. What
374 ecopolitics would we need to adopt in order to pry open this crack, this fissure, towards which Douglas gestures, and let the river itself roar through?
(b) Water in Common
In other words, if human rights is not an appropriate paradigm for promoting an ethics of interbeing between bodies of water, then what is? Can we imagine other ways of supporting a relation to water that could account for the ontology of "bodies" that we have been developing since the first chapter of this dissertation? In other words, can we respond to the needs of bodies of water not as separate, discrete and ontologically hierarchized individuals, but rather as materially situated nodes in a rhizomatic, co- evolving co-imbrication?
One alternative is the call for the recognition of water as a commons. Most broadly speaking, the concept of the commons refers to any creations of nature or culture that we inherit jointly or freely (Friends of the Commons 2004: 3). A commons implies not only common use of a resource, but also common responsibility. This means ensuring that our inheritance is appropriately managed so that it may be passed on to future generations undiminished, while also acknowledging that various models and systems of commons management exist (see Stern, Dietz and Ostrom 2002; Hanna 1990).
Importantly, the notion of a water commons concerns not only the management of the water supply that comes from our wells or taps or other localized delivery systems, but also common decision-making on the best use of geophysical bodies of water that we
375 may not need for our personal use. While one way of understanding the commons is as a
form of common ownership, perhaps a more appropriate way of understanding certain
commons, such as water commons, is as an active form of non-ownership, or "de"- ownership. Water commons management is thus also about making decisions about the
further proliferation of NHTs in all their forms, but also about allowing certain bodies of water their own "rights"—the right to proliferate, flow, gestate, differenciate. But nor is
commons management a come-what-may laissez-faire response; it might better be appreciated as the active provision of circumstances to let other bodies of water be, at least to the greatest extent possible.
Despite Garrett Hardin's now infamous invocation of the inevitable "tragedy of the commons" (Hardin 1968), past and ongoing management experience of water and other commons shows that indeed such tragedy is not a foregone conclusion. Even if
Hardin's descriptions of the pollution and overextraction of what were once common resources ring true in many respects, his diagnosis of the failure of the commons misses its mark. While the "non-ownership" of resources has sometimes resulted in their
exploitation, of greater concern (particularly in our current embedded and embodied globalizing situations) should be our failure to prevent the commodification of the commons and its appropriation for the benefit of a minority of privileged bodies.
In fact, as Shiva (2002) details, examples of ancient practices of local communal water use and management practices illustrate the ways in which such systems are able to thrive, in comparison to centralized and privatized systems whose failures continue to
376 mount.198 Moreover, the notion of a water commons exemplifies the meaning of "glocal":
although the Blue Planet Project, spearheaded by the Council of Canadians, advocates for
the promotion and protection of a global water commons,199 others make it clear that
water commons need to be framed in terms of local community responsibility and
management, first and foremost (Bakker 2007; Postel 1997; Shiva 2002). As trustees of a
local commons, communities are best equipped to appreciate the unique qualities of
water (its flowing nature, its essential role in the ecosystem, its non-substitutability, its
important cultural and spiritual dimensions) (Bakker 2007: 442). Yet, at the same time, to understand one's local resources as held in trust (as opposed to having a "right" to that
resource) implicitly acknowledges a responsibility to the ways in which that resource
extends far deeper and further than that community itself: local becomes "glocal" and
actual becomes virtual. The bodies of water that manage these commons, as well as the
bodies of water that are managed participate in an onto-logic of bodies that sees them not
only as interconnected but as gestational and transforming in response to other bodies.
In some ways, however, the commons is perhaps less an alternative to rights than
it is the remapping of rights. Indeed, many of those who support the global water
commons project are equally vocal in their call for the recognition of water as a human right. Yet it seems mostly clear that advocates of a water commons reject the concept
of water as a right as articulated according to the individualistic, speciesist and private property-advocating aspects of this paradigm that were outlined above.201 Shiva (2002),
for example, acknowledges the concept of water as a natural right, connected to the right
377 to life and the resources needed to sustain it (20-21). She also acknowledges the significance of certain riparian systems, based on usufructuary rights and grounded in
"the notion of sharing and conserving a common water source" (21), both as precursors to and examples of contemporary water democracies. Quoting from Donald Worster's research on ancient riparian systems, she underlines the notion that a usufructuary right entailed "a right to consume so long as the river was not diminished" (22). Similarly, the
Treaty Initiative to Share and Protect the Global Water Commons, drafted by Maude
Barlow and Jeremy Rifkin, articulates that "[t]he global fresh water supply is a shared legacy, a public trust and a fundamental human right and, therefore, a collective responsibility" (Blue Planet Project 2001). From the standpoint of a global water commons, then, rights can only be articulated in concert with a global and local responsibility that transcends both sovereign boundaries and private interests.
Moreover, although it could be argued that commons are established primarily to further human interest in sustainable maintenance of a resource upon which we depend, a notion of the commons nonetheless decentres the individual human subject, and explicitly recognizes the interests of the human, animal, or vegetable other who may also rely on this water. Again, the Treaty Initiative notes explicitly that "the Earth's fresh water belongs to the earth and all species." Similarly, Shiva's principles of water democracy, based on the notion of a commons, state that "all species and ecosystems have a right to their share of water on the planet" and notes that "water connects all beings and all parts of the planet through the water cycle. We all have a duty to ensure that our actions do not
378 cause harm to other species and other people" (Shiva 20002: 35). Again, the example of
the acequia irrigation ditches can help us describe how this unfolds: while the ditches themselves were constructed to support local food production, these ditches also provide
a thriving ecosystem for native flora, such as willows and cottonwoods, wild plums and
chokecherries. These in turn establish the micro-climate for a diverse array of wildlife,
including the flourishing of the endangered south-western willow flycatcher and the more
common juncos (Rivera and Martinez, 4). These rhizomatic systems actively proliferate the conditions of possibility for these ecosystems and these other bodies of water and acknowledge that diverse roles and entitlements of all the participants in this assemblage,
in ways that respond to the onto-ethological operations of chiasm, passage and intensivity that we laid out at the start of this chapter. While human rights law insists on the equality of all those before it, a commons (ironically) explicitly connects up as a common body
for those who have seemingly "nothing in common."
In short, a commons, unlike the notion of the individual right, recognizes the gestationality of bodies of water that implicates them in interconnected cycles of difference and repetition. In a commons, attention extends beyond the human, and beyond the here and now. Users are not owners but custodians, and not of an individual instance or expression of water, but of its very right to flow: to gestate, to differentiate, to repeat, to connect.
379 V. From No-Bodies to Common Bodies
It seems, then, that a paradigm of commons, far more than a paradigm of rights, opens the space for listening to bodies of water, for appreciating their onto-logic, and for responding in a way that can safeguard and nurture their specific relations. Perhaps, in fact, the time of the commons is upon us; perhaps the commons could indeed serve as a condition of possibility for an ethics of interbeing among bodies of all kinds more generally, and as a broader guide for that difficult task of "doing ontology." Recent thought on the notion of the "commons" or "the common," certainly seems to be pointing in such a direction. But perhaps these more general invocations of the common, too, have something to gain from an attentive listening to our bodies of water? In the following section, I unfold how the listening to bodies of water that is necessary for the cultivation of an ethics of interbeing requires that we also listen attentively to the watery others that we ourselves are. Our watery molecular bodies are equally neglected within some calls for a new social commons. My aim is thus to show how listening to our own watery molecular otherness articulates a vital dimension of the ethics of interbeing in reminding us of the virtual life-proliferating potentiality that we hold, enfolded, in our own watery molecularity. This requires an understanding of the commons as not only a
"network," but as a materially situated, embodied, rhizomatic choreography with internal differenc/tiations and a latent virtuality. Even as Deleuze and Guattari's theory of
"smooth space" is often invoked to buttress theories of "networks" (social networks,
380 actor-networks, global networks of affect, etc), we cannot be fooled into thinking this
"smooth space" can be actualized without its own scarification, hidden enfoldings, vestigial traces of potential and internal hinges where passages between bodies enact and safeguard the differences between them. In short, a network of the common must also be lived, by bodies, as our bodies of water so undeniably teach us.
While commons were traditionally understood as shared terrestrial (land) or elemental (water, air) spaces, more recent thinking on this concept designates commons of immaterial resources as well, for example, the networked or information commons of cyberspace or the intellectual commons of shared scientific knowledge or creative endeavours (Dyer-Witheford 2006; Felsenstein 1993; Friends of the Commons 2004;
Hardt and Negri 2000; Hardt and Negri 2004; Klein 2001). In current radical democratic political theory, moreover, the notion of the commons, or the common, is being increasingly invoked as a new paradigm for civil society, as both a place for action that can find commonality among difference, and as a counterstrategy to the globalized privatization of everything from spaces, to ideas, to forms of life.
But despite the radical democracy that the notion of the commons seems to offer, there remains the sense that current invocations do not quite account for the reality of our bodies of water, and the vast and complex web of interbeing through which they flow, and which they themselves gestate and proliferate. While these calls for a return to the notion of "commons" are inspiring and encouraging, what one finds striking in the academic and activist literature on the new commons, particularly surrounding
381 information and knowledge commons, is a stunning somatophobia—a fear or forgetting of our fleshy material bodies which hold great untapped political and ethical potential.
For example, Hardt and Negri's latest work of political theory, Multitude (2004), outlines a theory of the common which they, like activists for a global water common, claim is necessary to counter the enclosure of not only material goods and terrestrial places, but of what they call "immaterial goods"—such as ideas, codes, or affects, as the products of
"immaterial labour"—and forms of life itself. Although Hardt and Negri acknowledge the root of "the common" in pre-capitalist shared spaces that were destroyed by the advent of private property, they distinguish the common they are championing from this old sense of commons in claiming that their common is not a return to the past but a new development (xv). Hardt and Negri claim the common needs to be actively produced by us, so that through an expansion of the common the possibility of global democracy can be realized. What we need to do, according to Hardt and Negri, is "create a new social body" to mobilize the common (Hardt and Negri 2000: 204; Hardt and Negri 2004: 190,
192). Yet, this call seems to be for Hardt and Negri at best a metaphoric body and certainly a flesh-less body that already transcends the material bodies that we humans live. This dematerialization persists, moreover, despite Hardt and Negri's astute analysis of the ways in which the logic of enclosure profoundly affects material bodies, all the way to our DNA. Where, I wonder, are our fleshy, material and watery bodies in these political strategies? How can we understand them as more than what becomes captured
382 and enclosed? What might shift if we more overtly acknowledged these bodies as agents and tools of resistance, as gestational matter for the commons to come?
A similar "forgetting" is enacted in the work of cultural and political theorist Nick
Dyer-Witheford. In "The Circulation of the Commons" (2006), Dyer-Witheford takes up
Hardt and Negri's call for expansion of the commons and refines it with more specificity.
Here Dyer-Witheford seeks to articulate more clearly that "other world which is possible" and which can be achieved through what he calls a circulation of the commons. While this invocation of "circulation" seems to gesture towards an onto-ethology of the type we are looking to articulate in this chapter, in the end Dyer-Witheford, too, leaves the promise of circulation in the realm of the immaterial, without fleshing out the embodied relations upon which any network depends for animation and rhizomatic proliferation.
Sketching out a counterpoint to Marx's circulation of capital, Dyer-Witheford suggests that three types of commons must circulate in order to open up continually the potential for radical democracy. The first commons, according to Dyer-Witheford, is the terrestrial commons, or the sharing of natural resources. The articulation of the terrestrial common has as its goal the preservation of the biosphere from exhaustion, and is necessarily linked to the cultivation of a common social body. Here, Dyer-Witheford points to issues such as safe sex, emissions control and cloning as examples of sites where a common social body must be forged in order to allow the terrestrial commons to flourish.
However, as Dyer-Witheford notes, in order to prepare a fertile ground for the germination of this new social body, a second kind of commons is needed, which is a
383 planner commons. The planner commons would actively produce an ethic of public sharing and coordinated resource allocation at all levels. Although Dyer-Witheford notes that such attempts to plan the common can, and have, gone horribly wrong, he is not ready to give up on the radical democratic potential of the planner commons, or on the necessity to combat a neoliberal laissez-faire. The planner commons is necessary to counter a privatization of the commons, and the technological manipulation that often follows removal of these resources from the commons, which can strain an onto-logic of amniotics beyond tenable limits, as we have seen. The community management boards established to manage the acequia irrigation ditches and guard against water transfers in
New Mexico and southern Colorado neatly exemplify the planner commons and the benefits of such management systems (Garcia 2007, New Mexico Acequia Association).
But the key to a successful planner commons, as Dyer-Witheford unsurprisingly notes, is to prevent the plan from falling into the hands of those uninterested in the germination of the commons, whether the "commons" here refers to common terrestrial resources or common management ethics. This is why Dyer-Witheford posits the third necessary stage of the commons, the networked commons, which is required for the continued proliferation of the first two commons. Dyer-Witheford's preeminent examples of the networked commons are digital networks, as found in open access software and peer to peer networks. For Dyer-Witheford, the key aspect of these examples is that they are forms of communicational and affective production. Such digital networks are tools that produce things, albeit things that are primarily immaterial. The networked commons,
384 in other words, is not out there waiting for us; it has to be produced. As noted, Hardt and
Negri are also very specific on this point: "The common we share... is not so much discovered as it is produced" (2004: xv). But the question that both Hardt and Negri, as we already saw, and Dyer-Witheford, as we are now seeing, do not address is: From where? From what? Out of what will this networked commons, this new social body, be produced? As both Deleuze's theory of difference and repetition and the radically immanent onto-logic of our bodies of water remind us, something does not come from nothing. No immaculate conceptions here. What then gestates, sustains and proliferates this networked commons?
While Dyer-Witheford calls for a "complex unity of terrestrial, planner and networked commons, in which each reinforces and enables the other," in the end his argument rests on a careful illumination of the ways in which the terrestrial and planner commons require the networked commons for their proliferation: "the strategic and enabling point in this ensemble is the networked commons of immaterial labour."
Missing here, however, is an acknowledgement of the way in which the networked commons requires the terrestrial commons in order to be at all. The immaterial is still intimately connected to the material. In other words, our digital networks, ideas, affects and codes of life which we are trying to rescue from privatization, just like our rivers, lakes, or aquifers, only exist as extensions or intensions of our fleshy bodies of water.
The networked commons, although so-called "immaterial," does not exist apart or discrete from our bodily materiality. The two are intimately imbricated. Networked
385 commons proliferate not as a mere parallel metaphor to our interpermeated bodies of
water, I suggest, but rather because of our bodies of water, thanks to our interpermeated bodies of water. If the water commons is in Dyer-Witheford's analysis a terrestrial
commons, it is also necessarily a networked commons. And not just "a" networked
commons, but the commons that enables any other. Perhaps it is our general tendency to refer to our natural resources as "terrestrial" that in part accounts for Dyer-Witheford's
and our more general forgetting of our bodies of water as a profoundly material network.202 Nonetheless, to begin with what Dyer-Witheford refers to as the first type of commons is thus necessarily to begin with the last; both are lived as our bodies of water.
Hence what we are describing here is not a logical progression of types of commons, but
a gestation of the common.
In our current globalized world, we need the networked commons of immaterial labour, as Dyer-Witheford rightly points out, because this will be our tool (which he admits we will have to use with great specificity and care) for interconnection, intercommunication and thus the establishment of the possibility for true democracy—the governing of all by all. In a globalized world there is no other alternative but to respond to the geography that the Empire of global capital has territorialized. As both Hardt and
Negri and Dyer-Witheford also point out, this territorialization has been possible through the operation of biopower that has colonized not only the material products of our labour, but our biological lives as well—our affects, emotions, genomes, caloric intake, metabolic processes, diseases—in short, our means of living and ways of dying. After all
386 globalization is not only the globalization of culture, capital and corporations, but also of weather, pollution, and disease that have never really known any boundaries, but nonetheless have recently found new vectors of rapid velocity travel. As such, bodies are more vulnerable to the imposition of unasked for subjectivities by the privatizing puppeteers of biopower than ever. But as we see, in both Hardt and Negri's and Dyer-
Witheford's accounts of our need for biopolitical production as a counter to these acts of
sovereign privatization, an echo of Nietzsche's own forgetting of the sea stealthily creeps in. Perhaps Hardt and Negri and Dyer-Witheford need their own "marine lover" to ask them, in a gentle reminder: "Where have you drawn what flows out of you?" (Irigaray
1991: 38). Instead, we encounter in these entreaties to create a "new (common) social body" a repetition of the ignorance or disavowal of their watery gestation, and of the watery gestation needed for any commons, networked or otherwise. Moreover, this is matched by an ignorance of the way in which that same biological matter which these thinkers seek to reclaim from the clutches of private reterritorialization can be called upon as agents and tools of resistance, as gestational matter for the commons to come.
This is the radical potential still untapped. If we are going to create a new social body, it will not be separate from the bodies we already inhabit, the bodies that we live, the bodies through which we are connected in our watery wonder.
So this is what we need: a networked commons to "flesh out," metaphorically speaking, the terrestrial and planner commons, yes, but a networked commons that is not just about peer-to-peer software and digital open source networks. This networked
387 commons also needs to be literally "fleshed out." Our bodies of water are the open source network. And until we firmly and inextricably plant ourselves, our own bodies, within this commons—or more accurately, until we understand and acknowledge the ways in which we are inextricably part of this commons, that it does not stop at our skin, that is answers to an ontology of bodies that is rhizomatic, gestational, interpermeated, we will not be able to articulate an adequate strategy for a global water commons. We have already noted in the introduction to this dissertation the ways in which our bodies, in typical Western, somatophobic style, have been neglected, both as objects and agents of theory. As I have suggested there, our fleshy, material, feeling, moving, and above all watery bodies are an important source of knowledge and resistance. Hence, our pervasive somatophobia results in the overlooking of an important ethical teacher and political actor in the very watery-fleshiness of ourselves. This is something that our bodies "can do."
But in addressing our current water crises, the consequences of forgetting the body move to another level entirely. If we refuse to listen attentively to our bodies of water, not only do we neglect a potential resource, but we have misunderstood the problem in the first place. Water is not "out there." Despite our penchant for God Tricks, we are not separate or above. Molarly speaking, we are responsible for many of our water crises, and we are thus also responsible for effectively responding as bodies of water to these crises. But molecularly speaking, we are our water crises. Our bodies of water are completely intrinsic to any attempt by us to "do ontology" in a way resonant with and nurturing of our amniotic ethology.
388 In chapter six of her book Water Wars, Vandana Shiva discusses the possibility of
"creating abundance out of scarcity." She describes various local and decentralized systems of water management that in both past and present India have been able to use scarce water resources responsibly and effectively to meet the needs of local populations.
In one such example, she writes about the water management strategies of the relatively desert-like province of Rajasthan. Here, Shiva quotes Anupam Mishra, who writes: "The people of Rajasthan did not mourn the lack of rain Nature bestowed upon them. Instead they took it up as a challenge and decided to face it in such a way that from top to toe the people internalized the nature of water in its simplicity and fluidity." Mishra continues:
"Rajasthan's priceless drops of water are covered with sweat" (quoted in Shiva 2002:
119-120). While Mishra might be speaking in metaphors, his words give way to the embodied reality upon which his figurative language relies: the water of his commons is literally "internalized"—incorporated and ingested, and thereafter expelled in sweat, and tears, and excrement. As "bodies of water," we do not live as bodies on the one hand, that require water on the other, but rather we live this formulation indivisibly; we are intimately bound up, both physiologically and semiotically, in our wateriness. Our bodies are the global commons that we seek to build—woven into it, dependent on it, and very much contributing to the gestation of its difference and repetition. The strategies of the commons that Shiva outlines implicitly seem to recognize this connection. She concludes chapter six of Water Wars by noting, for example, that "the real solution to the water crisis lies in people's energy, labor, time, care, and solidarity" (127). In other words,
389 although our human bodies of water have exacerbated the situation, our human bodies of water also hold the potential for an ethical response.
If we seek to counter the trends to privatize, enclose, or otherwise remove the earth's geophysical bodies of water from their amniotic ethological relation with other bodies of water, then we must acknowledge that our bodies are active, productive and integral aspects of whatever commons we seek to protect. If we listen attentively to our bodies of water, and the ways in which they can (despite their failures of judgement) germinate and sustain a gestational, differenc/tiating and interpermeating onto-logic, then we will see we already have a fine blueprint for enabling an ethics of interbeing within the networked commons not only at, but literally in, our fingertips. The future success of our strategies of the commons relies on the continued insistence that we radically embody the commons and tap into the potential that our bodies offer up. This is not a categorical imperative, but rather a recognition that we still "do not know what a body can do." We would thus be ill-advised to discount the body's potential in any strategy or action that seeks to "do" the onto-logic of amniotics and cultivate an ethics of interbeing. This is indeed how our bodies—watery, fleshy and otherwise—will continue to matter. By actively embodying the hydrocommons, we can productively acknowledge and call on our own specifically human situatedness as a hinge between the uncontainability of our molecular dispersals and the weight of our molecular responsibilities.
