WATER

There are not enough mouths to utter

All your fleeting names, O water.

– Wisława Szymborska, “Water”

Wisława Szymborska’s poetic take on water is driven by a paradox. On the one hand, the poem speaks to, and celebrates, water’s material heterogeneity and the multiplicity of its forms and hence meanings. On the other, however, it points to the impossibility to grasp the abundant materiality of water and to the inadequacy of language to keep up with its fugitive realities and shapes. The “names” are provisional and potentially countless, the lines suggest, turning the poem, it might seem, into a dubious exercise in poetic creation. Indeed, Szymborska’s piece does what it declares impossible: it offers beautifully crafted names in an explicit recognition of their insufficiency and futility. And yet the lines also, and perhaps by this very reason, suggest that there are no other ways to access water except through the endless acts of naming (as Jamie Linton provocatively puts it: “Water is what we make of it” (3)). What is at stake, however, is much more than water’s “symbolic potency” or its discursive life (MacLeod 40). These acts posit us as always in a relation to water – as observers, (ab)users, thinkers, admirers, and survivors, to name only the few the poem references. This is why in Szymborska’s poem, water is at once elusive though palpably material; offering itself but also withholding; historical and yet to come; life-giving and life-taking; scarce and excessive; violent and benign; an object of our deeds, needs, and thoughts and an agent constantly chiselling the limits of what we do, need, and think.

Szymborska’s 1962 poem beautifully encapsulates some of the major currents of thought coalescing around what Cecilia Chen et al. have named a “hydrological turn” (3). More specifically, they have offered “thinking with water” in place of “thinking about water” as an approach most sensitive and attentive to the materialities of water and their political and poetic significance. To think with water, they argue, is to place water alongside our intellectual endeavours recognizing it is meaning-creating matter. It is also to acknowledge that water is a creative subject in its own right, generating our worlds, communities, and ways of knowing, frequently redefining our knowledges and theories about the world and ourselves. Szymborska’s endless “fleeting names” is a poetic recognition that “water does not exist in the abstract. It must take up a body or place (a hedgehog, a weather front, a turn of phrase) somewhere, sometime, somehow” (Chen et al. 8). These names also serve as a reminder that “water has a remarkable capacity to resist containments of all kinds” (12), including semantic containers (poetic or not). They intimate “water’s relationality” (5), bringing to the foreground the idea that, as Cecilia Chen succinctly and elegantly puts it, “waters are situated, lively, and shared” (275).

The methodological call to go beyond the understandings of water as a mere resource and an inert object of our inquiries is, of course, not unprecedented, although it may not always have been given a specific name it receives in Thinking with Water. Jamie Linton’s work What is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction aims precisely to trace the history of how water came to be abstracted from its material environment and the relations in which it has occurred. Turned into a homogenized object of (scientific) inquiry, water as H₂O has not only lost its materiality but also distanced waters from the myriad relations by which they are constituted and which they in turn constitute as well. For Linton, “water is not a thing, but, rather, is a process of engagement” (30). Ivan Illich’s much earlier H₂O and the Waters of Forgetfulness offers a powerful narrative of how water as H₂O became “a resource” in need of “technical management” (Illich and Nandy 76) but also of how water has been “a fluid that drenches the inner and outer spaces of the imagination” (24). In his 2004 book Social Power and the Urbanization of Water, Erik Swyngedouw examines the urban circulation of water, its physical and symbolic metabolizations which can reveal how power is not only wielded but also thought of in city space. What interests Swyngedouw, among others, is the various ways water’s urban life erodes the boundaries between categories such as nature/culture which we have traditionally used to structure and imagine the world.

The recent upsurge in research on the political, social, and aesthetic life of water no doubt owes its impetus to maritime, climate change, Anthropocene, and feminist studies (Steinberg and Peters, Neimanis, Blum, Mel Chen, and others). Critics have looked into the environmental, (post)colonial, geographic, political, and cultural significance and use of water across some very specific contexts (e.g., the Arctic, the Indian Ocean, film, literature, capitalism, water management, urban spaces, maritime crossings), engaging with both its realities and representations. The former has been addressed by, among others, Hawkins et al., Anand, Neimanis, and Helmreich. The latter has drawn critics such as Yates, Anidjar, Mentz, Neimanis, and Protevi, to name just a few. Philosophical discourses, on the other hand, have drawn on what water resists, enables, and connotes and the values thus generated: its mobile and liquid and life-giving nature. Gaston Bachelard probes into the imaginary textures of matter via literary representations of water. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have resorted to the physical properties of water to theorize what they call the smooth space. Michel Serres focuses on the acoustic life of the sea to talk about noise as the other of order and regulation. For (Freud’s) psychoanalysis, the oceanic is “the unconscious of the unconscious” (Rooney). A 2013 special issue of feminist review has focused on “gender–water geographies” (1), aiming to examine how water constitutes “subjectivities, bodies and communities” (2). One recent special issue of English Language Notes edited by Laura Winkiel inaugurates hydro-criticism, a term which marks novel interventions in the field of maritime studies and beyond. Kim De Wolff et al.’s 2021 collection titled Hydrohumanities: Water Discourse and Environmental Futures offers the term hydrohumanities to refer to the “emerging discourse surrounding water-human-power” which remains especially attentive to “the active role of water” in the creation of the variety of forms it assumes across disparate contexts (1). In the field of literary studies, Hannah Boast has recently deployed the concept of hydrofictions to speak of Israeli and Palestinian literature where water is not merely a motif but a substance affecting and constituting political and economic realities.

