Notes on Oceanic Pharmacology: Nature, Technics, Time
NICHOLAS ANDERMAN
University of California, Berkeley
For the official version of record, see here:
Anderman, N. (2022). Notes on Oceanic Pharmacology. Media Theory, 6(2), 159-184. Retrieved from https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/192
Abstract
Recent oceanographic research indicates that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), one of the earth’s major oceanic circulatory systems, has begun to weaken rapidly. Should the system continue to slow, it will have potentially devastating consequences for climatic negentropy. Given this situation, the world ocean might be understood as a vast, watery pharmakon: a material space of ambivalent effects, yielding up both life and death on a planetary scale. This article explores the pharmacological dimensions of seawater, in four parts. Part one establishes the concept of oceanic pharmacology in conversation with Jacques Derrida’s reading of Plato’s Phaedrus. Part two looks at Bernard Stiegler’s theorization of Derridean différance and phusis, or nature, in order to argue that the ocean is not a natural thing at all, but must instead be understood as a technical object, i.e. as pharmakon. Part three critically surveys geophysical research on AMOC decline in an effort to shift the concept of oceanic pharmacology into a materialist register. Finally, part four takes up the crucial temporal dimensions of oceanic pharmacology in the context of Christina Sharpe’s notion of residence time. Thinking with Sharpe, the paper concludes with a discussion of what I call resonance time: an oceanic temporality of pharmacological uncertainty.
Keywords
ocean, oceanic, pharmacology, pharmakon, nature, technics
Introduction
In this article, I revisit the concept of the pharmakon in order to examine how it might help make sense of the contemporary climatic conjuncture. I do so with the hope that a renewed attention to pharmacology may provide novel resources for a geographically inflected media studies to intervene in crucial ongoing debates around the relationship between environmental catastrophe and the temporality of the earth. By “geographically inflected,” I mean to delineate a materialist, non-media-centric media studies concerned primarily with tracing what Sarah Sharma has called “the rhythm of relations that particular technologies instigate or set off” (2019: 203).[1] The specific technology I explore in this essay is not usually understood as a technical thing at all, namely the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, one of the world ocean’s major circulation systems. Recent oceanographic research indicates that the AMOC, which includes the Gulf Stream, has begun to weaken rapidly. Should the system continue to slow down––which most scientists agree is a certainty at this point––it will likely have devastating consequences for climatic negentropy. As such, this article proposes that the world ocean might generatively be understood as a vast liquid pharmakon: a space of ambivalent effects, yielding up both life and death on a planetary scale.
To inaugurate and develop the concept of oceanic pharmacology, the essay pulls together two disparate kinds of knowledge: empirical geophysical knowledge on the one hand, and what is generally called philosophical, speculative, or theoretical knowledge on the other. One danger of this approach is that the theory is simply applied to the empirics in a facile or superficial manner, thus leaving both theory and empirics unchanged. Ideally, what we want instead from a theoretical analysis of an empirical object is for the object to defy the theory in some way, or to be unintelligible to it, thus necessitating a theoretical transformation. As the geographer Andrew Barry puts it, a productive theory-case pairing should “[tell] us something that we do not know or [create] an effect that is somehow unanticipated” (2010: 89). Putting the AMOC into conversation with the pharmakon yields this outcome precisely: both pharmacology and the world ocean emerge from their encounter with one another altered in important ways, with implications for a materialist media studies of environmental matter. Specifically, the concept of oceanic pharmacology has relevance for two reasons. First, because it suggests new modes of living amidst and within (but not necessarily against) capitalogenic climate change. And second, because it implies a basis for communal existence, or what might be called a notional politics, centered not on the troubled and troubling figure of anthropos, but on a capacious notion of the living that incorporates at every turn the non-living, i.e. the technical conditions that may allow for a prolongation of life on earth.
The article begins with some theoretical ground clearing. In the first section, I trace the development of the concept of pharmacology in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Jacques Derrida’s influential reading of the Phaedrus, which turns out to have considerable oceanic resonances. Next, in part two, I work through Bernard Stiegler’s theorization of Derridean différance and phusis, or nature. The point here is not to provide a definitive genealogy or a blinkered intellectual history of pharmacology. Rather, my aim is to draw out and develop a few key components of the term in order to attach it firmly, i.e. internally, to a critical-geographic understanding of the AMOC. Two claims emerge from these initial sections. First, I propose that the pharmakon has long been intertwined with the ocean, both conceptually and materially. Second, I suggest that a revitalized, explicitly oceanic understanding of pharmacology may have relevance within debates around climatic nature, on the one hand, and climatic temporality on the other. Pulling together these disparate threads, I argue that the ocean should not be conceived of as a natural space at all, but must instead be understood as technical apparatus, as material culture, as media, or as pharmakon.
The idea that the ocean is more than one thing, that it blurs longstanding natural scientific and metaphysical distinctions between nature, culture, and technics is of course well established in human geography, environmental media studies, and across the interpretive social sciences more broadly. Scholars working in the so-called “blue” (inter)disciplines figure the ocean variously as a “planetary archive of meaning and matter” (Neimanis, 2012: 98), as “the site of imperial incursion” (Hofmeyr, 2019: 12), as an “optical and sensory medium” capable of reorienting terrestrial modes of understanding (Jue, 2020: 22), and as “a space of volume” best thought “through a wet ontology” (Steinberg and Peters, 2015: 252), to cite only a few influential approaches.[2] In The Marvelous Clouds, John Durham Peters contrasts the experience of whales to that of humans at sea, to suggest that the meaning of oceanic media is species dependent: “Our access to cetacean nature is always technical…We learn their nature only through technical means––also the way we learn our own nature. Technics reveals––and, like all crafts, substitutes––for being” (2015: 110). I concur with Peters, and with the oceanic scholars cited above, on the ocean’s mutability and multiplicity of meanings, but I want to emphasize the radical indeterminacy of oceanographic knowledge, and of the distinction between nature and technics. As Stefan Helmreich points out, theorizing with seawater “can conjure new reifications” (2011: 133) that are especially difficult to see because they emerge from and are sustained by the material and discursive flux of ocean currents, fluid dynamics, and flows. The oceanic mode of pharmacology I sketch out here underscores the ambiguity of the nature/technics distinction, refusing at every turn to resolve or reify it, and yielding up in place of knowledge recursive difference and a kaleidoscopic deferral of meaning.
