Thinking elementally, from the microbe to the vast seafloor
There is a kind of deferral. We see there's a problem with fossil fuels. There's a desire for green energy transition. This leads to then more extraction at the seafloor, which is a different kind of catastrophe or, I guess, displacement of one catastrophe onto another.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:The emerging microbes are not microbes per se, but their emergence. They are beyond microscopic. We're dealing not just with the microscopic microbe, but you're dealing with its unknown future horizon.
Lisa Yin Han:Hello everyone. My name is Lisa Yin Han. I'm a assistant professor of media studies at Pitzer College. And I'll be talking about my book today, Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor. The book examines the relationship between historical and emergent media operations in the deep ocean and their relationship to extractive industry in particular.
Lisa Yin Han:So I'm interested in the production of the seafloor, specifically as a frontier space and a space of profit and how media technologies ranging from underwater video to sensor networks have contributed to producing the ocean floor in this way. That work is situated at the intersections of critical media studies, science and technology studies, and in the environmental humanities. And in general, I think a lot about how we mediate water and aquatic spaces in my work. I'm thrilled to be here today on the University of Minnesota Press podcast in conversation with Gloria Chancell Kim, whose book Visualization and Security in the War Against Emerging Microbes was also recently published by the press.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Hey, Lisa. Thanks so much for that introduction. I'm so happy to be here in conversation with you. Hi, I'm Gloria Chan-Sook Kim. I'm a scholar of visual culture and media studies working across the environmental and medical humanities, computation and culture, infrastructure, and science and technology studies.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:So in my work, I'm interested in the cultural and historical implications of scientific and technological developments as they interact with the epistemological and political stakes of vision in the twenty first century. I'm the author, as Lisa said, of Microbial Resolution. In that book, I chart The US led war on the emerging microbe to show how the not yet existing futures of microbes were transformed into objects of global science and security. I develop a theory of microbial resolution in the book to analyze this complex problematic that arises in that effort. So it's this problem of how do you cook something not just unknown, but unknowable into view?
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:So there are a lot of paradoxes and irreconcilabilities inherent in that project. And I'm interested in the ways that those tensions animate twenty first century epistemologies, aesthetics and ecologies. I'm so glad to be in conversation with you, Lisa. And I'm really excited to ask you this first question as a just kind of way to, I guess, dip our toe in the water. I'm sorry about that pun, and it was intended.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:I was struck by your book. In reading it, I was very much aware of your book coming up as this new volume in the ocean humanities. And I was interested in the ways that you work in the ocean humanities, but your book goes directly to the seafloor. So I wondered if you might talk about the move of just going straight there to the seafloor. And, you know, when we're doing elemental analysis, as you and I both do, we're often thinking with and through the materiality of our objects.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:So, you know, that means in the ocean humanities, we've come across analyses that are grounded in the materiality of things like the salinity of water or the pressure or transparencies and opacities of water, these kind of ideas of flow. And so I'm wondering how you might think elementally about the seafloor and how that has kind of changed or shaped your thinking around that.
Lisa Yin Han:Yeah, great question, Gloria. Thanks for that opener. I'm definitely influenced by a lot of the existing work in the ocean humanities or blue humanities as it's sometimes called. Much of that writing is sort of focused on surfaces, on the surface of the sea. And that has to also do with our popular media cultures and our popular imaginaries about the ocean being sort of very centered on these more accessible parts of ocean environments, the littoral spaces, the beaches, the surfaces.
Lisa Yin Han:And so I was interested in the specificity of the deep sea and the seafloor in particular, and also thinking about the entire volume of the ocean, really, ocean as a space from volumetric mediation. And so to your question about the elemental framework, which of course was a huge influence for me, I had been reading, for instance, Melody Ju's work on ocean media and thinking also about that, like how that changes the terms through which we understand mediation. So the seafloor is interesting to me because it really is this trans elemental space. It's all about the interplay between fluid and solid. So the thing that comes to mind for me is the importance of sediment in this conversation.
Lisa Yin Han:The movements of sediment become so important to understanding how the seafloor is made, but also how it's extracted from and how it's visualized. Building off of that question, I'd love to kind of throw that back to you and ask you how you came to your book topic. So was there something in your personal experiences, things that you were studying or just living through in particular that led you to want to write about this? What might your initial entry point have been into the book?
