Animal Encounters (Human-Animal Studies)

Animal Encounters

Human-Animal Studies Editor

Kenneth Shapiro Animals & Society Institute Editorial Board

Ralph Acampora Hofstra University

Clifton Flynn University of South Carolina

Hilda Kean Ruskin College, Oxford

Randy Malamud Georgia State University

Gail Melson Purdue University

VOLUME 6

Animal Encounters Edited by

Tom Tyler and Manuela Rossini

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2009

Cover image (top): Allison Hunter, Untitled (camel), detail (2008). Cover design: Wim Goedhart This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Animal encounters / edited by Tom Tyler and Manuela Rossini. p. cm. — (Human-animal studies ; v. 6) Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-16867-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Human-animal relationships. 2. Animals—Psychological aspects. 3. Anthropomorphism. I. Tyler, Tom, 1968– II. Rossini, Manuela. III. Title. IV. Series. QL85.A49 2009 179’.3—dc22

2008045750

ISSN: 1573-4226 ISBN: 978 90 04 16867 1 Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS List of Illustrations ...................................................................... Acknowledgements ..................................................................... List of Contributors .................................................................... Introduction: The Case of the Camel Tom Tyler

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PART ONE

POTENTIAL ENCOUNTERS Chapter One If Horses Had Hands . . . ................................ Tom Tyler Chapter Two Magic is Afoot: Hoof Marks, Paw Prints and the Problem of Writing Wildly ............................................ Pamela Banting

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PART TWO

MEDIATE ENCOUNTERS Chapter Three Post-Meateating ............................................ Carol J. Adams Chapter Four Americans Do Weird Things with Animals, or, Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? .............................. Randy Malamud

47 73

PART THREE

EXPERIMENTAL ENCOUNTERS Chapter Five Affect, Friendship and the “As Yet Unknown”: Rat Feeding Experiments in Early Vitamin Research ......... Robyn Smith

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Chapter Six Becoming-with-Companions: Sharing and Response in Experimental Laboratories .............................. Donna Haraway

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PART FOUR

CORPOREAL ENCOUNTERS Chapter Seven Invisible Parts: Animals and the Renaissance Anatomies of Human Exceptionalism ................................. Laurie Shannon Chapter Eight Invisible Histories: Primate Bodies and the Rise of Posthumanism in the Twentieth Century ............... Jonathan Burt

137 159

PART FIVE

DOMESTIC ENCOUNTERS Chapter Nine Fellow-Feeling ................................................. Susan Squier Chapter Ten “Tangible and Real and Vivid and Meaningful”: Lucy Kimbell’s Not-Knowing About Rats ........ Steve Baker

173 197

PART SIX

LIBIDINAL ENCOUNTERS Chapter Eleven The Predicament of Zoopleasures: Human-Nonhuman Libidinal Relations .............................. Monika Bakke Chapter Twelve ComingTogether: Symbiogenesis and Metamorphosis in Paul di Filippo’s A Mouthful of Tongues ... Manuela Rossini Index ...........................................................................................

221 243 259

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 3.1 David Lynch, ‘Eat My Fear’ (2000) .............. 3.2 PETA, ‘Got Beer?’ (2000) ............................. 3.3 PETA, ‘Got Prostrate Cancer?’ (2000) ......... 3.4 Playboar, ‘Ursula Hamdress’ ........................... 4.1a, 4.1b, 4.1c Pinar Yolacan, ‘Perishables’ (2004) ............... 4.2 Bruce Weber, ‘Tai and Rosie in Dior’ (2005) 4.3 Sketch for a fashionable elephant (2004) ...... 4.4a, 4.4b Petpics.com, Kittens in boxes ........................ 4.5 Cassius Coolidge, ‘A Friend in Need’ (c. 1870) .......................................................... 7.1 Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543) .................................................. 9.1 The Back Garden Hen (1917) ............................ 9.2 Miss Nancy Luce and two beloved hens ...... 9.3 Linda Lord on the Killing Floor (1988) ....... 10.1 Lucy Kimbell, One Night with Rats in the Service of Art (2005) ......................................... 10.2 Lucy Kimbell, Rat Evaluated Artwork, detail (2004) .............................................................. 10.3 ‘Rat Beauty Parlour’, Lucy Kimbell’s Rat Fair (2005) ...................................................... 10.4 ‘Is Your Rat an Artist?’, Lucy Kimbell’s Rat Fair (2005) ...................................................... 10.5 Jenni Lomax judges drawings at Lucy Kimbell’s Rat Fair (2005) ............................... 10.6 Lucy Kimbell, Rat Evaluated Artwork, detail (2004) .............................................................. 11.1 Greek two-euro coin ...................................... 11.2 Andres Serrano, A History of Sex (Red Pebbles) (1996) .............................................................. 11.3 Oleg Kulik, from the series Family of the Future (1997) ................................................... 11.4 Oleg Kulik, sketch for ‘Family of the Future: Kamasutra’ (1998) .........................................

49 62 63 68 78 83 84 86 93 147 174 180 187 197 200 207 207 208 212 233 235 237 238

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The editors would like to thank all those who helped with the preparation and publication of this volume. Tom Tyler would especially like to express his gratitude to Mohamed Mahmoud who provided valuable assistance and advice concerning Arabic translations and the Qur ān, and to those who helped with the German translations, including Julian Kücklich and Jens Spillner. Monica and Richard Tyler and Jane Harris provided, as ever, invaluable advice concerning both style and substance, and Jan Shirley and Jo Akers afforded their usual sterling library support. Manuela Rossini’s special thanks go to Ivan Callus, Bruce Clarke and Stefan Herbrechter, for encouraging her animots and thus supporting a posthumanist approach that takes the animal question seriously, and to Donna Haraway, her partner Rusten Hogness, and her canine companions Cayenne and Roland Dog for a warm welcome at their house in Santa Cruz in December 2005 and training me in ‘encountering well’. Several of the contributors to this collection presented early versions of their essays or similar ideas in the stream ‘Companion Species: Ecology and Art’ at Close Encounters, the 4th European meeting of the Society for Science, Literature, and the Arts (SLSA), organised by Manuela Rossini in Amsterdam, June 2006. We thank the SLSA for providing a home for Animal Studies in all its diversity. Thanks are also due to the individuals and organisations who kindly granted permission for the reproduction of images. Our sincere apologies if, for any of the images, we have failed to provide credit where it is due. Chapter One, ‘If Horses Had Hands . . .’ by Tom Tyler is a revised version of an essay first published in Society & Animals 11.3 (2003), pp. 267–81. Chapter Six, ‘Becoming-with-Companions: Sharing and Response in Experimental Laboratories’, is a slightly different version of Chapter 3 of When Species Meet, published by the University of Minnesota Press, 2008 (copyright 2008 by Donna J. Haraway). Our thanks to Brill and to the University of Minnesota Press for permission to republish these pieces here. Finally, our thanks to Ken Shapiro and to the staff at Brill for all their work on the Human-Animal Studies series, and for including Animal Encounters within it.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Carol J. Adams is a feminist writer and activist (USA). She is the author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (1990), Neither Man Nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals (1994), Living Among Meat Eaters (2001), and The Pornography of Meat (2004), and editor of Ecofeminism and the Sacred (1994) and The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader (2007) among other books. She has published widely in both popular and academic journals on animals and feminism, and is a regular speaker at universities and colleges across the USA and the world. She has also developed a series of books of prayers for animals based on children’s encounters. Steve Baker is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Central Lancashire (UK), and a founder member of the UK Animal Studies Group. He is the author of The Postmodern Animal (2000) and Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation (1993), and one of the authors of the Animal Studies Group’s Killing Animals (2006). His work on contemporary artists’ engagement with the more-than-human world has been published in numerous exhibition catalogues, artists’ monographs, and edited collections including Representing Animals (2002), Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (2003), The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings (2007), and Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, and Nature (forthcoming). His forthcoming book has the working title Art Before Ethics: Animal Life in Artists’ Hands. Monika Bakke is Assistant Professor of Aesthetics at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan (PL) and an art critic. She writes on contemporary art and aesthetics with a particular interest in cross-cultural, gender and posthumanist perspectives. She is author of the book Cialo otwarte [Open Body] (2000), co-author of Pleroma: Art in Search of Fullness (1998), and editor of Estetyka Aborygenow [Australian Aboriginal Aesthetics] (2004) and Going Aerial: Air, Art, Architecture (2006). Since 2001 she has worked as editor for the Polish cultural magazine Czas Kultury [Time of Culture]. She has edited the reader Zoo-filozofia [Zoo-Philosophy] (forthcoming), and is currently working on a book on postanthropocentric issues in contemporary art.

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Pamela Banting is an Associate Professor in the English Department, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. She is the author of Body Inc.: A Theory of Translation Poetics (1997) and editor of the anthology Fresh Tracks: Writing the Western Landscape (1998). Her research centres around exploring the relationship between language and materiality, and she has published widely in this line including articles on the body as pictogram, the postcolonial, the grammar of bear-human interactions, geography as intertext, deconstructing the politics of location, and cultural and biological diversity in Canadian literature. Her current interdisciplinary project explores questions of language, agency and epistemology regarding wild animals in the creative nonfiction of Canadian writers who are also naturalists, park wardens or biologists. Jonathan Burt is an independent scholar and freelance writer (Cambridge, UK). He is a founder member of the UK Animal Studies Group and has published widely on animal history. He is the author of Animals in Film (2003) and Rat (2004), the General Editor of the Reaktion Animal book series, and a review editor for the journal Society and Animals. He is currently writing a novel entitled A White Elephant in Corsica. Donna Haraway is a Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz (USA). Her passion is animals and everything that touches them—sciences, intimacies, politics, joys, disasters. She is the author of When Species Meet (2008), The Haraway Reader (2003), The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003), Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_Oncomouse(tm): Feminism and Technoscience (1997), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989), and Crystals, Fabrics and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (1976). In 2000, she received the J.D. Bernal Prize, a lifetime achievement award from the Society for Social Studies in Science. Randy Malamud is a Professor and Associate Chair in Modern Literature, Ecocriticism, and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at Georgia State University (USA). His publications include Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (1998) and Poetic Animals and Animal Souls (2003). He is part of the editorial board for the Brill book series Human-Animal Studies, and editor of A Cultural History of Animals in the Modern Age (2007).

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Manuela Rossini holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Basel (CH). She is Project Manager at the forum td-net (Network for Transdisciplinary Research) of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences in Berne. She has published in the fields of early modern studies, gender and feminist studies, critical theory, and cultural studies of science. Her forthcoming book project, Science/Fiction: Imagineering the Future of the Human, deals with configurations of the posthuman as a humananimal-machine compound in literary, scientific and philosophical texts. She is co-editor of the Rodopi series Experimental Practices: Technoscience, Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Editorial Board member of the book series Critical Posthumanisms, also with Rodopi. In addition, she is one of three Co-Creative Directors of the international network e-text+textiles, and Executive Board member of SLSA Europe, the European branch of the Society for Science, Literature, and the Arts. Laurie Shannon received her JD from Harvard Law School in 1989 and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1996. She taught at Duke University and is now Wender Lewis Associate Professor of English at Northwestern University. Her research and publications concern early modern literature and culture, especially topics in Shakespeare, political thought, natural history/animal studies, gender and sexuality, and medicine. Her first book, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (2002), and her forthcoming manuscript, The Zootopian Constitution: Animal Agency and Early Modern Knowledge, both explore historical experiments in constitutional thought. She lives with one human and one Airedale terrier. Robyn Smith holds postdoctoral fellowships from the Max Planck Society and the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her current research investigates the emergence of vitamins as bio-political objects in British biochemistry during World War One. Susan Squier is Brill Professor of Women’s Studies, English and Science, Technology and Society at the Pennsylvania State University (USA). She has published widely in the fields of cultural studies of science and medicine, feminist studies, and modernism. Her most recent publication is Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (2005), and she is currently working on a new book, An ABC of Chickens. She is Editorial Board member of the Journal of Medical

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Humanities and Executive Board member and past President of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. Tom Tyler is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Culture at Oxford Brookes University (UK). His research concerns pre- and post-humanist modes of thought and perception, particularly with regard to epistemology, animals, and technology, and he has published widely on animals in philosophy and critical theory. He edited the special issue of Parallax entitled Animal Beings and his book CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.

INTRODUCTION

THE CASE OF THE CAMEL Tom Tyler In the second of his Just So Stories, ‘How the Camel Got His Hump’ (1974), Rudyard Kipling recounts that, when the world was new and the Animals were just beginning to work for Man, the Camel refused to play his part, and went instead to live in the Desert where he ate thorns and milkweed and prickles. One after another the domesticated beasts came to the Camel, the Horse with a saddle on his back, the Dog with a stick in his mouth, and the Ox with a yoke on his neck. Each implored the Camel to lend a hand with Man’s work, and to each the Camel uttered but a single word: “Humph!” Man explains to the Horse and the Dog and the Ox that, due to the Camel’s willful idleness, they must all work harder still. The three hold a pow-wow, discontented as they are with their lot. The Djinn of All Deserts takes pity on them, however, and resolves to compel the Camel to contribute. After one “humph” too many the Djinn casts a Great Magic and there appears on the Camel’s back a large, lolloping humph, or ‘hump’ as it is known today. Sustained by this hump, the Djinn explains, the Camel will now be able to toil for three days without eating, and thus make up for the work he missed. For all that, however, Kipling tells us that the Camel “has never yet learned how to behave” (p. 25). Kipling’s tale presents us with a number of animal encounters, all different in tone. That between the three domesticated creatures is harmonious, a meeting of like minds, albeit one prompted by their disgruntlement with the camel. The conference called by Man, meanwhile, is directive and serves to steer the conduct of horse, dog and ox. Finally, the encounters between the camel and each of his would-be interlocutors are discordant, even quarrelsome. The camel has long been portrayed as an irritable, ill-tempered creature, whose relations with others are fractious and antagonistic. Foucault highlighted the distinction, however, between antagonism and agonism (2001, p. 342). He characterised the antagonistic encounter as “a face-to-face confrontation that paralyzes both sides”, a standoff that serves only to suppress

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each adversary. The agonistic relationship, on the other hand, is one of “mutual incitement”, a “permanent provocation” that has the potential for reciprocal stimulation.1 In Milton’s Samson Agonistes, for instance, the Israelite champion initially endures an antagonistic impasse with his Philistine captors, but his agonistic encounters with successive prison visitors spur him ultimately to spectacular and terrible action.2 We might choose to consider the camel’s conduct, then, at least prior to the Djinn’s despotic intervention, as rousing rather than merely resistant. The fast-growing field of Animal Studies, to which this collection contributes, is a varied domain. Encounters with animals have encouraged collaborations between researchers and writers within the arts, humanities, and social sciences, that have been every bit as wide-ranging as those between Kipling’s creatures. In coming together to discuss other animals there has been agreement and convergence amongst some, as well as considerable divergence amongst others. With researchers arriving to the field pursuing dissimilar objectives and preoccupations, employing different disciplinary tools and methods, how could it be otherwise? The name of the field itself is contested: should it be ‘Animal Studies’ (Shapiro 1993), ‘Human-Animal Studies’ (Shapiro 2008), ‘Anthrozoology’ (Rowan 1987), or something else again?3 Indeed, no consensus exists even regarding the nature or bounds of the object—or subject—of study, ‘the animal’ (Ingold 1994). These varying, even conflicting approaches that characterise the field are a strength rather than a weakness. They denote a genuine and entirely healthy multidisciplinary engagement, by which diverse disciplines bring to bear unique contributions to the question of animal encounters (Wolfe 2009). As an open, contested field, with no clear canon, Animal Studies is a meeting point where different species of researcher gather. The agonistic encounters that inevitably result demonstrate precisely the mutual incitement and productive provocation suggested by Foucault.

1 In pharmacology an agonist is a chemical that triggers a response in a cell, whilst the antagonist has the effect of inhibiting such reactions. Similarly, in physiology agonist muscles effect the movement of a body part, whilst antagonists work to restore a limb to its initial position. 2 On the complex classical and Christian meanings which inform the title of Milton’s poem see Krouse (1974, pp. 108–118). 3 Consider also ‘zooanthropology’, after zooantropologia (in the Italian collection of that name; Tugnoli 2003) and ‘anthropozoology’, after anthropozoologie (in the French journal Anthropozoologica, established 1984).

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The essays that make up Animal Encounters reflect this variety, both in terms of the disciplines and subject areas from which they are drawn, and the relations that pertain between the field’s contributors. There are essays from literary and cultural studies, sociology and anthropology, ecocriticism and environmental studies, art history and aesthetics, gender studies and feminism, philosophy and critical theory, science and technology studies, history and posthumanism. An encounter is a meeting between discrete parties, which ceases at the moment they combine or separate. The nature of such a meeting, which precludes both unification and partition, is captured typographically by those compound terms that retain capitals mid-word, such as CinemaScope, McLuhan, PlayStation, et al. These terms, in which the words meet but preserve their individual identities, are called ‘camel case’, or CamelCase, since they simulate camels’ characteristic humps.4 The essays that comprise this volume meet in a series of encounters not only between animals, human and otherwise, like the characters in Kipling’s story, but also between distinct disciplinary methods, theoretical approaches, and ethical positions. They seek neither concord nor dispute, but effective interchange. There are six such encounters, each of which represents a key arena of agonistic engagement that has attracted researchers within Animal Studies. The first section concerns Potential Encounters. When Kipling’s camel repeatedly “humphs” at those who would engage him, the question of interpreting his utterances becomes pressing. But are the Horse, Dog and Ox right to construe his grunts as expressions of an idle or cantankerous nature? Does the powerful, interfering Djinn appreciate what he is really about? Or are these socialized creatures cut off from the camel by their own expectations and assumptions? Is a genuine engagement with the camel, on his own terms, precluded by cultural chasms, or species barriers, that prevent each party from understanding the other? Is the potential for a true encounter foreclosed from the outset? This section addresses the difficulties and objections that have been raised to the very possibility of authentic encounters with animals. The essays consider obstacles alleged to exist, as necessary conditions of engagement with the natural world, that prevent not only transparent

4 CamelCase, also called ‘medial capitals’, has been employed in brand names since the 1950s, and became a computer programming convention from the late 1960s (New Scientist 2007).

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interaction between human and more-than-human creatures, but also adequate accounts of those experiences. In his essay ‘If Horses Had Hands . . .’, Tom Tyler examines the contentious notion of anthropomorphism, arguing that far from being unscientific and demeaning, as many researchers have argued, or inevitable and even productive, as others have suggested, the concept itself is in fact misjudged and liable to prejudice our investigations. At the same time, drawing on the nature writing of Andy Russell and Sid Marty, Pamela Banting reminds us in her essay ‘Magic is Afoot: Hoof Marks, Paw Prints and the Problem of Writing Wildly’ that humans are by no means the only creatures adept at reading signs, or even the most accomplished. The camel has, in Arabic tradition, long been called ‘the ship of the desert’ (safīnat al-barr or safīnat al- a rā ).5 The metaphor invokes an image, perhaps, of a dependable dromedary forging through a vast sea of sand. It implies, too, a particular conception of the place of camels in human society: as a means of transport, certainly, but more broadly as something to be used, a technology or tool that serves to facilitate human endeavours.6 The depiction of camels, in language, literature and discourse, as well as in other forms of culture, correlates with an understanding of the appropriate uses to which they can be put. Whilst the previous section dealt with the very possibility of encountering animals, Mediate Encounters is concerned with the consequences of the fact that, for many people today, the majority of their encounters with animals are not immediate but rather mediated. Whether through television and movies, digital games and online entertainment, art and design, radio and photography, novels, newspapers and magazines, we meet most animals by means of representations. The authors contributing to this section argue in different ways that the estrangement engendered by this mediation makes it all the easier for humans to dominate, subject and mistreat other animals. Carol J. Adams suggests in her essay ‘Post-Meateating’ that, despite postmodern theory’s potential to reformulate how we think about individuals and their experiences, the 5 See for instance Ad-Damīrī’s medieval bestiary (1906, I, p. 27). The phrase is perhaps even implicit in a verse of the Qur ān (Arberry 1964, XXIII:22, p. 344). On the widespread, early use of this image in Arabic literature and poetry see Goldziher (1890). 6 Richard Bulliet’s The Camel and the Wheel (1990) provides an excellent account of the role of camels in human culture, which might be characterised a “technological history” of the varied means by which societies have sought to “harness the animal’s energy” (p. 3).

