Techniques & Culture Revue semestrielle d’anthropologie des techniques Suppléments au n°75 Does anything dive? Diving beyond the metaphor Tout peut-il plonger ? Plonger au-delà de la métaphore Damien A. Bright and Roy Kimmey Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/tc/15034 ISSN: 1952-420X Publisher Éditions de l’EHESS Electronic reference Damien A. Bright and Roy Kimmey, “Does anything dive? Diving beyond the metaphor”, Techniques & Culture [Online], Suppléments au n°75, Online since 08 June 2021, connection on 17 June 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/tc/15034 This text was automatically generated on 17 June 2021. Tous droits réservés Does anything dive? Diving beyond the metaphor 1 Does anything dive? Diving beyond the metaphor Tout peut-il plonger ? Plonger au-delà de la métaphore Damien A. Bright and Roy Kimmey For their constructive editorial guidance and engagement, we thank Stéphane Rennesson and Annabel Vallard. We greatly benefited from the contributions of two anonymous reviewers, as well as provocations from Helen Abbott, Diégo Antolinos-Basso, Cameron Hu, Max Holleran, William Mazzarella, Sue Reid, Marianna Szczygielska, and Tara Zahra. Gone are the days when we looked like phenomena, supermen. Now commonplace, diving is accessible to all. So many amateurs have taken it up, so many professionals, that we can say it is less dangerous, far less dangerous than we thought. As long as you know the laws and, of course, follow them. Frédéric Dumas, Angoisses dans la mer (1978) The short film Ten Fathoms Deep (1952) goes like this: a German U-boat spots a freighter, dives, launches a torpedo, and scores a direct hit. The SS Radames becomes a wreck. Fade to black. In full sun, a slight man swaps words with two others. His face drips mirth and his hair shines wet. Here is Jacques-Yves Cousteau, with Philippe Tailliez and Frédéric Dumas. At dock, they unload two torso-sized frames that bear three gas tanks topped with gauges, hoses, and straps. They load a camera into a metal case on a wooden arm and fill it with gas. Two don goggles, flippers, shoulder the gas contraptions, and jump into the water. One disappears behind the camera to film the other, who glides among barnacles, algae, and schools of fish, then through a sunken ship by way of openings both intended and fortuitous. The diver sifts the wreckage and retrieves an ewer with Grecian lines. Throughout, bubbles stream from his head, enveloping neck and shoulders. Diver, camera, and water move in unison; the dock is a world away. Techniques & Culture , Suppléments au n°75 Does anything dive? Diving beyond the metaphor 2 1 In eight and a half minutes, Ten Fathoms Deep introduces a new diving technics, the Aqualung, as a heroic journey of transformation. The activity seems puzzling: a willing departure from the terrestrial condition, the body given over to technics as a disorienting milieu inundates the senses. And yet, the dive leads to a recognizable achievement: the resurfacing of something brimming with value to a community above. This picture of diving predates the Aqualung, remains familiar, and carries over into metaphorical use. A person dives into something mysterious in order to fathom its depths, the better to resurface intact and bearing new insights. This metaphor circulates in everyday speech and learned inquiry as a vibrant confrontation with a text, an archive, a field site, or the living world—as in the French expression “plonger dans le vif du sujet” (to dive into the heart of the matter). To dive is to extend the human reach beyond its present domain of knowledge and action. 2 As two landbound social scientists, we are struck by the power and pervasiveness of diving as metaphor. We wonder how much it gets at the dive’s practical exigencies: psychic attunement, the toll on the body, and effects on social life and the deep itself. Through two cases, we show how diving technics are foundational to the project of industrial modernity in its drive to recruit and manage the collective imagination, human physiology, and the earth’s forces. What makes underwater diving possible? What are its uses? How do changes in diving technics interrupt or sustain its promise of recovery and discovery? What does the development of such technics tell us about the way industrial modernity knows and acts upon a finite world? 