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Yeah, I'm happy to get to that question. I just want to come back to your response and just say that it's been really exciting to read a book in the blue humanities that takes up sedimentation and, you know, ground and earth because this is precisely this kind of complication of the ocean medium that I think is a really welcome kind of intervention of a different kind of materiality into that space. As for your question to me about how I came to my book. So I've been asked this all the time. Think I get asked this a lot and my response changes all the time.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Part of it is that it's kind of come together in ebbs and flows and bits and pieces. But there is one thing that I can point to that was a kind of defining moment when I knew that this project was kind of starting or some part of me did. So I had always been interested in scientific problems of knowledge and visualization. And I happened to stumble across an online ad in the online version of The New York Times for the deadly migration documentary that I talk about in chapter one. So it's a seven minute long, for those of you who haven't heard it or seen it, it's a seven minute long documentary by IBM about the futures of avian flu and how we need to prepare for these unknown futures today.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:I encountered it in this clickable banner as I was reading The New York Times, I also discovered that it was the kind of mandatory commercial content that one would receive on select American Airlines flights within a particular period of time. So when I watched this commercial or this documentarycommercial, it was hitting all of my buttons. It had this whole kind of scientific knowledge problem that I was interested in prior to this working on disease and bodies. But this was a very different kind of space, and it picked up all of my interest in computation, in planetary management systems, in future casting, and governing through weird kind of affective formation. So that's how it started.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:You know, as I was thinking about that, what the experience, and thinking about and writing about that experience, I'm watching this documentary on an airplane. So the narrative starts off with an airplane as this kind of carrier of a global future pandemic. So I'm thinking about that in this kind of materiality of communication. And then I was also thinking about you know, the experience of picking up a newspaper. I encountered this on The New York Times.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:It had me thinking about place and doing this research and how the research that we do kind of inflects the ways that we live and move as bodies in space. I had a question that I wanted to kind of think and toss around with you. This is really a question about place and writing. When we're writing anything, and especially when we're writing books, we are so deeply immersed in it, and our entire field of existence is blotted out by that research and where we need to be mentally in order to be in that space. So I was curious about your research into the seafloor, into the ocean more generally, and your various ways of being in relation to that as a land animal.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:So I'm thinking here of the way that, let's say, you know, Bouch writes about this experience of coming out of a movie theater, right? Coming out of this dark enveloping space and having to kind of resituate in the world outside of it. Or the way that, let's say, Selena Osuna, who writes about desert humanities, decided that they wanted to write about the desert in part through an experience of being estranged from desert climates. And so I was wondering if you could talk about this kind of transition from writing about the ocean to being this kind of land based animal, but especially someone who lived in the context of, you know, Colorado landlocked, but then also, you know, developing part of this work in Arizona, where we're in the desert, and then in Santa Barbara, right by the ocean.
Lisa Yin Han:Yeah, I love that question. You know, what you said also about your initial entry point, thinking about that film, and it made me really think about my own embodied experiences as well with the anxieties of pandemics and being in airports, especially where we get so much of that mediation. But in any case, for me, it's funny because I think a lot of what I've come to as a scholar is precisely because I haven't been in placed, right? Like as a media scholar, you know, I hadn't really grown up watching like a whole lot of television that didn't have cable. I think being in the ocean also, definitely part of this was in place.
Lisa Yin Han:I was writing the early parts of this book in Santa Barbara, where I did have that proximity to the sea. But then in being in the desert, come to think of water a little bit differently. Mean, it's definitely still at the forefront, but becomes much more so a question of scarcity and also management. And so when I was at ASU in the Phoenix area, was thinking about that. And also the interesting similarities.