In part three, I approach oceanic pharmacology from the perspective of recent oceanographic research documenting the rapidly changing state of the AMOC.[3] Situating the planetary movement of seawater in the context of critical geographic and environmental media scholarship on ocean circulation leads to a discussion of what it means for a non-linear earth system like the AMOC to “decline” (Lobelle et al., 2020; Weijer et al., 2020), to “weaken” (Bonnet et al., 2021) or to “slow down” (Latif et al., 2019; Caesar et al., 2021) as recent geophysical research describes the situation. Not only do these scientific explanations tend to efface their own deeply situated reliance on a whole range of inscriptive, infrastructural systems––sensor networks, data processing, computational modeling, and so on[4]––but they also repeatedly fail to account for the hyper-complexity and unknowability of the AMOC. The geographer Jessica Lehman helpfully formulates this failure in terms of a set of “productive limits of planetary knowledge about the ocean and its relation to Earth systems dynamics” (2021: 843). These limits to oceanographic understanding are productive, I argue, in part because they reveal the fundamental pharmacological ambiguities that subtend all oceanic knowledge.
In the fourth and final section, I elaborate further on the slowing movement of the AMOC by analyzing Christina Sharpe’s brief discussion of the oceanographic concept of residence time, which refers to the amount of time it takes for matter––including, in Sharpe’s crucial intervention, the bodies of Africans who jumped or were thrown overboard in the Middle Passage––to disappear entirely from seawater. For Sharpe, residence time designates the co-presence, or the shared present, of Black life and Black death, which is to say the ongoing constitution of being by and through (oceanic) nonbeing. Thinking with Sharpe, the paper concludes with a brief exploration of what I call resonance time, an oceanic temporality of pharmacological uncertainty. This final section seeks to make explicit the political stakes of oceanic pharmacology and to indicate how the concept might be put to use.
Derrida’s oceanography
Right from the start and somewhat outlandishly, I want to assert that the imperceptible laws and rules that subtend “Plato’s Pharmacy” are inextricably tied up with and bound to an oceanic eidos.[5] This is because Derrida’s text is itself concerned with identifying the hidden laws and rules that compose and endlessly recompose pharmacology, a term with significant oceanic underpinnings of its own, as we will see. Perhaps inevitably then, the oceanic currents and sub-currents that lend (in)coherence to the pharmakon in general, and to Plato’s pharmakon in particular, also flow into and through the text of “Plato’s Pharmacy,” where, although “they can never be booked, in the present” (as Derrida notes of any text’s laws and rules), they may, I propose, be dredged up in the future, as if from the inky depths of some deep ocean trench. In this first part of the paper, then, I range across Derrida’s text as a seafarer would read a periplus––an ancient Greek geographic log of ports and coastal landmarks viewed from the deck of a ship at sea. Except instead of some remote section of Erythraean coastline, here the object of analysis is the submerged corpus of the pharmakon, and specifically the pharmakon’s thus far “definitively lost” oceanic laws and rules.
On the face of it, Derrida’s text has nothing to do with the ocean. “Plato’s Pharmacy” consists of an interrogation of the relationship between hypomnesis, i.e. writing as a technical or artificial support for memory, and anamnesis, i.e. thinking, remembering, speaking, or living for oneself, or what Stiegler calls “the autonomy of thought” (2010: 2). In the Phaedrus dialogue, Socrates refers to writing as a dangerous pharmakon, whose toxic effects risk fatally poisoning humans’ innate anamnetic faculties, which themselves are what make us capable of knowing and learning in the first place, and thus what make us human. Derrida deconstructs as a fiction any clear distinction between writing and thinking/speaking, arguing instead that all thought relies in fundamental ways on supplemental, inscriptive––that is hypomnesic––mediation. Derrida interprets writing, then, as truly pharmacological, not in the one-sided negative sense proposed by Plato, but in the sense that writing is a fundamentally ambiguous activity, which both enables and threatens thought in equal measure. In “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Derrida unearths contradictory uses of the term pharmakon across Plato’s oeuvre, where it signifies, variously: “drug,” “medicine,” “poison,” “philter,” “remedy,” “charm,” “recipe,” and so on (Derrida, 1981: 70-1). The image of the pharmakon that emerges is of an indeterminate or perhaps overdetermined signifier, its referent always aporetically doubled and doubling.
“Plato’s Pharmacy” is thus an effort to reconstitute the hidden “chain of significations,” (Derrida, 1981: 129) which provides the pharmakon with its significatory ambivalence and depth, and also simultaneously with its seductive allure, which, as Derrida puts it, “makes one stray from one’s general, natural, habitual paths and laws” (1981: 70). In this first section I attempt a parallel analysis in order to reconstitute the hidden oceanic eidos that subtend(s) both Derrida’s text and the pharmakon itself. To pivot towards the sea in this manner is not to call into question Derrida’s own analysis, nor should it be interpreted as an attempt to claim, by way of a “strong” argument, that the pharmakon is only, always, or even unequivocally oceanic. Rather, I mean simply to open or initiate the possibility of oceanic pharmacology in a meta-theoretical register by working through some instances of the ocean in the pharmakon in Derrida’s text. What is evident is that the oceanic significations, or better yet the oceanic words I point to here appear in the text and, taken together, might be said to form a submarine layer running just beneath the surface of “Plato’s Pharmacy.”
