Leviathan, Andreas Gursky, and Second Nature

Leviathan, an immersive, experimental documentary from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, and the hyperrealist photography of Andreas Gursky, are linked in their addressing of the same question: how should we think of the relation between society and nature?

Immersion is quite a buzzword in cinema presently. IMAX spectacles promise to make you part of the movie. But curvature of the screen is no replacement for a palpable visceral connection. Save for a few exceptions (Nolan seems to remain head and shoulders above the rest as a blockbuster auteur: Dunkirk’s beach scene, with the thudding of bombs and it’s temporarily expulsions of sand, which come down to land over the soldiers head, hands suffocating the ears, is one of the finest flourishes of the Big Screen in recent memory) enlarged does not necessarily mean engrossing. Leviathan, a 90 minute avant-garde documentary fully occupied with the travails of a fishing trawler off the coast of North America, earns the epithet in a way unlike any other.

Produced by Harvard’s sensory ethnography lab — self-described as an experimental laboratory that ‘uses analog and digital media, installation, and performance, to explore the aesthetics and ontology of the natural and unnatural world’ — it is a mesmerising and kinetic experience, in as closest film can get to the sense of the world. We float along, untethered from any discernible camera person but (or should I say thus) omniscient, variously thrust into heaving chains and machinery; metallic pools of blood; writhing fish. There is no narrative, nor narration, and characters as such do not exist. It is a remarkably pure sensory immersion: smacking and lapping and flapping and creaking and scrubbing and dunking and on and on. It pulls you in; the more you accept and give yourself to it, the more meditative it becomes. Recurrent moments of artistry in the editing and cinematography, and a deep, transfixing commitment to the premise, elevate it into a hallucinatory masterwork.

A man vigorously sifts through the detritus of shells. His legs are rooted down, knees bent, a red bucket is held in between them, ever so slightly tipping forward to receive the prizes thrown back by his arms, hurriedly digging. Shells tumble over one another; scratching and clicking on the deck, which is covered, at all times, by a lapping film of seawater. A tin coke can breaks the pattern, landing in front of the lens.

In another, surprisingly comical vignette, a seagull taps its webbed feet past the carcass of a fish, patting through the now bloodied water; a slab of rusted metal, a perimeter structure on the catchment area, blocks its path. It lifts its head above over the corner, placing its chin down on it, heaving itself up. The camera tracks each shift: the head leveraging, the feet smacking, tail and wings rustling with determination. We move up across its back, It’s feathers slick with rain and salt and muck. The frame is filled; we look over it’s shoulder and down at its feet. Until It turns around, and, unhurried yet purposeful, plops off the side of the boat. I do not know exactly why the bird did not fly over it. I am yet more unclear as to how this intimate and telepathically rhythmic shot was achieved.

At one point we hover some inches out from the side of the hull, skipping the surface of the raging ocean, as the blood water pours out the disposal slots on the deck. Flesh and trash and crustaceans and plants caught in the crossfire stream out amidst the flow as one; a fountain, an excretion. The ship itself seems to be part of the life forms caught in this tussle.

This sensual enrapture serves a conceptual provocation. Leviathan is the dark underbelly of the didactic and anthropomorphic Blue Planet. If Attenborough’s show fetishises nature as an object of observation and entertainment, a sort of modern commercial variant of the old taxonomy books naturalists would compile, and completely eschews any meaningful consideration of the relationality of the social to the natural, Leviathan problematizes the distinction itself.

The central conceptual move of the film is to make unreal and alien the human practises depicted; or, more specifically, to blur the separation between the trawler and the ecosystem it is imbricated within, to the extent that we are left with one whole mass of flesh and metal, survival and predation, linked in a grimy metabolic dance. It is, in this sense, redolent of Andreas Gursky’s photography. His large scale, operatic, god-eye-view photographs of regular human activity — standing in line at arrivals in an airport; the parcellised jungle of commodities at a 99 cent store; the blinking cell phone lights and hero worship of a Beyoncé concert — denaturalise their subject. We are made to look upon these events with some form of objective distance, no longer a part of the strange colony it renders. It breaks, in other words, our habitual and affective link to the normality of the present social formation. Pristine, messy, alluring otherworldliness sits in its place.

