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DISMAL SCIENCE: PART 1

RED PASSENGER

When Friedrich Engels set out in 1844 to describe in detail the living and working conditions of the English working class, he began oddly enough by standing on the deck of a ship:

I know of nothing more imposing than the view one obtains of the river when sailing from the sea up to London Bridge. Especially above Woolwich the houses and docks are packed tightly together on both banks of the river. The further one goes up the river the thicker becomes the concentration of ships lying at anchor, so that eventually only a narrow shipping lane is left free in mid-stream. Here hundreds of steamships dart rapidly to and fro. All this is so magnificent and impressive that one is lost in admiration. The traveler has good reason to marvel at England’s greatness even before he steps on English soil. It is only later that the traveler appreciates the human suffering that has made all this possible.¹

For Engels, the increasing congestion of the Thames anticipated a narrative movement into the narrow alleys of the London slums. Very quickly, the maritime view–panoramic, expansive, and optimistic–led to an urban scene reduced to a claustrophobic Hobbesian war of all against all:

The more that Londoners are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and disgraceful becomes the brutal indifference with which they ignore their neighbors and selfishly concentrate upon their private affairs.… Here indeed human society has been split into its component atoms.²

Engels’ descriptive movement from the open space of the river to the closed spaces of the city’s main streets and slums also anticipated an incipient theoretical insight of historical materialism: the discovery of the unequal development of the technical means and the social relations of production. The river port, like Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, is a huge figure of contained and purposeful energy, contrasting with the aggressive and brutish frictions of the city itself. The city, at this juncture, is more primitive than the river.

If the river and the city did not entirely exist in the same present, it is also the case that the river belonged to an earlier epoch. Thus the geographical passage from river to city was on a more subtle level a historical shift from one motive force to another: the river was still ruled by the wind while the city ran on coal. Looking back, in a footnote added to the 1892 German reissue of his book, Engels felt the need to qualify that moment on deck:

This was so nearly fifty years ago, in the days of picturesque sailing vessels. In so far as such ships still ply to and from London, they are now to be found only in the docks, while the river itself is covered with ugly, sooty steamers.³

By the end of the century, Engels knew that his earlier rhetorical strategy had rested on an aesthetic and spatial contrast that had lost its validity, a contrast between the “picturesque” (malerische) port and the “ugly” city. Like Joseph Conrad, who described a steam tug as “an enormous and aquatic black beetle” leaving an “unclean mark” on the waves, Engels now found nothing to celebrate in the maritime use of steam. The city, and the factory system behind the city, had devoured any difference–or beauty–the river had to offer. But this obliteration of the river’s “difference” is already prefigured in the earlier text: as the river narrows it becomes less like a port and more like a city street.⁴

The “magnificent” (grossartig) scene on the Thames leads on to the dismal alleys of Manchester. At the outset, industrial capitalism is prefigured through its older mercantile counterpart, culminating in the image of the small steamships, that “dart rapidly to and fro,” sharing their motive force with the modern factory. From this point on the text is permeated with the metaphor of steam: society is a contained and superheated gas under increasing pressure. The working-class slum is the ultimate locus of this looming explosion, of atomized forces that threaten to build and rupture the cast-iron walls of the urban factory-boiler. Engels was to push his Hobbesian prophecy to its grim limit in the concluding chapter of his book: “The war of the poor against the rich will be the most bloodthirsty the world has ever seen.”⁵

Engels’ narrative begins at sea, in maritime space, a space defined in many of its distinctive features by an earlier preindustrial capitalism, a capitalism based on primitive accumulation and trade. When it was initially seized by the imaginary and made pictorial as a coherent and integrated space rather than as a loose emblematic array of boats and fish and waves, maritime space became panoramic. Its visual depiction even today conforms to models established by Dutch marine painting of the seventeenth century. It is in these works that the relationship of ships to cities is first systematically depicted. Obviously, the various historical modes of picturing maritime space should be distinguished from any provisional list of actual maritime spaces: the ship itself, the hinterland, the waterfront, the seaport, breakwaters and seawalls, coastal fishing villages, islands, reefs, the beach, the undeveloped shoreline, the pelagic space of the open sea, the deeps, and so on. (I include the hinterland here because it is terrestrial space defined in its spatial relationship to the seaport.) One can produce other, more strictly functionalist or legalistic typologies: strategic naval space, fisheries, trade routes, national and international waters, exclusive economic zones, free ports. And yet, on a fundamental level, there is a strong connection between the qualities of boundedness or openness of these worldly spaces and the possibilities imagined in pictorial representation. Over time, this relationship became partially reciprocal, and some maritime spaces, those devoted to touristic pleasures, were developed to conform to pictorial exemplars.