Let us start by looking briefly at the ancient Greek pharmakos ritual. The term pharmakos is a near synonym of pharmakeus, the latter of which means magician, sorcerer, or spell-caster, that is, the entity who administers or handles the pharmakon. But in ancient Greece, as Derrida points out, pharmakos has the added connotation of a scapegoat, a meaning that refers to a very specific and apparently common rite, which seems to reside at the center of ancient Greek society. Derrida quotes the Byzantine scholar Tzetzes’s description of the ceremony:
If a calamity overtook the city by the wrath of God, whether it were famine or pestilence or any other mischief, they led forth as though to a sacrifice [a scapegoat (pharmakos)] as a purification and remedy to the suffering city. They set the sacrifice in the appointed place, and gave him cheese with their hands and a barley cake and figs and other wild plants. Finally they burnt him with fire with the wood of wild trees and scattered the ashes into the sea and to the winds, for a purification, as I said, of the suffering city (Derrida, 1981: 133).
The pharmakos ritual was reportedly practiced in some form or another across the Greek world from the time of Plato in the fourth century BCE through at least the fifth century CE. The details of the rite vary widely by source. For example, the pharmakos is not always killed––in some accounts he is merely abandoned in the desert, or simply expelled from the polis forever. However, Walter Burkert recounts multiple instances of the pharmakos being put to death at sea:
From the cliffs of Leukas in the precinct of Apollo Leukatas a condemned criminal was plunged into the sea every year; he was, however, provided with wings to lighten his leap and an attempt was made to fish him up again. Another report speaks of a young man being plunged into the sea for Poseidon, in order to be rid of all evil with him… (1985: 83).
For Derrida, the ceremonial sacrifice of the pharmakos is primarily about reinscribing the boundary line between inside and outside. “It is necessary,” he writes, “to put the outside back in its place. To keep the outside out,” (1981: 128). In the context of the ritual, then, both the pharmakos and the ocean are made into representatives of this outside. We might think of the pharmakos as a species of ocean creature––a stingray or an octopus, perhaps[6]––in that the pharmakos essentially belongs to the sea and not the land. More than this, however, the pharmakos is representative of an oceanic outside that will not stay outside, an encroaching sea that is always already on the inside––this is why the ritual was repeated annually in Athens and other cities across the Greek world. As Derrida notes, the pharmacological outside penetrates the inside at every turn and is thus constitutive of it. The sea eternally returns.
Here it is difficult not to think of another, parallel encroachment, namely the increasingly commonplace intrusion of the ocean into everyday life across much of the planet due to catastrophic climate change. There is a revealing analogy to be drawn between the pharmakos ritual and the case of contemporary climate refugees who have been cast out of their homes because of rising water tables, flooding rivers, and so on. Indeed, it seems ever more likely that in the coming decades many more of us will be made into sacrificial oceanic pharmakoi of one kind or another, chased across the rocky boundary that separates land from sea and life from death. The analogy is not perfect, but to think climatic catastrophe in the schema of ancient Greek sacrifice in this manner raises a crucial and difficult set of questions. Who is responsible for this sacrificing? Where on earth is the inside that the expulsion of this particular outside is meant to shore up? And what polis, or community, is today being transformed from death into life via the oceanic movement of the pharmakon?
Derrida repeatedly notes that the pharmakon is poison(ous)––it is a transformative pollutant, by which he means that it transforms by polluting, by transgressing, by crossing boundaries and thus reaffirming the sanctity of those very same boundaries: “whether it be a question of sperm or of writing, the transgression of the law is a priori subject to a law of transgression” (Derrida, 1981: 153). But what is meant by pollution, or for that matter purity, in the case of the pharmakon? In the Phaedrus, Plato describes the pharmakon as a harmful pollutant because it introduces (hypomnesic) artificiality into phusis (nature) and into anamnesis, or human nature, which for Plato is an extension of nature in general.[7] Contra Plato, however, Derrida disarticulates anamnesis from hypomnesis, arguing rather that writing constitutes all thought/memory. Here we arrive at what I take to be the liquid center of Derrida’s deconstruction of the Phaedrus. His point is not simply that Plato got the causal order wrong, that in actuality writing always precedes thought, rather than the other way around. To make this claim would be to naïvely reinscribe the static, hierarchical distinction between memory and writing proposed by Plato. Rather, Derrida’s contention is that the pharmakon operates at a deeper level than both anamnesis and hypomnesis, that it both precedes and exceeds their opposition as such. We can conceptualize it as a never-depleted fund or reserve of potential or possible distinction––not difference in itself, but “the movement, the locus, and the play: (the production of) difference” (Derrida, 1981: 127). The pharmakon is thus synonymic with Derridean différance, the differentiating and deferring force that disarticulates signifier from signified and language from any self-evident meaning (though not, importantly, from meaning per se). Différance, like the pharmakon, is forever hidden away, doing its work “in the back room, in the shadows of the pharmacy, prior to the oppositions between conscious and unconscious, freedom and constraint, voluntary and involuntary, speech and language” (Derrida, 1981: 129), etc. The pharmakon, in Derrida’s analysis, not only (re)produces these opposing pairs, but also holds in abeyance their internal divisions, suspending them in its “bottomless fund” (1981: 127) of differentiation and deferral.[8]
Stiegler’s pharmaco-technics
This fundamental ambivalence, the pharmakon’s deep “structure of ambiguity and reversibility” (Derrida, 1981: 112), is taken up and carried forward by Derrida’s student Stiegler, first in his early work on technics and then later in a more explicit manner in the context of libidinal political economy and its relationship to what he called the neganthropocene. Underlying his entire project, however, are a few basic claims about the relationship between nature, technics, and time, a relationship that for Stiegler is essentially pharmacological. In this section, I will attempt to briefly explicate these claims, and to trace out a few of their consequences for oceanic pharmacology.
