It is a Tuesday in May in upstate New York, and the world is greening all around me. A little rain falls from a clouded-over sky scattering bright neon gray light wherever it catches. Don’t be fooled by the stacks of books and papers beside my desk, or the false chiming of distant bells at the window. I am hunting a creature of the sea – a hybrid species, intimate with the queer spatialities of submarine worlds, the manfish.
The history of human relations with the Earth’s oceans and seas is an old one, set back into deep time. As long as humans have been living by the shores of this planet, we have found ourselves drawn to marine worlds and species, to the fluid enchantments of water, waves, salt, spray, submersion. However, it is only in recent decades that scholars have begun to consider that the ocean itself has a history. And like the ocean, that history is far from static. As historians have noted in the wake of this emerging blue turn in the humanities, if the nineteenth century introduced novel ocean intimacies, a new, more volumetric sense of ocean depths, and more intensive scientific entanglements with marine environments and species, so it is true that the twentieth century bore witness to the professionalization – and increasing specialization – of the marine sciences on the one hand, and the rapid expansion or even, deepening, of popular engagements with the ocean on the other, as newly available leisure opportunities made the world beneath the surface more accessible to more people (Höhler 2002; Rozwadowski 2008; Rozwadowski 2018). One of the most influential events in this twentieth-century history of diving, was undoubtedly the advent of the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, more commonly known now, as scuba. Although predecessors of the self-contained diving system date back to the nineteenth century, with the Rouyquayrol-Denayrouze diving apparatus of 1865 marking the first suit to enable divers to navigate beneath the seas without relying upon surface air, it was not until the 1940s that such a model would make its way into popular use (Streever 2019, 116). Drawing upon a metaphorical displacement or enhancement of the human respiratory organ, the first scuba model to reach widespread distribution was called the “aqualung.”
Designed by the French naval lieutenant Jacques Cousteau and the engineer Émile Gagnan in the winter of 1942-1943 during the Nazi occupation of France, the aqualung would transform not only the way that ordinary people experience the seas for themselves, but also, the ways that scientists, environmental advocates, military and commercial actors thought, engaged with, and produced knowledge about marine environments and ecologies. Beyond this, the experiences of scientific divers especially would work to shape perceptions about the nature and potentialities of human bodies and futures, influencing everything from marine science and management to the law of the seas, environmental advocacy, the science of space exploration, hyperbaric medicine, submarine industrial labor, popular culture, and warcraft.
When Cousteau published a memoir in 1953 detailing his co-invention of the aqualung and his subsequent diving exploits, he began it by introducing the figure of the “manfish,” the body of the diver augmented by their scuba equipment so as to inhabit the oceans as a hybrid terrestrial-marine being, a kind of submarine cyborg, following after feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway (Haraway 1985). In her 1985 manifesto, Haraway describes the figure of the cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction,” attempting to unsettle the gendered and hierarchical categories of “man” and “machine” by drawing attention to the feminist and nature-cultural possibilities of embracing hybridity, a kind of transhumanism which might challenge the power relations and gendered dynamics of modernity and post-modernity (Haraway 1985, 149). However, in recent years, scholars have pointed out the ways in which this influential figuration of cyborg hybridity remains embedded in a (mostly) white and Western epistemological context of techno-optimism and embodiment, operating from a view of technology’s liberatory potential which obscures the ways that other bodies and being(s) have been and continue to be alienated from the possibility of belonging to the human, arguably reconfiguring the very conceptual boundaries Haraway intended to collapse. “Who gets to be a cyborg?” Julia DeCook asks, in a recent critique in which she offers that we must ask of the cyborg, “…in what ways does it help to dismantle traditional confines of identity and categorization, and in what ways does its very identity category (cyborg) continue to uphold social institutions that rely on the oppression of others – particularly the poor, racial and sexual minorities, and the disabled?” (DeCook 2020, 1161-1162). I bear this in mind as I think about the forms and figurations of hybridity which emerge in Cousteau’s figure of the manfish, and consider why we ought to care about diving hybridities at all, these creatures Cousteau suggests are “much further on in evolution,” for whom “human lungs [have] a new role to play, that of a sensitive ballasting system,” whose “naked human eyes…almost blind under water, can see clearly through watertight spectacles” (Cousteau and Dumas 1953, 5, 8-9).