The panorama is paradoxical: topographically “complete” while still signalling an acknowledgement of and desire for a greater extension beyond the frame. The panoramic tableau, however bounded by the limits of a city profile or the enclosure of a harbor, is always potentially unstable: “If this much, why not more?” The psychology of the panorama is overtly sated and covertly greedy, and thus caught up in the fragile complacency of disavowal. The tension is especially apparent in maritime panoramas, for the sea always exceeds the limits of the frame.

It is in early seventeenth-century Dutch legal theory that the sea is emphatically understood to exceed and even resist terrestrial boundaries and national proprietary claims. Writing in defense of the interests of the Dutch East India Company against Portuguese claims to exclusive trading rights in the southwest Pacific, Hugo Grotius spoke, perhaps somewhat cynically, of

… the OCEAN, that expanse of water which antiquity describes as the immense, the infinite, bounded only by the heavens, parent of all things. … the ocean which … can neither be seized nor enclosed; nay, which rather possesses the earth than is possessed.⁶

Thus the sea’s infinitude gives rise to a doctrine of free trade well before it provides a basis for eighteenth-century aesthetic notions of the sublime. Panoramic maritime space in Dutch painting is implicitly “open” in this preromantic sense: open to trade, a net cast outward upon a world that yields property but that in its idealized totality is irreducible to property. When protoromanticism is later confronted with this uncommodifiable excess, it transforms it into the sublime, taking it initially as proof of divinity; only later is the category naturalized and psychologized:

A troubled Ocean, to a Man who sails upon it, is I think, the biggest Object that he can see in motion, and consequently gives his Imagination one of the highest kinds of Pleasure that can arise from Greatness. I must confess, it is impossible for me to survey this World of fluid Matter, without thinking on the Hand that first poured it out.…⁷

In its blunt and clever materialism, seventeenth-century Dutch painting had not yet reached this point: the hands that mattered most in contemplating the sea were those of the shipwright and the seafarer. Svetlana Alpers has characterized the “descriptive” and “topographic” mode of Dutch painting in these terms:

Like the mappers, [Dutch painters] made additive works that could not be taken in from a single viewing point. Theirs was not a window on the Italian model of art but rather, like a map, a surface on which is laid out an assemblage of the world.⁸

Alpers’ account of Dutch topographic methods invites us to consider a mobile spectator, more inquisitive than acquisitive, a crypto-cartographer, and not the fixed humanist subject of Renaissance Italian perspective. Nonetheless, the seventeenth-century Dutch still lived in a world in which commodification, while everywhere expanding, was not yet universal.

There is a profound historical shift in the passage from a seventeenthcentury world view that recognizes a formal legal limit to the additive “assemblage of the world” and one that submits the totality to the same pecuniary accounting procedures with which it had grasped the fragments. That latter world had arrived with the factory system by the middle of the nineteenth century, thrusting the confidence and measure of older panoramic methods into crisis, while simultaneously routinizing the mechanical panoramic possibilities of the camera. The prototypically “Dutch” mobile spectator had been transformed into a figure of passive consumption. Dolf Sternberger argued that steam-powered travel by rail had submitted the world to a new panoramic spectacularity:

The railroad elaborated a new world of experience, the countries and oceans, into a panorama.… it turned the eyes of travellers outward, offering them a rich diet of changing tableaux, the only possible experience during a trip. ⁹

Sternberger assumed that the rapid linearity of railroad travel extended even to the view from coastal tracks onto the sea, but implicitly this passage suggested that even sea travel had succumbed to the railroad model, for otherwise how could the oceans truly have become panoramic?

It is true that steam travel by sea developed from steam travel by land, and thus was a step forward in the increasing dominion of the land over the sea. The gigantic transatlantic steamer Great Western of 1838 was the logical outward extension of its designer Isambard Brunel’s earlier project, the Great Western Railway. But the monotony and malaise and occasional terror of pelagic space, the space of the “middle passage,” resisted conversion into “a rich diet of changing tableaux,” whether or not one’s ship was powered by wind or steam. The opulent interior spaces of first-class travel on the steamships of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods may well have been designed to compensate for that lack of external “tableaux” on the high seas. The sea’s resistance to an all-consuming opticality lingered well into the modern period, most emphatically for those passengers unable to afford the outward view from the promenade deck or its inner surrogate in the grand saloon. Thus the sea’s “excess” is not easily superseded by modernization.