While Derrida focuses primarily on the pharmacological technique of writing, Stiegler explicitly reads the pharmakon not only into technical artefacts and material processes of various kinds, up to and including the ongoing collapse of climatic negentropy (Wambacq et al., 2018: 138), but into the very origins of humanity as such. Stiegler’s pharmaco-technics rests on a set of arguments initially developed in Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. In that text, he argues that hominization, the evolutionary development of humans from primates, took place only through, by, and as a result of tool-use, such that technicity and the human have co-constituted one another from the very beginning, and continue to produce and endlessly reproduce one another today. “The ambiguity of the invention of the human,” Stiegler writes, “that which holds together the who and the what, binding them while keeping them apart, is différance undermining the authentic/inauthentic divide” (1998: 141). Here we see différance, i.e. the pharmakon, at the very center of Stiegler’s thinking, mediating endlessly between life, on the one hand, and non-living technicity on the other. Perhaps the central problematic of his early work is this relationship between technical evolution and biological evolution, between tekhnē and bios: “the question of the traditional opposition between technical entities and entities deriving from phusis…” (1998: 26).[9]
Stiegler’s response to this question is not so much to answer it as to liquefy its terms from the inside:
If one can speak of a natural technical evolution, this is because the technical object, in becoming concretized, is in the process of naturalization: the concretization of the abstract technical object is its progress toward a naturalness that allows it as well to escape being known, its filiation improbably engendering its becoming beyond the “intellectual system” that gives birth to it. The difference between phusis and tekhnē thus fades, as if the industrial technical object had engendered a third milieu in which it “becomes more and more like a natural object…” (Stiegler, 1998: 77, emphasis in original; the quote at the end is from Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects.)
I want to linger on the word fades here. The difference between technics and nature does not disappear entirely; it is not the case that the technical object becomes nature. Rather, it becomes “more and more like” nature, until it is impossible to distinguish the two. There is an ultimate undecidability at play, whereby determining conclusively if the object under investigation is phusis or tekhnē becomes impossible, as the one has faded irremediably into the other.[10] This is the pharmakon at work, though at this point in his career Stiegler refers not to pharmacology as such, but to Derridean différance, which as we have seen is always already pharmacological.
In describing the origins of his own philosophical project, Stiegler refers to technics as a passage “remaining to be thought” by Derrida. Stiegler maintained that it was this lacuna in Derrida’s work that led him (Stiegler, that is) to write Technics and Time. Here he is in 2009, reiterating this point: “[Derrida] was not able to articulate his critique of structuralism with an analysis of its discourse on technics, or rather, of its lack of such a discourse…” (2009: 104). Irrespective of the validity of this critique,[11] Stiegler’s focus on technics, and particularly his theorization of the relation between nature and technics as différance, is suggestive of oceanic pharmacology in at least three ways.
First, Stiegler helps us to see that the ocean is not a natural space in any simple or traditional sense of the word “natural.” That the very existence of nature has long been called into question by geographers, by philosophers of science, and by a range of other thinkers does not negate this claim.[12] Rather, Stiegler’s emphasis on the ambiguity of the relationship between technics and nature deepens and complicates earlier critiques of the nature/culture dichotomy. Perhaps most importantly, Stiegler’s version of the distinction shifts attention away from idealist and colonial-ethnographic notions of culture towards a materialist understanding of the culture concept as, basically, everything made by humans, i.e. as technics. The Internation Collective, established by Stiegler with the explicit aim of fighting entropy at multiple scales, was founded precisely on the basis of a philosophically rigorous articulation of the technicity of nature. Daniel Ross states the project’s underlying precept succinctly: “the biosphere…has now become so anthropized that it can equally be referred to as a technosphere…” (Bishop and Ross, 2021: 118). As with the discussion of the “fading” of the difference between phusis and tekhnē in Technics and Time I, the point I want to make here is not just that the ocean is technical in lieu of nature, but rather that the ocean is pharmakon, which is to say that the ocean’s natural or technical being is, in some ultimate sense, unknowable. This ambiguity is communicated neatly by Ross’s notion of “referring” to the biosphere as a technosphere. Summarizing both Derrida’s and Stiegler’s position, Ross describes the pharmakon as “both the condition of possibility of knowledge and the condition of its impossibility, so to speak” (Bishop and Ross, 2021: 115). The extent to which this is materially the case at sea will be made clear in my discussion of the AMOC below.
Second, Stiegler’s rendering of nature as technics demands rethinking the primal pharmacological distinction between outside/inside. Summing up Plato’s deployment of the pharmakon in the Phaedrus, Derrida describes this opposition as follows:
In order for these contrary values (good/evil, true/false, essence/appearance, inside/outside, etc.) to be in opposition, each of the terms must be simply external to the other, which means that one of these oppositions (the opposition between inside and outside) must already be accredited as the matrix of all possible opposition (1981: 103).
