Presentation long abstract

For centuries, a fantasy of mastery and moral order, rooted in Calvinist traditions of discipline and stewardship has been at the core of Dutch water management (Schama, 1987; van de Ven, 2003). The Delta Works embody this infrastructural sublime (Kaika, 2005), in which floods appear as divine judgment and reclaimed land as virtue. The rise of ecological restoration and the re-opening of the Harinvliet sluice introduced new conceptualizations of nature, in which organisms, sediments, tides, and even metaphysical forces acquired relational and moral value. The article mobilizes the infrastructural sublime as a framework for understanding how fantasies of security give way to a desire for a return to Edenic naturescapes within tidal landscapes. Liminal environments such as estuaries and tidal zones, in turn, generate transgressive agencies: invasive crayfish undermining dikes, migratory fish defying infrastructural limits, sediment and salinity behaving unpredictably, complicating such binary oppositions. These boundary-crossing beings destabilize imaginaries of anthropocentri infrastructure, leaving space for queer ecologies that foreground fluidity.

To further articulate these dynamics, the article develops a multibeing approach that treats organisms, infrastructures, and metaphysical presences, spirits, forces, inherited cosmologies, as co-constitutive actors in coastal worlds. Through discourse analysis of policy documents, scientific publications, technical reports, and national and regional media, combined with affective-historical ethnography of the communities surrounding the sluice, the study shows how the Haringvliet sluice has become a site where competing imaginaries of security, decay, and cohabitation unfold.