Ewelina Jarosz
EXPOSING DIVING INTO THE WRECK OF THE CAPITALOCENE ACADEMY: THE BLUE TURN IN CULTURE STUDIES EDUCATION IN POLAND

Krzysztof Gil, “Uciekinierzy”, olej na płótnie, 130 × 170 cm, 2024

In 1972, Adrienne Rich – an American poet, educator, and activist associated with the lesbian feminist movement – wrote the poem Diving into the Wreck. In this poem, she recounts the experience of a solitary descent beneath the water surface, a journey confronting the diving figure with the past and stripping their consciousness of illusions. The impact of this work, stemming from its ambiguity and transformative potential as revealed through encounters with oppressive systems, transcends the decade in which it was written. The meaning of Diving into the Wreck goes beyond the identity‑based politics and agendas of lesbian feminism and the women’s liberation movement with which Adrienne Rich was aligned at the time of its creation. These movements aimed at critique patriarchy, heteronormativity, and systemic oppression. Today, the poem may be reengaged in reflections on broader structures of violence and exploitation that are driving the ecological catastrophe of seas and oceans – particularly as they intersect with the “wreckage” of cultural studies education and the systemic exploitation shaping the conditions of academic labour in higher education in Poland.

In this paper, I aim to position Diving into the Wreck as a subject of inquiry within blue and oceanic humanities, and to consider how the proposition of a “blue turn” might spark discussions about educational reform concerning the exploitative structures and crises in which academia is currently entangled. I interpret this poem as a response to the need for a shift within cultural studies – a field I am academically affiliated with – from a focus on human subjects toward water, and in particular, one specific element of the aquatic landscape: the seabed. In Rich’s poem, the seabed functions as a catalyst for the diving figure’s transformation. Water, in turn, emerges as an environment that confronts her embodied consciousness with various forms of hybridity – ranging from fantastical entities to objects transformed by the water’s force, such as elements of the wreck, which appear along with their psychological consequences. The models of education that attempt not to drown within the post‑communist institutions of higher education in Poland are also hybridized.

In this article, I examine the hybrid wreck‑forms within cultural studies education – and more broadly, within the humanities – highlighting their entanglement with the realities of the Capitalocene¹, as well as their potential consequences in the form of an embodied experience of health crisis, which I have undergone. Through this interpenetration between different permeations of reality and the metaphoric imagery of the wreck and the seabed, I aim to understand the trajectory of my immersion into a crisis brought on by drowning in an excess of academic labour.

I situate my reading of Adrienne Rich’s poem at the midpoint of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, declared by UNESCO for the current decade. With the signing in March 2023 – under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea – of the historic Agreement on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ Agreement)², commonly referred to as the Global Ocean Treaty, ecological issues and questions of environmental security in marine ecosystems have gained a formal legal foundation. These concerns have also become increasingly present in public debate – across various media platforms and as a key topic in interdisciplinary discussions within cultural institutions³ and dedicated online spaces⁴. This, in turn, serves as a compelling argument for the urgent need to integrate environmental humanities – including blue and oceanic humanities – into the academic curricula of cultural studies programs in Poland.

From this perspective, I view the wreck in Adrienne Rich’s poem as an ecocritical poetic figure that mediates ongoing debates about global technological imperialism – much of which, as a media scholar Nicole Starosielski has shown, unfolds along the cabled seabeds of the world’s oceans⁵. Kate Crawford has also addressed the seabed, drawing attention to the issue of excessive resource extraction that underpins the development of AI‑driven technologies⁶. Resistance to intensified anthropogenic activity on the ocean floor is one of the core motivations behind the emergence of “critical seabed studies,” advocated by Killian Quigley, Charne Lavery, and Laurence Publicover. These scholars provide compelling arguments against the notion of the mineral‑rich seabed as a “gift of Mother Nature” to humanity⁷. Killian Quigley is also the author of Reading Underwater Wreckage: An Encrusting Ocean (2022), in which he draws on the dynamic materiality of the seabed to propose a view of shipwrecks as sites of memory, survival, and adaptation⁸. In my article, the “interpretive challenge” posed by Diving into the Wreck is understood as a process of mediating and performing critical discussions about the academy as a space in which attitudes are cultivated and worldviews are shaped – particularly those relating to how the seabed is perceived and understood.

