Reflections on Subcide
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)