Diving with Donna Haraway and the Promise of a Blue Planet

Abstract

It has been two decades since Haraway spoke about the 'promise of monsters', and seventy years since a novel kind of sea monster was created through the Aqua-Lung, giving 'underwater worlds' better access to humans. By revisiting and examining the combinatory effects of these historical moments, this paper illustrates the 'promise of scuba divers' who are somewhat monstrous in their potential to disturb common ideas about being human and life on land. In exchanging 'sacred ground' for submersion beneath the sea, scuba diving redefines the limits of human experience and emphasises the historical and largely forgotten primacy of land-based coordinates in theorising human life. Under the sea, these coordinates are vastly altered so that even preconscious markers, like breathing, are transformed through a circuitry that includes humans, science, technology, and nature in a 'body-incorporate'. 'Immersion' becomes a threshold beyond which humans and nature, society and space are discovered anew in the reversal of the significance of territory to planetary life.

Seeing from Below: Scuba Diving and the Regressive Cyborg

“…As I have since come to realize, seeing the world’s underwater spaces from below is not merely about sight. Rather, it involves a conceptual exercise in rethinking our collective “land bias” and associated anthropocentric assumptions about nature/society relations (see Picken and Ferguson 2014:337, citing Peters 2010:1261). As Gomez‐Barris (2017:16) reminds us, “seeing from below” is a philosophical undertaking.…”

“…Some scholars have begun to consider the place of scuba diving in this developing field (Merchant 2011, 2014; Jue 2015; Picken and Ferguson 2014). Here, I discuss some ritualistic, phenomenological, shamanic, metaphorical, and material elements of scuba diving, which carry theoretical significance.…”

“…The paper reimagines scuba diving as a form of ethnographic immersion. My approach is intersected in important ways by Helmreich’s (2007) conceptualization(s) of underwater immersion through the interpretive lens of submarine soundscapes; by Braverman’s (2017:458) “breathing‐with” methodology, which attends through submersion to the above/below‐water overlaps of environmental law and the lives of corals; and by Picken and Ferguson’s (2014) rich theoretical discussion of the relationships between scuba diving and posthuman politics. My imagining, drawing from my own lived experiences as a diver, focuses on the ritualistic and embodied nature of scuba diving and the ways in which scuba diving technology makes possible a shamanic process of transitioning between lifeworlds.…”

“…In doing so, I reconsider the ever‐prevalent question of what it means to be human against the backdrop of rapid social and environmental change on a global scale. Following Picken and Ferguson (2014), I maintain that scuba diving offers a powerful technological lens for re‐evaluating our place on the planet and our relations to the marine species that inhabit it. This line of thought is informed by the growing realization within the field of ocean humanities that we must reteach ourselves to view the planet from the vantage point of the ocean (Jue 2015).…”

Toward a Sociology of Oceans

“…For example, oxygen is no longer a given but rather an “other,” which is compressed beneath the sea. New sociological studies of the ocean, she proclaims, “begin with the kinds of experiences that are possible under physical and social spaces vastly altered” (Picken and Ferguson :330).…”