Standing on the deck of his ship as it sailed upriver to London, Engels was straddling two very different ideas of panoramic space: the older panoramic tableaux of the Dutch and the new mobile panorama of an accelerated age of steam. He described a liminal maritime space that was just beginning to be enveloped by the polluted miasma of urban industry. This “enveloping” eventually rendered the older notion of the panorama obsolete, or at least anachronistic, in its reassuring depiction of a clear division between ships and the land, and ships and the sea.

This collapse, or blurring, of panoramic maritime space in painting was first grasped by J.M.W. Turner, in works produced coincidentally with the first appearances of oceangoing steam-driven ships in the decade preceding Engels’ voyage up the Thames. This is not to reduce the Turneresque sublime to a simple technological determinist explanation, but rather to suggest that a painted sky that presumed the wind to be a motive force had a different referential status from one in which steam and smoke were introduced as evidence of new powers. Steam cut an imaginary straight line through a space previously governed by the unpredictability of the wind. Paradoxically, however, steam made the possible directions of movement less evident in the aggregate view of ship and sea and sky. A line of smoke from a funnel is not always an indication of the vector available to or taken by a ship. Only if the speed of the ship greatly exceeds that of the wind, or if the ship steams directly into the wind, will this line indicate the ship’s path. Weather became paramount in painting as its actual power over human movement diminished, and transit times became more predictable. Turner’s exorbitation of weather occurred at the very historical moment when it was widely imagined to be vanquished.

Fig. 1 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Snow Storm-Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth, oil on canvas, 1842.

Engels’ implicitly romantic attitude toward the sea and seafaring–his sense of a heroic and even redemptive potential of the sea–required that his literary description of the approach to London on the Thames, while couched in the language of the romantic sublime, conform not to a Turner-esque blurring, but to the older model of sharp encyclopedic delineation of ships, shoreline, and buildings, albeit with a sense of an increasing congestion that anticipated disorder even as it testified to prosperity. By turning back to an older panoramic realism, the realism of Joseph Vernet or before that of Hendrick Vroom and the Willem van de Veldes, Engels initiated a newer social realism, an art of crowded spaces, previously hidden details and the statistics of misery. In doing so, he assaulted the optimism and confidence of those earlier aristocratic and bourgeois visions of economies seen from the waterfront. The slum was for Engels what the storm was for Turner in his later paintings: a catastrophic limit set against industrial hubris. Their great difference lies in the fact that industry and the slum produce one another, while the storm remains an external force.

Fig. 2 Map of Manchester slum. From Friedrich Engels. Der Lage der Arbeitenden Klasse in England, 1845.

There was a deliberate and ironic anachronism in Engels’ choice of the sailing packet as a platform from which to launch an economic investigation of the city, underscoring capitalism’s descent from its “earlier heroic phase” to the depraved exploitation of the fully developed industrial system.¹⁰ This device contained an element of theater, a staging of a “backward” German traveller’s touristic awe at the sights, which echoes even today in insurrectionary literature.¹¹

But ultimately Engels recognized that the port of London was in no respect anachronistically “outside” the contemporary system of production: “This great population has made London the commercial capital of the world and has created the gigantic docks in which are assembled the thousands of ships which always cover the River Thames.”¹² The order of causality here is significant: the port is the product of industrial capitalism. What is absent is a developed theory of primitive accumulation, which would comprehend the prior role of the merchant ship in producing that next stage of capital ist development. If the initial iconography of Engels’ journey to London and Manchester can be traced to Amsterdam, the Dutch precedent for his opening description of the bustling scene on the Thames can be found most clearly in paintings such as Ludolph Backhuysen’s Shipping before Amsterdam (1666), or earlier in Hendrick Vroom’s Return of the Second Dutch Expedition to the West Indies (1599). These are paintings with a deck or lowermast level viewpoint from which the profile of the city of Amsterdam is partly obscured by the density of triumphant vessels in the river IJ. The standard art-historical interpretation of pictures such as these assigns a larger symbolic and anthropomorphic significance to the image of the ship:

… a ship is not an inanimate object but a complex manned entity that is rarely depicted in isolation; by its very nature it is related to a larger visible or implied whole. Not only are these ships some of the most complex products of seventeenth-century engineering, but their inherently human presence arouses our interest. Once we realize that they are pitted against the elements or against each other we become absorbed in their destiny. By implication the subject is dramatic because there must be an outcome: survival or destruction–victory or defeat.¹³

It is precisely this insistence on hidden allegory that Svetlana Alpers opposes in her argument that what distinguishes Dutch paintings is the intellectually complex character of their non-narrative, “descriptive” engagement with the world and conditions of visual knowing. Alpers defends a mode of pictorial absorption that is not dependent on symbolization or narrativity. But the dramaturgy of eternal struggle and “destiny,” intended to elevate marine paintings above the level of mere documents of “seventeenth-century engineering” manages to arrive unwittingly at the threshold of an interesting and sometimes embarrassing historical truth: these ships are war machines, and their purpose is bloody plunder.

It might do well for us to rethink these Dutch pictures in allegorical terms, to regard them as allegories of empire in which national identity and external threat and dominion are persistently figured by descriptive, topographic means. This requires a move from Alpers’ interest in the epistemological basis of Dutch paintings to a regard for their combative and even paranoid features. Expansive panoramic space is always haunted by the threat of collapse or counter-expansion. Thus the panorama is always implicitly or explicitly militarized: the net can close in from the other side of the horizon. For example, nowhere is the panoramic spatialization of an external threat more topographically evident than in Willem van de Velde the Elder’s The English Fleet at Anchor off Den Helder. This elongated drawing from 1653, with a vertical to horizontal ratio of 2:9, traces a densely massed line of British warships blockading the strategic gap between the island of Texel and the mainland of Holland. Here the imperium implicit in the Dutch panorama meets its mirror image. The blockade matches and implicitly “contains” the otherwise expansive view from the Dutch coast. The British antagonist is like-minded but stronger, and it is worth noting that this defeat of the Dutch “viewpoint” is reenacted in the van de Veldes’ subsequent decision to cross the horizon line and practice their craft in England.

Many Dutch maritime paintings were commissioned by city magistrates, or by shareholders in the great trading companies. One obvious condition of their success lay in the ability of the painter to articulate the economic link between the ship and the city in appropriately illusionistic and nonsymbolic spatial terms. Consider an earlier Dutch maritime painting, Hendrick Vroom’s View of Hoorn of 1622. Hoorn does not sink modestly into the sea as Dutch cities tend to do when viewed from deck level. The elevated masthead view, and the slight curvature of the coastline combine to place the city of Hoorn at the center of a global circle, with favorable offshore winds propelling ships immediately outward in their quest for wealth. In effect, this picture gives us two panoramas: one visible and contained, showing the clear profile of the city and the parallel expanse of the Usselmeer, and the other “providential,” implied and open. This second, implied panorama extends outward at an oblique angle from the frame, along the speedy radius offered by the wind, leading to the larger expanse of the North Sea and on to the Baltic or the Indies. The viewer, a vicarious (or actual) seafarer, is invited to look back toward the city with the peculiar longings characteristic of approaches and departures.

Fig. 3 Willem van de Velde the Elder, The English Fleet at Anchor off Den Helder, drawing, 1653.

Once the ship loses sight of land, this panoramic and umbilical linkage back to the port of origin is broken. At the end of the age of sail, Joseph Conrad would come to understand well the phenomenology of this separation of the ship from the land:

The passage had begun, and the ship, a fragment detached from the earth, went on lonely and swift like a small planet. Round her the abysses of sky and sea met in an unattainable frontier. A great circular solitude moved with her, ever changing and ever the same, always monotonous and always imposing.¹⁴

Fig. 4 Hendrik Cornelisz. Vroom, View of Hoorn, oil on canvas, c. 1622.

The painter of this latter space was of course Turner. And with Conrad and Turner, the economic function of the ship loses the positive value it held for the Dutch. The mood shifts from the supposedly sanguine temperament of the lowlands to the melancholy of the late romantics, and the frontier, even bloodier and more colonized now than before, is imagined to be “unattainable.” As it moves at the center of its own panorama, the ship becomes the lost and wandering daughter of the land. One measure of Engels’ radicality was his ability to break with the fatalism of this emerging romance of the sea’s isolation, and to step from the deck of the ship onto the streets of the city at the center of the global circle of power.