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contemporary preoccupation with cultural representations ultimately undermines any challenge to the human exploitation of other creatures. Randy Malamud, meanwhile, argues that ‘Americans Do Weird Things with Animals’, citing as evidence the bizarre and manipulative creations of several artists, photographers and entertainers who have chosen to work with, or on, animals. Camels’ ability to survive for weeks without water, despite extreme desert temperatures, is legendary. In the 1950s, for the first time, a group of scientists working from a research station in southern Algeria undertook to investigate camels’ unique adaptive physiology. Experimental procedures included depriving camels of water, preventing them from urinating, catheters, prolonged exposure to the sun, shearing, and more (Schmidt-Nielsen et al. 1956). Investigative experiments on living animals date back at least to the time of Aristotle, and it has been estimated that between 50 and 100 million creatures are now used annually in experimental research around the world (Orlans 1998, p. 400). Commercial and governmental laboratories, alongside many universities, carry out experiments on specially bred animals, captured wild animals, and even former pets. The range of procedures, as well as the variety of animals involved, are as broad as the purposes for which the experiments are conducted. Pure research, such as that into the development or behaviour of different animal species, is carried out in pursuit of the ‘advancement of knowledge’. Applied research, for instance by means of genetic modification or induced pathologies, is undertaken to discover the etiology or evolution of diseases and disorders. Toxicological testing into the harmful effects of food and medication, pesticides and cosmetics, household products and their ingredients, is carried out, meanwhile, on healthy animals. Writers and researchers within Animal Studies have had to engage with the conceptual, practical, and above all the ethical questions raised by these Experimental Encounters. In her essay ‘Affect, Friendship and the “As Yet Unknown”: Rat Feeding Experiments in Early Vitamin Research’, Robyn Smith examines the ways in which the components of an experimental system—rats and scientists, diets and metabolisms, durations and desires—meet and intertwine. Donna Haraway suggests in ‘Becoming-with-Companions: Sharing and Response in Experimental Laboratories’ that in order to address the complexity of these wicked activities which may also be good, we need not a discourse of calculation—who should or should not be killed—but an appreciation of the incalculable responsibility involved.

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Camels’ accommodation to the desert climate is due, in fact, to a number of different physiological adaptations. They do not, as is sometimes believed, store water in their humps, nor anywhere else.7 Rather, camels conserve water by producing only small quantities of urine and by passing dry faeces; their nostrils include cavities in which air is cooled before exhalation, thereby reducing water loss; they have an unusually high tolerance for dehydration and weight loss; their fur provides insulation against the heat; and their blood temperature can rise significantly without ill effect, allowing them to absorb heat (Wilson 1984, pp. 72–78; Gauthier-Pilters and Dagg 1981, pp. 59–77; Bulliet 1990, p. 31). A camel’s body is, in short, an extraordinary evolutionary success. In the fourth section of the collection the authors consider the significance of Corporeal Encounters. The question of animal intelligence or mind has been much contested within psychology and the behavioural sciences, but new interest has increasingly been taken within the wider field of Animal Studies in the remarkable, brute materiality of animal bodies. Such corporeal encounters hold the twin fascinations of that which exposes the spectacularly alien and that which reveals recognizable commonality with a human form. The status of crossspecies comparison, both in early modern medical research and in the evolving conception of the human body that it produced, is dissected by Laurie Shannon in her essay ‘Invisible Parts: Animals and the Renaissance Anatomies of Human Exceptionalism’. Jonathan Burt, meanwhile, turns to more recent but nonetheless neglected animal encounters in his ‘Invisible Histories: Primate Bodies and the Rise of Posthumanism in the Twentieth Century’, taking as his principal case study the disturbing work of primatologist Solly Zuckerman. The long process of camel domestication began, most likely, in and around southern Arabia, some time between 3000 and 2500 BC or earlier.8 Richard Bulliet (1990) has traced the historical development of the integration of camels into Middle Eastern and North African societies. He argues, in fact, that dependence was so thorough during the medieval period that it occasioned the abandonment of the wheel for purposes of transportation. The impact of this substitution was far-reaching, affecting trade, military practice, road use, and urban

7 In reality the hump stores fat, at least when food is abundant, diminishing in size when it is not (Gauthier-Pilters and Dagg 1981, p. 71; Wilson 1984, pp. 72–73). 8 See Bulliet’s detailed discussion of the available evidence (1990, pp. 28–56).

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topography (pp. 216–236). The taming and assimilation of animals, on which human societies, both sedentary and nomadic, have depended, has much concerned Animal Studies. Domesticated species have supplied meat and milk, eggs and honey, silk and wool, leather and hair, fur and feathers, whilst beasts of burden have provided transportation and brute labour. Animals have been kept as pets and companions, have furnished bone and pearl ornaments, and have been subject to scientific experimentation. The fifth section of this volume addresses Domestic Encounters. Both essays suggest, in very different ways, that encounters with particular domestic animals prompt us to reconsider conventional modes of calculation and explanation. By tracking changes in the American chicken farming industry, Susan Squier argues that we should return to Adam Smith’s notion of ‘Fellow-Feeling’, reclaiming it as a fundamental part of social and economic relations and integral to the multiple forms of exchange between humans and other animals. In his essay ‘ “Tangible and Real and Vivid and Meaningful”: Lucy Kimbell’s Not-Knowing About Rats’, Steve Baker examines the artist’s “aesthetic experiments”, suggesting that knowledge—about art, about animals, about the more-than-human—derives always from a state of perplexity whose productive possibilities must be acknowledged. The final section of the volume concerns Libidinal Encounters. The sexually aroused camel is a notoriously unmanageable creature, becoming restless, ardent and even aggressive (Wilson 1984, p. 91; Novoa 1970, pp. 8–9). Despite their zealous behavior, it is common in domesticated settings for humans to assist with penetration at mating (Wilson 1984, p. 94). The essays that convene in this section concern desires, and the movement toward change that they prompt or foreshadow. They explore a good deal more than the untamed, uncontrollable, animal appetites characterized by Socrates as dominant when human reason is absent or in abeyance (Plato, IX: 571c–d). Animal pleasures and passions, shared by and between creatures of diverse species, including humans, can be a good deal more complex and affirmative than such a portrayal allows. Where the opening section of the volume discusses the very possibility of encounters with bird and beast, these closing essays explore the wildest and most promising prospects for continuing animal encounters. They look to the future, and the radical potential of Animal Studies. In ‘The Predicament of Zoopleasures: Human-Nonhuman Libidinal Relations’, Monika Bakke examines the far-reaching implications of the fact that commonalities between humans and other animals extend to forms of sexual pleasure, and calls for a conceptual shift from abusive ‘bestiality’

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to open, exploratory ‘zoosexuality’. Finally, in the concluding essay of the collection, ‘ComingTogether: Symbiogenesis and Metamorphosis in Paul di Filippo’s A Mouthful of Tongues’, Manuela Rossini suggests that the novel’s many transgressive, posthumanist becomings—animal, sexual and otherwise—invite us to imagine new ways of conceiving human life and identity. The function of an introduction is to bring together two parties, to lead in one to the other (from the Latin intro-ducere). It is, in fact, to facilitate an encounter. The Greek ‘agon’ (άγών) denoted a gathering or assembly to see the games, as well as the arena where the contest took place, deriving originally from ‘ago’ (άγω), meaning to lead, or fetch, or bring people along. In leading prospective readers to six arenas within Animal Studies, in which the contributors to this volume gather, the wish has been that new assemblies, new encounters, might result. It is to be hoped that these encounters will not be antagonistic, like that between the Djinn and the Camel, although at the same time it is perhaps too much to expect them to be entirely harmonious, like that between the Horse, Dog and Ox. Animal Encounters will have served its purpose if the paired essays, and the agonistic encounters they prompt, prove for the reader to be provocative and stimulating, and perhaps even incitement to further action, like Kipling’s consistently challenging camel. References Ad-Damīrī, Mu ammad ibn Mūsā. 1906. ayāt al- ayawān (A Zoological Lexicon). Translated by A.S.G. Jayakar. London: Luzac. Arberry, Arthur J., trans. [1955] 1964. The Koran Interpreted. London: Oxford University Press. Bulliet, Richard W. [1975] 1990. The Camel and the Wheel. New York: Columbia University Press. Foucault, Michel. [1982] 2001. ‘The Subject and Power.’ Part 2 translated by L. Sawyer. In Power. Edited by James D. Faubion, The Essential Works, 3 Vols, III, 326–48. London: Allen Lane. Gauthier-Pilters, Hilde and Ann Innis Dagg. 1981. The Camel: Its Evolution, Ecology, Behavior, and Relationship to Man. Photographs by Hilde Gauthier-Pilters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldziher, Ignaz. 1890. ‘Das Schiff der Wüste’. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, xliv: 165–67. Ingold, Tim, ed. [1988] 1994. What Is An Animal? London: Routledge. Kipling, Rudyard. 1974. Just So Stories for Little Children. Illustrated by the Author. London: MacMillan. Krouse, F. Michael. [1949] 1974. Milton’s Samson and the Christian Tradition. New York: Octagon.

introduction: the case of the camel

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Milton, John. [1671] 1968. ‘Samson Agonistes.’ In The Poems of John Milton. Edited by John Carey and Alastair Fowler, 330–402. London: Longmans. New Scientist. 2007. ‘CamelCase.’ New Scientist 196 (2627), p. 58, 27 October 2007. Novoa, C. 1970. ‘Review: Reproduction in Camelidae.’ Journal of Reproduction and Fertility 22: 3–20. Orlans, F. Barbara. 1998. ‘History and Ethical Regulation of Animal Experimentation: An International Perspective.’ In A Companion to Bioethics. Edited by Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer, 399–410. Oxford: Blackwell. Plato. 1871. The Republic. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons. Rowan, Andrew N. 1987. ‘Editorial.’ Anthrozoös 1 (1): 1. Schmidt-Nielsen, Bodil, Knut Schmidt-Nielsen, T.R. Houpt and S.A. Jarnum. 1956. Water Balance of the Camel. American Journal of Physiology 185 (1): 185–94. Shapiro, Kenneth J. 1993. ‘Editor’s Introduction to Society and Animals.’ Society and Animals 1 (1): 1–4. http://psyeta.org/sa/sa1.1/shapiro.html (accessed 2 February 2008). ——. 2008. Human-Animal Studies: Growing the Field, Applying the Field. Ann Arbor: Animals and Society Institute. Tugnoli, Claudio, ed. 2003. Zooantropologia: Storia, Etica e Pedagogia dell’Interazione Uomo/ Animale. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Wilson, R.T. 1984. The Camel. London: Longman. Wolfe, Cary. 2009 (forthcoming). ‘“Animal Studies,” Disciplinarity, and the (Post)Humanities.’ In What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

PART ONE

POTENTIAL ENCOUNTERS Any sustained examination of animal encounters must first take up the question of the kinds of engagement and experience that might be had. The essays in this section address the nature of the encounters that are possible between humans and other animals: they consider the potential that exists for understanding and comprehending more-than-human creatures. It has often been suggested that the worlds of other animals are forever closed to human beings, due to the necessarily anthropocentric modes of perception and awareness that we bring to any encounter. Human faculties and categories, the structures of mind or language, are determinants, it is argued, from which we cannot escape, ensuring that relations with other creatures are never genuinely reciprocal, and precluding authentic encounters with animals ‘in themselves’. The authors of these two essays argue, on the contrary, that this perspective assumes and imposes a limitation that need not be the case. We should not start from the proposition that other creatures are closed to us, or that the processes of comprehension and signification we employ are exclusively human. In his essay ‘If Horses Had Hands . . .’, Tom Tyler examines the contentious and confused notion of anthropomorphism, the inappropriate attribution of distinctively human characteristics to other entities. Beginning with an overview of the term’s historical and current uses, he goes on to consider the work of contemporary writers and thinkers who have explicitly addressed the practice. On the one hand many researchers believe anthropomorphism to be unscientific and demeaning to both human and animal. On the other, there are those who contend that it is an inevitable and useful pragmatic strategy for understanding the minds and behaviour of other animals. As Tyler demonstrates, however, Heidegger raises the more serious objection that it is not at all clear what is even meant by the charge of anthropomorphism. Elaborating his argument with examples drawn from evolutionary theory and elsewhere, Tyler concludes that use of the term ‘anthropomorphism’ commits one to an undesirable anthropocentrism that shackles thought concerning the relationships that are possible between human

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and animal beings. As such, those who pursue or describe potential animal encounters would do well to recount their endeavours without recourse to this problematic and prejudicial category. In ‘Magic is Afoot: Hoof Marks, Paw Prints and the Problem of Writing Wildly’, Pamela Banting considers the claim, often made by contemporary theorists, that texts in the broadest sense refer not to the real world but always and only to one another. She seeks both to extend and to problematize the conclusion that ‘nature’ is thus a social construction, fashioned from the signs and representations to which we are exposed. Banting examines the work of two Canadian writers of so-called realistic wild animal stories. Andy Russell reconstructs and recounts tales of the grizzly bear ‘Sage’, ‘The King Elk’, and ‘Kleo’ an amorous young cougar, based on his expert ability to read their tracks and marks, assisted all the while by his dogs Kip and Seppi. Sid Marty, meanwhile, interprets and retells nature’s inchoate messages, attuning himself to the voices of the vast wilderness around him. There are, Banting argues, more varieties of visual and verbal signification than those written by human beings. At the same time, other animals frequently exceed humankind in their ability to read the signs recorded in the natural world, depending as they do on this comprehension for their very survival. (TT)

CHAPTER ONE

IF HORSES HAD HANDS . . . Tom Tyler But if horses or oxen or lions had hands or could draw with their hands and accomplish such works as men, horses would draw the figures of the gods as similar to horses, and the oxen as similar to oxen, and they would make the bodies of the sort which each of them had. —Xenophanes of Colophon, Fragments, p. 251

The term ‘anthropomorphism’, Greek in origin, initially referred to the practice of attributing human form or traits to the deities. Xenophanes’ fragment is usually taken to be a wry criticism, aimed principally at Homer perhaps, of this fanciful tradition. Characterising the divine as an assortment of capricious and petulant individuals is, Xenophanes seems to be suggesting, risible. His contention that cattle or lions or horses, given the opportunity, would project their likenesses in a similarly parochial fashion is in effect a kind of reductio ad absurdum.2 The Christian anthropomorphite heresies of the fourth and tenth centuries were similarly condemned for their overly literal reading of certain passages in the Old Testament (“His all-seeing Eye”, “His everlasting Arms”, etc.) and for their ensuing attribution to God of a corporeal form (Herbermann

1 Bertrand Russell once made a similarly sardonic observation regarding not animals but the psychologists who study them: “Animals studied by Americans rush about frantically, with an incredible display of hustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired result by chance. Animals observed by Germans sit still and think, and at last evolve the solution out of their inner consciousness.” (Russell 1927, p. 33). 2 See Holtsmark (1994, p. 6B). Hume has Philo, in a similar spirit of gentle mockery, imagine a parallel scenario in which, on “a planet wholly inhabited by spiders (which is very possible)”, the idea that the world is spun from the bowels of an “infinite spider” is taken seriously (Hume, p. 51). For a more cautious reading of Xenophanes’ tantalising fragment, however, see Lesher in Xenophanes 1992, pp. 24–25, 89–94.

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et al., 1907–14). It wasn’t until the mid nineteenth century that the term ‘anthropomorphism’ moved closer to its contemporary meaning and began to refer to the practice of attributing human characteristics to entities other than deities, such as abstract ideas or “anything impersonal or irrational” (OED, ‘anthropomorphism’). This came to include animals, and one of the earliest recorded uses in this sense occurs in George Henry Lewes’ Sea-Side Studies, first published in 1858, in which the author warns against attributing ‘vision’ or ‘alarm’ to molluscs (pp. 255, 341).3 “As we are just now looking with scientific seriousness at our animals, we will discard all anthropomorphic interpretations”, he says. Lewes’ caution, and his use of the term ‘anthropomorphic’, was the beginning of a particular kind of vigilance that has endured, and indeed flourished, both in scientific and philosophical discourse. Today the term ‘anthropomorphism’ is used in any of three distinct ways. With decreasing regularity it is employed in its very literal sense to refer to the practice of attributing physical human form to some nonhuman being, as did the Christian anthropomorphite heretics. Secondly, it refers to the over-enthusiastic ascription of distinctively human activities and attributes to real or imaginary creatures, a practice frequently encountered, for instance, in children’s stories. Rupert Bear and his chums, anthropoid one and all, invariably dress in carefully pressed jerseys and blazers, and enjoy flying kites, foxing dastardly pirates, and solving all manner of seemingly impenetrable mysteries. The third use is the one most frequently encountered in scientific and philosophical literature, and refers to the practice of attributing intentionality, purpose or volition to some creature or abstraction that (allegedly) does not have these things. This particular charge of anthropomorphism is frequently levelled at doting animal behaviourists or sloppy evolutionary theorists who are careless in the terminology they employ. The suggestion that a particular aspect of a species has been ‘designed’ by nature, or that evolution has been teleologically ‘working toward’ some ideal type, fall under this heading.4 It has tended to be those intent on what Lewes called “scientific seriousness” who have most objected to anthropomorphic language in the discussion of animals. The entomologist John Kennedy, a vocal critic

This text is cited in the OED, and briefly discussed in Midgley (1983, pp. 128–9). For an engaging discussion of evolution and ‘design’, which meticulously avoids this pitfall, see Dennett (1995, especially Part I). 3 4

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of anthropomorphism, has objected to it precisely because it is, he says, unscientific (1992).5 Amounting to a kind of modern day animism, or vitalism (pp. 3–4, 9, 13–14, 157, 159), anthropomorphism assumes more than it explains by unthinkingly attributing all manner of mental states to animals (self-awareness, thought, purpose, mental images) without demonstrating that these states exist (pp. 157–60). In short, Kennedy argues, when looking at animal behaviour anthropomorphism confuses function with cause (p. 166). As such, it is a fatal mistake for any enquiry (p. 31) and a drag on the study of the true mechanisms behind animal activities (p. 5).6 Even beyond any narrowly defined scientific endeavour, there is a sense in which anthropomorphism is always seen as a mistaken approach. Implicit within the very concept of anthropomorphism is the idea that uniquely human traits are being attributed to creatures or beings to whom (or which) they do not belong. Indeed, if it were believed that the traits in question might possibly be shared, if God or molluscs might have that particular quality or characteristic in common with humanity, there would be no need to draw attention to this state of affairs with such a unique and highly specific term: the inquiry would instead be an open question concerning degrees of commonality (we will return to this in a moment). Anthropomorphism, as the reckless assignation of human traits to the brutes, is a projection, a kind of fetishism that is entirely inappropriate in any genuinely analytic enterprise. The very suggestion that a theory or approach is ‘anthropomorphic’ is, implicitly, always an accusation. There appear to be two distinct hazards here. On the one hand such anthropomorphism is in danger of demeaning humans by failing to appreciate their unique traits. The psychiatrist and psychotherapist Willard Gaylin detects just this tendency in the animal rights movement: The purpose of the people in this movement is not to diminish Homo sapiens but to protect the beast. They do so by elevating animals, often endowing them anthropomorphically with features the animals do not possess. Their purpose is noble—to protect helpless creatures from unnecessary suffering—but one untoward consequence of this decent enterprise

5 Kennedy seems unsure whether anthropomorphism is best characterised as a virus in need of a cure (pp. 160 and 167) or vermin that should be driven underground (p. 157), but by all accounts his antipathy is unequivocal. 6 The claim that animals are conscious, for instance, is not a scientific one, Kennedy asserts, because it cannot even be tested (p. 31).

