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Hydra

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There can be no justice, unless it is hydrojustice.

Justice can no longer be seen as a solely human affair. Its elemental and planetary dimensions must be brought through. Our planet is much less 'Earth' and much more 'Hydrogeos' (from the noun ?d???e???, which means 'hydroglobe' in modern Greek). Yes, there are earth, air, and fire on our planet. Yes, there are bodies, human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. Yes, there is a past and a future hidden in the planet's core and spread on its crust. But within it all there is water: airy or brilliant white, cascading or stagnant, threateningly murky or vaginally wet, exhaled or drowning, but always there - aqueous. The element that makes up this planet, its other elements and its bodies, is water.1

Hydrojustice is the paradox of individual bodies of water flowing along other individual bodies of water, all of which are part of various collective bodies of water, and ultimately of one larger body of water. The mere fact that this confluence and difference happens is hydrojustice. So hydrojustice is not a solution to issues of injustice. Hydrojustice is already here, around and inside us. It is not something to aspire to, a state of justice to come, but a condition to cherish. It is the way things are and the way they carry on. Hydrojustice is not in abeyance, just as our planet is not in crisis. For we can no longer talk about crisis: this is a new and continually changing anthropocenic reality on an already radically altered planet in rapid ecological degradation. Yet, even in this new reality, hydrojustice emerges. Hydrojustice is here. It is not a call to action but to adaptation.

Hydrojustice is how the agency of water takes over.2 It is the ontological condition of being everywhere and elsewhere at the same time, the distribution across time and space of distance and confluence. Hydrojustice is wet justice and slippery positions, gliding membranes and surface tension that collapse into smoothness. Hydrojustice is the moving and corroded divide between water and flesh, between geology and living beings, and between the decomposition and the recomposition of bodies.

Hydrojustice is a membrane and a passage. It is a dam and a flow. It is skin and its pores.

Hydrojustice is also a method. It shows us when to flow along and when to float away; how to tell when to keep one's distance and when to come together; and how to be at home in both. It is not just a Mitsein ('being with') or a way of thinking about identity politics. It is being at ease with both identity and difference. Hydrojustice's main methodological contribution is the palindrome: ebbing and flowing, transgressing and keeping away, becoming permeable and switching to impermeable when ethics around us demands it. It is also a way of thinking, researching, writing, performing: hydrojustice is a diagonal that links bodies of water (material and immaterial, humans and nonhumans, knowledges and practices) that always reside on a horizontal surface of ontological equality. And it advocates light paddling rather than deep breathless immersion, a hesitant positioning, a constant checking: to bring things together diagonally, one needs to embrace the surface.

Hydrojustice means: follow the waters in their confluence and difference, even if this entails an entirely altered humanity.

However abiding, hydrojustice gets regularly buried under the debris of anthropocentrism, colonialism, extractivism and capitalist exploitation, plastic islands and poisoned lakes. We cannot allow ourselves to be complacent. Our work is one of unearthing, in the double sense of revealing what has been hidden and allowing earth to cede priority to the aquatic.

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I used to dream of those houses whose windows opened to the sea, where the water would be a welcome guest in one's living room. Although I was born and raised near the Aegean Sea, my family home never had an unmediated view of the water. It was always there, but teasingly veiled: our home was on the second row of buildings in the centre of Thessaloniki, Greece's second-largest city, the sea promenade being prohibitively expensive for us. Mine was a privileged childhood in many respects, but also a tantalisingly incomplete one. I spent a large part of my early adolescent afternoons gazing wistfully at the water shimmering through a distant window of the building across the back alley of our apartment. My access to water was always framed by other people's windows or by a rapid succession of breaths of sea air whenever I visited the houses of better located friends and family.

But on those rare visits when the yearning was satisfied and I briefly had uninterrupted access to the open expanse, I found myself becoming restless, embarrassed, even afraid. I did not know what to make of it. It was too vast, too open, too available. I was used to the stealthy beauty of modernist framing: an aquatic rectangle emerging out of grey urban concrete, or a blinding line of reflected sun on the surface of the sea as we drove past the promenade. These waters, mediated, contained, framed, I could deal with. The vastness, no.

Largely North American, Australian, and generally anglophone, the recent blue turn in humanities and social sciences speaks of the ocean, of crossings, of plastic islands that roam over the planet. It deals with an expansive view of water, flirting with purity and unknowability, both urgent and open, disquieting and hopeful. I find that my way of thinking about water is different: in my water there is always mediation, whether human or geographical. I see water always through windows. I imagine water as the bay of Thermaikos licking the Thessalonian promenade I so coveted with its polluted, rubbish-strewn wavelets, itself part of a sea, not an ocean. My water stews in a claustrophobic toxicity, the inevitability of death by chemicals, the always more bloated pesticidal flow; and yet it still feels like home.3 My water is a bay, quivering in Mediterranean heat. There is very little rain, hardly any snow, and certainly no ice. My water is not an ocean. It is the Mediterranean enclosure, not a vastness across new worlds. It is an archipelago, not a continental shelf. More constancy, less lunar flow. And less leeway.

This affects my hydroproject in ways I cannot change, and perhaps do not wish to: it makes everything more contained, more proximate, more intimate. It works with glimpses and traces rather than the open invitation to battle against ocean waves. It demands a frame at all times, windows through which the vastness can be hinted at but never fully faced, awnings that connect but also separate. My hydroproject offers an ethical scheme of shared flow where all waters become proximate and lend themselves to a tangible affinity; but at the same time it parses the planet into aquatic neighbourhoods where bodies converge amid their desire for and fear of water.

As Mercè Rodoreda writes in her magisterially drenched novel Death in Spring, '[t]hat's why they're afraid. They are consumed by the fear of desire.'4 This is my water: a circularity of fear and desire, a need to stay behind the window and keep on wishing to slide outside.

Water scares me. I need to allow it to puddle. Only then can I write with it.

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Somewhere among all this there is injustice. Stacks of it. Injustice flashes so vividly, so passionately, everywhere one looks. It makes up the crushing majority of news, scientific analyses, or even theoretical writing on water. This is not surprising: water has been ignored, devalued, polluted, exploited, dumped, extracted, violated, depleted, weaponised. The list is endless and follows the usual logic of nature's exponential colonising by humans.

But please indulge me: my focus here is justice and its instances of emergence. The text is deliberately upbeat, optimistic (albeit in a 'planet doomed beyond recognition' way) - yet also quotidian and rooted in the present. Justice here is an effortless emergence, unlike most of the traditional conceptualisations of justice - such as liberal theories that parse justice out into chunks of procedure, locality, individual rights, and social expectations, or even critical theory that releases justice into the future, into the mythical, or into the space of negative theology, a divine space where justice appears blinding and therefore inaccessible. Here I want to do justice to the everyday, to the folds of the actual that hold justice not as a secret but as a constitutive element of their folding. Justice is already everywhere.

This does not mean that I ignore injustice. Quite the opposite: injustice is always folded within justice, entangled and co-implicated. It is the trigger for my engagement with hydrojustice. It underscores everything I write. But here I choose to dwell on the just outcome (if and when it comes), the luminous moment of hydrojustice that crowns (some) fights against injustice. Focusing on injustice instead would harbour important risks: first, it would lose sight of the ubiquity of justice; second, it would end up exalting basic attempts at what we can call juridical justice, namely justice connected to rights. Rights of rivers and other water bodies come to mind, as well as questions of distributive justice and reparation, or access to water. While these are important political and...