Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater

Elements

by Melody Jue

In Wild Blue Media , Melody Jue destabilizes terrestrial-based ways of knowing and reorients our perception of the world by considering the ocean itself as a media environment—a place where the weight and opacity of seawater transforms how information is created, stored, transmitted, and perceived. By recentering media theory on and under the sea, Jue calls attention to the differences between perceptual environments and how we think within and through them as embodied observers. In doing so, she provides media studies with alternatives to familiar theoretical frameworks, thereby challenging scholars to navigate unfamiliar oceanic conditions of orientation, materiality, and saturation. Jue not only examines media about the ocean—science fiction narratives, documentary films, ocean data visualizations, animal communication methods, and underwater art—but reexamines media through the ocean, submerging media theory underwater to estrange it from terrestrial habits of perception while reframing our understanding of mediation, objectivity, and metaphor.

Genres: Academic, Environment

240 pages, Paperback

Published February 28, 2020

Reviews

[Kai · Rating 3 out of 5]

had to speed read this one but did find some of it quite captivating -- definitely understand why it's become a popular book in the "elemental" anthropology and media studies world. at one point Jue describes it as a "pre-activist" work, and I think that's some of where my reaction would come from -- it was a little contemplative at times for my taste. i liked the shift from situated knowledge to milieu-specificity.

[nick]

“Terrestrial bias”—banal fact of our existence, or opening onto new models of encounter via an acknowledgement of our situatedness and a speculation about another way of being? Reading this, I didn’t always find that the triple-underlining of our landlubber habits of mind yielded new insight, but Jue gives bracingly oblique readings of media theory terms and the endpoint of all that bias-checking feels well worth it: a major disorientation of the surface/depth topologies that still constrain how we talk about reading.

It’s tempting to reverse the equation now: what if aesthetic experience is already more like diving than walking?

[Ika Willis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favourite kind of theory writing: beautifully written and written in a specific (not generic) voice, it has a lovely two-way movement where it theorises the author's own experience while drawing on that experience to inform and enrich media theory. It makes me think of Felski on Latour on cultivating "good attachments"; in both content and form, the book moves away from the ideal of the detached critic or the "view from nowhere". Using the figure of the sea-diver to defamiliarise and render visible the terrestrial bias of media and literary theory, the book offers a milieu-specific media theory, massively expanding the ways in which we can think about interface, inscription, and database, with some very interesting thoughts about scale.

It reminds me a bit of Irigaray on Heidegger's "forgetting of air" (which I haven't actually read, but the title itself gives me a lightbulb moment), and some of the ways I think about resonance and the experience of hearing (which is always a physical vibration) rather than seeing - the materiality, embodiment, and copoeisis of all experience, of all media and of all semiosis. This interest in the relations between agency, experience, materiality and signification is so important to me, and Jue links it in a few places to ideas about world-making or world-building, which I also have an intuitive sense about at the moment.

A lot of what Jue says about the aims of her work in relation to literary theory parallels what I am trying to think about at the moment in terms of a reception-informed literary criticism, and I think her insistence on immersion and milieu might help me solve a problem I'm working on at the moment, which is the relationship between texts and contexts.

I took lots of notes but only want to highlight one, which is an in-passing distinction between explanation and implication (explaining = to flatten out; implicating = to fold into), which reminded me of Catherine Driscoll's idea of the text as "a fold in the world" (which also might help me think through the text/context relationship, now I come to think of it).

It was nice seeing Derrida show up a couple of times, after ten or so years of being told that no nice girl would refer to him in public! And Jue also refers a few times to a short story by Ursula Le Guin which is really important in my thinking, "The Author of the Acacia Seeds".

[Tanner · Rating 4 out of 5]

a little dry / unexciting at times, but a lot of good analysis + commentary on how our terran-based lives shaping the way we understand / interact with media- in ways that are rarely considered because, well, it isn't too common to spend much time underwater, much less to spend time there explicitly thinking about life on land.