Chapter three, In Irus Braverman, ed., Animals, Biopolitics, Law: Lively Legalities, London:

Routledge.

Governing Jellyfish: Eco-Security and Planetary “Life” in the Anthropocene

Elizabeth R. Johnson

“Why do you like jellyfish so much?” I asked.

“I don't know. I guess I think they’re cute,” she said. “But one thing did occur to me when I was really focused on them. What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, This is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things […] Two thirds of the earth’s surface is ocean, and all we can see of it with the naked eye is the surface: the skin. We hardly know anything about what's beneath the skin.”

---Haruki Murakami, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, p. 225

We see the emergence of a completely different problem that is no longer that of fixing and demarcating the territory, but of allowing circulations to take place, of controlling them, sifting the good and the bad, ensuring that things are always in movement, constantly moving around, continually going from one point to another, but in such a way that the inherent dangers of this circulation are canceled out.

---Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 65

Jellyfish fill Toru Okada with dread. Having once encountered a swarm—or “smack”—of jellyfish on an ocean swim, a trip to the aquarium leaves the protagonist of Haruki Murakami’s Wind Up Bird Chronicle slumped on a bench, battling a rising panic. His wife-to-be is astonished. “I can see it in your eyes,” she says. “They’ve gone out of focus. It’s incredible— just from looking at jellyfish” (1999, 225). Her experience—captured in the epigraph above—is just as incredible. Through her eyes, jellyfish bring into relief the other-worldly character of the world that we inhabit. Much more than “cute,” jellyfish give form to what is “beneath the skin” of the earth.

Enabled by advances in jellyfish husbandry, exhibits like the one described in Murakami’s novel have proliferated over the past two decades. Aquarium-goers around the world now similarly experience the profound weirdness of jellyfish bodies. Eva Heyward (2012) has explored how looking at the alien-like bodies of jellyfish might open up new ways of relating to other organisms, creating the potential to alter our sense of what does—and what might—come to matter. These are organisms, she writes, that are encountered “viscerally rather than intellectually, sensuously rather than conceptually” (184). We cannot touch them without inviting distress, but through looking at a distance we nevertheless might, as Karen Barad writes, become more intimate with the infinite alterity that “lives in, around, and through us, by waking us up to the inhuman that therefore we are” (Barad 2012, 217-218).

Similarly, Stacy Alaimo has drawn on Jacques Rancière to speculate on how scientific representations of jellyfish may ignite a “redistribution of the sensible.” Such redistribution, for Rancière, would ostensibly transform our aesthetic, ethical, and political commitments. For Alaimo, jellyfish pulse beyond the “visible, the sayable, the thinkable [to] disrupt and confuse categories with their . . . mode of being” (151). Alaimo borrows from Cary Wolfe to figure jellyfish as creatures “before the law” (Wolfe 2012). Their uncanny shapes and being-ness elude signification, making them difficult to frame by juridical-legal structures. Unlike charismatic organisms—polar bears or sea turtles—that are easily enrolled in regimes of species protection or an extended conception of rights, the seemingly fluid continuity between jellyfish and the marine substrate that gives them life makes them difficult to individualize and practically impossible to judge. They do not conform to accepted frameworks of animal ethics. Do they suffer? Do they respond? The way their bodies process information—through a neural network rather than a centralized nervous system—make it difficult to know. Often, even their animality is called into question. Alaimo speculates that the challenge presented by jellyfish bodies may heighten our consideration of networks of entanglement and elicit “posthuman modes of environmentalist concern” (Alaimo 2013, 140).

As Toru Okada’s wife notes, this is incredible: “just [by] looking at jellyfish” we may alter our sense of what matters, shifting ethical frameworks and giving new shape to environmental politics. Gazing upon their bodies might offer a sense of the “liveliness” that Andreas Phillippopoulous-Mihalopoulos references in this volume, a liveliness that recasts our sense of responsibility in the world. But our lives with jellyfish go well beyond the spectacle of the aquarium. Scientists have made their proteins and peptides circulate outside of their bodies, into those of mice, pigs, and other organisms to make perceptible genetic differences by encoding them with jellyfish fluorescence. Jellyfish stem cells are similarly studied and extracted, woven into cosmetic treatments to reduce the signs of aging. Meanwhile, multiple species of jellyfish seem to be reproducing in the wild at alarming rates: swimmers like the fictional Okada and fishing boats encounter smacks with ever-greater frequency. Jellyfish, therefore, seem to have come into focus as part of our social and material existence as never before.[1]

