Sensing the Common: On the Mobilities and Makings of Sense

Abstract

How should we make sense of our current situation, global and local? What could such a making of sense imply? What, indeed, should we make of the notion of sense in this regard? In this chapter, in the company of Merleau-Ponty, Barad, Ingold and others, the modalities of sense are explored and deployed in interrelation with lived experiences of mobilities at the margins—of nature and culture. More specifically, such ruminations are developed from out of interactions with more-than-human actors such as seabirds nesting on offshore rocks and with concrete, decaying silos at the heart of a small fishing village in North-East Iceland. In the process, a sense will be developed of what such encounters can tell us—human sensitive, active and acted-upon beings—about the way in which we have to make sense of what we face. The ultimate aim is to think beyond tourism towards a wide-ranging notion of the coming-and-going of beings, through a situated, embodied common sense, that makes sense in the current global crisis.

Introduction

In the early days of the year 2023, as reports abound of snowless skiing slopes in the Alps, relentless storms and flooding in California, and the coldest December in Reykjavík since 1916, no one in their right mind can reasonably deny the fact that something is askew, globally, with regard to the general state of equilibrium, or of homeostasis, and we really should associate this with the health of the Earth. The atmosphere, or, more appropriately, the biosphere—that unfathomably thin layer of air where the conditions of life are met, on, under and above the surface of our planet (Latour 2021)—is changing, and, from the perspective of humankind, the unquestionable perpetrators of this whole scene, not for the better. Glaciers are melting, species are going extinct, the oceans are acidifying and plastics stubbornly turn up wherever we look, wherever they shouldn’t be, whether on the macroscopic or the microscopic scale. Things, apparently, have got out of hand—quite literally, as it happens, if one may say so. The hand—which, irrevocably, belongs to the primate, and, in this case, to the ‘highest’ of those, the human being—has lost control, but it has also, concurrently and complicitly, lost touch. Lost control of what, lost touch with what? Not only of itself and with itself, of course, but also of and with what stands over and against it, what offers it resistance, the resistance needed for any kind of touch to arise, or, more generally, for any type of sensation—for any type of sense to occur (Thorsteinsson 2023). What resists the hand has, to a significant degree, assumed control, leaving the hand isolated, on its own, essentially out of touch, or, insofar as it is still in touch; it keeps repeating its purportedly controlling gestures, only making things worse.

Now, assuming that it should surely be seen as the task of theory, broadly conceived, to face up to and tackle critical issues such as these—for what else could the task of theory be?—what will be attempted here is an approach towards the problems at hand, based on on-site research as well as deploying a handful of conceptual paraphernalia. Needless to say, this approach will be partial, probably in both senses of that term: limited and biased. The aim, in any case, is to produce some insights into the way in which we, human beings in our mobilities and travels, are situated in and faced by the ongoing shaping-up of the titanic forces that we have unleashed as well as succumbed to—the forces to which we have always been, and remain, subjected.

More specifically, we will first summon some conceptual resources by checking in with thinkers stemming mainly from the traditions of phenomenology, anthropology and feminist science studies. This will consist in a two-part examination of the discursive constellations gathered around the notion of sense, implying also its correlates such as the notions of sense-making, of common sense and of the common and of meaning and direction. Then, in order to produce some more concrete insights into these philosophical and conceptual intricacies, we will move on to field descriptions of visits to two locations in the extreme North-East of Iceland, places that without doubt are seen, by many a southern onlooker, as being on the margins in some (rather strong) sense—most likely in the sense of ‘on the margins of the inhabitable world’. A final section will then offer some concluding reflections related to the implications of sense—of the making of sense and of common sense—with regard to mobilities towards, on and at the margins.

Of Sense and Meaning

Early on in his landmark Phenomenology of Perception, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty proclaims that “we are condemned to sense” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, lxxxiv). To be sure, the personal pronoun here should primarily be seen as referring to human beings, potential readers of Merleau-Ponty’s book or of such a sentence—but leaving that issue aside for the moment, as well as the question of the larger context in which this proclamation is made, what is it that the phenomenologist wants us to understand by this claim? What, for Merleau-Ponty, is sense and how are we condemned to it?