FORGETTING THE SEA

It may well appear at this juncture that I am performing a grotesque juggling act at a triple funeral: a memorial service for painting, socialism, and the sea. Leaving aside for the moment the second and presumably most recently deceased of the three, what possible claims can be made for the totalizing ambition of the classical maritime view a century and a half after Engels turned his back on the waterfront? Why would anyone be foolish enough to argue today that the world economy might be intelligently viewed from the deck of a ship? Furthermore, isn’t an interest in marine painting liable to charges of antiquarianism and anti-modernism? And finally, by posing these three questions together, don’t I risk the additional charge of “naive realism” or reflectionism? The economic questions are relatively easy to answer, while the aesthetic questions are more difficult.

To the extent that transnational capital is no longer centered in a single metropole, as industrial capital in the 1840s was centered in London, there is no longer “a city” at the center of the system, but rather a fluctuating web of connections between metropolitan regions and exploitable peripheries. Thus the lines of exploitation today may run, for example, from London to Hong Kong, from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, from Taipei to Shenzhen, from Taipei to Hong Kong and Taipei to Beijing, from Beijing to Hong Kong and from Beijing to Shenzhen, and perhaps ultimately from a dispersed and fluid transnational block of capitalist power, located simultaneously in London, New York, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei, and Beijing, drawing ravenously on the rock-bottom labor costs of the new factories in the border city of Shenzhen and in the surrounding cities and countryside of Guangdong province in southern China. The ability of Taiwanese manufacturers to move rapidly from production in Taiwan to production in Guangdong or Fujian province is largely a function of the unprecedented physical mobility of manufactured goods and machinery. Shoes made one month in Taiwan are suddenly made a month later in Guangdong at greatly reduced cost. The shoes are identical, only the label registers the change. And even labels can be falsified when import restrictions are to be circumvented. The flow of cargo to Japanese or North American or European markets is never interrupted. A ship leaves Hong Kong with its forty-foot steel boxes full of sneakers, rather than Keelung or Kaohsiung.¹⁵

The key technical innovation here is the containerization of cargo movement: an innovation pioneered initially by United States shipping companies in the latter half of the 1950s, evolving into the world standard for general cargo by the end of the 1960s. By reducing loading and unloading time and greatly increasing the volume of cargo in global movement, containerization links peripheries to centers in a novel fashion, making it possible for industries formerly rooted to the center to become restless and nomadic in their search for cheaper labor.¹⁶ Factories become mobile, ship-like, as ships become increasingly indistinguishable from trucks and trains, and seaways lose their difference with highways. Thus the new fluidity of terrestrial production is based on the routinization and even entrenchment of maritime movement. Nothing is predictable beyond the ceaseless regularity of the shuttle between variable end-points. This historical change reverses the “classical” relationship between the fixity of the land and the fluidity of the sea.

The transition to regularized and predictable maritime flows initiated by steam propulsion was completed a century later by containerization. If steam was the victory of the straight line over the zigzags demanded by the wind, containerization was the victory of the rectangular solid over the messy contingency of the Ark. As we will see, containerization obscures more than the physical heterogeneity of cargoes, but also serves to make ports less visible and more remote from metropolitan consciousness, thus radically altering the relationship between ports and cities.

The story is of course more complicated than this. It would be difficult to argue that the pioneers of containerized shipping had a vision of the global factory. Their innovations were responses to the internal competitive demands of the shipping industry, but these demands were by their very nature of an international character. Historically-militant seagoing and dockside labor had to be tamed and disciplined: the former had to be submitted to the international search for lower wages, the latter subjected to automation. Ships themselves had to be built bigger and differently and by workers earning relatively less than their historical predecessors. International capital markets had to be deregulated and tariff boundaries circumvented or dissolved by fiat or international agreement, but these legal changes follow rather than precede containerization. NAFTA and GATT are the fulfillment in international trade agreements between transnational elites of an infrastructural transformation that has been building for more than thirty years.