If we are going to create a new social body, it cannot be separate from the bodies we already inhabit, the bodies that we live. By way of conclusion to my discussion of
390 rights and commons, then, I would like to propose that a water commons offers not only a better way of "doing" the onto-logic of amniotics than does a human rights paradigm, nor only an ecopolitical strategy that can more effectively cultivate an ethics of interbeing.
Rethinking the notion of commons through our bodies of water also provides a key opening for an embodied radicalization of strategies of the commons more broadly. As such, attentive listening to our bodies of water can help bridge the distance between an embodied ethics and the contemporary call to respond "in common" to our changing world.
VI. Conclusion: Who Has Standing to Be Heard?
Throughout these chapters I have unfolded various descriptions of the way in which water, in all of its political, economic, and cultural meaning, is not outside of us, but rather cycles through us, bringing moments of our meaningful materiality along with it. I conclude this last chapter now by underlining that in order to activate a practice of ethical interbeing, we need to find ways of "doing" this onto-logic. In ecopolitical terms, for example, this means understanding and acknowledging the ways in which the commons does not stop at our skin. Our ecopolitical strategies must figure out how to incorporate the onto-logics of our material bodies, rather than deny them. The onto-logic of amniotics, for example, asks that we rethink the water commons as a radically fleshy hydrocommons that we too are "of," in both the constitutive and gestational sense. Water is our animator, our differenciator, our prime mover. Water is not for us, nor for other
391 bodies of water, a mere biological function. As the gestational matter of our being, it also expresses our virtual potential; our bodies of water hold differences-yet-to-be-gestated, yet-to-be-known. And this difference, latent in our water that differentiates and repeats, will proliferate. Water will continue to seek out new, different expressions. Does not this watery, gestational life then ask of us that we find strategies for dealing with our water crises that are adequate to this positive, proliferative force? Can at least part of a political water strategy acknowledge the passionate, creative, proliferative force that we, as bodies of water, animate? How might recognition of the onto-logic of amniotics, that is, recognition of the virtual and gestational capacity that is inherent in us all, spur us on not to the next newest life-destroying hydrological technology, but to the production of something life-enhancing, life-fulfilling, the production of something that will proliferate this capacity for the gestation and differentiation of life?
A traditional environmental ethics stresses a logic of preservation or conservation,204 but the onto-logic of our bodies of water reminds us that regardless of our human foibles or efforts, bodies will continue to differentiate, proliferate, in one way or another. As we readily saw in the first sections of this chapter, all bodies of water are caught up in multitudinous forces and flows of co-evolution. Everything is moving, at one speed or another. Rather than fighting this inevitability, our strategies need to use this onto-logic as a basis for an ethics of interbeing that listens but also seeks to respond in a way that cultivates the proliferating life force latent in our watery bodies. This ethics can nonetheless be based on care, love, respect and joy. Such an ethics would be related
392 closely to what Rosi Braidotti calls an affirmative ethics (2005; 2006b: 163), or, in more direct reference to Deleuze's thought, an "ethics of becoming imperceptible" (2006a). As noted in the introduction to this chapter, Braidotti describes the possibility of an ethics or a politics built not on melancholy or mourning, but on a creative virtual potential yet-to- come, never fully knowable. She asks: "What is ethics, then?" and provides an answer that holds much value for our search for an ethics adequate to our bodies of water:
A thin barrier against the possibility of extinction. Ethics consists of reworking the pain into the threshold of sustainability. This requires adequate assemblages or interaction: we have to pursue or create actively the kind of encounters that are likely to favour an increase in active becomings and avoid those that diminish our potential. It is an intensive ethics based on the shared capacity of humans to feel empathy for, develop affinity with and hence enter in relation with other forces, entities, beings, waves of intensity. (2006a: 139-140)
As Braidotti notes, these encounters have to be both "pursued" and "created." Although the onto-logic of amniotics is always a latent possibility, it must also be actively nurtured, actively allowed to proliferate. And as we saw in the previous chapter, to ask the questions that an ethics of interbeing demands of us, we must pursue our watery others to the borders of the liveable, to what Braidotti above calls the "threshold of sustainability."
An ecopolitics that cultivates an ethics of interbeing cannot just be aimed at the conservation of the status quo, but rather at nurturing circumstances that will allow our watery others to be, and to become, in all of their proliferative force. As Braidotti moreover explains, "the production and expression of positive ethics is what makes the subject last or endure: it is like a source of long-term energy at the affective core of subjectivity" (2006a: 135). Here, Braidotti neatly captures the seeming contradiction at
393 the heart of an ethics of interbeing: endurance and energy, sustainability and proliferation. This endurance that is also a life-proliferating force, I argue, is the ethics that close listening to our bodies of water can open for us. Only in listening carefully to these bodies can we understand that this formulation is no contradiction, but rather a necessary tension, once again perched at the hinge of what we are conventionally taught to keep separate: preservation, creation. This is a tension gently managed by the acequia irrigation systems in New Mexico, by the waterscaped roof garden in the middle of a concrete city, or more generally, in the cultivation of a water commons as a means of
"doing" the onto-logic of amniotics. This tension is at the same time pushed beyond the brink of sustainability when we bottle water and sell it, or even claim that it is "ours" by
(human) right.
In a water commons, which is in fact a radically embodied hydrocommons, the body of water that we greet is not always a human other, nor even a yellowfin other, nor a whale other. These bodies are also a desiccated lake, a diverted river, a melting glacier.
The cultivation of a "commons" hence becomes a way of "doing" the onto-logic of amniotics that can account for all the watery others that we encounter, that circulate through us, that we gestate and are gestated by in turn: a river, a whale, a forest, a womb.
Again, in the words of the US Supreme Court Justice Douglas, the voice of the river
"should not be stilled." Nor should the voice of the whale, the forest, the womb. Justice
Douglas continues: "Perhaps the bulldozers of 'progress' will plow under all the aesthetic wonders of this beautiful land. That is not the present question. The sole question is, who
394 has standing to be heard?" We discussed above how Douglas's comments underline the inadequacy of the law to accommodate the onto-logic of amniotics, not only in the specific case of Sierra Club vs. Morton, but in anthropocentric law more generally, which insists on seeing the human as discrete and apart. But Douglas's comments also remind us that in order to understand our own relation, as human bodies of water, to other bodies of water, those others must be able to find an opening to receive our questions, and ask us these questions in return. Who has standing to be heard? In other words, if we pay attention to our bodies of water, not only will we learn about our own human embodiment—its meaning, and its potential—but we will be able to learn something about the watery bodies of our others as well. We can learn this not only because with them we are imbricated in this radically embodied hydrocommons, but also because within this hydrocommons we partake in an amniotic relation, whereby the membrane that connects us and enables the flow between us also safeguards our difference. While we can never know these others fully, in all of their watery depth, we must allow them to tell us something, and we must allow our human selves to hear them, if we are to allow them to be.
As we saw, although new hydrological technologies generally generate other life in one way or another in their various rechoreographies of our bodies of water, these transformations do not necessarily nourish an onto-logic of amniotics. Yet, even if these
NHTs deny the balance of gestation, differenc/tiation and interpermeation that sustains this onto-logic, this does not mean that in our interpermeations with these technologized
395 bodies we might not still locate an opening towards an ethics of interbeing. In fact, it
seems crucial that we acknowledge our interpermeations with these technologized bodies
of water, our co-evolutions, and our mutual imbrications with the forces and flows that
compose in ever-shifting relations of intensity. Only through such acknowledgement
might we deliberately locate this door, this threshold, onto an ethical encounter. By paying attention to our molecular bodies, we can locate this threshold at the edges of our
interpermeations, and "at the borders of the liveable," in order to call out a responsibility
in our molar bodies. Even if our molar subjectivities have failed to acknowledge the
imbrications of watery bodies on this planet, our molecular bodies need to step in as a
source, a reminder, a teacher, a call. In order to allow this, we need to pay closer attention
to our lived bodily molecularity, and what it might tell us, not only about our own bodies
of water but about the other bodies of water that are folded inside of us, and which we
gestate in return. While not every interpermeation is desirable (think again of the AIDS
or Marburg viruses we discussed in chapter three as examples of hypermarine gestational
nestings), every interpermeation nonetheless provides the opportunity for us to learn
something about the bodies of water we encounter and embody:
Who are you, this body of water that is before me? What is your difference, and where
are our moments of interpermeation?
396 What will you teach me about myself, and what will I learn about you? How can I allow you to be a body of water, still flowing in the rhythms of an amniotic onto-logic? How can you spur me on to safeguard that onto-logic, too?
Who has standing to be heard?
Are you listening?
397 How will you respond?
398 CLOSURES, OPENINGS
Water is making waves. Hardly a day goes by without some mention of water in the
news: drinking water quality in remote Canadian communities, cyclones coursing across
the tropics, more drought in Australia, bottled water companies trying to sell the latest
designer H2O, an island of garbage floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Another
marine species discovered in the depths of the big blue, while yet another goes AWOL
from more accessible watery habitats. Yet,
Again so I subside
nudged by the softening
driftwood of your body,
tangle on you like a water-
weed caught
on a submerged treelimb
these watery bodies that populate our current events are not merely problems to be
solved, resources to be tapped or tamed, or other people's, or animals', bad fortune,
399 thankfully far removed from our own. These watery bodies engage and implicate our own, and have something to tell us, about our own bodies and their various becomings within a relational ontology. If we are willing to listen. Indeed, as I have tried to show in these chapters, paying attention to our own embodied wateriness in its inextricable material-semiotic expressions not only opens to a new understanding of what it means to be a body, but also allows us to pay attention to other bodies, in whom we are implicated, but from whom we are also differentiated, across rhizomatic intervals of chiasm and passage, gift and relinquishment. By listening, as bodies of water situated at the hinge of a lived molarity and a lived molecularity, we can learn not only about the onto-logic of amniotics in which we participate, but also about the possibility for actively "doing" this onto-logic as an ethical practice. We are given a tool for understanding our bodies' capacities to affect and be affected by other watery bodies, but not according to evaluations that cling to the stability of categories such as nature and culture or the natural and the technological, nor according to laws or practices that would trap us in a discrete and privileged humanity, nor according to a biocentric egalitarianism that would seek to proliferate (or preserve) all life indiscriminately. The onto-ethological ground of an amniotic relation really just demands
with sleep like a swamp growing, closing around me
400 sending tendrils through the brown
sediments of darkness
where we transmuted are part of this warm rotting
of vegetable flesh
this quiet spawning of roots
that we listen.
These days it may be fashionable to refuse conclusions to one's work, insisting
upon the impossibility of closure. But bodies of water are both molar and molecular, both
longitudinal and latitudinal, and water perdures in our world as an open/closed system.
So this body of work should close with a period, but also with an ellipsis, and always
with a question mark (or perhaps with no punctuation at all). This body of work is
finished, but if it has been successful, its traces will be picked up, recycled, made
different, proliferated.
As I noted in the first pages of this dissertation, Bodies of Water is primarily about
embodiment, and looking for new ways of understanding what it means to be a body, of
understanding what a body can do. I hope that these chapters have contributed to
arguments for the need to refine our inherited paradigms for thinking about bodies, and
401 that they have not only shown up the inadequacies of these old paradigms but suggested
something new in their place. An onto-logic of amniotics, with its necessarily intertwined movements of interpermeation, differenc/tiation and gestation, elucidates one way of being, of living, that our bodies express particularly because they are bodies of water. But as I have also stressed, the onto-logic of amniotics does not tell the whole story of our beings and becomings. As an onto-logic, it elucidates one specific mode of our relational ways of being, but bodies live according to many onto-logics, and a broader investigation of these various logics could create a richer understanding of what it means to be a body.
As I suggested in the introduction, it might be interesting to explore the onto-logic of amniotics alongside other posthumanist logics that are similarly challenging what we think it means to be embodied, such as a cyborg onto-logic or an onto-logic of prostheses.
I have also suggested that the onto-logic of amniotics can help us think about sexual difference differently, in terms of a logic of gestation and the interpermeation of difference, rather than according to a stable sexual dimorphism. Even if both bodies within a dimorphism express a virtuality, the hinge between them must also be virtual, holding no guarantee for how these bodies might continue to morph along with the terms of relation. We still do not know what sexual difference can do, and we have only begun to see how thinking about sexual difference can gestate and support thinking more deeply about other differences and interpermeations. I hope this project has further broadened the opening for exploring this potential.
402 Moreover, while water has a this-ness of its own, thinking about our watery bodies also invites us to journey further and deeper into our other modes of elemental- bodiedness. While bodies of water suggest a bodily onto-logic of amniotics, what complementary ways of being might be suggested by our bodies of breath, of heat, of mineral traces? The history of the earth resides in my spleen, and in your clavicle, in the air that connects us, lung to lung. In fact, in contemplating all of the ways in which our worlds literally and materially continue to cycle through us and fold into us, our latent virtual potential begins to seem not strange at all, and paradoxically banal in all of its wonder. Luce Irigaray has given us a fertile starting ground for thinking about our elemental bodies, and Bodies of Water demonstrates one way in which this philosophy might be deepened, nuanced and activated when explored through our material-semiotic embodied experience, and in transdisciplinary conversation with other stories about bodies. Rhizomatically extended studies of our other elemental bodily logics would result in a detailed and wonderful portrait of embodiment that would undoubtedly force us to see ourselves anew in relation to our environments (construed in the broadest sense) and in ways silenced and discredited within our ocularcentric and compartmentalizing societies. Such a portrait would help us rethink what we mean by "environment" as well, again deepening and strengthening the fledgling connections between ecological and environmental theory and philosophies of embodiment. We do need to think more about embodiment in philosophy and critical theory more generally, but we also need to think about it differently.
403 In my introduction I also suggested that our bodies of water are a good thing to think with. They teach us much about what it means to be a body, but they also open up to and converge with many other issues, questions, and thought experiments, many of which I have been able merely to gesture towards in these chapters. I hope that through my work in these pages, the possibilities for thinking through these convergences have proliferated and that such thinking might venture in directions beyond the focus and scope of these chapters. Indeed, such thought could descend to depths much deeper, across oceans far more vast, through springs and streams and rivers in ever-increasing rhizomatic connection.
This spilling out of potential intellectual connections to my study is in part thanks to the leakiness of bodies of water themselves, as they trickle beyond thinking about embodiment, to thinking about the "natural" world, other animal bodies, technologized bodies, and the politics and paradigms that organize these various bodies alone and in relation. But rhizomatic lines of intellectual flight are also enabled by the means chosen to undertake this exploration. While I hope to have opened some space to think even further still about bodies, I also hope this dissertation has provided some guidance in how to think as bodies, specifically through the rhizo-phenomenological approach it unfolds.
Rhizo-phenomenology begins from our lived experiences of the world in order to learn something new about ourselves and that world, but as I have demonstrated, many of the experiences we live are difficult to access in our molar, subjectified modes of being in the world. Throughout these chapters I thus highlight the ways in which transdisciplinary
404 encounters not only teach us something about bodies, but also help us access our own embodied experiences through our bodies' molecular vectors. Bodies of Water thus also lays the groundwork for subsequent transdisciplinary studies of specific figurations of watery bodies in the world. Using an approach that is transdisciplinary, necessarily situated, and also connected to our lived experiences, I maintain that we can study some of the most vexing questions related to our corporeality and intercorporeality in innovative ways. By opening up our bodies of water as sites of confluence, where disparate ideas, perspectives and other bodies can all rub shoulders, we can loosen our sedimented views of certain situations and perhaps be surprised by the suggestions that our multitudinous body-assemblages offer.
In these chapters I was able to examine a small number of such situations, such as evolutionary processes, new hydrological technologies, and global networks of radical democracy. And, certainly each of these could still be plumbed to greater, more detailed depths. For example, I am further interested in what our watery imbrications might teach us about evolutionary processes of preservation and extinction (and vice versa), and how our molar human engagements that purport only to map these processes in fact open and close various vectors for the proliferation of life. The Census of Marine Life (CoML) program, for instance, is a global network of thousands of researchers who aim to make a detailed record of all ocean life by 2010. This consortium is collectively scouring the deepest depths of the ocean to chart, categorize and "explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life in the oceans—past, present, and future."205 But how might
405 these attempts to disclose fully the life of the seas change that life, both materially and meaningfully? Moreover, the CoML program also circles us back to the question of global networks. While the CoML as a network might be seeking to smooth out global
space by putting its deepest, darkest secrets on the table, we should also recall that all networks are necessarily comprised of fleshy bodies, and as such, are internally differenciated, with varying capacities to affect and be affected. The "network" as a
figure is too dispassionate, too neutral, and tends to obfuscate both the fleshy responsibility and potentiality that not only infuses that network but allows it to be in the
first place. As I argue in chapter five, the network needs to be enfleshed, and irrigated.
How might rhizo-phenomenological study of embodiment accomplish this in regard to current explorations of the multitudinous new social, political, economic and communications networks that are emerging in our globalizing world? How might our watery bodies provide new resources for action (and non-action) in this continually
stratifying and destratifying space? In general, how might projects of radical democracy be affected by both an acknowledgement and a doing of our watery onto-logics? As I note in the first section of chapter five, thought on ethics and thought on bodies are
finding increasing resonance in the work and commentators of Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray, among others. But how might we further translate this corporeal, relational
ethics into our political theories and undertakings?
Two larger projects which I would like to undertake that have been enabled by the groundwork laid in Bodies of Water are rhizo-phenomenological explorations as a body
406 of water of certain reproductive biotechnologies and of hydrological architectures. In the first project, I would like to cleave open further the productive space that my rhizo- phenomenological approach locates between philosophical and biological stories. As I have hopefully demonstrated in these chapters, a rhizo-phenomenological practice is particularly valuable for thinking transdisciplinarily between philosophy and the natural sciences, for it does not have to find recourse to pre-established categories or criteria for moral behaviour to learn something about ethical interbeing. Indeed, one of the strengths of rhizo-phenomenological descriptions of "things" themselves is the opportunity they provide us to be genuinely surprised by what we might learn from an attentive listening to embodied experiences, to desediment what we think we know about those relations, to suggest that our categories or paradigms may be inadequate or only partial. Moreover, because a rhizo-phenomenological practice can also reach, ply and extend our embodied experience in order to contact and amplify our latent virtual potentiality, we can also use this approach to think about our embodied might-have-been's, or our embodied still-to- come's. This is why an embodied rhizo-phenomenology can be aptly suited for thinking through the various biotechnological involutions that wait, anxious and breathless upon an ever-closer horizon, for access to our portable fleshy science labs.
For example, while the bioethical debate on ectogenesis (extra-uterine fertilization, gestation and delivery of babies so as to make the uterus useless and the bellybutton obsolete) began over a century ago, the possibility of gestating human babies in artificial wombs has now become less a question of "if than of "when." Adequately
407 anticipating the scientific, ethical, political, economic and cultural implications of this event seem more urgent than ever. However, I propose that unlike other explorations of ectogenesis in public policy, medical ethics circles, or even certain feminist theoretical approaches, a rhizo-phenomenological examination might circumvent some of the sedimented positions of these discourses, and think instead about the embodied experience of the womb as gestational architecture, and the bellybutton as a node of shared meaning and unsurpassable alterity. Because bellybuttons are both a marker of our bodily commonality and an index of our sexual difference, bellybuttons may support a middle position that can further deepen our explorations of the logics of relational ontologies. What might our experience of "bellybuttoning" tell us about interbeing as a collective, reciprocal and mutually imbricated experience and our means for cultivating this? What happens to interbeing if gestationality becomes disembodied? Given that ectogenesis explicitly challenges female gestational bodies, how do questions of sexual difference inform these debates? And certainly, how do our specifically watery imbrications play out here? A rhizo-phenomenology of our gestating bodies would allow us to analyze critically such potential technologies in a way that does not automatically reject them out of a knee-jerk technophobia or nostalgia for a body that has always been morphing and changing in relation to the world anyway. Instead, we would be able to describe the embodied experiences of watery gestation, of umbilical connection and see what our bodies themselves can reveal about these relations. Rhizo-phenomenology is
408 unlikely to give us categorical answers, but it will surely highlight what we stand to lose, and perhaps reframe these debates in new directions.
