Visceral, Abstract

In what ways, to what ends, and with what violent consequences does the offshore mediate the onshore in late capitalism? This question is the (silent) spur for the essay that follows. In it I consider the interimplicated violences of labor and mediation in two contemporary maritime films: Leviathan (2012), about commercial fishing off the New England coast, and The Forgotten Space (2010), about the global shipping industry. My analysis juxtaposes the immersive aesthetic on view in Leviathan with the dialectical dilation offered in The Forgotten Space — two perspectives that, likewise modulating the visceral and the abstract, nonetheless constitute importantly distinct forms of materialist commitment. Despite such differences, both films connect or indeed mediate ocean-work and camera-work as practices in order to foreground, provocatively, labors of looking — the work involved in what Jonathan Beller terms “value-producing human attention” (2006: 4) — and thus manage to capture the arduous interchange of material processes (manufacture and circulation) with supposedly immaterial ones (attention and affect) in late capitalist life.