1 - Resetting the Binary Bones

Summary

Abstract

Early Modern shipwrecks may seem unrelated to contemporary ecocide, but prior to wreckage, they were the mechanisms of European colonialism that portended industrialization and neoliberalism. But now, being broken, and having broken free from their utilitarian, sociocultural functions, wrecked ships open insights into the false nature/culture dichotomy in relation to common ideas of heritage generally and ruins particularly. In so doing, preservationist agendas for underwater cultural heritage are exposed as a continuation of the same anthropocentric logic underlying quests for utopia and immortality that first sent colonizing crusaders across the Atlantic in 1492. The ontological particulars of the eighteenthcentury Nissia shipwreck, an Ottoman armed merchantman off the coast of Cyprus, exemplify why arbitrary conceptual borderlines are better left in dissolution.

Keywords: anthropocentrism; agrilogistics; nautical archaeology; new materialism; dark ecology; Nissia shipwreck

From this ‘yes’ of her flesh that is always given and proffered to suit your eternity, you draw your infinite reserves of veils and sails, of wings and flight… Of sublimation and dissimulation. For this flesh that is never spoken—either by you or by her—remains a ready source of credulity for your fantasies.

This book hopes to find its place among the growing body of literature that challenges the conceptual dualisms established in European Renaissance thought and which, through processes of colonialism and neocolonialism, have impacted human behavioral ethics on a global scale. The old binary bones are deserving of such contention. The ecological consequences of dualistic thinking so prevalent in Western discourse, of course, could not likely have been prognosticated by Kant or Descartes, whose separations of mind and body have reverberated into the rifting of existence itself into a series of antonyms. Even so, these philosophers’ dialectics of bifurcation, in combination with the unique missionary quality of Western culture and the Enlightenment metaphor of Earth as machine, have contributed enormously to the ecological crisis that some humans have been inflicting upon everyone composing Earth's biomass. Early Modern shipwrecks may seem to have little to do with any of this, but prior to wreckage, they were the mechanisms of European colonialism and the globalization that portended contemporary neoliberalism. And yet, this book is neither analysis nor narration of those mechanisms—not the galleons, frigates, caravels, and carracks, nor the conquistadors, crusaders, and pilgrims sailing them.