A second project looks at the notion of "gestational architectures" in a connected, albeit more literal way. While in the preceding chapters I have written at length about the body as a gestational medium for other bodies, I did not include here a discussion of the built structures in which we as bodies dwell, which might also be watery bodies. As such, these architectures might cultivate and nurture an amniotic relation for those bodies that dwell therein, as well as for those who are rhizomatically interconnected. Architectural bodies of water are particularly interesting in the context of a rhizo-phenomenological study, given the way that architecture has been of great interest to both phenomenologists and Deleuzians in the past decades. But even more intriguing is the fact that the built structure of the house is precisely the figure that Deleuze and Guattari turn to in their critique of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the flesh in regards to the logic of sensation (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:177-189). As they put it, the flesh that Merleau-
Ponty unfolds in The Visible and the Invisible is "too tender," too reliant on the lived experience of human bodies to provide the structural support needed to shore up the percept and affect of sensation. The flesh is too wedded to a humanist perspective, while blocs of sensation filter the cosmos and join up parts of differently oriented planes to give the metastability needed for building (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:180, 182). In place of the flesh, Deleuze and Guattari offer the figure of the house as "the non-organic life of things," with walls, windows and doors negotiating the traversals and in-betweens of the
409 various planes of being. It would seem that Deleuze and Guattari are not writing of actualized houses, whose doors and windows are "really" blocs of sensation, but as with all figures they deploy in their work, one should be wary of treating them as mere metaphor. So what might we learn if we turn to a rhizo-phenomenological exploration of architectures that are both "house" and "flesh"—bodies of water explicitly built as places of dwelling or sojourn, with their own walls, doors and windows? Moreover, how might such explorations complicate the distinction between organic bodies and built structures?
What new insights might emerge in their in-between?
Two particular examples are worth consideration here. The first of these are artist/engineer/educator Natalie Jeremijenko's "amphibious architectures," which she has designed as interstitial places between watery and terrestrial topographies. "Whale Belly" is a design for dwelling inside the belly of a whale, while "Fish Restaurant" situates a restaurant submerged in the Hudson River, with fish interaction windows through which people can offer fish the dish of the day (Jeremijenko, Amphibious Architecture). Both examples suggest new models for animal interactions and ask questions about the ways in which architectures might nurture amniotic relations. Of additional interest are Polish artist Zbigniew Oksiuta's experiments with autopoietic, biological dwellings (Oksiuta
2006). Oksiuta is interested in the creation of isopycnic architectures, which create zero gravity conditions and emulate the situation of being like water in water, which, as
Oksiuta has pointed out, are the only conditions under which the gestation of animal bodies is possible. Oksiuta's projects also seem to suggest that we could have much to
410 learn from watery architectures about our co-imbrications as watery bodies and the proliferation of life, while also (like the project on ectogenesis) asking questions about
the "artificial" cultivation of "natural" bodies, and their capacity to affect other bodies.
Moreover, such studies would deepen my reflections on the significance of our
topographical relation to water, in which we are always coming up against the borders of
the liveable. How might we extend these limits, and what might be the results, for our
own bodies and those with whom we dwell? But neither Jeremijenko nor Oksiuta's work
can be adequately comprehended through rational analyses according to pregiven criteria
or semiotic systems. It seems that rhizo-phenomenological exploration of these
dwellings, whereby one could pay close and careful attention to the embodied relations
and interrelations inaugurated by the experience of these architectures, could yield much more fecund observations, and could in turn deepen the understanding of watery bodies that I lay out in these pages. Such a study might be called "Building, swimming, thinking."
In closure, new openings emerge. As always, we cycle back to
released from the lucidities of day when you are something I can
411 trace a line around, with eyes cut shapes from air, the element where we must calculate according to solidities
our bodies of water, situated at the pivot of body and world, ourselves and our others, the molar and the molecular, matter and meaning, ontology and ethics, that can open to us
but here I blur
into you our breathing sinking to green millenniums and slugging in our blood all ancestors are warm fish moving
a different way of being.
412 Rhizo-phenomenology, situated at the pivot between humanism and posthumanism, description and prescription, living and writing, can offer us a way of capturing that different way of being, just long enough to try to do something with it, to "do" our watery ontologies in a way that proliferates life of those to whom we are connected, but also whose difference we will never fully understand.
But in the end, these stretchings towards amplifying our lived molecularity, these torsions that twist and reach to contact our latent embodiment just past our thresholds of the liveable, will stealthily slip beyond our grasp once more, fold deeper into our own material expressions, float away on the rivers of our ever-proliferating lines of flight.
So perhaps we should pause, before things sediment once again too deeply, too certainly,
The earth shifts, bringing the moment before focus, when these tides recede; and we see each other through the hardening scales of waking
413 and recall that sometimes it is best just to listen
stranded, astounded
in a drying world
to the bodies that still speak, still question, in spite of our attempts at capture—
we flounder, the air
ungainly in our new lungs
with sunlight streaming mercilessly on the shores of morning
414 NOTES
Notes to the Introduction
1 Notable here are Irigaray's discussions of bodies and the mechanics of fluids, which I explicitly take up in chapter two, and also Helene Cixous's work on the overflowing body of ecriture feminine, which I comment on in the notes to that chapter. In Volatile Bodies (1994), Elizabeth Grosz also provides a very helpful discussion of the material- semiotic meaning of our leaking bodies in her analysis of both Kristeva and Mary Douglas's work. Of particular note in this section is Grosz's close attention to the way in which the materiality of the body cannot be ignored. She writes:
"Body fluids flow, they seep, they infiltrate; their control is a matter of vigilance, never guaranteed. In this sense, they betray a certain irreducible materiality; they assert the priority of the body over subjectivity; they demonstrate the limits of subjectivity in the body, the irreducible specificity of particular bodies. They force megalomaniacal aspirations to earth, refusing consciousness in its supremacy; they level differences while also specifying them. In our culture, they are enduring; they are necessary but embarrassing. They are undignified, nonpoetic, daily attributes of existence, rich or poor, black or white, man or woman, that all must, in different ways, face, live with, reconcile themselves to" (194).
In many ways, my dissertation picks up and expands in great detail these comments, and attempts to work through their ontological and ethical significance in a deeper way. Margaret Shildrick's work in Leaky Bodies and Boundaries (1997) is also notable in its attention to the social and political effects of the material leakages of our sexually different bodies. I comment in more detail below on the resonances of my dissertation with feminist theories on embodiment more generally.
2 Drew Leder's work in The Absent Body (1990) is of particular note here, as he draws attention to the viscerality of the body that Merleau-Body largely neglects. I comment more fully on Leder's phenomenology in my notes to chapter one. Alphonso Lingis (1994, 2000) is also notable here in his phenomenological descriptions of our bodies in what Deleuze and Guattari would call their molecular expressions. In chapter one I expound in detail this notion of bodily molecularity that brings together both Deleuzian rhizomatics and Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the chiasm.
415 31 borrow the term "companion species" from Donna Haraway (2003) to designate all of the other-than-human species with whom we are co-implicated—that is, "organic beings as rice, bees, tulips, intestinal flora, all of whom make life for humans what it is—and vice versa" (15). Although companion species usually refer to pets, Haraway makes a compelling case for understanding ourselves as "bound together in significant otherness" not only with domesticated animals-as-friends, but with all other species, even as each of these relations will carry its own history, materiality and meaning.
4 Donna Haraway makes use of the term "natureculture" throughout her oeuvre (e.g. 2003) and acknowledges her adoption of the term from Bruno Latour (1993). Here I use this particular formulation to illustrate the co-implication of what our Western imagination terms "nature" and "culture." I expound this relation more specifically in chapter three.
5 Natalie Jeremijenko (2005). See also Braun, "Troubled Water" (2006).
6 Water is notable among scientists for its many uncommon and counterintuitive properties. Its solid state is less dense then its liquid phase, thus allowing ice to float atop water. Also, as the "universal solvent," water dissolves more substances than any other liquid. As a result, it can carry vital minerals and other substances along on its journeys through various animal and vegetable bodies of water. Moreover, water has a very high surface tension, resulting in the capillary action that allows it to travel through the tiny passageways and networks (such as blood vessels) of living bodies of water. Water is also the only natural substance that can be readily found in a liquid, gaseous and solid state under Earth's (present) conditions (United States Geological Survey, "Water Properties").
Bruno Latour provides compelling arguments for how the field of science and technology studies can make important contributions to both the natural sciences and the social sciences specifically by reconfiguring the meaning of what a "social science" is, and what it can do (Latour 2000). As Latour argues, this would entail returning to an understanding of any "things" we study in any field as assemblies, "forcing us to see the divides between nature and society, necessity and freedom, between the relevant domain of the natural sciences and that of the social sciences, as a very peculiar anthropological and historical feature" (2000: 117). Following Latour's argument, we can understand science and technology studies as working as a similar "hinge" or pivot between these disciplines often at odds with, or uninterested in, one another. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that much work undertaken under the banner of "science and technology studies" (which in Canada is often copresent with the field of "the history and philosophy of science") upholds a more traditional ontology of things, as well as a
416 division between the natural and the cultural. In such cases, the "nature" of the world is simply studied according to "cultural" methodologies. In other words, not all "science and technology studies" necessarily live up to the promise of Latour's reformulation.
Deleuze states "I feel myself to be a pure metaphysician... Bergson says that modern science hasn't found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it would need. It is this metaphysics that interests me" (cited in Bonta and Protevi 2004: 12). In many ways the dominant metaphysics and ontologies that we inherited in the twentieth century also engaged in such a scientific-philosophical transdisciplinarity, but this was largely invisible. The ways in which scientific paradigms such as Euclidean geometry, Newtonian physics and then Einsteinian physics and their concomitant notions of space, time and matter grounded and deeply informed our ontological and metaphysical commitments went unremarked. Elizabeth Grosz (1995) has commented on how the inherent masculinity of these "hard science" commitments has framed our socio-scientific and philosophical notions of subjectivity; Irigaray (1985b) makes similar claims in terms of the philosophical biases that emerge from dominant scientific paradigms that privilege solids over fluids. Perhaps we "see" the transdisciplinarity of science and philosophy within neo-materialist thinking largely because our scientific paradigms are now shifting, and like Deleuze, we are looking for a way to accommodate emergent notions such as quantum physics, developmental systems theory, complexity theory or endosymbiotic theory. The invisibility of the transdisciplinarity in earlier philosophical works was rather an effect of the way in which earlier (and still hegemonic) scientific paradigms were taken for granted.
91 outline these criticisms in more detail in chapter one, in terms of the resonances and dissonances between Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze.
Interestingly, however, in Metamorphoses, Braidotti notes that Deleuzian rhizomatics takes issue with phenomenology precisely because phenomenology cannot accommodate the notion of the subject as embodied and embedded (2002: 123). My argument in this dissertation, and specifically in chapter one, however, suggests that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology actually pushes rhizomatics in a more embodied and embedded direction than Deleuzian philosophical projects often take.
11 See Grosz (2004) and (2005) for these helpful articulations, which I outline in more detail in chapter three.
17 . Braidotti's explanation of the "figuration" in philosophical writing is extremely helpful in thinking about how to approach bodies of water. She explains, "Figurations are not mere metaphors, but rather markers of more concretely situated historical positions. A
417 figuration is the expression of one's specific positioning in both space and time" (2006b: 90); figurations "are forms of literal expression which represent that which the system had declared off-limits" (2006b: 170). Braidotti situates figurations within the quest for an adequate philosophical style and posits them as one means of philosophical creativity (2006b: 170). In these chapters I approach bodies of water as "figurations" as they are at once concretely lived phenomena in social, topographical and historical contexts, but they also serve as nodes from which to think more broadly about what our traditional ontological paradigms have concealed in terms of our ways of being embodied, particularly in regards to our intercorporeality. This understanding of "figuration" complements my rhizo-phenomenological approach, and in its insistence on embeddedness, it tempers the more traditional phenomenological quest for an enduring essence of "things."
13 Haraway talks about "material-semiotic knots" (also referred to as "literalized figures") throughout her oeuvre. Examples include the cyborg, OncoMouse and companion species. Like Braidotti's figuration, these are concrete, situated material entities but also theoretical openings to reconsiderations of our usual thought-habits and ways of understanding ourselves in relation to the world. It is thus a term she uses to describe meaningful things, and a shorthand for her own version of thing theory. I expand Haraway's understanding of natureculture in chapter three (see also note 4 above).
4 The recent anthology, Material Feminisms (2008, Eds. S. Alaimo and S. Hekman), is an excellent compilation of contemporary feminist work in this vein, and the editorial introduction provides a helpful historical map of the feminist new materialist terrain. As this anthology reveals, feminist thinking from diverse "camps" or areas of interest finds a fecund space for dialogue within neo-materialism. Hence in new materialism we find dialogue between ecological feminist thinkers (e.g. Alaimo, Mortimer-Sandilands), those interested in cognitive science (e.g. Elizabeth A. Wilson), Deleuzian feminists (Colebrook, Grosz), those whose work is often counted as "cultural studies," (e.g. Bordo) as well as those whose oeuvre has been particularly interested in epistemological questions (e.g. Hekman). And certainly, a key effect of understanding these thinkers under the rubric of neo-materialism is the way in which all of these camps and labels seem to become increasingly inadequate and imprecise.
15 A detailed review of Irigaray's position within debates on essentialism, embodiment and difference is undertaken in chapter two.
16 And hence Butler's explanation in the preface to her next book, Bodies that Matter (1993), where she notes the need to set the record straight against those who suspected Gender Trouble "theorized the body away" (ix), makes much more sense now. Despite
418 Barad's (1998, 2003) nuanced criticisms of Butler's concept of performativity as the reinscription of matter as the passive product of discursive processes (2003: 821-822 n. 26), notions of Butler conjuring bodies out of a discursive thin-air, to my mind, are too coarse.
17 This assertion is not meant in any way to collapse or conflate the important differences among feminist theories on embodiment, the different traditions they emerge from and the different allegiances they espouse. For a very helpful map of these different positions see Braidotti (2002) chapter one "Becoming Woman, or Sexual Difference Revisited."
1 Q And, in drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty to make her argument here, Grosz, I would argue, lends strength to my assertion that Merleau-Ponty edges towards a Deleuzian posthumanism, despite Deleuze's critiques of phenomenology, which I discuss more thoroughly in chapter one.
19 Stacy Alaimo (1994) provides a helpful exploration of a middle ground between eco- feminist glorifications of nature and cyborg posthumanist technophilia. This sort of negotiation is a project I attempt to continue in the following chapters, and in chapter five in particular.
20 See also Protevi (2007) for his reading of the animal skin as portable water container, which is "as fully a part of the nomad assemblage as the more famous stirrup" that allowed for the "nomad occupation of the smooth space and the arid steppes" in ancient civilizations (para 20) in reference to Deleuze and Guattari's example of the horse-and- rider becoming-animal assemblage (1987: 260).
21 Here then I also distinguish my project from some of the now canonical texts of animal ethics literature, such as Peter Singer's utilitarian theory of animal liberation (e.g. 1989, 2007) and Tom Regan's rights-based approach (e.g. 2007) as well as Martha Nussbaum's "capabilities" approach (e.g. 2007). I concur with other critics of these approaches that we cannot adequately articulate an ethical relation to animals through a ranking of interests, and we must try to avoid an imposition of our own humanist view of what means "good" or "valuable" in a determination of the worth and value of animals.
22 However, Evernden's recourse to an embodied phenomenology and a lived engagement with the world, I believe, can temper this danger. As I explain in chapter one, our bodies can reveal nuances and complexities in our intercorporeal relationships that our logical and categorizing minds might reduce or efface.
419 Toadvine (2003) makes this point eloquently and convincingly. See following note as well on this point.
24 Again, see Toadvine (2003), for example, on "an impossible phenomenology of desire." I do not, however, quite agree with his final assertion that an ethics of nature cannot be built on any kind of kinship therewith, due to this ultimate opacity of nature and its "wildness with which we can never come face to face" (2003: 150). Toadvine to my mind presents a more nuanced suggestion of an ethics of nature in a later discussion of Merleau-Ponty's Nature lectures (Toadvine 2007). In this essay Toadvine refuses a reading of Merleau-Ponty as espousing a biocentric egalitarianism and instead highlights Merleau-Ponty's insight into our relationship with animals (and nature) as one of "strange kinship." This is not a kinship based on full coincidence of our ways of being, or even full knowability, but it is a kinship nonetheless which, because of the interpermeation it inaugurates, establishes the very condition of possibility of ethics. To be ethical one needs to be in relation, and to be in relation requires some degree of intercorporeality.
251 have not made explicit reference here to eco-feminist scholarship and projects, although they deserve a brief note as well, even as any attempt to generalize this body of thought would be again overly reductive. I do share the general eco-feminist view that important connections can and should be drawn between an androcentric humanist treatment of female human bodies and more-than-human (other animal, vegetable, or geophysical) bodies. Indeed, certain thinkers who have been aligned with eco-feminism have made valuable contributions to the way in which I think through our intercorporeality as bodies of water. Vandana Shiva, for example, is a key resource I draw on in thinking about our relation to our "natural" watery environments and our watery natural resources in chapter five. Carol Bigwood's Earth Muse (1993) also resonates deeply with some of what I try to accomplish here, particularly in chapter two where I lay out the onto-logic of amniotics as in part a gestational logic. Bigwood's attention to the material cultivation of our being (188-223) is of particular note here, as is her study of the being of water in the hydroelectric plant (224-247) in relation to my explorations in chapter five. Moreover, while Bigwood explicitly adopts a phenomenological method, hers is a Heideggerian one which as a result becomes infused with a certain nostalgia towards "nature." I try to avoid this by thinking carefully about our technological co-evolutions, again in chapter five in particular. While I do not think Bigwood ultimately falls into this (stereotypically) eco-feminist trap, I would not find any considerable affinity with an eco-feminist approach that idealizes and feminizes/essentializes nature.
420 Notes to chapter one
Deleuze's notion of differenc/tiation highlights the distinction as well as the slippage between differenciation as an internal process of differing from oneself and differentiation as an external differing from an other (see Deleuze 1994). I will develop this term and its significance in terms of our bodies of water more explicitly in chapter two. Like Deleuze, I will at times use either "differenciated" or "differentiated" to denote a specific process of difference.
27 See DeLanda (2002) for a comprehensive description of the ways in which the intensive is figured as a necessary aspect of a Deleuzian ontology.
Yet despite his quarrels with certain aspects of phenomenology, even Deleuze acknowledges its potential in various ways. This is particularly true if, as we are doing here, we take Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology as our reference point rather than Husserl's constitutive phenomenology and its commitment to the transcendental phenomenological reduction (although Deleuze's Logic of Sense clearly calls on the potential of Husserl's phenomenology as well). In his essay on Sartre entitled "He Was My Teacher," Deleuze notes that the work of Merleau-Ponty is "brilliant and profound," even if (unfortunately, in Deleuze's estimation) "tender and reserved" (2004: 77). Moreover, despite Deleuze's criticisms of phenomenology in Difference and Repetition, he also acknowledges Heidegger and Meleau-Ponty's contributions to the development of an ontology of difference (1994: 64-66).
Perhaps most notable among these commentators are Eric Alliez (2004), in particular chapter three, and Brian Massumi (2002), in particular chapter eight, both of whom agree that phenomenology cannot escape the paradigm of solipsistic subjective humanism. It should be noted, however, that other commentators of both Deleuze's corpus and the phenomenological tradition feel that the chasm between the two need not be that wide. A recent contribution to this discussion is Henry Somers-HalPs "Deleuze and Merleau- Ponty: An Aesthetics of Difference" (2006). In this comparison of the two thinkers Somers-Hall argues that Merleau-Ponty in "Eye and Mind" does initiate a break with classical phenomenology's exclusive focus on the actual and pushes towards an understanding of the virtual that is essential to Deleuze's ontology, even if ultimately Merleau-Ponty's language does not allow him to fully arrive there.(For assessments of this potential connection by Merleau-Ponty's commentators, see notes 30, 32, 41, and 48 below)
30 Most notably, eminent Merleau-Ponty scholar Renaud Barbaras notes, for example, "The Visible and the Invisible is, in my eyes, an extraordinary example of non-dialectical
421 thought, and it is not surprising that many readers recognize in Gilles Deleuze what they find in Merleau-Ponty, and vice-versa" (2004: xxii). Barbaras further nuances this statement in other places (2001, 2006). While Barbaras does not go so far as to say that Merleau-Ponty—particularly in The Visible and the Invisible and the Nature lectures— achieves the ontological break of a Deleuzian ontology, in his estimation the work of Merleau-Ponty is certainly at the brink of this achievement. Barbaras notes that Deleuze's understanding of the virtual in a sense completes Merleau-Ponty's thinking on the being of natural being (2001: 36) and posits that the key question that remains about Merleau- Ponty is whether "the philosophy of nature that emerges in Merleau-Ponty's last work [is] the sign of an abandoning of phenomenology or its most demanding mode of accomplishment?" In other words, Barbaras leaves the compatibility of phenomenology and a Deleuzian ontology based on the virtual as an open question of possibility. Other prominent phenomenologists who note the continuities between Merleau- Ponty and Deleuze include Lawlor (e.g. 1998) and Toadvine (e.g. 2004). Both see Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of expression as anticipating Deleuze's work, particularly in the Logic of Sense. Feminist phenomenologist Gail Weiss (1999, see chapter six "Ecart") is one of the few philosophers who has pointed out the debt that Deleuze owes to Merleau-Ponty in the context of rethinking difference through intercorporeality, although she does not pursue this connection in great depth.