Much of Gursky’s work is pertinent here. Micheal Fried wrote that his pictures cohere as ‘a kind of liberated, weightless, disembodied photographic “seeing” — different from anything previously known, or at least mobilised in art,’ a statement that may just as well be describing the Harvard teams transportive documentary. The relation between humans and nature is a recurring theme of his work; his formal techniques — the elevation, distance; shots stitched together into wide panoramas — recall the grammar of landscape photography. In his earlier, more naturalistic work, this would often conceal, or detach us from, the social features smuggled into the frames. He ‘resists or indeed repudiates all identification by the viewer with the human subjects of the image.’ Even when, in the 90s, he turned more explicitly to sociological subjects, the removal and denaturalisation — which, in the case of the social, actually sometimes comes paradoxically to become a form of naturalisation, in the sense of making our structures and procedures adopt an alien organicism — remains vivid.

Take Les Mees (2016). A horizontal tripartite composition with verdant hills stretching across up to the grey sky, a mountain range trailing off in the top right corner. Tufts of grass and mud suddenly meet in the foreground with solar panels which dress the hills entirely, undulating along with the topography. They sit closely atop the grass like scales, the tender flesh peeking out in sporadic breaks of the overlapping cells. It as once totally congruent with the land, the underlying formation carried forth in the peaks and troughs of the tiles; and totally incongruent — the distant mountains bare no other trace, and the regularity of the geometry raises a suspicion that it is not of the same substance.

But is not what we would consider remarkable engineering a recurrent artifact of nature? The delicate symmetry of snowflake patterns; interlocking crystalline structures; the chain-mail geometry of cells. This is, of course, the broad consideration Gursky is provoking. Hume noted that our ideas always already come from some form of sense impression. If we lack experience of an object as man-made — a watch strewn in the forest — we may not be cognisant of its divergent origin vis a vis the rocks surrounding it. Is the metallic netting of the trawler, dripping and rippling and billowing, any more distinct as a bizarre feature of the depths than the flashlight-headed, transparent deep-sea creatures, or the living rainbow rocks that crest our near-shores? In what sense can we say that the panels do not belong to nature? Does a beavers den, or a bees honeycombs, not either? Gursky’s image-making, and Leviathan’s splanchnic immersion, ejects us from the established way of seeing long enough to confront this question.

Amidst the various dizzying turns — cultural, new material, posthuman — that have ensconced environmental humanities, the distinction between the natural and the social has more or less been effaced. Latour, who is one of the most widely cited scholars in sociology, propounds a position called hybridism. In We Have Never Been Modern, he rejects that such a demarcation has ever properly existed: ‘reality is made up of hybrids of the social and the natural and that the two terms therefore have no referents, if they ever did.’ It is the conceit of modern epistemology, so goes his argument, to maintain this dualism. Latour begins his work pondering the case of the ozone layer as a prime instance of this truth; in the corrosive intertwining of chlorofluorocarbons and our atmospheric equilibrium, the essential hybridity is borne out.

Latour is correct, but only in the most trivial sense. The vast majority of objects in this world are indeed assemblages of the natural and the social, to an extent where materially extricating one from the other is an increasingly difficult task. Even the ancient, virginal forests of the Northwest of America, as Bookchin reminded us, are nothing of the sort; artifacts of indigenous hunting and combat practises, they flourished as the natives burned away the shrubs to stop their prey and antagonists from camouflaging. Nonetheless, a material imbrication — the fact of which emerges from the most elementary unity of society and nature, in that all are composed of the same basic atomic components, and humans are biological creatures like all others — does not warrant an analytical dissolution of the boundaries; nor, either, is it the case that ontologically there are simply no objects that can firmly reside in one or the other categories. When Cuadrilla hits shale gas through the sediments of Lancashire, there is a meeting of the social and the natural. Trapped beneath those rocks truly is an untouched piece of nature; the violence of hydraulic fracking, shooting a highly compressed admixture of chemicals, water and sand underneath, exists precisely to rip it out from this solitude.

