Abstract
This article conceptualises Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s experimental documentary Leviathan (2012) using Niklas Luhmann’s observation theory and Cary Wolfe’s writing on posthumanism which, significantly influenced by Luhmann’s attack on anthropocentrism in social theory, questions the importance of human agency for social and psychic systems. Leviathan, I argue, engenders perspectives drawn from visual culture that enable a rethinking of hierarchical humanist ethics based on species membership, contributing to posthumanist critical discourse.Leviathan offers a radically non-anthropocentric take on the topic of industrial fishing, presented via innovative use of camera placements and cinematic points of view. Unpredictable camera movements involving contingent framing and angles generate an open-ended work not tied to the human gaze. Shooting from a caught marine animal’s point of view forces the viewer to assume an unexpected perspective. To analyse this particular perspective, I turn to Luhmann’s theories about an observation not tied to human subjectivity, where the subject of observation is simultaneously an object, and where the external world is equally inaccessible to humans and nonhumans alike. In this schema, present in any observation is a constitutive blindness that can only be seen by another observer, but it is this very blindness which makes the observation possible.
Highlights
Leviathan offers a radically non-anthropocentric take on the topic of industrial fishing, presented via innovative use of camera placements and cinematic points of view
This paper considers Lucien CastaingTaylor and Véréna Paravel’s experimental documentary Leviathan (2012) in the light of Niklas Luhmann’s observation theory and Cary Wolfe’s writing on posthumanism as a critical discourse
I examine the non-anthropocentric approach to documentary filmmaking developed in Leviathan, presented via its innovative use of camera placements
Summary
Leviathan follows a commercial fishing trawler sailing from New Bedford, Massachusetts, into the North Atlantic. A significant part of the documentary is filmed at night or at dawn. The external world is not directly accessible to any observing system, whether human or nonhuman – their blindness, in short, is a shared, radically non-hierarchical condition In this context it is important to add that Luhmann rejects the human self-attribution of cognition to itself: the traditional attribution of cognition to ‘man’ has been done away with [...] ‘constructivism’ is a completely new theory of knowledge, a posthumanistic one. Luhmann would find the application of these categories to human problematic
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