The Self at Sea

Solid Identities and Fluid Subjects

While many forces contrive to impose a concrete, finite and impermeable self, as argued by numerous 20th Century theorists, the scaffolds of identity find purchase in no stable foundations. Through hydrotexts we re-immerse ourselves in fluidity, rediscovering the transience of these fickle constructs – that is to say, identities dissolve – and step further towards the liberation of not only our beliefs and behaviours, but our most fundamental inner awareness. Like an ocean weathering the cliffs of terrestrial thought, the flowing world of hydrosemantics allows us to explore the solubility of identity, in a search for personal authenticity energised by agency.

For the modernist and poststructuralist eras foster many inmates. Theorists of the twentieth century suspected the nature (or culture?) of identities, mounting considerable scepticism toward the Subject’s sense of self. Institutions of all kinds – and even language itself, they argued – intertwine to incarcerate the Subject in the artifice of identity, and thereby preserve the status quo. An account of each salient development in such theories of identity and power would greatly exceed the scope of this piece, but I suggest that even a cursory glance at some of the more famous critiques of identity’s apparent solidity suffices for present purposes.

Consider briefly the following cases: Althusser’s suggestion of the interpellating powers of ideological state apparatus, such that the Subject views capitalist society as an extension of the self: natural, normal and inevitable (Bertens 2014: 71-74); Gramsci’s hegemony, in which dominant culture serves the elite by subordinating the majority through cultural production (Bertens 2014: 74-75); Derrida’s notion of différance, by which the meanings of words constantly defer to other words ad infinitum, such that all language is stabilised only by the imposition of violence upon possible interpretations, ultimately constructing false binaries that must be deconstructed (Bertens 2014: 102-120); Lacan’s concept of the mirror-stage of early psychological development, wherein the Subject comes to misrecognise itself through the diffuse perspectives of the Great Other, the arrangement of powers within a society at large (Bertens 2014: 134-137); and Foucault’s discursivity, by which ideologically constituted presuppositions work themselves into the allegedly neutral, objective sciences, such that knowledge itself functions to exercise power (Bertens 2014: 123-131).

Suffice to say, insofar as we wish to account for our sense of self, particularly in relation to language and the present social order in which we find ourselves (that is, find our selves), we would be correct to heed their suspicions. If an array of cultural forces cement the Subject by imposing upon it a chassis of identities, hydrotexts are the acid to liquefy the Subject once more. The process of identity formation reverses, beckoning an unmaking of the self. Instead of lithifying the Subject in identity, hydrotexts facilitate a dissolution of the Subject into fluidity. By hydrosemantics, as I deploy it here, I mean the connotations arising from the fluid Subject in literary texts. Such hydrotexts exercise this fluidity at various levels to reorient our perspectives towards cultural theory – foremost, to destabilise intuitive notions of the self.

We turn first to Adrienne Rich, who seems to share a similar identity-wariness to the aforementioned theorists. Crucially for Rich, the questionable nature of identity avails to us an opportunity to further our authenticity, although the exact qualities of this authenticity go unsaid – and perhaps remain unsayable. In her “Diving into the Wreck”, 1972, she begins: “First having read the book of myths” (1), “I put on the body-armour of black rubber / the absurd flippers / the grave and awkward mask.” (4-6)

By this, Rich seems to echo Gramsci. The “book of myths” may here stand for hegemony – the amalgam of ideas, norms, values and prescriptions that serve the elites of a society foisted upon Subjects so as to create the dominant culture. Hence “the body-armour”, that which prepares the Subject for the dangerous elements and inherent violence of the prevailing social order, for it is the purpose of politics to manage and justify particular distributions of violence (Weber 1918).

Likewise, the flippers are “absurd” and the mask “awkward”, for neither authenticate the Subject. Instead, the Subject is repressed by them, burdened with alien apparel – false notions of the self. If flippers connote mobility and agency, then such absurdity suggests a regression into stasis, inhibition and conformity. For the mask, connoting the artificial reconstitution of our primary senses, the portal to our consciousness and the foremost surface of the self, to rest “awkward” on the face suggests an inner dissonance, a jarring of the internal, authentic self with the falsity of its external representation, hailing Lacan’s Great Other. The identity which one adorns – Rich’s wet suit – is ill-fitting of the true self.