Indeed, it can be argued further that the maritime world underwent the first legally mandated internationalization or “deregulation” of labor markets with the invention by American shipowners and diplomats of the contemporary system of “flag of convenience” registry in the late 1940s. At the time, American trade unionists concerned about the decline of the U.S. merchant fleet complained about “runaway ships,” drawing an analogy with the “runaway shops” of the textile industry then relocating from New England to the non-union South.¹⁷ Little did they imagine that within three decades factories would follow ships to a more complete severing of the link between ownership and location. The flag of convenience system, which assigned nominal sovereignty to new maritime “powers” such as Panama, Honduras, and Liberia, allowed owners in the developed world to circumvent national labor legislation and safety regulations. Crews today are drawn primarily from the old and new third worlds: from the Philippines, Indonesia, India, China, Honduras, and Poland, with Asians in the majority. Seagoing conditions are not infrequently as bad as those experienced a century ago.¹⁸ The flag on the stern becomes a legal ruse, a lawyerly piratical dodge. To the victories of steam and the container, we can add the flag of convenience: a new ensign of camouflage and confusion, draped over the superficial clarity of straight lines and boxes.

My argument here runs against the commonly held view that the computer and telecommunications are the sole engines of the third industrial revolution. In effect, I am arguing for the continued importance of maritime space in order to counter the exaggerated importance attached to that largely metaphysical construct, “cyberspace,” and the corollary myth of “instantaneous” contact between distant spaces. I am often struck by the ignorance of intellectuals in this respect: the self-congratulating conceptual aggrandizement of “information” frequently is accompanied by peculiar erroneous beliefs: among these is the widely held quasi-anthropomorphic notion that most of the world’s cargo travels as people do, by air. This is an instance of the blinkered narcissism of the information specialist: a “materialism” that goes no farther than “the body.” In the imagination, e-mail and airmail come to bracket the totality of global movement, with the airplane taking care of everything that is heavy. Thus the proliferation of air-courier companies and mail-order catalogues serving the professional, domestic, and leisure needs of the managerial and intellectual classes does nothing to bring consciousness down to earth, or to turn it in the direction of the sea, the forgotten space.

Large-scale material flows remain intractable. Acceleration is not absolute: the hydrodynamics of large-capacity hulls and the power output of diesel engines set a limit to the speed of cargo ships not far beyond that of the first quarter of this century. It still takes about eight days to cross the Atlantic and about twelve to cross the Pacific. A society of accelerated flows is also in certain key aspects a society of deliberately slow movement.

Consider, as a revealing limit case, the glacial caution with which contraband human cargo moves. Chinese immigrant-smuggling ships can take longer than seventeenth-century sailing vessels to reach their destinations, spending over a year in miserable and meandering transit. At their lowest depths, capitalist labor markets exhibit a miserly patience.

For those who face the sea under such conditions, the imagination both seeks, and is coaxed, to leap over the middle passage. This brings us back to the aesthetic questions posed earlier. In a short story by Bharati Mukherjee, a Tamil schoolteacher hoping desperately to emigrate from Sri Lanka seeks the services of a smuggler’s go-between:

“Options!” the man sneered. Then he took out a foreign-looking newspaper from a shopping bag. On the back page of the paper was a picture of three dour sahibs fishing for lobster. “You get my meaning, sir? They have beautiful coves in Nova Scotia. They have beautiful people in the Canadian maritimes.”¹⁹

Having “heard stories of drowned Tamils,” her protagonist dreams of safe passage to the north, “crisscross[ing] national boundaries on skates that felt as soft and comfortable as cushions.”²⁰ Mukherjee’s schoolteacher is a striking figure: a postcolonial “throwback” to the fearful Irish and Scottish emigrant passengers of the age of sail. And yet the image of danger is presented in the form of a grotesquely improvised tourist brochure; the counter-image of safe passage from tropical south to frozen north is conjured up as if from textbook reproductions of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It is in diasporic texts such as Mukherjee’s, full of desires sparked by images from elsewhere, that the threats and lures of actual maritime space continue to live.

The “forgetting” of the sea by late-modernist elites parallels its renewed intransigence for desperate third world populations: for Sri Lankans, Chinese, Haitians, Cubans, for the Filipinos and Indonesians who work the sealanes. Air travel assures that bourgeois cosmopolitanism no longer requires any contact with the sea. Social classes no longer rub shoulders in the departure terminals of the great steamship lines. And cruise ships, the floating apartheid machines of postmodern leisure, have a way of obscuring from passengers the miserable conditions endured by the third world crews who cater to their mobility and their desires.

