Who’s afraid of blue? (No one.

)
“Een goede afweging is gebaseerd op stemmen van alle betrokkenen,” is what
Peter-Paul Verbeek tells us on the website of the Ambassade van de Noordzee. The
problem with political representation thus far seems to be that it has not been properly taking
everyone into account. It has been focused on the humans, but left the many living and
lifeless non-humans out of account. This requires an overhaul. Starting from now on, we will
represent ​everyone and be complete in our decision-making. Although Verbeek probably
wouldn’t endorse this, his statement might thus be taken to mean that, as long as everybody
is heard and taken into account, we can proceed at full speed.
The problem with overstressing the importance of ​complete representation, is that we
forget that there are many actors that might never get or want a voice, and that the world is
subject to change and that new actors regularly emerge. The world is too complex to know in
advance what our actions will bring about.
In addition there is the danger of forgetting that part of the reason for representation
is not about decision making at all, but about detecting problems. Part of the joy of having a
voice is not just to add to a discussion, but also to be able to scream when someone else is
stepping on your toes. So the definition of problems - what is the matter that demands our
shared concern? - is an equally essential part of representation. In other words:
representation of the North Sea shouldn’t just lead to ‘better’ decision making ​about ​the
North Sea but also induce an increased sensitivity to troublemakers ​in ​the North Sea.
How do we make sure that these uncertainties are included in the process of
representation itself? How can we make sure that when we say ‘these are the relevant
actors of the North Sea, this is what they do, and this is what they need’, we don’t forget to
add: ‘but there will be others’. According to Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers, part of
doing so ‘is a matter of imbuing the political voices with the feeling that they do not master
the situation they discuss.’ We will have to show that decisions are always based on
temporary certainties and incomplete knowledge.
In ​Immanence and Fear anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro draws a relation
between fear and understanding. Western civilization has, according to him, banished fear
from its repertoire. And that repertoire has, over the last centuries, been taken over by
rational thought and scientific knowledge. ‘We would fear nothing because we understood
everything,’ he says. Mastery, in short, abolishes fear. This may be illustrated by how horror
movies ‘work.’ As long as the danger, evil or villain is undefined, unpredictable and unknown,
viewers are on the edge of a seat. As soon as the danger is defined, however, the specific
tension of unknowing transforms into a different, more recognizable form: a chase ensues,
or a fight - something we know and understand and have seen many times before.
To instill in all those that inhabit the North Sea the idea that they do not master it, that
they do not know to the full extent how it is going to react to their activity in it, could therefore
involve a reversal of Viveiros de Castro’s thesis. Instead of, as western civilization has been
doing so far, understanding more in order to fear less, we might try to fear more so that we
can come to grasps with our failure to understand.
This is not simply a fictional creation, a form of naive animism. It is not making a
subject out of a soulless, objective world. The world ​does ​bite back: we are already
witnessing many ways in which drought, temperature and sea-level risings are putting
human lives at risk. We live in a dangerous world, but our understanding of it, in part
because we have forgotten how to be fearful, obfuscates that.
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