10-« Quelque chose qui flotte, qui bouge… qui grouille… ». Some Flows of the Formless in Late Anthropocene Fiction

I will give here the sketch of a work in progress that addresses a diffuse category of matter figuring with increasing urgency in our imaginaries of the sea, its subsurfaces, and its landfalls – estuaries, nearshore, foreshore, backshore – all the places of contact between water, earth, and the human: mobile, formless phenomena that are among the most devastating and unsettling evidence of our planetary ecological crisis. These include, among others: hypoxic dead zones, current and weather-disrupting temperature anomalies known as “blobs” because of their appearance on satellite imaging, E. coli-laden rafts and deep-sea clouds of marine mucilage (“sea snot”), phytoplankton, algal, sargassum, and jellyfish blooms, upwellings of microplastics from deep-sea hotspots, great trash gyres (“garbage patches”), massive oil slicks from drilling, pipeline, and tanker accidents, and spills on land that make their way to the sea. And so on. We could extend this list more widely and more distressingly¹.

A common trait of these menaces is that they may flow inland, thus dissolving the distinction between solid and liquid, or press, insistently, against barriers we would mount against them to preserve the distinction. However we define this contact zone, it’s not a hard border – that’s a geographical concept, not a hydrological or imaginative concept – because the shore is also a mutable surface, as much in motion and in transformation as what it holds back². Efforts to hold back or hold fast are in this regard only temporary measures to plug openings that are always-already vulnerable to the deep shapelessnesses enacted at the contact zone. Which is to say, they are momentary distractions from larger specters of frightful mutability. When we focus on the image of a beach dotted with tens of thousands of tarballs, we look away from the archaic horror of the ungainly blob from which the tarballs were spawned. Surveying the bathtub ring stain of a red tide on the sand, the shapes of satellite images of temperature anomalies, or of the widening spans of trash gyres (Lebreton), is to look away from featureless interiors and restless heterogeneity. This is what is limiting in inventories of the restless and the shapeless, such as the one I began with: one fixates on partitioning shapeless things into series of discrete menaces or parades of menaces, and misses the general character of their undifferentiated flow and pressure.

transgressive passions of our ecological imaginaries.

II. Quelque chose qui flotte

The Burning World (1964) – the novel’s global drought is the effect of a layer of industrial polymers deposited on the oceans’ surfaces, preventing evaporation – and the Cadillac-desertic dreamscapes of Las Vegas of his Hello America! (1981), or the Amargosa, the vast hallucinatory inland desert sea of Claire Vaye Watkin’s Gold Fame Citrus (2015), would qualify for inclusion on this list.

Exodes is probably the bleakest of the series. It recounts the mostly unsuccessful efforts of a half-dozen characters to find refuge from the accelerating savagery of the late XXIst century. Among them are a married couple, Olaf and Risten Eriksson, who flee the social collapse of their native land, the Lofoten archipelago of Norway, and sail their trawler Ragnarok southward over the drowned cities of Northern Europe in search of safe harbor, improbably, in the Kerguelen Islands – aka les Îles de la Désolation – of the sub-Antarctic⁴.

As the trawler approaches Dunkirk Harbor, abandoned and mostly submerged, Risten, who is watching from the bow, calls to Olaf to come see something she cannot describe –

Il stoppe le moteur et, laissant le Ragnarok filer doucement sur son erre, rejoint sa femme à l’avant. Elle est penchée au-dessus de l’eau – il se penche donc à son tour.

À première vue, il trouve juste à l’eau des reflets roses, pense qu’ils sont dus aux ultimes feux du couchant. Puis il remarque que, non, ce ne sont pas des reflets. Quelque chose colore l’eau en rose. Quelque chose qui flotte, qui bouge… qui grouille. Sa vue accommodant, il distingue soudain ce que c’est.

Des milliers – des millions de méduses. Toute la rade en est couverte, à perte de vue.

Olaf émet un ricanement nerveux. C’est le premier signe de vie qu’il découvre dans cette mer depuis des lustres – et il faut que ce soit quelque chose de potentiellement mortel. La mer en est tellement saturée qu’elle est devenue comme une espèce de soupe rosâtre frémissante, dégageant un relent acide. Il a entendu parler d’une mutation des méduses, devenues plus corrosives que de l’acide chlorhydrique, parvenues – faute de prédateurs – au sommet de la chaîne alimentaire marine et capables de liquéfier toute matière organique, voire minérale. Elles ne sont pas encore montées jusqu’aux Lofoten, mais, l’eau se réchauffant à vitesse grand V, cela ne saurait tarder…

[He stops the engine and, letting the Ragnarok gently drift along, joins his wife at the front. She is leaning over the water – so he leans in too.

