Living Earth Community
7. Fluid Histories
SECTION III: PRACTICES FROM CONTEMPORARY ASIAN TRADITIONS AND ECOLOGY
Fig. 5 Yamuna River, near the Himalayas. Photo by Alexey Komarov (2015), Wikimedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yamuna_River_-_panoramio_(2).jpg#/media/File:Yamuna_River_-_panoramio_(2).jpg
7. Fluid Histories: Oceans as Metaphor and the Nature of History
Prasenjit Duara
© Prasenjit Duara, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.07
Time and tide wait for no man.
The field of pre-history is said to be characterized by the absence of a writing system. History is the study of human activity over the last 5,000 years or so based on texts and artefacts. Indeed, it is only recently that non-artefactual recording processes, such as carbon dating, tree-rings, the age of dental remains and bones have begun to be used in historical studies. John McNeill has proposed the idea of ‘superhistory’, distinguished from the academic discipline of Big History, which locates human history within the larger story of evolution. He explains that ‘Big History changes everything and changes nothing. It tells us that our species’ story conforms to a larger pattern. But it does not change our species story.’1 Rather, superhistory is the effort to link the history of humans to natural factors, beyond the specialized field of environmental history, and beyond the textual and artefactual. It will be a revolution in methodology, geared towards grasping how humans have interacted with the climate, and how the climate has interacted with humans. Mine is a related effort: to grasp the relation of historical time to natural time at a metahistorical level.
I seek to understand the temporality of historical flows through the model of oceanic circulations of water. I will seek:
to probe what I have called ‘circulatory histories’ as fundamental historical processes that are not tunneled, channeled or directed by national, civilizational or even societal boundaries, but are circulatory and global, much like oceanic currents. Processes emerging in one form in place A flow to many places, B, C, etc., where they interact with other local and trans-local forces to re-emerge often in place A, though recognized as something else.2 Older cosmologies, rhythms, and technologies of organizing time were closely in sync with natural patterns, even though they were not reducible to the latter.
to de-couple historiographical time from historical time, and re-link the latter to the temporal medium of natural flows. The flow of historical time can be viewed not only through the metaphor of ocean flows, but is also naturally continuous with the latter. The basic medium of temporal contact and intertemporal communication in historical time are the natural (including organic) and built environment which serve not only as its infrastructure but also its provisioner. Historical time is co-created by actors and actants, much as the ocean waters are the medium and co-creators of its flows with oceanic beings — both organic and inorganic.
by disclosing the metaphorical and natural links between historical and oceanic time, I want to reveal the consequences for the world as we know it, of the growing gap between historiographical time on the one hand, and historical and natural time, on the other.
Circulatory Histories and Oceanic Flows
In my recent work, I have introduced the idea of ‘circulatory history’ — a kind of history that is interested principally in the flow of time.3 Circulatory, in my usage does not necessarily reference a return to a starting point, but a movement or distribution from place to place. Historians have engaged with various conceptions of time, including the phenomenological, whereby different societies experience time differently. National and civilizational histories engage with evolution within a teleological framework of progress. The advocates of Big History and Journey of the Universe conceive historical time as embedded in processes of evolutionary complexity. But let us begin by asking what media — bodies, vehicles, and agencies — best allow us to recognize and measure the flow of time. The first candidate would be sunlight, with its diurnal and seasonal cycles. Another natural candidate is water, and may be more interesting for historical time, because, although water is a re-cycling element, we never step into the same water twice.
My interest in circulatory histories coincided with the burgeoning of inter-Asian studies, including important work by historians of South Asia who wrote about connected and entangled histories. Overwhelmingly, the picture we get of Afro-Eurasia is of a deeply interconnected historical sphere populated by sprawling networks, expanding and contracting empires, traveling ideas and practices, circulating microbes and species of all kinds. Our aim is to take stock of what kinds of intellectual, conceptual, and perhaps even epistemological significance this genre of trans-border work can have, not simply for Asian studies, but globally.
Since the publication of Rescuing History from the Nation in 1995, I have sought to dislodge historical writing from serving as the instrument of the nation’s sovereign legitimacy.4 The rationale for this is both simple and deep: the nation-form has been the dominant mode of identity for most of the world over the last couple of centuries, and it is structured to engage in a competitive race for global resource domination; in turn, it has led most visibly to two World Wars and to the ravaging of the global environment as we enter the Anthropocene.