The wealth and breadth of this scholarship is impossible to recount here. At the same time, to think with water in an exhaustive way and to give it definitive names once and for all is an ambition that would reproduce the fantasy of containment Szymborska’s poem cheekily attempts yet also deconstructs. The contributors to this issue draw on this expansive body of scholarship but also chart some novel terrains. They address a variety of contexts, geographical, historical, political, and aesthetic, and they examine diverse watery loci. As we see it, three major, broadly conceived, currents of thought run through their essays: the protean relationalities that water enables; appropriations of water in modernist logics of regulation and management; and the problematic figurations of water in scientific, philosophical, cultural, and political discourses.

A number of researchers have already addressed water’s relationality, among them Cecilia Chen et al., Irene J. Klaver, Stacy Alaimo, and Astrida Neimanis. Challenging the idea of modern water as an objectified abstraction (Linton), these scholars have variously emphasized water’s connective potential, its capacity to bring together or sever other watery bodies and to perpetually institute a “lively relationality” based on mutual and ongoing permeations (C. Chen 275). Astrida Neimanis’s seminal work on bodies of water proposes the idea of the “hydrocommons of wet relations” (4) or “embodied hydrocommons” (95), an idea which goes beyond our anthropocentric horizons, redefining our notions of embodiment and of what it means to be a human body. In this special issue, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev, Joseph Pugliese, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, and Jeremy Chow and Maite Urcaregui push the parameters of these inquiries to further probe the material, political, conceptual, and aesthetic effects of water’s relationality. Talbayev’s essay “Hydropower: Residual Dwelling Between Life and Nonlife” offers a radical reading of human residuality. Looking at the context of Mediterranean migrant deaths, Talbayev examines the power of seawater to corrode and dissolve human remains into the geological forms of aquatic worlds. Here, the wet relations transcend biopolitical classifications, unsettling the division between life and nonlife. Talbayev’s residual dwelling is a site of decomposition, amalgamation, and bonding where the need to rethink the political and its constitutive categories becomes more than urgent. For Pugliese, water is not merely a substance able to form and sustain relations with other entities, but constitutive of “the very conditions of possibility of relationality for all life.” Drawing on Indigenous cosmo-epistemologies and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Pugliese uses the concept of intercorporeity to convey the ways in which water is both enfleshed and enfleshing other bodies. This phenomenology of water at times fails to resist what Pugliese calls “aquapolitical regimes of governmentality”; at others, it propels “an insurgent aquapolitical agency” that consistently undoes such regimes. Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s piece is a creative meditation on intimacy, relationality, and water. The text celebrates water’s permeability and its material recalcitrance whereby water is always an agent bringing bodies into proximity, a connective material perennially sabotaging the boundaries we draw between bodies of water, human, and other-than-human. For Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos water comes to embody intimacy, becoming the quintessential form/material of relationality. The point is not that it lubricates relations, but that it materializes and signifies togetherness: we are all (in) water together. Using the framework of hydropoetics and ecosexuality, Jeremy Chow and Maite Urcaregui propose a similar idea in reference to specifically queer relationality and intimacy by looking at the much more domesticated instance of water use: pools. In pools, they say, “bodies come together in fluid ways” enabling queer affirmation, intimacy, and attachments. While the authors recognize the problematic role pools play in the exploitative economy that depletes natural water resources in an age of climate change, they believe the emphasis on large bodies of water – seas and oceans – in the blue humanities should be corrected by more attention to contained, domesticated, intimate water spaces as sites of queer potentiality.

