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Usually known as a highly idiosyncratic study of Melville's MobyDick, Call Me Ishmael thematically calls for an emergence of what Olson calls "Pacific Man," a new ethical subject who replaces Melville's Ahab in Moby-Dick as the archetypically self-reliant and selfpurposive American subject. [...]a thematic concern with a potential figure who engages in an exploratory practice of noninstrumental reason unfolds through the book's formal invention of prose form that figures such alternative lifeforms as at once singular and related. "18 But if an aesthetics of becoming as a method to critique the schema of the subjects lies in the Asia-Pacific of the 1940s, Olson's search for "the origin of things" in the Pacific, understood not as a recovery of stable origin in the past but as a more paradoxical reorigination of the old as the new or the novel in the present, needs to proceed through a confrontation with the hegemonic mode of subjectivities that constructs both the dominant and the subordinate identities through a grid of civilizational or colonial difference. [...]figuration and configuration of races within America's commercial whaling industry in the nineteenth century in Olson's book foregrounds what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call a "socius," a structure of domination in which economic forces and socio-political demarcations are mutually determinative and immanently inscribed as the subjectivized beings.19 Thus, if the chapter in Call Me Ishmael titled "What Lies Under" initially seems to offer a quasi-Marxist bifurcation of the U.S. whaling industry into its underlying economic base and its superstructural schema of races, Olson immediately introduces a notion of social and economic "forces" that are mutually determinative and immanent in one another:20 So if you want to know why Melville nailed us in Moby-Dick, consider whaling. [...]the poet's "field composition," which in Lytle Shaw's apt phrasing constitutes "a world of independent clauses" wherein attempts at predication are "suspended infinitely in expanding sentences without grammatical closure," also modulates its constitutively hesitant and infinitely digressive depictions of "things" found in Melville's Pacific.44 In fact, Olson's "several forces" appear most concretely as such things that Ishmael encounters in their linked emergence: "the whale itself's swiftness, Ahab's inordinate will, and the harpooner's ability to strike to kill from calm only. Kiyota recognizes in these historical moments of 1945 and the late 1960s the ways in which such utopian affect and desire that potentially traverse plural points of subjectivization can be articulated only according to the terms of "homecoming" that are legitimated and encouraged by the nation-states. [...]insofar as the discursive space provided by the nation-states allows people to be represented only as their national subjects who are potentially foes to one another, the task of rearticulating the potential constituents of Kiyota's "invisible commune" no longer as the subjects but instead as "the objets" of their mutual de-subjectivization still requires poetry in particular and, more generally, a poetic dispersal of "sympathy" across and against the hegemonic sensuous schema that produced and naturalized nationalities, genders, and classes within the transpacific imperial field.