Water and Gestationality: What Flows Beneath Ethics

Mielle Chandler and Astrida Neimanis question the very ground of ethics and explore its aqueous condition of possibility in a more-than-human world. While some theorists have attempted to broaden humanist ethics to include non-human entities, Chandler and Neimanis disturb this current by asking: what flows beneath (human) ethics that is itself more-than-human? They propose that human ethics is made possible by watery sociality, which they theorize specifically as gestationality. In other words, they suggest that as bodies both human and more-than-human, our capacity for ethics arises from the water that gestates, comprises but also exceeds us. Importantly, this proposal begins from a phenomenological understanding of watery materiality itself—that is, from water’s ‘gestational’ embrace in the inception, repetition, and proliferation of life-in-the-plural. However, in order to develop this proposal, the authors enter into theoretical conversation with Levinas and Deleuze. In a productive space where these two philosophers meet, Chandler and Neimanis unfold what water can teach us about the capacity to respond to other bodies, and about the unknowable futurity that all watery bodies hold. This, they suggest, is what is repeated at the interhuman level as ‘ethics;’ the ethical considerations that ground environmental and social justice start from the water in which all of life is bathed into existence.

But how might these theoretical considerations help us to understand our own relations to specific more-than-human watery others? For example, the ascidian (commonly known as a sea squirt) is a body of water immersed in water. The sea squirt’s flourishing in the oceans complicates simplistic notions of ethics in that ascidian life is both “harmful” and “helpful” to other life—at once a water-purifier and an invasive species, a threat to manatee life and a source for human pharmaceutical breakthrough. Can we be ethical towards these creatures? Can they be ethical towards us? These questions literally flow beneath the authors’ theoretical proposals. By exploring the possibility of speaking as and with ascidian life, this subterranean text reminds us of the leaks and flows between material existence and theoretical text, and of the inability of the latter to ever entirely account for watery sociality.