Academic Capitalism and Extractivism

While reflection on contemporary modes of marine and oceanic exploitation is gaining increasing visibility, it is not necessarily widely connected to diagnoses and critical discourses about the condition of academia within a system based on intensifying extraction. This system, often referred to as the Capitalocene, leads – as Donna Haraway has noted – to the destruction of myriad of critters.⁹ Within this amalgamated system, which embeds itself in educational institutions shaped by diverse geopolitical histories and traditions, energy management becomes a central concern. It is particularly directed toward efficiency, production, standardization, and the parameterization of knowledge – all of which, among other consequences, reduce academic workers to a labour force subjected to exploitation. This reduction depletes our energy, talents, and individual experiences – resources essential for enacting environed social change. Under conditions of chronic exhaustion, we witness the displacement of paradigm shifts in Polish humanities – as well as struggles for more equitable working conditions and sustainable educational practices – into the realm of defensive phantasms. Adrienne Rich’s poem invites a careful and in‑depth analysis of this defensiveness, offering critical intersections between the realms of myth and material reality.

By exposing the condition of the academy within the metaphorical framework of the dynamic forces of underwater environments – in a space of coexisting and interwoven crises –I aim to contribute to the development of the blue turn in cultural studies education in Poland¹⁰. This turn spans various areas of culture – visual¹¹, literary, and cinematic¹² – unfolding both within traditional media and through trans- and post‑media perspectives. It requires a decoupling of culture and academia from their understanding as exclusively human productions¹³ and continues the broader “turn toward the Earth,”¹⁴ which – due to the vast presence of water on its surface – is also referred to as the Blue Planet. By bringing together, within the scope of the blue turn, the motif of the seabed and the pursuit of both grassroots and systemic reformulations of academic labour conditions, I propose a regenerative discourse centered on breathing. This thread allows me to weave together two dimensions of exploitation and extractivism¹⁵, ultimately leading to a reflection on how rethinking the category of the seabed might offer a way to challenge the logic of subordinating education to market values and to mechanisms that reproduce the exhausting dynamics of productivism.

My point of reference is the concept of academic capitalism, coined by Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie in their book Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (1997). They used the term to describe the shift of higher education institutions toward market‑oriented practices, in which faculty and administrators engage in revenue‑generating activities such as securing external funding, patenting research, and collaborating with industry. Sheila Slaughter further developed the concept of academic capitalism in collaboration with Gary Rhoades in Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education (2004), analyzing the various roles played by faculty and students within a neoliberal system in which education and research are increasingly treated as commodities for sale.

Within the framework of academic capitalism, scholars have discussed and critiqued issues such as the corporatization of universities, the neoliberal restructuring of higher education, and the impact of competition – imposed by the capitalist model – on critical pedagogy. In her article “Academic Capitalism” is Reshaping Faculty Life, Rebecca Koenig¹⁶ examined findings from the higher education forum EdSurge, highlighting the growing and detrimental influence of market‑driven practices on universities. In addition to changes resulting from external pressures – such as the global knowledge economy – she drew attention to the declining state funding for public universities. Koenig also observed that academic life is disintegrating under the pressures of commercialization.

The pressure to secure external funding or research grants and to develop international programs is not necessarily the most pressing issue in Polish post‑communist higher education – although much depends on the policies of individual academic institutions. In Poland, where state subsidies remain the primary funding source for public universities¹⁷, systemic challenges include a flawed evaluation process, minimal resources allocated for research, and excessive administrative and teaching burdens placed on academic staff. Scholars in the humanities also experience the pressure of market‑driven mechanisms; however, this pressure often stems not so much from the need to improve research quality or professional growth, but from the necessity of securing a basic standard of living – our salaries are significantly lower than those of academics in other European countries¹⁸. This situation complicates our position within the international academic community: instead of focusing on scholarly growth, we are forced to seek additional income on the open market to supplement our wages.

Although still too marginal on a national scale, there is an ongoing discussion about the need for a paradigm shift in the humanities – one that would include robust support for interdisciplinary research addressing contemporary civilizational challenges such as the transformation of economic models or climate‑related issues. Exchanges on these matters more often take place within niche academic communities – through scholarly articles or professional debates – rather than being widely addressed at the state or societal level. In referencing various arguments from the broader debate about the condition of contemporary academia, I also draw attention to the proposal put forward by Sinéad Murphy, who connects a critique of corporate interests shaping universities with a more general critique of modern education. Through the radical metaphor of “zombie universities,” Murphy highlights the conformity of higher education institutions, which are producing generations of compliant and “thinking dead” graduates – individuals trained to subordinate life to market values. As she observes, although graduates may be aware of social injustices, they are unable to challenge them. Her conclusion is a pessimistic one: universities are failing not only their students, but society at large.

