Oceanic Interiority

Definition

Oceanic interiority is Sarah Treadwell's concept for the watery nature of inner space: the claim that the sea is not exterior landscape but "the most extensive interior that we confront, and on which we depend." Because "we have the sea within us" (salt sweat, tears, blood — Teaiwa's "the ocean is really in our blood") and because we fear immersion in the collective — in death — the sea "epitomizes our vacillations between individuality and collectivity." The concept's structural principle is the permeable membrane: "Such oceanic interiority is maintained by permeable membranes (skin and shore) that permit separation while allowing connections at individual and global scales." Where the wall divides, the membrane admits separation and connection at once — the boundary condition of every skin, every littoral, every domestic envelope cut through "with doors and windows and sound."

The concept has three moments in Treadwell's chapter. (1) The immersive interior as uterine space: "a space of beginning that endlessly repeats the ordinary dramas of life and recognizes an exteriority within that cannot be expelled" — swimming as "some sort of amniotic return," the body "held by surrounding water," collaboration with the medium "while still maintaining our breathing selves." (2) The sea's contradictory imagery: surface as ornamental and unreliable ("meretricious, ornamental, the sky falls"), horizon as "only an invention of our eyes"; the sea as neutral no-space (Krauss's "no-space of sensory deprivation"), as bloody container of guilt and detritus (Ruskin on Turner's Slave Ship; Revelation's sea turned to blood), as "implacable leveler" (the tsunamis), and as "the instigator and repository of loss and mourning" (Cixous's tidal grief). (3) The domestic culmination: "Every domestic interior is, in some senses, oceanic, being liquid… and permeable… the domestic interior is oceanic in the tears that flow: sweat forms, blood falls, and waters break over the difficulties and pleasure of everyday life."

The chapter's method is constitutive of the concept: "the making of a written image of the space of the sea" — "To write is always to construct an interior, through familiarity and estrangement, and to write a pattern of oceanic interiority has been both an act of mourning and a collaborative, formal undertaking," the extracted interior space "poised between the poetic and the accurate." Oceanic writing is swimming's analogue: "To swim in the sea is to form, momentarily and warily, a collaborative relationship with the medium while still maintaining our breathing selves. To undertake oceanic writing is to recall and enact that collaboration."

Key Thinkers

• Sarah Treadwell — the concept's author: "the watery nature of interiority"; the permeable membrane (skin and shore); the written image as collaborative, mourning practice; the domestic interior as oceanic.
• Epeli Hau'ofa — cited, not yet paged (see log): the sea within the body ("the ocean is really in our blood," via Teaiwa) and the expansive sea of islands (sea-of-islands).
• Philip Hoare — cited, not paged (see log): daily northern-ocean immersion; the horizon as ocular invention; "The sea defines us, connects us, and separates us."
• Hélène Cixous — cited, not paged (see log): mourning as tidal flight in "Déluge" — the oceanic interior's grief-form.
• Gaston Bachelard — the concept's phenomenological relative: Bachelard's "osmosis between intimate and undetermined space" (inside-outside-dialectic) radicalized from the room to the skin and the shore; Rilke's rising level in the capillary veins (intimate-immensity) becomes literal sea-water in blood.

Related Concepts

• Interiority — the parent concept: oceanic interiority is its watery register, the innerness that is liquid, permeable and collective rather than solid, sealed and private.
• The Dialectics of Outside and Inside — oceanic interiority's boundary logic: the membrane replaces the wall; the horizon imitates closure while luring "mind and body around the globe."
• Intimate Immensity — the sea as the maximal case: "the most extensive interiors that we confront"; and its inversion — Krauss's limitless expanse that flattens "into nothing, into the no-space of sensory deprivation."
• Embodiment — the swimming, floating, sinking body as the concept's instrument: buoyancy, temperature change, "dragging on flesh."
• Sea of Islands — the political-geographic pole: Hau'ofa's expansive liquid terrain, the sea as connection rather than isolation.
• Domestic Interior — the concept's landfall: every home as oceanic — liquid, permeable, navigable, measured in tears and breaking waters.
• Poetic Image — the concept's medium: the written image "poised between the poetic and the accurate."
• Boundaries — pre-European sea boundaries as "points of entry that were constantly negotiated and even contested" rather than imaginary lines.
• Liminality — the littoral as threshold: stepping "precariously into the sea, across a littoral of dried weed, sharp shells, and plastic."
• Repetition — the uterine space that "endlessly repeats the ordinary dramas of life."
• Uncanny — "recurrent images of the unknown in deep water" beneath the ornamental surface.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Oceanic interiorities (Treadwell 2018) — the source that names the concept: the sea as the most extensive interior; the permeable membranes of skin and shore; the uterine immersive interior; the contradictory sea-imagery (ornamental surface, bloody container, implacable leveler); the domestic interior as oceanic; the written image as method.

Open Questions

• Is oceanic interiority a type of interiority (a watery species of the general concept) or a correction to it — the claim that interiority was always watery and the solid-room model the parochial case?
• The membrane "permits separation while allowing connections" — how does this differ from Bachelard's osmosis (which loses geometrical evidence to value) and from Webb's double-membership surface? Is the membrane a third boundary state (selective passage) that neither value-play nor double membership describes?
• Treadwell writes from the South Pacific and names the ocean's colonial and climatic history (the slave ship, the drowned islands). Can oceanic interiority carry a postcolonial-climatic politics (climate-change-and-architecture) without dissolving the interior-theoretical register it was coined in?
• If the domestic interior is oceanic "in the tears that flow," is the interior's affective life (mourning, desire, anxiety) its hydrological system — and would an inventory of an interior's liquids be a theory of its inhabitation?