The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep-Sea Life
by Nathaniel Craig
STACY ALAIMO
The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep-Sea Life
Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 2025. 256 pp.; 9 color ills.; 12 b/w.
$27.95
9781517918736
Stacy Alaimo’s latest book, The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep-Sea Life (2025), examines ways to frame the deep-sea as an environmental concern in the popular imaginary. At stake is the fact that species are vanishing before we even know they exist, from climate change to deep-sea mining, their extinction occurring in darkness both literal and epistemological. To broach this problem, Alaimo utilizes an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating media studies to problematize the notion of objectivity, anthropology to emphasize our relationality with other creatures, and posthumanist thought to reevaluate which disciplines are privileged in knowledge production about the environmental as opposed to the cultural. The book proceeds by analyzing visual accounts of the abyss following two lines of inquiry: one historical, the other concerned with epistemology. In the former, Alaimo traces what she calls the “abyssal aesthetic,” one that prompts speculation, creates wonder, and contains the “beautiful, the adorable, the surreal, the weird, the monstrous.”1 This is followed across multiple media—drawings, films, novels, and coffee-table books—and across time, from the early oceanographic expeditions of William Beebe and the illustrations of Else Bostelmann to the 2010 Census of Marine Life’s digital image archives, and into the present. Through this account, Alaimo’s second line of inquiry argues for an epistemology of the deep that is capacious, one that understands and acknowledges its own limits, without striving for absolute mastery or a conception of the “ocean as unfathomably vast,” a misconception that could potentially place it “beyond the scope of environmental concern.”2 Here, Alaimo’s goal is to map an abyssal aesthetic that can be used in the future as a touchstone to stem the unresponsive or indifferent nature of the public to environmental tragedies. That is, aesthetic pleasure will spark speculation about the deep-sea, a tactic Alaimo feels has been ignored.
A poignant example that Alaimo draws upon is the aforementioned 2010 Census of Marine Life’s website, which created a gallery for images of deep-sea life taken during the project. In it, Alaimo acknowledges the lingering residue of an Enlightenment ‘cabinet of curiosities,’ where images of life are metaphorically shelved one next to the other. This feature divorces speculation from the real encounter of these lifeforms as distinct beings and, as a byproduct, creates the condition for these creatures to become the basis for human projection instead. While Alaimo remains critical, her analysis overlooks how speculation functions within the logic of financial capitalism and how this logic is increasingly intertwined with aesthetic production. Speculation, after all, is not only an imaginative practice but also a method for transforming contingencies into profit.3 This would strengthen her argument in relation to the Census and elsewhere, as she is careful to point out, this affective, speculative power while providing the basis for envisioning other worlds and ontologies is not unmediated. Alaimo traces how capitalism, sexism, and colonialism have shaped both conceptions of the ocean and imagery throughout the book. In terms of the Census itself, it is a project brought to us by science— a field always embedded in economic and political systems. Despite that and the cabinet of curiosity effect, the website gallery is still able to generate the affective nature of a portrait, where framing produces value and thus a space “where the aesthetic regard for the specimens flows into an ethicoaesthetic regard.”4 This is the paradox that Alaimo terms ‘mediated intimacy,’ the concept that the abyss is presented to us through various channels, and despite their artifice, such representations can produce real affective responses. Hence, Alaimo’s concept of mediated intimacy complicates the posthumanist orientation of the blue humanities by insisting that relationality is always technologically and politically mediated, even when it feels immediate or immersive.
Through a mediated intimacy, The Abyss Stares Back succeeds as both argument and model of the very aesthetic she describes; with a writing style that is reflective and self-aware, Alaimo provides room for exactly the capacious understanding she seeks for abyssal life. In doing so, Alaimo’s work stands as both an analysis and an embodiment of abyssal thinking, offering a vital contribution to the blue humanities and a model for future scholarship.
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Nathaniel Craig received his bachelors from Binghamton University in mathematical sciences and art history before returning as a graduate student in the art history program. His current research focuses on the architecture of home economics.
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1. Stacy Alaimo, The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep-Sea Life (Minnesota University Press, 2025), 13.
2. Alaimo, The Abyss Stares Back, 11.
3. Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Brill, 2018) and Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture (University of California Press, 2024).
4. Alaimo, The Abyss Stares Back, 144.