Saturation: An Elemental Politics

by Melody Jue (Editor), Rafico Ruiz (Editor)

Overview

Bringing together media studies and environmental humanities, the contributors to Saturation develop saturation as a heuristic to analyze phenomena in which the elements involved are difficult or impossible to separate. In ordinary language, saturation describes the condition of being thoroughly soaked, while in chemistry it is the threshold at which something can be maximally dissolved or absorbed in a solution. Contributors to this collection expand notions of saturation beyond water to consider saturation in sound, infrastructure, media, Big Data, capitalism, and visual culture. Essays include analyses of the thresholds of HIV detectability in bloodwork, militarism's saturation of oceans, and the deleterious effects of the saturation of cellphone and wi-fi signals into the human body. By channeling saturation to explore the relationship between media, the environment, technology, capital, and the legacies of settler colonialism, Saturation illuminates how elements, the natural world, and anthropogenic infrastructures, politics, and processes exist in and through each other.

Contributors. Marija Cetinić, Jeff Diamanti, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Lisa Yin Han, Stefan Helmreich, Mél Hogan, Melody Jue, Rahul Mukherjee, Max Ritts, Rafico Ruiz, Bhaskar Sarkar, John Shiga, Avery Slater, Janet Walker, Joanna Zylinska

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478011460
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	11/05/2021
Series:	Elements
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.72(d)

About the Author

Melody Jue is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater, also published by Duke UniversityPress.

Rafico Ruiz is currently the Associate Director of Research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the author of Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier, also published by Duke UniversityPress.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Thinking With Saturation Beyond Water: Thresholds, Phase Change, and the Precipitate / Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz  1
Water
1. The Colors of Saturated Seas / Stefan Helmreich  29
2. Hydromedia: From Water Literacy to the Ethics of Saturation / Joanna Zylinska  45
3. Fossil Fuels, Fossil Waters: Aquifers, Pipelines, and Indigenous Water Rights / Avery Slater  70
Thresholds
4. Sonic Saturation and Militarized Subjectivity in Cold War Submarine Films / John Shiga  105
5. Wireless Saturation / Rahul Mukherjee  123
6. Saturation as a Logic of Enclosure? / Max Ritts  144
Phase Change
7. Becoming Undetectable in the Chthulucene / Bishnupriya Ghosh  161
8. The Media of Seaweeds: Between Kelp Forest and Archive / Melody Jue  185
9. Drought Conditions: Desalination and Deep Climate Change in Southern California / Rafico Ruiz  205
Precipitate
10. Precipitates of the Deep Sea: Seismic Surveys and Sonic Saturation / Lisa Yin Han  223
11. Media Saturation and Southern Agencies / Bhaskar Sarkar  243
12. Oil Barrels: The Aesthetics of Saturation and the Blockage of Politics / Mariji Cetinić and Jeff Diamanti  264
13. The Data Center Industrial Complex / Mél Hogan  283
Afterword: Climate Change as Matter Out of Phase / Janet Walker  306
Contributors  313
Index  317

Editorial Reviews

"How do elements accumulate and transform? Saturation assembles a fluid compendium for navigating the phase changes of materiality. Tracking kelp and oil, seismic surveys and submarine films, drought and floods, smart oceans and data centers, the chapters in this collection teem with ideas for how to work within the fluctuating conditions of environments, media, culture, and politics."--Jennifer Gabrys, Chair in Media, Culture, and Environment, University of Cambridge

"This volume is a tour de force of media theory: the contributors posit saturation not just as one thing that happens in or through or by various media, but as an original and urgent way to understand what media are and do. As a heuristic, saturation draws new lines of relation between issues such as climate change, extraction, militarism, energy, security, biopolitics, and Indigenous sovereignty, among others, in surprising ways. In short, thinking with saturation helps us to see our contemporary condition anew."--Astrida Neimanis, author of "Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology"

From the Publisher

How do elements accumulate and transform? Saturation assembles a fluid compendium for navigating the phase changes of materiality. Tracking kelp and oil, seismic surveys and submarine films, drought and floods, smart oceans and data centers, the chapters in this collection teem with ideas for how to work within the fluctuating conditions of environments, media, culture, and politics.

Jennifer Gabryś

How do elements accumulate and transform? Saturation assembles a fluid compendium for navigating the phase changes of materiality. Tracking kelp and oil, seismic surveys and submarine films, drought and floods, smart oceans and data centers, the chapters in this collection teem with ideas for how to work within the fluctuating conditions of environments, media, culture, and politics.

Jennifer Gabrys

This volume is a tour de force of media theory: the contributors posit saturation not just as one thing that happens in or through or by various media, but as an original and urgent way to understand what media are and do. As a heuristic, saturation draws new lines of relation between issues such as climate change, extraction, militarism, energy, security, biopolitics, and Indigenous sovereignty, among others, in surprising ways. In short, thinking with saturation helps us to see our contemporary condition anew.

Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology - Astrida Neimanis