The ocean in (planetary) excess

Abstract

This commentary responds to Kimberley Peters and Philip Steinberg’s new provocation, ‘The ocean in excess: Towards a more-than-wet ontology’, and suggests a further contribution can be made by consideration of bodies that are other than human, and of worlds beyond our own. The Southern Ocean and its increasingly autonomous underwater drone intelligences are examined for their potential to flex the many multiplicities and possibilities that emerge from Peters and Steinberg’s arguments, and to reveal potentially destructive processes within a very much more-than-wet ocean. Thinly veiled intentions to export such actions beyond our own planet are also brought to bear on this discussion. Here, the imagined ocean reveals planetary and extra-planetary excesses often masked from human experience and oversight, and signals the scale of radical transformation required to make sense of both our own ocean-world and an increasingly fluid universe of multiple worlds.