*A Note on the Form: The following definitions of “strait” are taken from the Oxford English Dictionary.

I. Of a garment, etc.: Tight-fitting, narrow

Tight text(ure)s: the desire to control meaning, to fit it into narrow definitions, to place limitations on the possibilities of polysemy. Deconstructive philosophers have convincingly revealed the impossibility of such control. For those who refuse to accept this truth, these philosophers are nihilists who deny meaning as such rather than students of semantic turbulence and flow. Such desire for control grows out of a fear of losing control, and this fear leads to violence: bound feet, chastity belts, genital mutilation. Language as feminine, as loose, as promiscuous: no sexual pleasure here, no jouissance to be allowed, for that could lead to humiliation—an inability to sustain the flow, to reach the depths: in short, to be a man. Rather than be swallowed up by the vagina dentata, impose control with mythology, story, culture, so that the se(a)men cross the narrow strait of the cervix without fail. The author (semen in Latin means “author, seed”) imposes his meaning upon the chaos of the womb. A view of the cervix as a model of a strait.

II. Of a way, passage, or channel: So narrow as to make transit difficult

For George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, the conceptual metaphor of the mind as a body moving through space offers insight into the physical origins of abstract thought (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 236). The process of navigating straits, then, becomes a conceptual metaphor of a particular kind of thought, one that avoids the narrowness of strict interpretation, one that steers through a dangerous place in the process of exploration, of seeking new grounds for thought.

In The Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, Luce Irigaray invokes this conceptual metaphor of thinking as sailing as she describes the work of philosophers attempting to tame the sea:

From Irigaray’s perspective, Nietzsche and the masculine philosopher are afraid of water and want to control it: “Fluid and flaming as she is, are they not impatient to dry her up? To contain her in some enclosure where she finds her end. And thus be captive, stifled within the narrow limits of their perspectives” (Irigaray 1991, 48).

I quote this remarkable passage at length because it shows Deleuze, notoriously difficult most of the time, in a moment of frank searching, resorting to a metaphor of rowing in a boat to describe his concept of nomadic thinking.

III. Of modes of living, diet, etc.: involving hardship or privation; severely regulated

We have all heard the statistics. At 5% of the world’s population, the United States consumes 25% of the world’s meat and 25% of the world’s energy. For the rest of the world to live like those in the United States would require the resources from four more earths.

To what extent will the West be willing to cut back on consumption so that they will coexist with the rest of the world?

IV. Rigorous in principles: Strict or scrupulous in morality or religious observance

Religious fundamentalism in the United States drives the new petro-imperialism. Read Kevin Phillips for the details: American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. It’s not just Muslim fundamentalism that we need to be afraid of. “Although the exact portion of the GOP electorate taking an end-times view is unknowable, polls suggest that close to a majority of those who voted for Bush believe the Bible to be literally true” (Phillips 2006, 66). End-times theology determines much of American politics: “As the millennium itself came and went, 40 percent or more of American Christians continued to tell poll takers in 2000 and 2001 that they expected the biblical prophecies of Armageddon and the end times to come true” (Phillips 2006, 88). Given that the “economic, military, and financial parallels between America today and previous leading world powers are eerie” (Phillips 2006, 96), the coming decades will be difficult to navigate.

V. Of a legal instrument: Stringently worded, peremptory

Fair Trade Agreements (or FTAs) are being crafted that will secure the profits of large multinational corporations (MNCs) afraid to invest in volatile third-world countries. Such MNCs are protected against the “loss of potential profits.” These laws, in conjunction with the push for water privatization, will guarantee that 21st century wars will be fought over water just as 20th century wars were fought over oil. Without a direct challenge to the legal concept of corporate personhood, the rights of corporations will compete with the rights of individuals, and the legal battles will be won, as they often are, by those with the most financial resources. That is, when the case comes to an open court at all; FTAs do not require open legal proceedings but happen behind closed doors.

VI. Of words: Limited in application or signification

In A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Manuel De Landa speaks of language as a material thing that undergoes processes similar to geological, biological, and other forms of “nonorganic life.” Processes of stratification and destratification occur over vast periods of time, processes affected by group dynamics and migrations, social semiotics, and linguistic evolutions (e.g. the “Great Vowel Shift”). “Linguistic engineering” involved the deliberate homogenization of language in order to limit the degree of linguistic change. De Landa writes:

The spread of language became, then, a means of spreading and maintaining empire. The emerging Anglo-American hegemony over the past four centuries has led to the dominance of English as a global language (Phillips 1999, xxvi). Ultimately, for De Landa, “geology, biology and linguistics are not seen as three separate spheres... but as three perfectly coexisting and interacting flows of energetic, replicative and catalytic materials” (De Landa 2000, 267).

VII. fig. A narrow or tight place, a time of sore need or straitened circumstances, a difficulty or fix

E.O. Wilson, in his important book The Future of Life, describes the biological straits imposed upon us as we enter a century in which we will have to, in the words of Jared Diamond, “choose to fail or succeed” (Diamond 2005):

Wilson attributes the narrow and short-sighted perspective of humanity to the evolution of the human brain: it is a “hard-wired part of our Paleolithic heritage” (Wilson 2002, 40) which makes it difficult to combine the short-term values necessary for the future of one’s own tribe with the long-term values necessary for the future of the whole planet. “But combine them we must, because a universal environmental ethic is the only guide by which humanity and the rest of life can be safely conducted through the bottleneck into which our our species has foolishly blundered” (Wilson 2002, 41). Safely navigating these dire straits which humanity has entered will be the greatest challenge to the human race and will require a broader sense of economics that encompasses energy flows and availability: energonomics, the management of energy.

VIII. A comparatively narrow water-way or passage connecting two large bodies of water

Straits as a geological formation are often considered strategic water-ways by countries dependent upon oil for energy. The Energy Information Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy does not hide this fact when it writes of “World Oil Transit Chokepoints”:

For Manuel De Landa, such energy flows are a manifestation of a larger “nonlinear history” which “concerns itself exclusively with dynamical elements (energy flow, nonlinear causality) that we have in common with rocks and mountains and other nonliving historical structures” (De Landa 2000, 20). As he writes, “Rocks and winds, germs and words, are all different manifestations of this dynamical material reality, or, in other words, they all represent the different ways in which this single matter-energy expresses itself.” (De Landa 2000, 21). The geology of straits, then, becomes a template for the latest—and perhaps last—chapter in world history, one in which the human species approaches the edge of the “flat world,” ruled as it is by the forging of neoliberalistic free-trade agreements; fundamentalist politics; and diminished cultural, environmental, linguistic and ecological diversity. How we navigate the coming decades will determine the fate of life on this earth.

Bibliography

De Landa, Manuel (2000): A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books.

Deleuze, Gilles (2004): “Nomadic Thought”, in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974. Tr. Michael Taormina. Ed. David Lapoujade. New York: Semiotext(e), 252-261.

Diamond, Jared (2005): Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking. Energy Information Administration (2005): “World Oil Transit Chokepoints”. Viewed 15 July 2007.

Irigaray, Luce (1991): The Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. Tr. Gillian c. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson (1999): Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Phillips, Kevin (1999): The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America. New York: Basic Books.

Phillips, Kevin (2006): American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. New York: Viking.

Stiglitz, Joseph E. (2002): Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Wilson, E.O. (2002): The Future of Life. New York: Knopf.