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Networking the (Non) Human: Moby-Dick, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and Bruno Latour T. Hugh Crawford (bio) There are as many theories of action as there are actors. Bruno Latour 1 Matthew Fontaine Maury—“the Pathfinder of the Seas”—begins the 1854 edition of Sailing Directions with a commonplace metaphor: The wind and rain; the vapor and the cloud; the tide, the current, the saltness and depth, and temperature and color of the sea; the shade of the sky; the temperature of the air; the tint and shape of the clouds; . . . each and all may be regarded as the exponent of certain physical combinations, and, therefore, as the expression in which Nature chooses to announce her own meaning; or if we please, as the language in which she writes down the operation of her own laws. 2 Like many of his colleagues in a broad range of scientific activities, Maury wants not only to read this Book of Nature—a nature both legible and legislative—but also to marshal these particular features in order to produce a network of representatives that both translates nature’s language and controls “her” fury. Maury’s most significant accomplishment was the development and deployment of a system for the superimposition of standardized data that, in the language of [End Page 1] Bruno Latour, produced an asymmetry: each ship had already visited the latitude, ocean current, and meteorological system it cruised. To accomplish this, Maury needed allies, standardized delegates who were faithful, true, and subservient. Some were human—ship captains, members of the National Meteorological Observatory, cabinet members, and ambassadors; and others, as the above quotation makes obvious, were nonhuman—water that expands when it freezes, mercury responding to barometric pressure, standardized time, relative salinity, and whales traveling in specific migratory paths. In precisely the same years that Maury was attempting to read the seas, Herman Melville was producing his own handbook on the oceans and the art of whaling, a novel that, at least initially, did not enjoy the success of Maury’s own efforts. William Spanos divides the critical reception of Moby-Dick into four major periods: the initial rejection of (or indifference to) the novel; the focus on Ahab in the 1920s; the postwar critical preoccupation with Ishmael; and the recent “New Americanist” examination of the politics embedded in the different critical appropriations of the novel (Spanos’s own book is a clear example of this last period). 3 Perhaps it is too obvious to note that the critics in each of these periods are primarily concerned with humans—Melville, Ahab, Ishmael, and other literary critics. However, what many readers from the novel’s first publication to the present have found both troubling and (for some) fascinating are the “cetology” chapters, those numerous breaks in the narrative where Melville/Ishmael explains the shape of the whale’s head or tail, the construction of the boats, the apparatus for trying-out the blubber, 4 navigational instruments and techniques, or the mechanism that deploys the life-buoy. In a novel that primarily concerns the actions and passions of humans (authors, critics, characters), nonhumans continue to assert themselves as central to the functioning of the ship and the act of reading. Melville’s narrator comments on the importance of the nonhuman for even as charismatic a figure as Ahab: “For be a man’s intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always in themselves, more or less paltry and base.” 5 Of course Ishmael refers to a number of “external [End Page 2] arts”—shipboard discipline, capitalist ideology, Ahab’s dark ritual designed to unite the crew behind him and his quest—but this comment (and the novel in general) also points to such items as the bone leg upon which Ahab plots his position, or his pipe, which gives no solace. To read Melville’s novel solely as a study of human action—mania, passion, or equanimity—is to ignore much of the text; yet, apart from heavy-handed symbolic interpretations, traditional academic humanism is generally ill-equipped to deal with the physical objects and...
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