Andreas Malm, in his scathing critique of much contemporary ecological scholarship, The Progress of This Storm, characterises Latour’s position as a double monism: not only does he hold that Cuadrilla and the shale gas, or the fishermen and the marine life, or ‘UN climate negotiations and the process of photosynthesis’, are of the same substance, they also partake of the same properties. There is no qualitative difference between the two, and any attempt to partition them is an illusion. But there is something deeply implausible about this. Yes, the fishermen are men, biological men; the ship is made of metal admixtures; the practice of fishing is part of the general biological cycle of consumption and self-reproduction. It is important to note that the substance monism of Latour is undeniably correct; and further, that humans and the social are always already embedded in nature. Rigid dualism, which poses nature instrumentally as an object subjected to rational, mechanistic experimentation and manipulation, a domination of the subject over the reified object-world (a move which, as Adorno and Horkheimer demonstrated, wrapped back around onto ourselves), is to be rejected. Such a bourgeois (non)relation serves only the fervor of capital accumulation, always deluded by a notion of economic circuits independent of biospheric ones, comforted by an ‘away’ to which its material-commodities are thrown, an ‘away’ which of course never actually exists (and if it does, it only denotes the habitats of disposable humans; the ‘Third-World’ dumps of South-East Asia, poisoned by the constitutive residue of ‘First-World’ commodity fetishism). But there too seems to be central differences that cannot simply be waved away sophistrically.

Nature, as per Kate Soper, ‘is those material structures and processes that are independent of human activity (in the sense that they are not a humanly created product), and whose forces and causal powers are the necessary conditions of every human practice, and determine the possible forms it can take.’ Following this, Malm notes how it’s actually quite simple to disaggregate the social from the natural component in Latour’s opening case: the former is ‘the manufacturing of chlorofluorocarbons for refrigerators and aerosol cans and other products sold by companies such as duPont’, and the latter is ‘the way the chlorine atoms […] react with ozone molecules in the stratosphere’. One has ‘arisen through relations between humans as they have changed over time.’ The other: ‘a set of forces and causal powers’ created ‘independent of their agency.’ Bookchin argued that nature, if the term was to have any meaning at all, had to relate to evolution; dynamic, biological processes, out of which we arose as — and this is crucial — a second nature. Such a tier branches off from biology insofar as we are able to construct social institutions, which are, at base, forms of normative social relations through which we conduct our interactions and subjectivities. What is pertinent here is the constitutive malleability of such structures, allowing us not only to transcend any vulgar biogenetic determinants (I am reminded here of the case of the psychology of attraction: it was presumed males universally seek large child-bearing hips and milk-dispensing breasts as a function of their biology, a trope which shattered upon contact with the panoply of libidinous links the disparate civilisations of our species has given us. It is now, of course, accepted that the vicissitudes of beauty are largely socio-culturally intelligible). But also to invert the usual dynamic of a life-form to its environment — the evolutionary parry of adaptation — so that the environment becomes adapted to us, and not the other way around. A beaver may of course build a dam; but for good or for ill, only humans could disrupt the entire biosphere by burning fossil-fuels.

One approaches, therefore, the central position: that human society is an emergent feature of first nature, a second nature, which — like all emergent artifacts — possess qualities beyond its constituent parts. Gursky’s Salerno I (1990) — a synoptic landscape overlooking an Italian port, the homogenous square shapes of cars and shipping containers rationalised into larger configurations, the lego-bloc components of global capitalism — and Untitled XIII (2002) — a brutally detailed vertical landscape of the heap of the formers detritus, carcasses of lost commodities, broken by a suspiciously clean horizon in the top third — draw attention to the distinctive properties of this emergent artifact. Defamiliarizing the institutional processes of our species, they together hint at our creative adaptation.

