“The Flesh of The Perceptible”: The New Materialism of Leviathan

Abstract

This article seeks to entangle two current philosophic praxes: New Materialism, and Sensory Ethnography. Jane Bennett has become one of New Materialism’s most prominent proponents since the release of her now-seminal text, Vibrant Matter in 2010. Due to the varied ground upon which New Materialism stands (often conflated with object-oriented ontology, post-humanism, and other general turns within nonhumanism), Bennett’s work will be looked at idiosyncratically, then pushed into the realm of the cinematic via an analysis of the documentary, Leviathan. Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, this film was among the first exemplary works to emerge from the Sensory Ethnography Lab, based at Harvard University. In striving for a revitalization of ethnographic film practices, the Lab aligns itself with similarly non-anthropocentric, and non-discursive, aspects of experience to the New Materialism of Jane Bennett. By placing these two contemporary camps into conversation, this article intends to reposition them both: New Materialism as a vehicle for the Sensory Ethnographic, and the SEL as an exhibition of the kind of world Bennett’s philosophy envisages. The article concludes with an assessment of the political and eco-political critiques and ramifications surrounding these works.