Description
Book SynopsisBringing 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, th
Trade Review“How do elements accumulate and transform?
Saturation assembles a fluid compendium for navigating the phase changes of materiality. Tracking kelp and oil, seismic surveys and submarine films, drought and floods, smart oceans and data centers, the chapters in this collection teem with ideas for how to work within the fluctuating conditions of environments, media, culture, and politics.” -- Jennifer Gabrys, Chair in Media, Culture, and Environment, University of Cambridge
“This volume is a tour de force of media theory: the contributors posit saturation not just as one thing that happens in or through or by various media, but as an original and urgent way to understand what media are and do. As a heuristic, saturation draws new lines of relation between issues such as climate change, extraction, militarism, energy, security, biopolitics, and Indigenous sovereignty, among others, in surprising ways. In short, thinking with saturation helps us to see our contemporary condition anew.” -- Astrida Neimanis, author of * Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Thinking With Saturation Beyond Water: Thresholds, Phase Change, and the Precipitate / Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz 1
Water
1. The Colors of Saturated Seas / Stefan Helmreich 29
2. Hydromedia: From Water Literacy to the Ethics of Saturation / Joanna Zylinska 45
3. Fossil Fuels, Fossil Waters: Aquifers, Pipelines, and Indigenous Water Rights / Avery Slater 70
Thresholds
4. Sonic Saturation and Militarized Subjectivity in Cold War Submarine Films / John Shiga 105
5. Wireless Saturation / Rahul Mukherjee 123
6. Saturation as a Logic of Enclosure? / Max Ritts 144
Phase Change
7. Becoming Undetectable in the Chthulucene / Bishnupriya Ghosh 161
8. The Media of Seaweeds: Between Kelp Forest and Archive / Melody Jue 185
9. Drought Conditions: Desalination and Deep Climate Change in Southern California / Rafico Ruiz 205
Precipitate
10. Precipitates of the Deep Sea: Seismic Surveys and Sonic Saturation / Lisa Yin Han 223
11. Media Saturation and Southern Agencies / Bhaskar Sarkar 243
12. Oil Barrels: The Aesthetics of Saturation and the Blockage of Politics / Mariji Cetinić and Jeff Diamanti 264
13. The Data Center Industrial Complex / Mél Hogan 283
Afterword: Climate Change as Matter Out of Phase / Janet Walker 306
Contributors 313
Index 317