Lisa Yin Han:I think the desert is a highly productive way of thinking about the oceans because there are all these similarities between how we imagine desert spaces as empty and comparable and how we imagine the oceans also as vast empty spaces, spaces for waste, right? And so that becomes an occasion to reflect on how some of these questions about environmental justice or environmental harm might cross between different kinds of environmental spaces for me.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:What you're saying right now reminds me of some of my experiences of the ocean. So full disclosure here, I'm Canadian and I grew up in the Northeast. And I've just, fairly recently, my whole life has been around research positions in the Northeast and East Coast and the Midwest. And then I moved to California. And right now I work in the desert, that's where my institution is, but I live right by the ocean.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:So I live in Long Beach, California, right by one of the major logistics ports of The US, but also right by the oil islands there in the ocean. So for those of you who don't know what this area looks like, the ocean, have this large, there's a Port of LA, and then you have these three or four islands not too far from ashore. And they're populated by what appear to be palm trees and these kind of vague architectural structures, you know, like a tower of some sort, but they're actually pretend. So what these are are oil islands, the palm trees and the other structures there are there to conceal this infrastructure. My orientation to the ocean, since I moved to California and my awareness of its not emptiness, but it's very fullness and how active it is and of the kinds of things that happen in it are all these effects of surfacing.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:So whether they be these kind of bizarre structures of the oil islands, where trees are not trees and buildings are not buildings, but are oil, or even just kind of walking along the shore with my dog, where you mentioned this in the kind of small moment in your book, where there are little dots of tar that get stuck to my feet, in my dog's feet. I see very sadly, some of the animal, deaths that occur, I think, in part through some of the sounding experiments that you're talking about. So once in a while I do see a dolphin that has died from what appears to be a sonic blast. So there's this really interesting kind of relationship between surface and depth that your work is kind of calling up to me. So when you go down to the sea floor, it's really interesting that you do that because I experienced all the surface effects of it.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Yeah, I wondered if you might want to think about that kind of relationship.
Lisa Yin Han:I think that's a super interesting question. And I like that you use the word surfacing too. It reminds me of actually Nicole Saraselski's work. I think she had an additional project called surfacing and her critical orientation towards like surfacing fiber optic infrastructures in the ocean. So, I see the kind of surfacing that you're describing here about how infrastructure is made visible in very specific ways.
Lisa Yin Han:I think that speaks back to a lot of early work in infrastructure studies that was sort of making this argument that infrastructure is invisible, right, until it breaks. But that's not the only way that it becomes visible. And sometimes that surfacing is about spectacle, right? Like transforming a liability into an asset, right? By like making an oil infrastructure beautiful.
Lisa Yin Han:Or we see that also with cell tower infrastructure, right? Through design. Of course, not all surfacing is profitable, not all surfacing fits into that kind of condition of making do and adapting the product, right? So there's so much there in terms of I think what we can engage with in regards to the idea of what it means to surface something. And that I think leads me to a question about you and your own orientations towards infrastructure and what that makes visible.
Lisa Yin Han:I mean, thinking in particular about your discussions about particularly at the end of the book around standardization, and I guess sort of these larger conceptual as well as physical infrastructures around microbial emergence. So, yeah, what was important to you about like critically examining infrastructure or things like standard setting?
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:I love infrastructure and I love logistics. The last two chapters are about infrastructure and logistics, which is kind of weird maybe at first take because we're talking about microbes, these really And not just microbes, but emerging microbes. So these things that don't yet exist, right? So one of the things that in the process of researching and writing the book and talking to people about it, one of the things that constantly kind of came up was this kind of confusing materiality or immateriality of microbes and emergence. So I guess I want to say two things.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:One of the things that I was trying to do in writing about emerging microbes in relationship to things like logistics infrastructures was to really kind of pull into a very kind of durable materiality, all of the kind of stuff that kind of gets built up around this kind of scientific knowledge project, right? So in talking about infrastructure and logistics, I'm trying to show that this project that gets erected around this ever present possibility that never fully arrives actually has these really, really material effects, right? They are ecological, they are infrastructural, and they kind of move through the world in these very systematic ways. Another thing, another reason why I'm interested in infrastructure and logistics in this discussion is because, in, again, in the course of reading and researching and talking about this topic, one of the things that I really noticed both in official discourse and in more casual discourse, there was this kind of confusion about what the horizons of possibility were for, let's say, global health, right, around pandemic management. There's a way in which a lot of these kind of, so let's say, activist discourses or progressive discourses, was some oftentimes come to dovetail with some of these more militarized and corporatized forms of dealing with with pandemic risks.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:So this is a point where, you know, we saw with COVID a lot of people across whatever political spectrums or whatever social beliefs were pleading for, you know, more preparedness. Like, Oh my God, why weren't we more prepared? We should have had more stockpiles of this and that. And so one of the things I really wanted to kind of get at was that this is a kind of militarized discourse that has kind of taken hold over this area, this topic. And one of the things that I'm trying to do as I'm talking about infrastructure and logistics is to kind of show clearly through the policies that determine how these kind of conduits of transmission and sharing and all of those standardization and harmonization, how all of those processes, what actually ends up happening through them is this kind of, very clean neoliberalization of these things.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:So part of that kind of larger effort, as I discussed in the book, is a way in which when you have this kind of system, it becomes very difficult to decipher what is humanitarian and what is an extension of a war logic. Right? But I think in drawing out the infrastructure and logistical kind of arrangement of the bioeconomy, I'm trying to show the reasons why it feels so hard to kind of move in that space and why it feels so hard to think outside of it.