In the following reflections, I situate the analysis of a poetic work that holds iconic status within the culture of its time within a critique of contemporary extractive academia – both locally and globally – an institution that exploits humans, animals, and technologies to normalize a destructive economic and cultural system. In the humanities, this mechanism – like an ouroboros devouring its tail – leads to stagnation and the solidification of ossified disciplinary structures that hinder the development of infrastructure for engaged cultural studies – including the blue turn. My methodological inspiration for the hybrid conjunction of themes in this article is drawn from feminist posthumanism, within which the method of storying exposure (or exposure stories) has been developed and advocated by Cecilia Åsberg. According to the Swedish scholar and writer, this method entails an intensive mode of writing grounded in localized experimental experience, enabling an exploration of the relationships between the self, language, and the world in order to strengthen a sense of belonging to both global and local communities. Moreover, exposure stories are meant to challenge technocratic approaches to solving environmental problems and to foster collective resilience. Building on theories of exposure, toxicity, stress, and vulnerability, they emphasize the pursuit of possibilities for social transformation through elements of surprise and disruption¹⁹.

The themes addressed here, particularly the critique of technocratic narratives within extractive academic productivism, will be further reinforced by insights drawn from the category of eco‑media, developed in Poland by cultural and media scholar Anna Nacher²⁰, as well as through the elaboration of the original concept of the aesthetics of withdrawal proposed by Anna Olszewska, a cultural studies scholar specializing in the history of science and technology²¹. While the former seeks to diagnose the pressures placed on the humanities to conform to “standardized technical solutions, strictly measurable productivity, and efficiency,”²² the latter advocates stepping away from routine actions within the technosphere and exploring the passive components of creativity. Engaging with Anna Olszewska’s ideas on artificial intelligence research and the transformation of systems we design, my analysis of Adrienne Rich’s poem links strategies of withdrawal – necessary within an educational system in which individual life energy is increasingly devalued – with the vital processes of regulation and recovery.

Exposing the descent into the wreck of the Capitalocene academy

In Adrienne Rich’s poem, the wreck is an infrastructure “ripped open by water” – a low‑tech²³ media environment where one encounters “half‑destroyed instruments/that once held to a course.”²⁴ Within the underwater setting of a ship withdrawn from circulation and routine operations, an act of descent unfolds, intertwining with the experience of learning and transformation.

This wreck became an intellectual lure for me during a period of heightened professional productivity associated with my intensive work as an artist‑researcher in the 2023/2024 academic year. I took the bait at a time when I had been pushed to the limits of embodied consciousness – psychic exhaustion manifesting in difficulty breathing and disturbances of balance. At that point, I also lacked the vital energy needed to engage in activities requiring creativity, passion, and imagination. For some time, I felt like a sailor swaying at sea, having momentarily lost solid footing – or worse, like “hit and sunk” in a game of Battleship. My reflections on this personal collapse concerned the unequal opportunities within the international academic community and the desire to transform a system that is itself part of a larger whole. My position of privilege from which I’m writing is paradoxical and fraught with tension. It compels me to acknowledge complicity and to recognize that my experience is only a drop in the ocean of destruction caused by racialized, classed, gendered, and speciesist capitalism. And yet, thanks to that privilege – and the laborious summer I spent after I had reached the bottom – I acquired the interpretive competencies necessary to read Diving into the Wreck.

Adrienne Rich begins the narrative with a technical motif related to the form of descent, which is simple and minimalist, but also – echoing Anna Olszewska’s invitation to “reverse the flow of energy”²⁵ – defines a level of engagement by reducing it to a manageable action:

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

The imperative of a slow descent, “rung after rung,” down the ladder that “is always there,” aligns with the art of diving, particularly the principle of decompression. The poem reminds us that in conditions where machines are excluded – as would be the case in a contemporary rejection of extractive exploration of the ocean floor – humans are able to descend only gradually. This slowness also resonated with my body, which had said “enough.” Descending to the bottom became an invitation to exit the machinery of academic labour²⁶, which had become increasingly entangled with digital university bureaucracy²⁷ and the use of online platforms to standardize an already existing system. This issue has been thoroughly addressed by Anna Nacher in her recent article To nie sztuczna inteligencja jest naszym największym zagrożeniem. Rozległe performanse technologii medialnych (It’s Not Artificial Intelligence That’s Our Greatest Threat: The Expansive Performances of Media Technologies). Recognizing the ubiquity of automated systems and administrative technologies used to manage academic and institutional processes, Nacher prompts reflection on whether these systems operate at the expense of media‑conscious approaches to integrating technology into education – as well as practices related to both the production and circulation of knowledge, and the creation of communities of practice centered around such activities²⁸.

