Take Me to the Sea

Listen: spoti.fi/37nU7Fb • Collab 1 • 10 July 2020

Playlist by Pranathi: I have always lived within walking distance of large water bodies, a privilege for which I find myself eternally grateful. With the pandemic, however, I am sheltering in place in a city that mandated that we avoid the waterfront entirely. This playlist is a love letter to the lakes, the seas, and the oceans that I miss dearly. Some of the songs sample sounds associated with water—waves, birds, sea breeze. These tunes are a mix of old favorites and new finds, curated to recreate the memory of feeling small and humbled in the face of shifting tides that cannot be controlled.

Waterfronts have rarely been spared from the politics of possession, and the stereotypical imagination of beaches as idyllic is for the privileged. Remaining cognizant of this struggle between public space and private occupation on coastlines and lakefronts, I come from a city in which the beach is a site for vendors to sell their spiced peanuts or predictions for your future; a refuge for lovers from the prying eyes of family, neighbors, or the police; and a brief respite from a city that never ceases to churn. I feel nostalgic for the water’s edge and for a space where the bustle of real life freezes temporarily in time. Take me back to the sea!

Pranathi Diwakar appreciates good tunes, good naps, and good writing. She’s also a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the University of Chicago.

Response by Josh: I’m struck by the many forms of the “oceanic” surging through this playlist: the “oceanic” as instrument, as aesthetic, as feeling. The tracks from the 1958 Maysa anchored my listening experience, brilliantly surrounded by a shifting thematic current of tracks leading to and away from this core. I noticed how fluid my descriptive vocabulary for music often is: swells, flows, waves, washes. As I listened, I was reminded of “the oceanic” as mystical critique of psychoanalytic dualism; from where I currently sit in Singapore, I’m reminded also of the ocean as connective medium in Nanyang and the Malay World.

Notes on Pairings: This admittedly eclectic selection of texts is united by two broad threads: First, by “the oceanic” as a central figure, albeit developed in very different ways. Second, by the authors’ insistence on history as a critical resource for challenging our habits of thinking in the present.

Psychoanalysis remains one of the most influential intellectual developments of the 20th century, in spite of having faced a great deal of attack. The category of the “oceanic” comes from classic psychoanalytic theory, conceptualized as a feeling of infinite connection, of limitlessness.

As the philosopher Ayon Maharaj (2017) describes, Freud theorized the “oceanic” as an infantile stage of human development, since, for Freud, infants hadn’t developed a distinct sense of self. He held that infants couldn’t differentiate their own bodies from either the bodies of their mothers/caretakers, or from their surrounding environments. Freud used this concept to analyze religion, thus connecting religion to an infantile developmental stage.

Histories of psychoanalysis usually describe Freud as extending and popularizing the “oceanic” concept from French theorist Romain Rolland. But Maharaj shows instead how Rolland’s theorization of the “oceanic” was a critique of the very foundations of psychoanalysis. Whereas Freud drew on the Western tradition of the “Classics” to conceptualize psychoanalysis broadly, and the “oceanic” specifically, Rolland took his inspiration from Hindu-Indian mystical traditions. Rolland’s challenge wasn’t ultimately accepted by Freud, but it can be recovered today as a way to unthink the assumptions built into Western theories of subjectivity and the self.

The latter two readings I’ve selected are more particular to my own research, but I think they’re still of relevance to readers and researchers outside Southeast Asia. The political scientist Lily Zubaida Rahim and the literature scholar Brian Bernards both take an historical approach to making sense of vast regions whose pasts are defined by regional interconnections, linked by the sea.

Writing on Nanyang — or the South Seas — Bernards reminds us that,

“[a]s an archipelagic trope of symbiotic, interdependent relations, the postcolonial Nanyang imagination defies demands for uniformity, homogeneity, and dependency based on racial, ethnic, or linguistic criteria. It provides an alternative to the continental imagination and cultural capital of China as ancestral homeland, a bounded Chineseness as its racial idiom, and standard Chinese as its monolingual expression” (2015, 19).

Similarly, Rahim shows how the ability to imagine Singapore as a distinct, independent nation required the erasure of its deep histories as part of Nusantara, the Malay archipelagic world: the city-state’s national fictions are sustained by “historical obfuscation and selective forgetting” of “national and Nusantara regional identities, both of which [were always] intertwined” (2009, 41).

Though Bernards’ and Rahim’s analyses are grounded in particular places and histories, both offer an intervention into our thinking about location, territory, and sovereignty generally. They urge us to shift away from imagining political entities as islands, real or metaphorical: in the archipelago, oceans are connectors, not boundaries, and even real islands are not isolated, but rather are embedded in broader worlds. Together, these readings can help us to unthink the modern tendency to consider location, territory, and sovereignty in terms of boundaries and separations, and to focus instead on our interconnections and interdependency.

Josh Babcock is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Chicago and a Visiting Researcher (2018–2020) at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities, Singapore University of Technology and Design.

Read Here:

Maharaj, Ayon (2017) “The Challenge of the Oceanic Feeling: Romain Rolland’s Mystical Critique of Psychoanalysis and His Call for a ‘New Science of the Mind.’” History of European Ideas 43(5): 474–493.

Bernards, Brian (2015) “Chapter 3 — Creolizing the Sinophone from Malaysia to Taiwan.” In Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature, pp 81–108. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Rahim, Lily Zubaida (2009) “Chapter 3 — Remembering and Forgetting: Nusantara Malays in the Singaporean National Imagination.” In Singapore in the Malay World: Building and Breaching Regional Bridges, pp 13–43. New York: Routledge.

Image by wirestock / Freepik.