At first glance, he finds only pink reflections in the water, thinks that they are due to the last fires of the sunset. Then he notices that, no, they are not reflections. Something is coloring the water pink. Something that floats, that moves… that swarms. His vision adjusting, he suddenly sees clearly what it is.

Thousands – millions of jellyfish. The whole harbor is covered with them, as far as the eye can see.

Olaf lets out a nervous chuckle. It’s the first sign of life he’s seen in this sea in ages; of course it would be something potentially deadly. The sea is so saturated that it has become a kind of pinkish soup, simmering with an acidic smell. He has heard of a mutation in jellyfish, making them more corrosive than hydrochloric acid and placing them – for lack of predators – at the top of the marine food chain, able to liquefy any organic matter, even minerals. They have not yet reached the Lofoten Islands, but as the water warms…] (390–91)

Stung!)⁵. More numerous and widespread blooms are a recognized peril of worsening global warming: many jellyfish species flourish under conditions of eutrophication, rising temperatures, and increased ocean acidity that kill other marine life. Scientists predict a more “gelatinous” future for some ocean ecosystems, in which cartilaginous and bony fish will cease to be apex predators (Richardson, et al.).

6. They are a clotted, barely-differentiated solution of mobile flesh, their numberless bells less like individual animals than bubbles rising thickly to the surface of an ocean in the process of becoming gelatinous. What arrests the gaze here – Olaf’s gaze, our vicarious gaze – is the shameful movement of these heralds of a featureless abyss in the process of turning over: a suffocating heterogeneity that travels, repellantly, under its own power.

It seems to be a subjectless heterogeneity, though perhaps it is not unreactive or unaware. Jellyfish lack the brain and central nervous system of other animals, though they possess neural nets that control their movements and connect to sensory receptors (Gershwin, Jellyfish). There is intriguing evidence that at least some jellyfish species exhibit distinct waking and sleeping states (Nath, et al.). Their experiences of mind, such as they are, must be more diffuse and more marginally subjectified than we can imagine. If the pink soup of Dunkirk Harbor can then be said to act or to think with even the slimmest of purposes it must do so otherwise than we do: agency and thought as pure operations of unquiet matter. It’s all uncannily a little too efficient for us to bear, except with a nervous chuckle of the kind elicited by stories of slime molds – affectionately referred to as “blobs” by their devotés – navigating a maze (Dussutor), or the clumsily pouring bodies of the molds’ science fiction film precursors (Fredo and Bava, Yeaworth). The very idea of this, not an altogether-thoughtlessness but a headless-thoughtlessness, is offensive to members of our species, living as we do in brain-centered, melancholy isolation from one another, moving about with confidence that the spaces between our bodies define us. In Ligny’s unsettling/unsettled image, countless gelatinous individuals are congealing into a plenum, prodigally and continuously becoming the same substance. The water is wrong all the way to the horizon – à perte de vue – and, we assume, it is in the process of becoming wrong all the way down.

III. The Flow of the Formless

It’s tempting to characterize all this churning of surface and below-surface as the production of abject materiality. Certainly the yuck factor, on a very grand scale, suggests the disorienting affects that Julia Kristeva attaches to the abject. The repulsive sensation of a crossing of boundaries that menaces integrities on each side is close, as well, to the insistent mobility of the image. And, comparable to Kristeva’s inventory of the abject upwellings of the body – vomit, urine, blood, sperm, shit, pus – Ligny’s roiling horizon of pink soup, moving outward and downward from the gaze, is fundamentally interfacial. Recall the paradigmatic example of abjection that Kristeva cites in the opening pages of Pouvoirs de l’horreur:

Lorsque cette peau à la surface du lait, inoffensive, mince comme une feuille de papier à cigarettes, minable comme une rognure d’ongles, se présente aux yeux, ou touche les lèvres, un spasme de la glotte et plus bas encore, de l’estomac, du ventre, de tous les viscères, crispe le corps, presse les larmes et la bile, fait battre le cœur, perler le front et les mains.

[When this skin on the surface of milk, inoffensive, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, puny as a nail clipping, presents itself to the eyes, or touches the lips, a spasm of the glottis and even lower, of the stomach, of the belly, of all the viscera, tenses the body, squeezes the tears and the bile, makes the heart beat, the forehead and the hands bead.] (10)

In the moment of the gaze alighting on or the lips briefly touching the surface of the milk, a simultaneous fixing and crossing of a margin between us and the other side matters in every sense of the word. It makes no difference that you could hold a glass of clotted milk at arm’s length or below your nose and mouth, what is decisive is that the surface of the milk that you can’t, or don’t want, to touch or taste is materially transforming beyond you, toward the bottom of the glass. The skin is a featureless something that limns the threshold between the subject and something else, neither subject nor object (Kristeva 9). It could only be worse – this is implied by the process of clotting – if the skin went all the way down.