Lisa Yin Han:Wow, that resonates so strongly. I mean, this this idea that the humanitarian and military gazes not only intersect, but are so wrapped up in each other. I think that for me really resonates with what I was thinking about around conservation and its kind of elements with militarization also, And neoliberalization.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:That gets me thinking around your book and the ways that we mobilize this kind of similar dynamic. We both look at that text Natural Capital, right? But this moment where conservation and enclosure come up in the same take, right? And where they are not contradictory, they are no longer contradictory in such a logistical system. And through these kinds of policy infrastructures or regulatory infrastructures, what happens is that they become, they actually do, are made to dovetail, right?
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:They come together cleanly. You can have the biospheric and the economic come together without contradiction, right? Or where they do contradict becomes a site of productivity in terms of capital, right? So you talk about this in your book in that kind of salvage and extraction dynamic. So do you want to take us there for a moment?
Lisa Yin Han:Absolutely, yeah. So in the first chapter of my book, I lay this out in my discussions of shipwreck salvage. This is one of the dominant ways in which we mediate the seas or understand the sea floor, right? I think if you ask the lay person to imagine shipwreck media, they might tell you about the Titanic, or they might tell you about shipwrecks. And so, you know, I was thinking about the politics of that, really how those dynamics around salvage are unfolded into projects of nation building and the ways in which how we understand, how we mediate or imagine the sea floor as a kind of archive of the past is at the same time tied to this dynamic of extractivism and frontierism that I talk about, right?
Lisa Yin Han:The need to also build a particular kind of future from that ability to narrativize the past. And so that's where I kind of come up with this idea of a salvage extraction dynamic that really, you know, both institutionally as you were talking about, right? Like there's an institutional connection to all this. And on the kind of more like figurative level, we see these collusions between extractivism and ideas of heritage and ideas of preservation of culture.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:I mean, you brought up shipwrecks. So now I want to go there. I like that you begin with a scene of wreckage. So your book starts with shipwrecks, and then you open your narrative of extraction from that and through it, right? So I'm always interested in these kind of narratives of failure and how they might structure the ways that we think about how they might structure certain projects.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:So, you know, it's inherent in my work, certainly, and we can talk about that later. But I was wondering, there other ways in which failure, you know, because of the ocean and because of what it does and how it acts, is present as a kind of fundamental dynamic in your work? So maybe just to clarify the question, I'll let you know where I'm coming from a little bit. So, you know, I'm thinking of work that is looking at the desert and all of the things that its elemental conditions disallow, like, you know, it distorts, it bleaches. So it has this kind of negative, I guess, mediation, to use Dewey's term.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:But then I'm also thinking about books like Christopher Heuer's book Into the White, where he too starts off his book with failed Arctic exploration efforts, right? And the book is about, in part, about this kind of visual theory structured by a fundamental condition of the inability to see in the Arctic. And the quest for the Arctic is kind of dotted and populated by stories of folly and hubris and disorientation and literally ice coming into people's eyes and blocking vision. And so I'm wondering if there's a kind of larger structure of failure or dynamic at work in the things that you research in this book?
Lisa Yin Han:Absolutely. That's such an important question, I think. I feel like it's failure, but it's not just failure in itself, but the risk of failure, the idea of possible failure, and risk taking, that is a huge aspect of what I'm looking at. And so, yeah, the threat of, I think, the ocean as a risky space has informed ocean media from the very beginning, right? Even our very conceptions of risk and is tied to early ideas of insurance as they emerged in the maritime space, Through trade, through this idea that you would need to secure something in case, right?