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tom tyler is a reduction of the distance between the nature of people and that of animals. Animal rights advocates constantly emphasize the similarity between the human and the subhuman in a worthy attempt to mitigate our abuses of the subhuman. But in so doing they seriously undermine the special nature of being human (1990, p. 11).7

Leaving aside the question of Gaylin’s incautious use of the term “subhuman”, does anthropomorphism risk ignoring the “special nature” of being human? Does it misrepresent what is distinctive and perhaps even superior in humanity? The flying of kites, or wearing of blazers, are hardly the only areas in which humans have excelled over their animal kin, after all. On the other hand, it might be argued that we are not doing any favours to the animals either. By focusing on that which the animal shares with the human we are in danger of missing all that is peculiar and proper to it. We try so hard to show that chimpanzees, or monkeys, or dogs, or cats, or rats, or chickens, or fish are like us in their thoughts and feelings; in so doing we do nothing but denigrate what they really are. (Budiansky 1998, p. 194).8

An oft-recounted equine example furnishes a good illustration. At the beginning of the twentieth century, in Berlin, one Wilhelm von Osten, an elderly schoolmaster, presented to the public and scientific community a horse who, he claimed, possessed extraordinary mental abilities approaching those of a human being. Clever Hans, as he was known, communicated with von Osten, and with anyone else who cared to 7 Gaylin’s book, Adam and Eve and Pinocchio: On Being and Becoming Human, styles itself as a “necessary corrective” to the lack of confidence that the human species currently has in itself, and is an attempt to “reaquaint ourselves with our nature” (inside cover and p. 10). See especially the Prologue, ‘What’s So Special About Being Human’, which, one should notice immediately, is not a question but a declaration (pp. 3–19). The penchant for ignoring the specific concerns of animal rights activists by focusing instead on the purported effects for humans, or on the alleged motives of the human activists themselves, is common amongst those unsympathetic to their views. For an instructive discussion of this “denial of the animal”, see Baker (1993, pp. 211–217). 8 Note that this objection to anthropomorphism on the grounds that it demeans animals, is not quite the same as those which are often directed at chimps’ tea parties or similarly degrading instances of performing animals. Such protests, necessary and well-founded though they are in their own terms, do not constitute an argument against anthropomorphism per se, since they fail to apply to performances which do not so obviously demean an animal (cinematic representations of faithful collie dogs adept at child rescue, for example). For an illuminating discussion of chimps’ teaparties, see de Waal (2001, pp. 1–5).

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make his acquaintance, by tapping his right forehoof an appropriate number of times, or by nodding or shaking his head to indicate yes and no. Amongst his many feats were the ability to pick out coloured cloths, to tell the time, solve complex mathematical equations, identify musical intervals and scores, read and spell (though admittedly in German only), and even answer questions about European politics (Pfungst 1965, pp. 18–24).9 A hoax was suspected, but a committee of thirteen respected professionals—including a psychologist, a physiologist, a veterinarian, a director of the Berlin zoo, and a circus manager—certified that Hans was not responding to cues, intentional or otherwise, from his trainer or any other person (Rosenthal, in Pfungst, p. x). Incredible though it seemed, Hans appeared to possess a power of abstract thought uncannily close to that of humans, and pretty well educated humans at that.10 After extensive and meticulous experimentation by Oscar Pfungst, the psychologist charged with the task of undertaking a serious scientific inquiry into Hans’ abilities, it was eventually found that questioners were, by means of their body language, unconsciously providing subtle, almost undetectable cues, to which Hans was responding. As Hans tapped his hoof observers tended to tense up very slightly in anticipation of the correct answer, and then, when he reached the right number of taps, they relaxed, or provided other inadvertent cues which he noticed.11 This finding was taken to indicate that Hans was exhibiting none of the complex cognitive faculties that had been claimed for him, and the case has been considered a cautionary tale for animal behaviourists ever since. This rather perverse conclusion ignores the fact, however, that Hans was actually demonstrating a fantastically keen ability to read the attitudes and behaviours of those around him, an ability far exceeding that of the trained human scientists conducting the experiments. In fact, Hans was so good at this that even when Pfungst had discovered his secret, and intentionally tried to suppress his own cues, Hans was still able to ascertain the correct answers (Rosenthal, in Pfungst p. xii). The anthropomorphic attitude shared by Hans’ enthusiasts and detractors

9 For brief discussions of both Hans and Pfungst, see Budiansky (1998, pp. xxx–xxxv) and Griffin (1992, pp. 24–26). 10 “Experienced educators” declared his development to be equivalent to that of a human child aged about 13 or 14 (Pfungst 1965, p. 24). 11 Pfungst actually constructed an elaborate instrument to amplify the questioner’s head movements and measure their respiration (Rosenthal, in Pfungst, p. xii).

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alike blinded them to his truly impressive talents. Hans was ‘clever’, after his own fashion, and the error had been to characterise his abilities in terms of human faculties. The objections to anthropomorphism which argue that it demeans either human or animal suggest, then, that significant differences between the two are being ignored. Jacques Derrida, the philosopher who, above all others, has sought to highlight diversity and heterogeneity, has suggested that flouting such differences amounts to “blinding oneself to so much contrary evidence”, and is, in fact, just “too asinine” (bête) (Derrida 2002, p. 398). Anthropomorphism, it seems, is a disservice both to man and to beast, and an affront to true scientific or philosophical thought. There have been two main responses to these attacks on anthropomorphism. First, it has been argued that discussion of animals will inevitably involve anthropomorphism, and that it is therefore not something about which we should complain too loudly. Interestingly, Kennedy himself has emphasised this point. He suggests that anthropomorphic thinking is “built into us”, and that we could not abandon it even if we wanted to: It is dinned into us culturally from earliest childhood. It has presumably also been ‘pre-programmed’ into our hereditary make-up by natural selection, perhaps because it proved to be useful for predicting and controlling the behaviour of animals. (1992, p. 5)12

Stephen Budiansky too suggests that anthropomorphism is a hardwired, evolved trait, arguing that Natural selection may have favoured our tendency to anthropomorphize . . . Being good at thinking “what would I do in his position” can help us calculate what our rivals may be up to and outsmart them . . . (O)ur tendency to anthropomorphize the animals we hunt may have given us a huge advantage in anticipating their habits and their evasions. (1998, p. xviii).13

See also pp. 28–32. Kennedy and Budiansky get themselves into something of a pickle here. On the one hand they are both inclined to suggest that the predisposition to anthropomorphize is ‘hardwired’ (genetically determined). Kennedy even calls it “human nature” (p. 155). On the other, though, they are both of the opinion that we should try our damnedest to transcend this decidedly unscientific inclination (see Kennedy pp. 160–68 and especially Budiansky pp. 192–94). They are rather vague as to precisely how we might engage in this literally superhuman overcoming, however, a point that the primatologist Frans de Waal delights in pointing out (de Waal 2001, p. 68). The contradiction here seems to arise from a clash between competing objectives. As serious-minded 12 13

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This explanation of the inevitability of anthropomorphism, and the evolutionary advantage that it bestows, suggests a second potential defence of the practice. The psychologist Gordon Burghardt has suggested that “anthropomorphism can be a pragmatic strategy” which “aids in formulating testable hypotheses” (Burghardt 1985, pp. 916, 905). Excessive rigour in avoiding potentially misleading terminology produces, he suggests, rigor mortis in attempts to devise pertinent research questions, and so investigators should feel perfectly free to ask, for instance, “ ‘Well, if I were a rat faced with this problem what would I do?’ or ‘Does that monkey want his rival to think there is a leopard in that tree?’ ” (p. 916).14 The data used in formulating working hypotheses should arise, he argues, from all manner of sources, including one’s own prior experience, anecdotes, imagining being the animal, insight from observing one’s maiden aunt, etc. (p. 917). Burghardt calls this “critical anthropomorphism”, and suggests that it is both useful and healthy for the purpose of speculative enquiry just so long as we remember that we are not seeking to verify postulated characteristics or attributes, but using this strategy as an exploratory, investigative tool (pp. 916–18). Variations on this pragmatic approach are recommended by the primatologist Frans de Waal (who calls it “heuristic anthropomorphism”)15 and the philosopher Daniel Dennett (who calls it “the intentional stance”; 1987).16 Even Kennedy and Budiansky, who call it “mock anthropomorphism” (Kennedy 1992, pp. 9, 158–59; Budiansky 1998, pp. 33–36), consider it a useful “metaphorical” mode of thinking about the development of particular species, or of the processes of evolution. All these writers issue stern warnings about the dangers of conflating anthropomorphic language with anthropomorphic thinking, however.17

scientists they find themselves obliged to provide a plausible (i.e. evolutionary) explanation for humankind’s evident and persistent anthropomorphism, but as card-carrying humanists they also feel bound to assert the possibility that humans can transcend this genetic programming (in order the better to pursue the goal of scientific objectivity, of course). Kennedy encapsulates this tension when he suggests that the anthropomorphic disease “cannot be cured completely” but, with the right treatment, “need not be fatal” (pp. 167, 160). 14 Burghardt’s rigor mortis quip (p. 908) is borrowed from Griffin (1981). 15 deWaal identifies three types of anthropomorphism: “animalcentric”, “anthropocentric” and “heuristic” (2001, pp. 74–78). See also pp. 37–42 and pp. 320–21. 16 See also Dennett 1996, pp. 35–54. 17 The psychologist Randall Lockwood has also discussed this constructive method, which he calls “applied anthropomorphism”, including the important safeguards that

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Both the objections to anthropomorphism (that it denigrates human and animal) and the responses they have elicited (that it is inevitable and informative) are superseded, or rather preceded, by a more fundamental question. This concern, which renders problematic the very notion of anthropomorphism, has been articulated most clearly by Heidegger. During his second lecture course on Nietzsche, Heidegger points out that, in order even to raise “suspicions” (Bedenken) concerning anthropomorphism, one must assume that one knows “ahead of time” what human beings are (Heidegger 1984, pp. 98–105).18 To be able to claim that a characterisation or representation of some being assigns to it a quality or state that is actually distinctively human, one would need to know just what it is about human beings, in themselves, that makes them the kind of being they are. But this question concerning the nature of human beings, the question “Wer ist der Mensch?” (who is man?), is one that, according to Heidegger, is rarely even properly asked, and has certainly not been answered satisfactorily. Without posing and answering this question, any suspicions concerning “humanization”, as well as all refutations tendered, do not even make sense. They amount, says Heidegger, to mere “idle talk” (Gerede), to “superficial and specious discussion” (p. 102).19 Heidegger is right to argue that the very claim that anthropomorphism is a potential danger for philosophical enquiry depends on far more than has been adequately established. This is true of anthropomorphism both as a term and as a concept, if we can separate the two for a moment. There can be no doubt that there are certainly cases when behaviour that might usefully be described as distinctively human is attributed

he believes must be set in place in order to prevent it from becoming an anthropomorphism of a less benign kind (Lockwood, 1989). Kant himself takes a similarly pragmatic approach, suggesting that it is beneficial to study nature (or the Author of the world) as if it had systematic and purposive unity (desires, volitions, understanding, etc.). This “subtler anthropomorphism” (subtilerer Anthropomorphismus), as he calls it, is a useful regulative principle of speculative reason, provided we remember that we are only applying an idea of such a being, not establishing knowledge of it (Kant 1964, A700–01/B728–29/pp. 568–69). See also his discussion of “symbolic anthropomorphism” (symbolischer Anthropomorphism) (1953, §57–58/pp. 123–28). On the varied uses to which self-consciously constructive anthropomorphism has been put, see Mitchell et al. (1996) and Daston and Mitman (2005). 18 Heidegger uses the terms Vermenschung and Vermenschlichung, translated by Krell as ‘humanization’ and ‘anthropomorphism’ respectively. 19 Interestingly, this does not stop Heidegger from levelling precisely this accusation of anthropomorphism at Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power. See Ansell-Pearson (1997, pp. 109–117).

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to animals. Rupert has already helped establish this much for us. It is unfortunate, however, that a special term—‘anthropomorphism’—has been appropriated to describe this practice. There is an asymmetry in place here that renders the expression prejudicial. What of those occasions when behaviour characteristic of bears is erroneously attributed to humans? Or to wolves? Or fish? How often does one encounter accusations of ‘arktomorphism’?20 The very fact that there are no equivalent terms for other species seems to imply that there is something rather special about humans, bursting as they are with a host of unique qualities that we can’t resist attributing to other beings. If occasion arises when it seems important to point out that bears don’t really indulge in the kinds of activities practiced by Rupert, it would perhaps be more informative, and less hasty, to draw attention to these errors in their specificity (“hold on, real bears don’t wear clothes!”), rather than unnecessarily entangling the revelation in loaded terminology. My suspicion is that simply by employing the term ‘anthropomorphism’ one has already adopted a set of unexamined assumptions about human beings, and begun to engage in Heidegger’s Gerede.21 The objection here is to more than just the terminology, however. We can, in fact, go further than Heidegger’s claim that we have not yet adequately answered (or even asked) the question ‘who is man?’. The designation of any quality or attribute as distinctively human, a designation required by the concept of anthropomorphism, is unwarranted, I would argue, even were we able, by means as yet unknown, to identify a characteristic or attribute as being uniquely human. It is dangerous and misleading to suppose that attributes or behaviours ‘belong’ to the creatures who display them, even in those cases where these creatures seem to be the only ones who exhibit a particular quality. This point is perhaps best demonstrated by an example of convergent evolution, the phenomenon whereby the same adaptation is evident in entirely unrelated species. Bats (order Chiroptera) are well known for their distinctive means of navigation: sonar, also known as ‘echolocation’.22 This ingenious ability is so different from anything experienced by humans 20 The Oxford English Dictionary includes an entry for ‘zoomorphic’, a general term intended to cover any and all cases in which “the form or nature of an animal” is attributed to something, although even this is principally used only of “a deity or superhuman being”. 21 See Plumwood (2001, p. 57). 22 For accessible accounts of bat sonar see Dawkins (1986, pp. 21–37), or, more concisely, Fenton (1998, pp. 27–32).

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that it has even prompted the philosopher Thomas Nagel to claim, notoriously, that it is literally impossible for us to imagine what it is like to be a bat (Nagel, 1974).23 But as Richard Dawkins has pointed out, sonar is by no means unique to bats. It has evolved, independently, in two different genera of birds, in dolphins and whales, and, to a lesser extent, in shrews, rats and seals. Even in bats it has (probably) evolved on two quite separate occasions, in two distinct groups (Dawkins, pp. 94–97).24 It was first suspected that bats could “see with their ears” in the eighteenth century (and confirmed in the 1930s), whilst it was not verified in dolphins until the 1950s (Fenton, pp. 24–27). This contingent historical fact, concerning the order in which different instances of sonar were discovered, gave scientists no reason to suggest, thankfully, that dolphins are ‘chiropteromorphic’. That a trait has been identified in only one class of creatures thus far is no guarantee that it is unique to that class of creatures, be they bears, bats, or life forms more alien still.25 The fact that, to date, the only creatures who have been observed exhibiting trait x are human beings, does not justify the claim that trait x is fundamentally and uniquely human, no matter how clever or intellectually advanced it is. It is not inconceivable that aliens might land tomorrow who engage in all kinds of activities and behaviours that had, up until that point, only appeared on earth when humans practised them. It would be a little perverse to claim, I think, that those extra-terrestrials were presumptively ‘anthropomorphic’ in their behaviour, especially if it subsequently transpired that they had evolved those same advanced traits and abilities long before the ancestors of Homo sapiens had thought to come down from the trees.26 Better,

23 For a range of replies see the sustained discussion in Dennett (1991, pp. 441–48), a rather quirky response by Hofstadter in Hofstadter and Dennett (1981, pp. 403–414), and a speculative but illuminating treatment by Dawkins (1986, pp. 33–36). 24 Dawkins also points out that, pace Nagel, even (blind) humans make some use of echoes in order to find their way about (p. 23). 25 For a lively discussion of the ‘how and why’ questions of convergent evolution, with intriguing examples, see Gould (1980), or Dawkins (1986, pp. 94–109). Both writers point out that, strictly speaking, even the most remarkable cases of convergent evolution do not result in absolutely (genetically) identical adaptations. But the convergence is frequently so close that only wilful pedantry would insist that the functions were different in each case. 26 Exactly when this ‘descent’ occurred has been a matter of intense debate. Gould manages to combine discussion of convergent evolution and the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence in his essay ‘SETI and the Wisdom of Casey Stengel’ (Gould 1985). Briefly, he suggests that the existence of the former (on earth) makes the latter (elsewhere) a possibility.

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at this stage at least, to recognise and identify the quality in its own right, and to leave as an open or empirical question its manifestation (or not) in diverse beings.27 Anthropomorphism, both as term and concept, imprudently starts with the human, even though the whole question of the nature of the human has yet to be determined. Anthropomorphism as a notion is, in short, anthropocentric, in a particular sense. This variety of anthropocentrism is not one that necessarily implies human superiority. We need not understand the various species—the mollusc, the bat, the bear, the dolphin—as existing in some kind of hierarchy, at whose summit humanity sits. But by invoking anthropomorphism as a term, one is inevitably committed to thinking humanity first. By relying on anthropomorphism as a concept, one places the human foremost. The ‘centrism’ of which one is guilty is best considered, then, not in spatial terms, as a hierarchy, but in temporal terms, as a pre-eminence. Anthrôpos is here central not in the sense that it is higher, but in the sense that it is primary. Anthropocentrism is a kind of species narcissism, an obsessive love of self. Just as the narcissist is self-absorbed, selfcentred, so the anthropocentrist is species-centred (‘anthropo-centric’). Anthropocentrists, like Narcissus, have eyes only for themselves. This ‘first and foremost’ anthropocentrism, this species narcissism, which is evident far too often in philosophy and contemporary critical thinking,28 is the foundation on which the notion of anthropomorphism rests, and is in turn sustained by its continuing invocation. Those who believe in anthropomorphism, those who see it about them in the discourses of science and culture, whether they are the Kennedys and Budianskys who desire to eliminate it, or the DeWaals and Burghardts who see a need to preserve it, are, we might say, modern day anthropomorphites. These anthropomorphites see animals being transformed, being given human form. They believe that they see a transmutation, a metamorphosis, taking place: the Animal cast in the image of Man. With this belief, though, they maintain a faith in an originary distinction between Human and Animal. Like 27 Midgley develops this point more fully when she discusses the possibility of understanding moods and feelings in both human and nonhuman creatures (Midgley 1983, pp. 129–33). 28 It is characteristic, for instance, of a certain hasty phenomenology which inscribes too quickly a distinction between ‘humanity’ and ‘animality’. See Bataille (1989, pp. 17–25) or Heidegger (1995, pp. 176–273), whose work I discuss more fully elsewhere (Tyler 2005).

