ABSTRACT
An aesthetic history of the submarine acknowledges contingent cultural inheritances and essential physiological realities simultaneously. The specificity of the submarine’s aesthetic atmosphere helps rumple firm separations between aerosphere, surface, and undersea. A materialist analysis of environmental aesthetics – notably one engaging such a forbidding realm as the undersea – teaches the need to take into account the specificity of the environment being represented as well as the science and technology of accessing it. Work in Western environmental aesthetics has, likewise, been thinking and moving around and past its inheritances, notably the long-standing dichotomy between humans and nature. In and from the water, it was possible not only to become singularly intimate with nature, but to render unstable the margin “between spectator and spectacle” that ran through so much of conventional aesthetics. Submarine aesthetics and phenomenology were key energies for fictions, poems, and criticism that preoccupied themselves with “figures of dissociation and dissolution” in their musings on modernity.
