Touching the Breeze: Sue Goyette’s Ocean
“Objects are the way things appear to a subject – that is with a name, an identity, a gestalt or a stereotypical template. … Things, on the other hand, … [signal] the moment when the Object becomes the Other, when the sardine can look back, when the mute idol speaks, when the subject experiences the object as uncanny and feels the need for what Foucault calls ‘a metaphysics of the object, or, more exactly, a metaphysics of that never objectifiable depth from which objects rise up to our superficial knowledge.’”
(W. J. T. Mitchel in Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010), 2) In Sue Goyette’s Ocean, the “never objectifiable depth,” which is both ontological and epistemological, is the Atlantic Ocean. Goyette imagines the ocean as a mythical surface from which all things, knowledge, and cultural practices rise to shape the daily lives of a small community of ocean dwellers living in the coastal city of Halifax, Canada. What makes Goyette’s corpus of work particularly interesting for environmental criticism and interspecies discourses is that in her contemporary poetic universes a belief in pure individuality either does not exist or is seen as misguided. Her poetry relies mostly on a language that is semantically enriched by an …show more content…
Here, multiplicities of any kind form and make an assemblage of collective agencies to create a super structure. Here assemblages make relations between stratas in a rhizome network possible. For Deleuze and Guattari “becoming-minoritarian” (106), employing variable minority elements to connect and conjugate them, leads to the creation of a specific, novel, and autonomous becoming. The creation of a somebody and not a nobody within the masses is not orderly, but always multiple as an
“Objects are the way things appear to a subject – that is with a name, an identity, a gestalt or a stereotypical template. … Things, on the other hand, … [signal] the moment when the Object becomes the Other, when the sardine can look back, when the mute idol speaks, when the subject experiences the object as uncanny and feels the need for what Foucault calls ‘a metaphysics of the object, or, more exactly, a metaphysics of that never objectifiable depth from which objects rise up to our superficial knowledge.’”
(W. J. T. Mitchel in Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010), 2) In Sue Goyette’s Ocean, the “never objectifiable depth,” which is both ontological and epistemological, is the Atlantic Ocean. Goyette imagines the ocean as a mythical surface from which all things, knowledge, and cultural practices rise to shape the daily lives of a small community of ocean dwellers living in the coastal city of Halifax, Canada. What makes Goyette’s corpus of work particularly interesting for environmental criticism and interspecies discourses is that in her contemporary poetic universes a belief in pure individuality either does not exist or is seen as misguided. Her poetry relies mostly on a language that is semantically enriched by an …show more content…
Here, multiplicities of any kind form and make an assemblage of collective agencies to create a super structure. Here assemblages make relations between stratas in a rhizome network possible. For Deleuze and Guattari “becoming-minoritarian” (106), employing variable minority elements to connect and conjugate them, leads to the creation of a specific, novel, and autonomous becoming. The creation of a somebody and not a nobody within the masses is not orderly, but always multiple as an