3 We track correspondences between mass media, industrial design, human biology, physical force, and histories of violent world-making (Taussig 1993). First, we examine Cousteau’s “invention” of underwater cinema, breathing, and recreation. We query the heralding of the Aqualung in the postwar Euro-American living room (Section I) then turn to its technics (Section II) to understand the world historical proposition it contained: the domestication of the ocean floor by a new kind of human, homo aquaticus (Section III). Second, we describe helmet diving, whose tethered relationship with the surface the Aqualung was designed to sever. Helmet diving dramatizes the inescapable problem of pressure in the dive (Section IV). By situating helmet diving in Australia’s pearling industry at the turn of the 20th century, we show how pressure—atmospheric, economic, and racial—governs life, death, and profit at the colonial frontier (Section V). We juxtapose these two cases to discern the tethers that connect helmet diving to the Aqualung, divers to the surface, and fantasies of free movement to pressures that span water and land. 4 Diving as metaphor tells us why we should dive but little of its repercussions or limits. We contend that diving in its industrialized form offers freedom of movement for some but always works through tethers, pressures, and confinement for all. We must feel these forces to reckon with the way diving technics saturates our present and presages a future in which social life strains at ever greater depths (Masco 2021). Rather than demystify the dive or the deep, we seek to extend the descriptive repertoire with which to think and feel the pull of this “beyond” on social life (Bryld & Lykke 1999). Diving enters the living room From the wreck of the Second World War, the Aqualung led a double life, at sea and in picture. Wartime newsreels of Navy “frogmen” provided a prototype for Cousteau’s Techniques & Culture , Suppléments au n°75 Does anything dive? Diving beyond the metaphor 3 experimental films and a culture industry in need of new adventure. One film—edited and repackaged as Épaves (1943), Danger Under the Sea (1951), and Ten Fathoms Deep (1952)—shows how the Aqualung travelled from the cinema of occupied and liberated Paris to the living room of 1950s America. 5 Ten Fathoms Deep was a montage. Castle Films, a leader in the 8mm and 16mm US home movie market, advertised this “thrilling adventure movie of daring men, equipped with the Aqua-lung” as an “ideal” Christmas gift in 1952 alongside family titles such as Alice in Wonderland. Its U-Boat shots are from newsreels, long the company’s stock-in-trade. The rest is an edit of Épaves, Cousteau’s 35mm short feature screened as a silent film in 1943 and rereleased with voiceover and full score in 1945. Universal-International, Castle Films’ parent company, acquired US distribution rights for Épaves in 1951 and promptly released it as Danger Under the Sea, earning an Oscar nomination. 6 In one sense, these three titles are the same film, altered in translation and editing (figs. 1a & 1b). They record the first open water tests of the Aqualung as exploratory vehicle and cinematic subject. In other senses—narratively, historically, and in format —they differ markedly. Épaves makes no mention of war within the frame because it is the unspoken backdrop to this passion project of equal part art, science, engineering, and reconnaissance. The film is a lyrical attempt to escape the occupation under which it came to life. Thus the narrative mirrors its creation: the team hoarded filmstock despite rationing in Marseilles and Toulon, and Cousteau carried papers from the Museum of Natural History in Paris presenting him as a marine biologist mad about sponges (Leaney 1997, Dugan 2004 [1948]). Figure 1a. 1945 poster for Épaves The poster has Dumas descending with the fish, arms spread winglike, before a sunken ship’s wheel. This pose became the logo for La Spirotechnique. © LAPI / Roger-Viollet, 1945 Techniques & Culture , Suppléments au n°75 Does anything dive? Diving beyond the metaphor 4 Figure 1b. 1952 package of 8mm home movie Ten Fathoms Deep The 8mm package is a picture-in-picture portrayal of the nuclear family delighting at the drama of cinema, in which the diver is but one player. © D. Bright 7 By contrast, Ten Fathoms Deep unfolds with dramatic efficiency. War is a plot device for launching the divers and their contraption on an adventure of recovery. Thus, the home movie and its industry draw out a claim that the cinematic feature Épaves can only imagine: there is a world beyond war, salvageable like treasure, as much for the diver as the viewer at home. The familiar grip of the newsreel gives way to recreation. Released, men with a movie camera restore a promise of worldly wonder. This does not just happen out there, on some faraway coastline, but also in the conjuring act of the home become underwater cinema. The film reel shifts from a technics of national mobilization to one of mass recuperation. 8 Formerly, recreation indexed curative practices undertaken by an ailing individual, the spiritually or physically overwrought. Now, it occurs in the living room. What Ten Fathoms Deep shows us is that technics of domestic viewing do more than summon an aquarium at the flick of a switch.