When addressing this question, let us first note that the word translated here as sense is what seems, at first sight, to be its immediate French counterpart: sens (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 20). However, as soon as we start to dig deeper, we are bound to realise that the correspondence here, between sense and sens, is far from straightforward. As it turns out, English readers of Merleau-Ponty have at their disposal particularly clear textual evidence for the intricacies at stake, for, as it happens, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception has been translated twice into English, and in the first translation, now largely considered obsolete, the phrase in question was translated as “we are condemned to meaning” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, xxii). What is the difference here—what is at stake in the transition from meaning to sense, what is it that the latter term adds with respect to the former term and what, if anything, goes amiss in the transition?

To be sure, and to state the obvious, these translational issues attest to the fact that the French word sens has, strictly speaking and despite appearances, no single, clear-cut corresponding term in English. With regard to the issue at stake here, namely the intended meaning of Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, this fact could, however, conceivably be sidestepped by means of arguing convincingly that Merleau-Ponty really had one specific and particular meaning of the term sens in mind when writing the phrase, and not only that, but also that the specific meaning that he had in mind corresponds to a particular English term, either sense or meaning or even a third option (which would then necessitate yet another English rendering of Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, if not the whole of Phenomenology of Perception). But such a view would surely appear all too reductive and, to put it bluntly, hopelessly simple-minded and tainted by monolingualism; let it suffice to counter it with the straightforward remark that, for some reason or other, in this respect the two translators of Phenomenology of Perception into English disagree, and neither of them is entirely wrong. Being condemned to sens really does imply connotations of meaning as well as sense. And, to follow up on the point just raised, the word sens has at least one more aspect to it that also comes into consideration here: namely, the aspect of direction (cf. e.g. translator’s remarks in Merleau-Ponty 2012, xlviii, 491n9). Thus, keeping these intricacies in mind, let us read Merleau-Ponty’s phrase in the following way: in our being in the world, we are condemned to sense, and sense is to be understood here as also involving meaning and direction. In other words, when reading the phrase “we are condemned to sense”, we should refrain from hearing, in the (English) word sense, only its straightforward connotations, rather, we should maintain the other implications contained in the French original term, namely meaning and direction. Thus, to finally move to the issue at hand, the unpacking of Merleau-Ponty’s formulation: our being condemned to sens means that our mode of being in the world is sentient, and as sentient, sensitive beings, we attribute meaning to whatever appears to us. This attribution of meaning is always already a response on our part; we respond to what appears meaningful to us, and this responding, in its turn, implies that we also make sense, we participate in the making of sense. And this participation, on our part, inescapably involves a direction towards which we are headed, so to speak; in our sense-making, we orient ourselves, the sense we make is also a sense of direction.

The reference to condemnation in Merleau-Ponty’s phrase—an evocative term, to be sure and here we should bear in mind that Merleau-Ponty, when writing his striking phrase, probably saw himself as giving due to Sartre’s no less memorable proclamation that we are condemned to being free (Sartre 1965, 41)—implies, no doubt, that the condition being described is not of our choosing, and, further, that it is somehow doubtful whether we possess any means of detaching ourselves from this condition: sense, meaning, direction and even freedom. As long as we live, as sentient, embodied beings, we are bound to participate in sense-making, the giving of sense to the common reality which we share—the world itself:

There is an autochthonous sense of the world that is constituted in the exchange between the world and our embodied existence and that forms the ground of every deliberate Sinngebung [sense-giving act]. (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 466)

Starting from where we are, from what we perceive, on our passage through time and space, through our participation in the aptly named “autochthonous sense of the world”, we go on, also, to constantly contribute to the ongoing sense-making of this world. We cannot fail to do so, everywhere we go, in every instance where the sense already inherent in the world surges forward to seize us, impress us or, as also happens, pass by us largely unnoticed. When we travel to what we call the margins—running up against something that in some way stops us in our tracks, presenting itself to us while also withdrawing from us in some sense and telling us that we are about to reach the limit of our preconceptions—our role as participants in the world’s making of sense, which is also a world-making of sense, may spring forth or shine through, making itself felt, prompting us somehow to come to our senses in the sense of discovering ourselves in the act of participation. What is at stake here, what here happens to us, at the margins, in this way, is a quintessentially phenomenological operation whose technical name(s) would be the reduction and/or the epoché—defined, at one point, by Merleau-Ponty quoting Eugen Fink, as “a ‘wonder’ before the world” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, lxxvii).

