Reflections on Subcide
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:
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.we are always already the very substance and stuff of the world that we are changing.
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)