Jeff VanderMeer’s (2014) Southern Reach trilogy of weird fiction evokes a creeping relation between the strange territory called Area X and vertigo, a set of visceral, bodily affects involving dizziness, nausea, and a sense of hovering at the edge of the abyss, just about to take the final step. But vertigo also has a complementary conceptual dimension. It can be understood as embodying an experimental disposition (Jensen, 2019) to make one available to ‘ontological openings’ (Taguchi and de la Cadena, 2017). At least that is the speculative proposition we explore in this short visit to Bangkok¹.

But first a word about Southern Reach. After the sudden appearance of the mysterious Area X, official explanations settled on a form of environmental disaster. Meanwhile, military research expeditions enter to gather info, only to disappear or return weirdly … changed. The agent Control is dispatched to take charge of the deteriorating situation. His name is another misdirection.

At base-camp, the mad scientist Whitby has been working on a mytho-theoretical compendium to explain the area. The central concept, he proposes, is terror. No. Another glitch in communication. ‘Not “terror.” Not “terror” at all. Terroir … A wine term’ A wine term used to capture how the ‘specific characteristics of a place – the geography, geology, and climate … in concert with the vine’s own genetic propensities, can create a startling, deep, original vintage’ (VanderMeer, 2014b: 178-79). Terroir means a confluence. And sometimes the line between terror and terroir is razor thin. Vertigo.

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They were, he realized, making their way along the periphery of a huge sinkhole, the kind of “topographical anomaly” that created an entirely different habitat

(VanderMeer, 2014b: 166)

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Sitting on top of the Chao Phraya delta, Bangkok, too, is an enormous damp, wobbling confluence. You feel it walking alongside major roads like Sukhumvit or traveling along narrow canals. Shaky footpaths covered by cracked cement, water splashing in all directions during sudden rain. Slow down time and zoom out, and you would see river communities come tumbling down, a confluence of tides and neglect. The entire city is a slowly sinking transitional environment, a topographical anomaly. Since 2020, activists have organised protests against the unelected military government. They would sorely like to make the political environment transition too. They’ve been met with water cannons, tear gas, beatings, and imprisonment. Terro(i)r.

Image 1: Water terro(i)r. Credit: THE STANDARD / Thanis Sudto.

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Something about the idea of a tower that headed straight down played with a twinned sensation of vertigo and a fascination with structure

(VanderMeer, 2014a: 24)

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One of Bangkok’s massive flood tunnels runs underneath Ratchada Avenue. Built to channel water, this multinatural infrastructure (Jensen, 2017) is the Umwelt² of rats, cockroaches, and water lizards who live in pools of polluted water among piles of rotting garbage. At the surface, mobile street vendors pour out food oils; their customers carelessly drop plastic straws and wrapping paper. Drains clog, the downstairs neighbours don’t drown … and the city floods again and again (Sangkhamanee, 2021). This loop-sequence is one (just one) cause of the frustrations that in recent years lead protestors to gather at Ratchada and other central hubs, to march and demonstrate (all the while eating street foods that drip, clog, and seep downwards …).

There are other kinds of spill-over as well. Protestors use social media to complain, harangue and organise, but also to create false leads, which send the police and army forces in the wrong direction. Several vertiginous confluences wrapped in one, then: up and down, wet and dry, virtual and physical, over there, no here!

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The entrance to the tower leading down exerted a kind of presence, a blank surface that let us write so many things upon it. This presence manifested like a low-grade fever, pressing down on all of us

(VanderMeer, 2014a: 15)

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Over the last decade, Thailand has experienced several disruptive tremors. The latest round came with the military coup in 2014, which brought along various mundane kinds of terror that press down ‘like a low-grade fever’ to this day.

The tower (of power) maintains a forceful presence, but it seems like a mere clinging on, without any sense of firm purpose beyond its own perpetuation. In contrast, the ‘low-grade fever’ that grips the protest movement, appears positively hallucinatory (in both senses). In recent years, it has variously drawn attention to abuses, occupied public space, and often made a fool of power. Most importantly, it has held on to the dream of unsettling politics as usual. By keeping alive a feeling for different civic sensibilities in the absence of any clear endgame, it can be said that the protestors are taking care of the possible (Sangkhamanee and Jensen, 2021). So, rather than fully engulfed by terror, this is terro(i)r as a kind of kaleidoscopic confluence, a changing pattern of darkness and light. Perhaps Bangkok 2022 is after all also a political anomaly, besides being a topographical one.

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Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken

(VanderMeer, 2014a: 308)

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Bangkok as a transitional environment that entwines cockroaches, monsoon rains, drainage tunnels, food vendors, students and police, and, of course, very much else. There are apparent resonances with political ecology – bring together the political and the ecological! – and with psycho-geographies that excavate half-hidden connections between territory and urban atmospheres. Disorientation follows the realisation that there were no separate sides to begin, and everything happens from the middle. Anthropological instruments, theories, and methodologies with operational principles based on such ontological separations—or hoping to ‘bridge’ them—now appear outdated, useless and broken. But the same morass creates the awareness that something else is possible and could already happening. Vertigo pushes toward ontological openings.

In an exploration of how ‘critical zones’ enable a rethinking of territory, Bruno Latour (2020: 2) observed that their ‘surprising shape, size, contents, and activity’ can trigger ‘a feeling of disorientation’. We imagine him, bewildered and bespectacled, at Southern Reach, trying to make sense of Area X together with Whitby. Just as easily we can imagine Jeff VanderMeer scouting out drainage tunnels and multispecies worlds under Ratchada Avenue. They join hands with protestors on the lookout for other possible worlds and dizzy explorers of Southern Anthropocenes searching for other futures.

Endnotes

1. Isabelle Stengers (2011) has characterised speculative pragmatism as a manner of ‘taking care of the possible’. Drawing on Alfred N. Whitehead, Didier Debaise (2017: 77) defines it as ‘the intensification of an experience to its maximal point’. [↩]
2. The pioneering 19^th century ethologist Jacob von Uexküll used the term Umwelt—surrounding world—to capture how organisms inhabit different perceptual worlds due to their different bodies. [↩]

References

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