Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

'C' Sickness


Rather than embed its reader in the nonhuman world as an act of ecomimesis, sea-reading is said to bring us back into the very world we “contain”. Borrowing from Alaimo’s concept of ‘transcorporeality’ which recognises our literal enmeshment with the physical world, sea-reading resists embedding us in an ‘externalised’ world by alerting us to the sea that courses through our very own bodies.

This gesture is essential to the concept 'subcide'. To simply view the human-initiated deaths that occur beneath our anthropocentric gaze is to position the nonhuman world as something humans act upon. Yet Alaimo stresses how the non-human world is:

also acting back upon us, as we are always already the very substance and the stuff of the world that we are changing.

Humans greatly depend on the ecosystem work that insects do - from the bees that pollinate to the worms that recycle - and humans consume foods peppered with various chemicals. As these ecosystems subcide, so do humans.

Nevertheless, Alaimo does alert us to how the transit of toxins can also erase certain subjectivities in transcorporeal thinking, particularly since the transferal of pesticides does not recognise the divisions of human bodies according to race, class or gender. However, Neimanis reminds us that water does not exist in the abstract; it must be embodied. Hence, the surfaces of the human which bear the brunt of racial and patriarchal oppression are never erased but "pulled beneath the surface of our skins in a persistent undertow." This requires us to deploy a new attentiveness that recognises that our indiscriminate pesticide use has discriminate impacts not only across certain species, but across divisions within species. 

Hence, where I previously referred to a ‘motion sickness’ humans must experience in order to take in the micro and macro scales of their destruction, sea-reading (or ‘c’-reading) asks us to look inward and consider how the porous qualities of our own bodies means that it is also in a process of subciding. Perhaps, then, we can merge these two ideas into 'c' sickness which accounts for the simultaneous outward and inward gaze we must undertake during the process of subcide; a realisation that the deaths outside our bodies are intimately connected to the decay within us.  

Further Research 

In this article, Rae provides a conceptual tool for reading oceanic fictions by combining Freud’s uncanny and Alaimo’s transcorporeality in their concept, ‘uncanny waters’. Through the interplay of both concepts (the sea that exists ‘within us’ but also the unknowable sea), 'uncanny waters' allows us to read literary depictions of oceans in a way that resists a discourse of mastery and control. This resonates with the concept of 'c' sickness that ensures the deaths we must see beneath our anthropocentric gaze are not merely viewed as external causes of our actions, but are also intimately linked to our own bodily processes. Hence, during 'c' sickness, the familiarity of our inhabited bodies takes on an uncanny quality since we begin to recognise the salty streams of sea-water and pesticides that course through our veins. 

Returning back to the idea that in subciding ecosystems, we must see a chain of deaths initiated by pesticides, scientists at Harvard University have very much materialised this process. These scientists have studied how pesticides affect collective bee behaviour by attaching barcodes to the bees' bodies. By scanning the barcodes before and after their exposure to imiadacloprid, the bees' slowing movements become traceable. Perhaps, then, technology can assist us in seeing living things as they subcide. 

George Raptis (z5206747)

Works Cited 

 

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