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their mediaeval forebears, their perspective on the world starts with the human. Appeal to the notion of anthropomorphism breezes over awkward questions concerning the nature of the human, or rather, it implicitly takes these questions to have been answered. It dashes on to examine animals afterward, in second place, as if humanity and animality were not conceptualised and constituted mutually and simultaneously. This ‘first and foremost’ anthropocentrism should never be our starting point. If, by relying on the notion of anthropomorphism, we preclude the possibility of recognising or discovering new kinds of human-animal continuity we are condemned to a particular kind of anthropocentrism which restricts what we can think both about human being and about the being of other animals.29 If, on the other hand, we suspend this assumption, this implicit and uncritical prior belief in human uniqueness, the very notion of anthropomorphism fails to make sense. Budiansky, a dedicated anthropomorphite, suggests that anthropomorphism betrays a “lack of imagination” on our part as we struggle to imagine what it would be like to be something else (1998, p. xvii). Truer to say, perhaps, that the very belief in anthropomorphism betrays a lack of imagination on the part of those so thoroughly wedded to the idea that they are, first and foremost, human. References Ansell-Pearson, Keith. 1997. Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition. London: Routledge. Baker, Steve. 1993. Picturing the Beast. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bataille, Georges. [1948] 1989. Theory of Religion. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone. Budiansky, Stephen. 1998. If A Lion Could Talk: How Animals Think. London: Phoenix. Burghardt, Gordon M. 1985. ‘Animal Awareness: Current Perceptions and Historical Perspective.’ American Psychologist 40 (8) (August): 905–19. Daston, Lorraine and Gregg Mitman, eds. 2005. Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia University Press.

29 This is not to say that a scientific or philosophical endeavour which adopts an investigative strategy that is broadly in line with what was called ‘critical’ or ‘heuristic’ anthropomorphism might not be productive or illuminating. Far from it: Lockwood lists a series of cases “where an anthropomorphic perspective has been helpful” (1989, pp. 52–55), and Dennett has explored in depth just how productive this approach can be (1987). Characterising this strategy as a form of “anthropomorphism” (Lockwood does, Dennett does not), however, is in danger of leading researchers and readers alike into adopting an anthropocentric perspective which is at odds with the possibility of keeping the question of human uniqueness open.

if h orses h ad h ands . . .

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Dawkins, Richard. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: Norton. Dennett, Daniel C. 1987. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press. ——. 1991. Consciousness Explained. London: Allen Lane/Penguin. ——. 1995. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. London: Allen Lane/Penguin. ——. 1996. Kinds of Mind. New York: Basic Books. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’. Translated by David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter): 367–418. de Waal, Frans. 2001. The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist. London: Allen Lane. Fenton, M. Brock. 1998. The Bat: Wings in the Night Sky. Shrewsbury: Swan Hill. Gaylin, Willard. 1990. Adam and Eve and Pinocchio: On Being and Becoming Human. New York: Viking/Penguin. Gould, Stephen. Jay. 1980. ‘Double Trouble.’ The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History. New York: Norton: 35–44. ——. 1985. ‘SETI and the Wisdom of Casey Stengel.’ The Flamingo’s Smile. New York: Norton: 403–13. Griffin, Donald R. 1981. The Question of Animal Awareness: Evolutionary Continuity of Mental Experience. 2nd Edition. New York: Rockefeller University Press. ——. 1992. Animal Minds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, Martin. [1937] 1984. Nietzsche Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Translated by David Farrell Krell. New York: HarperSanFrancisco. Heidegger, Martin. [1929–30] 1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Herbermann, C.G. et al., eds, 1907–14. ‘Anthropomorphism, Anthropomorphites.’ Catholic Encylopedia, 558–59. London: Caxton. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/ 01558c.htm (accessed 25 March 2008). Hofstadter, Douglas R. and Daniel C. Dennett. 1981. The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul. Brighton: Harvester. Holtsmark, E.B. 1994. ‘Critiques of “Proto-Guru” Xenophanes, a Precursor to Plato: Xenophanes Fragments 11–12. The Daily Iowan (February 22). Hume, David. [1779] 1977. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. New York: Hafter/ Macmillan. Kant, Immanuel. [1783] 1953. Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics that will be able to present itself as a Science. Translated by Peter. G. Lucas. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ——. [1781/1787] 1964. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith [1929, revised 1933]. London: MacMillan. Kennedy, John S. 1992. The New Anthropomorphism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewes, G.H. 1860. Sea-side Studies at Ilfracombe, Tenby, the Scilly Isles, and Jersey. Edinburgh & London: Blackwood. Lockwood, Randall. 1989. ‘Anthropomorphism is Not a Four-Letter Word.’ In Perceptions of Animals in American Culture. Edited by R.J. Hoage, 41–56. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Midgley, Mary. 1983. ‘What is Anthropomorphism?’ Animals and Why They Matter. Athens: University of Georgia Press: 125–33. Mitchell, Robert W., Nicholas S. Thompson and H. Lyn Miles. 1996. Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes and Animals. New York: State University of New York Press. Nagel, Thomas. 1974. ‘What Is It Like To Be a Bat?’ Philosophical Review 83: 435–50. Pfungst, Oskar. [1911] 1965. Clever Hans (The Horse of Mr von Osten): A Contribution to Experimental Animal and Human Psychology. Edited by Robert Rosenthal. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

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Plumwood, Val. 2001. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge. Russell, Bertrand. 1927. An Outline of Philosophy. London: George Allen & Unwin. Tyler, Tom. 2005. ‘Like Water in Water’. Journal for Cultural Research 9 (3) ( July): 265–79. Xenophanes. 1992. Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments. A Text and Translation with a Commentary. Translated by J.H. Lesher. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. http://dictionary.oed.com/ (accessed 25 March 2008).

CHAPTER TWO

MAGIC IS AFOOT: HOOF MARKS, PAW PRINTS AND THE PROBLEM OF WRITING WILDLY Pamela Banting We were latecomers in a well-established process that had gone on for fifty million years. The four-legged carnivores and their prey had long since learned that an animal, watched long enough, gradually dissolved into signs. It left the marks that came to represent it: footprints, urine, secretions, feces, molted antlers, scratchings and rubbings, gnawed stems, bones, feathers, beds, diggings, nests, tracks, and bits of fur as well as an immense range of sounds and smells unavailable to us. —Paul Shepard, The Others, p. 24 Good writing is ‘wild’ language. —Gary Snyder, ‘Language Goes Two Ways’, p. 130

Poststructuralist thought developed two intriguing yet seemingly contradictory notions about textuality. First, from the work of Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and numerous other theorists we drew the notion that the term ‘text’ can be extended to other media beyond the covers of the book. Film, music videos, photographs, fashion shows, and body building, to name just a familiar few, were declared texts, readable using methods not so dissimilar from those associated with reading poetry or fiction. The second poststructuralist theorem about textuality was that there is nothing outside the text, which is usually interpreted as meaning that we have no access to the real per se but only to its representations. Just as signs are not the things themselves—the map is not the territory—texts do not refer outside or beyond themselves to the world at large. Texts refer to other texts: textuality is intrinsically intertextual. One cannot read ‘through’ a text to the world: that is simply the illusion of realism. That is, even as I glance up from my computer screen and look out the window to the Rocky Mountains in the distance, my mind involuntarily (even violently against my will)

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jerks to the traditions of the sublime and the picturesque, vaguely remembered lessons about tectonic plate movements from a course on Earth and Planetary Sciences, tidbits of mountaineering history, the mountain photographs of Byron Harmon, swivelling racks of postcards, fragments of memories from hikes I have taken, and so on. The very window in my study comes into play, framing my response as aesthetic; it too is part of my momentary construction of ‘mountain.’ In other words, we are surrounded by texts, which implies that the universe is readable, but paradoxically, according to the same poststructuralists, it is in the very act of reading these texts that we find ourselves caught in a textual loop or Möbius strip from which we can never escape to the world ‘outside.’1 Our debt to poststructuralist theories of textuality therefore includes the corollary that the ‘natural’ world is not one. That is, the natural world is not the binary opposite of culture or civilization. It is not a place unmarked by human signs and indications. Some go so far as to claim that the ‘natural’ world is no less socially constructed than an urban environment or even a film for that matter. In his essay ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’ William Cronon summarizes the idea of the social construction of wilderness. He writes: Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it [wilderness] is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. (1996, p. 69)

Interpretations of Derrida’s comment that there is nothing outside the text are frequently misleading. What Derrida meant in that oft-quoted sentence is cogently summarized by Alex Callinicos, in his obituary of Derrida: Derrida’s most famous saying must be understood in this context. It was translated into English (rather misleadingly) as, “There is nothing outside the text”. In fact, Derrida wasn’t, like some ultra-idealist, reducing everything to language (in the French original he actually wrote “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”—“There is no outside-text”). Rather he was saying that once you see language as a constant movement of differences in which there is no stable resting point, you can no longer appeal to reality as a refuge independent of language. Everything acquires the instability and ambiguity that Derrida claimed to be inherent in language. (Callinicos 2004) 1

hoof marks, paw prints and the problem of writing wildly 29 It is not just tamed, landscaped or designated recreational spaces that are socially constructed: even the wildest places on earth are subject to social constructions. The very idea of wilderness is itself a template placed over the land. Think for instance of how Canada’s Arctic, which until fairly recently signified to Europeans and non-aboriginal Canadians barren wastes and frigid wilderness, is increasingly coming to signify rapid climate change and even warm temperatures. However, many writers who depict the natural world throw a monkey wrench (or perhaps a Conibear or leg-hold trap) into the poststructuralist conundrum that everything is always already textual. Such writers tend to reinforce or even radically extend that dictum, but they are just as likely to deconstruct it. Even if our ideas of nature and wilderness are as culturally conditioned as those pertaining to any other system, nevertheless nature preceded us, exceeds us and, if our present wasteful and profligate practices are not changed quickly, may also succeed us. From an environmental standpoint, nothing exceeds like success. With or without us and our sociocultural constructions, nature, such writers inform us, is always already textual and will remain so long after we humans extinguish ourselves. In his article ‘Lost for Words? Gadamer and Benjamin on the Nature of Language and the “Language” of Nature,’ philosopher Mick Smith states that It is often, precisely, a thing’s ‘materiality’ (in the sense of its tangibility) that is expressed and communicated to other things, the rock that falls on your head, the force of the river’s currents against your legs. (2001, p. 64)

American poet Gary Snyder has suggested that the growth rings of a tree, the meanders of a river, geological strata, and other such elements of nature are “tawny grammars” (1990, p. 76) which can be read.2 Snyder objects strenuously, as do I, to the notion that the human species is alone in its use of language. He writes: “But they [animals] do communicate extensively, and by call systems we are just beginning to grasp” (p. 17). Animals’ lives are vocal, textual and significant in the sense that they are rich in signs. We are not the only creatures who can read and make sense of cougar tracks, bear or coyote scat,

2 Snyder borrows this term from Henry David Thoreau, who translated it from the Spanish term grammatica parda. It refers to the kind of wild and dusky knowledge humans used to learn from nature during childhood.

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the “clock, clock, clock” of ravens, or indications that the weather is about to change.3 A consideration of river meanders, bee dances and grizzly semiotics illumines the prominent anthropocentric bias latent within the ostensibly posthumanist, poststructuralist project insofar as it boldly declares that nature is not the real but is always already cultural and textual.4 While it is without doubt true, as my previous illustrations attest, that we construct nature through our various cultural lenses, it was after all nature which taught us to read and write in the first place. For one thing, the human brain evolved from the brains of our primate and earlier mammalian ancestors. Moreover, as Paul Shepard has argued, what we call culture and oppose to nature was built through protohuman interaction with and mimesis of the survival techniques and cultures of animals and birds. Shepard links tracking animals with the development of humans’ sense of narrative: The human mind came into existence tracking, which for us creates a land of named places and fosters narration, the tale of adventure . . . The unexpected turns in the epic quest have their origin in traces of the wonder of things, itself the object of our tracking mentality. (1996, pp. 25–26)5

3 Not only can wild animals read the behaviours of other wilderness creatures but a recent study at the University of Calgary reveals that they also have the ability to read human behaviours. That is, like humans, more-than-human animals also use popular hiking trails in the Rocky Mountain parks, trails which after all were in many instances built over old animal trails. A multi-year study using cameras placed along such trails demonstrates that the animals tend to make themselves scarce when nature-loving humans invade the area on summer weekends. “It seems that they know that when Friday night rolls around, it’s time to disappear, and on Monday morning they’re back,” according to Mike Quinn, co-supervisor of the project (Semmens 2005, p. 6). 4 Val Plumwood calls this the culture-reductionist project (2006, p. 143). 5 Likewise, in her essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, novelist Ursula LeGuin suggests that hunting and gathering, direct engagement with animals and plants, and the need to recount our excellent adventures with them taught us how to tell stories. Her playful and witty feminist analysis critiques the dominance of the hunting tale: So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn’t any good if he isn’t in it (1996, p. 152). She recasts the novel instead as a gathering story, with an overall shape resembling a sack, bag, purse, or medicine bundle.

hoof marks, paw prints and the problem of writing wildly 31 Or, as Snyder remarks in his essay ‘Language Goes Two Ways’: Each of the four thousand or so languages of the world models reality in its own way, with patterns and syntaxes that were not devised by anyone. Languages were not the intellectual inventions of archaic schoolteachers, but are naturally evolved wild systems whose complexity eludes the descriptive attempts of the rational mind. (2000, p. 127)

Like Shepard and Snyder, philosopher David Abram contends that: Writing, like human language, is engendered not only within the human community but between the human community and the animate landscape, born of the interplay and contact between the human and the more-than-human world. . . . These letters I print across the page, the scratches and scrawls you now focus upon, trailing off across the white surface, are hardly different from the footprints of prey left in the snow. We read these traces with organs honed over millennia by our tribal ancestors, moving instinctively from one track to the next, picking up the trail afresh whenever it leaves off, hunting the meaning, which would be the meeting with the Other. (1997, pp. 95–96)

Considered from much broader, more inclusive, ecological notions both of what constitutes the social realm and of textuality, ‘meaning’ is not simply the semantic, symbolic, cognitive, and solitary function to which we habitually reduce it. In Western cultures, generally speaking we tend to think of meaning as, at best, a sudden and unexpected insight, a modest and brief epiphanic storm set off in our foreheads by, for example, a passage of particularly well-written text, or, if we are feeling expansively full of ourselves, we may claim that meaning consists of a meeting of minds between reader and author. Contrast the beard-stroking “aaaah” or “a-ha” in academia with the condition of being awe-struck when encountering the Other in the flesh, whether that Other be human or more-than-human, and especially when she or he is the latter. Even given that the world is always already textual, it does not logically follow that therefore we cannot access the ‘real.’ It may simply indicate that the real is everywhere criss-crossed with text like animal tracks over freshly fallen snow. Contrary to the pervasive notion that there is nothing beyond the text, the real (or the beyond) is textual. We are not forever one or more dimensions removed from the real by virtue of human textualization or the multiple screens of historic, aesthetic and cultural representation. The textual is the real. Moreover, if we wish to claim that nature is always already socially constructed, then it would seem only fair and just to incorporate into our notion

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of that sociality our companion beings on the planet—the birds who taught us how to nest, the bees who taught us sweetness, the moose and bears who taught us how to track and read sign—and to interpolate how animals in many ways made us human—and textual—in the first place. As Shepard writes, “Humans tracked into a new world of double meaning, based on an amplified relationship to plants and animals”. (1996, p. 22) Let us now turn to the work of two Western-Canadian writers—Andy Russell and Sid Marty—who have spent much of their lives outside and who write out of prolonged personal interaction with both human and more-than-human creatures and a deep awareness of nature’s own semiotics. Natural historian, documentary filmmaker, environmentalist, and creative nonfiction writer the late Andy Russell (1915–2005) often figures the workings of nature in textual terms. His realistic wild animal story ‘Sage,’ about a female grizzly and her male cub Sage, published in his book Adventures with Wild Animals, offers a particularly good example for analysis, presenting as it does a condensed biography of a grizzly family.6 Russell borrows some of his anecdotes about the early years of the female grizzly from an old trapper named Bill who “saw more in a casual glance than most men would in a month, and he understood the smallest sign” (1991, p. 14). When Bill examines a kill site, “What had occurred, what bear was involved and every detail of the incident was as clear as newsprint to him” (p. 17). As a former guide and outfitter, Russell himself is adept at ‘reading sign.’ He writes: Trailing him [Sage] was like reading a book written in a unique kind of script, revealing and totally fascinating. Although we rarely saw him, he taught us much about grizzlies in a way that was matchless. (p. 36)

6 The realistic wild animal story was pioneered in Canada and became a very popular subgenre in both Canada and the United States just prior to and at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to Ralph Lutts, The wild animal story combined elements of nature writing and animal fiction. Traditionally, nature essays about animals emphasized more or less detached scientific observations of animals or the author’s emotional responses to them. Earlier forms of animal stories tended to be fictional accounts in which the animals were little more than humans in furry or feathery coats, whose narrative role was to instruct and morally elevate the reader. . . . In the realistic wild animal story, however, the animals ‘live for their own ends,’ rather than for human ends. The stories emphasized the perspective of the animal itself. . . . Although the accounts are presented in story form and employ fictional devices, the authors assert that their tales are factual and represent accurate natural history (Lutts 1998, pp. 1–2).

hoof marks, paw prints and the problem of writing wildly 33 Russell often, even typically, incorporates such signs as hoof marks, paw prints, broken twigs, deer beds, and his readings of them into his narratives. That is, he consciously foregrounds these kinds of signs as intertexts to his narrative in a way that would be considered reflexive if the marks, signs and inscriptions of other animals were considered textual. In ‘Sage,’ for example, Russell simultaneously tells the story and incorporates the story of the origins of the story. In fact, he erases his own authorship insofar as he figures his writing simply as a reading, a reading of signs left by animals during two sequences of events: Once I found a place where he [Sage] had surprised and killed a beaver among some aspens by a pond. All that was left was a slight smear of blood and a few tufts of fur on a skiff of snow. Another day, trailing his big paw marks through an early fall of snow, I read the story of how he had taken a snowshoe hare. Going into the wind, he had obviously seen the animal crouched in its hide in a tuft of slough grass along the edge of a swamp. There was no apparent shift of stride or attempt to stalk it—he just walked up to the hare, and plucked the mesmerized animal from its bed with no more effort or fuss than he would use to pick a mouthful of berries. (pp. 35–36)

In addition to such sources as the anecdotes of fellow guides, hunters and trappers, as well as his own extensive first-hand observations of events, Russell derives whole sections of his narratives from evidence written in the snow, mud or sand, which, expert tracker that he is, he decodes and relays for his readers. In other places in his work he fills in the blanks in a narrative with clues derived from, for instance, his dogs, Kip and Seppi, often figuring their information in what one might quite properly call semiotic terms. Describing his relationship with his dog Seppi, for instance, Russell acknowledges the epistemological exchanges the two enjoyed: I trained him, and he schooled me in many things associated with the world of nature. His superlative nose told me much that the sharpest eyes could not see. . . . He would pace ahead of me reading the scent, the hair standing up on his shoulders, and we would trail the bear through fiercely difficult places and conditions. Thus I was able to study movements and habits of the grizzly where the sign would have been almost invisible without the dog. (p. 35)

Russell also credits his sources, co-signing his narrative along with his various animal partners and informants. In his work Andy Russell also describes animal vocalizations in what might be called anthropomorphic terms. A great horned owl, he writes

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in the story ‘Sage,’ “hooted its question to the night” (p. 18). In ‘The King Elk’ Russell describes how “The whole flat [valley] was alive with the moving shapes of the great deer [elk], and the night musical with their conversational squeals” (p. 46). In ‘Kleo’ a young cougar, whose amorous advances upon a female are abruptly terminated by a larger rival, is bested and bloodied. Hours later, Russell writes, Kleo was still seething and boiling, a very angry cougar—so furious, in fact, that he was talking to himself. He continued the soliloquy as he moved down the opposite side of the ridge, his waving tail signalling his rage. (pp. 143–44)

Some animals can be called either by mimicking their vocalizations oneself or with mechanical calls. In ‘The King Elk’ Russell recounts how, at the request of a client—a wildlife filmmaker—for some spectacle in the scene in front of them, he knew there was a good chance of blowing the whole herd out of sight by calling in a second bull, but thinking it was worth the risk, I took out my call. Pulling in a chestful of mountain air, I cut loose with a challenge. Instantly King swung around to face us, and pointing his nose directly at us, he let out a short bugle that sounded deceptively like an immature bull. (p. 68)