The forces for global cooperation and checks against predatory activities upon people and nature have been much weaker, in great part because of the nationalist imperative for GDP growth and the assemblage of interests legitimated by this imperative. In turn, I have argued that national histories are the principal means of establishing the imagined solidarity and destiny of the nation. I try to show here that history is by no means linear and tunneled, predestined to tell the story of the nation.
The oceanic metaphor of historical time allows us to grasp how historical ownership of science, technology, culture, civilization — the question of sovereignty itself — can only be sustained when historical process or flow is separated from historiographical understanding (i.e., not only in the historical discipline). When we attend to temporalities of different processes, we recognize that human history shares significantly with other organic and natural processes and that it is a collective planetary heritage. This recognition is imperative if we are to address the problems of planetary sustainability.
This, however, is not to say that there are no subjects — or agency, now recognized to be distributed between different humans and nonhumans — in history that seek to control or shape processes, but, beyond a point, the process escapes these subjects. Analytically, we need to distinguish between historical time and historiographical time, which includes purposive reflexivity. To be sure, the two are practically difficult to distinguish because this reflexivity also shapes the process. Nonetheless, the process exceeds the determinate purpose of the actor as it emerges in the circulatory flow of historical time. Historical time flows on, shaping and being shaped, carrying with it, to paraphrase the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, the ‘many’ from the ‘disjunctive universe’ which it gathers.5 And in its carrying, there are also memories and brandings that are cognized by some and recognized by others as a return. But for a start, we need to analytically differentiate the reflexive moments from the process itself.
Historical time is not fundamentally different from the flow of time in nature, which too remains irreversible.6 The flow of historical time is expressed in routine repetitive acts (never exactly identical) as well as the gathering or morphing into events caused by global interactions and contingencies, human and natural.7 The model of natural processes that I find most useful to understand history is the circulatory flow of oceanic water. Unlike rivers, they are not tunneled and bounded; their channeling is more interactive.
Ocean currents develop in interaction with changing atmospheric conditions of heat and wind, geological features and tidal activity. The Coriolis Effect, trade winds, the Gulf Stream, Equatorial Currents and Counter Currents, El Niño, La Niña, monsoons, cyclones, tsunamis, upwellings, and thermohaline circulation are some of the well-recognized oceanic processes. The oceans and seas are realms where spaces and temporal processes interact at varying scales. Take, for instance, the Mediterranean Sea — a waterbody that has been well-studied due to the fact that it is relatively enclosed. This Sea is a microcosm of an ocean and like it, has surface, intermediate and deep-water masses, the circulatory patterns of which are relatively autonomous, but also influence the North Atlantic circulation regime. The geography of islands and their shelves affect the circulation of these waters significantly. Thus, the converging of the Sardinian and Tunisian shelves directs the inflowing Atlantic waters southwards whereas decaying eddies in the north are constrained to flow northwards off Western Corsica.8
Oceans reveal circulatory currents of differing temporalities and effects, dependent on the diverse conditions they travel through. Surface currents are faster moving, because they carry heat and are shaped by winds; eddies are still faster, and more temporary gyres churn up smaller spaces. Deep currents are heavier, because water becomes colder at the poles and is pulled down by salinity and gravity. Nonetheless, deep currents also flow across the various oceans and cycle through roughly once every thousand years.
Over the last several decades, this deep-water flow across the oceans has been understood as a ‘conveyor belt’, reflecting the relatively stable pathway through which the warm waters pushed to the poles, overturned and made its way across the oceanic world. Recently, scientists have ‘deconstructed’ the model of the conveyer belt, suggesting that while overturning and coursing remain true, the conveyor belt idea was too simple. Rather, several different pathways have appeared, formed by surface eddies and wind-fields.9 This suggests that their temporality — the rate of flow and the types of activity they produce — has been maintained at the level, but they are also interactive with other geo-atmospheric forces. Even the deepest level is affected, and, in turn, affects the rest. The impact of anthropogenic activity on the conveyer belt has alarmed the scientific community in recent years. The massive polar ice melt has already and, is expected to, increasingly lighten and warm the polar water with excessive freshwater and thus to slow (or even halt) the flow of the conveyer belt carrying tropical waters to the north. One major consequence of this is the generation of colder weather in North America and Europe.
