Winter 2000
Volume 26, Number 2

The History of the World
The history of the world, says the American poet Charles Olson in his little book on Moby-Dick, Call Me Ishmael, published in 1947, could be summed up by three oceans; the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and now the Pacific. (Homer, Dante, and now Melville.)3

The Disappearance of the Sea & Its Fantasmatic Recovery
Yet how unthinkable Olson's proposition has become. Not because of the ordering but because of its substance. For now so few of us have any direct experience of ships or the sea. Today we relate to the ocean and its histories through the commodities brought in the hulls of ships. Joseph Conrad's writing is not a reflection of the sea and a worldwide experience of it so much as an anxious premonition of its disappearance as a key element of nature from human experience. Conrad retired from the sea shortly after receiving his master's certificate, just when sail gave way to steam, which is when radical experiments in modernism were born. This displacement of everyday experience by commodities caught Karl Marx's eye, too, in his notion of fetishism. The point of this concept was not, as many writers on this concept seem to think, that a more significant reality (for example, the process of material production) is occluded and people (other than intellectuals and party leaders) become blinded to reality. Rather, that reality is displaced and thereby, as with the labor of the negative underlying fantasy, propels strange flights of imagination and even stranger ways of juxtaposing time and place.

Today the old ports have gone. Concrete container terminals have replaced them, and the wharves have moved to industrial sites far from the people who go as tourists to the gentrified old ports where sailing ships are resurrected as museums. Yet as never before, so we are told, is the whole world unified into the One Big Market, which must mean immense amount of shipping and human dependence on sea-borne freight: the iron ore from Australia and Canada, the apples we eat from Tasmania, the cheap steel from China, sun-ripened tomatoes from Israel, transistor radios and teevees from Taiwan, cars and computers from the U.S. and Japan, the blue jeans from Medellin, oil from Venezuela and Kuwait, and so on. The conduct of life today is completely and utterly dependent on the sea and the ships it bears, yet nothing is more invisible.4

How different it must have been until well into the twentieth century when ships and sailors filled the horizon of Western experience from Ulysses onward! Is this what Joyce sensed would happen when he backtracked on Melville and demythologized Ulysses, forgot the great white male and instead had his Ulysses be a fumbling everyman, a Dublin Jew named Bloom, barely making it through life, masturbating on the beach? "'She is our great sweet mother,'" declares "stately, plump Buck Mulligan," "'the snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.'" And he turns abruptly to Stephen Dedulus. "`The aunt thinks you killed your mother.'" "`Someone killed her,' Stephen said gloomily." 5

3 See Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (San Francisco, 1947).

4 This theme is evoked and explored with originality and great insight by Allan Sekula in his Fish Story, a catalogue of 204 pages of text and photographs to accompany a travelling exhibit (Dusseldorf, 1995). Reminiscent of John Berger's work with photographs by Jean Mohr, Sekula writes a terse, telegraphic, echoing prose alongside his photographs that, through a wide-ranging Marxist sensibility, knits together political with art historical interests concerning the awesome mix of business and romance that is the sea and the ships that cross it. (Thanks to Tom Mitchell and Antony Gormley for reminding me of this work, and Michael Watts for giving me a copy of it as the deluge descended over San Francisco.)

5 James Joyce, Ulysses: Annotated Student's Edition, ed. Declan Kiberd (Harmondsworth, 1992), pp. 3, 1, 4; hereafter abbreviated U.

Michael Taussig teaches anthropology in New York and has written a good deal about peasant economy, shamanism, and fear in Columbia, a country he first visited in 1969. His books include The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1990), Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987), The Nervous System (1992), Mimesis and Alterity (1993), The Magic of the State (1997), and Defacement (1999). At present he is writing about prison islands and law in a lawless land.