Seawater

Abstract This essay probes the methodological contours of an (eco)critical practice centered on seawater as an analytical category. It queries how a focus on seawater as substance implicates the human and the geophysical in a bilateral process of mutual alteration and eventual amalgamation. I propose a “trans-material” ontology articulated around the corrosive power of seawater, through which organic and inorganic matters (in this argument, the disintegrating, submerged bodies of shipwrecked migrants in the Mediterranean and their ecologically ravaged, more-than-human deep-sea environment) commingle. Reading the process of human dissolution under the influence of seawater alongside the alteration of the marine environment that it causes reveals the reciprocal agency of material bodies, be they biotic or non-biotic. Rescripting matter, all matter, in agential terms productively erodes Anthropocentric models at the root of theories of the Anthropocene. By emphasizing human/more-than-human assemblages, the seawater epistemology that I propose delineates an immanent, multi-scalar form of being-in-the world—an ontology of dissolution premised on loss and decomposition that reveals other definitions of the human beyond the dictum of exceptionalism and the destructive acts that are perpetrated in its name.