Compare currents to historical processes — ideas, practices, and material — that flow through time and space. Let me cite a case of a circulatory ideational complex across continents over the last two hundred years. In 1833, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, a polyglot thinker and reformer, deist, and Unitarian, who is often called the ‘father of modern India’, was visiting Bristol in the United Kingdom. In Salem, Massachusetts, at the time, Unitarians were circulating a locket with a curl of his hair in preparation for his visit, which, however, never happened, since Raja Ram Mohan died in Bristol that year. New England Transcendentalists, particularly, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, read Roy’s translations of the Upanishads and the principal Vedas, texts they deeply admired and cited profusely. American transcendentalists influenced a wide range of global ideas and practices, including abolitionism, proto-environmentalism, and civil disobedience founded upon transcendentalist conceptions of self-cultivation of the powers of the mind and consciousness of ultimate reality. Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience (1849)10 influenced many people, including Leo Tolstoy, who in turn was an important influence on Mahatma Gandhi. In the 1890s in South Africa, Gandhi adopted the phrase ‘civil disobedience’ as the English version of his satyagraha (truth force) experiment. During Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement in post-war USA, it was Gandhi and not Thoreau who was seen as its patron saint.
We can continue to trace this circulatory current, which merges, re-emerges, submerges, converges, and de-merges with various related or novel processes right up into the present. Thoreau’s insights were carried on by spiritual naturalists — John Muir (Sierra Club), Aldo Leopold, and Arne Naess — and these insights today have transformed and emerged as a significant American environment movement (although with many different channels). E. F. Schumacher, Gary Snyder, the deep ecologists, and feminist ecologists, among others, have been influenced by Asian and Indigenous traditions. Many of these ideas around environmental spiritualism and moral protest have cross-fertilized with movements of Indigenous people, forest dwellers, civil society and religious groups across the world, climaxing (at least for millions of Catholic schoolchildren) with Pope Francis’s radical encyclical of 2015 on ecology and justice.11 What was for almost two centuries a sub-cultural and inconspicuous ‘countercurrent’ may yet swell into a movement of significance.
On a different level, consider the various temporal scales of historical processes. Modern nationalism (which developed symbiotically, for the most part, with competitive capitalism) has developed as the axiomatic principle of legitimacy globally over the last two hundred years. The nation-form built around the self-other binary is the most enduring circulatory feature that has permeated all parts of the world which emerged from empires and other political forms built around more complex forms of belonging. The ideal nation-form is a confessional form that compacts people-state-culture for competitive control of global resources. Its immediate predecessor was the confessional state of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe, where a compact of church-state-believer believed itself to be saved as the chosen people, and other(s) to be damned.12
The ecology that sustains this doxic and durable temporality from the early nineteenth century has to do with the system of nation states that has been its most necessary condition for over two centuries. The fundamental raison d’être for the nation state is competition, even if competition alone is insufficient to account for nationalism in a particular time and place. At this level, the identitarian polity that is the nation, is mediated by a host of other forces such as religion, language, political regime, historical relations, etc. — forces that are often changing and mixing. Note that the institutions of the capitalist competitive order have not always been the most durable formations; consider, for instance, the period of Soviet and Maoist socialism. I believe that Maoism itself needs to be understood within a world-order of competitive states that ultimately pushed China towards capitalism.
Emergent historical forces or currents shaping societies at this level of mediation possess a kind of middling temporality. The temporality may be seen in the mediatory form of Chinese nationalism which changed in accordance with the change in China’s place in the international order during the 1980s: simply put, a change from a Maoist socialist state, to a globally participating market society. It changed gradually from the socialist model of the civic nation state that was built, however rhetorically, upon the fraternity of nationalities within and socialist and third-world internationalism abroad, to an ethnic model of privileging the culture of the Han majority. In practice, this shift was also facilitated by the need to attract powerful overseas Chinese capitalist networks based on Chinese culturalism and Confucianism. At the same time, the relative weakness of development in the western regions of China and among the ethnically marginal communities also fostered ethnic nationalism among these minorities that we are witnessing daily today. Finally, at the most variable level, like eddies and gyres, nationalism can function as an ideology, as political strategy, as mobilization politics and as ideals and dreams, changing according to contexts and constituencies.
The Nature of History
What we call history is fundamentally a natural process upon which humans have created artificial technologies of recording, including, of course, the exclusive prerogative of historical writing and reflection. What can we learn from re-embedding history in the natural process?
Natural processes too register their activities, whether in geological layers, in tree-rings, in DNA (which is a record of our species’ epidemiological history), and, not least, in memory, language, and practices — the record of our social history. These are natural or elemental media for recording temporal processes which the inscriptions of historical humans mimic. Beings in time, of course, cease to exist; but not without registering their presence or trace — whether for functional purposes or not. To be sure, traces and records must be recognized and recalled. Biological organisms also leave information for the species and for others.
