Wet Ontology, Moby-Dick, and the Oceanic in Performance

This essay sets out the possibility for a politics and aesthetics in performance that it calls "oceanic." The essay moves from Kant's gaze across an instrumentalized ocean into the generative work of Caribbean scholars and others thinking with the ocean and its histories. The ocean is de-instrumentalized into a force of de-containerization, the explosion from the hold, the collapse of epistemology and representation, black philosophical production, the obscure and the errant, new temporalities, new forms of global affinity, interspecies being, the displacement of exchange value by use value, and maybe even a new communism. Building its case on Melville's Moby-Dick, especially through Orson Welles's theatrical adaptation and the author's own adaptation and direction of Welles's text, and through engagements with the work of three black choreographers, Cynthia Oliver, nora chipaumire, and Ligia Lewis, the essay searches for an aesthetics or dramaturgy of performance that can be said to be sea-bred, that gathers new collectivities, and invents new political ideas.