Epilogue: Becoming Polar

Abstract

The entire earth becomes polar in Anne Noble’s “Bung at the South Pole on a Blow-up Globe.” New globes of ocean and ice home in on territories once assumed merely obstacles on the way to somewhere, or as spent ends, nowhere (Figure 7.1). The “Oceanic Turn” in cultural studies gives a new territorial objective to the decentering of humans. Noble uses a child’s blow-up globe to simply upturn the conventional perspective on the inhabited globe to reveal its “bunged” South Pole. A bung is a somewhat anachronistic, even salty, nautical term for a plug in a wooden cask that neatly evokes the voyages of

discovery and the often sloppy ocean logistics of supply. As a familiar air valve on which the integrity of the blown-up globe rests, the bung signals an understandable panic about ecological risk: it is a precarious stopper for this new “hole at the pole.” The bung of Antarctic ice is the repressed, forgotten, and abject key to environmental integrity; it refunctions the imperial pleasure of the map to spectacularize the territory as a possession. Whether a hyper-technical satellite image or as the hokey mass consumerist plastic toy, posthuman maps of Antarctica unsettle the power of even remote, scientific, or culturally “knowing” views of the earth: this earth, and the humanist modes of knowing and producing it is, in another turn on Noble’s blow-up toy, also under threat of being blown away.