‘What is the sense of all this?’ we may wonder. Indeed, we may, and such a question, precisely such an interrogative attitude, unsure of itself in its aversion to finding itself, all of a sudden, in the midst of, and even involved in, sheer nonsense, testifies to an important truth. In our search for meaning, through our participatory sense-making (a notion, by the way, that has emerged in the literature about the phenomenology of autism, De Jaegher 2019, 2013), we sometimes run aground, or go astray, ending up where nothing much makes sense anymore—and, what is worse, we sometimes, too often, end up participating in processes that, manifestly, have world-threatening consequences. Where to go, what should we do, what direction should we take? The adventure of sense, meaning and direction is ongoing and presses itself upon us. “Thus, we must not wonder if we truly perceive a world; rather, we must say: the world is what we perceive” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, lxxx).

Matter(ing), Meaning and Dancing

A lot, thus, hinges on wonder—on wondering and perceiving, and on how we wonder about what we perceive: the world. Thus, wonder is by no means a prerogative of theory, be it phenomenological or otherwise. British anthropologist Tim Ingold, drawing on Merleau-Ponty, invites us to appreciate the scope and depth of what is at stake here, rewriting the concept of wonder as astonishment which he then opposes to surprise: “Surprise […] exists only for those who have forgotten how to be astonished at the birth of the world”, he remarks and adds: “By contrast, those who are truly open to the world, though perpetually astonished, are never surprised” (Ingold 2006, 19). This openness to the world with its perpetual astonishment and concurrent absence of surprise has to do with a certain “animic way of being” (Ingold 2006, 18) which, for Ingold, should not be seen as “a way of believing about the world but [as] a condition of being in it”, or, more specifically,

as a condition of being alive to the world, characterised by a heightened sensitivity and responsiveness, in perception and action, to an environment that is always in flux, never the same from one moment to the next. Animacy, then, is not a property of persons imaginatively projected onto the things with which they perceive themselves to be surrounded. Rather […] it is the dynamic, transformative potential of the entire field of relations within which beings of all kinds, more or less person-like or thing-like, continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence. The animacy of the lifeworld, in short, is not the result of an infusion of spirit into substance, or of agency into materiality, but is rather ontologically prior to their differentiation. (Ingold 2006, 10)

The world, thus, is alive: materials are not dead and do not stand opposed, rigidly, to a perceiving, sensible—and discursive—spiritual being, rather, materials and discourse intertwine. American feminist science and technology studies scholar Karen Barad, trained in theoretical physics, famously argues along these lines, introducing, for the notion of the liveliness of matter (or of living nature), the conception of “the lively dance of mattering” (Barad 2007, 37). Or, as she writes:

Meaning is not a property of individual words or groups of words but an ongoing performance of the world in its differential dance of intelligibility and unintelligibility. In its causal intra-activity, part of the world becomes determinately bounded and propertied in its emergent intelligibility to another part of the world, while lively matterings, possibilities, and impossibilities are reconfigured. (Barad 2007, 149)

Let us spell out that by intra-activity, Barad understands the ongoing dynamism of the world that happens not between discrete pre-defined units—as in inter-activity—but rather, it is an event that takes place and, through its taking place, gives rise to the relata of the relation implied in the event (Barad 2007, 33). Matter is very much alive: matter is mattering, and mattering implies meaning or, in other words, discursivity:

[…] matter is a dynamic intra-active becoming that is implicated and enfolded in its iterative becoming. Matter(ing) is a dynamic articulation/configuration of the world. In other words, materiality is discursive […] just as discursive practices are always already material […]. (Barad 2007, 151–152)