31 While Deleuze and Guattari have come to be widely cited in reference to both sets of concepts here, they have their own conceptual debts as well. The plane of immanence and the plane of organization are terms grafted onto Hjelmslev's semiotic planes of content and expression, which Hjelmslev elaborates as mutually interanimating, and as "functives of one and the same function" (Hjelmslev 1969: 60). Deleuze and Guattari thus draw upon Hjelmslev's work in their various proposals of doubly articulated strata, and cite Hjelmslev as "the only linguist to have actually broken with the signifier and signified" (1987: 523). In terms of the concepts of molar and molecular, it is worth noting that the use of the term "molecular" owes a debt to Antonio Gramsci's concept of molecular, or micro-politics. Guattari in particular picks up on the political potency of the molecular in his singly authored book Molecular Revolutions (1984). While throughout this dissertation I deploy the concept of molecularity, primarily in terms of embodiment, to emphasize how we might tap into our dis-organ-ized dispersals that counter the molar, sedimented organ-ization of subjectivity, for Gramsci and Guattari the molecular holds a strongly political connotation, and is primarily related to the micro-politics of political movements, i.e. "molecular revolutions." In these pages I do not explicitly think the "molecular" in this precise political context, yet I hope that my work here and in subsequent chapters shows, in an albeit different manner, the way in which our molecular embodiment can be a potential source of political action. I gesture towards this in my discussion of "doing" the onto-logic of amniotics and cultivating an ethics of interbeing
422 in chapter five, where I consider how we might respond to our world's ecopolitical water crises.
32At the same time, Toadvine (2007) also makes a strong case for the fact that Merleau- Ponty in his final works (i.e. The Visible and the Invisible, and the Nature lectures) announces an "animal being." This possibility of an "animal philosophy," argues Toadvine, invites a reconsideration of the notion of reflection upon which the phenomenological method rests, yet is nonetheless able to avoid the trap of human exceptionalism into which other phenomenological investigations of the human-animal question fall. Yet, despite a reading of Merleau-Ponty that would suggest his work breaks with the humanist tradition, if such a break would mean a rejection of the ontological exceptionalism of the human, this "break" is best described as anticipated in his work, or gestured towards, rather than fully accomplished.
33 This concision of definition owes a debt to Baugh's (2005) helpful elucidation of Deleuze's concept of bodies.
34 Deleuze's theory on bodies has an acknowledged debt to Spinoza and the question Spinoza poses: What can a body do? (see for example Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 153; 253-265). For a deeper discussion on Deleuze's debt to Spinoza in terms of a theory of bodies, see Ian Buchanan (1997).
35 Again, we see here how ocularcentrism is a driving force in our understanding of "bodies" and their ways of being. Because for the most part we do not see our watery bodies at work, we discount these processes as ontologically (or ethically) significant; because we do not generally see the molecular interconnectivity of watery bodies, we do not appreciate the significance of these imbrications and passages. "Point of view" here is thus understood in its most literal sense, while the story that the molecular watery body will "tell" challenges the hegemony of ocularcentrism.
Other-than-human bodies also participate in organizing processes, but these may not be subjectivity. Such processes include scientific classification that work to compartmentalize natural phenomena, or processes of language and naming that capture and reify things. Subjectivity, I would argue, applies primarily to human bodies, but some other-than-human animals may also be subjected to it by humans (e.g. pets).
37 Deleuze and Guattari describe the workings of the molar and the molecular in A Thousand Plateaus (57-59, 211). See note 31 above for their conceptual debts related to these terms.
423 Although processes of subjectification are indeed related to movement and transformation, the point here is that these processes are primarily conservative, reactive, reterritorializing processes that aim at maintaining a fixed status quo (despite the ultimate impossibility of this endeavour).
39 I owe this particular categorization of bodily modalities to S. Mallin's work on Merleau-Ponty (see his book Merleau-Ponty 's Philosophy [1979]). However, it should be noted that neither Merleau-Ponty nor Mallin explicitly acknowledge viscerality as an irreducible bodily modality, and I include it in this list following Drew Leder's convincing argument in The Absent Body (1990). In this phenomenological study, Leder offers an account of the visceral body that inspires my own articulation of lived molecular embodiment. As Leder puts it, we require an account of "blood" (i.e. our visceral bodies) to supplement Merleau-Ponty's account of the "flesh," which Leder understands as focused solely on the ek-static or surface body. My reading, however, finds more "depth"—that is, molecularity—in Merleau-Ponty's account of the body than Leder acknowledges. There are indeed aspects of our motility, affectivity and even perception, that extend beyond, under or above what our surface bodies can grasp (I return to this point in section III (b) "Sci-Phi" below). Hence, I do not feel viscerality is incompatible with the general tendencies of Merleau-Ponty's description of embodiment, and thus I include it nonetheless in the company of Mallin's categorizations. It is also important to note that the particular understanding of "cognition" and the "cognitive body" here may be misconstrued in the context of our contemporary theoretical landscape. Cognition here does not refer to the neurological body that is the subject of emerging studies in continental philosophy and cognitive science. This emerging understanding of a neurological bodily modality would be more closely aligned with the visceral body in my list—that body made up of the physiological processes that often seem to operate below our subjectified perceptual threshold.
In Chinese philosophy of yin and yang, the element of water is associated with the emotion fear, and is connected to the downward movement of flushing and expulsion.
41 These then are some of the ways in which Merleau-Ponty breaks away from a traditional notion of individualistic humanism. Many of Merleau-Ponty's more recent commentators note how Merleau-Ponty thus already moves towards a radically revised version of subjectivity. Vicky Kirby, for example, argues that Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the flesh is a "major assault on our most routine notions of subjectivity" (2006: 132). Johanna Oksala in fact provides a quite radical reading of Merleau-Ponty in her claims that his theory of the perceptual body as a dynamic and developing structure or process that intertwines nature and culture. Oksala's reading thus also can be seen to anachronistically fold Merleau-Ponty into the trend of neo-materialism I describe in the
424 introduction. For other assessments of Merleau-Ponty that read this potential into his ontology, see notes 29, 30 and 32 above, and note 48, below.
42 Note that here I again call on Deleuze's use of "differenciate" and differentiate," which although workable in the French, does not translate into English (see Deleuze 1994 and note 26 above). The notion of difference of/in bodies is taken up in greater detail in chapter two.
4 While Deleuze's ontology is most often characterized by the distinction of the actual and virtual, as acknowledged in note 27 above, in this dissertation I am following DeLanda's (2002) convincing argument that this ontology consists of a middle term as well - the intensive. This view is also upheld and thoughtfully explained by Bonta and Protevi in Deleuze and Geophilosophy (2004).
44 For deeper descriptions of the actual and virtual see Deleuze, "The Actual and the Virtual" (Deleuze and Parnet 2002) md Difference and Repetition (1994: e.g. 208-214).
John Protevi has suggested that water's virtual dimensions would include those that govern the hydrological cycle and the points of water's transition therein: "to flow, to become denser, to expand while freezing, to float as ice, to boil, to rain, to snow, to sleet, and so on." (2007: para 7) The infinitives that I highlight in my own description are chosen because of their specificity to our bodies of'water , and not to water as an element more generally, as is the case with Protevi's example (although meteorological bodies of water are indeed "bodies" as well).
46 Again, see Protevi, "Water" (2007), where he discusses water flows such as differences in density and temperature that result in ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream as intensive processes.
47 For example, Merleau-Ponty discusses the body in space as a "system of possible actions, a virtual body with its phenomenal 'place' defined by its task and situation" (1962: 250); the body I live is only ever a "provisional sketch" of what it might be (1962: 198). Similarly, the world is for Merleau-Ponty an "open totality, the synthesis of which is exhaustible" (1962: 219); there is a "depth" of objects "that no progressive sensory deduction will ever exhaust" (1962: 216).
48 This is argument made by Renaud Barbaras (2001, 2004, 2003), where he concludes that Merleau-Ponty's ontology remains "incomplete," because it does not fully cast off a philosophy of consciousness. See Somers-Hall's (2006) discussion on the extent to which
425 Merleau-Ponty approaches a language of the virtual, but ultimately cannot accommodate it.
49 These phenomenological techniques have been honed primarily from my study of embodied phenomenology under the tutelage of Samuel Mallin and his development of a phenomenological method that he calls "body hermeneutics," based on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Nietzsche in relation to embodiment. While Mallin's writings on the method itself are unpublished, application of his method can be seen in his work Art Line Thought (1996). Other commentators on and practitioners of phenomenological methodology that have guided me include Merleau-Ponty (1962) and Heidegger (1962), Leder (1990), Spiegelberg (1965), Ihde (1977), and my own experimentation.
50 Feminist scholars of science have been particularly instrumental in illuminating the ideological and semiotic systems in which scientific practice and knowledge are inextricably bound up (e.g. Fox Keller [1985], Haraway [2004c], G. Lloyd [1996] and Longino [1996]). Grosz (1995) and Irigaray (1985b) also provide illuminating critiques of the way in which scientific paradigms have shaped our notions of subjectivity. Within the "neo-materialist" paradigm more generally, Bruno Latour (e.g. 1987) has offered a sustained, powerful reading of science as a culturally situated practice within a network of mutually determined practices. It should be noted that none of these critiques dismisses the value of science, but rather asks that we approach scientific knowledge from an appropriately critical perspective (see also Introduction).
51 Ruonakoski (2007) makes a similar argument specifically regarding the study of human and non-human animals. She suggests that while animal behaviour these days is widely studied from the (often overlapping) scientific perspectives of comparative psychology, ethology, cognitive ethology, socio-biology and social ecology, phenomenological perspectives have much to contribute to an understanding of human/non-human animal relations, particularly in terms of the relation between the scientist and the research subject (75). Specifically, she demonstrates how phenomenology can help reveal the "fundamental ontological assumptions of the researcher" (82). Varela (1999) argues for a similar complementarity between phenomenology and cognitive neuroscience in the production of what he has termed "neurophenomenology," according to which he does "not hesitate to mix both modes of discourse, as if they were partner in a dance" (267).
52 One prominent contemporary exception is Don Ihde (1993), who has referred to his later work as "post-phenomenology" in its reliance on phenomenological methodologies alongside the incorporation of science and technology studies. Other interesting examples
426 include Morris (2007) and Sheets-Johnstone (1999, 2007), whose work brings together scientific studies on other-than-human animals and phenomenologies of human embodiment. Phenomenologists are also expressing a growing interest in cognitive science; See, for example, Eds. J. Petitot, F. Varela, B. Pachoud and J-M. Roy, Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science (1999), Bernard Andrieu, "Brains in the Flesh: Prospects for a Neurophenomenology" (2006) and Stephen M. Rosen's Topologies of the Flesh (2006).
53 Merleau-Ponty retains an ambivalent position in regards to the marriage of phenomenology and science, for while he distinctly criticizes the hegemony of the scientific perspective of the body, at the same time cognitive and biological scientific research results are important touchstones for the development of his theory of embodied consciousness. Given his own reliance on scientific stories as entries into his phenomenological descriptions of embodiment and being, it is clear that Merleau-Ponty does not discredit scientific perspectives altogether, but rather sees their great value if they are drawn upon in a way that can desediment their singular hegemony in telling the story of what it means to be embodied. Ruonakoski argues that Merleau-Ponty indeed saw the relationship between these scientific and phenomenological discourses as reciprocal, and in support of this argument quotes Merleau-Ponty's 1964 essay "The Metaphysical in Man" where he writes that science without philosophy "would not know what it is talking about" while phenomenology without methodological exploration would only result in "errors" (quoted in Ruonakoski, 83). Oliver (2007), in reading Merleau-Ponty's Nature lectures, explicitly proposes that "For Merleau-Ponty, science is not simply or in principle opposed to philosophy; rather science and philosophy can engage in a reciprocal exchange that can enliven both. [...] Meaning lies somewhere between the abstract philosophical categories and the so-called brute facts of empirical observation" (17).
54 Protevi's (2001) identification of a "political physics" within the work of Deleuze in fact underlines the connection between scientific perspectives and lived experience more than it would deny it.
55 Drew Leder (1990) refers to the type of perception that is involved in visceral and other "internal" bodily processes, such as the digestion that follows eating or drinking, as interoperception (39). He claims (drawing, no less, on the scientific descriptions of physiologists) that inner sensations, as distinct from outer sensations, are experienced in a single dimension, that they are vague and difficult to pinpoint by our conscious bodies, that they partake in both spatial ambiguity and spatiotemporal discontinuity (36-68). Indeed, these conclusions can be supported by my own basic phenomenological experience of eating an apple (i.e. the example chosen by Leder). My suggestion in this
427 chapter, however, is that we can move deeper and further than this form of interoperception with a rhizo-phenomenological practice; we can use those same scientific descriptions to find greater complexity and interconnection in the "disappearance" within the "recessive body" than Leder describes.
56 Here Smith quotes from Deleuze's The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 129, translation modified by Smith.
57 For example, Hardt and Negri's work (2000, 2004) relies on this prescriptive element in Deleuze and Guattari that enjoins us to become multitudes.
CO This connection between concepts and description also plays out in the difficulty of defining Deleuze's concepts. Deleuze himself rarely provides "authoritative" definitions of his concepts within his work, and prefers instead repetitive descriptions, each subsequent one a different and nuanced version of the former, as if to provide us with multiple actualities of the concept so that we might ephemerally synthesize its virtuality—that "infinitive verb" of the concept that holds all of its potential expressions. This difficulty of definition is exemplified in Karen Houle's entry on "micropolitics" in Charles Stivale's edited collection Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts (2005). Here, Houle spends the first pages of the entry recounting a pedagogical experience in one of her classrooms with hardly a mention of Deleuze. She concludes this first section of the entry with poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke. It is as though Houle is telling us: This concept cannot be definitively presented to you. But I can describe it through my own lived experience. I can afford you an ephemeral glimpse of how it is lived.
Mallin's reflections on his phenomenological method of hermeneutics are unpublished, but this practice is best reflected in his book Art Line Thought (1996).
60 See Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (1962), in particular the chapters "The Body as Expression, and Speech" and "The Cogito."
61 See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1987), chapters four and five, and Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1986).
428 Notes to chapter two
I am indebted to David Morris's (2007) accounts of the "onto-logics" of faces and animals for my own suggestion that amniotics can be understood as an "onto-logic." From Morris, I have gleaned an understanding of how an onto-logic can be helpful for understanding human embodiment in terms of an underlying kinship that this embodiment shares with other expressions of being. In other words, this kinship reveals itself not in terms of what these bodies are, but rather in terms of how they are. Morris is keen to stress that "logic" in this sense is not a formulaic theory used after the fact to explain something, but rather is more closely related to the Greek notion of "logos" whereby logic is a being's inherent accounting for itself.
63 This argument is explicitly developed by Irigaray in her essay "The Invisible of the Flesh" (1993a). Other readers of both Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray, however, disagree with Irigaray's reading. For example, G. Weiss (1999) provides a helpful reading of Irigaray's criticisms of Merleau-Ponty's chiasm, and points out that Irigaray does not seem to fairly acknowledge Merleau-Ponty's attention to the ecart, or dehiscence, that allows reversibility to occur in the first place. Similarly, Irigaray's criticism of the primacy of vision in Merleau-Ponty that cannot account for what can never be visible, such as intrauterine life, is challenged by Weiss for unfairly downplaying Merleau- Ponty's focus on tactility and hearing as well. Butler (2006) also provides an illuminating discussion of the way in which Irigaray, despite her criticisms of Merleau-Ponty, is nonetheless ambivalently caught up in an enactment of the very concept of intertwining (of her own thought with Merleau-Ponty's) that she critiques. Kirby (2006) also objects to Irigaray's reading of Merleau-Ponty, on the grounds that Irigaray does not acknowledge the role of the flesh as gestational of difference. These challenges of Irigaray's critiques are well-founded and likely more faithful to the spirit of Merleau- Ponty's work than Irigaray may allow. I will more explicitly address the tensions between Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty in section V of this chapter.
64 Irigaray claims here that multiplicity relinquishes the specificity of sexual difference which is paramount to her philosophy (although she does acknowledge that women are in themselves "multiple"). Desiring machines are another instance of the masculine's use and abuse of the feminine for his own gain, just as recourse to a body without organs would mean that one had a relation to sex and organs in language in the first place, which women, Irigaray claims, have never had (1985b: 140-141). These Irigarayan criticisms of Deleuze are echoed by Jardine (1984) and in Grosz's Volatile Bodies (1994), although more recent work by Grosz is more interested in the resonances between Irigaray and Deleuze. Indeed, a certain body of recent feminist scholarship has devoted itself to examining the resonances and dissonances between Irigaray and Deleuze's theoretical
429 projects. These include more recent work not only by Grosz (2004, 2005 inter alia), but also Braidotti (2000, 2002, 2003, 2006b, inter alia), Lorraine (1999), Colebrook (2000) and Olkowski (2000). While all of these recent readings of Deleuze and Irigaray have their own focus and nuance, they share the opinion that what resonates in Irigaray and Deleuze is the desire to dismantle the traditional Western metaphysical subject as self- sufficient. These various accounts differ, however, in their assessment of the extent to which they feel Irigaray's notion of sexual difference is compatible with a Deleuzian ontology or cosmology, and the extent to which they feel Deleuze fails or succeeds in addressing the specificity of the feminine.
5 To my knowledge, Irigaray does not use the precise term "gestationality" to denote her theoretical position, although the concepts of the maternal, the placental, and the intrauterine are all prominent in her work. As I will show in this chapter, however, the specific concept of gestationality is indeed suggested by Irigaray's work, and it will be important to carefully consider how gestationality overlaps with but nonetheless is not synonymous with maternity. The appropriateness of this specific term, "gestationality," was suggested to me by Mielle Chandler during her review of an early draft of this chapter. Chandler expounds the notion of gestationality in reference to the work of Emmanuel Levinas in her manuscript "Gestational Matters" (2007). Another important link to highlight here is Irigaray's rejection of Socratic maieutics (whereby new ideas are purportedly born with the help of an "intellectual midwife" who assists the birth, but does not materially contribute to it; the new remains the independent product of the philosopher) in Speculum of the Other Woman (1985a). Irigaray instead challenges Plato's forgetting of the maternal/feminine, and her material gift to the repetition of the self-same. Diprose (2000) picks up a critique of Socratic maieutics in her rejection of Jean Curthoys's argument that feminist knowledge arises autonomously from the self. Diprose, like Chandler, turns to Levinas as a source for further articulating a rejection of the maieutic tradition and positing in its stead the necessity of disturbance by/participation of an other in order to produce the new. More generally, the concept of gestationality is a recurrent theme in feminist thought, although it is nuanced in various ways and expounded under various names, ranging from "phusical" cultivation (Bigwood 1993), an ethic of care (Gilligan 1982), pregnant embodiment (Young 1998), maternal thinking (Ruddick 1995), and the ecriture feminine of Cixous (e.g. Cixous and Clement 1986) that calls upon the giving, diffuse and overflowing feminine body. In very different ways, all of these feminist theories suggest a relation between a feminine bodily gestational/maternal way of being (whether actual or virtual) and an ethics of interbeing. Unlike maieutics, these various understandings of feminist ethics affirm the material interconnectivity of life and the gifts of the body in providing the conditions of possibility for ethical intersubjective relations and fecundity. My use of gestationality in this chapter, and my development of the notion
430 of amniotics more broadly, certainly resonate with this feminist tradition. I seek to provide one specific articulation of embodiment's gifts through the material-semiotic concept of the body of water, yet I also hope that my development of the notion of "amniotics" might stress the simultaneity of interpermeation, gestation, and differentiation, as well as the enfolding and unfolding of materiality through different bodies. While some of the above "gestational" theories highlight certain aspects of this onto-logic, they background others. I argue that water is an exceptionally fecund way to think through this simultaneity.
