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The word sustain has achieved this kind of adaptation and transferal. It was only in the 1980s

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that it became firmly associated with the environment as the noun sustainability . According

to the Oxford English Dictionary it appeared in 1980 in the Journal of the Royal Society of

Arts, where it was defined as ‘the management of both individual wild species and

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ecosystems [and it] is critical to human welfare’ (‘Sustainability’ 2016) . It also found its
way onto the agendas and rhetoric of global environmental, economic and social politics, and

environmental campaigns. This version of sustainability was very much based on natural

sciences and responded to environmental issues. It preceded and was foundational to the

integrated model I analysed in the previous chapter.

To comprehend the emergence of the word sustainability we can position it as a

discourse. For Michael Foucault (1991, p. 63) discourse is:

…constituted by the difference between what one could say correctly at one
period (under the rules of grammar and logic) and what is actually said. The
discursive field is, at a specific moment, the law of this difference…In discourse
something is formed, according to clearly definable rules; that this something
exists, subsists, changes, disappears, according to equally definable rules; in short,
that alongside everything a society can produce (alongside: that is to say, in a
determinate relationship with) there is the formation and transformation of “things
said”.

By drawing on Foucault’s extensive work on discourse the current chapter questions

th
sustainability as a “thing said” and practiced in the latter part of the 20 century. I keep the
framework of assemblage in mind but focus on a core part of the assemblage and process of

assembling: that which is said and put into practice in relation to the term sustainability and

its knowledge coordinates, with a focus on marine sustainability. This entails an analysis of

the network of institutions, laws, regulatory structures, set of statements, knowledge, values,

and measuring devices, all of which are part of the discursive formation and function of

sustainability. In addition, and complementary to the framework of discourse, I begin to draw

on the notion of market device forwarded by Fabian Muniesa, Yuval Millo and Michel

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