Not only is Russell’s “challenge” answered directly but moreover it contains a note of subterfuge as King is a mature bull elk, not a juvenile. Of course, it would be easy to dismiss out of hand Russell’s intimations of animal rhetorics—an owl’s interrogative hoots, elk’s conversational squeals and “wild music,” a cougar “talking” to himself, a bull elk masking his age and strength by imitating the call of a younger male—as poetic license or anthropomorphism, the writer simply applying metaphors of human language use to animals the same way voiceover narration for television documentaries typically compares animal lives to traditional, heterosexual North American or European human nuclear families (dad as the defender and breadwinner, mom as a stayat-home nurturer; see Crowther 1997). Passages like these in nature writing and environmental nonfiction are routinely ignored or written off. For the most part, anthropomorphism is dangerously reductive and ought to be avoided. There is also a very long and problematic tradition of referring to nature as a book, and an equally long metonymic chain of signifiers which has devolved therefrom. But is the notion of nature’s book only yet another inherited cultural cliché, simply a residual metaphor for bridging the gap between the guide’s world

hoof marks, paw prints and the problem of writing wildly 35 and that of the reader in the Lazy-Boy recliner?7 I would argue that Russell’s diction points to actual phenomena which need to be taken into account in developing an environmentally responsible literary criticism or, to use Snyder’s term, a rhetoric of ecological relationship (Snyder 1990, p. 68). In addition, Russell’s comparison of tracking to reading a newspaper or book should be taken seriously and not automatically dismissed as mere stylistic ornament.8 Furthermore, he himself is careful not to sentimentalize the notion of the textuality of animals’ lives. The best illustration of his resistance to sentimentality may be found in his realistic wild animal story ‘The Friendly Owl,’ also collected in Adventures with Wild Animals, in which he recounts an anecdote about the owl who lived with the Russell family. He speculates Perhaps exposure to the written word triggered some kind of desire to amuse himself or whoever happened to be watching, but he learned to ‘read.’ He would jump down on a newspaper page and closely trace the letters across the columns with his beak in a way that was hilarious. (pp. 167–68)

Note that I am not arguing that Andy Russell does not draw upon his inherited cultural repertoire in some of the metaphors he deploys. His figuration of some individual animals as monarchs (particularly prime elk and the largest of grizzlies, so-called ‘trophy animals’ in short) traffics in metaphors which were not uncommon for the era, the 1960s, in which he began to write and publish his first books. They are the conventional metaphors one may find in any sportsmen’s magazine. What I am arguing here is that to choose to read passages about animal signification solely as conceits or metaphors is a deliberately premature generalization, a hasty foreclosure and a logical reduction reflective of our own poor listening skills and general poverty of experience with the natural world. It is also deliberately to ignore, override, reduce, or even

7 Gary Snyder refers to the metaphor of nature as a book—the idea that creatures and creation are the signifiers pointing irrevocably to a Creator as transcendental signified and origin—as pernicious (1990, p. 69). I agree with him to that extent, but I think that the evidence for the textuality of nature, understood in its broadest sense, is overwhelming. 8 Sid Marty uses similar diction when he evokes animal significations, sometimes comically, other times more seriously, always colourfully. For example, a flock of crows pursues a red-tailed hawk “like fishwives nagging the butcher’s boy” (1995, p. 141). His only company one day consisted of “whiskey jacks, scolding me for trespassing as they hunted for cones among the limber pine” (p. 171). A ruffed grouse clucks “its scandalized protest” (p. 172).

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ridicule the voice and experience of a writer who spent most of his life outdoors, was a well-respected naturalist with several honorary doctorates for his work and whose expertise in reading sign probably exceeds that of most literary critics (including the writer of this essay). In Switchbacks: True Stories from the Canadian Rockies Sid Marty—poet, singer/songwriter, and author of several books of creative nonfiction—writes that he views it as his job as a writer to act as a voice for nature, a role contiguous, I might add, with that of his former job as a national park warden. He writes: I am here to be the voice of the inchoate, in a word; I am here to listen to the mountains. I need to be alone sometimes to hear what they have to tell me. (1999, p. 13)

Note first of all that Marty does not present himself as speaking on behalf of a mute nature which cannot speak for itself. Clearly if nature did not in some sense have its own significations, he would not be able to ‘hear’ the mountains either. What he purports to do is to listen to the mountains and retransmit their incipient messages to those of us who cannot or do not wish to hear them or who are outside range most of the time. Christopher Manes’s article ‘Nature and Silence’ is helpful in this context. Manes contends that Nature is silent in our culture (and in literate societies generally) in the sense that the status of being a speaking subject is jealously guarded as an exclusively human prerogative. . . . It is as if we had compressed the entire buzzing, howling, gurgling biosphere into the narrow vocabulary of epistemology . . . (1996, p. 15)9

For Marty, as for Manes, signification and subjectivity cut across the great divide of the human/non-human, and listening can play a pivotal role in “restoring us to the humbler status of Homo sapiens: one species among millions of other beautiful, terrible, fascinating—and signifying—forms” (Manes 1996, p. 26).10

9 Similarly, in his article ‘Fabricating Nature: A Critique of the Social Construction of Nature,’ David W. Kidner describes the ‘epistemic fallacy’ as the view that “statements about being can be reduced to or analyzed in terms of statements about knowledge” (quoted in Kidner 2000, p. 343). 10 Sid Marty is not the only writer who accords the natural world a voice. Ecofeminist critic Greta Gaard writes that “Listening to the voice of nature has been widely suggested as one means of reconnecting humans with nature” (1998, pp. 232–33). She sees this concept running through the work of various Native American women writers as well as the work of non-native writers such as Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver.

hoof marks, paw prints and the problem of writing wildly 37 As auditor, interpreter and amanuensis, Marty can serve as a voice for the inchoate not because nature is outside signification but because his previous job as a park warden took him into such prolonged, daily proximity with the natural world that the mountains have inscribed themselves upon all of his senses, his muscles and bones, and his memory. In his aptly titled essay ‘Porters of the Great Signs,’ Marty describes his arrival at pioneer trail-maker Lawrence Grassi’s cabin: As I stared at the circle of mountains again from the porch of Grassi’s cabin, I felt the old joy of greeting combined with a powerful rush of unrestrained animal spirits. (1999, p. 90)

The recognition scene, which engenders in him joy and a surge of unnamed corporeal feelings (or perhaps I should say mammalian energy) is stirred by his encounter not, in this instance, with another human or even a non-human animal, but a landform and a place. His body is wild: nature speaks or calls out to it, and he feels the need to reply.11 As he writes in the opening pages of his book Leaning on the Wind: Under the Spell of the Great Chinook, If the land has a voice, the [Baby] Boomers have not heard it yet. If, in these pages, I can sometimes hit the notes that echo and harmonize with that sustaining voice, I will be satisfied. (1995, p. 12)

In ‘The Old Trolls of Lake O’Hara’ Marty evokes the very moment when that lake inscribed itself indelibly upon his consciousness. Humbled by the beauty of the place, he writes, The forest here was the kingdom of shadows, and I imagined whatever creatures lived within it were staring out on the lake, like spirits at the service of these gods. I wondered what purpose a raw young mortal might serve in this mountain splendour. Then a trout, a large one, jumped where the shadows of spruce trees turned the water to pools of mercury: at the top of its liquid arc it seemed suspended between air and water. Perhaps it was the quicker eye of youth made it so, but I think Lake O’Hara imprinted itself on my brain at that moment. (1999, p. 34)

11

Recalling his childhood in Redcliff and Medicine Hat, Alberta, Marty writes: The river washed me clean and the prairie wind was my towel. . . . I learned in childhood what every prairie creature knows: it is the coulee, the creek bottom, the river valley that offer the only shelter from the freezing winds of winter and the hot winds of summer. (1995, p. 83).

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The leap of a fish imprints the place upon Marty.12 Following in the tradition of encounters with the sublime and its attendant ‘sublimation’ of the ego, Marty, humbled in the face of those particular mountains, becomes simply “a raw young mortal” in the company and service of the gods, along with the other creatures living there.13 Not only have Marty’s body, senses, mind, and memory been imprinted by specific places but over the years his canvas rucksack too has become a sort of palimpsest, scored outside and in by weather, river water, mice, squirrels, porcupines, bears, fresh elk liver, the blood of an injured friend, the angles of books, and his mandolin. The artifact has been marked and marred by the natural. The rucksack functions in the book as a sort of synecdoche for the author’s body, the marks representing his experiences. Out of this weathering, erosion and inscription, out of the short preface ‘Rucksack,’ tumbles the rest of the book as Marty recreates the events associated with the rucksack’s visible snags, tears, blood stains, and bulges. Just as Russell’s reading of signs along the trail fills in gaps in his narratives, so too Marty’s narratives stream from his reading of visual marks and material signs. Like Russell, Marty does not privilege cultural over natural signs: signs are signs as far as he is concerned, animal, vegetable or mineral (unless they are trail markers that resemble crosses, weigh two hundred pounds each, and have to be carried on his back up a mountain, as he relates in ‘Porters of the Great Signs’). While the activity and trope of reading are foregrounded in many texts, in both Russell and Marty references to reading or to signs and signification go beyond puncturing the realist illusion and gesturing toward the artifice of the text to something even more interesting. Frequently in these two western-Canadian writers’ nonfiction, reading points to a co-constitution of the text by the writer and other animals, or by writer and environment. In Russell and Marty, their sense of their own subjectivity is flexed, reflexed and refracted not only by the raced, classed and gendered Other but by Others in the broader, more 12 On a personal note, in my own experience I have found that nothing marks a place in my memory like the sighting of a wild animal—the place where we saw the young grizzlies, the avenue of poplars where we often see mountain bluebirds, the rise where we saw three moose, the trail where I met a black bear, the stretch of highway where a cougar crossed in front of my car. 13 Poet Tim Lilburn has written extensively about the loss or surrender of one’s name in encounters with the natural world. In Living in the World As If It Were Home, he writes “contemplative looking involves a slendering of self ” (1999, p. 17).

hoof marks, paw prints and the problem of writing wildly 39 inclusive and much more radical sense of the animal Other and even of place itself. With regard to place, as environmental philosopher Christopher J. Preston remarks, geography does not just affect what we choose to observe about the world; it plays a more subtle, constitutive role in shaping the constructions of the world on which we bestow the honorific ‘knowledge’. (2000, p. 215)

He continues: “only by pressing the idea that humans are not just embodied, but embodied in particular and distinctive environments can epistemology be naturalized to its fullest extent” (p. 217). For instance, one cannot help but wonder in what ways not just epistemology but Derrida’s philosophy of the animal may have been different had he lived not in Paris but in Banff or Waterton, Alberta, Canada, or somewhere else in grizzly country. Would he have philosophized on grizzly bears instead of his cat? I think of his essay ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’ (2002) in which, naked, he muses on his cat having followed him into the bathroom. By way of contrast, think of Sid Marty coming home after his day’s work to his warden’s cabin in Jasper National Park and finding a black bear standing on his hind legs in front of the white fridge. As Marty writes “It is amazing, really, how wild and scary a mere black bear looks, standing on your kitchen floor while outlined against a home appliance” (1999, p. 172). Thinking the animal, I would suggest, depends very much on whether or not that animal can or cannot, may or may not, eat you alive—not just whether it might see you naked in your bathroom. In his article ‘Hunting, Tracking and Reading’ J. Edward Chamberlin states that “Tracking as a form of reading has long had currency, but always with a primitive cast” (2001, p. 70).14 He argues instead that The complex balancing of the letter and the spirit of a text—or of a sign and its meaning (which may include the motive of its maker)—which we identify with reading practices that developed from classical through to medieval to renaissance Europe was flourishing in a very sophisticated form in the intellectual dynamics of ancient tracking in indigenous societies around the world. (p. 69)

Although in Chamberlin’s summary below of Louis Liebenberg’s book The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science the figure of the tracker

14 I would like to thank former graduate student Jeff Petersen for bringing this article to my attention.

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is human, I would suggest that we can read the quotation equally well with a non-human tracker in mind. The passage, although somewhat lengthy, is key to my argument: Simple or systematic tracking, as he [Liebenberg] describes it, involves taking information from animal signs in order to determine what an animal was doing and where it was going: following the tracks, where possible; finding them, when necessary. Even in its more systematic form, this mode of tracking does not go beyond evidence into opinion; but trackers must, of course, know undisturbed terrain in order to ‘read’ disturbances, and this requires what Liebenberg describes as “intermittent attention, a constant refocussing between minute detail of the track and the whole pattern of the environment.” Memory is crucial, since the tracker must be able to recall a wide range of knowledge both significant and metasignificant in order to place the signs in the appropriate semiotic context. But the key is attention to detail. In fact, this kind of tracking highlights a point often made about reading written texts: one must carefully read what’s on the lines before one can read between or behind them. I suggest tracking also often involves the recognition of what might be called style and genre, for each animal has a style—predator or scavenger, individual or herd, young and old, male or female, in different seasons; and each animal may work in what for want of better terms might be called lyric, dramatic and narrative modes. (2001, p. 77)

I would add that not only were our human ancestors ‘literate’ 30,000 years ago in the sense that they could read and interpret tracks and other signs recorded in the natural world but other animals could do the very same thing, often with more reliable results than those obtained by our ancient relatives or ourselves today. While the dangers of literal interpretations of texts are rehearsed daily in English literature classes, those of always reading metaphorically—specifically, of leaping completely over the literal meaning of signs to some transcendental signified—have been far less criticized but are no less real. I would contend that it is just as risky summarily to dismiss or arrogantly to overlook the reading and writing practices of the wild as it is to fail to read novels or poetry accurately. One of the tasks remaining in the ongoing assimilation of poststructuralist thought is to interrogate some of its European content in terms of other geographies, in North American, Canadian, WesternCanadian, even Albertan terms. Why not start from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, on the prairies or in the boreal forest? In this essay I have examined aspects of the textuality of nature in the work of two environmental writers from Alberta—Andy Russell and Sid Marty—in order to adduce the texts of the natural world to a general

hoof marks, paw prints and the problem of writing wildly 41 science of signs, and to begin the process of examining how including animal calls, tracks and other forms of bio-, zoo- or eco-semiotics in our notion of text might reconfigure our notions of signature, event and habitat, as well as those of subjectivity, voice, writing, author and authority, setting, metaphor, and meaning. There has been considerable quarrel with the idea of the social construction of nature, mostly by humanists who do not wish to surrender the view that meaning is exclusively man-made. However, Val Plumwood writes, As animal studies are increasingly showing, culture as learned forms of adaptation and forms of life, is also found in other species, animals particularly, and is not exclusive to the human. If the term ‘culture’ is used more broadly, in the fashion of anthropology, as meaning the sum total of a group’s knowledge and practice in all spheres, there is even less case for confining it to the human. (2006, p. 122)

The whole idea of the social construction of nature needs to be rethought in relation to the animal Others who precede and exceed us, in some respects, in sign-making and reading practices. How many of us who read for a living—as professors do—would be capable of reading for our life, as wild animals do on a daily basis? I would hazard the claim that the ability to read for one’s life is the very definition of wildness. Such accepted poststructuralist notions as text and intertext are radically refreshed when one includes within them signs and texts from the more-than-human world. In this regard it is worth recalling that Barthes formulated the very notion of the text (as opposed to what he calls the ‘work’) one day while walking in a valley. He writes: The reader of the Text may be compared to someone at a loose end . . .; this passably empty subject strolls—it is what happened to the author of these lines, then it was that he had a vivid idea of the Text—on the side of a valley, a oued flowing down below . . .; what he perceives is multiple, irreducible, coming from a disconnected, heterogeneous variety of substances and perspectives: lights, colours, vegetation, heat, air, slender explosions of noises, scant cries of birds, children’s voices from over on the other side, passages, gestures, clothes of inhabitants near or far away. (1977, p. 159)

Writers such as Sid Marty and Andy Russell who have lived their whole lives in close proximity to wild creatures have a major contribution to make both to our literary inheritance and to poststructuralist thought. Frequently in contemporary Canadian literary criticism, unless a text performs a kind of overt postmodern acrobatics on the page imitative of the way Superman leaps from tall building to tall building in a cityscape,

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it is either ignored or denigrated as some kind of hairy throwback to a realist aesthetic and world view. Environmental nonfiction in particular is generally ignored by literary critics, partly, I suspect, because despite all our rhetoric around deconstruction and de-centering a significant number of postmodernist and poststructuralist critics still read from an essentially humanist position. On the one hand, the texts of Russell and Marty are subtly rather than blatantly self-reflexive in the sense usually associated with postmodern prose and, on the other hand, they are so radical as to challenge and stretch the limits of those same aesthetics and critical methodologies. Russell incorporates his interpretations of hoof marks, paw prints and canine olfactory inferences into his stories of encounters with wild animals. Marty deploys self-mockery and parody to undermine the imperial humanist subject, and an expansive trans-species sense of ‘voice’ to uproot some of the extended colonial metaphors which continue to condition and skew our relationships with our respective locales and with animals. In Russell’s and Marty’s texts, as in the rest of the natural and material world, a sense of the magic inherent in wild encounter is afoot. Maybe after all it is not human tool use, consciousness, reason, spirit, language, or syntax—not our speech, our handwriting or our opposable thumbs—which separate us from other animals but rather our footprints which link us with them.15

15 I would like to thank the organizers of the following conferences and speakers’ series for the opportunity to test out earlier drafts and portions of this paper. A short version of the paper was first presented under the title ‘Wilderness Words: Tawny Grammars and Biosemiotics in the Work of Andy Russell and Sid Marty’ at the Wild Words Conference, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, October 19–23, 2005. Thanks to conference co-ordinators Harry Vandervlist, Clem Martini, Donna Coates, and George Melnyk. Thanks also to Gary Geddes, organizer of the Writing Home: Science, Literature and the Aesthetics of Place Conference, Green College, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, May 12–14, 2006. I am grateful also to Phil Hoffmann and the Apeiron Society for the Practice of Philosophy, Calgary, who invited me to give a guest lecture as part of their Questions of Nature and Philosophy Series. A short version of the penultimate draft was presented at the fourth biannual meeting of the Society for Science, Literature and the Arts, ‘Close Encounters: Science, Literature, Art,’ at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, June 13–16, 2006. In particular I wish to thank Manuela Rossini, Programme Chair, for the opportunity not only to present to the SLSA but to meet so many other researchers in the field of Animal Studies.

hoof marks, paw prints and the problem of writing wildly 43 References Abram, David. 1997. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-ThanHuman World. New York: Vintage-Random House. Barthes, Roland. 1977. ‘From Work to Text.’ Image-Music-Text. Selected and trans. Stephen Heath. Glasgow: Fontana-Collins: 155–64. Callinicos, Alex. 2004. ‘Obituary: The Infinite Search.’ Socialist Review. http://www .socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9101 (accessed June 14, 2007). Chamberlin, J. Edward. 2001. ‘Hunting, Tracking and Reading.’ Literacy, Narrative and Culture. Ed. Jens Brockmeier, David R. Olson, Min Wang. London: Curzon: 67–85. Cronon, William. 1996. ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.’ Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Ed. William Cronon. New York and London: W.W. Norton: 69–90. Crowther, Barbara. 1997. ‘Viewing What Comes Naturally: A Feminist Approach to Television Natural History.’ Women’s Studies International Forum 20 (2): 289–300. Derrida, Jacques. 2002 (1997). ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).’ Trans. David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28 (2): 367–418. Gaard, Greta. 1998. ‘Hiking Without a Map: Reflections on Teaching Ecofeminist Literary Criticism.’ Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy. Ed. Greta Gaard and Patrick D. Murphy. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press: 224–47. Kidner, David W. 2000. ‘Fabricating Nature: A Critique of the Social Construction of Nature.’ Environmental Ethics 22 (4): 339–57. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1996. ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.’ The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press: 149–54. Lilburn, Tim. 1999. Living In The World As If It Were Home. Dunvegan, ON: Cormorant. Lutts, Ralph H., ed. 1998. The Wild Animal Story. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Macauley, David. 1993. ‘A Few Foot Notes on Walking.’ Trumpeter 10 (1). http:// trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/issue/view/46 (accessed June 14, 2007). Manes, Christopher. 1996. ‘Nature and Silence.’ The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press: 15–29. Marty, Sid. 1995. Leaning on the Wind: Under the Spell of the Great Chinook. Toronto: Harper Collins. ——. 1999. Switchbacks: True Stories from the Canadian Rockies. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Plumwood, Val. 2006. ‘The Concept of a Cultural Landscape: Nature, Culture and Agency in the Land.’ Ethics & the Environment 11 (2): 115–50. Preston, Christopher J. 2000. ‘Environment and Belief: The Importance of Place in the Construction of Knowledge.’ Ethics and the Environment 4 (2): 211–18. Russell, Andy. 1991 (1977). Adventures with Wild Animals. Illustrations Harry Savage. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Semmens, Grady. 2005. ‘Who Owns the Forest?’ On Campus 3 (1). September 16: 6–7. http://www.ucalgary.ca/oncampus/weekly/sept16–05/forest.html (accessed June 14, 2007). Shepard, Paul. 1996. The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. Washington, DC/Covelo, CA: Island Press/Shearwater Books.

