Agential Entanglements and the Fluidity of Gaze in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital

Öz

Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel, captures a 24-hour period in the lives of four astronauts and two cosmonauts as they orbit the Earth in a space station. In this single day, the novel traces the observatory’s sixteen orbits shifting between the reflections and perspectives of each character while they observe the Earth from space. Interspersed throughout the narrative are references to Diego Velázquez’s famous painting Las Meninas, and this paper contends that the painting’s intricate interplay between the observer and the observed resonates with the novel’s central themes. The painting’s enigmatic compositional structure highlights an ambiguous and interwoven relationship between the subject and the object, which parallels the liminal position of the crew as they observe the planet. Although the crew view Earth from a seemingly detached position, their survival is inseparable from their entanglement with each other, the planet and the observatory. This intertwined condition requires a reconfiguration of the boundaries between the subject and the object, challenging the anthropocentric mode of perception. Therefore, through the lens of Karen Barad and other new materialist thinkers, this paper aims to analyse how the novel calls for attentiveness to the dynamic flows among beings and the vitality of matter, advocating a more ethical and ecologically conscious mode of living.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• intra-action
• agential realism
• new materialism
• material turn
• ecology
• environment

Kaynakça

1. Alaimo, S. (2010). Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. google scholar
2. Alaimo, S. (2018). Trans-corporeality. In R. Braidotti & M. Hlavajova (Eds.), Posthuman Glossary, (pp. 435–438). London: Bloomsbury Academic. google scholar
3. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. google scholar
4. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press. google scholar Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press [ePUB version]. google scholar
5. Chmutina, K. & von Meding, J. (2019). A dilemma of language: “Natural disasters” in academic literature. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, 10, 283–292. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13753-019-00232-2 google scholar
6. Coole, D. & Frost, S. (2010). New materialism: Ontology, agency, and politics. Durham: Duke University Press. google scholar
7. Creamer, E. (2024, November 13). Samantha Harvey’s ‘beautiful and ambitious’ Orbital wins Booker prize. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/12/orbital-by-samantha-harvey-wins-booker-prize-2024. google scholar
8. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. google scholar

9. Emanuel, K. (2005). Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years. Nature, 436, 686–688. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03906 google scholar
10. Foucault, M. (2005). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. London: Routledge. google scholar
11. Gatens, M. (2003). Imaginary bodies: Ethics, power, and corporeality. London: Routledge. google scholar
12. Gilford, D. M., Giguere, J., & Pershing, A. J. (2024). Human-caused ocean warming has intensified recent hurricanes. Environmental Research: Climate, 3(4), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1088/2752-5295/ad8d02 google scholar
13. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066 google scholar
14. Haraway, D. (2023, September 7). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhucene: Donna Haraway in conversation with Martha Kenney. Interview by M. Kenney. M+. https://www.mplus.org.hk/en/magazine/donna-haraway-critique-anthropocene-capitalocene/ google scholar
15. Harvey, S. (2023, October 28). Samantha Harvey: “I like Alien as much as anybody else. But I see this novel as space pastoral.” Interview by A. Cummins. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/28/samantha-harvey-orbital-i-like-alien-as-much-as-anybody-else-but-i-see-this-novel-as-space-pastoral. google scholar
16. Harvey, S. (2024). Orbital. Dublin: Vintage. google scholar
17. Iovino, S. & Oppermann, S. (2014). Introduction: Stories come to matter. In S. Iovino & S. Oppermann (Eds.), Material ecocriticism (pp. 1-20). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. google scholar
18. Katsumori, M. (2011). Niels Bohr’s complementarity: Its structure, history, and intersections with hermeneutics and deconstruction. Dordrecht: Springer. google scholar
19. Morton, T. (2010). The ecological thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. google scholar
20. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. google scholar
21. Morton, T. (2016). Dark ecology: For a logic of coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press. google scholar Plotnitsky, A. (1994). Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida. Durham: Duke University Press. google scholar
22. Sobel, A. H., Camargo, S. J., Hall, T. M., Lee, C.-Y., Tippett, M. K., & Wing, A. A. (2016). Human influence on tropical cyclone intensity. Science, 353(6296), 242–246. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaf6574 google scholar
23. Soper, K. (2012). The humanism in posthumanism. Comparative Critical Studies, 9(3), 365-378. https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2012.0069 google scholar
24. Spinoza, Benedict de. (1994). A Spinoza reader: The Ethics and other works. Edited and translated by Edwin Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press. google scholar
25. Tuana, N. (2008). Viscous porosity: Witnessing Katrina. In S. Alaimo & S. Hekman (Eds.), Material Feminisms (pp. 188-213). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. google scholar