Later, still referring to Plato, Derrida tells us that the pharmakon “doesn’t come from around here. It comes from afar…” Specifically, as we have already seen, it comes from the ocean, which might be thought of as an ur-figure or image of the outside, both for the ancient Greeks as for us today. When, during the pharmakos ritual, the pharmakoi are led out of the city walls and cast into the sea, the idea is that the polluted substance inside the polis is excised and returned to where it belongs, to its home beyond the world of the living. However, if, as per Stiegler, nature cannot be understood as external to human activity, then the ocean cannot properly be conceived of as “outside” landed society at all. Indeed, the ocean must be thought instead as living right at the center of the inside, as constituting the inside, and as having preceded the (landed) inside and so functioning as its recurrent origin. The ocean has of course always produced life on land in important ways––think of maritime trade, of fisheries, and of the weather, not to mention research indicating that life on earth originated from deep ocean vents. Moreover, as discussed further below, recent scholarship on the AMOC suggests that slowing ocean circulation will have significant material impacts on landed life for the foreseeable future.
Third, Stiegler’s analysis raises explicitly the question of the temporality of the ocean. This question will occupy us for the remainder of this article. Stiegler’s explanation of the relationship between technics and time, stated succinctly, is that technics is memory, i.e. that technics forms the horizon of possibility for human experiences of time as such. As a reminder, Stiegler conceives of temporality in phenomenological terms, whereby each moment in time is connected to a previous moment via retention, and, at once, to a future moment via protention, or what he thinks of (invoking Heidegger) as anticipation. To the two-part Husserlian schema of primary and secondary protention/retention, Stiegler adds the concept of tertiary retention, whereby memories of other people who pre-exist us are still accessible to us in technical form.[13] In this way, “all technical objects constitute an intergenerational support of memory which, as material culture, overdetermines learning and mnesic activities” (Stiegler, 2010: 9). Now, if the ocean is conceived as a technical entity, in Stiegler’s pharmacological sense of technical, then this opens up the question, once again, of the temporality of the ocean, and in particular the question of the movement of memory in and through the technical milieu of seawater. To what extent does the ocean today function as an intergenerational support of memory? Does the movement of seawater structure temporal experience, as Stiegler’s theorization of technics suggests? If so, how exactly does this work? And most importantly, what is at stake in thinking the ocean in conjunction with memory and temporality in this manner? To answer these questions, it is necessary to turn now to the AMOC and to residence time in more detail.
The pharmakon in the AMOC
It is difficult to overstate the importance of the AMOC for planetary climatic stability. For millennia this enormous circulatory system has continuously moved massive amounts of warm, salty water from what is now the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean across the Atlantic Ocean to the west and north coasts of Europe. The AMOC is thought to be responsible for as much as one quarter of global northward ocean heat transport. As such, it is generally held to be the cause of the relative warmth of the Northern Hemisphere.[14] The AMOC is a key component of the global thermohaline ocean circulation system, wherein saltwater that has been warmed by the sun in the equatorial regions travels on the surface of the ocean both north and south, cooling along the way, until it sinks near the poles. Now in the depths, cold water travels back to the equator, where upwelling brings it to the surface and the whole process begins again. Thermohaline circulation is one of the planet’s primary mechanisms of heat redistribution; it is integral not only to the distribution of life on earth, but also to the timely question of life’s ability to persist for much longer, or not.[15] Here, already, the pharmacological contours of ocean circulation are apparent: “the pharmakon and writing are always involved in questions of life and death” (Derrida, 1981: 105).
The geophysical research indicates that as of 2021, the AMOC was at its weakest state in a millennium due to capitalogenic warming. In a recent meta-study of multiple published proxy records, Caesar et al. (2021) reconstruct the evolution of the AMOC since around 400 CE. Prior to the nineteenth century, the movement of the AMOC appears to have been relatively stable and continuous. Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, an initial decline in the system is detected across the oceanographic record. Then, around 1960, the system enters a new phase of precipitous decline, followed by a brief recovery in the 1990s, before continued rapid decline from around 2005 to the present. Indeed, since 2005, high-resolution data indicate considerable and progressive weakening of the circulatory system. Other recent scientific efforts to understand changes to the AMOC arrive at slightly different conclusions. In a survey of 27 global climate models, for example, Weijer et al. found a slight upward trend in the AMOC from the 1850s through the 1980s, followed by precipitous decline through today. The authors hypothesize that the 1850-1980s increase “reflects a compensation between AMOC response to a continuing increase in greenhouse gasses, and to a late-20th century peak in sulfate aerosol forcing” (2020: 5). Regardless, the point stands that, as Caesar et al. describe the situation, “the modern AMOC slowdown is unprecedented in over a thousand years” (2021: 120).
It is necessary at this point to pull back a bit from the AMOC science, so as to point out that an environmental entity on the scale of the AMOC is not simply or empirically knowable or representable in an unmediated, everyday, or phenomenological manner. “No one lives in a ‘global’ climate,” points out Paul Edwards (2010: 4). Rather, oceanographers have had to construct the AMOC from, as it were, the ocean up, collecting local, contingent data from the water column and the seabed, then putting that data into conversation with various other metrics in the context of planetary-scale computational climate models and what Edwards calls “global knowledge infrastructures” (2010). The AMOC should thus not be mistaken for a self-evident or autonomously operating thing in the world; we can only know it via technical mediation and scientific imaginaries. In one sense, then, the AMOC is itself pharmacologically inscribed by geophysical science into our understanding of what the ocean is. In another, however, thinking with and about the AMOC involves continually brushing up against the limits of scientific understanding.
