Saturation: An Elemental Politics

"Saturation shows how underwater points of view have much to teach us about the nature of objectivity, teaching us to look for the ways that a terrestrial bias appears in the ways we speak about and orient to the world. The volume takes the ocean as a vital starting place from which to develop a method of milieu-specific analysis, calling attention to the differences between perceptual environments and how we think within and through them as embodied observers. Through discussions of science fiction literature and visual media, Saturation shows that attending to the ocean is just the beginning of developing a broader sensitivity to the role of milieu in the fields of media studies, literary studies, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities. The ocean is not only a medium; the ocean is a vital milieu from which to reconsider what we have taken for granted about the nature of mediation, objectivity, and metaphor. By developing a method of oceanic displacement-and submerging media concepts in the ocean-this book is a science fictional exercise in speculation, exploring how we might think outside of our terrestrial habits by seeing things through the opacity of seawater"--
Bringing together media studies and environmental humanities, the contributors to Saturation develop saturation as a heuristic to analyze phenomena in which the elements involved are difficult or impossible to separate. In ordinary language, saturation describes the condition of being thoroughly soaked, while in chemistry it is the threshold at which something can be maximally dissolved or absorbed in a solution. Contributors to this collection expand notions of saturation beyond water to consider saturation in sound, infrastructure, media, Big Data, capitalism, and visual culture. Essays include analyses of the thresholds of HIV detectability in bloodwork, militarism's saturation of oceans, and the deleterious effects of the saturation of cellphone and wi-fi signals into the human body. By channeling saturation to explore the relationship between media, the environment, technology, capital, and the legacies of settler colonialism, Saturation illuminates how elements, the natural world, and anthropogenic infrastructures, politics, and processes exist in and through each other. Contributors. Marija Cetinić, Jeff Diamanti, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Lisa Yin Han, Stefan Helmreich, Mél Hogan, Melody Jue, Rahul Mukherjee, Max Ritts, Rafico Ruiz, Bhaskar Sarkar, John Shiga, Avery Slater, Janet Walker, Joanna Zylinska
Bringing together media studies and environmental humanities, the contributors to Saturation develop saturation as a heuristic to analyze phenomena in which the elements involved are difficult or impossible to separate as a way of exploring the relationship between media, the environment, technology, capital, and the legacies of colonialism.