Examining scientific practice and language rather than aesthetics, I find that jellyfish and their study are not eroding “humanist claims to sovereign knowledges” (Alaimo 2013, 155) but are instead becoming part an ongoing respatialization of those claims. In what follows, I show how the science of jellyfish research has become part of changing spatial practices of biological governance, consistent with the nomination of “the Anthropocene” as our current era. While a universalized human problematically stands at the center of this proposed geologic stratum, the era’s nomination also references our deep entanglement with other organisms, organisms who respond—positively and negatively—to our manipulations of the earth. Jellyfish are emblematic of this shift in planetary awareness. Scientists tie the growth of their populations to anthropogenic climate change and ecological degradation; their uptake in the cosmetic and biopharmaceutical industries integrates their liveliness to our own even more tightly. As a result, these organisms are paradoxically figured both as the uncontrollable agents of a coming apocalypse and as a vehicle of biopharmaceutical innovation that will enable humans to attain immortality. The science of jellyfish therefore crystalizes what philosopher Frederic Neyrat (2014) considers one of most pressing paradoxes of the Anthropocene: that we are increasingly driven to recognize our own mortality and finitude—as individuals and as a species—but continue to organize our social lives (at least in the West) as if we are immortal. This tendency and its corresponding focus on a particular understanding of human survival has prompted an expanded discourse and practice of securitization into new spaces and into the bodies of nonhuman organisms.

A return to Foucault’s lectures published in Security, Territory, Population (2009) provides a useful touchstone for considering this respatialization of security. There, Foucault described how the object of power shifted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “Fixing and demarcating the territory” gave way to controlling the circulation of things, “sifting the good and the bad,” to ensure the enhancement of human populations (2009, 65). The literature on biopolitics has primarily paid attention to how this transition has played out on and over human bodies. The rise of biopower meant that attending to “limits and frontiers, or fixing locations” was no longer the predominant expression of power. Human health, behavior, everyday routines and social relationships also became the objects of governance. This is a story that is rehearsed with some frequency. However, Foucault also made plain that the rise of biopower entailed more than a management of human bodies. It also required close attention to the management of lively things, their circulation, and their interconnections across space (Foucault 2009; Crampton and Elden 2007). In his lectures, Foucault referred to this as the management of a milieu: the rise of biopolitics also involved “making possible, guaranteeing, and ensuring circulations: the circulation of people, merchandise, and air, etcetera” (Foucault 2009, 29). This required attention to the details of natural processes, particularly those related to agricultural production. While Foucault’s milieu was largely limited to those things easily recognized as objects of human consumption, others since have detailed the centrality of nonhuman bodies—predominantly livestock, viruses, and captive animals—and their circulations within a biopolitical frame (Shukin 2009, Braun 2007, Hinchliffe et al. 2012, Wolfe 2012, Braverman 2012). This literature makes clear that contemporary biopolitics demands the knowledge and management of a socio-biological system that is more-than-human. In the process, organisms once considered distant and alien are studied, mapped, and enrolled as objects of ecological threat and ecological security.

Through examining how jellyfish are taken up in the aquarium and in scientific practice, I shed light on the changing relationship between securing life and the space of juridical territory. I show how the entwining of human and nonhuman concerns in this era of climate change and ecological degradation is not a smooth process, but involves what Rancière has referred to as a “repartitioning [of] the political from the non-political” (Rancière 2011, 4). In the first part, I show how jellyfish are being figured as agents of ecological devastation alongside the human behaviors that facilitate them. I further explore the legal and practical limitations of securing life in a more-than-human space—the three dimensional space of the living sea, which both extends and exceeds the boundaries of territorial jurisdiction and the law. I describe how scientists, fisheries, and policy-makers have struggled to make jellyfish and other forms of sea life objects of ecological securitization—one part of a “bad” set of conditions and circulations—on a terrain that is more “fluid” than “fixed.” In part two, I take up how scientists and the pharmaceutical industry are sifting jellyfish and other Cnidaria in the category of social “good” through stem cell research. In the conclusion I draw on the writing of Frederic Neyrat to consider how the science of jellyfish research might be directed differently—not toward a planetary extension of biological security, but to “invent a new form of municipality that does justice to the munificence of forms of life” (Neyart 2010, 37).