Kristeva’s emphasizing of our repugnance to daily reminders of abjection – how we are compromised by traces of a primordial fractioning off of the ab-ject from the subject as such – that, at least the primordiality and the recurrence of the experience, are also partly right for my purposes, in that they specifically attach anxiety and disgust to a traversal of boundaries. But I think that the sensation elicited by the Kristevan abject – though it is closely allied with the sensation elicited by unquiet matter – may be too narrowly defined by the subject’s self-interests. It doesn’t address the full range of transgressive passions of an encounter with, not only an abject something, but also a clotted everything that is provisionally not the subject, and which works to absorb the subject into its undifferentiated field.

I think I prefer Georges Bataille’s version of this encounter.

Un dictionnaire commencerait à partir du moment où il ne donnerait plus le sens mais les besognes des mots. Ainsi informe n’est pas seulement un adjectif ayant tel sens mais un terme servant à déclasser, exigeant généralement que chaque chose ait sa forme. Ce qu’il désigne n’a ses droit dans aucun sens et se fait écraser partout comme une araignée ou un ver de terre. Il faudrait en effet, pour que les hommes académiques soient contents, que l’univers prenne forme. La philosophie entière n’a pas d’autre but : il s’agit de donner une redingote à ce qui est, une redingote mathématique. Par contre affirmer que l’univers ne ressemble à rien et n’est qu’informe revient à dire que l’univers est quelque chose comme une araignée ou un crachat.

[A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks [besognes]. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.] Georges Bataille, “L’Informe” (1929)

La Ressemblance informe (2019) and related observations by Pierre Fédida, Paul Hegarty, and others, that the work of Bataille’s formless was never the negation of form, or the disclosure of a beyond of form, but rather form’s ineluctable, unresolved precarity and active transgression in art and in life more generally, and what this means for our experience of transgression. That is where the matter of the formless matters – in the sense of process, not state or import – precisely in terms of what Bataille calls base matter, stubbornly resistant to idealization and flattening all impostures of dressing it up in absolutes (Bataille, “Matérialisme,” “Le Bas matérialisme”). A universe becoming spider, worm, spittle, and pink goo fills us with anguish because it won’t hold still in place of something else, and it won’t stay only itself. Bataille’s observations in this regard are among the most brutal and incendiary criticisms of a cultural dominant that elevates mimesis in alliance with a rational vision of the world in which humans are upright, at the world’s pinnacle and not, horizontally, in the muck with everyone else (Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance). “In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal.” The unfinished varieties of the formless force a leveling of anthropomorphism: the undoing of anthropos as the privileged shape, not merely the privileged center, of things.

IV. Transgressive Passions of the Formless

The viscosity of water in general? Isn’t it the universal element of life?]
– Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent (c. 1822), in Jules Michelet, La Mer (1861), in Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les reves (1942)⁷

Exodes: humans who feed on other humans for lack of other prey. It is, to be sure, an alarming and heartbreaking turn of the plot.

But it’s also true to the challenge that Ligny’s compassion poses for us throughout the series and in this case especially – to love his characters enough to obscure their awful deaths but also to not spare them their suffering – and it’s true as well to the formless’s tasks (besognes) in imagery of the Anthropocene’s decline: the unsparing foreclosure of a naïve anthropomorphism, consonant with the lacerating dimensions of Bataille’s thought, and an opening toward utopian post-anthropology that his thought might prefigure.

The latter assertion – that there is a utopian task for the formless, even in the muck and the goo – needs more unpacking and nuance that I have space for here. But I would say this with, appropriately, Olaf’s nervous chuckle in mind: in a general ecology, a human might learn to live with and among others more fluid than itself, as in a soup, a continous flow, a viscous blob: in the world in which the human is more like water in water (l’eau dans l’eau) – or jelly in jelly – than Bataille imagined us capable of being⁹. Or if we seek a more solid footing, in an immanently vital compost (Haraway) of tragic and convivial heteronomy, and not in an illusory and melancholy autonomy, from which we cannot see the moving whole that draws us into its undefined field.

The transgression of anthropomorphism by the formless, its smearing into an endless series of roiling surfaces at the conjunction of anguish and laughter, and something equally extreme and akin to ecstasy – points to an extending of a Bataillean left-handed sacred, unlucky, taboo, and improductive¹⁰, on the outer edge of the Anthropocene: more leveling than elevating, more lacerating and dispersing of forms than holding them together and holding them fast. Such a formulation of a path forward in this crisis would be more about experiencing our transgressive passions as authentic, tragic, and unfinished responses to the prospects of loss and extinction, and new ways of making kin and keeping with the trouble, as Donna Haraway might put it, in the ruins of the near future. More about those things than the feckless confidence games of denial and assured survival, or the hollow consolations of righteous indignation and bitter grief.