Category Archives: Week 4: Prefatory Framing–Mentz and Delblanco

“Deterritorializing Preface” Perspective – A Whirlwind

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I have to confess that some of the suggestions that Mentz put forth in his preface made me feel uneasy and uncomfortable to think about. The changes, as he describes in his fourth word “ship,” go so far beyond just a material shift in thinking. What he’s suggesting is a complete turning point for all ways of life, intellectual perspectives, political formats, etc. Going to his sixth word, “distortion,” I could not wrap my brain around why I felt so uneasy with some of these changes. Then, it hit me.

I remembered a point that we made in class last Thursday about how we, as human beings, were not supposed to be in the ocean in the ways that we commonly are. We’re fundamentally land-based, so far as including land as one of our highest central issues in our language, political systems, and ways of thinking. The reason that Mentz’s encouragement to adapt to the “visual distortion” of “any aqueous [environment]” makes me so uncomfortable is that it’s so beyond literally all systems that I was taught.

Mentz writes that “water-thinking makes distortion a baseline condition” and that it “sometimes orients us on the buoyant top and at other times closer to the irresistible bottom.” It’s a change in perspective to focus on flexibility and openness, not a solid interpretation of what’s in front of you. There is a bend and flow of the ocean that Mentz is encouraging us to think about in ways that make our stubborn land-based lifestyles tremble a bit because it’s so different. It’s in this difference between the ways of our lives on land, through “grounded metaphors of the state,” and the movement offshore into the deep blue waters beyond that we find the importance of Melville.

As a reader of this six-page preface, I felt uneasy thinking about the changes that would occur through the “deterritorialization” process, whether it’s through the acceptance of buoyant perspectives or the reformation of something once thought to be so permanent as the horizon. I can only imagine how these changes would feel to someone confined to the oceans and waters. Where I can read about these alterations and try to apply them to my ideological perspectives on my own time, someone like Ishmael was surrounded by them, forced to recognize the movement of the currents and replace the term “progress” with “flow” due to necessity. It’s because of the changes posed by Mentz that I’m even more excited to see if and how the characters of Moby-Dick “[swap] out the old terrestrial language for saltwater terms” and outlooks.

Earth. Ocean.

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Long ago, the two territories lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Steve Mentz nation attacked. With seven words, he launched an assault on the old ways of thinking… ideas that relied on ground-based words to help everyone towards true progress, or rather, flow.

His first statement already captures the message, but the rest further supported his claim. It’s understandable: changing “progress” to “flow” would rewire our mindset to keep going. Don’t stop. Just keep going. You can’t stop here. Keep up the momentum, and finish the race.

His idea to change “state” to “ship” is also fathomable. “Ships, as historians, philosophers, and Hollywood movies have long shown, are symbolic unities, heterotopias, and polyglot fantasy-spaces. Perhaps it is time to imagine politics through ship-to-ship encounters—trading, fighting, hailing, sighting—rather than through the grounded metaphors of the state?” I agree, and in fact, I’ve always seen politics as such. Though, I’m not familiar with those grounded metaphors.

However, one splashing statement was when Mentz said, “Our metaphors must float on water rather than resting on ground.” This quote baffles me… why can’t they stick? Are they not the reason we could understand most complicated matters? Just as much as we should use water as a metaphor for innovation, the earth is where we can find a sense of stability. What if we drown in responsibilities? Flooded by relentless ideas?

Water as a metaphor to improve thinking can also rattle our ships of thought. We could swim in a mundane pond, unable to grasp the stone of stability. That very pond could also blind us. Mentz mentioned distortion instead of clarity, but without clarity, would our way of communication be self-contained in our own rivers? Rivers all lead to the same destination, but their origins are never the same.

The soil separates us, and the rivers then converge into the same thinking, yet rivers only flow because of what holds them apart. Mentz wants us to continue thinking, shaping the form of Earth into something different. Even with rivers guiding us, land will always be somewhere. Without land, there is no where we can simply bask in the sunlight. Without land, we would not prevail against the creatures of the sea.

Underwater animals don’t need sight, as Mentz said, but he also said “water bends light.” We are dependent on what we can see. The blind can only “see” because they were able to enhance their other senses. But not everyone can do that.

Out of the seven (or rather six) words he replaced, I would keep Clarity, Landscape, and Ground. What lies below the ocean is ground as well, but we are not for the world below the surface. We are built for above it.

Unmoored, Vulnerable, Dispensable – Past & Present Converging as One

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                Reading the introduction to Moby-Dick made me considerably nervous – not dissimilar to the nervousness I experience watching movie trailers in the modern era. I do not long for synopsis, I do not strive to have my stories spoon fed to me in digestible segments shorn from the story like butchered meat before I ever get the opportunity to read it for myself. I want to dive into the ocean of language, into the thick of the chaos and make my peace with my ability to sink or swim along with the author’s current. The farther into the introduction I read, the more I found things that my brain will elect to latch on to thanks to Andrew DelBanco’s focus on them – such as the figure Bulkington that is due to appear in chapter three and then “recedes from view until twenty chapters later” (xvi). I do not wish to read about how “everything becomes unmoored, vulnerable, dispensable” (xviii). I wish to find myself adrift!

