Depth, Integrity — Surface, Boundary — Circulation, Residence Time

Reflecting on the move from depth to surface that Donna Haraway detected in late twentieth-century fashionings of aesthetics and subjectivity—and that she tagged to advanced capitalism’s fixation on the flattening of communicative action into a play of surfaces—the essay looks back at (as well as contemporarily to) how depth and surface have been mobilized in encounters with and representations of the planet’s oceans, particularly in science, technology, and art, especially in the age of climate change. Thinking with what Haraway called “unfriendly and drowning depths” and “boundary conditions and interfaces,” the essay thinks about what sorts of codes and myths ocean depth and ocean surface direct us to now. It concludes with how the concepts of circulation and residence time, specific to the Black Atlantic, lead us to a new reading of the Titanic’s wreck together with ever-churned-together histories and futures.