Blue Sublime and the Time of Capital

Abstract

This essay proposes a concept of the “blue sublime” in order to address how the contradictions of capitalist accumulation regimes manifest themselves in the hydrosphere. My argument starts from the fact that capitalism entails a shift in the imagination of the sea: from the point of view of commodity production and consumption, the sea has turned into field of extraction, resource to be exploited or waste disposal site. But capitalism also involves circulation, which casts the sea into a space of contradictions. On the one hand, the oceanic expanse can be an image for the flow of capital and commodities, and a privileged route that has been central to the mercantile expansion of the world economy. On the other hand, however, the sea can become the emblem of the limit to accumulation, and the ultimate barrier to capital’s self-expansion. The blue sublime, hence, provides an image for picturing the totality of capitalism, while in its materiality it embodies capitalism’s contingency and perishability. From this point of view, the blue sublime registers a process described by Marx as the “annihilation of space by time” proper to the universalizing tendency of capital. Through a reading of Marx’s Grundrisse, the blue sublime hence provides a tangible representation of the asymptotic tendency of capital to reach a zero time of circulation and a privileged location to grasp the material contradictions of a global modernity.