Lisa Yin Han:And so for me, like it's, yeah, it's the it matters the way that because the ocean is seen as risky as a space of failure, potential failure, underwater mediation then becomes this heroic act of overcoming in the wake of that, you know, similar to space, similar to I think to microbial emergence, right? Like this dynamic that I think it was Paul Verrillio, right, who said this, that when you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck. There's a kind of inevitability to ruination, but also a productivity in that also being present. And so that I think really gets to a question that I want to ask you, which is, you know, I think you talk a little bit about catastrophe or catastrophic deferrals specifically in the final chapter. And it's different than the kind of, you know, I was thinking like in the early years of the COVID pandemic, right?
Lisa Yin Han:There was a kind of like sense of catastrophe. Now we've kind of entered this stage of like, yes, there will be more. We know that there will be more. We're anticipating catastrophe after catastrophe. And so I'm kind of, yeah, I'd love to kind of throw that back to you and ask like how you think about how that discussion of risk and catastrophe changes in the wake of microbial emergence and these projects to also then like secure, I guess, the microbial future.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Yeah, so I'm thinking about, and I'm hearing that question right off the tails of our conversation about failure. A spoiler alert of the book is that in the end, you know, so I describe all of these technologies and techniques that I have to kind of bring this unknowable and ungraspable future that's always changing into stability as a scientific knowledge object. And I call that whole process in the project microbial resolution, right? And then in the end, we come to see that in fact, all of this stuff, all of the policies, all of the technologies, all of this and that lead basically us to an irresolvable scene. So at the crux of the project of microbial resolution is failure.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Is not this thing that is to be Failure is not this thing that is now to be overcome, but the project of microbial resolution actually inheres in that failure. It is because it fails, because our pandemic projections never really kind of hit the right mark that this project must continue, right? It's because the next one will always come, you know? So it's not that COVID came, right? But we are living in this kind of extended and indeterminate kind of, I hesitate to call it an afterlife, but just this kind of long and vague shadow of it because it's still here.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:But even as we're doing that, and even as that event has happened, if I can kind of use a present tense, put past tense loosely for now, the gaze of microbial resolution is always on that next thing. And that's a quest that is just its logic is not to ever end, right? So in terms of catastrophic deferral, you know, I can't remember the exact context in which I use that phrase, but it resonates throughout the project where the point of all of the of the war on emerging microbes is not to end emergence, but in order to, you know, this becomes a question, it becomes this quest to kind of ride the productive waves of its continually deferred disasters, right? So we will always be preparing for the next one, right? We will always take our past experiences as this way to kind of think and kind of anticipate and live in that kind of anticipatory mode, right?
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:So that catastrophic deferral animates this idea that we're living in these kind of multiple temporalities and all the contradictions that brings into its fold animates the conditions of living today.
Lisa Yin Han:Yeah, very much so. You know, that resonates for me in my discussions of seabed mining and in general, the energy crisis that we experience alongside that, right? That there is also a kind of deferral going on where we see there's a problem with fossil fuels. And so there's a desire for green energy transition. This leads to then more extraction at the sea floor, which is a different kind of catastrophe or it's a deferral, it's also a kind of, I guess displacement of one catastrophe onto another.
Lisa Yin Han:And so maybe those dynamics of deferral and displacement also kind of go together. And I think it's so interesting that there is that dual temporality to it, right? That it's both deferral and delay and preemption and precaution and thinking ahead. And so I see maybe possible connections then, right? Between how we can temporally orient ourselves to both our projects and to these questions of catastrophe, of risk and ruination, etcetera.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is a really broad and kind of unformed question, but I'll just talk for a minute because you're making me think about another point of overlap or another area of overlap. And that happens to this kind of beautiful and weird temporality, both of emerging microbes, but also of the stuff that you're describing in the seabed. When I'm thinking about the temporality of emerging microbes, I'm thinking about this really weird complex interplay that unfolds the past and the future, this kind of endless future and this kind of continuous catastrophic deferral, right? So this is all enfolded in the entity of emergence, right?
