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• 1 2022-11-11T20:30:50-08:00 Reflections on Subcide 26 plain 2022-11-19T14:42:06-08:00
  The e-concept subcide emerged from a recent news story about the ongoing destruction caused by agricultural runoff on the north coast of NSW. Subcide combines the prefix ‘sub’ which means under or beneath with ‘cide’ which denotes a substance that kills. To subcide is to look beneath our anthropocentric gaze to see the ‘hidden’ deaths we have caused as a result of our indiscriminate pesticide use.
  
  Subcide is a concept founded on various destabilisations. Firstly, one cannot aurally differentiate the e-concept 'subcide' from 'subside'; a word which evokes vastly different images of a calming storm or a receding tide. By replacing the letter ‘s’ with ‘c’, the e-concept subcide demands us to remain alert to the subtle changes in language that turn words into something more pernicious, in the same way we must remain alert to the silent deaths around us. The second destabilisation developed out of my close reading of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring where the rhythms and content of her language stretch us across micro and macro scales to comprehend the totality of our destruction. Where Carson's words mobilise us to see the deaths beneath our gaze at various scales, what necessarily accompanies subcide is an experience of motion sickness.
  
  Through the continual development of my e-concept, I also discovered how it reinforced certain anthropocentric presuppositions. Notably, my initial conception of subcide positioned the non-human world as the object which the human subject acted upon by spraying it with harmful substances, thus denying the non-human world any agential power. In an attempt to transcend this binary, I drew upon transcorporeal thinking to show how the non-human world also acts upon us. In Alaimo's words:

  we are always already the very substance and stuff of the world that we are changing.

  Hence, where we experience a ‘motion sickness’ in trying to comprehend the micro and macro scales of our destruction, the porous quality of our bodies means that our gaze must also turn inward; something which the earlier e-concept of ‘sea-reading’ elucidated. I then merged the idea of 'motion sickness' with sea-reading (or 'c' reading) to create ‘c’ sickness: a term that describes the dizzying effect that accompanies subcide. It asks us to simultaneously project our gaze outward and inward to account for the fact that the deaths outside our bodies are intimately connected to the decay within us.
  
  The development of my e-concept also urged me to reassess my understanding of theories conceived by Morton and Alaimo. The more I thought about the ongoing chains of deaths pesticides cause, the more it began to emerge as a hyperobject. That is to say, the totality of pesticide deaths seemingly resists spaciotemporal specificity. Its smaller manifestations - like the single death of the tawny frogmouth - gesture us towards the larger totality of deaths, yet can never fully embody the hyperobject. Additionally, where I relied on transcorporeal thinking to deduce that humans are not exempt from the process of subciding, this raised new ethical questions about the erasure of certain subjectivities based on race, class and gender. This lead me to think about how our indiscriminate pesticide use has discriminate impacts on divisions across humanity and other species; from the underpaid workers who spray chemical agents, to communities of colour who experience a disproportionate amount of hazardous waste disposal by governments and large corporations. 
  
  While the bulk of my research centred around death and irreversible destruction, I also found that to subcide is to also see something more profound about life. Like the moth under Woolf’s watchful eye or the “subsiding spasm” of Nabokov’s butterfly, the ongoing transferal of pesticides is only made possible by the life-sustaining chains that connect all living things. Hence, the easy transferal of toxins also alerts us to unexpected interconnections between living things. Similarly, to experience a ‘c’ sickness when fluctuating between micro and micro scales invites new possibilities for the human subject to see how the “tiny bead of pure life” thrums across all life forms.
  
  
  This tiny bead led me to the through-line of my research which came to rest on the blueberry aphid’s Compound eyeS; the very insect which provoked the farmers in northern NSW to spray their crops in the first place. Where the aphid views the world in a series of tiny images that converge to represent one larger visual image, the notion of subcide requires us to hold the millions of pesticide-affected life forms in a singular view to ultimately see the chain of pesticide deaths in its totality. In this sense, to subcide is to hold ourselves accountable to the deaths we have caused, and to undertake a renewed ethical obligation to protect and preserve life. 
  
