The Coming Goo
I recall reading, in The New York Review of Books a couple of years ago, an article that said jellyfish were taking over the planet. Reviewing a study by marine biologist Lisa-ann Gershwin, the piece pointed to instances of giant agglomerations of the things covering (or saturating) ocean stretches up to sixty miles long, destroying fisheries, clogging up the intake-vents of shoreline factories; when, in 1999, they blocked the cooling system of a Filipino power plant, causing a blackout, it was presumed—and widely reported—that there’d been a coup. Invertebrate guerrillas, plasmic terrorists. Last year, Donna Haraway published an essay on “Tentacular Thinking” in e-flux, calling for fibrous, flagellated, tendriled, and microbial revolt, accompanied by an agitprop poster showing invertebrates—“the 97%”(of animal diversity)—marching beneath the banner “Octopi Wall Street.” This is funny, and sharp; but Gershwin’s cnidarian revolutionaries are more sexy, because they’re more brazenly militaristic: they even once apparently took on—and beat—the nuclear warship USS Ronald Reagan, subduing it not with thrashing and encoiling arms out of Jules Verne but through an older, Coleridgean tactic of softly yet ineluctably sludging it fast within a sea that had become pure slime.
These essays were written between 2002 and 2016. Some were commissioned as introductions to reissued novels; some as articles; some as live lectures; one as a BBC radio performance. You launch them, and they float around for a while, catching and refracting various types of light; then this same translucence camouflages them against the general background, and they fade from view. But they’re still there, trailing strands in all directions, looking—seductively, or with toxic malevolence, or both—for points of contact, larger cluster-meshes to lace into, feed off, and recalibrate, or just to sting. Sometimes they break down as clumps of them detach and, like in Terminator 2, run into other clumps, and something starts reconstituting that might or might not be what was there before. Eventually, you realize that a kind of saturation level has been reached; there’s a critical mass of goo in circulation; and it’s coming back, lodging, sticking . . .
Does this mass have intent? Is it governed by some kind of plan? A systematic, or at least strategic (revolutionary? or reactionary?) program? What citadel or intake-vent is it storming? Even if it lacks the central nervous system that would enable it to think it had a plan, could one be attributed to it retrospectively, or vicariously, or by default? Maybe, maybe not. The only way of beginning to answer these questions is to scoop these essays up and float them out again, as one big cluster.
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I’M EXTREMELY GRATEFUL to Melanie Jackson and Edwin Frank, without whom this collection would never have taken shape. Also to Ed Ruscha, for allowing me to use his beautiful image on the cover. And to Jonathan Pegg, and the many collaborators—institutional, commercial, and (perhaps most importantly) amical—whose kindness has allowed the pieces such a hospitable environment in which to spawn and multiply.