States of Suspension: Trans-corporeality at Sea

Abstract

To suspend: “To debar temporarily, especially from a privilege.” “To hold in an undetermined or undecided state awaiting further information.” “To keep from falling or sinking by some invisible support as buoyancy.” “To keep fixed or lost (as in wonder or contemplation).” In Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, I argue for a conception of trans-corporeality that traces the material interchanges across human bodies, animal bodies, and the wider material world. As the material self cannot be disentangled from networks that are simultaneously economic, political, cultural, scientific, and substantial, what was once the ostensibly bounded human subject finds herself in a swirling landscape of uncertainty where practices and actions that were once not even remotely ethical or political matters suddenly become so. Trans-corporeality is a new materialist and posthumanist sense of the human as substantially and perpetually interconnected with the flows of substances and the agencies of environments. Activists, as well as everyday practitioners of environmental, environmental health, environmental justice, and climate change movements, work to reveal and reshape the flows of material agencies across regions, environments, animal bodies, and human bodies—even as global capitalism and the medical–industrial complex reassert a more convenient ideology of solidly bounded, individual consumers and benign, discrete products. Even though the recognition of trans-corporeality begins with human bodies in their environments, tracing substantial interchanges renders the human permeable, dissolving stable outlines. Tracing these connections discourages us from taking refuge in the fantasies of transcendence and imperviousness that make environmentalism a merely elective and external enterprise.

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