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.
Steinberg et al. (Sun,) studied this question.