Early model of a swimsuit that made scientific diving possible and helped shape the metaphor of the manfish discussed by the author. (CC0)
In her book Wild Blue Media (2020), media studies scholar Melody Jue contends with the narrative Cousteau and his companions spin about the nature and meaning of their subaqueous encounters with marine worlds, as well as the technologies they built and used to facilitate them, using her own embodied experiences as a scuba diver as a methodological tool for resisting the unconsidered acceptance of Cousteau’s “manfish.” And though I agree that we might do well not to take Cousteau’s claims and his figure of the “manfish” for granted, I would offer with and perhaps against this interpretation, that it matters nonetheless that the “aqueous ‘menfish,’ free to swim where they pleased” did in fact characterize the narrative iconography that Cousteau put forward (Jue 2020, 164). Importantly, the manfish was a figure which would circulate widely in both scientific and popular culture, exerting a profound, sometimes circuitous, and arguably enduring influence upon Western, and especially American perceptions of oceans and ocean-going humans. Both the figurations of the human and the mechanical which emerge in the figure of the manfish embed ideas about who belongs deep below the ocean’s surface in ways inflected by gender, race, dis/ability, and colonial entanglements.
Nearly all of the accoutrements he lists as essential to the manfish – goggles and flippers – for example, were encountered (and in most cases patented) by affluent, able-bodied white men who first learned of them through their engagements with coastal indigenous peoples from the far-flung stretches of empire and wartime entanglements – Haiti, Tahiti, Japan, among others. When Cousteau suggests that, “Today [in 1953], a decade after our hesitant penetration of the one hundred and thirty foot zone, women and old men reach that depth on their third or fourth dive,” he is making claims about what bodies and modes of embodiment belong to the ocean, to diving – cast in the 1940s and ‘50s as a masculinist, even “macho” sport and science activity – and to diving history (Cousteau and Dumas 1953, 33). By examining the embedded meanings, contexts, and relational dynamics of its figuration, I suggest that we might come to better understand how both marine environments and the human beings inhabiting them were conceptualized and positioned during this period of rapid expansion in both popular ocean encounters and oceanographic sciences. Narratives, after all, don’t need to be accurate or true to have an impact. Of course, this is a point which I believe, Jue, as a media studies scholar, and one who attends so carefully to the nature and effects of narratives in her own work, would find uncontroversial.
Importantly, Jue’s notion of human amphibiousness as only ever a temporary passport, one requiring an excommunication from one (terrestrial) world in order to enter into another (aqueous one), is a central point of her critique of Cousteau’s manfish. At the same time, it is a productive and evocative thread to think with for interpreting the ways the manfish matters, and the matter of the manfish. In particular, it brings to mind the colonial context of spatial relations that the model of diving-as-exploration, and concomitantly, exploration-as-science, raises. Historians of race have long noted that early European colonists of the “New World” of the Americas and the Caribbean had very strong ideas about the ways that entering into a new (i.e. non-European), “alien” world of “wild” lush possibility could potentially alter their bodies, change the nature and the shape of who they were through exposure to the new environmental and cultural conditions they encountered – including the sun, the wind, the water, the food, the flora and fauna, human and nonhuman natives (Earle 2014). Is there a relationship here, one might ask, between the ways that diver-explorer-scientists like Cousteau, typified in the image of the manfish, thought about their encounters with marine places and the potential of those encounters to shape or alter their own bodies and bodily capacities? How does the different cultural and social context of their own terrestrial worlds shape the difference here?
In my dissertation research, I am historicizing, tracing, and tracking down the residues of the “manfish” in its own midcentury context, so that we might better locate and interpret the echoes that can still be found in contemporary marine sciences, attending to the colonial registers of place, space, and belonging that inflect the figure of the manfish, and the ways the concept takes on gendered, classed, and raced dimensions. Toward this end, I find myself engaging in a close reading of Cousteau’s manfish as it appears in his influential and much-written-about memoir, The Silent World (1953), drawing in recurrences of the manfish (and its reception) in scholarly and popular media through its appearance in works like that of the historian James Dugan, whose history of underwater exploration, Man under the Sea, was first published in 1956 with a foreword from Cousteau, alongside the reception literature surrounding Cousteau’s memoir and the much-lauded 1956 documentary which resulted from it.
Thus, I sit at my desk, dry, if a little wet behind the ears, chasing menfish.
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Andra Sonia Petrutiu.
References
Cousteau, Jacques and Frédéric Dumas. 1953. The Silent World. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers.
DeCook, Julia. R. 2020. “A [White] Cyborg’s Manifesto: the overwhelmingly Western ideology driving technofeminist theory.” Media, Culture & Society 43(6): 1158-1167.
Dugan, James. 1965/1956. Man Under the Sea. New York, NY and Toronto: Collier Books.
Earle, Rebecca. 2014. The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 1985. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism for the 1980s.” Socialist Review 15(2): 65–107.
Höhler, Sabine. 2002. “Depth records and ocean volumes: ocean profiling by sounding technology, 1850-1930.” History and Technology 18(2): 119-154.
Jue, Melody. 2020. Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Rozwadowski, Helen M. 2008. Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Rozwadowski, Helen M. 2018. Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans. London: Reaktion Books.
Streever, Bill. 2019. In Oceans Deep: Courage, Innovation, and Adventure Beneath the Waves. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company.