Or, to sum up, “matter and meaning are mutually articulated” (Barad 2007, 152). This, in turn, has to do with an openness (or an astonishment, or wonder) which is also a responsiveness—to meaning, to what matters. As such, this responsiveness is something that we are a part of. Being already not only in the world, but also of the world (cf. Merleau-Ponty 1968, 134–135), we are, from the start, to a certain degree, in the know, for, being of the same flesh as the world itself (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 137), we are a part of its ongoing articulation; or, as Barad succinctly puts it, “knowing is a matter of differential responsiveness […] to what matters” (Barad 2007, 149). Again, keeping in mind that knowing and wondering, as well as perceiving, are intricately related, we come back to the crucial importance of how we wonder and perceive. Our experiencing is not innocent—it calls for care. Why is that? For one thing, because when we perceive, we matter, through our responding—and, to finally quote Merleau-Ponty’s phrase in context, our responding is, by the very fact of its partaking of the making-(the)-sense-of-the-world, nothing less than historically implied: “Because we are in the world, we are condemned to sense, and there is nothing we can do or say that does not acquire a name in history” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, lxxxiii–lxxxiv). Being in the world, we cannot abstain from sense—the makings, the meanings and the directions of sense—and, quite simply, this entails that what we do leaves traces: “marks on bodies” (Barad 2007, 178), thus, it matters. In this sense, then, the making of sense in which we are implicated is inevitably a matter of community—it has to do with what we have in common, with common sense. The beings involved in the making of sense that is mattering thereby interact, or more appropriately intra-act, in the sense of leaving traces or marks on one another. They intertwine, and from then on—as Barad shows with reference to quantum physics—they are entangled. Their encounter has left a mark on them. The manner of their mutual leaving-of-traces constitutes the sense of the event. The sense is the way that marks are made, the transpiring of mark-making. Thus, the dance of mattering reveals itself as the ongoing development of sense, the emerging of sense. As such—one might even say ‘by definition’—this emerging is communal in the sense of being not exclusive to any type of closed-off, monad-like, private consciousness. Sense is communal; it takes place in community—and thus, irrevocably, in some sense, common sense.

Making Sense at the Margins: Two Cases

Encountering the Súla

24 September 2021: a lovely late-summer afternoon in North-East Iceland. The weather is hospitable, with a light wind traversing the grasslands, a vague rem(a)inder of the storm that passed some hours ago and left its mark, for those in the know, in the magnificent waves coming in from the north and running largely, where we set out on our walk, along the coast. The destination, for us human travellers, is a hill and its steep encounter with the ocean, complete with its—in my eyes—most precious and coveted offering, birds. Among those, I’ve learned, is that majestic white and seclusive queen of the seaside (and the seas) called súla in Icelandic (such a beautiful and precise word—pronounced soo-lah—that I can hardly bring myself to even mention its English-language equivalent, the (northern) gannet; the Latin term is Morus bassanus). Being something of a mildly enthusiastic birdwatcher since childhood, I only have vague and uncertain memories of ever having seen the súla with my own eyes, notwithstanding its lifeless representative at the Icelandic Natural Museum which I loved to visit as a child. This, to be sure, can mainly be attributed to the fact that the súla likes to keep to itself in the sense of forming extremely concentrated colonies, preferably on seaside cliffs or offshore clifflike islands. Accordingly, the places where you actually can observe the bird in Iceland are few and far between—and quite remote.¹ I had not had the good fortune, or the determination, to travel to any of these rare locations for decades on end—until that day, when my membership in the research group brought me to the site where my old (but not altogether conscious) wish would be fulfilled.

We walked northwards, along the ocean, with the coveted destination in the distance. The enormity of the waves hitting the rocky shore provided us with a constant source of amazement and awe. Seeing an unusual object lying on the shore, among the rocks, my colleague and I found ourselves compelled to take a closer look; running down as the waves pulled back, we managed to hoist the object between us and rush up again before the next wave hit: it turned out to be what we thought it was, namely a whale’s baleen (jawbone with the associated filaments). The smell stuck to my gloves for months to come. Happy, we carried on, and the bird-cliff drew closer. The beauty of the berries, blue and black, and of the heather, green turning ruby red, attracted the eye. Sky, sea, earth—and life (also in its remains), everything coming together, being together. Gradually we scaled the slope, reaching the top and, finally, there it was, before us: the two cliffs off the shore—and, indeed, as hoped and promised, there they were, schools of them, súlur (in the plural) (Fig. 2.1).