The ladder, which “is always there” (13), is the avenue into the medium of all fluidity – the sphere of dynamic identities, rather than static and ultimately artificial roles imposed upon the self. Introspection, for Rich, is always at our disposal. Once more, just as Lacan’s ‘Great Other’ leads the Subject to misrecognise themselves, the ocean itself flows as a gargantuan body of interrelated organisms and currents. Rich’s speaker enters the hydrosphere – the relational world, per Lacan – submerging herself so as to perceive it for what it is: a web of relationships in flux, rather than a secure, singular identity. Rich assures us of her Subject’s quest for authenticity: “the thing I came for: / the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth” (60-62). For Rich’s speaker, this search can take place in no other medium than water – the realm of fluidity.

For Rich, as for Derrida, fluidity can arise only from dismantling language’s oppressive illusions. To “explore the wreck” (51) is to deconstruct language, and to expose the “purposes” (52) of the words (i.e. the function of language in reproducing social hierarchies). To read words as “maps” (53) is to pursue a destination through language, which Derrida would suggest can lead only to more words, recursively, thereby revealing the inherent ‘constructedness’ of language, falsifying our logocentric presuppositions.

This Derridian shift in the verse seats us before a theatre of the false binaries that language offers us, such as between ‘self and other’. Rich drops her hydrous acid over each instance, writing: “I am she: I am he” (76), and later, “We are, I am, you are” (86), and in so doing inaugurates a collapse of these binaries between gendered selves, between collective and individual. The piece in its totality canvases a model for the Subject to infiltrate itself, disrupting its surface of binary identities to peer deeper into the fluid Subjectivity beneath – escaping the “book of myths / in which our names do not appear” (91-92).

We revisit fluidity in Rebecca Giggs’s “Whale Fall”, where the crowd surrounding a beached whale struggles to label the creature: “How they imagined the whale – predator, prey or distant relation – was anyone’s guess” (Giggs 2015). The creature’s identity effervesces, as the crowd attempts to account for their connection to the creature: are they to fear it (“predator”), is it to fear them (“prey”) or do they share a kind of commonality (“distant relation”)? Giggs recounts the astonishment of the crowd upon learning that whales fall under mammalian taxonomy, just as humxns do – reducing the otherness of the whale, and othering instead the humxn Subjects themselves. The relationship between humxn and whale reminds us of identity’s artificiality and relationality: that it does not fully express who we are, but is constructed through interactions with others. The apparent strangeness of the whale is internalised by the humxn Subject when they learn of the whale and humxnkind’s common biological ancestry, and thereby the Subject sees itself as strange; our stable, finite identity liquefies into a state of possibility: fluidity.

Derek Walcott’s “The Sea is History”, 2007, too seems to support this thesis of identity’s artificiality, but critically, as the telos of history’s eternal march. Walcott’s speaker introduces an eco-Marxist perspective, whereby the natural world bears the scars of class-warfare and the tyranny of markets, erecting the society from which we gain our identities today. What is “only faith” (66) – traditional narratives of (European) society’s development – is “not History” (65) (capitalised to emphasise truthfulness and primacy), but a distortion of stratification and struggle throughout the ages. Hence “each rock broke into its own nation” (67), describing the formation of nationhood through capitalism, as slowly, competing imperial economies swelled to centralise power and industry under the bourgeoisie and increasingly bourgeois-orientated government.

Walcott recites the emergence of this modernising social milieu. The rising call for democracy – “the bullfrog bellowing for a vote” (70) – speaks to the growing demands for worker self-governance and collective ownership of the means of production during the early industrial period, as labourers resisted the encroach of a then-nascent capitalism. Scientists and engineers – “fireflies with bright ideas” (71) – invented creations that could mechanise workplaces to produce new commodities, accelerating production, and thereby exploitation. The “mantis, like khaki police” (73) and “furred caterpillars of judges” (74) paint Walcott’s impression of the industrialising world, in which the arbitration and enforcement of law themselves fall into the workings off minority wealth consolidation, preserving private property through bourgeois law and state-sanctioned violence against a disenfranchised proletariat.

In such invocations, Walcott wishes to remind us of the historicity of identities: that they are not absolute or essential, but the products of contingent structural circumstances. True history – if the notion is tenable – is not the fictions of royal ascendance and noble war, but a social order in which minority rule pervades through anti-democratic socioeconomic institutions, without which the identities we wear today would not exist.

History determines our present, and therefore our identity, for, as Stacy Alaimo observes the common biological principle, all life depends on its environment. In her example, the jellyfish, when hauled from water, collapses into shambling slime (Alaimo 2013: 141). Beyond the specific pressure of its habitat, in which it has evolved to survive, it perishes in a corpse of goo. Alaimo advances the conclusion that we are not merely dependent on our environment, but one with it. Jellyfish, being 95% water, are visibly and corporeally nearly identical to their environment (Alaimo 2013: 140).