Culturally, the sea becomes a vast reservoir of anachronisms, its representation redundant and overcoded. The last aesthetic movement to claim the sea with any seriousness was surrealism. It is both perverse and fitting that the founder of structural anthropology should later in life sustain this surviving surrealist spirit, asserting his preference for the eighteenth-century maritime painting of Joseph Vernet while dismissing cubism and lamenting the modernist “shipwreck of painting.” Of Vernet he says:

By means peculiar to the art, one is transported into a vanished world. And even more marvelous, perhaps this world never existed, for the painter didn’t slavishly reproduce what he saw; he rearranged the elements and combined them into a lyrical synthesis. One of Vernet’s great harbors is not far from the evening at the Opera that Proust described!²¹

In keeping with the surrealist love of obsolete didacticisms, Claude Lévi-Strauss is producing here a radical recoding of the classical edification demanded from the port scene. This earlier project of waterfront enlightenment, toward which we can orient the ironical figure of Engels as well, has been described in a recent book by Alain Corbin:

The practice of walking along wharfs and stone piers … expressed the fascination exerted by a stage on which spectators could observe particularly manifest displays of energy, activity, heroism, and misfortune. It fitted logically into the classical journey. Here nature had retreated before the labors of man, who had cut stones and reshaped the boundaries that God had set to the ocean.²²

Corbin remarks further that “Vernet made the harbor view into a privileged panorama. In his work, the port is first and foremost a picture that walkers in the hills examined with their spyglasses.”²³ We can better understand Lévi-Strauss’s point when we realize that Vernet’s viewpoint, described thus, corresponds to Proust’s initial “naive” attitude toward the theater: “… real people, just living their lives at home, on whom I was thus able to spy without their seeing me.…”²⁴ But Lévi-Strauss’s discovery of Marcel Proust in Vernet is all the more perverse and comical when we turn to some of what Proust had to say about seascapes:

A few weeks later, when I went upstairs, the sun had already set. Like the one I used to see at Combray, behind the Calvary, when I was coming home from a walk and looking forward to going down to the kitchen before dinner, a band of red sky over the sea, compact and clear-cut as a layer of aspic over meat, then a little later, over a sea already cold and blue like a grey mullet, a sky of the same pink as the salmon that we would presently be ordering at Rivebelle reawakened the pleasure which I was to derive from the act of dressing to go out to dinner.²⁵

This paragraph, in which the mundane synesthesia of culinary anticipation slides into a reverie of shipborne escape from “the necessity of sleep and … confinement in a bedroom,” ends with the line, “I was on all sides surrounded by pictures of the sea. “But it is precisely the unity of the “picture” that Proust is dissolving, by stripping the perceptual qualities of iconic signs away from the larger visual field. As Walter Benjamin observed:

It is the world in a state of resemblances, the domain of correspondances; the Romanticists were the first to comprehend them and Baudelaire embraced them most fervently, but Proust was the only one to reveal them in our lived life.²⁶

Throughout this chapter, “Seascape, with Frieze of Girls,” Proust repeatedly forces the tropes of romantic longing up against a de-psychologized post-impressionist treatment of seashore space. On the one hand, his narrator speaks of “the shipwreck of my nervous storms.” At the other extreme, the optical superimposition of a garden in the foreground and a steamship in the far distance is described in this way: “… the tiniest slice of blue still separates the questing prow from the first petal of the flower towards which it is steaming.”²⁷

Proust’s deconstruction avant la lettre of seascape is all the more striking for being staged within the realistic idiom of the novel. For Proust, it is photography that initiates the collapse of seascape into an increasingly undifferentiated spatiality. His character Elstir, a painter of seascapes and port scenes, produces confusions of terrestrial and maritime space for which a precedent was already found in certain photographs. Elstir “reproduce[s] things not as he knew them to be but according to the optical illusions of which our first sight of them is composed.….” Having “prepared the mind of the spectator by employing, for the little town, only marine terms, and urbanterms for the sea.” Elstir gives the “impression of harbours in which the sea entered into the land, in which the land was already subaqueous and the population amphibian.…”²⁸

Over the course of this chapter, Proust engages in a double and contradictory movement: participating both in a romantic revival of the deluge and in the counter-tendency to domesticate the maritime sublime by converting its perceptual properties into the raw material of still life. This ambivalent strategy is entirely consistent with surrealism.