This critique of scientific ways of knowing has particular relevance here because the idea of a “slowing” AMOC calls to mind the popular “conveyor-belt diagram” of ocean circulation, which, as Lehman points out, severely underplays the recursive intricacies of the movement of seawater through ocean space. As recently as the 1970s, oceanographers thought that water circulated placidly and continuously throughout the oceans, like a conveyor belt, and that the deep ocean was mostly still and devoid of life. Over the course of the past half century, however, data obtained from satellites––initially in the context of Cold War military-industrial competition––and other new sampling methods showed that the water column was in fact coursing with chaotic energy, in the deeps and in the shallows alike. The emerging consensus today is that the deep ocean likely has an enormous amount of life in it, much of it still unknown to us. Moreover, contemporary ocean circulation models are “characterized less by the steady flows of the conveyor-belt heuristic and more by swirling, fluctuating, meandering features that follow the laws of chaos and complexity rather than linear calculation” (Lehman, 2021: 849). Suggesting that ocean variability thus marks both an epistemic and an infrastructural limit to planetary-scale knowledge, Lehman goes on to show that far from shutting down scientific activity, science’s encounter with these limits tends to result in a flurry of activity and thought, directed at least in part at shoring up the authority of scientific knowledge production itself. This is why Lehman deems these limits “productive.”
However, as Lehman herself notes, scientific productivity does not by definition negate or overcome the radical uncertainty that continues to haunt oceanography today. As she describes the situation:
…ocean variability and its relationship to the very systematicity of the Earth should be considered as the posing of a potential limit without clear resolution: it may not be possible to know something so fundamental as the mean state of the ocean” (2021: 855).
What we are dealing with here, I contend, is the basic ambiguity of the oceanic pharmakon. Of course, none of this negates the evidence of the AMOC’s rapid weakening, nor are these issues completely unknown to the scientists who study oceanic and atmospheric circulation. Caesar et al., for instance, point repeatedly to the limits of existing AMOC modelling, and to the challenges of tracking oceanic circulation more generally (2021: 120). Their own model incorporates not only historical marine sediment samples, surface temperature readings, subsurface water mass properties, and evidence of physical changes to deep-sea currents, but also terrestrial data like tree rings and ice-core samples––a reflection, perhaps, of the impossibility of determining ocean circulation on the basis of oceanic evidence alone. How and when, after all, should one “measure an entity that is always changing” (Lehman, 2021: 850)? However, even as they acknowledge the limits to existing models, Caesar et al. describe the weakening of the AMOC as a slowdown, by which they presumably mean that the currents, gyres, eddies, fluxes, and other active mechanisms that compose the non-linear system are moving today at a more moderate pace than at any other time in the past millennium. But this can only be a general claim, for, as they point out, not enough is known about how the AMOC works to grasp with much clarity its ongoing transformation:
Improved understanding of this slowdown is urgently needed. The next step is to resolve which components and pathways of the AMOC have altered, how, and why––no small feat, and requiring a community effort… (Caesar et al., 2021: 120).
The apparent slowing of the AMOC, and our inability to know it, has at least two further pharmacological implications. First, it refers us once again to the crucial temporal dimension of différance, i.e. the pharmakon’s capacity for deferment, for stilling the forward movement of time. The ocean is the earth’s largest heat sink––it collects and stores the bulk of the planet’s thermal energy, only to release it slowly back into the atmosphere over time. In this way, then, the ocean has always deferred future warming, even as it guarantees future warmth. Today, however, due to the slowing of the AMOC (which itself is the result of capitalogenic warming) the ocean’s ability to continue to take in atmospheric heat has been severely compromised. On the one hand, we can interpret this situation as a flattening of the temporal capacities of the ocean, and so as a foreshortening of the temporality of the earth. On the other hand, the fact that the sea is currently saturated with heat means that even if the global economy were shut down entirely today, the ocean would continue to pump excess heat into the atmosphere for decades to come. The ocean can thus be conceptualized as pharmacological not only in terms of the impossibility of knowing it, in an epistemic and/or infrastructural sense, but also at the level of thermal geophysics, i.e. as a pharmacological reserve or an excessive store of thermal energy. In this way, then, we might say that the ocean is not just conceptually, but also materially pharmacological.
Second, the slowing of the AMOC calls into question not only the very existence of a monolithic movement of time, but specifically the distinction between the time of the living and the time of the non-living. As I understand it, this ambiguity between life and death is central to what the pharmakon is, to the extent that the pharmakon can be said to be (a thing) at all. To better grasp this existential meaning of the AMOC, and to add an additional, critically important layer to our accretive understanding of oceanic pharmacology, I will turn in the final section to Christina Sharpe’s description of residence time.
Sharpe’s stilled oceanic temporalities
In oceanography and other environmental sciences, residence time refers simply to the amount of time it takes for a given substance to pass entirely through a particular body of water. The term measures time and also, simultaneously, volumetric space––it signifies the speed of movement of a substance through water. The writer and Black Studies scholar Christina Sharpe deploys the concept of residence time in the context of a searching exploration of the temporality of Black being “in the wake” of the Middle Passage (2016). Here is her initial reference to residence time, in full:
The amount of time it takes for a substance to enter the ocean and then leave the ocean is called residence time. Human blood is salty, and sodium, [the geologist Anne] Gardulski tells me, has a residence time of 260 million years. And what happens to the energy that is produced in the waters? It continues cycling like atoms in residence time. We, Black people, exist in the residence time of the wake, a time in which “everything is now. It is all now” (Sharpe, 2016: 41).