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Where present day living is reformatted within that temporality. There's this really weird and confusing and disorienting temporal orientation, that comes with emerging microbes. When I was reading your chapter on plumes, I also am interested in plumes, but I've been watching all of those slow motion animations and calculations and, you know, algorithmic kind of crunching of sneezing and coughing plumes. I was really interested in your discussion there about plumes and the kinds of knowledge practices that need to kind of surface or come up around making these weird formations knowable, right? So I wondered if you could talk about that.
Lisa Yin Han:A hundred percent. Yeah, the plume was such an interesting figure for me, largely in part because of the difficulty of it's the project of capturing a body in motion, a body that is always changing. I found a lot of inspiration from Andrea Balcero's discussions of concentration and the way that we make concentration visible and how that also is connected to these anxieties about the invisible. But then also the research itself was interesting to me, way that people used markers and dyes and state of the art sensors to really try to achieve this aesthetic of containment and control. I think that really brought to mind some of the existing regimes of surveillance that we have and other kinds of social spaces, in spaces of mobility in particular.
Lisa Yin Han:And so like the connection to the temporality discussion is interesting because it's all about that real time tracking, right? It's the desire for real time and we see that like time is a kind of frontier as well. Know maybe it's not just Terra incognita but also a Tempus incognita or something along those lines.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:It's a churning, churning. Was thinking, I mean, one way that I think about plumes and it's been really helpful for me to kind of complicate, When you're talking about plumes, I'm thinking of all of these things that are unsettled from the seabed, right? And then put into this plume as this really turbulent force, right? And it had me thinking about plumes in my work, which I'll talk about in a second. But I was thinking about things like, you know, so Adriana Petrina in Life Exposed, it's a book about the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, meltdown in 1986.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Somewhere in the beginning of the book, there's a kind of map of the plume of radiation. And what was interesting about this plume and Petrone's discussion of it was that you have the plume that you can see, right? But it's radiation, it's nuclear technology. Mean, the plume is this thing that evades territorial boundaries. It really complicates questions of bodies and citizenship and what rights a body has in relationship to something that's been affected by, let's say, a different state, right?
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:So you have the plume, the visible plume, but then you have all of the kind of shadow effects of that. You have it through space. So there's a plume you can see. Then there's all of the radioactive stuff around it that can't quite be traced, right? Then you have the plume kind of acting and unfolding generationally through time.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Right? So that plume is still active in ecologies and bodies and so on and so forth today. And this brings to mind the kind of aquacious plume mappings around Fukushima Daiichi, that nuclear power plant meltdown. So, I'm interested in that formation of the plume as this thing that has to Because it calls into being all sorts of scales beyond the visible plume, all sorts of temporalities beyond what is visible there in the moment, something that, you know, and for me it involves, you know, like a sneezing plume or a breathing plume is a scene of great material displacement, right? It's just things being moved from one place to another that are coming into a body, that are going out of a body.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:And so that kind of what we might call your tempest in a plume demands these kinds of, the cultivation of different kinds of knowledge practices and perceptive capacities to try to get a hold of that. That's kind of how I've been thinking about it in my work. And it's been helpful to look at it in the seabed, because you have this, you know, you have the ocean, which we think of as water and salt, which oversimplification. But then now when you introduce all of the material displacements of sedimentation, it becomes an interesting, very messy object.
Lisa Yin Han:This is great. Yeah. I think you're so right. And I love that you invoke like both this question of bodies and the multi scalar ways in which bodies are kind of like intersected with these forces. I mean, so much about the tensions around like perception.
Lisa Yin Han:I think you mentioned this also in your own formulations of resolution, right? Like resolution is kind of about scale. I think you talk about this metaphor of the fishing net and like what falls through the net and you know the pixel is falling through the net. So I think it's important to me to think about that scaling up and the scaling down that happens. And the plume is a great figure for being able to kind of think about the mediation across scales.