66 As I acknowledge more fully below, this is not to say that the readings of Irigaray offered by these commentators are not valuable. My issue here is precisely with the use of "strategic" or "tactical" essentialism as a characterization of Irigaray's project. Braidotti (2002, 2003, 2006a), for instance, despite her repeated reference to Irigaray's strategic essentialism, nonetheless provides a helpful and nuanced account of sexual difference in Irigaray. In these same texts Braidotti also refers to Irigaray's understanding of woman as a "virtual reality," which sidesteps the problems raised by the notion of "strategic essentialism" and is in my view a more fecund and accurate characterization.
67 Moreover, while Shildrick's essay does not reference Deleuze's work on difference and repetition, it too alludes to the ways in which "the natural" is subject to differentiating movements of repetition. Weiss (1999), on the other hand, makes explicit reference to Deleuze's Difference and Repetition in relation to both Irigaray and Merleau- Ponty's ontology of the chiasm. Although Weiss's explication of the connection to Deleuze is truncated, it gestures towards some of the claims of resonance that I, too, find in this triad of thinkers and which I more fully develop throughout this chapter.
Irigaray asks this question in response to the psychoanalytic writings of Freud and Lacan, which present women as lack. Indeed, Irigaray's implicit and explicit engagements with Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze (as noted above in notes 63 and 64) can be contextualized within her general response to Lacan as an intervening figure.
69 Some readings do draw attention to the fluid masculine. Grosz (1994: 199-200) notes that the fluid of the masculine is also picked up on by Irigaray in "The Mechanics of Fluids" (1985b) where Irigaray notes how under the rule of phallogocentrism, even semen is solidified. Grosz does not further elaborate, however, how male fluidity plays out more broadly in Irigaray's work. Stone (2003) provides a deeper analysis of male fluidity in Irigaray, suggesting that men do not lack the substance of fluid according to Irigaray, but rather that men and women embody different rhythms of fluids. I will return to this point below.
431 Oliver (1995) and Lorraine (1999) both provide helpful comments on Irigaray's reading of Nietzsche's eternal return in Marine Lover (1991). Both suggest that Irigaray's reading of Nietzsche betrays something of a blindspot in regard to the ways that his philosophy of eternal return might indeed admit the return of difference (as in Deleuze's reading of the eternal return, to which we will return below). Yet both Oliver and Lorraine find Irigaray's criticism compelling and insightful, despite its limitations, because of its attention to Nietzsche's elision of the maternal and sexual difference.
71 A similar association is made in Helene Cixous's text "Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays" (Cixous and Clement 1986), where she discusses the feminine body/of writing as diffuse, never fully knowable, fecund and overabundant, thus comparing it to a sea. "Comparison" however, is hardly the precise term, for in Cixous's text, like Irigaray's, the relation between the feminine, the maternal body and the sea is invoked less as direct metaphor and more as ambiguous slippage and overlap, facilitated in part by the specificity of the French language, where "mer" and "mere" (sea and mother) are homonyms. Cixous describes the way in which men can never succeed in separating themselves from water/the mother, from "seas and mothers" (88). She continues: "But that's it—our seas are what we make them, fishy or not, impenetrable or muddled, red or black, high and rough or flat and smooth, narrow straits or shoreless, and we ourselves are sea, sands, corals, seaweeds, beaches, tides, swimmers, children, waves ... seas and mothers" (88-89). In a move similar to Irigaray's, Cixous invokes a complex relationship between the feminine and the fluid which is hardly a direct, complete or exclusive relation. In her descriptions, the relation of the feminine body to the sea is on some level metaphorical, but it is also materially constitutive and topographical, that is, the feminine is not only like water but also of water and in water in a variety of ways. A closer comparison of the relation between the feminine and the "mer/mere" figurations in Cixous and Irigaray's respective works shall be the focus of another study.
72 It serves also to recall here that water, as a chemical entity, is not bound to a fluid form, and Irigaray certainly picks up and plays on these ambiguous actualizations in her work. However, when Irigaray refers to ice, vapour or other manifestations of water, they are referred to by those other names.
73 See A. Lingis (1994), in particular chapters eight "Fluid Economy" and eleven "Elemental Bodies."
7 Hence another connection is also introduced here—to our evolutionary watery beginnings—but this discussion will be explicitly taken up in chapter three.
432 See Irigaray's essay on Merleau-Ponty, "The Invisible of the Flesh" (1993a), where she criticizes Merleau-Ponty for his failure to acknowledge the dispersed relation of tactility between mother and fetus in the intrauterine environment, and note 63 above. Irigaray's critiques of Merleau-Ponty will be addressed in more detail in section V of this chapter.
76 See Blue Planet (2001).
77 See Shildrick's (1997) critique of representations of women's body and reproduction that show "the status of the foetus or embryo, even the pre-conceptus at times, [as] characterized as free-floating, independent, radically other than the mother herself (25). Shildrick, like Irigaray, reminds us that the fetus has a necessary relationship to and a dependence on a specific gestational medium, that, I am stressing, is also a body of water itself.
78 Irigaray bases this on her reading of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1982), to which Marine Lover explicitly alludes. Irigaray finds Nietzsche's replication of the self same in Zarathustra's penchant for heights, love of birds and disavowal offish, and his crossing of bridges that keeps him from acknowledging the sea (See Nietzsche 1982, particularly Part One). Interestingly, however, Zarathustra also makes several references to his relation to the sea. For example, the Overman is referred to as a sea (125), and Zarathustra also talks of himself as a river in relation to the sea: "I want to plunge my speech down into the valleys. Let the river of my love plunge where there is no way! How could a river fail to find its way to the sea? Indeed, a lake is within me, solitary and self-sufficient; but the river of my love carries it along, down to the sea" (198). In passages such as these, alongside Zarathustra's additional frequent comments on his need to "go down" and "go under" in fact suggest that Nietzsche indeed acknowledges his connection and reliance on the fluvial feminine more than Irigaray would allow. See also note 70 above for criticisms of Irigaray's reading of Nietzsche as too ungenerous.
79 Note here again the significance of the term "differenciation" (internal force of differing) alongside the more common English-language term "differentiation" (differing from something external). Deleuze (1994) makes extensive use of this conceptual slippage, and deploys as well the concept of "differenc/tiation" to underline the force of difference as simultaneously at work both internally and in relation.
Here again we see the inhospitability of Deleuze's philosophy to binary oppositional conceptual systems. Reading bodies of water through a Deleuzian framework that would understand this watery system as both open and closed also challenges Olkowski's (2000) reading of Irigaray and Deleuze, where she argues that Deleuze characterizes the world as an "open whole" while Irigaray stops short of this, instead insisting on a "totalizing
433 framework" (Olkowski 2000: 103-104). Reading the work of Deleuze and Irigaray, and particularly through our bodies of water, I suggest, shows that both would reject such binaristic options. (Olkowski does get at a key point here, however, when she notes the burden put on fluidity in Irigaray's work: within a totalized framework the fluid must always "be in excess with respect to form as well as permanently unstable by nature" [104]. Olkowski's observation here opens towards my own proposal, i.e. that bodies of water are both finite and always still yet-to-come).
81 Grosz's (1994) discussions of bodily fluids, and in particular her discussions of the work of Mary Douglas and Iris Marion Young, further highlight the different semiotics of masculine and feminine bodily fluids (192-208). See also note 69.
The significance of movement to meaning in phenomenological terms is carefully theorized in Sheets-Johnstone's The Primacy of Movement (1999). Here she argues that movement is foundational for animate being (what other philosophers call lived or bodily experience). While Sheets-Johnstone does not analyze movement at the molecular level, as in the case of the rhythms of our bodily fluids, her argument nonetheless lends phenomenological rigour and validity to the claims that while feminine and masculine bodies may both be comprised of water, matter acquires meaning and difference in its choreographies of movement.
While the possibility of ectogenesis (out-of-body gestation) looms imminent on our horizon, we have not yet accomplished it. Shall science deliver to us this possibility in any viable or sustainable way, the very real elision of the maternal-gestational waters will no doubt bring with it questions and consequences we are only beginning to contemplate. See, for example, Olkowski (2006) on the intersubjective significance of the maternal- embryonic relation. On the feminist philosophical implications of ectogenesis see for example, Gelfand, ed. (2006), Aristarkhova (2005), and Murphy (1989).
84 My suggestion here is not that explorations of the comparative difference of the feminine and masculine has no political value. As Braidotti (2002) has also quite rightly noted, the notion of theorizing material difference in a contemporary context cannot be disembedded from considerations of sexual difference. To do so would be an absurd detachment from the social, political, economic and cultural contexts such theorization hopes to ultimately address. My point is rather that if we want sexual difference to be part of an onto-logic of amniotics that insists on difference as difference but also on the interpermeation of bodies, then we need more than a comparative analysis of the sexual difference of bodies of water that holds then infinitely apart.
434 Here, Lingis quotes from Michel Tournier's Friday, trans. Norman Denny (New York: Pantheon, 1985), page 123.
86 See Grosz (1994, 109-110) for this criticism.
87 In chapter three, I delve more deeply into the relation between the onto-logic of amniotics and sexual reproduction of species. Here, I also briefly address how asexual reproduction might be configured in this discussion.
88 See Olkowski (2000) for an explanation of Irigaray's refusal of the logic of an appropriated copula.
SO Within this discussion of origins and differenc/tiation we can also find an interesting resonance with the work of Michel Serres. While I am suggesting here that origins are always multiplicitous, requiring the disturbance of sexual difference in order to allow for proliferation of the new, Serres posits that this disturbance can be thought in terms of "noise" (Serres, 1995), or that static that infiltrates a message while it is passing from sender to receiver. Steven Brown (2002) provides a helpful explication of Serres on noise and origins: "Serres adopts this archaic term [noise] to name the 'pure multiplicity' or founding disorder [...]. 'Noise' is unrealizable, it is the clamour which surrounds an endless trading of place where it becomes impossible to clearly differentiate one thing from another. There is only a continual movement which seems to overrun place, take up and confuse space. Serres refers to this 'noise' as 'black multiplicity'" (Brown 13). Yet, while there is a parallel between the function of noise and sexual difference in Serres work and my own propositions here, the figures Serres develops do not evoke a strong sense of the gestational potentiality linked to fleshy bodies. While Serres is not a key figure in my discussions here, I flag this connection now as I will take it up again in my notes to chapter three in terms of origins, differenc/tiation and Serres's logic/figure of the parasite.
Notes to chapter three
90 Quoted in C. Zimmer, "At the Water's Edge" (1998), no page number.
91 D. Suzuki, "Foreword" in When the Rivers Run Dry by F. Pearce (2006), p. 11.
92 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1987), p. 55.
435 Protevi (2007) also draws on the McMenamins' theory of Hypersea to illustrate the way in which life on land can be understood as a Deleuzian "apparatus of capture." He makes this argument in the broader context of the way in which water—bio-water, water cycles, hydraulic civilizations—help us understand Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophy. I find Protevi's illustrations illuminating and provocative, but in my own use of the Hypersea theory, I am more interested in unpacking what it can teach us about our bodily relations of material interpermeation and gestation.
94 "Macroevolution" refers to the branch of evolutionary thought that is interested in a scale of evolution beyond the generation-by-generation changes in lines of species that comprise microevolutionary studies. Although both microevolution and macroevolution look at the same sorts of process, the latter is concerned with the "big picture" of the overarching patterns in the evolution of life, where, as Zimmer puts it, "new kinds of bodies are built for new kinds of lives" (Zimmer 7).
95 Not all amphibians lay their eggs in water: some eggs are buried in the flesh of their mother's back, while some grow inside their father's throat, or cling to his thighs (Zimmer 108). But in all cases, the point is that these eggs require a watery environment to carry nourishment and allow waste to pass in and out of the egg throughout the gestational period.
96 See Margulis (1971), (1982) and Margulis and Sagan (1986).
97 Philosophers relevant to my work in this dissertation who draw on the work of Margulis include Protevi (2007), Olkowski (2006) and Haraway (2004d).
98 In her essay, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" (1989), LeGuin refers to Elizabeth Fisher's 1975 discussion of the theory of human evolution that claims "the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier" (Fisher, quoted in LeGuin, 166). But LeGuin raises the bottle or the carrier bag to new heights, imbuing it with heroic status in a new kind of story. LeGuin claims that the Carrier Bag theory not only makes sense ("If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you" [166]), but it "also grounds me, personally, in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before. So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing and killing, I never thought that I [as a woman] had, or wanted, any particular share of it" (167). To carry, argues LeGuin, is a much better and more inclusive criterion for assessing what makes one human. This connects to my theory of amniotics as a way of being for bodies of water, where facilitation of being and the provision of gestational matter and habitat for an other being are key points, but I extend this onto-logic beyond
436 the human. For the moment, however, I wish to simply take LeGuin's notion and radicalize it, suggesting merely that bodies on land became innovative carrier bags themselves that brought their watery habitat with them.
"For example, Irigaray's narrator tells her interlocutor, "Into the sea you are returned," at the same time as she asks him: "Why leave the sea?"(1991: 12). She continues: "Perched on any mountain peak, hermit, tightrope walker or bird, you never dwell in the great depths. And as companion you never choose a sea creature. Camel, snake, lion, eagle, and doves, monkey and ass, and... Yes. But no to anything that moves in the water. Why this persistent wish for legs, or wings? And never gills?" (13).
Zarathustra suggests to the people gathered in the marketplace that just as the ape from which they are descended is a laughingstock or embarrassment to man, so too will man be a laughingstock or embarrassment to the over man. Zarathustra continues: "You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape./ Whoever is the wisest among you is also a mere conflict between plant and ghost." (Nietzsche 1982: 124) Yet I understand Irigaray's critique to be concerned with the fact that these invocations of evolutionary debt are followed by Zarathustra's call for his listeners to "remain faithful to the earth," with no mention of the water and water-life necessary to gestate that earthly life.
101 Echoes of these connections between a forgetfulness or maternal beginnings and our evolutionary fishy beginnings reverberate throughout Marine Lover. When Irigaray speaks of "the fluid world you once inhabited" (67) and "that dark home where you began to be once upon a time. Once and for all" (57), we are invited to consider not only a feminine human womb but an evolutionary watery womb as well. These beginnings are an event of "necessity" and "chance"(57), Irigaray reminds us—just as is every zygote's eruption and development, and just as are those aleatory points upon which our evolutionary differentiation to a large extent depends. When Irigaray asks "Did your idol not come from the bottom of the sea? Did it not habitually return there at times of greatest peril? Did it not find its survival in the sea?" (57) we are even more suggestively asked to map this movement of emergence and return across life's evolutionary becomings: from the first signs of primordial soupish life that appeared in the sea at least 3.9 billion years ago, to the terrestrial invasion and the emergence of Hypersea that followed, to finally the return of certain land mammals to their watery ancestral homes in their becoming-cetacean.
102 As Elizabeth Grosz notes in her Nietzsche chapters in Nick of Time (2004), although Nietzsche was critical of Darwin's work, his criticisms seem to be aimed more squarely
437 at the social applications of Darwin's work than at the core ideas within a Darwinian philosophy, many of which Nietzsche in fact takes up in his own philosophy. For Nietzsche, natural selection and evolutionary processes seemed most likely to exalt the average and reward the majority, while the exceptional were weeded out, yet at the same time his own philosophies of the eternal return and will-to-power are inspired by what Grosz calls a "moral Darwinism," "a dynamic active Darwinism, in which life excels, expands, and transforms itself (2004: 113). Hence, Grosz refers to Nietzsche as a "monstrous offspring of Darwin" (111) and "an irritant for Darwinism, to [the] extent [that] he brings out what in the Darwinian tradition is not readily observed" (113). As Grosz points out, prominent Nietzsche scholar Arthur Danto, as well as Deleuze and Nietzsche scholar Keith Ansell Pearson (whose work on evolutionism I also turn to below) share similar readings of Nietzsche's relation to Darwinism (Grosz 2004: 98-99).
In Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference (1993b), Irigaray criticizes a "Darwinian model" of behaviour that she characterizes as life's struggle against both the external environment and other living beings (37). As I explain below, this most common understanding of Darwinian thought as a "survival of the fittest" social Darwinism ignores the much more nuanced and potentially productive position that other thinkers, noted below, locate in both Darwin and other evolutionary models.
Sheets-Johnstone makes several important points in regard to why it would behove phenomenologists to seek a common ground with evolutionary biology. Most convincingly, she argues that both practices are grounded in descriptive foundations (2007: 328). She accuses present-day continentalists of failure to stay true to this descriptive, attentive grounding, and asserts that they rather "need to eschew speculative armchairs and practice philosophy close-up" (334). Yet, her argument enters shaky territory when she begins to expound what such a "close-up practice" might entail. For Sheets-Johnstone, this means "consulting primary sources in invertebrate biology, ethology, and more, i.e. learning of animals in their natural habitats" (334). Certainly, describing the ways in which animals move, act, emote and perceive is an important step towards "close-up" philosophy. But Sheets-Johnstone too uncritically accepts that scientific literature will provide the information one needs, free from any bias or agenda of its own. In this text she assumes too facilely that evolutionary biological research has produced a cohesive body of knowledge with no controversy or contradiction between reputable scholars. Sheets-Johnstone speaks of the biological literature as if it were a transparent map of the "truth." Such assumptions ignore the fact that evolutionary biology is a continuously evolving body of knowledge itself, and "facts" that were widely accepted even twenty years ago have since been replaced with new "facts." (For feminist critiques of the so-called "facts" of evolution, see Fox Keller [1996], Gowaty et al, [1997], Gowaty [2003], Morgan [1972,1982], E. Lloyd [1996]).
438 Moreover, evolutionary biology is not, as Sheets-Johnstone claims, always "open to verification by others" because of its "exacting methodological procedures." (This is particularly true in macroevolutionary science). In fact, perhaps more so than in other natural sciences, evolutionary theories need to rely on speculation and conjecture, not least due to the fact that the fossil record has many important gaps and deficiencies. For example, not even 70 years ago the scientific consensus was that life of earth began 600 million years ago. That figure has since been considerably revised to at least 3.9 billion years (Margulis 1982; Margulis and Sagan 2000). But even more to the point, no one even knows how the first feat of life was even accomplished (Margulis and Sagan 2000)! Another example that will be discussed in chapter four concerns the evolution of human beings, and Elaine Morgan's Aquatic Ape Theory that proponents of the more traditional Savannah Theory ridiculed for decades. I am aware that my own reference to "scientific facts" in this chapter subjects me to the very same criticisms with which I charge Sheets- Johnstone, although in my defence I stress that I am interested in these "facts" not as proof of any necessary truth about humans or other animals, but as hooks within stories that can allow us to imagine our interbeing otherwise. Finally, Sheets-Johnstone also claims that the key commonality between evolutionary theory and phenomenology is the pursuit of origins. While this claim is not necessarily false, the concept of "origins," as noted above, needs to be examined critically and used carefully in both phenomenological and evolutionary discourses. For these reasons, although I agree with Sheets-Johnstone's encouragement of transdisciplinary learning, I do not see her work as "molecularly evolutionist."
105 See note 102 above.
06 Bergson's thought undoubtedly is a key precursor for contemporary explorations of the connections I will discuss in the rest of this chapter. In Bergson's Creative Evolution (2005), he seeks to articulate a philosophy that could accommodate both the continuity of all living beings as well as their differences implied by evolutionary change. Bergson suggests that the only way to do so would be to start from an examination of real life and the evolution of species. While my dissertation does not address Bergson's work, it should be clear that his theories on this matter were surely a great influence to my two main philosophical interlocutors in these chapters, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Both owe a great gestational debt to Bergson.
07 Merleau-Ponty directly addresses Darwinian thought, as well as the interpretations of evolution that were being propagated at the time he was writing, in Nature: Course Notes from the College de France (2003). As the title of this work implies, his thoughts on evolution are contained in lecture-style notes, and thus also include many dialectical passages that set up the positions he would like to refute, rather than those he himself
439 espouses. Nonetheless, the Nature notes are a rich source for understanding how Merleau-Ponty finds in scientific thought a path for further elucidating his own ontology of the flesh. While this chapter calls on Merleau-Ponty's thought on evolution several times to note its resonances with Deleuze's own thought on the matter, a detailed appraisal and description of Merleau-Ponty's theories requires the time and space of another project for appropriate elaboration.