Human reflexivity and the technologies it has generated are said to distinguish historical knowledge from data produced by other organisms. But the sophisticated technologies of scientific observation reveal that the nonhuman world is constantly registering and responding to environmental changes, faster than ever in the Anthropocene. The Star Moss Cam is a sensor technology that does not merely sense mosses over time, but observes how the moss itself is a sensor that is detecting and responding to changes in the environment.13
Thus, Susan Schuppli argues, matter itself bears witness to events. It registers and documents change internally within its substrates and molecular arrangements, and is often expressed as a material aesthetic, increasingly in ‘dirty pictures’, be it of black carbon on polar snow, radioactive leakage or oil spills that transform the Arctic. Inuit hunters who followed a predictable ecological sign system have lost their moorings and capacity to hunt not only with the rapid changes in the snowscape, but because the geo-atmospheric changes have brought about new optical regimes: the sun appears to be setting farther west and the stars seem to be no longer where they were.14 The naked eye trained for generations to scope for life, can no longer do its job.
While many organisms may not have reflexive capacities, they certainly have cognition and communication. Just as the terrestrial earth, the ocean too is a storehouse of records and information for species and interactive organic forms. Cetaceans or marine mammals like dolphins and whales appear to differentiate sounds — phonations in water travel four times faster than in air — possibly identifying who must be responding to whom through the rapidly intensifying — and life destroying — din in the ocean.15 A recent report on whale songs reveals that whales do not communicate only for mating purposes, but are constantly transforming and evolving forms of communication across hundreds of kilometers.16 Some even claim that dolphins have an aquatic public sphere! In the words of John Durham Peters:
Maybe the whole ocean is their [cetaceans’] auditory apparatus and archive; by joining their water-based inner ear with the outer ear of the ocean, perhaps they have a medium for being in time that resembles our recording media but contrasts with the apparent instantaneity of our oral communication. What is perhaps natural for them — nonlinear data access — is a matter of cultural techniques for us, and is only made by recording media.17
Peters, a philosopher of communication technology, has argued that since the appearance of technological media of distant communication in the nineteenth century, we have forgotten the idea that media is primarily natural. In Marvelous Clouds, he argues that air, water, ground, fire, light, clouds are the elemental media of communication for beings. His point of departure in the philosophy of communication is — to simplify radically — Marshall McLuhan’s idea of ‘the medium is the message’. However, Peters demonstrates that the two — medium and content — are not entirely separable and shape each other. In the example given above, the properties of water and the sonic capacities of the cetaceans must be considered together as the communication medium.
The natural and built environments are the medium of communication across time and space.
Following Peters’ conceptualization, this composite environment is not only the container or infrastructure of historical or intertemporal communication. Rather, it also provisions beings in time. At the same time as the media provision beings, beings (i.e., content makers) ‘read’ and interpret these traces and signs to subsist, thus generating emergences. In the oceans, water is the principal medium for beings, but water is itself shaped by geo-atmospheric forces and even by the techniques of water beings. Peters asserts that ‘Dolphins and whales’ techniques shape the environment to enhance their techniques. Tuna for example, take advantage of vortices to propel themselves through the water at speeds much greater than would be predicted from their body size and strength, benefiting from hydraulic phenomena their swimming creates’.18 Humans use their technological capabilities to record and reflect upon processes which, in turn, re-shape the environmental media in which they are borne.
Let us explore the historical process as a medium. The historical is typically thought to be activity engaged by humans; but human-initiated activity is enabled and exceeded by chains of actors/actants, each of which may be linked in other chains. Historical time is the chain of events and activities, emergences and circulations of materials, practices and ideas which leave traces and records in their built and natural environment. The natural and built environment provides both the medium of flow and reshapes the messages channeled across time and space. Some of these sequences die out, others have con-sequences and take on new lives, and others return or are renewed, whether they are recognized or not.
The ‘ontological turn’ in social sciences has tended to break down the subject-object binary by attributing agency or quasi-agency to animals, organisms, instruments — for identifying, measuring, evaluating, or attaining — and, not least, the natural elements, in any consideration of a human undertaking. To be sure, this hardly displaces the fundamental condition of human knowledge for understanding these roles. But we might note that animals and organisms can and do process chains of action; and the great variety of human knowledge forms alerts us to ways in which sequences of action and knowledge are exceeded.