Lisa Yin Han:For me, definitely it's tied to a kind of fear of like mobilities or inability to see at certain scales. I could definitely see that with microbes, right? There's that project of both needing to perceive the imperceptibly tiny while also understanding it as global, right? That you talk about the planetary macro biopolitics and those dynamics that come with the larger scale mediations. So yeah, I'm curious maybe if you can kind of also reflect on the role of scalar mediation for you and it's also relationships to these questions of security.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Okay, yeah. Let's see. So the scalar mediations of microbes, so we have that formulation by Latour that the presence of the microbe permits basically the hygienicist right to be everywhere in social relations, right? But for me, the really interesting thing about the emerging microbes, so not microbes per se, but their emergence, is that they are beyond microscopic. In fact, they are immaterial because I mean, immaterial in the sense that they don't yet exist, right?
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:We're dealing with not just with the microscopic microbe, but you're dealing with really its unknown future horizon. And so it's not even the minimum, it's just this thing called possibility. So in the book, I'm really interested in understanding how this risk and this kind of ever present possibility infuses, for lack of a better word, this kind of the planet. So, when I think about in that chapter where I write about macro biopolitics, I'm interested in working through, we'll talk about plumes, but, you know, Cecilia Lowe's notion of the viral cloud as this kind of inseparable formation of relations and entities and things that when we're thinking about viruses and microbes, we're not, and I'm not thinking about that little kind of microscopic thing, I'm thinking about this incohate kind of ungraspable force and how that might scale out and how fears around that and a kind of global scientific project to make knowledge out of that informs planetary existence, I suppose. Yeah.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:I mean, I wondered, I mean, thinking now about these diffuse formations like plumes and clouds and breath actually brings me to a question that I'm burning to ask. And I like asking this of a lot of people who've written books, but it's a question that was asked to me by a graduate student at NYU. In the books that one writes, there is a subject, there is a topic, there are its objects and its archives, right? There are the core things that one, you know, so you wrote about the seafloor and mediation. So we expect certain things to be there, certain people and scholars to be in conversation with you.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:And I did the same with microbes. But this student pointed out that, you know, all books they understand are haunted. That is to say that there is a lot of literature and scholarship and all of the stuff that authors are thinking alongside and with, and they're not really the object itself, but they help to kind of inform and shape a lot of the thinking in the book, even though they may not be directly about its topic. So if that makes sense as a question, I wondered if, or as a provocation, I wonder if you might take that up and think about and talk to us about what were some of the kind of places around the book that don't appear as its main objects.
Lisa Yin Han:That's a great question. I think my mind goes in two directions for this. The first is definitely waste. You know, there's so much amazing work around plastic waste in our oceans, other kinds of waste. And I was thinking about it the whole time, you know, even though I don't address necessarily address waste directly.
Lisa Yin Han:I mean, the plume chapter is about, you know, a kind of toxic plume, but that literature is so connected to the conversation about extractivism as well as something that produces waste. Since I've written the book, I've just continued to think about waste a lot. It's become a lot more central after the fact of the book. And also, know, I have to say microbes as well. One of the first books that I read about the oceans in this kind of field was Stefan Helmreich's Alien Ocean, which probably features, you know, marine microbes.
Lisa Yin Han:And even when I kind of think about my own, like, entry points into academia, when I was a kid, you know, my dad was a microbial researcher. Spent a lot of time in front of a microscope, like, looking at these microscopic organisms. And so in a way, like, that also informed my interest in scientific vision in a much deeper sense. Yeah, I'm very interested in those questions of scale, waste, animal labor is also something that I've taken up and that's something that you know I was super interested to read in your book when you were kind of talking about flightways and tracking animals and how sentinels also become an important proxy for you in microbial resolution.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:You know, so thinking about waste, there's so much great work now on, you know, the economies of waste and how value is and productivity is directly tied to this special moment in this discourse of waste and bodily waste, earthly waste. You know, as I was thinking, you brought up Stefan Helmreich's book, and, you know, that was one of the books that came up when this student asked me this question. And, you know, it was such a great question because it really clarified for me at a point where I was just kind of finishing things off. All of our books are about something and then they're about something as well. I had done a lot of research in microbes.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Neither of my parents were microbiologists, and so I did a lot of that research on my own. And, you know, there are sections on microbes that I actually just took out of the book because I realized that that well, first, it's all about this war on the microbe and microbial resolution is about, not the microbe itself, but it's about its absence and the profound kind of penumbra of things that come up around it. Like, you know, how in the beginning of your book you describe, that character who tries to fill in that void. Right? So, you know, in the similar in a similar kind of way for me, the absence of the microbe was important.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:What I wanted to show, going back to your infrastructure question, is all of this stuff that has to come around to kind of block in the shape of that kind of future horizon. When I was asked this question, it forced me to just embrace something that I had been kind of denying. Don't know why, but, you know, writing is a struggle. But I thought, well, you know, the stuff that I read when I'm not writing and where I get really excited about the stuff that I'm doing is about the ocean. It's about outer space.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:It's about deserts. It's about all of these kind of extreme conditions in which catastrophe is close at hand in these places where that pose challenges to comfortable modes perception and orientation. But also, you know, scientific knowledge in these places is perpetually this quest of edging onto whatever that kind of movable horizon of the future is going to be, right? So there's a space between the unknown and this pursuit of it. That was really exciting for me.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:I mean, you talk about Hamilton-Paterson's book Seven-Tenths . And, you know, that chapter about the deep where he talks about all of these ways of fantasizing about the deep, know, different densities, different quests, that was really evocative to me as I was thinking through how are we going to try to build out this social project around this kind of abyss called Americans?