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Smith, Mick. 2001. ‘Lost for Words? Gadamer and Benjamin on the Nature of Language and the “Language” of Nature.’ Environmental Values 10: 59–75. Snyder, Gary. 1990. The Practice of the Wild: Essays by Gary Snyder. San Francisco: North Point. ——. 2000. ‘Language Goes Two Ways.’ The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. Ed. Laurence Coupe. Foreword by Jonathan Bate. London and New York: Routledge: 127–31.

PART TWO

MEDIATE ENCOUNTERS The essays in this section address the consequences of the fact that, for many people today, the vast majority of their encounters with animals are not immediate but rather mediated. Animals are rarely present to individuals but are instead represented, for instance in television programs and movies, in digital games and entertainment, in novels, newspapers and magazines, in art and design, in radio broadcasts and on websites, and in countless other media. At the same time, the animals that people do encounter in the flesh are frequently unrecognized as animals, having been slaughtered, processed, and renamed as ‘veal’ or ‘pork’ or ‘beef ’, that is as ‘meat’. The authors of the two essays in this section are in agreement that the consequence of these different forms of mediation, through contemporary mass media and through language, is a distancing of humans from other animals. This estrangement makes it all the easier for humans to dominate, subject and mistreat individual animals and indeed entire species. First, in her essay ‘Post-Meateating’, Carol J. Adams explores the changing ways in which humans have encountered animals as we have moved from a modern to a postmodern sensibility. Whereas, during the modern period, there was an acknowledgement of both the difficulty and importance of understanding the experiences of real animals, in today’s postmodern environment there seems to be an unreflective preoccupation only with their cultural representations. Individuals are more likely to concern themselves with the ‘neglect’ of Winnie the Pooh stuffed toys than with any real bears or tigers or kangaroos, whilst David Lynch’s artistic depiction of a cow, ‘Eat My Fear’, is likely to cause greater offence than the fate of any real cows on which the work is based. Adams outlines diverse manifestations of this shift from the modern to the postmodern, from factories based on slaughterhouses to farms modeled on factories, from animals conceived as machines to digital toys treated as pets, from ‘pollo-vegetarians’ who eat meat to vegans who wear fake fur, from campaigns for animal rights to PETA’s ironic use of supermodels and celebrities. Adams does not suggest that life was better for animals during the modern period. In fact,

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notwithstanding the many changes, significant continuities persist in the human subordination and exploitation of other creatures. Despite its potential to challenge and reformulate how we think about individuals and their experiences, postmodernism ultimately provides no great relief for nonhuman animals. Randy Malamud, meanwhile, examines in his essay ‘Americans Do Weird Things with Animals’, the anthropocentric, imperialist prejudices exhibited in the peculiar procedures adopted by many cultural practitioners and their audiences. Beginning with the dead chicken parts used by Pinar Yolacan to construct blouses, he moves to the elephants made to appear in Richard Avedon’s famous photograph of the model Dovima, and in fashion shoots promoting Chanel suits and Manolo Blahnik shoes. In each of these instances, he argues, the animals are chopped, chained, and cut up—sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively—as a means of asserting human dominance and supremacy. Siegfried & Roy’s stage show on the Las Vegas strip, featuring their ‘White Tigers of Nevada’, provided a kitsch, symbolic battle ground for humanity’s ongoing conquest of nature. Similarly, despite explicit messages of empathy and commonality, Disney films such as Antz and Finding Nemo prompted audiences to casual, incongruous acts of consumption and control. Opportunities for genuine anthrozoological understanding continue to be missed, as humans persistently ask the wrong questions. Malamud closes the essay by providing his own, unpresumptuous answer to that most enduring of animal questions in popular culture, ‘why did the chicken cross the road?’. (TT)

CHAPTER THREE

POST-MEATEATING Carol J. Adams The Postmodern Cultural Referent In the early 1990s, activism in the United States against the methods used to catch tuna fishes resulted in the Dolphin Protection Consumer Information Act (DCPIA). The DCPIA was aimed at protecting dolphins so that they would no longer be captured and die as a result of the nets used. National Public Radio carried a report when Congress passed the DCPIA. As a follow up to the story, Linda Wertheimer, then one of the hosts of National Public Radio’s news program ‘All Things Considered,’ conducted an interview. Did she conduct it with an activist against the nets? A marine biologist? A trainer of dolphins in an aquarium? A tuna fish sandwich eater? None of these. She interviewed the creators of the award-winning play ‘Greater Tuna,’ and asked them what their fictional characters from the town of Tuna, Texas would say about the news. Or consider this: during the 1990s, a hotel in Washington took lamb chops off their menu whenever the late puppeteer extraordinaire Sheri Lewis and her puppet ‘Lamb Chop’ were visiting. In each of these instances the issue, which might be seen as the impact of human beings on other animal beings—tuna fishes, dolphins, and lambs—becomes instead an impact on cultural beings—actors and puppets—who become the focus of attention. Sensibilities about something cultural are being evoked, not sensibilities about something ostensibly ‘natural.’ The referent is cultural; actual dolphins, tuna fishes and lambs are eclipsed by the cultural. In The Sexual Politics of Meat I proposed that nonhuman animals used for meat are absent referents (Adams 2000). Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the nonhuman animal whose place the meat takes. The “absent referent” is that which separates the meat eater from the other animal and that animal from the end product. Consider the New Yorker cartoon by Robert Mankoff called ‘The Birth of a Vegetarian’:

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a man is sitting in front of a slab of meat, looking startled because the sound “moo” is emanating from the steak. Of course, the nonhuman’s death is not in our face; only the postmortem state of a nonhuman’s corpse is. We do not see our meat eating as contact with another animal because it has been renamed as contact with food. This is the function of the absent referent: to keep our ‘meat’ separated from any idea that she or he was once a nonhuman animal, to keep the moo away from the meat, to keep something from being seen as having been someone. And if our references to animals in culture refer back to something else that is also cultural—the residents of Greater Tuna, or Lamb Chop—then they do not have to be about someone else, that is, they do not ever have to land on nonhuman animals themselves. This point was made in the greatly entertaining but evanescent Pooh furor of 1998. ‘Free the Pooh Five’ demanded a chorus of British newspapers in early 1998. A British Member of Parliament had visited the New York Public Library where the original stuffed animals of Christopher Milne, those that inspired the stories about Winnie the Pooh, reside. It seems that M.P. Gwyneth Dunwoody detected that Pooh, Tigger, Eeyore, Owl and Kanga were unhappy there, as they were ‘incarcerated’ in a glass case (in fact, a climate and light-controlled, bulletproof glass case). She insisted they needed to return to Britain. The New York Times jumped into the fray with a jocularity equal to the British papers (Barry 1998). The Times carried photos of the stuffed animals on the front page. As a Times reporter once observed to me, a newspaper writer must know how to write well about nothing. But what provided some fun headlines for the newspapers and unbearable puns for the politicians confirmed the existence of the age of the postmodern referent. Everyone knew that no stuffed bear was actually unhappy, no stuffed kangaroo was actually homesick. The ‘sympathy’ evoked in the media stories damages real animals in several ways: in what it says about people who express care (such as those activists who worked to bring about protection of dolphins) and the ones for whom the care is expressed (dolphins). By substituting a cultural referent for the absent referent it displaces any sympathy we might have for the real suffering of real animals. Secondly, its humor undercuts our (meager) store of concern for animals. Finally, consumers of the images and stories may consider that they have had an animal encounter when they encountered solely cultural beings. During the year 2000, New York City hosted more than 500 life-sized fiberglass cows that had been decorated by artists. They were placed around the five boroughs of New York in a ‘CowParade.’ Among

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Fig. 3.1 David Lynch’s ‘Eat My Fear’ from the New York City Cow Parade (2000)

fanciful and colorful cows like a Rockette cow, a surfing cow, and a taxi cow, was filmmaker David Lynch’s ‘Eat My Fear’ cow. With forks and knives stuck into the cow’s behind, the bloody disemboweled cow was displayed for only a couple of hours. During that time at least one small child, upon seeing it, started crying. Then it was banished to a warehouse and put under wraps (Friend 2000). While meat eating requires violence, the absent referent functions to put the violence under wraps: there is no ‘cow’ whom we have to think about, there is no butchering, no feelings, and no fear, just the end product. (And David Lynch is correct: people eat animals’ fear. Nonhumans who experience fear before death release adrenalin which can leave soft, mushy spots in their ‘meat,’ making their flesh tougher.) In the case of the banished cow, it was a cultural product—David Lynch’s artistic representation of a slaughtered cow—that was offensive and removed.1

1 In the United States, since the nineteenth century, slaughterhouses themselves have been banished from the marketplace through zoning laws that forbade their operation

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In modernism there was something to be alienated from. Modern humans were sensible of their distance from the ‘real.’ Indeed, there was a nostalgic sense that there existed a real to be alienated from. In postmodernism there is nothing to be alienated from. There is only the system. We can never know the structure itself that we are in. Ontologically, the cultural becomes the ‘real.’ There isn’t anything more real to someone than Lamb Chop the puppet or the play ‘Greater Tuna’ or Pooh Bear. Such a change in perspective is a devastating one for it enables a further distancing from the fates of individual nonhuman animal beings. There is a great divide between those who love lambs and do not eat lamb chops and those who love Sheri Lewis’s Lamb Chop. What we have now is an extreme distancing from the experience of most nonhuman animals at the same time that people express and act upon deep longings for connections with others, including nonhuman animals and the rest of ‘nature’—whatever that is. As the appearance of the ‘actual’ displaces the actual experience of nonhuman animals as the referent for our relationships with other animals, feelings of alienation and separation for humans, as well as a deep longing for connection, intensify.2 Frederic Jameson observes in Postmodernism: In modernism . . . some residual zones of ‘nature’ or ‘being,’ of the old, the older, the archaic, still subsist; culture can still do something to that nature and work at transforming that ‘referent.’ Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which ‘culture’ has become a veritable ‘second nature.’ ( Jameson 1992, p. ix)

Jameson argues that in general we have passed from the modern period, with nature still a referent, to a postmodern period with culture as the referent. His insight suggests that in a postmodern time animals too will more frequently have cultural referents. The response to the Lynch-ed cow was not that David Lynch should become an animal rights activist (he admits that he eats meat), but that he should return to filmmaking—return to more acceptable cultural productions (Friend 2000, pp. 62–63). in certain sections of a city. In the first test of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1873 this zoning was upheld. See my discussion of ‘Slaughterhouse Cases’ in Adams (2000, p. 209, note 23). 2 On this point see Berger (1980).

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During the modern period actual animals were the referent, albeit often absent. Now our culture’s concept of animals is the referent. The cultural referent is stuffed animals, puppets, fiberglass cows, and plays. In response to the Pooh furor, an ironic reminder of cultural consumption at its most literal was invoked. A New York Times editorial reminded its readers of Maurice Sendak’s classic comment concerning great children’s books: few first editions exist because they have been eaten (‘Psychoanalyzing’ 1998). Modern vs Postmodern Animal Encounters If, as I suggest above, there has been a shift in relationship to animals, and what prevails now is a cultural concept of animals, such a shift should be evident in a variety of cultural manifestations. In this section I identify some of the areas in which this change can be perceived. The shifts from modern to postmodern approaches are often telegraphed through a chart of binaries. David Harvey, for instance, reproduces Ihab Hassan’s thirty-two binaries that show schematic differences between modernism and postmodernism: purpose/play, design/chance, hierarchy/anarchy, presence/absence, centring/dispersal, paradigm/syntagm, metaphor/metonymy, master code/idiolect, symptom/desire, paranoia/ schizophrenia, metaphysics/irony, determinancy/indeterminancy, et al. (Harvey 1997, p. 43; Hassan 1985, pp. 123–24). For Hassan and Harvey these are not solely polarizations. As Harvey explains, “the ‘real structure of feeling’ in both the modern and postmodern periods, lies in the manner in which these stylistic oppositions are synthesized.” (p. 42) Such an evocation of binaries that juxtaposes the modern with the late capitalist or postmodern can be helpful in demonstrating how human beings are encountering animal beings today. I discuss a selection of these binaries below (see table, p. 52). Factories Modeled on Slaughterhouses > Farms Modeled on Factories In The Sexual Politics of Meat I described how the division of labor on factory assembly lines owes its inception to Henry Ford’s visit to the disassembly lines of Chicago slaughterhouses (2000, pp. 63–64). Ford credited the idea of the assembly line to the fragmented activities of animal slaughtering: “The idea came in a general way from the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers use in dressing beef ” (Ford 1922, p. 81). One book on meat production, financed by a meat-packing

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Binaries

Modern

Postmodern

• transforms the referent of nature • animals are absent referents • factories modeled on slaughterhouses • farms owned by individuals • zoos • animals as machines • vivisection in universities • in vivo research • ‘pollo-vegetarians’ • viruses • animal rights • product liability

• transforms the referent of culture • ‘cultural beings’ are referents • farms modeled on factories • • • • • • • • •

factory farms owned by corporations conservation and p/reservation machines as animals biomedical research by corporations in vitro research mock meat prions animal rites product ‘libel-ity’

company, describes the process: “The slaughtered animals, suspended head downward from a moving chain, or conveyor, pass from workman to workman, each of whom performs some particular step in the process.” The authors proudly add: “So efficient has this procedure proved to be that it has been adopted by many other industries, as for example in the assembling of automobiles” (Hinman and Harris 1939, pp. 64–65). Although Ford reversed the outcome of the process of slaughtering in that a product is created rather than fragmented on the assembly line, he contributed at the same time to the larger fragmentation of the individual’s work and productivity. The dismemberment of the human body is not so much a construct of modern capitalism as modern capitalism is a construct built on dismemberment and fragmentation. As James Barrett observes, “Historians have deprived the [meat]packers of their rightful title of mass-production pioneers, for it was not Henry Ford but Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour who developed the assembly-line technique that continues to symbolize the rationalized organization of work” (Barrett 1987, p. 20). The introduction of the assembly line in the auto industry—called ‘Fordism’ by David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity—had a quick and unsettling effect on the workers. Standardization of work and separation from the final product became fundamental to the laborers’ experience. The result was to increase worker’s alienation from the product they produced. Automation severed workers from a sense of

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accomplishment through the fragmentation of their jobs. In Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Harry Braverman explains the initial results of the introduction of the assembly line: “Craftsmanship gave way to a repeated detail operation, and wage rates were standardized at uniform levels.” Working men left Ford in large numbers after the introduction of the assembly line. Braverman observes: “In this initial reaction to the assembly line we see the natural revulsion of the worker against the new kind of work.” (Braverman 1974, pp. 148–49). Ford dismembered the meaning of work, introducing productivity without the sense of being productive. Fragmentation of the human body in late capitalism allows the dismembered part to represent the whole. Fordism created mass consumers as well as mass producers, insuring a plentiful supply of consumers for, among other things, those slaughterhouse products. David Harvey’s Condition of Postmodernity traces the architectural changes from modern to postmodern, from a time when space was shaped for aesthetic purposes to a time when “timeless and ‘disinterested’ beauty” was an objective in itself (1997, p. 67). In the reversal of the reversal—from disassembly line to assembly line—factories provide the architectural template for the new production methods applied to nonhuman animals. The attitude advised for pig farmers—“Forget the pig is an animal,” but see him or her instead as “a machine in a factory” (Byrnes, quoted in Mason and Singer 1980, p. 1)—required an architecture of disinterest, of mass production, of factories. Architecture, which in many ways had failed to respond to the human shape, errs even more so with farmed animals. Thus, animals kept warehoused are crowded, unable to move or stretch. It is not surprising that they engage in antisocial behavior. The architectural change has enabled cannibalism. Rather than ameliorate the situation by changing the architecture, the response was to change the animal, for instance by removing the beaks of chickens and turkeys or the pigs’ tails. Harvey cites the analysis of ‘symbolic capital’ proposed by Bourdieu: product differentiation in urban design has become more and more important in the “pursuit of the consumption dollars of the rich.” Luxury goods manifest this symbolic capital, whose purpose is to conceal “the fact that it originates in ‘material’ forms of capital” (Harvey 1997, p. 77). Meat, once available only for the consumption of the rich in Europe during the early modern period, became ‘democratized’ in the United States during the nineteenth century—a food that was available to all classes. It became one of the commodities that lessened the

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injury of class. Drawing on Bourdieu, Harvey explains the function of symbolic capital: since “the most successful ideological effects are those which have no words, and ask no more than complicitous silence,” the production of symbolic capital serves ideological functions because the mechanisms through which it contributes “to the reproduction of the established order and the perpetuation of domination remain hidden” (pp. 78–79). Ideological effects are found too in the architecture of factory farms. They, too, required no more than a complicitous silence, enacted by the verbal silence of the nonhumans within and by the restriction on access to their inner spaces. Farms Owned By Individuals > Factory Farms Owned By Corporations After World War II this new way of ‘producing’ nonhuman animals for human consumption also meant a change for the individual farmers. Farmers become contract laborers who grow the nonhumans at the corporations’ behest, and the family farm disappears. This is a radical transformation: it changes the way some people can earn money; it changes the ‘countryside’ as huge farms appear and produce, among other things, immense piles of manure; it changes the relationship between farmer and farmed; and it changes the very lifecycles of the farmed animals, e.g. the early removal of calves from their mothers, the killing of male chicks who have no economic value to the farmer.3 Zoos > Conservation and P/reservation According to Randy Malamud, the zoo is a model of empire and also imperial confiscation. The zoo “is the analogue, in popular culture, to the colonialist text in literary culture” (1998, p. 58). Zoos present a restricted, imperialistic, supremacist view of the natural world. Zoos are cruel to the animal beings who reside there. They inflict pain. Zoos steal not only the physical animals but also “their more metaphysical essence and integrity” (p. 325). Zoos are not, despite their claims, mimetic of a larger macrocosm. Animal captivity therefore is harmful to the captive animal and to the human spectator. “People imprison animals, and pretend that they are bettering themselves by such actions” (p. 27). Zoos want us to misread them as they inculcate in us a spectatorship of voyeurism.