Fig. 2.1

(Photo by Sigrún Alba Sigurðardóttir)

Encountering the súla

So, when the moment arrived, what was it that struck me, what was it like, for me, to witness the realisation of my dream? Well, as it happened, what stood out, above all else, was how absolutely they didn’t care. They didn’t mind me, or my human fellow travellers, one bit. We didn’t interrupt their comings and goings, their everyday routine, in the least. It was as if we were not there. In this sense, certainly, their manner of being provided an explicit, albeit not tangible, confirmation of what, in some respect, we had all set out to find—and/or to search for, to research: they were not only at the margins, they were beyond the margin in some insistent sense. Their mobilities seemed to constitute a world beyond us, a non-anthropocentric reality to which they belonged, with all the ease, but also struggle, inherent in such a belonging. I shuddered when reminded of the fact that soon, in just a few weeks, they would be leaving their lair, the rock on which they had fostered their offspring, to spend the coldest months of the year at sea, in the middle of the ocean. How—on earth—is such an existence possible? Pondering this question, I also found myself running up against the margins of my own imagination.

This is not to say that the encounter with the súla fulfilled all my expectations. For one thing, they were strangely silent, contrary to what I had expected; indeed, my colleague, who had been at the site a couple of months earlier, in mid-summer, had described to me the wall of noise that they had produced on that occasion. This surely had its explanations—perhaps the bird was, as autumn and winter loomed (the two often intermingle mercilessly in Iceland), saving its energy for the coming cold months at sea. But this hypothesis rested uneasily with another let-down that I also had to face: they were not hunting in the way they are so famous for, falling head-first and resolutely from the air to pierce the fish with their sharp beaks. Indeed, I saw little sign of any nutritional activity going on. Well, one cannot have everything at once. I’ll be back, dear súla.

In any case, and beyond doubt, the súla left a mark on me that day. She—for the bird’s name is feminine in Icelandic—mattered to me, and that day she really mattered, albeit differently than I had expected. By writing about that particular case of mattering here, hopefully I’m being accountable to her, responsive in a way that matters (to her, to others). But did I leave any mark on her? My words seem to indicate that such was not the case. Still, but not too happily, there is evidence to the contrary. More than a year later, in December 2022, when she had left her earthly lairs and moved to the high seas, scientists undertook one of their regular expeditions to one of the súla’s major colonies—actually the biggest one, reportedly the biggest in the world—namely the island of Eldey, a few kilometres off Iceland’s southwestern tip. What the scientists found, this time around, made its way to headlines in Iceland’s mainstream media (Morgunblaðið 2022). First, there was an unusually high number of dead birds in the colony. This, apparently, could partly be explained by the avian flu, which had been particularly rampant in 2022. Second, the scientists found excessive plastic pollution in the colony, giving rise to inevitable suspicions of the material also having made its way into the intestines of the birds. Now, from the distance to which I was reduced in my encounter with the súla in the North-East, I did not notice any plastics polluting the scene, but still my perception that the birds there had been in some way untouched—by the human being and its endeavours—now appeared as unfathomably naive. For, as the Eldey expedition found, the súla, for all its splendour and aloofness, for all its remoteness and apparent residency and mobility beyond the margins, has not been left untouched by the way we humans, makers of plastic, matter.

Making Sense of Silos

3 September 2020, another setting, another day: pelting rain this time, typically Icelandic, but we do not mind it too much, for today we are inside, at the town hall of Raufarhöfn, one of Iceland’s smallest villages (population 180 as of 1 January 2022) (Statistics Iceland, n.d.). We are meeting with a small group of people representing municipal authorities broadly conceived. Outside the window, across the street, an overwhelming presence makes itself felt and naturally turns into one of the main topics of our conversation: gigantic concrete silos, white paint peeling off the walls, sit there and, quite naturally, address us, as if they themselves are asking: what about us? What do you want to do, what can you do with us?

The silos, of course, are there for a reason. Situated on the extreme north-eastern corner of Iceland, not far from the Arctic Circle and practically as far from the populous capital region of the island as you can get, Raufarhöfn has never been a major conglomeration, not even by Icelandic standards. Still, its history is not devoid of a certain moment of glory: síldarárin, the herring years, when a significant number of that precious fish saw it fit to honour the coastal regions of Iceland, especially the northern and eastern ones, with their presence, giving rise to an enormous boom, starting around 1950 and ending abruptly in 1969, when, partly due to overfishing, the herring literally disappeared (Síldarminjasafnið, n.d.). Thus, like many other small villages in North and East Iceland, Raufarhöfn became, for a time, a major hub for the fishing and processing of herring. In fact, already in 1900 the town had a fish processing plant, built by Norwegians, but it was in the 1960s that the town saw its heyday, with 11 stations for salting herring and over 500 inhabitants—as well as many more who came there as intermittent workers (Norðurþing, n.d.). But to return to our protagonists here, the concrete silos, they date back to before the boom years; built in 1938–1940, their role and raison d’être was to contain fish-oil. During the ‘herring years’, more silos were built, albeit less imposing ones: made of metal and used for the herring processing, they were torn down, one by one, in the decades following the bust. What remained, however, and what still remains, are the original two big silos, the concrete ones—sitting there, as already noted, in the heart of town, right opposite the building housing the post office and bank branch as well as serving as town hall; occupying space, doing little else—being of no use (Fig. 2.2).

