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The following excerpt is from Stacy Alaimo’s “Jellyfish Science, Jellyfish Aesthetics: Posthuman Reconfigurations of the Sensible”, in Thinking with Water, edited by Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis.
Animal studies scholarship tends to emphasize animal-human relations, encounters, and similarities. Tom Tyler and Manuela Rossini entitle their new collection Animal Encounters. Most notably, Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto insists upon the co-constitution and co-evolution of humans and dogs. Furthermore, from Charles Darwin’s vivid tales of animal antics and abilities in The Descent of Man to the recent work of Marc Bekoff, who documents the emotional lives of animals, those who attempt to include animals within ethical consideration have stressed the similarities between various animals and humans. Jellyfish and other gelatinous creatures whose bodies are 95 percent water, however, float at the far reaches of our ability to construct sturdy interspecies connections, thus posing both conceptual and ethical challenges. As Neil Shubin puts it in Your Inner Fish, “How can we try to see ourselves in creatures that have no nerve cord at all?”
Even as we may question the compulsion to see ourselves in every creature, the animals dubbed mere “organized waters” stretch the definition of life itself, as they seem to lack both substance and recognizable organs or features. Although much cultural theory has for the last several decades valued fluidity as a mode of ethical and political possibility, the extreme fluidity and fragility of jellyfish render them almost invisible, almost unrecognizable – at risk, in the human imagination, of being lost at sea. Indeed,siphonophores and jellyfish have been notoriously difficult for scientists to collect. Laurence Madin notes that it has been nearly impossible for scientists to distinguish separate animals within the “shapeless see-through gelatinous blobs” or the “unattractive jello-like mass” brought up in nets and trawls. Another collector concurs: research trawling “reduces most siphonophores to a nondescript goo.”
Interestingly, as scientists have struggled to capture, collect, distinguish, and categorize these fluid forms of life, others have transported them from biology to art, rendering them distinct aesthetic objects. Even though people who experience jellyfish in the ocean often have difficulty distinguishing these soft and often translucent creatures from the water itself, photographic representations of jellyfish portray them as glittering “jewels,” perfectly set against the sharply contrasting background of black water. Photographic collections, including Jellies: Living Art, Amazing Jellies: Jewels of the Sea, and the spectacular volume The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss, depict these creatures as stunningly beautiful and profoundly strange. In contrast to the environmental critiques of how standard nature photography objectifies and overly aestheticizes, resulting in the pejorative term “ecoporn,” I would like to argue that these aesthetic presentations of fluid forms of life can be understood as manifestations of care, wonder, and concern. Thinking with these watery and elusive creatures – tracing the currents flowing through science, art, and environmental politics – may reveal an ethics implicit in the desire to distinguish them from the vast oceanic depths.
(…)
Gelatinous creatures are unlikely candidates for aesthetic attention. Marine scientists may bring up ctenophores in a net, but “only as the formless mystery snot that plankton biologists have always chucked over the side after picking out the hardy copepods.” Nevertheless, artists and scientists have long been drawn to jellyfish. Biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature (1904) includes several colourful plates featuring jellies. The “DISCOMEDUSAE: Desmonema Annasethe Haeckel,” which he named in honour of his wife Anna Seth, becomes gynopomorphically transformed by Haeckel: “Its tentacles hung like blonde hair ornaments of a princess.”
His luscious, ornate drawings, recognizable as Art Nouveau, could not be farther from twenty-first century minimalist photos of jellies. Most of Haeckel’s illustrations paint the gelata as solid and substantial; the Antomedusae and Peromedusae resemble objets d’art; the decorative forms arranged in a perfectly balanced, symmetrical manner.
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