108 In this chapter I will focus on Deleuze and Guattari's references to evolutionary science in. A Thousand Plateaus, as well as Deleuze's use of evolutionary thought and embryology in Difference and Repetition.
Both Ansell Pearson and O'Toole bounce off of the work of Deleuze and Guattari to further develop notions of evolution as "machinic" rather than strictly biological. See Ansell Pearson's Germinal Life (1999) and "Viroid Life: On Machines, Technics and Evolution" (1997) and O'Toole "Contagium Vivum Philosophia: Schizophrenic Philosophy, Viral Empiricism and Deleuze" (1997).
110 Agamben's essay "The Anthropological Machine" in The Open: Man and Animal, uses evolutionary stories and debates to further articulate his theory of bare life. DeLanda's A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History (1997) provides a rewriting of various evolutionary stories (geological, biological and linguistic) in order to present a materialist history of life. However, I will not be drawing on Agamben's or DeLanda's work in this chapter, although a deeper comparative study of the ways evolutionary theory has been integrated into continental philosophy would indeed be a valuable topic for a further project.
111 Elizabeth Grosz's recent work (2004, 2005), to which I will continue to return throughout this chapter, provides a strong argument for revisiting evolutionary theory and Darwinian thought specifically as a way to bridge the unproductive interdisciplinary divide between the life sciences and continental philosophy, as well as the persistent dichotomy of "nature" and "culture." Grosz, similar to Sheets-Johnstone, muses about philosophy's amnesia regarding humanity's embodied evolutionary debts, but in the context of how it might enrich feminist and anti-oppression politics and theory. Braidotti more subtly folds an evolutionary perspective into her recent work (2002, 2006), as she argues for the ways in which evolutionary theory (if cautiously used, in an embedded manner) can contribute to a revitalization of attention to zoe in philosophy. The work of Donna Haraway, while not engaging in a specific dialogue with Deleuze, also makes an explicit case for attending to our evolutionary histories. Despite her novel rereading of our "naturecultural" evolution stories, Haraway nonetheless refers to herself as a "dutiful
440 daughter of Darwin" (2003: 15). Some of the commonalities between these thinkers will be discussed in more detail below. Of course, feminist interest in evolutionary biology is certainly not limited to the thinkers I note above. Other feminist interest has been mostly directed into one of two agendas: (a) philosophical critique of the masculinist premises of that presumably "objective" science; or (b) scientific application of evolutionary theory for a feminist agenda. The first agenda, described by Gowaty et al (1997) as "feminist critiques of Darwinism," was already forwarded in the nineteenth century critiques of Blackwell, Gamble and Perkins Gilman (see Deutscher [2004]), and could include contemporary evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden, although her work is more about exposing the heteronormative and transphobic biases of much evolutionary science. The second agenda, described by Gowaty et al (1997) as "Darwinian feminism," includes the work of scientists such as Elaine Morgan (1972, 1982), Evelyn Fox Keller (1996), Emily Martin (1996), Patricia Adair Gowaty (2003), Anne Fausto-Sterling (1997, 2003), and Griet Vandermassen (2004), although there are considerable differences in the feminist positions these scientists espouse. Both groups of scholarship have been important for revealing the normative male bias in evolutionary science and contributing substantially to the body of "facts" that evolution teaches us about men, women and sexual difference.
112 Genetic drift is a stochastic process of gene-pool continuation in subsequent generations of a population. As Suzuki et.al. succinctly put it, "Populations do not exactly reproduce their genetic constitutions; there is a random component of gene-frequency change." This randomness can be attributed to factors both internal to the beings (i.e. the fact that not all possible zygotes mature into reproducing adults) and to external factors (e.g. natural disasters that eradicate some specific gene-carriers more than others). It is thus an apt way of describing a philosophical genealogy of thinking on evolution, where many if not all of these thinkers are "inheriting" the thought of their predecessors, yet their further proliferation thereof is subject to a variety of lateral interference and redistribution.
Drawing on the contributions of Henri Bergson to an alternative view of evolution, Ansell Pearson notes, for example, that "on a certain model one could legitimately claim that the 'success' of a species is to be measured by the speed at which it evolves itself out of existence" (1997: 183). Hardly the "fitness" that commonly comes to mind in contemporary sociobiological notions of evolution!
4 Ansell Pearson (1997) claims this move is already prefigured in Deleuze's Difference and Repetition. We have already discussed such a move in chapter two in our description of the latent virtuality of the larval subject or the egg, who does not grow towards a teleological type, but rather is an expression of unknowable potentiality that
441 differenciates in its actualization. This move from the virtual to the actual, and its link to difference and gestation, will be further discussed below.
115 To refuse the idea of essentialized species is not the same thing as refusing the notion of species as a useful category in some instances. As we already discussed in chapter one, molar or subjectified identities need not be wholesale rejected, but we must refuse to consider them the only "truthful" or real way of ordering life. Haraway makes the point clear when she refers to herself as a "dutiful daughter of Darwin": "I insist on the tones of the history of evolutionary biology, with its key categories of populations, rates of gene flow, variation, selection and biological species. All the debates in the last 150 years about whether the category denotes a real biological entity or merely figures a convenient taxonomic box provide the over- and undertones" (2004b: 302). Those under- and overtones are what I am stressing in this description of molecular evolutionism. But as Haraway notes, this does not mean that species cannot be invoked: after all, to consider the meaning of human embodiment requires some temporary faith in the category of what Haraway calls a "defining difference" (2004b: 302).
116 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari discuss the wasp-becoming-orchid as a prime example of lateral or aparallel evolution (238, 293-4).
117 See Grosz (2004) for an extended discussion of why the genotype should not be privileged over the phenotype. She argues, after evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr and developmental systems theorist Susan Oyama, that "natural selection never functions at the level of genes; rather, it operates only on the phenotype, whose characteristics are always structured by clusters or combinations of genes that function only in relation to environmental factors" (48). The consideration of the phenotype in evolution is not new, and can be traced back to Lamarck (1744-1829) and his proposition of the adaptive force, whereby animals adapt to their local environments. However, this notion is in opposition to equally well-accepted theories by evolutionary geneticists and sociobiologists such as Richard Dawkins (1989) and E.O.Wilson (1980). More recently, these two approaches have been synthesized in an approach to evolutionary science known as "the modern synthesis" or "evo-devo," as mentioned. Development systems theory (DST) is a more recent "gathering" of multiple ways of thinking about development, heredity and evolution. Oyama, Griffiths and Gray (2001) describe DST in their introduction to a volume of collected works on the same topic in the following manner: "[DST] is not a theory in the sense of a specific model that produces predictions to be tested against rival models. Instead it is a general theoretical perspective, [and] a framework both for conducting scientific research and for understanding the broader significance of research findings. [...] It draws on insights from researchers in a wide range of areas" (1-2). What I am proposing in my reference to "molecular evolutionist stories" is thus in many ways
442 similar to DST. I prefer, however, to refer to a molecular evolutionist perspective, as my version is even less of a theory, and more a way of facilitating my thought about evolution in a philosophical context that can bring together diverse but resonating perspectives.
118 In the Nature notes, Merleau-Ponty describes von Uexkull's concept of Umwelt in these terms: "There are natural plans that are living beings. The sign of it is that identical exterior conditions bring along different possibilities of behaviour. The crab uses the same object (the sea anemone) to different ends: sometimes for camouflaging its shell and protecting itself thus against fish, sometimes for feeding itself, sometimes, if we take away its shell, for replacing it. In other words, there is a beginning of culture. The architecture of symbols that the animal brings from its side thus defines within Nature a species of preculture. [...] [T]here is not a break between the planned animal, the animal that plans, and the animal without plan" (176). Merleau-Ponty then concludes that based on this understanding of Umwelt, natural or physiological factors are inextricable from cultural practices or behaviours (what Merleau-Ponty refers to as "the so-called higher behaviours"): "In the simplest physiology, we will find behaviours similar to so-called higher behaviours. Reciprocally, we will have to conceive higher phenomena according to the mode of the existence of lower behaviours" (178).
119 Note here the resonance with Bruno Latour's actor-network theory and in particular, his reading of the modernist split between nature and culture (Latour 1993). I do not include Latour's work here as the bulk of his oeuvre does not focus specifically on evolution. One particular work, however, deserves comment in this context. In a talk entitled "Progress and Entanglement? Two models for the long-term evolution of human civilization" (given in Taipei, 1998), Latour echoes many of the sentiments I lay out here. To begin, Latour offers in place of a grand narrative of "Progress," the "Entanglement grand narrative," which suggests that we are not moving towards a culminating teleological goal, but rather that "things," "humans," nature and culture are all becoming increasingly entangled. Moreover, Latour suggests here that, like my notion of molecular evolutionist "stories," the Entanglement narrative is less a theory and more a "tale," "myth," or "counter-proposition" that would upset the hegemonic (and Latour underlines, misrepresentative) version of Darwinian evolution as socio-biological survival of the fittest. I would suggest, however, that the diagram Latour offers in accompaniment to this talk, in which each stage of "progressive Entanglement" is depicted within a distinct order and which shows evolution as always necessarily mobilizing an increasing number of elements, is already in its own right quite a "molarized" version of evolution. Latour does not consider, for example, what this view of increasing Entanglement might have had to give up along the way, or which "species" it might have left extinct in its wake. For a more detailed discussion of the ways in which Latour's work figures in the
443 positions I expound in this dissertation, and the ways in which I distinguish my own propositions from Latour's theories, see my Introduction.
120 Haraway, "The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others" (2004e) and "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (1985).
121 Moreover, nor does Grosz make specific reference to Irigaray or Marine Lover in this passage, although elsewhere in Nick (2004) she does acknowledge that Irigaray is one of the "(ghostly) guides" that inhabits Grozs's explorations in this work (13-14). On the one hand, Grosz notes that it is Irigaray who "insists on the irreducibility of sexual difference, a claim that finds startling confirmation in the writings of Darwin," and on the other hand, she notes that "[i]t is [Irigaray] who reminds Nietzsche of the watery maternal element his projects for self-overcoming entail and which they forget." So, although in Nick Grosz does not make an explicit connection between water, Irigaray, and evolutionary/maternal debts, as I am doing in this chapter, the seeds for my conclusions were in part planted by Grosz in an extremely suggestive way.
122 Kandel (2003), 39-40.
123 Here we can find a resonance with Serres (1995), who similarly rejects the notion of pure, localizable origin, and rather thinks about origins in terms of "noise" and a "founding disorder" (see 89 above). Interestingly, Serres draws on the metaphor of a river as a confluence of a confusion of streams to illustrate his point (1995: 17). What I would add to Serres' discussion here, however, is the question of the origin of that congeries of streams: from where do the streams arise? At once we are again immersed in the open/closed hydrological cycle of water and its difference and repetition, as we discussed in chapter two.
124 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze makes this allusion in reference to von Baer's discovery that "an embryo does not reproduce ancestral adult forms belonging to other species, but rather experiences or undergoes states and undertakes movements which are not viable for the species but go beyond the limits of the species, genus, order or class, and can be sustained only by the embryo itself, under the conditions of embryonic life" (Deleuze 1994: 249). In A Thousand Plateaus the reference is more direct ("You can never draw conclusions about phylogenesis on the basis of embryogenesis" [Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 47]). However, the implications of this theory for what I am calling gestation and differenc/tiation are most thoroughly worked out by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, and that is why I focus on this text in the following paragraphs.
444 This is also why, referring back to our molecular evolutionist stories, Deleuze is leery of the idea of "species" as a fully knowable category. He writes, "It is not the individual which is the illusion in relation to the genius of the species, but the species which is an illusion—inevitable and well founded, it is true—in relation to the play of the individual and individuation" (1994: 250). Like Haraway, Deleuze understands the pragmatic and narrative value of "species" as a category, but also knows the "difference" between species is subordinate to the differenciation, or internal forces of differing, within species. The individual, and its virtual capacity to become different, precedes the notion of species and as such a "species" can only be a precarious crystal structure, whose constituencies threaten to branch off, split, and reconstitute the boundaries of that species at any moment. Moreover, although a full foray into Merleau-Ponty's writings on evolution cannot be accommodated here, it should be noted that Merleau-Ponty shares a similar sentiment with Deleuze in his rejection of "typological essentialism" and the "ontogenesis as recapitulation" theory. In fact, Merleau-Ponty's language eerily anticipates Deleuze's. Merleau-Ponty writes: "Ontogenesis as recapitulation? No: The somatic cannot give back genetics. There is sometimes an anticipation. / All phylogenesis is ideal: because Nature is made only of schema then no Urform could live" (2003: 258). As I will elaborate further, this rejection first, of ideal types, and second, of the teleological progress of lower-to-higher species or embryos-to-adults, in both Merleau- Ponty and Deleuze is important here in terms of helping us understand how our bodies of water live according to an onto-logic of amniotics. This resonance between the two thinkers, however, also serves a supplementary purpose of further illustrating how the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze are not in fact so distant.
126 While Grosz does indeed make references to sexual difference as virtual, unknowable, yet to come, and incalculable, on the other hand she continually makes reference to sexual difference as "two nonreducible forms... which have their own interests, needs, organic body parts, and ways of negotiating the world through them" (2004: 67). This for Grosz is an "irreducible binarism." Hence, even if Grosz allows that sexual difference is virtual and not yet actualized, this virtuality is nonetheless necessarily bifurcated into "two forms... which also produce two types of bodily relation." In the end, she claims that
The Darwinian model of sexual selection comes to a strange anticipation of the resonances of sexual difference in terms of contemporary feminist theory! It provides the outline of a nonessentialist understanding of the (historical) necessity of sexual dimorphism. (2004: 67)
This quote seems most exemplary of the confusing aspect of Grosz's claims here, for on the one hand it insists on the nonessentialist (virtual) aspect of sexual difference, but at
445 the same time already invokes its actualized form in sexual dimorphism. I do not actually dispute Grosz's claims about the value of Darwinian theory and evolution, in terms of the deeper understanding they can lend to questions of sexual difference in and beyond feminist theory. Indeed, Grosz's work in this direction is inspiring and inspired. However, it does not seem (to me) that Grosz adequately works out the problem of sexual difference in Irigaray, in terms of a rigorous explanation of the virtuality and actuality of this difference, and whether or not the virtual is, as Grosz states here, a necessary and irreducible dimorphism correlated to a male body and a female body (where femaleness and maleness may be virtual), or rather, as I attempted to show in the previous chapter, a force whose forms of actualization are not yet determined, and will always remain an open question. Grosz hints toward a mitigation of this point by suggesting that sexual dimorphism is a "(historical) necessity," and thus perhaps a feature of our own specific space-time. But she is not adequately clear on this. Even in the context of sexual reproduction, we fail the diversity of life miserably if we assume that sexual difference must posit the perdurance of masculinity and femininity residing within stably and discretely sexually dimorphic bodies. While Grosz does not explicitly claim this, her use of the term dimorphism, without explicit address of the actual/virtual distinction, or even of the potential slippage in-between, counteracts her attempts to present sexual difference as virtual. It is still unclear how we might reconcile her claim that sexual difference "is not merely a detail, a feature that will pass" with one of Darwin's primary gifts to thinking about ontology: that is, evolutionary "progress" (if we will call it that) as never fully knowable. Darwin (as Grosz indeed points out) shows us that evolution is not comprised of precisely distributed intervals of change, but is rather subject to fits and starts, highly susceptible to those aleatory moments of chance, accident and uncanny serendipity. Evolution has no teleology, no grand plan. Even if we feel confident that sexual difference "will not pass," can we make the same claims—as Grosz seems to—for masculine/feminine dimorphism?
197 In Time Travels, published one year later as the companion book to Nick of Time, Grosz seems to be more aware of this strange tension in her work between the necessary irreducible "two-ism" of sexual difference and the acknowledgement of its unknowable future expressions. We see this realization, for example, in her switch to describing sexual difference in terms of "at least two" expressions, rather than in terms of the "only irreducibly two" formulation she insists on in her discussion of Darwin and sexual selection in Nick. 128 Fish are particularly instructive on this count: the bluehead wrass develops three genders: males who remain males for life; females who change into males; and females who remain males (Roughgarden 32). Clown fish, on the other hand, include males who change into females, if the female is removed from the "home" (Roughgarden 33).
446 Hamlets (coral reef basses) are both sexes at the same time, while gobies include fish that "crisscross" sexes many times over the course of their lives (Roughgarden 34-35).
129 Such species include pipefish and seahorses (Roughgarden 45).
130 In alligators, crocodiles, some turtles, lizards and fish, sex is not determined by different (XX or XY) chromosomes, but rather by the temperature at which the eggs are raised (Roughgarden 27-28). This is a perfect example of how sexual dimorphism is an actualized trait that does not necessarily stem from an essentialized "true" core inherent in the larval subject, but rather is guided by external factors.
131 Roughgarden (28). For example, 5% of female hooded warblers are almost indistinguishable from males (Roughgarden 104).
Hyenas, bears and spider monkeys include females who have penis-like genitalia (Roughgarden 37-40), while the male fruit bat of Malaysia and Borneo has milk- producing mammary glands (Roughgarden 28).
133 Males, for example, are not always aggressive sexual competitors. For instance, male bluehead chub fish form partnerships and build nests together (Roughgarden 99), while males amongst the lamprologus brichardi fish of Lake Tanganyika exercise cooperative brood care (Roughgarden 100). Moreover, as Darwin noted, females often are in control of mate choice, although as Roughgarden notes, the criteria females use seem to be more complex than Darwin elaborated. Female sand gobies, for example, look for male mates who will take good care of the eggs (Roughgarden 106-109). Similarly, in many bird species, such as the alpine accentors, females determine how often mating happens and when (Roughgarden 110). As far as sexual behaviour lining up with sexual dimorphism goes, many species, such as the whiptail lizard, the pukeko (a bird) from New Zealand, swans and geese, exhibit courtship between animals of the same sex and same gender. Moreover, mammals ranging from squirrels, marmots, foxes, and bats to dolphins, sea lions and manatees all exhibit same-sex genital behaviour.
134 The most accomplished "free-divers" (divers who dive without the aid of breathing and pressure-regulating apparatuses) can hold their breath for almost 3 minutes while descending to depths of over 100 metres and then returning to the surface (Ferraras, "The Deep Deep Blue"). See note 157 below for some more descriptions on how these divers "live the unliveable."
135 Waterbirth International explains this in terms of (a) the placental prostaglandin levels that inhibit a newborn's breathing reflex, (b) the fact that babies are born experiencing
447 oxygen deprivation (apnea), which does not induce breathing or gasping, (c) the physiological barrier that prevents hypotonic water from mingling with the hypertonic lung fluids of the fetus, and (d) by the mammalian diving reflex that closes the glottis and ensures water would be swallowed, not inhaled. In all of these respects, the newborn is the larval subject of which Deleuze writes, living at the borders of the liveable, while in other respects this virtual subject is indeed already actualized! Again, here, we see the slippage that both maternal and evolutionary becomings introduce between the virtual and the actual.
136 Deleuze and Guattari are adamant about distinguishing this type of evolution from the filiative evolution by descent. They note that in aparallel symbioses "evolution does not go from something less differentiated to something more differentiated" and thus "ceases to be a hereditary filiative evolution, becoming communicative and contagious" (1987: 238). It should be noted, however, that Deleuze's discussion of Darwinian evolution, the egg and the processes of individuation and differenc/tiation already challenge a view of evolution by descent as going "from something less differentiated to something more differentiated," as we discussed in the above section. I therefore do not read aparallel or symbiotic evolution as necessarily a critique of Darwinian evolution; both can be read as part of a molecular evolutionist paradigm.
137 Haraway develops her key concept of "companion species" from such stories of co- evolution, and explodes this term beyond its normal association of humans and domesticated pets, such as dogs. Although dogs serve as a fruitful illustration, Haraway understands companion species as necessarily reevaluating what we mean by "domestication" in order to consider it as an "emergent process of co-habiting, involving agencies of many sorts and stories that do not lend themselves to yet one more version of the Fall or to an assured outcome for anybody"(2003: 31). Companion species thus become "the figures of relational ontology, in which histories matter; i.e., are material, meaningful, processual, emergent, and constitutive" (2004b: 307).