                When not exposing the story beats, speaking of important later moments well before the time we access them ourselves, there is much to dissect and carry with us as we venture into Moby-Dick. DelBanco’s belief that “Melville…extracted a human sample from a culture he both loved and abhorred, and he made of the Pequod a kind of Noah’s ark” is absolutely fascinating (xxi). Yet more amazing still is the knowledge that these human capsules are still reflective of figures in power today. It’s impossible to discern which is a more terrifying revelation: That time is inevitably cyclical, forever repeating the mistakes of the past with brighter clarity, or that the individuals in power frequently exhibit the same monomania of the doomed captain of the Pequod. Our ship continues to steer into darker, dangerous waters, my friends.

Somethings have to change

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The ocean can teach us so much about our lives on land and its fragility, highlighting our refusal to acknowledge the delicate nature of the society we have created. Steve Mentz and the Blue Humanities movement uses the presence of our oceans as a signifier of the chaos that belongs to nature, something so obviously vicious and beautiful you cannot turn away from its message. This untamable spirit has connected humans across worlds, creating empires on land that tumble but are quickly replaced by a bigger one. The human empire is at odds with nature as the climate crisis worsens every day, Mentz calls this the “central challenge of the current generation”. Water is our survival but it has the potential to destroy the human empire on Earth. We cannot possess water and we certainly cannot survive in it. 

Before this course, I never attributed any sort of characteristic to water, it was just a thing that we needed, essential but invisible. Thinking about it in vast amounts and the various climate crises that have happened through bodies of water, it’s both creator & destroyer of life. As we continue to live on Earth at the pace we are going, these water crises will be more prevalent until we have completely lost the privilege of seeing water as invisible, its presence will demand our attention through its violence. Mentz sees water, the ocean, as a way to slow down and embrace the vulnerability of the human empire. Rather than a stagnant society shaped by people who lived hundreds of years ago, the fluidity of water can teach us about how we can move towards a freer world. Mentz renames progress, not as something that has a is already defined in a single direction, but flows outwards unable to take a single shape, confusing us enough to think outside of “historical narratives”. Thinking about the nature of water can reshape the things we take for granted as truth. Greed and hatred have been byproducts of what we deem as truth, as ‘the way the world is’. Reframing the world through the lens of water can offer us “possibilities for new ways of thinking and living”, a world where we are no longer captive to ancient establishments but we become both destroyers & creators, like water.

Realistic Representations in Blue Humanities

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As our environmental policies regress under a regime which declines to accept the harpooning of our planet, it is more necessary than ever to pay attention to the blue humanities. But, as policies shift, so too must the aim of blue humanities. As captivating as it is, it is time to stop romanticizing the sea. It is no longer a scene that unveils “pristine nature” in contrast to the industrialized land we inhabit. Industrialization has meandered its way into the ocean, into the water. Steve Mentz uses Aristotle’s conceptualization of poetics to help define his term: “Poetics of planetary water”. In this concept, Aristotle explains poetics as “a system of representations”. Mentz is drawn to the notion that “poetics combines pleasure and pain” in regard to water that both “allure and threaten human bodies”. Mentz furthers Aristotle’s claim that “though the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view the most realistic representations of them”, as a parallel of the enchanting, yet dangerous relationship we have had with the ocean throughout human history. In blue humanities future, this notion will have to be reversed: Though the ocean, the water, may be a beautiful sight, we must agonize over the most realistic representations of it. The trash ridden, biomagnificated, micro-plastic filled animals that inhabit the bleached, dead, splintering coral of the acidified ocean. We need depictions of a climate changed future. Paintings of risen seas. New York halfway under water. Undiscovered life straining to create ecosystems in the shipwreck that was once Manhattan. Netflix series that delineate a climate fueled apocalypse rather than a zombie or digital one. That is, if we want to see another societal push for eco-change. Mentz coins the phrase “watery criticism” the aims of which “include both describing the complex working of water in our environment and also imagining ways to change our relationships to it.” The immensity and resilience of the ocean conceals hundreds of years of pollution the way small bodied ecosystems cannot. Refocusing the blue humanities to embody all forms of water, captures the deterioration climate change imparts on small ecosystems. Therefore, adapting our attention to all forms of water changes our relationship with it. As much as the blue humanities depends on water, water depends on the blue humanities.

 My Reponse to Steve Mentz’s “A Poetics of Planetary Water: The Blue Humanities after John Gillis”

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When I first started to read this article by Mentz, I was a bit intimidated by it. But when I came across this line I believe I finally understood what he is trying to tell us about in this article: “We have come to know the sea,” he concludes,“as much through the humanities as through science.” Artistic, poetic, and humanistic knowledge, he insists, define the sea’s centrality to modern Western culture.” (pg. 144). There are so many ways that a vast number of people can learn about our oceans and what is within them and how they can help us as a society. As our oceans are so vast and cover most of the planet it has become a cental part of how we live our lives today.