Outside the knot of the university as a “neoliberal apparatus,” my immersion remained raw, analog, intertwined with a cultural text whose intertextual sociability – within the frame of the blue turn – was activated by the diving figure. Bold and resilient, donning a “the body‑armor of black rubber/the absurd flippers/the grave and awkward mask”, she sparked curiosity and generational associations. She evoked the figure of Benjamin Braddock from The Graduate (1967), directed by Mike Nichols – a film telling the story of a young man experiencing deep disillusionment with the social constructs surrounding white American middle‑class life, particularly the career path laid out for him by his parents. The character, played by Dustin Hoffman, is especially memorable in the iconic pool scene in which, at the behest of his proud father, Benjamin parades among party guests wearing a heavy, $200 scuba diving suit and holding a spear gun. Mr. Braddock tells his son: “You’re disappointing them, Ben.” Much like in Adrienne Rich’s poem, the diver’s suit and mask signify discomfort, weight, and a profound sense of isolation from the world. The mask that hinders the young man’s laboured breathing functions as an “interface”²⁹ of the tragicomic clash between the separated worlds of adults and youth; the reality seen from inside offers a descent into the claustrophobic space of psychological conflict. Submerged by his father, Benjamin lingers at the bottom in a state of neutral buoyancy, near the pool ladder that – just like in Rich’s poem – “is always there” (almost like a cinematic vision of Ben’s drowning in prosperity³⁰).

While Benjamin Braddock remains submerged as a victim of social expectations, the diving figure in the poem descends deeper – not in a gesture of surrender, but in one of exploration. This act resonates with Anna Olszewska’s reflection on constructive strategies of withdrawal, reclaiming the acts of sinking and inertia as forms of creative resistance and self‑subjectivation. Writing on this issue in the context of humanities education, Sebastian Borowicz has noted that such an approach constitutes a key element of resistance to the aggressive technologization of learning. He also emphasized that literary studies should be integrated into a new model of “hybrid subjectivity and communality,” grounded in embodied simulation, transversality, immersiveness, and the metaverse³¹. This approach can be comfortably applied to cultural studies as well.

Not every act of exploration, however, implies withdrawal as a strategy of resistance. The history of diving and underwater expeditions demonstrates that submersion has also served as a tool of technological domination and military imperialism. In this context, analog immersiveness – my chosen mode of reading – allows for deeper understanding the bodily discomfort of the diving figure in Adrienne Rich’s poem, who grapples with an inherited history of exploration: “I have to do this /not like Cousteau with his /assiduous team /aboard the sun‑flooded schooner.” If the contemporary meaning of this declaration is a desire to minimize harm, it is worth recalling that before Jacques‑Yves Cousteau became an advocate for ocean conservation, his scientific expeditions contributed to the destruction of marine flora and fauna. A telling example appears in The Silent World (1956), a documentary made with Louis Malle, in which a coral reef is blasted with dynamite to collect samples for research. Margaret Cohen insightfully linked Cousteau’s experimental innovations in underwater cinematography – and in the realm of the imagination more broadly – to the history of modern military imperialism. This form of cinematography emerged in the post–World War II era, driven by technological competition between nations, though it also relied on transnational cooperation³². The well‑known documentarian of the underwater world and discoverer of shipwrecks such as the HMHS Britannic and the 17th‑century French warship La Thérèse, however, elicits skepticism from the diving figure in Adrienne Rich’s poem for reasons other than the anthropogenic wounds inflicted on the oceans. Her journey has not been chronicled in the adventure‑filled annals of maritime myth, legend, and lore – narratives that often glorify male heroes. Similarly, the early development of blue humanities, as it was being charted on the map of emerging humanistic fields, largely centered on celebrating canonical figures of Western culture: William Shakespeare, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad³³.

