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• 1 2022-11-11T20:30:50-08:00 Reflections on Subcide 7 plain 2022-11-12T14:05:05-08:00 The e-concept subcide was born out of a recent news story about the ongoing destruction caused by agricultural runoff on the north coast of NSW. The word 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 the word 'subside'; a word which evokes vastly different images of a calming storm or a receding tide. This subtle replacement of the letter ‘s’ with ‘c’ demands us to remain alert to the hidden deaths and to see them as a direct consequence of human action. 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 complete outreach of our destruction. 
  
  
  Through the continual development of my e-concept, I also discovered how it unconsciously repeated various anthropocentric presuppositions. Notably, my initial conception of subcide positioned the nonhuman world as the object which the human subject acted upon. 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 the human subject experiences a ‘motion sickness’ in trying to comprehend the micro and macro scales of its destruction, the porous quality of human bodies meant that the human gaze must also turn inward. By drawing on an earlier e-concept ‘sea-reading’ (or 'c' reading),  I merged the two concepts into ‘c’ sickness; a term that describes the dizzying effect the human subject feels when simultaneously projecting its gaze outwardly and inwardly to recognise 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; something whose smaller manifestations (like the death of the tawny frogmouth) gesture us towards the totality of deaths caused by pesticides yet never fully embodies the whole 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 certainly has discriminatory 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 most of my research centred around death and irreversible destruction, I also found that the notion of subcide alerts us to 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 also alerts us to the life-sustaining chains that connect all 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 all my research which rests on the compound eyes of the blueberry aphid; 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 image to ultimately see the chain of pesticide deaths in its totality. In this sense, while the e-concept subcide asks us to see the deaths beneath our conventional gaze, it nevertheless discharges a renewed ethical obligation to protect and preserve life.
  
  
  George Raptis (z5206747)
   
• 1 2022-10-22T21:16:55-07:00 A Close Reading of ‘Surface Waters and Underground Seas’ from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) 5 plain 2022-11-06T01:23:31-07:00 The agricultural runoff on Gumbaynggir country sparked my interest in reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). While published 60 years ago in human time, the poetic urgency with which Carson wrote makes her text a sounding board for discussing my e-concept, subcide, particularly since we must still account for the pesticides used in Carson’s time that still enact chains of deaths today.
  
  One way we can construct a causal chain that ties the deaths of living beings to our indiscriminate use of pesticides is by materialising the rhizomatic connections between living things on earth. Carson deftly achieves this connection in the following passage:

  Water must also be thought of in terms of the chains of life it supports – from the small-as-dust green cells of the drifting plant plankton, through the minute water-fleas to the fishes that strain plankton from the water and are in turn eaten by other fishes or by birds, minks, racoons – in an endless cyclic transfer of materials from life to life.

  The passage offers the idea of going deeper within the syntax through the interventions initiated by the hyphens. This urges us to see beyond our initial glance at a body water, to go beneath the subsiding tide, before coming up for air at the end of the sentence. As we proceed deeper within this intervention, Carson uses a mix of asyndeton and polysyndeton to literalise the unexpected connections between invisible green cells and racoons. The commas and conjunctions erase any presumed boundaries between cells and plankton, fish and birds, since they feed, breathe and exist with one another. There is also an abundance of fricatives in words like ‘drifting’, ‘through’ and ‘fishes’ which causes friction; perhaps a literal fusing of the apparent boundaries between these organisms and the water. This fusion suggests that we cannot have minks without plankton, or birds without fish; life depends on other life.
  
  This co-dependence is not immediate to the human eye. Our indiscriminate use of pesticides reveals our monistic view of food production; one which overlooks the flow-on effects of protecting crops from pests or disease. But if we allow our anthropocentric gaze to fall back on itself, if we watch as the tide subsides, we can see beneath the water-level of our ignorance to find that birds feed on the fish that feed on the water-fleas that feed on the plankton...
  
  Yet this life-sustaining chain which connects all living things within water worlds is also the very chain that pesticides hijack. Carson describes how “the amount [of DDT] found in the flesh [of living beings] always exceeded the original concentration in water” when analysing the Clear Lake in San Francisco (a tantalising name for a lake whose depths are currently covered with a soft black ooze). Like the poison which severs the connections between lifeforms, Carson’s sentences begin to separate interconnected lifeforms; “the plankton contained as much as 5.3 parts per million”, the “California gulls had built up concentrations of more than 2,000 parts per million.” Here language and syntax plays a part in individualising species; the full stops separate the species, the numbers obfuscate reality, the signifier ‘plankton’ kills off the signified. “Even though no trace of DDT could be found in the Lake after 12 months of its usage,” Carson writes, “it lived on and grew in the lives of others.”
  
  The poison has flow-on consequences since life depends on other life. The same lethal particles lodged in the gull were once metabolised by the plankton further along the food chain. And so something like a chain that sustains life becomes malevolent. No longer is there a feeling of things becoming ‘less intense, violent or severe’ as a flood subsides or order restores. Instead, there is a gradual cleaving at the chain by invisible poison. And so if we think of a chain of life connected by the loops in a repeated ‘S’, it becomes slowly shorn off by pesticides, cleaved to a single ‘C’.
  
  And so the ‘C’ replaces the ‘S’; subside becomes subcide.
  
  To see the whole chain of destruction caused by pesticides requires humans to see across different scales; from the heady-heights of a gull in flight to the plankton existing in subterranean waters. Carson is a master at fluctuating between scales:

  Rain, falling on the land, settles down through pores and cracks in soil and rocks, penetrating deeper and deeper until eventually it reaches a zone where all the pores of the rick are filled with water, a dark, subsurface sea, rising under hills, sinking beneath valleys.

  Carson’s use of asyndeton mobilises words like water which stream through the passage as it does through rock and soil. In the absence of conjunctions, the initial word ‘rain’ is carried through the sentence without interruption, lodging itself in the commas and surfaces of words before finding its place in the valleys. We follow micro rain drops into a macro terrain - from visible to invisible spaces - through a topography that Carson constructs with words and their sounds. Take the phrase ‘rising under hills, sinking beneath valleys.’ Here the repeated trochaic feet of stressed-unstressed syllables create an interchange of rise and depression which can be mapped like so:
  
  These words form a topography much like the hills and valleys of California.
  
  The modulations in sounds produces a destabilising quality for the human reader - a motion-sickness of sorts - who hear the vast valleys beneath them, or the looming hills ahead of them.
  
  And so to truly see the chains of destruction initiated by our unregulated use of pesticides, a destabilisation must take place. We must fluctuate between scales to take in the loaded consequences of our actions. We must remain attentive to the literal signs of our destruction in both sight and sound. And we must remain attentive to the small slips in language that cannot be heard but nevertheless turn words into something vastly devastating. While we might remain ignorant to the silences of Spring, we cannot help but see it subciding.
  
  George Raptis (z5206747)