Mapping the subaquatic animals in the Aquatocene: Offshore wind power,the materialities of the sea and animal soundscapes

This paper examines the controversy around marine animal management in Taiwan Strait, where the sea has been territorialized by offshore wind power developers. Concerns have been focused on the impacts of pile-driving noise on the Taiwanese white dolphin which is on the IUCN list of extremely endangered species. To deal with the problem, both state and developers have been involved in volumetric practices which attempt to render the marine mammals knowable, and in turn, governable. While recent work on volumetric thinking has revealed that power is exercised through volume, we contend that insufficient attention has been given to those lively ‘non-human’ subjects living in the volumetric spaces. Inspired by recent scholarship on animal atmospheres and the wet ontologies, we argue that marine animals are sentient beings that cannot be known, or mapped, by the state-corporate volumetric practices which are mainly based on scientific experiments, conducted in isolated social contexts. To illustrate this, we draw on assemblage thinking and develop the idea of marine animal soundscapes. We suggest that marine animal soundscapes exist only through the embodied experience of a sensory, marine animal body, which is able to affect, and learn to be affected by, others, through non-linguistic ‘signs’, such as sound. We maintain that animal soundscapes are shaped by social, ecological and material circumstances, of which, the materialities of the sea, such as its liquidity, rapidity and fluidity, are of great importance. With an emphasis on the subaquatic animal soundscapes, our approach intends to extend social relationality to non-humans and calls for an ontology, distinct from the one with which existing volumetric analysts work.