But this ambivalence, which allows the features of classical and romantic seascape to atrophy and hypertrophy at the same time, has also become a routine and unconscious staple of journalistic prose. A reporter for the New York Times produced a series of accounts of the oil tanker Braer breaking apart on the rocky coast of the Shetland Islands:

The Braer’s final hours came in the overnight darkness, in a setting of almost primeval fury, as 30-foot surf and winds gusting up to 95 miles an hour smashed the writhing superstructure. Every so often, flashes of lightning illuminated the dark cliff and the wild seascape ²⁹

But two days before this, the scene is described with an almost Proustian taste for the banality of culinary metaphors: “At its worst, patches of cappuccino-colored foam swirl along the shore, barely staining the beaches and rocks.”³⁰

If this account seems to veer between Lord Byron and Proust with a shift in the weather, the reporter’s confusion may have more to do with an epistemological difficulty than with any migration of modernist indifference or postmodern semiotic play into journalistic discourse. Confronted with an oil spill and a tempest, the reporter is hard-pressed to differentiate between the destructive workings of first nature (the storm) and manufactured second nature (the leaking oil). The result is the forced simile by which leaking crude oil is repeatedly and reassuringly likened to upscale coffee. Wittingly or not, this metaphoric loop takes us back to the very origins of maritime risk insurance at Lloyd’s coffeehouse in eighteenth-century London.

But it is unlikely that most readers of the New York Times would make this connection. If Proust can be said to have rigorously enacted the exhaustion and death of seascape within the modernist literary canon, then the elite newspaper of a coastal cosmopolis, the New York Times, can be said to have taken the lead in turning its back to the sea. When maritime news appears it is restricted to stories of disaster, war, and exodus: thus the subject is compressed into a weirdly blasé and episodic faux-sublimity. The sea is the site of intermittent horrors and extraordinary but brief expenditures of energy, quite distinct from the dramas of everyday life.

The disappearance of the sea took place slowly, over two decades. In the 1960s, the New York Times typically ran a page of shipping and transport industry news, alongside the weather, which was charted far into the Atlantic. Cargo and passenger ship departures and arrivals were reported daily. By 1970, the “Shipping/Mails” section was restricted to passenger and mail ships only, excluding cargo vessels. By 1980, the “Shipping/Mails” listing had migrated to a small corner of the “Stock Options” pages of the newspaper’s business section. The weather maps, placed elsewhere, were more likely to hug the Eastern seaboard. By the end of 1985, in the middle of the Reagan-era decade of speculative accumulation, the everyday shipping news sank entirely from sight. By contrast, a paper such as Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post continues to make shipping news a major feature of daily coverage, rivaling the more specialized press, such as the New York-based Journal of Commerce, in the depth of its reporting.

One can argue correctly that this disappearance is coincident with New York City’s decline as a seaport. But this argument misses the point that the combined Port of New York and New Jersey remains second only to Los Angeles and Long Beach on the west coast as the preeminent port in the Americas. But the working port is invisible from Manhattan and increasingly so from Brooklyn, with the main cargo terminals relocated with the advent of containerization to Port Elizabeth and Port Newark.

The metropolitan gaze no longer falls upon the waterfront, and a cognitive blankness follows. Thus despite increasing international mercantile dependence on ocean transport, and despite advances in oceanography and marine biology, the sea is in many respects less comprehensible to today’s elites than it was before 1945, in the nineteenth-century, or even during the Enlightenment.

This incomprehension is the product of forgetting and disavowal. In this sense elites become incapable of recognizing their own, outside of narrow specialist circles. Consider, by contrast, the obscurity of Malcom McLean, the trucking executive who initiated containerized cargo movement in 1956, alongside the historical and cultural importance accorded to Donald McKay, the nineteenth-century Boston clipper-ship builder. In his American Renaissance of 1941, F.O. Matthiessen reproduced as a frontispiece a striking daguerreotype portrait of McKay by Southworth and Hawes:

McKay’s portrait makes the most fitting frontispiece, since it reveals the type of character with which the writers of the age were most concerned, the common man in his heroic stature, or as Whitman called the new type, “Man in the Open Air.”³¹

Matthiessen’s choice reflects both the legacy of American romanticism and the pragmatism of a nation entering a convoy war in the North Atlantic. But the line leading from American romanticism to American pragmatism has since been broken. The new model hero, in an age that celebrates cunning survivors of corporate bankruptcies and victorious commanding generals in wars against abysmally inferior opponents, is less Walt Whitman’s “common man” than Herman Melville’s archetypal American swindler, the Confidence-Man.