Fig. 2.2

(Photo by Hreinn Helgason)

The silos in 1952, with rising smoke from the fish factories

This being-of-no-use, however, and as we found at our meeting in the town hall, in no way comes down to being inactive or, to make things even more complex, to holding no potential. Entering one of the silos with my colleague, acrobatically crawling through a hole in the wall, we discover the enormity of the space. What immediately springs to mind, of course, is acoustics—and there are already several cases in Iceland of decrepit containers like this one having been turned into elaborate recording studios and concert venues. But numerous other possibilities also come to mind. In the age of global mass tourism, anything seems possible, even—or especially—in the remotest of locations in Iceland: why not a guesthouse, or no, make that a luxury resort with in-built jacuzzi and stargazing facilities. I mean, the northern lights! And the midnight sun! After all, Raufarhöfn has in recent years profiled itself as a major hub for observing the ‘heavenly bodies’ and their mobilities, building on the fact that nowhere in mainland Iceland you find a conglomeration as close to the Arctic Circle (the island of Grímsey, off the north coast, literally lies on the Arctic Circle and harbours a small village) (Barðadóttir et al. 2023).

Thus, the silos sit there, in the heart of town, testifying at once to what Tim Edensor refers to, when discussing St Ann’s Church in Manchester, as “the endless transformation of urban matter through non-human agency” (Edensor 2011, 238), and, more generally, to what Jane Bennett calls “a vital materiality” (Bennett 2010, vii). To deploy an argument of the order of mathematical indirect proof: if the silos were fully and purely inert, senseless in the sense of passive, then they would not matter. But they do, they most certainly and concretely do, and in that way they make sense, or rather they demand to be made sense of. And that making of sense can range from leaving them as they are (which, admittedly, would entail disregarding security concerns) to tearing them down, erasing them (which, however, will never entirely succeed—there are traces, there will be traces of them, on the ground and on the record). The inescapable fact is that they matter, in and through their very materiality, in their enormity and their crumbling, in their matter and their form, in their entanglement with nature and history, in their being and their becoming. Making sense of them, for the local authorities especially but also for any wondering onlooker, requires, precisely, an immersion into these multiple senses, into the manifold, intricate meaning of their mattering (Fig. 2.3).

Fig. 2.3

(Photo by Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson)

The silos in 2020. The metal tank on the right has now been removed

Senses, Mobilities and Margins

Now, to start summing up, gathering our senses: in the light of the previous discussion, what do the two cases tell us in relation to mobilities and margins, to sense and sense-making, within and without the common? How can conceptual constellations such as those offered by Merleau-Ponty, Ingold and Barad—and others—help us make sense of the cases? As it turns out, addressing these questions will entail adapting a somewhat broader perspective, bringing in new resources, theoretical and experiential.

To begin with, let us note, on a very general level, that mobilities towards, on, and over the margins necessarily involve the question of desire, or, more specifically, of the limits of desire. When speaking between ourselves—between us, humans—of the margins, it is only natural to see them largely from an anthropocentric perspective. Thus, Icelanders often speak, jokingly or not, of their country being situated ‘at the edge of the inhabitable world’, the implication being that it is altogether undecided whether the land is on the right side or the wrong side of that edge. The inhabitable, of course, is here seen from an exclusively human perspective, as our encounter with the súla makes explicit. But let us add in passing, again referring to common parlance, that while the margins can certainly be (at) the edge, they can also be at the centre, as when we speak of the middle of nowhere.