  George Raptis (z5206747)
   
• 1 2022-10-09T16:06:29-07:00 Subcide: An E-Concept in Images 11 plain 2022-11-19T14:30:34-08:00
  Blueberry farms cut ordered topographies on the hills of Gumbaynggir country. However, beneath the appearance of order, just a few kilometres downstream, is rampant disorder. The soil in this hilly region sits atop a clay base that limits the absorption of water, leading to significant runoff when short bursts of rain fall. Where blueberry farmers use pesticides to protect their crop, nitrite and nitrate levels stream through the nearby creeks and feed into the nearby Hearnes Lake catchment where these toxins are found to reach 695 times higher during high rainfall events than in dry weather. The Hearnes Lake is freshwater source for all that lives in the region, and it is currently being diluted by these toxins.
  Farmers spray the aphids and moths that feed and hide in the blueberry bushes with pesticides that are too dangerous (and mostly banned) for domestic use in Australia. But the deaths do not stop there; the poisoned insect bodies become food for birds. Take the tawny frogmouth, a nocturnal species of frogmouth whose earliest fossil evidence on this landmass dates back to the Eocene (about 56 to 33.9 million years ago in human time). It is prone to eating insects sprayed with organochlorine pesticides; a particularly sinister chemical which stores as fat deposits in these birds and gradually increases over time. When food is scarce or the birds experience a change in their environment, these fat stores are metabolised, discharging the poison into their blood streams and initiating the tawny frogmouth’s slow internal death.
  When I think of pesticides tainted a sickly blueberry blue, I think of Joan Mitchell’s Les Bluets (1973). In an attempt to ‘read’ Mitchell’s work, Lydia Davis wrote about how she discovered the painting borrowed its name from a small shaggy cornflower that grows rampant in New England. Upon her discovery, Davis wrote: 

  'the painting abruptly went beyond itself, lost its solitariness, [and] acquired a relationship to fields, to flowers.’

  The impressionist painting may very well have an external referential field. Perhaps, the swirls of blue become the pesticides that bursts into the blood streams of tawny frogmouths, or the unbelievable darkness of the blue screens are the Hearnes Lake diluted with poison. But an eco-critical reading might ask us to look ‘within’ the painting and consider the spillage at play here; the varied colours of oil paints share the same base, the threads of the linen canvas form a microscopic patchwork of grids and lines (much like the topographies of the blueberry farms), the fine hairs on the paint brush are plastered across the immense canvas. Ultimately, if the painting goes beyond itself, so too does the human want of eating blueberries.
  
  E-Concept Generation
  
  What connects these images is our inability to see the unending chain of deaths that pesticides cause. Like scrutinising Mitchell’s painting for meaning, we might begin to truly see a monoculture farm or the slowing waddle of a tawny frogmouth in a process of human-initiated destruction if we shift our perspective.
  
  To borrow from Deconstruction theory, signs are generated from the difference it has from other signs. Yet the sign itself will always contains a trace of what it does not mean. If we think of the word pesticide whose root word 'cida' means to kill, we might think of farmers protecting their crop by killing insects. However, pesticides imply a whole chain of destruction; they pollute waters, harm plants, and kill birds. If we are to truly see the deaths we have caused around us, we must take on all these consequences loaded in the word 'pesticide', to see the hidden deaths beneath or beyond our passing gaze. So, I propose the e-concept subcide.
  
  The original word ‘subside’ means to become less intense or violent like a receding storm or lowering water levels. However, in a Derridean turn, I have replaced the second ‘s’ with a ‘c’ to make what sounds like a calming tide returning to equilibrium as something more pernicious; to subcide is to see what humans have killed ‘beneath’ their anthropocentric gaze.
  
  While the prefix ‘sub’ implies a hierarchy which positions humans above the deaths below it, I deliberately use 'sub' to destabilise the human subject whose literal foundations become shakeable as a consequence of their destruction (think about the groundwater rivers that sustain the soil beneath us, carrying with it our pesticides and waste). Like Derrida’s ‘différance’, the difference between subside and subcide produces another destabilising effect since its difference cannot be heard but only seen in writing. This emphasis on seeing is central to the notion of subcide, which asks us to see the Hearnes Lake and the tawny frogmouth not as idealised versions of the Australian bush but in their protracted deaths as a direct consequence of human action. 
  
  George Raptis (z5206747)
  
  Links for Further Reading
  • Peter Hannam, "'Rampant' expansion of blueberry farms triggers compliance crackdown," Sydney Morning Herald, last modified 21 September, 2020, https://www.smh.com.au/environment/sustainability/rampant-expansion-of-blueberry-farms-trigger-compliance-crackdown-20200919-p55x7q.html. 
  • "Wildlife and Pesticides," WIRES, last modified August, 2022, https://www.wires.org.au/wildlife-information/wildlife-and-pesticides. 
  • Lydia Davis, "'Les Bluets', 1973," Poetry Magazine, published 1 February, 2013, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/69935/les-bluets-1973.