Lisa Yin Han:That's the other shadow I think is space. So I think it's super interesting that you brought that up too. Mean, I don't know if you don't mind elaborating also, you know, what was there something specific about space that you were thinking about? And yeah, I love the question as well about the stuff that didn't make it in the book. I'm curious if you would be interested in elaborating more on what didn't quite make it in the book, but maybe things that like you've taken up afterwards.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Well, a lot of bad writing didn't make it into the book and failed thoughts didn't make it into the book. In terms of your first The first part of that question was about outer space in particular. The features of outer space that really speak to me in this work are, you know, these weird, disorienting inhuman experiences of time and scale that occur when one is out of space. I was listening to Oh, I won't even try to recreate it because all sound like I'm bananas. But there's, I was listening to a space scientist, someone whose job it is to go up and repair space,
Lisa Yin Han:some
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:of these satellite pieces. This person was talking about being up in space and repairing this one arm of something and watching the sun kind of move around the planet a few times, like it moving between dark and light very quickly. And I just thought, oh my god, that's such a trip. It's such a different orientation to time. To have to try to orient one's body and mind in that is a really exciting thing.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Where that is taking me in the future, I won't say too much right now because it's still information, but I am in my second book, moving towards a study extreme environments and revisiting some of these questions and redirecting some of them. What about you?
Lisa Yin Han:I've been thinking about living waste. So the kinds of organisms that crop up on infrastructures that we don't want to be there, we call biofoul, and also like the ways in which waste becomes part of our understanding of ecology, thinking about how we intervene into those ecologies by for instance like we're thinking about microbes eating waste right or also my case study specifically was looking at drones and cleanup and the post natural vision of like using technologies to clean up the ocean en masse and how that in some ways is another kind of, to use your term, catastrophic deferral that is happening around our oceans. So yeah, those questions of like living waste and waste have become much more central to what I think will be my next book project, but that's definitely still in the works too.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:When I teach my course in elemental media and I show, say, Internet cables in the ocean or these, let's say, Microsoft's data storage centers that are submerged in the ocean. And when they're pulled out or when someone goes to repair them, you have this footage of all of this, I guess, what we call biofouling on these infrastructures. My students are always shocked to see that because it is so at odds with how we think about the Internet or, you know, the cloud as surrounded by delicious little sea creatures.
Lisa Yin Han:Yeah. I mean, guess I just want to say, Gloria, that reading your book really helped me rethink my own projects, particularly your articulation of resolution as kind of being the main framework. I really enjoyed that and also the discussion of resolution and what doesn't get resolved. And so I appreciate so much that we were able to be in conversation about this because in some ways I think we're telling a similar story but in different realms.
Gloria Chan-Sook Kim:Yeah. That is one thing that actually came to mind when I was reading your framework of alchemy. We're both using this analytic, yours alchemy, mine resolution, in various ways, but as a transmuting dynamic of mediation. Thank you so much for sharing it with everyone. I'm glad it's out in the world and floating around, bobbing its head going there.
Lisa Yin Han:The metaphors continue. Continue.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The books Deepwater Alchemy by Lisa Yin Han and Microbial Resolution by Gloria Chonsook Kim are available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.