What has been erased from hegemonic narratives of exploration becomes an enigma in Adrienne Rich’s poem, where the diving figure demonstrates a resistance to myth‑making logic. While dominant culture constructs its narratives around stories of discovery and conquest, the diving figure chooses a different perspective – the descent into the wreck is not a search for another grand narrative, but an act of exposing and destabilizing the mechanisms of narrative and representation, which, in the underwater realm, are revalued and reconfigured. This realm, as Melody Jue observes, constitutes a distinct epistemological environment – one that involves a different mode of perception, a different experience of color³⁴, and, as the poem itself suggests, a different way of breathing:

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

The “easy forgetting” emphasized in the stanza activates mechanisms of decolonizing hegemonic histories of wrecks. Yet the problem of representation – when considered alongside Anna Olszewska’s discussed strategies of withdrawal – is subject to a revaluation, wherein the absence of representation may serve as a protective function. In this framing, sensitivity to the fate of those erased from history is more closely linked to a different register of experience – to its alterity, exemplified in the poem by the act of breathing. The courage and willingness of the diving figure to confront what lies beneath the surface of official narratives anticipates the experience recounted in the poem – one associated with the search for an alternative to the absence of cultural representation:

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring

The diving figure also draws attention to the act of learning – a motif that allows me to connect the poem with critical reflections on the academy. For them, learning is an autonomous, embodied, immersive kinesthetic experience that unfolds in an environment not naturally suited to the human being:

I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

The withdrawal of force – an idea that Anna Olszewska’s paper may also invite, much like decolonial oceanic humanities – becomes, in Adrienne Rich’s poem, intertwined with the surrender of the body to the forces of nature, and perhaps also with the necessity of inertia as a condition for survival and transformation. From this perspective, learning becomes an act of unlearning the system – one that normalizes extractive academia, which, when reshaped by technocratic visions of science, results in the appropriation of life‑space from others, at the expense of coexistence and adaptation. In the “deep element,” which alters the very character of experience, the diving figure – amidst the air that darkens in color – begins to undergo human identity’s erosion. Her human self splits into a posthuman subjectivity: dissociative and mediating across multiple life forms:

And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
[…]
I am she: I am he

Analyzing Adrienne Rich’s poem, Killian Quigley pointed to the expanding, ambiguous self of the diving figure, which – through immersion – reaches a moment of articulating a form of collective experience, set against the masculine identity of the wreck³⁵. This vision of fluid subjectivity blurs the boundaries between opposites: women and men, humans, animals, and fantastical creatures, and even life and death. It is a space of experimentation, but also of withdrawal from being human in the traditional sense. However, the most radical strategy for merging the self beyond the logic of extraction and for redefining one’s identity is perhaps presented in the penultimate stanza, where, in the transversal space of the ocean floor, the diving figure becomes the wreck itself:

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half‑wedged and left to rot
we are the half‑destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water‑eaten log
the fouled compass

In this story of exposure, Adrienne Rich’s poem develops the idea of becoming the wreck as a form of staying with the trouble, which resonates with Donna Haraway’s thought. Through this concept, Haraway argues that instead of seeking solutions meant to “fix” problems or restore an idealized past, we must learn to live in an uncertain world, full of complex situations and challenges. The idea of “staying with the trouble” echoes the moment of the breakdown of a coherent self described in Adrienne Rich’s poem, as well as the meaning of refusal analyzed by Anna Olszewska, associated with reaching a boundary beyond which the redefinition of engagement and the system may become an irreversible necessity for the emergence of a more resilient community:

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage

Killian Quigley observes that stories about shipwrecks are divided into tales of plunder and tales of salvage, emphasizing the entanglement of the natural, cultural, and historical in underwater worlds³⁶. The reinterpretation of Diving into the Wreck that I propose, focusing on the entanglement of different dimensions of exploitation and extractivism, reveals patriarchal-colonial-capitalist systems of oppression not only as mechanisms of domination but also as spaces for critical exploration. This perspective becomes particularly important for feminist-queer scholars developing the discourses of blue posthumanism, among whom I situate myself. Highlighting the need to deconstruct dominant narratives and to build rescuing alliances based on survival strategies, the story retrieved from the ocean floor – the story of exposure – haunts the present in a form as spare as a ladder. The treasure turns out not to be a spectacular discovery. It is the ability to connect the dots in a situation where the account of the diving figure breaks off, and the anticipated alternative to violence and cultural appropriations – symbolized in the poem by “the book of myths” – ultimately does not materialize:

carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

From Exposure to Regeneration: a Hydrofeminist Reception of Diving into the Wreck

