Representation at sea: on the limits of representing oceanic subjects

This paper revisits theories of representation from the perspective of the sea, based on ethnographic research with ocean activists. One dominant representation of the ocean that scholars in the blue humanities and the blue social sciences have discussed in recent years is that of the ocean as the 'outside' of society. As Steinberg demonstrated, this view of the ocean took hold in the period of industrial capitalism, during which the ocean was constructed as a “great void”, that is: “an empty surface between the terrestrial places that “mattered”” (2001, p.208). Until today, the ocean continues to be represented as the “‘negative space’ on many maps” (Lehman, 2022, p.23), such as on Google Maps where the ocean is presented as a flat, blue surface without character (see Steinberg and Peters, 2015). Crucially, this void in the cultural representation of the ocean corresponds with a gap in the ocean’s political representation and what Armstrong has called the “ocean-shaped hole” in democracy (Armstrong and Scharenberg, 2023, p.10). Directing our attention to counter-representational practices which aim to centre the ocean on our political maps, this paper asks how the ocean may be represented both culturally and politically, based on ethnographic work conducted amongst ocean activists between 2023 and 2024. As I demonstrate elsewhere, there is a long tradition in ocean activism - as illustrated, for instance, by the direct actions of marine conservation organisations like Sea Shepherd - of using different practices of media representation as a key strategy to put ocean-themed issues on the public agenda (see Scharenberg, 2024). Yet, my fieldwork with marine conservationists and activist divers in the UK and Europe reveals that the ocean also presents a number of limitations, both with regards to possibilities of cultural and political representation. The paper conceptualises these issues by consulting different theories of representation (such as Pitkin, 1972; Hall, 1993), including Spivak’s (1994) distinction between 'speaking for' (vertreten) and 're-presenting' (darstellen), alongside scholarship on underwater representation from the blue humanities and social sciences. Further developing an idea from Jue (2020), I propose the concept of counter-illumination to describe a political practice that challenges conventional understandings of representation in two ways. The term usually refers to a behaviour which allows marine animals to hide in the water column by means of bioluminescence, through which their moon-lit silhouette becomes invisible to predators approaching from below. Here, I appropriate the term to describe practices which shine a light on habitats threatened, for instance, by corporate actors seeking to extract marine resources outside of the public eye. Secondly, practices of counter-illumination point to the limits of representation in oceanic contexts with regards to who can speak for the ocean and how. The paper argues that what is at stake here is not merely how oceanic subjects can be included in representative democracy, but how an oceanic subject of representation may be delineated and re-presented in the first place.