Sensible spectators: emancipation from mastery through the more-than-human

Abstract

This essay practices a mode of story-telling embedded in Freya Mathews’s argument for the ontopoetic. By approaching the ecofeminist ontopoetic moment, with an awareness of Jacques Rancière’s identification of the sensible possibilities of literature enacted through the body, new networks of the sensible are suggested in the interchange between the text and the body. Writing and reading non-human sentience through the co-affective ontopoetic moment creates a critical resistance to human containment, providing the potential to redistribute the position of the spectator, decentralising the human perspective in ways that might create more diverse relations with the more-than-human. Viewing the world outside the human skin in such ways may help reform the shared body of the earth.