This abuts upon our concerns for identity’s cage: that like jellyfish, we are almost indistinguishable from our historically produced social conditions – our identity is constituted by the cultural structures of language, ability, race, religion, nationality, gender, sex, sexuality, class position, neurotype, and others. We are not merely born into, but in many respects, are our circumstances. If these factors mould the people we become, we must question to what degree we merely reflect these intersecting positionalities, and whether like the jellyfish, there remains a comparable 5% of our Subjectivity that is not forged in relation to our milieu, but that is in some sense internal, innate and authentic. However, at this stage, if hegemony, language, discourse, ideology and misrecognition all arise from our ‘social habitat’ to construct our identities, it is difficult to conceive of how the Subject may reach an authentic self.

Perhaps in “The Imaginary Iceberg”, 1946, we recover an answer, where Elizabeth Bishop explains that “We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship” (1). For the iceberg defies our stable categories: it is water, but frozen into the mountainous forms we associate with stone; it flows, but so slowly that we scarcely know it. A preference for the iceberg is a preference for defying the category of liquid water without losing its capacity for seamless change; defying the category of stone without losing its resilience. Bishop seems to suggest that authenticity begins in finding this resilient fluidity. Her terms “cloudy rock” (6) and “floating field” (9) too dissolve standard notions of materiality, and give way to this ‘permanent impermanence’, where the solidity of rock passes through aeolian currents as water vapour, where earthen planes themselves sublimate into the air.

Bishop’s understanding of authenticity seems to emanate from the Subject’s agency. She writes: “Its weight the iceberg dares / upon a shifting stage and stands and stares.” (21-22) Although the “stage” – the realm in which we perform, that is, live and act as participants in society – is “shifting”, we, may dare to stand and stare, to hold to our authentic inner selves regardless of power’s machinations. It is, for Bishop, a kind of mental combat – “The wits of these white peaks / spar with the sun” (20-21) – in which we are prepared to protect our consciousness from Althusser’s interpellation, from Foucault’s discursivity which inscribes into seemingly objective knowledges domination and subjugation. Bishop’s agency is thus the purest of self-determination – hence: “The iceberg cuts its facets from within” (23), in which we forge some portion of our Subjectivity from that which lies beyond language and the social order, a lost innermost wholeness. To be “self-made from elements least visible” (32) suggests the infusion of components to the self that lie beyond the limited imagination of our present, which in conjunction constitute an “indivisible” (33) Subject, a material (“fleshed” (33)) person outside of traditionally static identity.

Hydrotexts, therefore, offer a unique moment of productive instability, in which the Subject unhinges from identity’s scaffolds to explore themself, both in relation to society, history and others, but too the deeper reaches of an emancipated humxn self.

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[I submitted the following essay for a seminar entitled ‘Writing the Sea’ (co-run by Dr. Charne Lavery and doctoral student Maria Geustyn), which posits the ocean – and particularly the Indian Ocean – as a site of extraordinary literary significance. I decided to test an idea – that the sea’s fluidity assists us in reimagining identity – and mentioned in passing a few theorists who might help us as we investigate several ‘hydrotexts’. ] 

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References:

1. Bertens, Hans. Literary Theory: The Basics. Routledge, 2014. “Ideology” pp. 71-74, “Gramsci” pp. 74-75, “Derrida” pp. 102-120, “Lacan” pp. 134-137, “Discourses” pp. 123-131

2. Rich, Adrienne. “Diving into the Wreck”, Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973. Published on Poets.org. https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/diving-wreck <Accessed: 15 March 2018>

3. Weber, Max. “Politics is Violence”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2015. https://fee.org/articles/politics-is-violence/ <Accessed: 21 March 2018> Originally published in “Politics as a Vocation”, 1919.

4. Giggs, Rebecca. “Whale Fall”. Granta, 2016. https://granta.com/whale-fall/ <Accessed: 4 March 2018>

5. Walcott, Derek. “The Sea is History”, Selected Poems, 2007. Published on Poets.org, 2017. https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/sea-history <Accessed: 15 March 2018>

6. Alaimo, Stacy. “Jellyfish Science, Jellyfish Aesthetics: Posthumxn Reconfigurations of the Sensible.” MicGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013. pp. 139-164

7. Bishop, Elizabeth. “The Imaginary Iceberg”, North & South, 1946, reprinted in Poems, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York, 2011. pp. 6.

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