Before I open a broader space for other ways of thinking about history and regeneration, I would like to briefly outline selected threads in the reception of Adrienne Rich’s poetry, her poem Diving into the Wreck, and her role as a commentator on the poetry of other authors. I will focus on the struggles of the lesbian subject, whose cultural representations were submerged within universalizing narratives of “we” – women’s bodies experiencing patriarchal oppression in the United States of the 1970s. I will evoke the social dimension of these struggles from an intersectional perspective, allowing the proposed reading of Diving into the Wreck to be enriched by deeper references to various feminist traditions: Black feminism, posthumanist feminism, and hydrofeminism. By analyzing specific lines of thought in the poem, I gradually shift the energies of this text into the space of regulation and regeneration.

In the classic study The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, which explores nineteenth‑century women poets and the strategies they developed to resist patriarchal violence, the chapter devoted to Adrienne Rich’s parable of the cave draws attention to the connection between women’s journeys and memory. It is important to remember that at the time Diving into the Wreck was written, the postgender turn – which challenges the binary division of two sexes – had not yet appeared on the horizon as part of the identity politics of Western societies. Social reality was organized according to a dichotomous principle. Poetry served as a lifebuoy thrown into a world where gender could not be fluid. It is easy to imagine that a lifebuoy is something different from a ladder – and the ladder could only be climbed by those fulfilling traditional gender roles. For part of society – transgender, nonbinary people, gays, and lesbians – the norms were restrictive, linked to experiences of marginalization and discrimination, as well as exclusion and confinement.

The appearance of the legendary captain Jacques‑Yves Cousteau in Adrienne Rich’s poem serves to contrast the image of a shared male adventure with an undefined, individual experience of discomfort and oppression – an experience for which there are neither words nor a place in the culture. The story of the diving figure arouses curiosity because it is only beginning to take shape in the face of the saturation point of dominant cultural narratives – narratives that are highly publicized yet insufficiently capacious. It is dense and spare, palimpsestic and enigmatic, courageous and articulating co‑participation (through the concept of entangled identity, in which the pursuit of emancipation intertwines with the awareness of internalized structures of oppression), as well as complex and non‑obvious in how it speaks of the struggle to transcend the boundaries of cultural identity and species belonging. Instead of heroism, it invites us to explore, to listen, and to “breathe differently,” offering a counterpoint to the journey of “where the traditional male hero makes his «night sea journey» to the center of the earth, the bottom of the mere, the belly of the whale, to slay or be slain by the dragons of darkness.”³⁷

I add the above observations to Killian Quigley’s remarks, who also pointed out that the epistemological intent behind the poet’s declarations such as “I came to explore the wreck” and “the thing I came for:/the wreck and not the story of the wreck,” may be connected to the need to unanchor one’s interpretive abilities from one‑dimensional – including human‑centered – historical narratives, as well as to an openness toward “other possibilities of knowing”³⁸ – linked to a world inhabited by “creatures that move in a fluid and swaying manner, invertebrates, fish, algae – organisms whose behaviors reflect another form of existence.”³⁹

At this point in the reflection, it is also worth recalling Bonnie Zimmerman’s book The Safe Sea of Woman: Lesbian Fiction, 1969–1989 (1991), which foregrounds the motif of the “lesbian hero’s journey.” Zimmerman’s goal is to restore a place for lesbian literary creativity within the broader sea of feminist studies, alongside such important milestones as the Stonewall riots, the emergence of lesbian separatism, and the politics of difference within feminist identity politics⁴⁰. As I have sought to argue, the ocean floor – as part of the wreck’s environment – holds emancipatory potential that extends beyond specific events of oppression linked to women and sexual minorities. The true stake of the introverted expedition described in the poem turns out to be liberation from a predetermined way of experiencing and understanding reality. It is a story of exposure, in which dissociative experience is set against the clarity of classification and categorization.