Historical processes may be indicated and evidenced through tiny traces such as Roy’s circulating lock of hair, itself an adaptation of circulating religious reliquaries. These traces can carry historical forms and ideas across continents and time. Regarding material history, it is now the gargantuan nuclear and hydro-power projects and millions of miles of fiber-optic cables on the ocean-bed that generate possibly still more con-sequences and counter-finalities that historiography and scientists may or may not be able to capture.
The point of this exercise is to suggest that the medium of intertemporal communication has a natural ground that humans share with other organisms, albeit with different proportions or relations of the nature-culture dialectic of the evolving, ‘living earth’.19 The communicator, the message/communication, and the medium are interdependently creative, much as the ocean waters are the medium and co-creators of its flows with oceanic beings. It is not then entirely surprising that historical processes are expressed in temporal patterns that resemble patterns and interactivities that we find in oceanic flows. At a fundamental level, the historical process engaging humans is also natural. Processes generate other processes. Events impact, churn, and disperse; parts die, and other parts transform, transmute, and return. As such, the flow of oceanic waters is not just a model or even a metaphor. The historical process is continuous with it.
It was not till the second half of the eighteenth century that the notion of history as the property of a subject — a nation or civilization — in linear time, tunneling through the past into the future, became the dominant mode of temporal knowledge, first in northwest Europe and subsequently across the world in the twentieth century. The factors that combined to produce the linear conception of time in Europe are also complex; conceptions of religion, science, and the quest for global resources generated the temporal framework for a capitalist mode of endless accumulation.
The ideal of the conquest of nature as the means to achieve human satisfactions is the driving force of modern history as conceived by nation states. The nation states’ apparatuses of knowledge production also set up — to put it in the barest terms — the opposition between history and nature. This cosmological reversal from the pre-modern era perhaps saw its greatest triumph when humans — particularly early modern Europeans — began to successfully navigate the deepest oceans. For most humans, oceans had presented the limits of their capacities. Well into the Renaissance, the Pillars of Hercules that marked the passage between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean were said to bear the warning Non plus ultra, ‘nothing further beyond’, cautioning sailors and navigators to go no further.
Over the last two hundred years, humans have begun to colonize the ocean itself. This colonization has been industrial in nature, battering the ocean by massive commercial traffic and fishing, nuclear testing, constant bombardment for oil and gas explorations and militarized island buildings, among other invasions. Not least, it is being strangled as the dumpsite of the terrestrial planet. To my mind, the modern idea of the conquest of nature, and the institutionalized and technologized modes of exhausting it is radically unprecedented. We now come face to face with the hubris that human history can destroy, negate, and transcend the medium of its sustenance.
I have argued that historical time should to be understood in the terms of natural processes, more than has been done heretofore. As such, historical time is continuous with the nature of oceanic flows. For this purpose, I have rendered the historiographical process that is uniquely human to the background as something to be grasped in relation to historical-oceanic time. Reflexive historiography remains powerful; after all, it is a necessary condition of the capacity of humans to dominate nature. Can this reflexivity be turned to develop another relationship to nature?
Merely reducing fossil fuel emissions cannot address our problems. The massively growing scale of consumption and destruction of natural materials and organisms for increased production has depleted and destroyed the earth and the oceans. The treadmill of ever-increasing consumption for profits and GDP growth embedded in the deeply institutionalized cosmology of our times demands change. Is there still a way to reconcile the creative capacities of humans with the limits of nature? The re-direction of historiographical knowledge to accord better with the nature of historical time and the sovereign planet would mark an important step towards it.
The powers of symbolic representation that gave humans the capacity to race ahead of all species in the evolution of life may well have met its match in the revenge of the oceans. The greatest threats to the human world today appear from the oceans, from rising sea levels to geo-atmospheric transformations of recognizable climate patterns. The question that arises today is the extent to which the Anthropocene, an era where human activity has the greatest influence on climate and the environment, will ravage the ocean and the degree to which the ocean will ravage us.
