The more-than-geological abyss

Abstract

In Neto and Baptista’s Abissal (this symposium), the ROV Luso’s striation of the seabed resonates with the expansionist and colonial aims of the nation-state. As on the surface, the conquest of depth by the land-based Portuguese state is achieved through exploration, enhanced by the logic of the map, to fill what is conceived as a “blank space” with the potential to be made into territory: cuius carta, cuius regio (Sloterdijk, 2013). Luso stands proud as the ultimate cyborg-hero. However, like all cyborgs, Luso is a multifaceted character: an entity that is simultaneously human, non-human, and super-human; both otherworldly and intimately rooted in statist projections of power. And so the territorial seabed that Luso encounters, and indeed constructs, needs to be understood as a technoscientific abstraction made possible through appeals to forces that go far beyond the geological, and through logics of conquest that go far beyond the mechanics of resource extraction.