ABSTRACT
“For power to be free to flow,” Zygmunt Bauman writes in 1999, “the world must be free of fences, barriers, fortified borders and checkpoints” (2000: 14). Power, then, is a flow. It circulates. And the freedom of power is the freedom of a world free and open to flow. The freedom of flow—the rhetoric of liquidity and the affirmation of fluidity—is here invoked by Bauman as a contrast with “the practice of feverish nation-and-nation-state building” which “put the ‘soil’ firmly above the ‘blood’” (12). The association of freedom (or its semblance, as Bauman makes clear) with motion and circulation and, more precisely, with the liquidity of the sea, as opposed to the constraints of the solid ground, is an ancient one. More puzzling, perhaps, is the conjunction of the freedom of the sea with the liquidity of the blood. Italo Calvino sheds a difficult and equally ancient light on this matter (that is, on this liquid matter) when he tells us in a segment entitled “Blood, Sea” that “the primordial wave” of the oceans “continues to flow in the arteries” (Calvino 1969: 39; 2002). Our blood, Calvino continues, “in fact has a chemical composition analogous to that of the sea of our origins, from which the first living cells and the first multicellular beings derived the oxygen and the other elements necessary to life” (1969: 39). Grounded in the rhetoric of scientificity, Calvino’s sea is also surrounded by walls, although these seem to be different from Bauman’s modern “fences, barriers, fortified borders and checkpoints.” Blood, at any rate—“a kind of general pulsation” and the free flow of power (43)—is inside us, enclosed within us. As Calvino writes, “the sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies” (40). Blood thus evokes the ancient, primordial seas more than it does the figure of the future, the prospective expectation that is our modernity and that Bauman calls “liquid modernity.” Yet, across the span of time of our entire history, we may be led to imagine “a combustion chamber of infinite volume as the sea appeared infinite to us, or rather the ocean, in which we were immersed” (44). By blood, we were perhaps fated to perceive the past into the future, the future of the past, and thus to “repeat the pulsing of the ocean now buried inside us, of the red ocean that was once without shores, under the sun” (44). And though it seems natural enough to think of the free flow and pulsing of the sea as having a “piston effect,” after Calvino, we would have “to imagine a piston without walls” (43). Oceans without shores, power without borders, blood without walls—such would be the unfinished project, not of modernity but of our oceanic history. “The sea-blood would have become one with us, that is, all blood would finally be our blood” (47). Calvino’s famous narrator, old Qfwfq, sums all of this up with a kind of warning that would be inherent to the history of blood, to the uncertain progress and development of the blood of freedom.