Bibliography
Duara, Prasenjit, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226167237.001.0001
— The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139998222
— Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
El-Geziry, T. M., and I. G. Bryden, ‘The Circulation Pattern in the Mediterranean Sea: Issues for Modeller Consideration’, Journal of Operational Oceanography, 3.2 (2010), 39–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/1755876x.2010.11020116
Gabrys, Jennifer, ‘From Moss Cam to Spillcam: Techno-Geographies of Experience’, in Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 57–80, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816693122.003.0003
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McNeill, John, ‘Historians, Superhistory, and Climate Change’, in Methods in World History: A Critical Approach, ed. by Janken Myrdal, Arne Jarrick, and Maria Wallenberg Bondesson (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2016), pp. 19–43, https://doi.org/10.21525/kriterium.2.b
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Raj, Kapil, ‘Beyond Postcolonialism… and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science’, Isis, 104.2 (2013), 337–47, https://doi.org/10.1086/670951
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Swimme, Brian, and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
Thoreau, Henry David, ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, in Aesthetic Papers, ed. by Elizabeth Peabody (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam, 1849), pp. 189–213.
Tucker, Mary Evelyn, and John Grim, ‘Four Commentaries on the Pope’s Message on Climate Change and Income Inequality’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 91.3 (2016), 261–70.
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1 John McNeill, ‘Historians, Superhistory, and Climate Change’, in Methods in World History: A Critical Approach, ed. by Janken Myrdal, Arne Jarrick, and Maria Wallenberg Bondesson (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2016), pp. 19–43, at 22, https://doi.org/10.21525/kriterium.2.b
2 In addition to my own The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), see chapter 2, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139998222, from which I cite some of my examples, see also Jack Goody, The Theft of History (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511819841; and Kapil Raj, ‘Beyond Postcolonialism… and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science’, Isis, 104.2 (2013), 337–47, https://doi.org/10.1086/670951
3 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity.
4 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226167237.001.0001
5 Methodologically, I follow process philosophy, particularly the idea of ‘emergence’ as delineated in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Emergence is a form of creativity — which, for Whitehead, is the ultimate principle (also known as God). He writes that ‘“Creativity” is the principle of novelty. An actual occasion is a novel entity diverse from any entity in the “many” which it unifies. Thus “creativity” introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The “creative advance” is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates’ (my emphases). Thus, historical processes and events may be seen fundamentally as emergences. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York, NY: Free Press, 1985), p. 21.
6 In the Newtonian conception of time, natural processes can be reversible, but the temporal medium in which they occur is absolute time, which is not reversible; it depends on nothing external and moves in a linear way. See Brent D. Slif, Time and Psychological Explanation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 273–74. The phenomenological conception, while not denying the idea of absolute time, finds it inadequate to the task of explaining how consciousness experiences a temporal object.
7 Routine repetitive acts — for instance, the activity of institutions — to be sure are still emergent occasions, because they are separated by ‘degrees of difference’ not necessarily visible in everyday activities.
8 T. M. El-Geziry and I. G. Bryden, ‘The Circulation Pattern in the Mediterranean Sea: Issues for Modeller Consideration’, Journal of Operational Oceanography, 3.2 (2010), 39–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/1755876x.2010.11020116
9 M. Susan Lozier, ‘Deconstructing the Conveyor Belt’, Science, 328.5985 (2010), 1507–11, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1189250, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5985/1507
10 First published under the title ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, in Aesthetic Papers, ed. by Elizabeth Peabody (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam, 1849), pp. 189–213.
11 See Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, ‘Four Commentaries on the Pope’s Message on Climate Change and Income Inequality’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 91.3 (2016), 261–70.
12 The making of modern nation states since the nineteenth century is a complex and multidimensional process. However, two aspects, in particular, are important here. Firstly, nation states and nationalists seek to create a centralized, homogenized, and mobilizable political body to gain advantage in the competition of global resources for domestic growth. Secondly, nations are themselves products of circulatory forces morphologically similar to each other generated by importing and exporting ‘best practices’, to use an anachronistic term. See Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
13 For more on the Star Moss Cam, see Jennifer Gabrys, ‘From Moss Cam to Spillcam: Techno-Geographies of Experience’, in Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 57–80, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816693122.003.0003
14 Susan Schuppli, ‘Dirty Pictures’, in Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014–16, ed. by Mirna Belina (Amsterdam: Sonic Acts Press, 2016), pp. 189–210.
15 Jim Robbins, ‘Oceans are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marine Life’, New York Times 21 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise-offshore-drilling.html
16 Karen Weintraub, ‘These Whales are Serenaders of the Sea’, New York Times, 7 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/science/whales-songs-acoustics.html
17 My emphasis. John Durham Peters, ‘Of Cetaceans and Ships’, in The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 53–114, at p. 96.
18 Ibid., p. 88.
19 See Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
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