Towards a post-anthropocentric aesthetics: Kerry Tribe’s Exquisite Corpse

Kerry Tribe’s recent film on the Los Angeles River, Exquisite Corpse (2016), blurs the lines between genres. With aspects of documentary and experimental filmmaking, it captures interactions among human and non-human life, ecological systems and machines along the river. This article develops a post-anthropocentric aesthetics from the film by drawing on Sianne Ngai’s book, Our Aesthetic Categories (2012), and Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) work on post-anthropocentrism. Bringing these resources together leads to three productive transformations of Ngai’s categories: the commodity aesthetic of cuteness becomes the differential aesthetic of interaction; the performative aesthetic of zaniness becomes the functional aesthetic of activity; and the discursive aesthetic of information becomes the peri-discursive aesthetic of sensation. The article concludes by arguing that these three aesthetic categories are well suited for describing how the contemporary built environment and the complexity of life within it might be perceived and assessed and, following Jacques Rancière, affirms these categories’ role in building a politics that is attuned to such complexities.