Residence time, in Sharpe’s usage, refers to the corporeal material of the bodies of those Africans who jumped or were thrown overboard in the Middle Passage, and whose decorporealized matter continues to circulate through the unstable flows of the AMOC and other oceanic current systems today. In the Wake explores the many ways that Black being and Black nonbeing are woven together and co-constitute one another. For Sharpe, the concept of residence time describes the duration or temporality of Black suffering and death, while at the same time designating or naming a key temporal condition of Black life.[16] When Sharpe writes “we, Black people, exist in the residence time of the wake…” she is referring at once to the (re)production of Black being and to the still-circulating nonbeing produced by the slave system, by the Atlantic passage, by the racist violence of contemporary carceral regimes, and so on. The nowness of residence time, as denoted by the quote from Beloved at the end of the passage, thus describes the co-existence in time of Black life and Black death, what we might call the coterminous relationship between being and nonbeing, or, more simply still, the presence of nonbeing in being, and the constitution and structuration of the latter by the former.[17] The line that Sharpe draws between life and death is thus not really a line at all, but rather a door that is held open by the pharmacological movement of différance.[18]
In Sharpe’s text the ocean literally holds (onto) the material stuff of Black (non)being, refusing to give it up, keeping it always in motion, cycling it now through the tropics, now through the depths, now through the past, now through the present––as she points out, at sea everything is now. This oceanic circulation, which holds in infinite suspension both the closure of the past and the opening of the future, is of course the movement of the pharmakon. How could it be otherwise? In “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Thoth, the god of the pharmakon, “knows how to put an end to life,” but is also capable of raising the dead (1981: 94); residence time, meanwhile, entails the literal raising of the dead from the bottom of the ocean. And even though the hypomnesic ocean is not itself anamnesic memory, in Sharpe’s rendering the ocean clearly “affects memory and hypnotizes it in its very inside” (Derrida, 1981: 110). Indeed, both Derrida and Stiegler might as well be describing the hypnotic effects of residence time on memory, of living with and alongside and interpenetrated with the past, and thus always with and in death.
In a 2017 interview, Sharpe describes her ongoing interest in and continued exploration of the concept of residence time:
[In In the Wake] I wrote about residence time of sodium being 260 million years, I thought about that in relation to those Africans who were thrown, dumped or jumped overboard in the Middle Passage. I was thinking about the [slave ship] Zong, but also beyond the Zong, and into the present. […]
I’m still trying to think about residence time…. I want to think about Black still life in which the word still carries all of its meanings: still as in the opposite of a moving picture, something that has durations, something that’s without a certain kind of movement, but, [in my current monograph project Black. Still. Life.] I also think about still in the wake. I give different examples of a life that I call anagrammatical: the way they were shipped in relation to Black life. I want to think residence time still in relation to water… (Sharpe and Lambert, 2017: n/p).
I do not know if the slowing of the AMOC played any role in Sharpe’s turn to still life, and to the stilling and stillness of Black life in the hold of residence time that she describes here. What is certain, however, is that the continued weakening of the AMOC will not so much still the movement of residence time as transform that movement in as-yet unknown and unknowable ways. This future indeterminacy should be understood precisely as the radical deferral engendered by the oceanic pharmakon, a deferral of time but also, simultaneously, a deferral of the finality and meaningfulness of the distinction between life and death. Here, then, we have arrived again at the question of the possibility of the continuation of life on earth, given the ongoing ecological catastrophe of racist capitalist accumulation.
One potential response to this question is to move further into a Stieglerian theorization of technicity, in order to grapple with technics as the very “specificity of the temporality of life in which life is inscription in the nonliving, spacing, temporalization, differentiation, and deferral by, of and in the nonliving, in the dead” (Stiegler, 1998: 139-40, emphasis added). As this passage suggests, Stiegler enables us to think the movement of the living “by, of and in” the dead as technical mediation, which is to say as pharmakon. But in this technical rendering we lose any sense of the materiality of the bond between ocean space and the human body. Given Sharpe’s crucial engagement with the ocean(ic) as a vector of racialization, this is a real loss. Instead, in conclusion, I want to gesture briefly towards a different way of parsing the problem of the continued existence of life on earth, an approach that draws on and operationalizes the concept of oceanic pharmacology that has been provisionally established in this essay.
Residence time, as we have seen, describes a cyclical movement through the space of the ocean and a linear movement forward through time––260 million years forward in the case of sodium. As the AMOC continues to slow, however, and as the oceanic pharmakon enters a new phase of indeterminacy, both of these movements will be transformed. What is the current climatic catastrophe, after all, but a crisis in the relationship between spatialization and temporalization? I wonder, then, if the decline of the AMOC might be taken as an opportunity to confront the apparent necessity of the forward movement of residence time, and, more generally, to rethink the compulsion to circulation encoded in and by capitalism since at least the sixteenth century. In its simplest form, this compulsion is evident in the idea that the movement of commodities through the capitalist system is necessary for life in the exact same way that the movement of blood through the human body is necessary for life. This false but commonplace equivalency belies the fact that capitalist circulation is precisely that which has come to existentially threaten the continuation of life on earth today.
Contra residence time, then, perhaps the current crisis demands that we cultivate a sensitivity to resonance time, an oceanic temporality of pharmacological uncertainty. Resonance time describes the temporal movement of still life, or what Derrida might call the “differing-deferring” (Derrida, 1982: 17) movement of the oceanic pharmakon. If I understand Sharpe correctly, the still in still life does not refer to the stillness of death, in the sense implied by finitude. Rather, as she puts it, still life is “something that’s without a certain kind of movement” (emphasis added). That is, still life is still in motion. And this motion, the movement of still life as pharmakon, must always hold open the door between life and death, and between the past, the present, and the future. This holding open, I want to suggest, is the movement of resonance time, a tensive vibration coursing with suppressed force, trembling with potential energy.
To live in resonance time would mean attempting to grasp the potentialities and possibilities of climatic collapse, not by trying to instill life into all non-living things, as some new materialist work does, but rather by stilling life, by embracing the play of oceanic pharmacology. That is, by remembering that your life relies materially and in each resonant instant on what came before you and on what comes after you. I am not sure if oceanic pharmacology is capable of all this, either at the level of therapeutics or in terms of revolutionary praxis. But a radical transformation of the capitalist economy must be the practical objective of living in resonance time. This would be a revolution devoted to what Yuk Hui and Pieter Lemmens, summarizing Stiegler, call the creation of “a new system of care and attention, of a global ecological care and attention” (2017: 34). In short, a revolution premised on an expansion of the meaning of communism to incorporate the resonant presence and force of the non-living, the abiotic, the inorganic, the technical, the oceanic pharmakon.
