Abstract:
As Carl Schmitt has elaborated, the practice of territory is founded upon an assumed permanent division of Earth into two surfaces: land and sea. Land is understood as solid and stable, a differentiated series of points that are settled, developed, and bounded into states. Water, by contrast, and in particular salt water, historically has been perceived in the Western legal-political tradition as liquid and mobile, an undifferentiated surface or an unmanageable volume: a space of flows that is fundamentally external to social life and state territory. While this binary division is contestable everywhere, this is particularly the case in frigid regions, most notably the Arctic. There, frozen water is a central space of habitation, and frozen land provides only limited opportunities for investment, development, and state control (at least as these are typically conceived in more temperate capitals); the physical state of land and water is highly variable, both seasonally and in the longer term due to climate change; the boundary between land and water is often not immediately evident; and the entire environment is characterised by exceptional dynamism and mobility, in both time and space. As the imprint of state institutions intensifies at the ice-land-water interface, ruptures are emerging between the idealised geophysical environment that underpins notions of territory and Arctic space as it is actually encountered by those who would control, live in, invest in, or pass through it. This paper investigates this problematic through a study of recent efforts to define, locate, and map the extent of sea ice, and by critiquing how these efforts apply discursive notions of stabilisation and categorisation to a complex and indeterminate marine environment.
4.00-5.30pm
Thursday February 16, 2017
Rocque Lab, Ground Floor, Rhetoric House
Maynooth University