The book After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement by Cheryl Clarke provides additional reference points for the themes of community and resilience. The author offers a perspective on the poetry of twentieth‑century African American women, focusing on the themes of rebirth and regeneration, inspired by reflections prompted by the closing section of Adrienne Rich’s poem. Among the voices of Black women writers fighting for the rights and liberation of Black citizens in the United States, Adrienne Rich’s poetry emerges as a secondary point of reference. Nevertheless, her collection Diving into the Wreck is mentioned alongside the works by Black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde (From a Land Where Other People Live, 1973) and Black feminist and human rights advocate Alice Walker (Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, 1973). Cheryl Clarke links these three volumes with “a critique of heterosexual white institutions, projects, and privileges.”⁴¹ Audre Lorde is also significant here, as she regarded self‑care as a political act. In 1988, describing her struggle with cancer in A Burst of Light and Other Essays, she advocated for justice for Black women fighting for social change, intertwining self‑care with the instinct for self‑preservation⁴².

The racial justice issue was recently taken up by hydrofeminist scholar Astrida Neimanis, who made a direct reference to Diving into the Wreck. In her book Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, she incorporated reflections on Adrienne Rich’s poetry into a philosophical meditation on the ecological problems emerging from the climate crisis⁴³. Neimanis’ project of posthumanist hydrofeminist philosophy engages critically with the limitations of blue humanities, which often masked the violence inflicted by whites upon Blacks, both on the surface of the water and beneath it. In her 2021 lecture Sea and Breath, delivered a year after the death of George Floyd – a Black citizen of Minnesota who died due to police officer Derek Chauvin’s restraint, which prevented him from breathing freely – Neimanis evoked interpretations of Diving into the Wreck concerning “the deformed social order,” “the wreckage of gendered systems of power,” and “the submerged history of patriarchal oppression and its victims.”⁴⁴ Neimanis’ reading situated the poem within complex socio‑environmental relations, starting from the issue of racial prejudice, allowing her to highlight “the metaphorical impossibility of breathing experienced by African Americans as well as by the oceans.” For the scholar, these issues “remind us that climate change is entangled with the politics of social justice in ways that are not always obvious.” Thus, in her interpretation of Diving into the Wreck, gender politics intertwines with ecopoetics, with significant influence from the concepts of “anti‑Blackness” and “the weather of the deep,” drawn from Christina Sharpe⁴⁵, a feminist scholar of African American studies. Through this combination, the poem can be read as an allegory of the Anthropocene, in which the issues of racial prejudice have not reverberated strongly enough.

Breathing as a Survival Strategy

Politicization – a key strategy for most researchers referenced here – now prompts me to reclaim the ground for regenerative discourse. Against the backdrop of the analyses presented, it emerges as a site of surviving crisis, of learning how to “breathe differently,” and of reclaiming oneself for a more‑than‑human community. Reaching this place requires abandoning many routine activities and attuning oneself to the biosocial sphere of exhaustion. Following Anna Olszewska’s proposal, I interpret the descent into the wreck as a form of withdrawal, whose political understanding – along with its aesthetics and ecopoetics as expressed in the poem – enables us to open up to new practices and values⁴⁶. Diving into the Wreck also teaches us to abandon the illusion that simply taking a deep breath and waiting out the crisis in some convenient shelter will suffice. This embodied, gradual descent instead invites attentiveness: listening to the body and making pauses that no one else will make for us. In this understanding of the condition of human identity in crisis, our inactivity may prove salvific, hindering the work of unsustainable systems.

In her book Błony umysłu [The Membranes of the Mind], Jolanta Brach‑Czaina, a pioneer of environmental humanities in Poland, devoted a few lines to breathing, recognizing in it a positive force that fosters the erosion of human identity. This phenomenon evokes the image of the diving figure from Adrienne Rich’s poem, drawn toward a planetary identity: “After all, breath – the source of inner energy – might somehow be connected to my identity. Yet it seems as if certain elements of the world momentarily become part of me, then drift away, allowing someone else, for a brief moment, to build themselves anew. Perhaps we should not cling too tightly to the notion of our uniqueness, though for individualists like us, such thoughts may feel uncomfortable.”⁴⁷

In turn, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, in her book Undrowned: Black Feminism and Marine Mammals, recently translated into Polish by Dominika Wasilewska and Weronika Zalewska, devoted an entire chapter to breathing, linking it to such issues as forms of adaptation, conscious relationships with others, meditation on the cost of prioritizing profit over breath, expressions of gratitude to ancestors, and ways of learning about one’s origins and heritage. Importantly, Gumbs’ reflection emerges from an engagement with the shared historical experiences of Black feminists – marked by the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade – as well as with the harm inflicted upon marine mammals in the Capitalocene. Breathing, which helps navigate the extreme conditions of the world’s turbulent, crisis‑laden waters, is for the writer a crucial survival skill: “[…] We, too, on land are often navigating contexts that seem impossible for us to breathe in, and yet we must.”⁴⁸

