Jacob Henry Leveton

This preface and opening interlude from 'Sites/Sights of Ecology' introduces a philosophical and aesthetic method for reading visual culture at the intersection of ecological crisis, materialist critique, and speculative perception. Drawing on Spinoza, Merleau-Ponty, Aristotle, Barad, and Derrida, the essay explores how composite artworks—those that traverse painting, poetics, artist books, sound, and moving image—operate not just as aesthetic events but as ontological provocations. Attuned to the political and philosophical stakes of perception, the piece develops a sensory methodology for encountering ecological breakdown through images. It theorizes “speculative infrastructure” to name the perceptual labor required by artworks that document, distort, and reimagine environmental experience. Examples from William Blake and Zachary Cahill frame artmaking as a mode of witnessing, shaped by post-Romantic and post-conceptual lineages. The essay contributes to conversations in environmental aesthetics, media philosophy, and critical theory, offering a conceptual toolkit for understanding how art and philosophy might co-construct new modes of perception and resistance in the Anthropocene.

This preprint excerpt, titled “Jazz, Refusal, Metabolic Improvisation,” is drawn from a collaborative article-in-progress, Chew on It—Toward a Compostable Imaginary, co-authored with artists Camila de Andrade Bianchi and Liza Stout. Emerging from a March 2023 performance at Arizona State University’s Grant Street Studios, the work stages collective chewing as a sonic, embodied act of refusal. This excerpt develops a philosophical account of chewing as improvisatory labor, drawing on sonic critical theory—particularly the writings of Ralph Ellison and Fumi Okiji—to frame oral rhythm as a fugue of metabolized resistance. Situating the performance within traditions of jazz, ecological aesthetics, and feminist materialisms, the piece explores how affective, collective sound-making functions as a mode of critique and survivance. Positioned at the intersection of aesthetic theory, environmental philosophy, and experimental performance studies, this text contributes to emerging discourses on political refusal, sonic epistemologies, and the ethics of embodied practice.

This essay examines William Blake’s rare lithograph 'חנוך' (“Enoch”) as a radical meditation on self-annihilation and spiritual resistance amid the political turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars. Rather than a purely esoteric or theological figure, Enoch becomes in Blake’s rendering a symbol of embodied refusal—a spectral counterpoint to the nationalist and imperial mythologies of his time. Drawing on Blake’s visual poetics, Hebrew etymologies, and contemporaneous print culture, the essay explores how this singular work critiques dominant narratives of historical progress. By foregrounding the lithograph’s aesthetic of disappearance, it reveals a Blakean theory of vision grounded in subtraction, vulnerability, and messianic interruption. In tracing Enoch’s ascent as an anti-heroic gesture, the piece argues for Blake’s alignment with prophetic traditions that resist both divine and imperial sovereignty through erasure and the politics of the unrepresentable.

This article reads William Blake’s 'The Book of Thel' (1789) as a visionary counterpoint to Adam Smith’s 'Theory of Moral Sentiments' (1759) and its conception of the “economy of nature.” Rather than reaffirming liberal ideas of self-preservation and self-interest, Blake’s artwork dramatizes an ecological ethics rooted in mutuality, impermanence, and reproductive interdependence. Drawing on Enlightenment botanical science and poetic traditions of pollination, the piece situates 'Thel' within early debates around ecology, mortality, and the poetics of care. In contrast to Smith’s proto-capitalist framework, Blake offers a composite artistic vision in which the natural world models a vital, dissolutive resistance to possessive individualism—what the essay terms a “negative ecology.” The work thus foregrounds a Romantic aesthetics of interconnectedness still resonant amid contemporary planetary crisis.

This article reads William Blake’s '[First] Book of Urizen' (1794) as a mytho-political response to early industrial modernity, positioning Urizen as a metaphysical emblem of combustion, enclosure, and machinic reason. Interpreting Blake’s illuminated plates in relation to the architecture and ideology of Albion Mill—London’s first large-scale steam-powered flour mill—I argue that Urizen functions not as abstract cosmology, but as a materialist diagram of fossil modernity. The essay draws from Romantic media studies, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities to reframe Blake’s image-texts as anticipatory infrastructures: speculative constellations of ecological violence and poetic resistance. In Blake’s visual language, steam becomes scripture, cloud becomes control, and Urizen becomes a spectral machine conjuring law. The article proposes a method of infrastructural reading that attends to how poetic form can metabolize planetary crisis—inviting new modes of historical consciousness and critique in the Anthropocene.