138 Here we can see both similarities and divergences from the way in which Michel Serres invokes the parasite as a figure or logic of relations in his book of the same title (2007). For Serres, the parasite corresponds to three meanings in common French: static or noise, the biological organism which preys upon a host, and the "uninvited guest" who freeloads off his social host (S. Brown [2002] provides this helpful systematization of how the parasite figures in Serres's book.) Through elaboration of all three of these meanings, Serres develops a figure of the parasite that suggests two key "onto-logics" of relation: first, the parasite inaugurates an interruption that generates invention and change. The parasite is the site of "translation" whereby exchange is not reciprocally symmetrical but rather transversal: something of one order is exchanged and thus invents
448 something new, of another order (Serres 2007: 35). This notion of non-symmetrical exchange as life-proliferating certainly resonates with my suggestion of the onto-logic of amniotics, whereby watery interpermeation invites passage across membranes, but according to various asymmetrical speeds and choreographies. But Serres also elaborates the parasite as a relation of "taking without giving." As Serres puts it, "The chain of parasitism is a simple relation of order, irreversible like the flow of the river. One feeds on another and gives nothing in return" (182). While this one-way relation is not necessarily a negative thing for Serres, as indeed he posits this as a productive relation of life proliferation, my invocation of parasitical relations here should (unlike this aspect of Serres' exposition) only be understood in context of the gestational relation which is its necessary flip-side. If the parasite (here, the pentasome) inaugurates a relation of taking without giving, the host (in this case, the dinosaur) inaugurates a relation of material gift and passage. Only together can the parasite and host proliferate life. Moreover, it cannot be said that nested organisms only take without giving. In the McMenamins' previously mentioned example of the millipede, for instance, microbes are invited into the millipede in order to perform a service to it as well, namely aid in digestion. Similarly, when Serres figures the parasite as the man who takes from the tree shelter, decoration, flower, fruits and shade, and in return gives nothing but a felling (Serres 2007: 24), perhaps it would be worth remembering Silverstein's classic children's tale, The Giving Tree, where the (eventually felled) tree receives from the boy/man company, joy and the gratification of giving (Silverstein 1964). How can we be so sure that the arrows point necessarily "in only one direction" (Serres 2007: 27)? Hence, while Serres' logic of the parasite is certainly instructive and thought- provoking, I suggest that the life of parasite, when contextually embedded, can also teach us something about interpermeation and gestationality.
139 Even asexual reproduction, where the matter of the single parent is passed to the offspring, can be considered in terms of interpermeation and a version of the onto-logic of amniotics: the production of new life resulting from asexual reproduction still requires gestation (the single parent must still provide the nurturing habitat to let its offspring become), differentiation (the offspring still engages in a setting itself apart from its parent) and interpermeation (the new life still requires to be gifted matter from the parent in order to be). It still carries its gestational environment in its own materiality, in order to pass it on further. Asexual reproduction, however, does not require the meeting of at least two to kick-start the amniotic cycle. But as noted above, nor does asexual reproduction produce the same degree of diversity and difference that sexual reproduction can. This is not to attribute value judgements to the two types of reproduction as better or worse, for indeed asexual reproduction has its own advantages, namely the ability to procreate in conditions where mates cannot be found. I would argue, however, that sexual
449 reproduction (including hermaphroditic reproduction, and other forms of reproduction that require the crossing of difference but not necessarily a discretely male and discretely female body) are a brighter or more perspicuous illumination of the onto-logic of amniotics, because of their stronger life-proliferating force.
140 Again, this description clearly illustrates what Serres' theory of the parasite as "taking without giving" leaves out: parasites, too, contribute to the functioning of the onto-logic of amniotics, and arrows move in all, albeit asymmetrical, directions.
1 Sonia Kruks (2006) uses Merleau-Ponty's theory of embodiment and intersubjectivity to make a strong argument for why our common embodiment offers a potential for shared affective ground and ethical intersubjectivity, but never automatically or necessarily serves as a short-cut to this common ground. Her argument is particularly relevant in the case of "evolution stories" (although it is not framed in these terms) because it offers a way out of what she calls a regressively fracturing "epistemology of provenance," otherwise known as 1980's-style identity politics, where one's sexual, racial, ethnic, etc, or in our case here, species, difference granted them admission into a discrete group of like-bodied individuals whose common interests were guaranteed.
Notes to chapter four
142 Toadvine (2007) makes a strong argument against reading Merleau-Ponty as advocating human exceptionalism. Rather, Toadvine argues, Merleau-Ponty posits the difference between humans and other animals as a "lateral movement" as opposed to a "fundamental ontological discontinuity" (50). Kelly Oliver (2007) also provides a helpful explication of Merleau-Ponty's concept of interanimality. Other helpful sources for clarifying Merleau-Ponty's thought on animals include Langer (2003: 115-116) and Smyth (2007), although none take up the relation of interanimality to Deleuze's becoming-animal.
1431 should emphasize that I am not being overly picky here or inordinately emphasizing a chance turn of phrase in Lingis. Vision reappears in various ways in Lingis' work in terms of negotiating our relations to our animal others in ways that I find less than convincing. For example, in describing the experience of scuba-diving, Lingis stresses that the entire purpose for donning prosthetic apparatuses is to be observed by the fish; "You feel your eyes and your big bloated body completely exposed to that yellow eye which reveals nothing whatever in response to you" (Lingis 2000: 33). Certainly, the underwater seascape is visually wondrous, fascinating and even discombobulating, and the way in which we are reversibly made aware of being looked at brings a new and
450 startling quality to our own vision. Yet, this emphasis on vision unduly backgrounds the other (to my mind) far more notable bodily shifts that occur here: weightlessness and lack of gravitational pull, a new sense of motility whereby the force of water transforms all our motions into slow-motions, the eerie echoing sound of our own deep breath with all other sounds muffled, and finally, the epidermal tactility of water in water. Given these amazing transformations of our body's capacities and ways of being in the world, it seems strange that Lingis would focus only on what we see below the surface, and how we are seen, as the sole allure. If this were true, what would differentiate the experience of diving from standing behind the glass at Sea World?
144 Interestingly, Lingis explicitly cites neither Deleuze and Guattari's becoming-animal, nor Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of lived embodiment, in relation to any of the descriptions from this chapter of Dangerous Emotions discussed above. He is, nonetheless, clearly familiar with both of these corpuses of work. (Lingis is the English language translator of Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible, and makes many references to Deleuze and Guattari's work both elsewhere in Dangerous Emotions, and in other books as well.) In fact, despite this particular lack of reference to Deleuze and Guattari's becoming-animal, Lingis is not only evidently indebted to its concepts but even borrows its images and examples. For instance, his reference to our human bodies as having the individuality of a pack, a swarm, a fog, a season, directly echoes A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guattari write: "You are a longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects. You have the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration)—a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack (regardless of its regularity)" (262).
145 Zimmer notes that dolphin interbeing and intercorporeity may in fact be far more sophisticated than human intersubjectivity, but that we may not appreciate this because "our anthropomorphism inevitably makes it hard to understand an intelligence other than our own" (131). As a result, we may use the criterion of "self-awareness" as a mark of intelligence, without realizing that "a choice between self-awareness and the lack of it may be one that dolphins don't have to make" (133). Dolphins have hierarchies and conflicts and may even be able to name each other, but dolphin "society may nevertheless be one of an overlapping network of minds, wandering linked through a transparent ocean"; "If dolphins are in fact continually sharing and exchanging interior and exterior worlds with one another, our notion of self would be meaningless to them" (134).
146 The title of this section is para-cited from the title of Karen Houle's essay "(Making) Animal Tracks" (2007), where she likens the process of philosophical thinking about other-than-human animals to the act of (amateur) animal tracking: in tracking animals, we enter a world that is fully populated by our animal kin, yet we can barely recognize
451 the signs of their presence right before our eyes. From this I extrapolate: although we are always interpermeated, connected, we require close attention to our becomings-animal in order to learn something from them, both about ourselves and them. While Houle does not explicate the meaning of her paper's title, it inspires me to consider the way in which such close attention is both a process of following tracks already there, but also an act of active mapping and reterritorialization. Houle's title, though, also asked me to pause considerably over the following questions: What sort of tracks are left in a watery habitat? What sort of attention do we need to "track" a whale? Don't all people head for the river to throw their pursuers off the scent? Whale tracking slips below the surface of actualized tracks—particularly our own. Again, the significance of watery topography is highlighted in terms of our different capacities and effects as bodies.
Zimmer recounts the fate of Darwin's speculations about whales (144-145).
148 Briggs, 2007.
149 Of course, our "empathy" for our cetacean kin has been much emphasized in the western imaginary (think of the television series Flipper, the success of the movie Free Willy or the proliferation of "swim with the dolphins/whales" programs offered in seas around the world as both recreation and therapy). Unsurprisingly, this has aroused suspicions of what some see as a new-age fascination that romanticizes both cetacean species and our "connection" to them (while in many cases also doing them harm). Bryld and Lykke, in their book Cosmodolphins (2000) recount humankind's fascination with dolphins and the great unexplored "wilderness" of the deep sea. The authors recast these mythologies as a "postindustrial radical nostalgia" (23) that re-enacts the "return to Nature" of the Romantics but with a "twist," as it also becomes entwined with our post- Cold War fascination with the conquest of the other great uncharted territory, the Cosmos. Yet, despite the authors' ironic (verging on mocking) stance towards human reverence of dolphins and other cetaceans, I do not think we should dismiss this sense of connection to our cetacean kin as "mere" mythology or misplaced nostalgia. Perhaps instead we should consider more closely what it might be about our bodily imbrications that in part sustains these mythologies. This is not to say that a critical investigation of how cultural stories shape natural stories and vice-versa, and how these play out in material relations in our societies, is not valuable. Bryld and Lykke clearly demonstrate the value of such an exercise, and in the end configure the dolphin as a "jester capable of carnivalesque acts of blurring boundaries and mocking genderized and ethnicized hierarchies and oppositions" (225), not unlike Haraway's cyborg figure of the late 1980's. I am suggesting, however, that the power of these mythologies is surely connected to the evolution stories, material imbrications and bodily enfoldings that hold
452 both cetacean and human bodies in their current situatedness and relation to each other. One way of dealing with this material interconnectivity is to claim that we are all in fact recent creations generated by extraterrestrial dolphin-beings with various superpowers (as does Joan Ocean, discussed in Bryld and Lykke 160-161); another way is to see whether this interconnectivity can teach us something about our responsibility to other bodies of water, as I attempt to do here.
150 An encaphalization quotient (EQ) measures how big a mammal brain should be according to the weight of an average-brained mammal of a given weight and then factors in how far above or below this average a particular mammal's brain actually is (Zimmer 220). "At an EQ of 1 a mammal has all the brains it needs to live a standard mammal life. If its EQ is higher, extra nerve cells are available and they can usually be found bulking up the neocortex" (Zimmer 220). By no means is this an exact indicator of intelligence, but it is probably the sharpest tool science currently has at its disposal. While Homo Sapiens have an EQ of about 7, various dolphins come in at the low to mid "4" range. A killer whale's EQ is 2.57, while the nearest primate's EQ is the chimpanzee's, at 2.34 (Zimmer 221).
151 Morgan's theories are developed extensively in The Descent of Woman (1972) and The Aquatic Ape (1982). Recent support for her theories can be found in Verhaegen, Puech and Munro (2002) and other articles by Verhaegen. See also the collection of papers presented in 1999 at the "Symposium on Water and Human Evolution."
1 CT Only countries who are members of the IWC, however, are bound by the moratorium, and even member countries can apply for limited whaling rights according to certain criteria. It should also be noted that some traditional whaling cultures, such as the Lofoteners of coastal Norway, still use traditional whaling methods to engage in what is called a "sustainable hunt" (Glavin 2006).
153 Certainly, all whaling experiences could not be considered examples of becoming- whale! Ahab's experience was exceptional, although it is not uncommon for animal trackers and hunters develop deep affinities and what we would call here molecular interpermeations with the animals they track and hunt (see, for example, Houle [2007]). Such possibilities are however largely annihilated with most commercial hunting practices, or those that no longer require embodied engagement with animals (e.g. dynamite fishing or "guaranteed" hunts where prey are delivered to hunters who pay large sums of the money for the experience of the kill).
154Grosz (2005), 147. See Introduction.
453 While this holds true in this instance, I am not asserting that prosthetics are always an impediment. As Grosz notes, and as I cite above, prosthetics can also enhance our bodily capacities. As we are becoming accustomed to a new prosthetic, such as scuba gear, the experience can still be terrifying and wondrous, akin to the first time a child rides a bike without training wheels, or the first time a visually impaired person dons a pair of glasses: our bodies are doing something we never imagined they could do. Once these bodily habits are securely enfolded inside of our own bodies, the experience becomes qualitatively different, and in this particular case even limiting or diminished. In other words, we can certainly experience wonder with the aid of prosthetics, but once the prosthetically enhanced experience becomes habit, the wonder begins to dissipate. Sometimes, as in Philippe's case, the removal of the prosthetic can restore a sense of wonder, terror, and awe.
156 My primary debt here is to Zimmer's description of a human body's likely fate, too long in the depths of the water, or too speedily returned to its surface (Zimmer, 3).
157 Another interesting description of diving to depths "at the borders of the liveable" can be found in world-champion free diver F. Pipin Ferreras' descriptions of his experiences when he dives to depths up to 127 metres—depths, which according to "modern science," should leave a non-prosthetized body completely broken. Ferarras writes, I also remember the 40-year-old "scientific" theory which held that at 100 meters deep, man would break and die, a theory that was ratified by the great French doctor Bagarrou. And then I smile. I should have broken hundreds of times. If no one dared question science's theories, perhaps the wheel would not exist. This is why I believe it's only fair for me to dare to break the limits, as I am doing now, because I have a right to discover how deep a human being can go. Of note is also Ferraras's descriptions of how inviting uncommon interpermeation between his body and the body of the ocean further help him sustain life at the borders of the liveable: At 105 meters down, I again check my compensation, blowing as hard as I possibly can to further equalize. But nothing happens. The difference of 5 meters has squeezed the remaining air to the point that it is virtually nonexistent. I decide to call upon one of my greatest discoveries, one that allowed me to pass what was once a barrier. I take off my nose plug and let water flood my nasal passages. This forces the remaining tightly compressed air from the sinuses to the internal ears, obligating equalization. From this moment on, I will not have to make another attempt to equalize because it will be automatic. Compensation in the
454 open, flooded cavities leading from my nose to my ears will be gradual as I descend."
Ferraras's descriptions also resonate with our descriptions of the gestational oceanic body of water as an abyss, whose depths are unknowable, but which can nonetheless be contacted, if only ephemerally, by our molecular bodies:
I am on the surface of the ocean. Under me lies the great abyss: an area tinted by an absolute, impressive, monochromatic blue, a blue toward which I feel the greatest respect, which I love and without which I could not survive. This is the realm of the great Yemaya Olokun, my religious mother, who has protected me for so many years and to whom I owe my life. Under me lies the unknown, that which only I have experienced with her. Endless depth, through which I will embark on a new and challenging adventure, under the stress of great pressures and dizzying currents. [...] I don't see the vast ocean as friend or foe; it is neither good nor evil, neither prose nor poetry. The sea is as it is: matter. [...] I see myself penetrating the ocean, representing humanity in a primitive profile of the antique marine mammal from which we came.
158 See Grand Manan Whale and Seabird Research Station, "North Atlantic Right Whale Adoption Program." Interestingly, Stacy Alaimo (1994) makes reference to these callosities for very different purposes. In her discussion of the Whale Adoption Project (Alaimo does not specify where, or which one), Alaimo notes that a fundraising letter she received stresses the way that the whales "up for adoption" have been identified, named and tracked (although she does not make this clear, callosities or other epidermal patterns are the principal means of doing this). Alaimo argues that "constructing the whales as individuals with personalities fosters empathy and blocks their appropriation into discourses of victimization," but that the historical context of individualism, which has depended on "the contrasting ground of the Other," does not bode well for animals that are less individualizable than the whales (141). While Alaimo is certainly right to be suspicious about the historical context of humanistic individualism, I think we are only exacerbating this paradigm by thinking that only humans can be individualized and differentiated. The callosities are part of the whales' differentiation, part of their "whale- ness" and provide one opening for us to negotiate their difference from us (which is not the same as claiming that the whales themselves use the callosities to identify each other as individuals, which indeed would be an absurd projection and anthropomorphization). Other animals announce their difference in different ways: spiders in their spideriness, moles in their moleness. Wolf-ness, for example, as Deleuze and Guattari teach us, is all about the pack, rather than the individual (1987).
455 Notes to chapter five
Elspeth Probyn (2004) provides a very helpful paraphrase of Deleuze to explain the relation of ethology to bodies: "Simply put, ethology defines bodies, animals or humans by the affects they are capable of. [...] Concomitant with the figure of the rhizome, and conjoined with the injunction that we cannot know beforehand what a body is capable of, the point [of ethology] is to focus on the specificities of bodies in each given encounter, arrangement, or combination" (218).
160 Prominent Deleuze scholar Eric Alliez in fact devotes considerable attention to the "onto-ethological" aspect of Deleuze's work and the establishment of the plane of immanence therein (53-84, in particular 69, 76-77).
161 As Irigaray notes in the Preface to Sexes and Genealogies, "[t]he essential issue, however, is always whether it is possible to advance an ethics governing the relations between the sexes" (1993c: v). Moreover, as she remarks in the introductory essay to An Ethics of Sexual Difference, "Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our 'salvation' if we thought it through" (1993a: 5). And, she indeed acknowledges that a "revolution in thought and ethics" would require the reinterpretation "concerning the relations between the subject and discourse, the subject and the world, the subject and the cosmic, the microcosmic and the macrocosmic" (6), but that such reinterpretation is dependent first and foremost on rethinking sexual difference.
For example, see Schwab's essay, "Sexual Difference as Model: An Ethics for the Global Future" (1998), where she argues that Irigaray's I Love To You "can be read as a follow-up to Ethique and as a founding text for the construction of an ethics of difference modeled on sexual difference, an ethics for the future of humanity in all of its diversity" (76). Schwab takes up this argument particularly in the context of global capitalism and commodity exchange. Nonetheless, Schwab still uses sexual difference as "model" for other human relations. Extending this model into human and other-human-relations is far less explored, although this is gestured towards in some feminist theory. For example, Grosz (2004, 2005) suggests that Irigaray's theory of sexual difference finds important resonance in Darwin's theories of evolution, and thus can help us understand the becoming of life more generally; Stone (2003) lays out what she calls Irigaray's "philosophy of nature" and suggests that Irigaray posits a particular set of relations "within" nature that parallels sexual difference, hence linking an ethics of sexual difference to an environmental ethics; Glazebrook (2002), in her discussion of Karen Warren's ecofeminism intimates that there is a longstanding connection between French feminist thought, including Irigaray's, and ecofeminism, but does not elaborate how Irigaray's thought might itself be considered relevant to ecocritical practices (if, in fact, it
456 can be). At the same time, I would suggest the paucity of broader application of Irigaray's ethics beyond a focus on sexual difference is less because her work is irrelevant or incompatible with broader explorations of ethics, but rather because most close readers of Irigaray are precisely interested in the importance of sexual difference, and hence the trajectory of commentary and application of her work follows this lead. Additionally, it should be noted that even claiming that Irigaray's ethics has "relevance beyond sexual difference" is tricky, as Irigaray claims that all being is grounded in sexual difference—hence there is no "beyond" to sexual difference. My own search for the broader applicability of her ethics, however, is not intended to posit a "beyond" to the exclusion of sexual difference, but rather hopes to tell the story of the ethics of sexual difference in a different voice. This voice does not deny sexual difference as a key relation, but rather asks what we might learn by recasting our ethological ethics according to our bodies of water. (See chapter two for my arguments regarding how we might rethink Irigaray's insistence on sexual difference as ontological by reconsidering sexual difference through Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze's ethologies, and most significantly, through our bodies of water).
As Bogue (2007) notes, Deleuze "does not develop a formal ethics as a discrete component of his philosophy" (3). Reynolds (2007) similarly acknowledges that "Deleuze proffers no prescriptive or rule-based account of ethics" (152). Even where Deleuze explicitly uses the term "ethics," (e.g. in The Logic of Sense where he outlines the concept of the Event [1990: 149-153], or in his discussion of Nietzsche's eternal return as "ethical thought" [2002: 68]), one notes that such discussions are not laid out explicitly as an "ethical platform," i.e. a prescription of how to live. At the same time, as many of Deleuze's commentators have noted, such "lessons" are indeed implicit throughout his oeuvre. As Bogue also comments, "there is a sense in which the ethical permeates all his work" (3). See notes 165 and 169 below for further comment on Deleuze's ethics, commentaries thereon, and applications thereof. Merleau-Ponty scholars similarly note that Merleau-Ponty offers no program of ethics as such, yet an ethics can certainly be extracted from his embodied ontology. Clarke (2002) for example notes that while "Merleau-Ponty did not author an ethic," it is possible to distil one from his ontological descriptions (211). See note 164 below for further comment on how Merleau-Ponty's philosophy has been used to develop and articulate various ethics.
