Saturation: An Elemental Politics (Elements)

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 Cover 1 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Thinking with Saturation Beyond Water: Thresholds, Phase Change, and The Precipitate / Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz 14 Water 40 1. The Colors of Saturated Seas / Stefan Helmreich 42 2. Hydromedia: From Water Literacy to The Ethics of Saturation / Joanna Zylinska 58 3. Fossil Fuels, Fossil Waters: Aquifers, Pipelines, and Indigenous Water Rights / Avery Slater 83 Thresholds 116 4. Sonic Saturation and Militarized Subjectivity in Cold War Submarine Films / John Shiga 118 5. Wireless Saturation / Rahul Mukherjee 136 6. Saturation as A Logic of Enclosure? / Max Ritts 157 Phase Change 172 7. Becoming Undetectable in the Chthulucene / Bishnupriya Ghosh 174 8. The Media of Seaweeds: Between Kelp Forest and Archive / Melody Jue 198 9. Drought Conditions: Desalination and Deep Climate Change in Southern California / Rafico Ruiz 218 Precipitate 234 10. Precipitates of the Deep Sea: Seismic Surveys and Sonic Saturation / Lisa Yin Han 236 11. Media Saturation and Southern Agencies / Bhaskar Sarkar 256 12. Oil Barrels: The Aesthetics of Saturation and The Blockage of Politics / Marija Cetinić and Jeff Diamanti 277 13. The Data Center Industrial Complex / Mél Hogan 296 Afterword: Climate Change As Matter Out of Phase / Janet Walker 319 Contributors 326 Index 330 A 330 B 330 C 331 D 332 E 333 F 334 G 335 H 335 I 336 J 337 K 337 L 337 M 338 N 339 O 339 P 340 Q 341 R 341 S 342 T 343 U 344 V 344 W 344 X 345 Y 345 Z 345 "Saturation shows how underwater points of view have much to teach us about the nature of objectivity, teaching us to look for the ways that a terrestrial bias appears in the ways we speak about and orient to the world. The volume takes the ocean as a vital starting place from which to develop a method of milieu-specific analysis, calling attention to the differences between perceptual environments and how we think within and through them as embodied observers. Through discussions of science fiction literature and visual media, Saturation shows that attending to the ocean is just the beginning of developing a broader sensitivity to the role of milieu in the fields of media studies, literary studies, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities. The ocean is not only a medium; the ocean is a vital milieu from which to reconsider what we have taken for granted about the nature of mediation, objectivity, and metaphor. By developing a method of oceanic displacement-and submerging media concepts in the ocean-this book is a science fictional exercise in speculation, exploring how we might think outside of our terrestrial habits by seeing things through the opacity of seawater"-- Provided by publisher 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 as a way of exploring the relationship between media, the environment, technology, capital, and the legacies of colonialism.