Beyond the Aesthetics: Jellyfish “Behaving Badly”

Having read Alaimo and Heyward’s accounts of jellyfish encounters, I had anticipated a visceral, transformative experience when in the winter of 2014 I toured the jellyfish exhibit of the National Aquarium in Baltimore. To be sure, each of the many jellyfish housing units, also called kreisels, glowed with ethereal beauty of several species (see, e.g., Figure 2 below). Some floated orange against a turquoise background. Others were lit with blue florescent light. Each provoked distinct sensations. But alongside these otherworldly denizens of our world, I also found a narrative I was not expecting: one of danger and ecological insecurity.

Place Figure 2 here: Moon jellyfish, Aurelia Aurita, float in the National Aquarium’s exhibit (December 24, 2014). Courtesy of the author.

The title of the Aquarium exhibit offered the first clue: “Jellies Invasion: Oceans Out of Balance.” As it suggests, scientists and the media have enrolled jellyfish as bioindicators of ailing oceans. In her recent book Stung! (2013), for example, marine biologist Lisa-Ann Gershwin describes jellyfish as exploiters of already fragile ecologies. She argues that the more frequent blooms witnessed in recent years indicate that overfishing and pollution are having catastrophic effects on populations of larger marine species. While organisms considered valuable to human life—and general biodiversity—suffer in low-oxygen, high-acidity environments and warming temperatures, jellyfish thrive. Their gelatinous bodies store oxygen and, unlike those made of muscle and fat, they seem unaffected by the accumulation of radiation or other toxins (Gershwin 2013). Fewer organisms “higher” on the food chain mean that plankton, copepods and other small marine organisms—jellyfish food—have grown in abundance. Since the 1990s, for example, moon jellyfish populations have thrived in the Gulf of Mexico’s so-called “dead zone,” an area often animated by organism too small or strange to be considered human food. These creatures seem to take advantage of conditions that denigrate other forms of life.

More than a symptom, jellyfish are also a threat. In the text surrounding the Aquarium’s kreisels, visitors not only read of stinging tentacles, but also of “voracious appetites,” “formidable” predatory capacities, tendencies of prolific reproduction, and an ability to “gobble up” all of the sea’s plankton. As an article in the Smithsonian Magazine reported in 2010, “all around the world, jellyfish are behaving badly” (Tucker 2010, n.p.). Framed as the perpetrators of ecological insecurity, jellyfish appear as demons of the sea. Indeed, the growing frequency of blooms does seem to impinge on anthropocentric values in several ways. In the short term, jellyfish threaten the world’s fisheries. When they bloom, jellyfish consume enormous amounts of prey in a relatively short period. They are themselves, however, consumed only by an ever-smaller number of threatened predators like leatherback sea turtles, leading scientists to refer to them as “trophic dead ends” (Gershwin 2013). According to Gershwin, jellyfish threaten already fragile tuna populations and could “starve the whales to extinction” (Gershwin 2013, 134). And they not only threaten ecologies, but also put built infrastructures at risk. Going back decades, one can read about smacks infiltrating the intake systems of nuclear power and desalination plants around the globe, causing power outages and millions of dollars in damage (Tucker 2010, n.p.; Vanzi 1999). Fishing boats are also compromised, as “jellyfish masses” can break nets and jam engines “beyond repair” (National Science Foundation 2008, n.p.).

But jellyfish themselves are only part of this story. Curators of the “Jellies Invasion” exhibit also highlighted how human behavior was responsible for blooms, ultimately “tipping the balance of the earth’s aquatic ecosystems.” Each bit of information about the dangers jellyfish pose to fisheries and marine biodiversity was paired with a list of “what you can do” to limit their continued expansion. Promoted practices included cleaning boat bottoms, limiting fish consumption, supporting “green” legislation, and reducing the use of household fertilizers. According to one journalist, “there’s a queasy sense among scientists that jellyfish just might be avengers from the deep, repaying all the insults we’ve heaped on the world’s oceans” (Tucker 2010, n.p.). These connections suggest that “we”—or, at least the excrement of twenty-first century civilization—are becoming jellyfish.