3 Susan Squier discusses these transformations in her essay ‘Fellow-Feeling’, in this volume.

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Under attack for the conditions of nonhumans under their care, zoos in the late twentieth century discovered a new raison d’etre besides exhibiting the otherness of the other animals: saving them. While failing to acknowledge that the existence of one’s species is of no relevance to an individual tiger or elephant, under the umbrella of preventing extinction zoos have become sites of preservation, ‘reservations’ for those whose otherness is deemed worthy of perpetuating for human spectatorship. This leads to incongruous alliances. For instance, the Dallas Zoo and Exxon Corporation together created a $4.5 million tiger exhibit and breeding facility. Called ‘Exxon Endangered Tiger Exhibit,’ it was funded by city bonds, a $765,000 grant from Exxon, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s ‘Save the Tiger Fund.’ The Exxon exhibit was planned to house as many as ten Sumatran and Indochinese tigers and to include a facility where tigers could be bred every four to five years. Also included would be air-conditioned indoor holding areas with sleeping shelves and skylights, an outdoor exercise yard and two maternity dens. Explaining why an oil company was undertaking this venture, Ed Ahnert, president of the Exxon Education Foundation and manager of contributions for Exxon Corp explained, “We are the company that puts a tiger in your tank.” A cultural tiger is concerned about ‘real’ tigers. Whether a tiger in tank or zoo, the idea of ‘tiger’, like the idea of ‘the wild’, is undergoing massive change. Since extinction does not matter to the individual (see Kappeler 1995), but to the group, a humanocentric concern is being imposed to create a unitary perspective. Further, the conditions of poverty, colonialism, and hunting that threaten the ‘tiger’ are not identified. The political context is not a referent, only the cultural; ‘the zoo’—whose existence is traced to the human need to reaffirm human superiority over the other animals—becomes the referent for (and saver of !) the tiger. The logical extension of this is that one day there will be just one or two animals of each species left—but they will be available to all of us, perhaps via the Internet. Whenever we want to ‘see’ an animal, we will just log in to the virtual zoo, or ‘pet’ store, or rain forest. Animals as Machines > Machines as Beasts Tom Regan’s scholarly attempt to claim consciousness and biography for animals, The Case for Animal Rights—a valuable effort at recognizing the individuality of nonhuman animals—is notable, for our purposes, for two things. First, it was practically dated, even before its appear-

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ance, by postmodernism’s replacement of the idea of the individual, autonomous subject with the idea of multiple selves and a fluid subject.4 Secondly, however, Regan’s attempt as a ‘modern’ project, of repudiating once and for all Descartes’ definition of animals as machines, was an important development. Others, especially Steve Wise, have ably followed in his footsteps (Wise 2001). While farmed animals become treated more and more like machines in factory farms when alive, the idea of machines as animals proliferates. I proposed earlier that one aspect of the postmodern relationship to the ‘cultural’ animal is reflected ontologically: there is only ‘the system.’ Ontologically, the virtual becomes the real and this is effectively demonstrated in the development of the virtual pet, a digital toy that is treated as a pet. The ‘Tamagotchi’ is one of the most well-known brands. One consumer describes the Tamagotchi: The object is to see how long you can get your tamagotchi to live and how well you care for it. Nothing complicated about it, which means no breeding, no nothing. With great care the tamagotchi can live 30 years (days). If you neglect it [it] might only live about 6–9 years (days). Its up to you how you want your tamagotchi to be. (Lisa “insane” 2005)

Another explains just how to keep your ‘pet’ alive: You feed the pet, care for it, clean up after it, and teach it to behave. The second model has a sensor on top that lets your pet interact with other version 2 pets to play or even mate to make the next generation of Tamagotchis. The third model is able to use codes [. . .] to give your pet gifts, special food treats, and toys. (Miss Kitty “Toy Diva” 2006)

Giga Farms and Giga Circuses have also appeared. The majority of the first round of virtual pets were sold to girls. Manufacturers—to tap into the boy market—decided to forget about pets that need to be nurtured and to market virtual pets that fight. Computer game play involving killing and blasting things fetishizes death in such a way as to remove the concept of death. But with virtual pets, ‘dying’ takes on another meaning: the playing is over. In order to understand the concept of meat eating, much less the ‘fact’ of it, you have to comprehend the dying involved. In the computer-mediated world of virtual pets death involves mere disposability and replace-ability. The mediated realm of the computer-influenced age involves never seeing the actual animal

4

See ‘Animal Rights > Animal Rites’, below.

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and yet experiencing the animal as virtual pet. Elaborate mourning procedures can occur when a virtual pet dies. Needless to say, however, a relationship with a virtual pet is not an encounter with an animal being. Vivisection > Biomedical Research, In Vivo > In Vitro Research ‘Vivisection’ sounds so quaint; ‘biomedical research’ has replaced it. The latter term works by association: biomedical research is research on animals. Where ‘vivisection’ sounds perhaps unsavory and invasive, ‘biomedical research’ sounds important and necessary. Thus, negative connotations accrue to those opposed to experimentation on animals: if one is not experimenting on animals one is not doing biomedical research. University research has spawned spin off for-profit companies. Research no longer focuses on how the nonhuman animal as an entity experiences something (in vivo research) but instead on how isolated animal parts experience being experimented upon (in vitro research). Ironically, the postmodern state has seen the proliferation of experimentation on nonhumans at the behest of the government at the same time that the possibilities for replacing such experimentation come into existence. The bureaucratic state has reinforced the use of the nonhuman through a Byzantine regulatory process that insures that questionable animal studies are performed instead of quicker, less expensive nonanimal ones. If relevant information from the experience of humans exists, it may be disregarded for questionable data from animals because of these regulations. Tests on nonhuman animals introduce variables that are not predictable and not necessarily reproducible.5 Yet, because they are required by regulations, they continue. Consider, for instance, one of the most popular nonhumans used for animal experimentation: rats. Rats cannot vomit toxins; humans can. Rodents are nose breathers; humans breathe through both the nose and the mouth, enabling us to ingest toxins simultaneously through both routes. Rats synthesize Vitamin C in their bodies; humans do not. Excess fat accumulates in rats’ livers; in humans it accumulates in the coronary arteries. Rats have no gall bladder; humans do. Animals are exposed to high doses of materials being tested; humans are exposed to low doses. Arsenic, to take one example, is not carcinogenic in rodents; 5 See, for instance, the infamous effects of thalidomide, taken by pregnant women in the 1950s and 1960s.

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it is in humans. Because of these and numerous other differences that Alix Fano enumerates, the toxic effects observed in rodents may be completely irrelevant to those observed in humans because the organs that are affected, the types of cancers that are produced, the way in which they metastasize, and the rates at which they manifest themselves, are vastly different. (Fano 1997, p. 53)

At the same time that the postmodern state requires use of nonhuman animals, technological advances have created alternative, non-animal methods, including “computerized modeling and predication systems . . ., genetically engineered cell lines, X-ray assays, batteries of human skin and tissue cultures, epidemiological studies of populations, and carefully controlled clinical trials.” (Fano 1997, p. 136). Most of these are fast, less costly, reproducible, and importantly, more accurate. Some companies have begun to use these alternatives. But regulations imposed by governmental bodies have created a double standard, requiring that non-animal methods be validated before they can be used, even though, as Fano explains, “it has never been scientifically shown that animal tests could be used to establish qualitative or quantitative carcinogenic risk for humans” (p. 69). Pollo-Vegetarians > Mock Meat A response that weakened the concept of vegetarianism was its modification through terms such as ‘pollo-vegetarian’ or ‘pesco-vegetarian.’ Individuals using such (mis)nomenclatures for themselves are actually omnivores who omit only dead four-legged beings or land animals from their diet. One might argue that the ‘pollo’s’ and the ‘pesco’s’ were hijacking vegetarianism back within a dominant modernist framework: the radical critique by vegetarianism of the consumption of dead bodies was eviscerated. Clearly, meat eaters who did not eat dead cows thought they could be classified as vegetarian because they did not eat ‘red meat.’ Chickens and fishes continued to be absent referents. In contrast to meat eaters who believed themselves to be vegetarians has been the appearance of vegetarians who eat ‘meat.’ Prior to its contemporary manifestation, the use of substitutes that resemble the texture of meat could be found in many cultures. Now, however, mock meat is much more widely available, giving a new meaning to ‘mock turtle soup.’ Chinese cuisine pioneered the use of flavored gluten as a meat substitute. Buddhist vegetarians could dine on sweet and sour ‘shrimp,’ Chinese ‘duck,’ and kung pao ‘chicken.’ Chinese vegetarian

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restaurants whose entire menu comprises meat substitutes can be found in major cities throughout the United States. Meanwhile, mock meat suppliers of ‘tofuturkey’, veggie ‘hot dogs’, veggie ‘burgers’ and even Canadian ‘bacon’ have made inroads into traditional supermarkets. Here, quotation marks allow for the substitution of a cultural referent for the absent referent without any harm befalling animals. Ersatz meat is meat without the animal. There is no absent referent. Rather than meat eaters believing themselves to be vegetarians (pesco or pollo), the postmodern period has allowed for vegetarians to eat ‘meat.’ Moreover, it means that meat eaters may be eating vegetarian meals without even knowing it.6 Thus, post-meateating. Does a meal still require an ending, a closure? The modernists’ ending was that a meal required meat. Perhaps, in fact, the idea of meat in a meal is a legacy of modernism. Postmodernism may liberate the absent referent from the meal without the consumer experiencing a perception of lack, of deprivation. The referent of tofuturkey can be unconsumed. Viruses and Antibodies > Prions Viruses, such as HIV, influenza, and Ebola are modern diseases. Though they may have been around for centuries, especially influenza, they were only ‘discovered’ during modern times. Viruses contain genetic material and require an animal host. A virus, by virtue of being a virus, infects cells. The metaphor for describing the working of a virus is invasion: When a virus successfully invades a cell, it inserts its own genes into the cell’s genome, and the viral genes seize control from the cell’s own genes. The cell’s internal machinery then begins producing what the viral genes demand instead of what the cell needs for itself. (Barry 2004, p. 100)

The influenza pandemic of the early twentieth-century and the threat of another one share a common source—birds. Indeed, “evidence now suggests that all pandemic influenza viruses—in fact all human and mammalian flu viruses in general—owe their origins to avian influenza” (Greger 2006, p. 13). The disease that represents postmodern times is so-called ‘mad cow disease’. This disease is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE). An encephalopathy is any degenerative illness of the brain; in this case the disease attacks the brain and gives a sponge-like consistency

6 See my maxim in Living Among Meateaters: “Nonvegetarians are perfectly happy eating a vegan meal, as long as they are not aware they are doing so.” (2009, p. 208)

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to it as the nerve cells are destroyed. It is a debilitating, fatal illness that afflicts many species. Like viruses, this disease jumps species. Unlike viruses, it is believed that the agent that causes mad cow disease—prions—has no genetic material. As with the avian flu virus, mad cow disease signals the return of the referent as the prions leap from cows to human beings causing Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the fatal human equivalent of mad cow disease. In 1984, Dr. Stanley B. Prusiner proposed that TSEs were caused by rogue proteins known as prions that are thought to be abnormal variants of the prion protein normally present on the surface of nerve cells . . . Prions lack the DNA and RNA that are the hereditary material of other transmissible agents. (Altman 1996)

Dr. Prusiner’s studies, for which he won the Nobel Prize, were at first “regarded as heretical because they invoked a bizarre concept that infections could be caused by an agent without genetic material” (Altman 1996). As Laura Beil put it, “to science, that’s a bit like announcing that after some research, it turns out that computers can crunch numbers perfectly fine without software” (Beil 1996). TSE’s appear invulnerable: cooking, canning, freezing, bleaching, and sterilizing cannot destroy them. They have been called “the smallest . . ., most lethal self-perpetuating biological entities in the world” (Greger 1996). It is difficult to ‘make science’ when a disease has no genetic material, a long incubation period, and cannot be precisely identified until after death. What makes it the representative postmodern disease is that it has no genetic materiality for it to refer back to (see also Adams 1997). Animal Rights > Animal Rites After an incredible flourishing in the 1970s, the animal rights movement has undergone some difficult times. First, many people seem concerned about animal welfare, but not quite as many are willing to go vegan or stop going to zoos. Secondly, because it has been best known as a ‘rights’ movement, anyone who does not feel ‘rights’ is the appropriate language because of its liberal assumptions (from environmentalists to postmodernists), disassociate themselves from the intent of the movement as well.7

7

Another way exists, as Josephine Donovan and I have sought to establish (2007).

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In the narrative that imposes cause and effect on radical movements, the animal rights movement is traced to Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975), which doesn’t actually advocate rights per se. More probably the awareness of the oppression of nonhumans that erupted in the 1970s was a result of a confluence of forces, including the extension of the anti-Vietnam war and anti-violence activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s to concern for nonhumans, the evolution of Earth Day from 1970 onward, and the extension of feminist insights to beings other than humans. The animal rights movement has the misfortune of articulating a modernist claim just as postmodernism absorbs and displaces modernist thinking. It appears dated, announcing in its activism—boycotts, placards, lobbying—its own anachronism. It appears absolutist and serious in a time when irony and self-deprecation prevail. It is seen as too serious, too literal, too preachy. Trying to get culture to get back to the referent ‘animal’ is seen as too boring, not playful. Peter Singer and Tom Regan, major theorists about nonhuman animals, are dismissed in a postmodern response that rejects their basic assumption that a modern, autonomous subject exists from which to extend his or her rights to nonhuman animals. For postmodernism, multiple, evolving selves exist, not a fixed unity. This appears to be what People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) knows. They don’t spend too much time in their public campaigns saying “care about the animals.” Instead, they shock. They use visual images but with cultural referents, not animals. They use supermodels. They use celebrities. They take any cultural idea that is circulating and twist it. Rather than producing for general consumption the ‘bleeding Jesus’ pictures, as one Catholic friend calls them, of damaged, injured animals, PETA puts on Mickey Mouse masks to protest animal experimentation. They’re ironic. ‘Got Beer?’ they ask in their attempt to point out that it is ‘safer’ to drink beer than milk, infuriating anti-drinking activists. ‘Got prostrate cancer?’ they asked when Rudi Guiliani—who indeed, did—was Mayor of New York City. (They were pointing out the connection between drinking milk and prostrate cancer.) PETA has recognized that the referent, animals, is gone. And they are trying to work with what is there, cultural consumption, by manipulating cultural images and issues. They are trying to get people to talk about veganism without having to address what has disappeared. It does not matter who they offend. In fact, the more the better. Tastelessness is newsworthy; nonhuman farmed animals are not.

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Fig. 3.2

PETA’s ‘Got Beer?’ campaign (2000)

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Fig. 3.3

PETA’s ‘Got Prostrate Cancer?’ campaign (2000)

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David Harvey suggests that another aspect of the condition of postmodernity is that because of “widespread insecurity in labour markets, in technological mixes, credit systems, and the like” a preoccupation with identity, with heritage, with entertainment has appeared (Harvey 1997, p. 87). We all carry around with us, according to Jencks, a “musee imaginaire in our minds” (cited in Harvey, p. 87). Animal rites become a postmodern project, in which members of the dominant culture claim identification with Native practices such as hunting while they continue to get their meals of dead animals from dominant practices such as factory farming or ‘organic’ farming. Animal rites as heritage or New Age expression—the use of eagle feathers, drumming with leather drums, et al.—supersedes animal rights. Animal rites might also entail the desire to affect the trappings of primitive cultures via scarification, tattoos, piercing, and following diets like the ‘Neanderthal’ diet and the ‘Caveman’ diet. Trying to recapture one’s primitive roots through body modification and false rituals that offer a ‘mystical experience’, from sweat lodges to hunting, becomes a cultural response to a cultural idea of the primitive. Similarly, the referent for faux fur is cultural. As Diana York Blaine observes, the insistence by producers and promoters of ‘faux fur’ that it is not ‘real’ seems strange, perhaps for a more postmodern reason than merely avoiding the politics of fur, especially when it’s bizarre in color or form. No animal bears fur like that, so it’s in effect ‘virtual fur,’ divorced from any living being. (Blaine 1998)

If, in modernism, there’s something to be alienated from, “postmodern faux fur has no relationship to an actual animal—so why wear it? Perhaps the engineered is now the Real” (Blaine 1998). Product Liability > Product ‘Libel-ity’ Commodification is a process that produces consumers as well as meat. If product liability was the concern of the modern reform movement, seeking to protect consumers from the product, product libel-ity is the postmodern response, designed to protect the product from consumer advocates. During modern times, advocates attempted to protect consumers from dangerously manufactured products. Ralph Nader’s famous Unsafe At Any Speed (1965), outlining car manufacturers’ reluctance to introduce safety features, could be said to have originated this time period. In postmodern times, product libel-ity predominates, whereby

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products are protected from the consumers, specifically from activists speaking out on behalf of consumers. In many cases the products being ‘protected’ are consumable dead animal bodies. In Great Britain, McDonald’s sued activists Helen Steel and David Morris in the infamous and protracted ‘McLibel’ case (‘McLibel Trial’, no date). In Texas, the National Cattleman’s Beef Association attempted to sue Oprah Winfrey and anti-meat eating activist Howard Lyman after Lyman had commented on Oprah’s show that ranchers were feeding dead cows to their herds (Lyman, no date). Product ‘libel-ity’ becomes the vehicle for corporations to protect the commodification of the product and of the consumer. No Particular Relief I am not claiming that the modern period was a ‘better’ time for nonhuman animals; it was not. Exploitation was their fate then, too. Nor do I see a break, some definitive moment when the modern ended, for I am not examining a linear process, but one with both continuities and discontinuities. In many instances, how the nonhumans are exploited remains the same—they are eaten, experimented upon, are the captive entertainment at circuses and zoos. What seems to be different is how humans receive this information. I quoted Harvey’s suggestion earlier that “the real ‘structure of feeling’ in both the modern and postmodern periods, lies in the manner in which these stylistic oppositions are synthesized” (Harvey 1997, p. 42). For instance, Hassan and Harvey identify a movement away from metaphysics toward irony. Such a movement enables the ‘ironizing’ of animals’ situation and of how humans encounter them. Those caring for animals face another layer of denial that they must break through: not that people do not care, but that people are bored by it. Thus, we are more likely to encounter the (absent) animal referent in the Business section of the New York Times than in the News section. For instance, before the Thanksgiving holiday, celebrated in the United States on the fourth Thursday of November, regular newspaper articles will feature the silly (the President ‘pardons’ one turkey) and the dead (how to cook the unpardoned ones). Meanwhile, in the Business section, the Patents column announced in 1997, ‘New techniques for raising and killing turkeys arrive just in time for Thanksgiving’ (Riordan 1997). Because patents have to be very specific in their description, the

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Times had to be very specific in explaining them and why they were needed. The patents were for the development of antibodies to counteract a hen’s unhappiness when her eggs are removed, to insure she will continue to lay more eggs; radiating the upper beak to cause it to fall off; a turkey call on a shotgun; and a suffocation process for killing turkeys by placing them in a chamber with carbon dioxide, argon, and little oxygen. The specificity of description of why the patents were needed was fascinating, touching on reproduction, the turkey’s role as producer, and the transformation of live into dead—all topics that require describing what happens to the absent referent: – Reproduction: though turkey hens “like to lay a clutch of eggs and then sit on them until they hatch,” the turkey farmer removes the eggs to hatch elsewhere. Yet, the Times acknowledges, the turkey hens have feelings: they are “upset” and “unhappy over the absence of their progeny.” – The turkey’s role as producer of his or her own flesh: because turkeys live “in close proximity”—recall that farm architecture has changed, enabling cannibalism8—the “tips of their beaks often are either cut off or cauterized to prevent the birds from injuring one another.” – During slaughtering, poultry workers must shackle a turkey’s legs, hanging the bird upside down so that her or his head is immersed in water. The bird is stunned by an electrical current passing through the water. We are told that for the turkeys, “Their wings are flapping and they’re very unhappy.” Then their throats are slit.