Much work has been done to date on the commodification of water by such scholars as Karen Bakker, Jamie Linton, Erik Swyngedouw, and others. Mikki Stelder’s and Massimiliano Tomba’s contributions to the current issue offer a complementary perspective by focusing on the imperial and capitalist economies water has been made to enable but also incessantly unsettle. More specifically, they explore the economies of water in order to investigate how water has come to inform the economic ideas about ownership and property. Stelder probes the depths of Hugo Grotius’s ocean to examine what she terms the “conquest of maritime imagination” – the ways his notions of the ocean as perpetual res nullius not only did not escape “the logic of property,” but in fact enabled this logic in the first place. Yet while Stelder traces the ways in which Grotius’s idea of the ocean as common property has rendered “the globe capturable,” she also looks to how the materiality of water undoes the economic and legal regimes Grotius helped to institute. Tomba turns to the context of the Cochabamba water war in 2000 – a case that has drawn much critical attention in political and social water studies – with the aim of investigating how it inaugurated the notion of social property. Interested in extracting theory from practice, Tomba analyses the social and legal entanglements that accompanied the war and argues that social property is a practice of democracy beyond “the colonial appropriative parable.” Ultimately, then, the war was not only about access to water but also about an “alternative political and legal framework” based to a large extent on indigenous opposition to modernist logics of water management. Modernization, and particularly the capture of water’s energy through the momentous project of hydroelectricity, is also Kieran Murphy’s point of departure in his attempt to reimagine our temporal and spatial relationship with water through the concept of deep time. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s elaborations on imagination as driven by the waters of deep time, Martin Heidegger’s emphasis on an elemental wonder that “taps into an upstream reservoir of forgotten knowledge,” and Dipesh Chakrabarty's notion of planetary history, Murphy postulates a “deep time theory of knowledge” grounded in a geological consciousness that extends far beyond current scientific-technological epistemologies and practices. Together with natural electricity (thunderstorms), water seems to carry in it some planetary memory, especially life’s planetary memory. As such, it is in a privileged position to teach us “timefulness” (a term Murphy borrows from Bjornerud), or a sense of our physical and mental participation in the planet’s deep temporality.

The inadequacy of received epistemologies also animates Gil Anidjar’s meditation on the practice of teaching and learning with water. Taking the simple (yet infinitely complex) object of a plastic bottle of water as a point of departure, Anidjar meanders through questions of plastic production, water marketing and consumption, water’s affinity to – or continuity with – speech and memory (Bachelard), to finally arrive at the ultimate lesson that water can teach us: that “there are more things in heaven and earth, more things than heaven and earth, and more waters too, than in any science or philosophy.” The text’s conclusion harks back, again, to Wisława Szymborska’s insight briefly discussed above, in that water resists the disciplinarian compartmentalization of distinct sciences and practices of knowledge. One might further conclude that water, just as knowledge about water, always overflows distinctions and resists the state of absolute purity. For Pantuchowicz, who follows Jacques Derrida in this respect, water – including the spring water in Anidjar’s plastic bottle – always figures both purity and threats of contamination. She draws on a wide philosophical literature (including Plato, Nietzsche, Derrida, Esposito) in order to delineate the ways in which the figure of water management works to control the “purity of cultural exchanges and transmissions.” To overcome that logic, Pantuchowicz invokes “a politics of affirmation” which she recognizes in the posthumanist perspectives of Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Astrida Neimanis. Agnieszka Pantuchowicz’s focus on figurations of water is methodologically echoed in Eszter Timár’s article in the present issue. But where Pantuchowicz offers a broad picture that spans from Plato to posthumanism, Timár performs a rigorous deconstructive critique of what she posits as Astrida Neimanis’s construction of (bodies of) water through “maternal materiality.” If, for Pantuchowicz, water’s purity is inevitably haunted by contamination and contagion, for Timár the ontologization of water as life-affirming, gestational, nurturing, and maternal is necessarily haunted by figures of separation, loss, anxiety, and death. Timár’s analysis points to what Benjamin Noys termed “the persistence of the negative” which continues to haunt (to remain in the realm of haunting) the “politics and metaphysics of affirmationism” prevalent in contemporary philosophies of resistance (x). Matter’s “negativity” – inextricable from its affirmative figurations – has important implications for, among others, the way we relate to our (posthumanist) watery embodiment. Indeed, the central concern of the current issue – water’s materiality – may be refreshingly revisited through the lens of what Timár calls, after Geoffrey Bennington, the desire for ontology.

Variously theorized, studied, legislated, managed, and exploited, water – or whatever we decide to understand as water – remains an inescapable concern. In a time of widespread droughts and floods, rising sea levels, omnipresent industrial pollution, rampant privatization of vital resources, and tightening of water borders against migrants, thinking about / with / through water offers one of the ways we can rethink identities, embodiments, politics, naturecultures, and planetary engagements. As many of the authors included in this issue point out, or at least imply, thinking about / with / through water is an invitation to search for new ways of knowing, being, and relating.

acknowledgements

We owe thanks to Charlie Blake and Gerard Greenway for their assistance and support throughout the process, from the issue’s conceptualization to its final materialization. We would also like to thank all the peer reviewers who generously shared their expertise to make the issue more focused, original, and enjoyable. Ewa Macura-Nnamdi’s research for this special issue was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland, under research project Fictions of Water: Refugees and the Sea, grant number 2019/33/B/HS2/02051.