Ian Buchanan’s (2014) short essay “The ephemeral coast” appears to fixate the coastline as a sort of vantage point, from which multiple worlds, realms, and logics become discernible. Interestingly, Buchanan almost immediately slips on the rocks, so to speak, and falls into the water where his initial thought is swallowed by eddies, currents, and bifurcating fluxes of water. This research-project is a serious attempt to work in the same continental tradition as Buchanan, and more precisely the posthumanist branch of it, but without going so far as to practice what Ian Bogost (2010) provokingly has labelled “Fire Hose Metaphysics”, which he thinks is a common but somewhat erroneous move of process philosophers. Water in movement is spellbinding, as is evident from Buchanan’s essay. What if were to follow the “amphibious anthropology” of Peter Sloterdijk (ten Bos, 2009)? This also amounts to upheaving the land-water binary as pointed out by Lahiri-Dutt (2014)

Epistemologically, what is at stake is the odd task of trying to give the curious posthuman, or perhaps more-than-human, being a voice. One cannot fully get rid of the paradox that posthumanist theories and methods are formulated by the same entities that called themselves human beings not long time ago. In order to do this, I will address another conceptual couplet in posthumanist thinking: the material-semiotic relation. By treading the border of land and sea, my presupposition is that I have found a good conceptual locus for pondering the divide between nature and culture, which according to Bruno Latour (1993, 2013) is an essential labour of thought today; a sustainable ontology of sorts. Rather than an explication of the relation between the material and the semiotic in this setting, what I endeavour to achieve is to urge the material surroundings to use me as a ventriloquist dummy, that is: to press a semiotic content.

I will stand on firm land, or rather: run on not so firm land. The space of Breakwaters has begun to fascinate me in a number of ways, which I aim to explore in the present study. Breakwaters form a jagged, and fractal defence against the sea: a froth of the land in its desperate attempt to avoid erosion. This could theoretically implicate that when the posthuman being is given a voice, culture and society, land and rock, could also be given a voice (that is not fully human). Equipped with an array of technological devices (cell phone, headset, GoPro, Runkeeper), I will run on the Breakwaters of the Öresund Strait and talk at the same time. The data will consist of audio and video recordings, which could be regarded as a sort of “memory writing” (Ceder, 2016) in medias res. The uneven surface and pace will ensure that I will not know fully what I will talk about prior to the event; all to trick my intentionality and in a somewhat post-Socratic manner deliver the posthuman me from the human me, and thus become the frothing voice of the land. This more-than-human testimonial will be treated as a semiotic statement evoked by the blurred materiality of breakwaters.