Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater by Melody Jue (review)

The milieu is the state in which nature placed us; we are floating in a vast milieu.

— Canguilhem (2001, 25)

A few centuries before the contemporary commonsensical usage of milieu had been settled, Newton defined milieu as the “fluid” or ether that envelops bodies in space.¹ In the Cartesian mechanist physics of the time, ether explained how discrete bodies separated by distance could act upon each other through gravity, contact, or force. Over the course of modern intellectual history, however, milieu lost its association with ether. What remained in its stead was the vitalist notion of the milieu as a medium or vessel that sustains and informs life, a spatial co-habitance or co-becoming of entangled life and matter. But even as milieu retained its life-enabling spatial, atmospheric meanings, its close ally “medium” lost these associations through the twentieth century, coming to refer almost exclusively to communicative technologies that record, store, and transmit information across time and space—in the classic definition of technological media offered by Friedrich Kittler.²

Situated within these intellectual matrices, Melody Jue’s Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater takes the ocean as a subject to set up a conceptual dialogue between “milieu” and “medium.” Jue posits the ocean as a spatial field that acts upon bodies, sustains life-forms, and communicates. The book renders the oceanic milieu as the means of expression and conceptualization of life but also asks a larger question: How do we analyze the ocean as a pragmatic, material, and phenomenal environment that informs our perceptions and epistemic frameworks? If media theory has been obsessed of late with materiality, then Jue rides against the wave with “milieu specific analysis”: a conceptual rubric attentive to the singular material qualities of the life-world in which one produces knowledge. Wild Blue Media thus borrows from Donna Haraway to propose a situated theory of oceanic mediation.

Notably, Jue departs from the more predominant elemental media approach that envisages natural environments like oceans as technical systems mediating sensory information. Though Jue is interested in elemental qualities of seawater like salinity and fluidity that mediate oceanic information in specific ways, she offers a more ambient, “archi-textural,” spatial and sensory account of the oceanic milieu than elemental media theorists are wont to give. For Jue, oceanic depth, temperature, and pressure are as important factors in media thinking as seawater’s material properties. Jue is concerned with how depth, pressure, and temperature can be measured or recorded (as elemental media theorists are) but her account of the ocean’s properties exceed engagements with technical mediation alone. That is, if elemental media is invested in expanding the definition of communicative media beyond man-made media systems, Jue is preoccupied with imagining what media concepts look like from the oceanic depths. Jue insists that because of its unmarkedness, media theory (if not theory as such) is terrestrially biased, unconsciously thinking with the solidity of life on land. Theory is a form of grounding. To challenge this terrestrial bias, Jue dives (both literally and metaphorically) underwater, rebelling against the surface-level perspective that has so far dominated ocean humanities. If media theory is written from the solidity of our desks and chairs, and is permeated by a masculine desire for stability and transparency, then Jue suggests going underwater allows a move away from our bodily rectitude and the theoretical penchant for groundedness. Wild Blue Media thus echoes much of hydrofeminism’s political stakes, the work that Astrida Neimanis sets out to think with water and fluidity as a feminist recuperative strategy against masculinist containment and control.³ But more importantly, it displays a methodological inventiveness that foregrounds the technical, theoretical, and milieu specific conditions of embodiment in the ocean that inform a hydrofeminist imaginary in the first place.

As a methodological intermediary, Wild Blue Media sets up a conversation between canonical media concepts (interface, inscription, and database) and oceanic properties (pressure, fluidity, and salinity) as they refract, react to, and mould each...