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Notes
[1] Regarding non-media-centric media studies, see Morley, 2009; Krajina et al., 2014; and Peters, 2015, among many others.
[2] This is of course a woefully inadequate catalog of oceanic work in environmental media studies, not to mention the fields of Black Atlantic studies, feminist theories of ocean materiality, Indian ocean studies, critical geographic research on ocean shipping, the oceanic or “blue” humanities and interpretive social sciences more generally, and so on. For an extremely cursory primer on studies of the ocean in geography, see Steinberg, 2013. For more contemporary currents in oceanic thought, see at minimum Peters, 2015 (especially chapter two); Siegert, 2010 and 2015 (especially chapters four and eight); Starosielski, 2015; Casarino, 2002; Gilroy, 1993; DeLoughrey, 2019; Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000; Oreskes, 2014; Zyman and Scozzari, 2017; and Sharpe, 2016.
[3] I focus on the AMOC here because Atlantic circulation is better understood by oceanographers than most other large-scale oceanic circulation systems. Nonetheless, my argument is gesturally global in scope––the aim here is to theorize oceanic pharmacology, by which I mean to refer to the world ocean. As such, throughout the paper I refer somewhat interchangeably to the AMOC and to the ocean. I trust this does not present significant conceptual difficulties.
[4] Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
[5] Here I am shamelessly imitating Derrida’s opening assertion in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” which begins as follows:
A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its law and its rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked [livrent jamais], in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.
And hence, perpetually and essentially, they run the risk of being definitively lost. Who will ever know of such disappearances? (Derrida, 1981: 63).
[6] The references here are two-fold. First, in the Meno, as Derrida notes, Plato explicitly refers to Socrates as a stingray: “MENO: […] I feel you are exercising magic and witchcraft upon me and positively laying me under your spell until I am just a mass of helplessness. If I may be flippant, I think that not only in outward appearance but in other respects as well you are exactly like the flat stingray that one meets in the sea. Whenever anyone comes into contact with it, it numbs him, and that is the sort of thing that you seem to be doing to me now (Plato’s Meno 80a-b). Second, in “Enfolded Vision: Refracting The Love Life of the Octopus,” Eva S. Hayward examines the conjoining of cephalopod bodies and human spectatorship on film to explore non-anthropocentric ways of seeing and otherwise experiencing oceanic others (2005). See also Alexis Pauline Gumbs: “Could we acknowledge that we are the place? That as we melt the world, we are becoming ocean creatures (2019: 338)?
[7] Or perhaps vice versa, cf. Laws 10: “in the truest sense and beyond other things the soul may be said to exist by nature; and this would be true if you proved that the soul is older than the body, but not otherwise” (n/p).
[8] There are several additional oceanic references in Plato’s Pharmacy that I could not analyze here. In particular, I would point to the Pharmacia myth recounted on pp. 69-70, wherein Orithyia is blown into the sea; to the oceanic resonances of Derrida’s definitions of histos, specifically I and II.3, on p. 65; to the references to Melville’s Billy Budd and Moby Dick by, of all people, Northrop Frye, in the footnote on p. 132; and to the central role of the sea of Coptos in the tale of Satni-Khamois recounted in the footnote on p. 94. See also Derrida’s contention that the pharmacological medium par excellence is liquid water:
[T]he pharmakon always penetrates like a liquid; it is absorbed, drunk, introduced into the inside […] Liquid is the element of the pharmakon. And water, pure liquidity, is most easily and dangerously penetrated then corrupted by the pharmakon, with which it mixes and immediately unites” (1981: 152).
[9] For a detailed examination of the etymology and origins of phusis I would recommend Naddaf, 2005.
[10] Peters makes a similar point: “The questions of how to define nature, humans, and media are ultimately the same question” (2015: 51).
[11] Scholars continue to debate where exactly Derrida’s thinking ends and Stiegler’s begins across the three volumes of Technics and Time in particular and across Stiegler’s oeuvre more generally. See Roberts, 2005; Vitale, 2020; and, for a primary source, Derrida and Stiegler, 2002.
[12] Key introductory texts in this vast literature would include Williams, 1980; Smith, 1984; and Cronon, 1996.
[13] For brevity’s sake, I have glossed both Stiegler’s and Husserl’s positions here. For a more thorough working through of Stiegler’s relationship to phenomenology, the key text remains Stiegler, 1998.
[14] Interestingly, ocean circulation in the Pacific differs dramatically. There does not appear to be a similarly well-established PMOC, for instance. See Burls et al., 2017; and Su et al., 2018.
[15] Very little was known about the AMOC, nor was the system’s importance to climatic stability properly grasped, until well into the twentieth century: “Even though it was recognized over 200 years ago that the oceans’ cold subsurface waters must originate at high latitudes, it was not appreciated until the 20th century that the strength of the deep circulation might vary over time, or that the ocean’s Meridional Overturning Circulation may be very important for Earth’s climate” (Le Treut et al., 2007: 111).
[16] Naming is a recurrent trope in In the Wake. See, for instance, p. 46.
[17] Morrison is misquoted here, though the original differs only slightly in meaning. In my copy of Beloved the quote runs as follows: “All of it is now it is always now” (2004[1987]:248). Alternately, in Jazz (2004[1992]), Morrison writes, “Anything that happens after this party breaks up is nothing. Everything is now” (191).
[18] To be precise, in Sharpe’s own terms, this is Dionne Brand’s door of no return. See Sharpe, 2016: 131.
Nicholas Anderman is a PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, and an editor at Qui Parle.
Email: nanderman@berkeley.edu
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