LEARNING WATERS

Abstract

I teach with water. It’s nothing very remarkable and I myself do not remember how I settled upon water as a most convenient introduction to what I have to teach, which is to say, to learn. Did not everything begin with water? My own beginnings, in any case, would border on the banal, if they did not signify so much about where I live (race and class) and how I teach (tradition, institution, location), the liberties I can responsibly take, or the sheer length to which one might have to go to register and partake of a sense of wonder – and of outrage – on the impossible path toward a collective experience of learning. In this particular instalment, learning with water is very much about recalling what we know, knowing what we do with the knowledge that we have. I teach with water. I start my class by quietly, if ostensibly, depositing in front of the class, or at the center of the seminar table, a bottle of “spring water.” I then invite the students to attend to this classroom instance of the proverbial elephant, though not necessarily true to the desperate manner of the three blind men.

Keywords:

• learning
• consumption
• oil
• disciplines

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1

Let us take seriously this hypothesis, at least for an instant, for the sake of radicalizing it: the aim here is to transform what presents itself as a simple empirical finding on the significant and yet contingent connection between life and fluid medium into a necessary cosmological relation. Let us suppose, then, that life has sprung from a fluid physical environment (the content, be it molecules of water or ammonia, doesn’t matter) not simply by chance, but because life becomes a possible phenomenon exclusively through fluid environments. (Coccia 30)

On the Middle Passage and the “Waterscapes of the African Diaspora,” see Dawson.

2 In his brilliant H₂O and the Waters of Forgiveness, Ivan Illich offers the word “stuff” to think about water, or indeed, waters. For more on “waters,” see Hamlin.

3 Fishman goes on to explain that

no water is being created or destroyed on Earth. So every drop of water that’s here has seen the inside of a cloud, and the inside of a volcano, the inside of a maple leaf, and the inside of a dinosaur kidney, probably many times.

Soon, the inside of a water bottle too.

4 Alice Outwater titled her fantastic book, Water: A Natural History, but beginning as she does with the “dismantling” of water systems that the fur trade brought about with the extermination of the beaver, the buffalo, and the prairie dog, she is also offering a layered, unnatural history of water.

5 Gotman discusses Michael Craig-Martin’s “An Oak Tree,” an installation in which “a glass of water sits on a shelf above head level […] and that glass, now, is an oak tree.” In this “act of transformation” – a learning event – the artist “claims the water is not special water” (Gotman 49).

6 I took the pictures, though images of this brand are readily available.

7 Bachelard will go on to wax eloquently about what he calls “the maternity of waters” (118).

8 I found in this book the necessary encouragement to engage in the water exercise since “one could teach what one didn’t know” (Rancière 18).

9 Jamie Linton has argued that H₂O is “a modern abstraction” (see also Chakrabarty 75–76, 83–85), which it surely is, but consider that ultra-pure water (UPW), a water that is “10 million times cleaner than regular tap water” (Linton 46) and would come closer to being made exclusively of molecules of oxygen and hydrogen, such water “is found nowhere on Earth because water out in the world is constantly flowing past, over, and through things, from it is absorbing particles” (Fishman 46–47). Incidentally, UPW, a critical solvent in the making of computer microchips is also a deadly poison that, if swallowed, would quickly “leach minerals right out of your body tissues” (48). Most likely, I am told, your cells would simply explode.

10 MacLeod proposes a parallel distinction between two oceans, one “encompasses the movements of capital” and the second, which

emerges in literary figures, religious traditions, mythologies, and everyday language. It is an infinite water in which everything is retained, and where all times mingle together. This is the body of water we refer to whenever we talk about the past as a watery depth. Those who have passed on rise up from its fathomless reaches to speak with us. It is the final outlet of those rivers that so many cultures entrust with the task of receiving and carrying away the dead. (Chen et al. 41)

MacLeod also writes that, for certain objects, among which she counts the water bottle, “the act of assigning exchange value […] either effaces or instrumentalizes its history […] the object appears ‘new,’ like the bottle of water whose origins become unreadable in its seemingly spontaneous genesis by the convenience store refrigerator” (43).

11 “We insist on thinking with water – and not, for instance, with air, with plastics, with rare earths, or with any of the other articulable categories of matter that we experience,” write the editors of Thinking with Water (Chen et al. 5). I do not disagree, but it seems plastic has made the task impossible by now.

12 Schmitt writes, for instance, of “the elemental freedom of the sea” (175).

13 The English translation has “complete being” for “être total.” One might contrast Bachelard’s phrase with Marcel Mauss’ “total social fact.” By way of example, nonetheless, Bachelard anticipates on what seems eluded by Coccia’s astrology (although science does actively, and surely not entirely unwittingly, pursue it), namely, “the loss of our being in total dissolution […] Water dissolves more completely [complètement]. It helps us to die completely [totalement] […] Water is the matter of despair” (91–92).