Valuable regenerative practices based on breathing – particularly relevant in the context of academia – are proposed by Anna Nacher, the author of the Breath Library project, a “bank of breaths” created in collaboration with Victoria Vesna. Since the pandemic, this transdisciplinary researcher, together with the artist, has been encouraging thinking about breathing as a communal and relational practice. Thus, the project takes the form of “dynamic workshops aimed at fostering regenerative activities and innovative concepts within and beyond higher education’s traditional institutional frameworks.”⁴⁹ Anyone can contribute by recording and uploading their breath at any time. I would add to the Breath Library recordings of the breaths of fish, mussels, and snails — nonhuman animals suffocated during the ecocide caused by the ongoing discharge of brine from coal mines into the Odra River since 2022. The breaths of these beings, many of whom lived on the riverbed, are priceless voices calling for the creation of breathing, regenerative spaces of coexistence and renewal.

Just like the riverbed, examples of such spaces can also be found in places of learning rooted in traditions older than the universities of the Capitalocene. One of the key authors within this tradition is bell hooks, a Black feminist who begins her well‑known book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994) by expressing her fear of being forever trapped within the academy. bell hooks developed the concept of holistic education, according to which education is a practice of freedom, growing out of the hybrid experience of both oppression and pleasure. She first encountered education connected to pleasure, ecstasy, and the practice of freedom in schools for Black students during the era of racial segregation, where students were offered the possibility of identifying with knowledge. These schools provided a counter‑hegemonic narrative and fostered a sense of belonging to a community, whereas post‑segregation schools placed Black students in a subordinated position – subject to the authority of white teachers and a system that continued to reinforce divisions between the “better” and the “worse.”⁵⁰ Although today’s academies of the Capitalocene program all their actors toward falling into the abyss – toward exhaustion, depletion of resources, and loss of health – they continue to protect the privileges of strong, healthy, white, male, human bodies.

Conclusion. Have a nice bottom lie!

Reflecting on the blue turn in cultural studies education in Poland, I see breathing as a strategy of consciously withdrawing energy from the academic system of exploitation, which subjugates our bodies to the logic of productivity. Breathing – in its somatic, affective, and political dimensions – is for me a practice of reclaiming agency and belonging to a glocal community of the exhausted, opening up a space for regeneration, relationality, and care. I also see in breathing the potential for literally retuning education to the rhythms and needs of the body – both individual and communal, human and nonhuman – as an act of resistance against the suffocation of the Capitalocene.

During a conversation about revaluing the seabed, held within a class on the ethical aspects of artificial intelligence, Jakub Twarduś, my exceptionally talented student, observed that at the seabed lies everything that has made us who and where we are. He also noted that it is worth pausing there, as the seabed might have more to offer us than the surface. Our conversation also touched upon the socialization of the seabed – a situation in which the solitary descent into the wreck ceases to be an isolated experience. Stories of exposure, emerging from direct and physical individual experiences – elements that lose meaning in an unhealthy, imbalanced, and neoliberal world – stand in opposition to the strategies of extractive academia. They allow integration of embodied crisis experiences with formal education, potentially contributing to transforming the academy into a space of greater freedom and resilience. They offer an alternative to the myth‑making of old science and humanities, and to ideologies that subordinate technologies to dominant narratives and hegemonic goals.

From this perspective, the blue turn in cultural studies would first and foremost signify a transformation and an experimental cognitive process, one that turns our raw, unfiltered, and real experiences into tools of resistance against the systemic management of our energy and the technocratic modes of acquiring and applying knowledge for extractive capitalism. It would oppose technologically mediated simulations that entangle our subjectivities and histories with the history of violence and cultural erasure. It would begin with a confrontation with the wreck of ourselves that brings neither spectacular discovery nor triumphant return, as it critically questions narratives of progress, growth, succession, and success.

In the twilight zone of experiencing reaching the seabed and the difficulty of breathing, performing and mediating arguments about the blue turn in cultural studies education may gain in credibility, leading to a deeper, healthier, and more authentic relationship with the world we are immersed in every day. Adrienne Rich’s poem demands that we reach the bottom – and, both literally and metaphorically, stay there for a while…

Enjoy your day!