What is immediately apparent with Salerno I is the role of economic imperatives in the shaping of space. Gursky sees it as his transition photo from landscapes to socio-cultural subjects — and one of his best — opening up the thematics of capitalism’s gigantic metabolism of consumption and production. What is, of course, not pictured but latent in the frame is the web of contingent connections — of property regimes, trade regulations, of financial markets and supermarkets and factories — that make alive the frozen containers as material condesnations of our corrosive relation to nature: of overproduction, exhaustion, suffocation. But his stylistic techniques once again break through any residual connection we may have to the subject: the spatial compression and repetition of forms rendering the capilliaries of late capitalism a strange, distant structure. Similarly, with Untitled XIII, the mass and abstraction of the rubbish coagulates into one hideous apparatus. By making the subjects alien, by approximating some eye external to their ideological naturalisation, Gursky open space for their changeability. These linkages are simply one bizarre configuration amongst many, and it is precisely in this sense that they are not natural, not fixed. The relational toolkit of the social world, the normative technologies of practises and institutions, are defined by their magnitude and malleability.

Malm wrote lyrically of what he calls the substance monist, property dualist account, to which we can align Gursky, that ‘Exactly as material, the tree and the chainsaw inhabit the same forest: that is why one can fell the other. But they also follow different laws of motion. That, also, is why one can fell the other.’ His central argument is that it is imperative that this distinction between the social and the natural be kept. Since it is within the pathologies of the linkage that the crisis exists, its effacement ‘whisks away the significance of the combination.’ Politically paralyzing and theoretically inert, if we merely stuff all into a lumpen hybrid, unwilling to extract our mistakes from the natural dynamics they had inflamed, then we cannot grasp ‘what sort of damage the one does to the other, and […] how this destruction could come to an end.’

In this context, Les Mees now comes to resemble hope. The incongruence shifts, folding into the congruence. The contradiction between nature and the social remains — they are not one and the same — but flattens out, resolves, as the panels caress the rhythm of the hills. It counters the destruction of Untitled XIII — rank and indecipherable forms choking off each other, the eye unable to rest anywhere with comfort, restlessly tracking through the trash piles as if one was seeking, in vain, a safe place to stand — with a graphical fusion of the social and natural: geometric solar panels rest on the undulating hills, the gaze tracing the patterning as it shifts gently with the land. An aesthetic reconciliation here expresses social relations of reconciliation, condensed in the materiality of the solar energy system; of a second nature that has evolved to a point of rationality and humility, able to chart another path beyond asphyxiation and depletion. (This is, indicendentally, why I am always bemused by NIMBY panic over the putative eyesores of wind farms. Quite aside from the fact that the slim, angular structures are more pleasing than any alternative power generation, they are totems of another way, another future, another relation to nature that doesn’t spell Mutually Assured Destruction).

It is our capacity to ask why, to question what we ought to do — to pose a ‘double-ought’, as philosopher Martin Hagglund calls it, subordinating the established ways of acting to another justification criteria, a second ought — and to construct social relations that instantiate the answers, that distinguish us from the fish on the deck of Leviathan’s trawler. This gives us no right to exploit and consume as we see fit. ‘It does not mean,’ Bookchin cautioned, ‘that the world was made for us … that we should “dominate”’ it. It only means that whatever we do, we could do otherwise; a capacity which bestows upon us a certain moral responsibility. If nature is, in some sense, a realm of necessity, where its tragedies may be excused as such, then the social is a realm of possibility; whose mistakes, precisely as such, simply cannot be dismissed with the same air of resignation.

In order to operate, ideology acts upon — indeed actually generates — a subject-position. What Leviathan and Andreas Gursky’s work does, in this context, is break the dichotomous subject-position of man(kind) to nature. They leave us, in the first case, flailing around as part of the marine life we see covenionally only as stock, and in the second, awe-struck and perturbed by our emergent creations, seen fresh through dereifying eyes. They test the boundary, provoking it’s collapse; but they nevetherless refrain from it. Rather, they place us within the vision of “socioecological relations”, rejecting the externalisation of nature as an Other to be abused and instrumentalised, in favour of a mutually constitutive entanglement. But this is an entanglement that maintains a second order distinction, where one can not so simply be reduced to the other.

Liberating us from the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, we become both part of and distinct from nature. Distinct, precisely because there is the option to do otherwise; to mould and form ways of life, scaffolded by institutions and practises, that are more than our biological endowment, and can, in turn, shape nature. Whether we do so with anatagonism and exploitation, or mutuality and humility, is an open question. If Salerno I and Untitled XIII crystallise the former; Les Mees is a paean to the latter.