Merleau-Ponty's ontology is being called on increasingly to suggest an ethics of intersubjectivity, intercorporeality or as an ethical relation to the other/alterity. Early articulations of this argument include prominent Merleau-Ponty scholar David Michael Levin's claim (against Claude Lefort's critique [1990] of Merleau-Ponty as unable to account for the radical otherness of the other) that "Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of
457 the flesh helps us to appreciate the otherness of the other in all its dialectical subtlety and ambiguity, and that his articulation of the intertwinings, transpositions, and reversibilities taking place in the dimension of our intercorporeality brings to light the body's deeply felt sense of justice" (Levin 1990: 35). In a subsequent reading of Merleau-Ponty alongside Levinas, Levin provides a powerful argument for the way in which the traces of alterity, inscribed in our flesh, "encourage an affective and conative disposition crucial to ethical life" (Levin 1998: 390). Seamus Carey has made a similar argument for the way in which Merleau-Ponty's ontology "opens the door to understanding our capacities of the body as ethical tasks," and invites an understanding of intersubjectivity that can open us to an ethical relation with others (2000: 34). More recent explorations of an embodied ethics include Al-Saji's (2006) discussion of Merleau-Ponty's treatment of vision as an ethical relation and Mazis's (2006) argument for a reading of hospitality in Merleau-Ponty's many allusions to the face. Mazis provides a surprising yet convincing argument for the way in which Merleau-Ponty can offer a paradigm of ethically responsive embodiment, which Mazis calls a "physiognomic ethics." A Merleau-Pontian ethics has moreover been taken up in specifically feminist and environmental considerations of his work. Many feminist thinkers add specificity to the notion of a corporeal, inter subjective or embodied ethics. Such commentators who have drawn on Merleau-Ponty's thought to develop an ethics include Sonia Kruks (2006), who describes how a Merleau-Pontian understanding of embodiment as a potential ground of shared affectivity can form the basis of a feminist ethics (and politics). Judith Butler (2006) argues that despite Irigaray's criticisms of him (discussed in Chapter 2 of this dissertation), Merleau-Ponty's elaboration of the relation of intertwining exchange nonetheless provides an insightful answer to the ethical question of "how to treat the Other well when the Other is never fully other" (2006: 116). Jorella Andrews (2006) discusses the way in which perception for Merleau-Ponty is "ethically productive" (168) and how perception grounds what Andrews contends is a very powerful Merleau-Pontian ethics of intersubjectivity. This ethics, explains Andrews, can only occur between subjects who understand their profound connectedness across their respective differences (177). Feminist philosopher Helen A. Fielding has drawn on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology to suggest the body's potential for the articulation of a bioethics (Fielding 1998, 2001), and has also more generally discussed the possibility of a corporeal ethics, or for "creating new ways of relating" (2006: 88) through the embodied philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (Fielding 2000, 2006). Environmental philosophy has also drawn on Merleau-Ponty's ontology as a source for rethinking our relation to the earth. Deep ecologist Monika Langer (1990) argues that Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the intercorporeal intertwining offers a powerful resource for the development of an environmental ethics, and more recently, Melissa Clarke (2002) has made a similar argument. Eco-phenomenologists, including Abram (1996, 2006) and Toadvine (2006) also draw on the work of Merleau-Ponty to explore the ethical possibilities that open
458 from an ontological understanding of our bodily intertwining with the "natural" world. Glen Mazis (2002) also draws explicitly on the work of Merleau-Ponty to develop an ecological ethical paradigm which he calls "earthbody ethics."
165 Most recently, Ronald Bogue's Deleuze 's Way (2007) suggests that the best way to understand Deleuze's ethics is through the notion of "transversality." While "ethics" may not be a discrete concern for Deleuze (see note 163), Bogue argues that an understanding of Deleuze's "ethics" can be best understood by zigzagging across and between his commentaries on art, education, music, literature, politics and other practices (Bogue, "Introduction"). Here, Bogue locates Deleuze's "transverse practice of an immanent ethics of creation that opens new possibilities for life" (5). In an older but particularly influential book-length study, Keith Ansell Pearson notes that "the notion of ethics has to be seen not as an incidental element of Deleuze's project, but as one of its most fundamental and essential elements." For Ansell Pearson (1999), despite the various guises in which this ethics appears in Deleuze's work (i.e. the ethics of the eternal return, an ethics of affective bodies, an ethological ethics) they are all connected within an ethics of what Ansell Pearson calls an ethics of the plane of immanence or an ethics of germinal life (11). Shorter studies of Deleuze's ethics include Boundas (2006), who explicates the ethics of the event in Deleuze, and Sparks (2005), whose succinct and insightful contribution to the Deleuze Dictionary explicates the relation between Deleuze's ethics and the thought of Nietzsche and Spinoza. Smith (2007) discusses the connection between Deleuze's immanent ethics and desire, while Reynolds (2007) links this immanent ethics to Aionic time. Moreover, although Deleuze has been criticized by many feminist thinkers precisely for what is perceived as a lack of attention to the ethics of historically situated bodies, Deleuze's ethics has nonetheless been particularly influential in the development of Rosi Braidotti's feminist, neomaterialist articulations of ethics which she alternately nuances as nomadic ethics, the ethics of becoming-imperceptible, affirmative ethics and an ethics of sustainability (2005, 2006a, 2006b). The possibility of an environmental ethics emerging from Deleuze's work has been explored in a recent edition of the on-line journal Rhizomes "Deleuze and Guattari's Ecophilosophy" (ed. D. Chisholm, 2007) and the work of Mark Halsley, most recently in his book Deleuze and Environmental Damage: Violence of the Text (2006), which advocates a new way of "thinking-acting" in relation to the environment which engages the environment as a series of becomings, and eschews the categorical and representational language of most environmental policy.
166 As deep ecologist Neil Evernden reminds us, "restraint from certain behaviour is also a significant form of action" (xii).
459 For example, Irigaray's notion of sexual difference as always yet-to-come, as I discussed in chapter two, affirms the notion of a virtual dimension to the ethics of sexual difference which means its futurity will always remain an open question. In Merleau- Ponty this virtuality expresses itself it two ways: the first way is in the latency of the flesh that we materially embody (see chapter two for a discussion of this); the second is in the inherent indeterminacy of intercorporeal relations that Merleau-Ponty consistently emphasizes. This indeterminacy keeps us open to an unknown future. Andrews (2006) provides a strong argument for the way in which Merleau-Ponty's ethics do not rely on a categorical imperative. She notes Merleau-Ponty's own claims in "Metaphysics and the Novel" that "true morality does not consist in following exterior rules or in respecting objective values: there are no ways to be just or to be saved" (quoted in Andrews, 177). Andrews does not argue that all already existent moral laws "must be jettisoned," but rather that they must not be applied automatically or indiscriminately, for intersubjectivity is always indeterminate, and its meaning must be allowed to reveal itself. Her argument here has strong resonances with my own proposal of an ethics of interbeing, even if she does not extend Merleau-Ponty's ethics beyond human intersubjective relations. Levin (1998) also clearly states that our embodiment, which carries traces of the other therein, is no guarantee of an ethics, "unless ... we make something" of these traces. The traces that hold an ethical potentiality to be gleaned from the chiasmic relation are "pre-personal" and constitute "prior to the recognition of a moral law, a certain moral disposition or attunement" (1998: 390).
168 Smith (2007) phrases the "question" of ethics in Deleuze in a strikingly similar, if less succinct way: "The fundamental question of ethics is not 'What must I do?' (which is the question of morality) but rather 'What can I do? What am I capable of doing?' (which is the proper question of an ethics without morality)" (67).
169This point deserves some peripheral analysis, as the notion of an ethics that is both "prepersonal" and relevant to how we, as humans, might "learn how to live," may not be altogether convincing. Indeed, some commentaries that focus on exegetical readings of Deleuze's ethics (e.g. Boundas, Sparks) might leave one wondering how this "immanent" ethics without a morality could ever be lived or cultivated by us, other than accidentally. If, for Deleuze, ethics is "willing the event" in order to "release its eternal truth" (1990: 149), the meaning of the material effects (on humans and other beings) of such a release might seem secondary. As Boundas notes, this ethics concerns only pre-personal and pre- subjective intensities, eschewing "subjectivity, transcendental fields and personological coordinates" (15). This general notion of an ethics of the event that is both before us and beyond us also explains why, as Reynolds notes, "it is difficult to pinpoint positively what [Deleuze's] ethics might involve" at a practical level of action (154).
460 My own proposal of an ethics of interbeing, however, sides with Reynolds in affirming that this "virtual ethics" cannot be irrelevant to lived bodies and experiences because, as I have argued in this dissertation, the virtual is not independent of matter, but rather folded therein. Here I agree with Reynolds that Deleuze's oeuvre as a whole would in fact go against the notion of an ethics "independent of all matter" (Deleuze quoted in Reynolds, 156), despite Deleuze's claim that this is so. But while Reynolds concludes that this results in competing tendencies in Deleuze's work, whereby "using this ethics to discriminate between different modes of existence" becomes "exceedingly difficult," I prefer to side here with thinkers such as Braidotti (2002, 2006a), Bogue (2007) and Smith (2007) who imply that even without categorical imperatives, Deleuze's ethics can teach us something about a style of living. Ethics here does not concern the actions we must necessarily engage in, but rather the modes of existence we should cultivate in order to open ourselves to the potentiality of the virtual.
170 In the cases of all of the commentators I have referred to in these paragraphs and their notes, the "we" does indeed appear.
171 While Heidegger's arguments in "The Question Concerning Technology" (1977) would certainly find valid application in my examination of new hydrological technologies, I do not think that such an analysis by me, at this point, would reveal much that is new. After all, Heidegger himself aptly demonstrates how and why a windmill is a revealing, but a hydroelectric dam is a "challenging" that regulates and secures "nature" as standing reserve. Indeed, there are interesting resonances and discords between the onto-logic of amniotics I am proposing here and Heidegger's exposition of techne as a fourfold causality of indebtedness. A deeper examination of how amniotics both supports and challenges Heidegger's claims, however, will be the subject of another study. See also Bigwood's chapter "The Being of Water in the Hydroelectric Dam" in Earth Muse (1993), that draws on Heidegger to examine our relation to technologized bodies of water. While I agree with Bigwood's examples of modern technology as being secured and controlled in being-for-another, I disagree with Bigwood's general sentiment that all modern technology necessarily does this. Like Heidegger, Bigwood holds on too tightly to the sentiment that there is a "natural" expression of geophysical bodies-of-water, that does not sufficiently account for the "turtles upon turtles of naturecultural interactions," as Haraway would say, that constantly participate in the becomings of these watery bodies.
172 Mongabay.com (2007a).
173 DeVilliers (2003:149).
461 XJlennon (2002: 71-77).
1/5 DeVilliers (2003:113-114).
176 Petersen (2006, 2007).
177 DeVilliers (2003:119).
Hamilton was the first Canadian city to privatize its municipal water supply (Carty 2003). Due to public outcry, Hamilton City Council reversed its water privatization scheme in 2004 (Moist 2006).
179 Protevi's article "Katrina" of course provides a far richer, more complex and beautiful account of this convergence out of multiplicity than I am able to convey in this mere precis of his general argument.
While likely unintentional, I noted with interest Tuana's feminist morphing of Protevi's reference to the Deleuzian event into "events" in the plural. There is always more than one way to tell a story!
In many ways, Tuana accomplishes here on a more focused scale one of my objectives in this dissertation: to understand bodies as connected to other bodies through various differenc/tiated relations. Unlike other material-semiotic accounts of "things" that argue for their agency yet largely overlook the way in which this agency not only acts upon other bodies, but through them as well (see my discussion of Latour, Brown and Barad in the Introduction), Tuana's discussion of "plastic flesh"(198-203) acknowledges the molecular interpermeation of bodies in a direct material manner. But even still, Tuana's analysis remains tied to a logic of contamination. One way in which I distinguish my own project is in its move to explore the whole complex onto-logic of amniotics, and its ethology, more deeply. While Tuana certainly acknowledges that interpermeation is more complex than an unmitigated or undifferentiated fluidity, my own exploration of bodies of water asks more penetrating questions about the difference of these relations, their meaning, and what they are capable of creating. The importance of gestation, for example, cannot be accommodated in an interactionist understanding of molecular contamination.
182 While for some the term "technics" may seem like an effacement of the biological, it is important to consider technics as related to "techne," or crafting, and not simply aligned with the contemporary common usage of technology as synthetic and manufactured manipulations.
462 While the division of life into these six kingdoms seems to be the most prevalent contemporary view in biology, some divisions maintain a three-, four- or five-kingdom division, while others insist upon twenty or more sub-groups. As we have already discussed at various places throughout this dissertation, there is always more than one way of categorizing something. I thus do not claim that my option to go with the "six- kingdom" division is more correct than other divisions. It simply allows me to refer to Kelly's theory of the "seventh kingdom" in a sensical way.
184 Kelly's theories of technology can be found on his website (http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/index.php). where draft writings for his book-in- progress The Technium are posted. See also an interview with Kelly with the online publication Edge: The Third Culture at http://www.edge.org/3rd culture/kelly07/kellv07 index.html.
185 As Bijker notes, while the US uses a 1:100 risk criterion in designing levees and other coastal defence structures, in the Netherlands the risk criterion is 1:10,000. Bijker surmises that "dikes and levees may incorporate different styles of coastal engineering and different value systems. I would even propose that they incorporate different technological cultures in the way they handle vulnerability, risk and uncertainty" (121)— which contributes to Bijker's (and Protevi's) thesis that such technologies are indeed "thick with politics."
186 See Shiva (2002: 27-28), Garcia (2007) and the detailed documentation on the New Mexico Acequia Association website for a description of these acequia systems, the threats they are currently facing, and the political organization and community-building that is taking place around them.
187 New Mexico Acequia Association, "Acequias Take Action on Water Issues."
1 RR Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 139-140 and the fifth plateau more generally) discuss how semiotics should always in fact be understood as pragmatics, where there is no such thing as meaning in the form of an invariant immune from transformation. Meaning is rather derived from the generation of assemblages that constantly territorialize and de- territorialize their parts in relation to each other. 189 Note that "water rights" are property rights, and are distinct from the "human right to water," discussed below.
463 Two possible exceptions are the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which includes access to clean drinking water as a necessary provision for the highest attainable standard of health (Article 24[2][c]) and the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which proclaims rural women's right to adequate living conditions, including in relation to electricity and water supply (Article 14[2][h]). However, in neither case is the right to water approached comprehensively.
191 Gleick (1998) addresses the question of potential transnational conflict arising from the inability of a state to meet its basic water needs and thus calling on a neighbouring state to guarantee their neighbour this right. To respond to this dilemma, Gleick points to the UN 1997 Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational uses of International Watercourses, which states that "neighboring States do not have the right to deny a co- riparian sufficient water to meet those needs on the grounds that the upstream nation needs the water for economic development" (Gleick 1998: 500). Gleick hence concludes that "a country is thus not permitted to exploit a shared water resource in a manner that deprives individuals in a neighboring country of access to their basic human needs" (500). However, while the 1997 Convention deals with upstream water uses for the purposes of economic development, it does not address questions of non-riparian neighbours meeting their own basic needs. In other words, would a country like Canada be obliged to provide frozen Arctic freshwater to the US if the latter could not meet its basic needs? And in the unlikely event that Canada could not meet its own needs, how would this dilemma be resolved? Gleick conveniently sidesteps these difficult questions. Moreover, he adds that "in practice, this kind of conflict is unlikely to arise" because almost all nations have sufficient water to meet their basic needs (500). However, just ten years after the publication of this article, such a statement seems increasingly dubious, particularly in water-strapped regions such as the Middle East. Young (2006: 65) similarly dismisses the likelihood of such disputes, which is particularly puzzling, given the inventory of transborder water conflicts Young's hefty report later lays out (see Water: A Shared Responsibility, Chapter 11). Again, even if the current situation is such that no country lacks water to meet its basic needs, the terrestrial network of bodies of water holds out no guarantee for such a future.
192 I borrow this evocative metaphor of the knot (individuals) and the net (community or society) from Panikkar's (1982) critique of the notion of individualism in human rights.
Charlesworth, Chinkin and Wright (1991) provide an astute overview of the ways in which the principle of non-discrimination has never guaranteed women's equality in the context of the law, which in many ways echo the ways in which so-called Third World concerns are marginalized and undermined in this masculinist legal structure and paradigm.
464 See the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Article 10. Together, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights comprise a triumvirate of documents known collectively as the International Bill of Rights.
195 It should be noted that some major international human rights documents do acknowledge the diversity of people and their situatedness. For example, the United Nations Declaration on the Right to Development acknowledges the difference in responsibilities inaugurated by a so-called first and third world, or developed and developing nation split. However, this exception is again more revealing of the flaws of a human rights equality paradigm within a world of lived experience that is embodied and situated, than it is of the strengths or logic of this paradigm.
196 John Locke, whose writings are widely considered to be among the most important precursors of contemporary articulations of human rights, explicitly argued that ownership of property is a natural right. Note how this has carried over into our current preeminent human rights instruments, i.e. Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: "(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others; (2) no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property." Even the UN Declaration on the Right to Development, which is widely understood to be an achievement of the so-called "developing nations" in the face of Western individualist imperialism, nonetheless still upholds the "right of peoples to exercise ... full and complete sovereignty over their natural wealth and resources." Although the individual right is replaced by the right of a people, the claim is still for sovereign property rights, regardless of another people's needs or rights.
1971 am grateful to Alyce Miller for drawing my attention to Douglas's dissenting opinion in a discussion following her conference paper presentation "Voice, Injury and Third Party Standing: Speaking to and for Animals in the Law" (2007).
198 Notable examples of such failures include Bechtel's ousting in Cochabamba (Shiva 2002: 102-103) and the privatization and subsequent de-privatization of water services in 1995-1996 and 2004 in Hamilton, Ontario (Carty 2003; Moist 2006).
199 For more information see www.blueplanetproiect.net
200 Under Maude Barlow's leadership, for example, the Council of Canadians has expressed explicit support for the campaign for a UN treaty recognizing water as a
465 fundamental human right (Barlow 2005). Similarly, the Council's Blue Planet Project has developed the Treaty Initiative To Share and Protect the Global Water Commons, which was supported by over 100 NGOs and social movements at the December 2001 "Our World is Not For Sale" meeting in Brussels and which recognizes the global fresh water supply as a "fundamental human right" (Blue Planet Project 2001).
2011 say "mostly clear" as certain inconsistencies still work themselves into the call for a global water commons. For example, the Blue Planet Project's Treaty Initiative to Share and Protect the Global Water Commons still locates the responsibility for protecting the water commons with national governments, yet a water commons governed and managed at the national level is unlikely to sidestep many of the jurisprudential problems outlined in my problematization of the human right to water as an appropriate strategy. Moreover, the guarantee of state sovereignty upheld in the wording of the Treaty Initiative may not only take decision-making power away from local communities of users, but may also open the door to "public-private partnerships," despite the Treaty Initiative's explicit rejection of the commodification, sale and for-profit trading in water.
202 This forgetting is also echoed in our common references to the "landbase" needed to sustain human populations, or even in Aldo Leopold's inspiring, if not also somewhat hydro-phobic (or at least "terrestrialist"), "land ethic" as described in his influential A Sand County Almanac (1966: 217-240).
203 This sentiment resonates with the tenets of deep ecology, and particularly with Evernden's claim that "we are not in an environmental crisis, but are the environmental crisis," as a means of underlining the human/nature split as a false one (1985: 134). See my comments on the relation of this dissertation to deep ecology, and Evernden in particular, in the Introduction.
204 Evernden notes that these have been two of the most common approaches to the "environmental crisis" (the third being a defence of pastoralism) (1985: 4). But, as Evernden also makes clear, these approaches may be inappropriate because they still posit "the environment" as something outside of and disconnected from us, the problem- solvers.
Notes to the Conclusion
205 A full description of this project and its results so far can be found on the website for the Census of Marine Life at
466 The italicized lines of text in "Closures, Openings" together constitute the full text of the Margaret Atwood poem, "Pre-Amphibian" (1990). Intrusions of my own text within Atwood's lines come at the stanza breaks of her poem.
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