Basic human knowledge as he says is part of how we know the sea, yes we can see it, touch it, smell it, and swim in it. But many don’t have acess to the ocean because of where they might live and they have heard of what the ocean looks like and might see pictures, a basic idea of the ocean. Those who might even do dives in the ocean and more, a lot of people can enjoy the ocean and what it can provide for us emotionally and even physically. People can also make art depicting the ocean and how others feel reguarding it which I enjoy seeing the most. The art works we looked at in class really spoke to me and I could see the story behind them and manty artists through their art styles can show how calm or even how violent the ocean might be. Reading about the ocean through poems is another way that Metz speaks of later and he does give examples of poems he enjoys which evokes the idea of blue humanities. So many poems have been written about the beach, the ocean and how one might feel regaurding it and this can help people gain a better knowledge of the ocean and what the ocean can mean for us.

As the ocean is so vast and everyone knows of it, it has become a source of where many countries recieve their food sources from and how much we use it, is very important for our modern world today.

Extra Credit Mentz Questions

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  1. What other oceanic studies were there before the rise of blue humanities?
  2. How much does the study of the ocean in blue humanities include life in the ocean and how they interact with it?
  3. How are places such as aquariums and Sea World viewed from a blue humanities perspective?
  4. What are some consequences that may arise if we were to ignore blue humanities?
  5. Can a similar approach to the ocean in blue humanities be applied to other frontiers, such as the desert?

EXTRA CREDIT: QUESTIONS FOR STEVE MENTZ

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While you may never read this post verbatim, Mr. Mentz, I thought that I might address you directly here. We were given an extra credit assignment for this class, instructed to create 5 questions that we might want to ask you for your visit next week. While I may not know much about the Blue Humanities, there is something inherently interesting about them, something alluring that makes me want to learn more. So, my questions are:

  1. If there was a single word in the English Lexicon that you could change from terracentric to aquacentric, which word would you choose and why?
  2. Was there a particular piece of media that inspired you to pursue the Blue Humanities?
  3. What is an essential piece of media to consume when beginning the journey to understanding Blue Humanities? This can be fiction or fact, but it should be something that a person needs to spend time analyzing.
  4. What is your definitive edition of Moby Dick?
  5. What piece of media has done sincere harm to the Blue Humanities? How should one engage with this piece of media?

Thank you for taking the time to visit our class and impart on us wisdom regarding the Blue Humanities! I look forward to Tuesday, though I will have to miss the larger event due to a conflict in my schedule.

Week 4: Advancing Our Knowledge of the Sea= a revert back to the superficial?

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While rereading the article on the Blue Humanities, I kept thinking how when a society advances we become self-reliant and dependent. In addition, Steve Mentz’s “A poetics of planetary water” solidifies the idea that the sea should be a meditative condition, not necessarily something to believe by sight. The sea as a form of the unknown and unconventional would diminish in value, being purely for aesthetic and commercial appeal if its knowledge becomes easily reproducible. Gillis states that “Until the nineteenth century, notes writer James Hamilton-Paterson,”… our understanding of the sea was “literally superficial, . . . a navigable surface, obviously, above an abyss.(Gillis)” In this instance, the sea was a superficial symbol to status because we had less information about the sea to even acknowledge its significance. The article illustrates the depth to how much information we hold in digital and real time, but with that power, the aesthetic of the sea repeats itself as it becomes recycled and reproduced overtime. With this in mind, Mentz also suggests that water is everywhere– as a solid liquid, and gas– but, it is something we feel the most: “Water changes appear intimately and tangibly. We feel them on our skin(Mentz 144-145).” Consequentially, would already knowing the sea mean we have the advantage to dismiss subjectivity and prioritize Western principle in institutions as beforehand during the Industrial era? In modern day, it can be witnessed digitally without any thought of its significance. I guess there is no real concern besides the sea becoming less anticipated and groundbreaking as before, but one can only speculate how the symbol of the sea becomes marketable– in a good or bad way? In a way, planetary water is restricted for the elite knowledge and the sea as a symbol of hope for marginalized communities becomes a medium to manipulate the less privileged.

For a summer class, I studied anthropology and how literature keeps the area of study alive with its material culture. While the sea is a body of water that cannot be analyzed all at once, one notable thing stood out to me in the class, which is: the anticipation of fiction, with maritime curiosity, helps us prepare for events that are unexpected and out of the ordinary. I think there are pros and cons into regulating and advancing the information of the sea, but it depends on how it is viewed as in society’s grapple. With this in mind, I am interested to see how we then prepare for this advancement of knowing the seas and how we preserve maritime literature for future generations.