In any case, the implication here is that what is beyond the margin, on the other side of the edge of the inhabitable world, can also be seen as being beyond the desirable. Thus, when Icelanders joke or grumble about the this-or-that-sidedness of their country with regard of the edge of the inhabitable world, the looming question concerns the desirability, and ultimately the very possibility, of living there. However, as adequately portrayed by Slavoj Žižek in numerous works, following in the footsteps of figures of no lesser stature than Jacques Lacan or, indeed, St Paul, what lies beyond the limits of desire, the reputedly undesirable or not-to-be-desired, is precisely what really sets desire off. It—this perilous, forbidden it beyond the limits—becomes, in Lacanian parlance, the object-cause of desire, the objet petit a. The catch, of course, is that this particular object is not only forbidden or foreclosed but impossible—it can never be attained. Accordingly, the ever-recurrent story consists in the desiring being travelling to reach the margin and, if possible, pierce it—only to find, and, again, this is an absolutely irrevocable condition, that the coveted object has stolen away, it is no longer there—or rather, it is not there and (probably) never was. The ‘it’ of desire, the ‘thing’ that you were looking for, never was—or, which comes down to the same thing, the thing that you found turned out not to be it.

From this perspective, we may perhaps venture the following tentative conceptual circumscription: at the margins, at the limits of sense, or of what we are supposed to sense, we glimpse, indirectly and mediately, the coveted object. This object cannot fail to attract us, precisely, in a sensual way—it lends itself to sense in its very prohibition or withdrawal from sense. Thus, it teases us. Accordingly, we can perhaps, at this point, conceive of a certain way of discerning between sense and meaning: meaning resides on this side of the margin, having already been made sense of, being the relic of an already performed process of making sense, whereas sense is what seeks to occur at the margin, on the border of the sensible and the insensible or even of sense and nonsense.

From this perspective, then, we can lend a certain additional meaning to a term that seemingly entertains a difficult relation with a significant part of contemporary analysis of human mobilities: the concept of the tourist (Graburn 2017; McCabe 2005; Singh 2016). Since the turn of the century, it would seem, and concurrently with the advent of truly global mass tourism, the label of the tourist has been subjected to thoroughgoing critical review, leading, in the end, to a certain rehabilitation of the term within the literature (Cohen and Cohen 2019). This rehabilitation, in turn, has been considered necessary because of a certain denigration of the tourist as manifest in its opposition to figures such as the excursionist (Singh 2016, 19), the explorer (Graburn 2017, 83) or the drifter (McCabe 2005, 88). To give a rough indication of what is at stake in these oppositions, in relation to our discussion above about the ‘dialectics of desire’, we can state that the tourist is someone who compromises on their desire already before setting off, willingly renouncing the risky ideal of obtaining the coveted object by choosing a destination and/or a voyage which does not venture too far towards the margins. The opposing figure, whichever label we choose for it, is someone who presses on, unabated, with the ideal of transgressing the margin to find and obtain the coveted object. But in this light, the second figure, the ‘opponent’ of the tourist, will, in keeping with the very essence of desire, necessarily be thwarted.

Now, of course, in the current global situation, whether we consider ourselves to have arrived at an epoch properly named Anthropocene, Capitalocene or Chthulucene (Haraway 2015), one thing seems clear: the societal structure called capitalism specialises in the engineering of desire, of consumption, and of the production of objects to covet. As such, it has proved to be inherently—and hopelessly—addicted to the reduction of whatever it finds, in nature or in culture, to the commodity form. In its wake, everywhere it goes, it also leaves remains—former centres of capital, big or small, urban or rural, world-reaching or locally embedded. Decaying remnants of bygone days are left to address those who remain. What is gone will not go away, just as much as plastics keep popping up when we thought, in our thoughtlessness, that they were gone forever (‘out of sight, out of mind’, to deploy yet another all-too familiar phrase). As such, in their meaningful material presence, they summon us, they matter. Everything matters in some way: that is the other side of capitalist globalisation with its ubiquitous military-industrial-technological implications. Nothing does not matter. But not everything matters in the same way, and the task is to respond in such a way that the response matters in the right way. Such is the task of thinking, and of knowing: responding differentially to what matters, as Barad pointed out to us. And this responding inevitably has to take into account that, given that everything matters comes down to everything belonging to the common(s), the sense we need to make of our situation, of what we currently perceive, of the world—our world—will inevitably have to be, in some sense, a sense that makes sense in the common, a justly understood common sense.