The newly registered patents were attempts to ameliorate the situation for the farmer and the consumer, not the “unhappy” turkey, who still faces loss of progeny, beak, and life. Just as the banning of the cow from the CowParade suggests a rather definite substantiality to the referent, so too does the acknowledgement of slaughter in the New York Times’ Business section. This is what complicates the postmodern response to activism on behalf of other animals. How does the absent referent become restored, made present? How is the very real animal body encountered? In contrast to activist efforts to undo reification, the postmodern cultural referent may only further objectify, and thus complicate, the attempt at restoration. Even if there were agreement that someone is there, who is it?

8 See ‘Factories Modeled on Slaughterhouses > Farms Modeled on Factories’, above.

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Playboar—the Pig Farmer’s Playboy offers one answer. Playboar’s function is to create a playful male identity. I was sent my first copy of Playboar shortly after the original 1990 publication of The Sexual Politics of Meat. At first Playboar seemed to me a dated—modern—example of sexist humor. Its cover announced this, as it featured an homage to the 1960’s movie version of Lolita. The movie advertisement for Lolita depicted heart-shaped sunglasses being worn by Lolita; with Playboar, a piglet wears heart-shaped sunglasses. In the many years of its existence, Playboar has felt the need to update itself only minimally. It did so with one aspect of its centerfold. I had described the centerfold that appeared in Playboar in The Sexual Politics of Meat (Adams 2000, pp. 50–51). At that time, I did not know that the image I was describing was from this magazine. I had encountered it in the pages of The Beast, a British animal activist magazine, in the early 1980s. Jim Mason had seen the image posted on a wall at the Iowa State Fair and snapped a photograph of it. The centerfold depicts a healthy sexual being posing near her drink. She wears bikini panties only and luxuriates on a large chair with her head rested seductively on an elegant lace doily. Her inviting drink with a twist of lemon awaits on the table. Her eyes are closed, and her facial expression beams pleasure, relaxation, enticement. She is touching her crotch in an attentive, masturbatory action. Anatomy of seduction: sex object, drink, inviting room, sexual activity. The formula is complete. But a woman does not beckon. A pig does. At the time that I first encountered this seductive pig she was called ‘Ursula Hamdress’, a clear reference to Ursula Andress, the buxom movie star of the 1960s. But in the copy of Playboar sent to me by an activist in the 1990s, this ‘Littermate of the Year’ had been renamed ‘Taffy Lovely.’ Sensing that some cultural referent had gone out of style, Playboar updated itself. But regarding the animals themselves, nothing had to be changed. In Chapter 3 of The Conditions of Postmodernity, David Harvey provides a discussion of the postmodern binaries referred to in part two of this essay. He observes “the evaporation of any sense of historical continuity and memory, and the rejection of meta-narratives” (p. 55). One of the manifestations of postmodernity is that, “The immediacy of events, the sensationalism of the spectacle (political, scientific, military, as well as those of entertainment), become the stuff of which consciousness is formed” (p. 54). Running parallel to the text in that chapter are several famous images of naked women, specifically Titian’s Venus d’Urbino, Manet’s Olympia (which reworked the ideas of Titian),

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Fig. 3.4

‘Ursula Hamdress’ from Playboar (reprinted in The Beast: The Magazine that Bites Back, 10 (Summer 1981), pp. 18–19)

Rauschenberg’s Persimmon, and an advertisement for Citizen Watches featuring a naked young woman. If he had encountered ‘Ursula’ or ‘Taffy’ in his research he might have included her as well for she, too, like Manet’s Olympia, is posed in a reworking of the ideas of Titian. The question to be asked of both of them is: are they masturbating? Those who manipulated the pig offer the answer that art historians initially hesitated to admit about the Venus d’Urbino: her genitalia are not being covered, they are being stimulated. The major difference between them is the gaze: Venus beholds us directly, but would, or could, the pig? Is the pig even alive? In a note to the paperback edition, at the end of that chapter, Harvey responds to what must have been some surprising criticisms. The illustrations used in this chapter have been criticized by some feminists of a postmodern persuasion. They were deliberately chosen because they allowed comparison across the supposed pre-modern, modern, and postmodern divides. The classical Titian nude is actively reworked in Manet’s modernist Olympia . . . All of the illustrations make use of a woman’s body to inscribe their particular message. The additional point I sought to make is that the subordination of women, one of many ‘troublesome contradictions’ in bourgeois Enlightenment practices, can expect no particular relief by appeal to postmodernism. (Harvey 1997, p. 65)

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As PETA itself has shown, using pictures of a woman’s body and working with Playboy magazine ensure a successful media campaign. So the question to be posed to the sexualized pig, following Harvey’s acknowledgement that the subordination of women can expect no particular relief by appeal to postmodernism, is this: does she reflect the situation of women or pigs or both? Recently I came upon Playboar for sale at the bookstore at one of the most upscale of Dallas’s upscale malls, where symbolic capital is their stock-in-trade. Playboar was placed immediately in front of the check-out counter. “Out of curiosity,” I said to the clerk, “I am wondering why are you carrying this?” “We can’t keep it in stock!” the man behind the counter responded. Playboar confirms Harvey’s claim that some things do not change and there are some things that postmodernism has not relieved. Clearly gendered, the pig is either drugged or dead to be posed in this position. Her eventual fate is represented there: dead, consumable female flesh. Which will prove harder to change, the menu with pig, cow, chicken and other flesh still central to it, or the subordination of women? It depends in part upon whether butchery truly animates an aspect of women’s consummability and whether women’s subordination creates the environment for the absent referent status of nonhumans (see Adams 2003). Playboar conveys a message to those injured by class, a message that meat eating once was able to sustain on its own: not only, “I can’t be wealthy, but I can eat meat”, but also, “I can’t be wealthy, but I can own a woman, I can eat meat, and I can enjoy the comic degradation of women and animals.”9 With the absent referent, we do not have to see meat eating as contact with a once-living animal because it has been renamed as contact with food. We do not have to think, “This is an encounter with an animal, an animal whom I required be violently killed and dismembered.” Whether or not that nonhuman can be experienced more fully because of the slippery nature of the subject as ushered in by postmodernism, it remains the case that whatever subject status nonhumans might gain from postmodernism, they have yet to gain it at the supper table. When I meet postmodern theorists whose work I value and we discuss the status of nonhuman animals something peculiar happens. I think

9 I explore these ideas of how racism, sexism, and classism are implicated in meat eating more extensively in The Sexual Politics of Meat (2000), especially pp. 36–49.

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that we are discussing the cultural referent when suddenly a defensive acknowledgement is made. I am not told, “I think the referent is even more slippery or culturally-mediated than you discuss in your book.” Instead I am informed, “You need to know, I’m not a vegetarian.” I am always surprised that they feel compelled to tell me this, as in those situations I usually follow a “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule.10 Sometimes, precisely which nonhumans the theorist consumes are identified (“I still eat fish,” “chicken,” etc). The autonomous, unitary human fades in the presence of postmodernism, except at a meal. At that time, there is only one mouth, one stomach, one tongue performing the act of feeding one body. If George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a representative modern novel, in both its theme and its depiction of a time when animals were owned by individual farmers, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park is perhaps the postmodern equivalent: animals are produced by science, especially the computer, and then computer graphics bring the animals to ‘life’ at the movies. In Animal Farm one of the first things the liberated pigs do is to throw away the implements of their oppression. In Jurassic Park, a meat-eater’s nightmare is depicted, as carnivorous dinosaurs attempt to do to people what people do to nonhuman animals, i.e. eat them. From a farm to a park, from politics to play, from animals representing the working laborers overthrowing the moneyed class, to the consumption of leisure and entertainment for that moneyed class. Interestingly, the individual who saves the humans from the nonhumans in Jurassic Park is the sole vegetarian in the movie. She does so not through battling the foe in hand to claw combat, but by breaking the computer’s password which enables certain doors to close and stop the carnivores. Ursula Nordstrom, the famous Harper and Row children’s editor, who worked with almost every luminary of children’s literature—Margaret Wise Brown, Maurice Sendak, and E.B. White among them—tells an interesting story. She was once offered a meal with a dead rabbit as the main course. She demurred, explaining “I publish rabbits” (Marcus 1998, p. xxxi). The referent was cultural. Not a break, not a dichotomy, but something continuous from Animal Farm onward remains in the

10 On the dynamics of discussions between vegetarians and meat eaters, see my Living Among Meat Eaters (2009), especially pp. 91–122.

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present. It is the difference between eating one’s childhood copy of a children’s classic and eating a rabbit or a cow.11 References Adams, Carol J. 1997. ‘ “Mad Cow Disease and the Animal Industrial Complex: An Ecofeminist Analysis, Organization and Environment, 10 (1) (March): 26–51. ——. 2000. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical. Tenth Anniversary Edition. New York: Continuum. ——. 2003. The Pornography of Meat. New York: Continuum. ——. 2009. Living Among Meat Eaters: The Vegetarian’s Survival Handbook. New York: Lantern. Barrett, James. 1987. Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s Packinghouse Workers, 1894–1922. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Barry, Dan. 1998. ‘Back Home to Pooh Corner? Forget It, New York Says.’ The New York Times (February 5): 1 and A20. Barry, John M. 2004. The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. New York: Viking. Beil, Laura. 1996. ‘What’s the Beef ? Unusual type of infectious agent is likely suspect in “mad cow” disease’. The Dallas Morning News. April 15: pp. 8D, 9D. Berger, John. 1980. ‘Why Look at Animals?’ In About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books. Blaine, Diana York. 1998. Letter, 8 February. Braverman, Harry. 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York and London: Monthly Review Press. Donovan, Josephine and Carol J. Adams. 2007. The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. Fano, Alix. 1997. Lethal Laws: Animal Testing, Human Health and Environmental Policy. London and New York: Zed Books/St. Martin’s Press. Ford, Henry. 1922. My Life and Work. New York: Doubleday/Garden City. Friend, Tad. 2000. ‘The Artistic Life: Kidnapped? A Painted Cow Goes Missing.’ ‘The Talk of the Town.’ The New Yorker (August 21 and 28): 62–63. Greger, Michael. 1996. ‘The Public Health Implications of Mad Cow Disease’. 32nd World Vegetarian Congress. http://www.ivu.org/congress/wvc96/madcow.html (accessed 11 September 2007). ——. 2006. Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching. New York: Lantern Books. Harvey, David. 1997. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Hassan, Ihab. 1985. ‘The Culture of Postmodernism.’ Theory, Culture, and Society, 2 (3): 119–32. Hinman, Robert B. and Robert B. Harris. 1939. The Story of Meat. Chicago: Swift & Co. Jameson, Fredric. 1992. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Kappeler, Susanne. 1995. ‘Speciesism, Racism, Nationalism . . . Or the Power of Scientific Subjectivity.’ In Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations. Edited by

Thanks to Tom Tyler and Randy Malamud for their careful reading of this essay and their valuable suggestions in improving it. For discussions that greatly improved my understanding of the phenomena I explore in this essay, I thank Diana Blaine and Jayne Loader. This essay is for them. 11

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Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, 320–352. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Lisa “insane”. 2005. ‘A Review on the Orginal Tamagotchi’. Amazon Customer Review. June 12. http://www.amazon.com/review/R11K6BZTYVAPIZ/ref=cm_cr_rdp_ perm (accessed 8 February 2008). Lyman, Howard (no date). Mad Cowboy. http://www.madcowboy.com/ (accessed 11 February 2008). Malamud, Randy. 1998. Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity. New York: New York University Press. Marcus, Leonard S., ed. 1998. Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrum. New York: HarperCollins. Mason, Jim and Peter Singer. 1980. Animal Factories. New York: Crown Publishers. ‘The McLibel Trial’ (no date). McSpotlight. http://www.mcspotlight.org/case/ (accessed 11 February 2008). Miss Kitty “Toy Diva”. 2006. ‘Tamagotchi 1, 2, and 3’. Amazon Customer Review. 22 June. http://www.amazon.com/review/R173PNY4320FJQ/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm (accessed 8 February 2008). Nader, Ralph. 1965. Unsafe At Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of The American Automobile. New York: Grossman. ‘Psychoanalyzing Winnie-the-Pooh,’ 1998. The New York Times, 6 February. Regan, Tom. 1983. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Riordan, Teresa. 1997. ‘Patents.’ The New York Times, 24 November, p. C2. Singer, Peter. 1975. Animal Liberation. New York: Random House. Wise, Steve. 2001. Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals. New York: Perseus.

CHAPTER FOUR

AMERICANS DO WEIRD THINGS WITH ANIMALS, OR, WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD? Randy Malamud Americans do weird things with animals. Others do as well, but as in most other mass-market cultural enterprises, Americans lead the way, with our commercially-powerful resource-intensive anthrozoological perversities. These perversities proliferate amid America’s imperialistic orientation of entitlement toward our ecosystem (‘it’s all ours, we bought Alaska, so drill away’), an orientation that sanctions animal fetishism, speciesism, and short-sighted greed for material goods and experiential novelty that we reap at the expense of nonhuman animals. Probably our imperious stance toward the natural world grows out of the same sensibility embodied in the political ideology of Manifest Destiny. Nineteenth-century Americans invoked Manifest Destiny to justify westward expansion toward the Pacific Ocean; in the twentieth century a comparable ethos of self-important entitlement underlay America’s claim to the role of superpower. And now, having achieved a virtually unilateral geopolitical dominance, the next realm ripe for the onslaught of Manifest Destiny is nature: more trees must be cut down, more habitats bulldozed, more wetlands filled, more wilderness plundered, more coal mined and burned, in the name of American progress. We Americans have a dysfunctional and sometimes paranoid compulsion to ‘disarm’ the threat we see emanating from ‘nature-as-other.’ Our cultural exploitation of animals often facilitates—directly or indirectly, consciously or subconsciously—this agenda of disempowering animals. We seem to embrace Freud’s expression that a civilized society is one in which “wild and dangerous animals have been exterminated” (1969, p. 30). When we encounter other animals, we selfishly abuse and manipulate them, often and on a grand scale. Mostly, I think, we simply do not understand them, and we are certainly poorer for this. Our cultural interactions and representations are ecologically significant: how we treat animals in culture affects how we treat animals in nature. The

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implications of my polemical screed are meant to broach what the world might look like if we could transcend demeaning idées reçues about other animals’ “abjectivity” (lack of control over one’s representation, in the words of Philip Morrissey; 1997, p. 20) and commence upon the challenge of seeing them in a way that would enable us, in the future, to generate representations that are more ethically and ecologically reasonable. “What is at stake ultimately,” as Erica Fudge writes, “is our own ability to think beyond ourselves” (2002, 22). Americans are not unique in our proclivity for using animals weirdly. A Brazilian ‘artist,’ Eduardo Kac, created what he calls a GFP Bunny: GFP stands for Green Flourescent Protein, which is normally produced by genes in the DNA of jellyfish. This rabbit glows in the dark. Kac calls it transgenic art, billing this project as the first artwork to include a genetically altered mammal.1 Nathalia Edenmont is a Ukranian ‘artist’ who kills animals to make art. She constructs displays of the taxidermized heads of mice, rabbits, doves and cats: for example, a hand with the head of a dead mouse on the tip of each finger. Her gallery defends her by saying One can, of course, choose to think that it is always wrong to kill animals in the name of art . . . [ but] many other beautiful things hide some sort of suffering. . . . Many of us eat meat, wear leather, or use makeup that has been tested on animals. . . . But when a picture shows a dead rabbit, all hell breaks loose. . . . She is not the first to use dead animals in works of art.2

Indeed she is not: English ‘sculptor’ Damien Hirst, too, does weird things with dead animals. One could enter into a long and heated debate about how such tableaux as ‘This Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed at Home’ (a pig cut in half ), ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ (a shark floating in formaldehyde), and ‘A Thousand Years’ (a rotting cow head with live flies) relate to the tradition of art: what this work means, and whether, as Hirst has suggested, we may actually read into his oeuvre some sort of redemptive, eye-opening exposé about the human-animal relationship (see e.g. Baker 2006). But I prefer not to have that discussion, and simply to dismiss him as brutal: and brutal in the particular mode of high humanism. That is, the conceit that we can do what we want with animals, because . . . we can do what we want with animals. 1 2

GFP Bunny, http://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html (accessed 15 September 2007). Wetterling Gallery, http://www.wetterlinggallery.com (accessed 6 January 2007).

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Anyone can do anything. This is my pithy formulation of the humanist ideology. But even amid this international carnival of anthrozoological weirdness, I would argue, on behalf of my countrymen and women, that Americans do the weirdest things with animals, and with such extensive global ramifications, that we would do well to investigate, and ideally, to reform, some of our cultural habits and behavior. My premise is that it is morally, intellectually, and ecologically preferable not to do weird things with animals. By ‘weird,’ I mean contra natura; silly; irrational; counterproductive or retrograde, in terms of envisioning a relationship that people could have with animals that would be more fulfilling and better suited to our role as one species among many in a complex and vast ecosystem. As someone who tries to be ecologically informed and intelligent—aware of the complex interrelations that exist between me and other animals, and plants, and the environment; intent upon behaving in a way that respects the rights and the integrity of all these elements, and minimally impinges upon their prosperity—it makes me cringe with embarrassment for my fellow human creatures in the presence of the pervasive cultural weirdness that manifests itself so frequently. Characterizing this sensibility as ‘weird’ is an admittedly simplistic, perhaps even juvenile way of trying to wholeheartedly shame the weirdoes into recognition of their annoyingly bad form. On the schoolyard, the taunt is hurled with the intent of challenging, even bullying, the deviant subject to adhere to social norms. In this essay, the taunt is meant to challenge the ecologically deviant actors among us—the anthropocentrists—to stop behaving in a way that mocks the ‘normal’ symbiotic dynamic of our ecosystem. To give a self-serving example of how people might benefit from a more enlightened relationship with other animals: during the 2004 Asian tsunamis, many animals escaped. They seem to have had what we might construe as some sort of ‘sixth sense’ (though this metaphysical construction might overstate the fact that the other animals simply had keen sensitivity to the elements, and the planet’s rumblings). It was widely reported that no animal corpses were found among the tens of thousands of human corpses; the animals apparently fled to higher ground before the waves hit (Mott 2005).3 Despite our earthquake/

Eyewitnesses reported that elephants screamed and ran for higher ground, dogs refused to go outdoors, and flamingoes abandoned their low-lying breeding areas (Mott, 2005). 3

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tsunami alert technology (which, like the Maginot line, was facing the wrong way; Revkin 2004), despite all the satellites and sensors and computer models, we as a species failed to save ourselves while the animals survived. Maybe someday the animals will tell us how they did it. We do in fact talk to animals today: animal behaviorists, modern day Dr. Doolittles, teach animals human signs, words, and grammars. The apotheosis of this enterprise, as it now stands, is that we teach orangutans how to communicate in sign language such expressions as “I would like to buy an ice cream cone,” and when the animal gives over the correct change (they are paid in coins for performing upkeep tasks in their compounds), he gets his ice cream (Spalding 2003, p. 124). Learning to talk with animals is a great idea, but we shouldn’t be talking about ice cream. Maybe somebody thought it would be a clever market expansion to train another species to consume our goods in a commercial economy, but I think we need to be talking more along the lines of: how can we escape from the tsunamis? And what do you think about what we are doing to the forests? Do you have any better ideas?4 I want to interrogate humanism in terms of how we have integrated animals into our cultural worldview. I’m interested in what part animals play in this bundle of culture in the age of humanism, and what comes next: what part will animals play in a posthuman consciousness? Let me cut to the chase and acknowledge that my answer, indeed the final three words of my essay, will be, “I don’t know.” But I’d nevertheless like to ask these questions and, by critically examining the state of animals amid the last days of humanism, try to inspire others to grapple with some of the problems I am unable to resolve myself. It appears that the collapse of humanist ideology is imminent in a dithyramb of toxic junk food and toxically bad culture (reality TV), insane globalist fantasias (Iraq, ‘mission accomplished’) and ecological suicide by SUV. We might think about where people will stand when the dust has cleared, and we would be wise, in this assessment, to look carefully at animals: to look at people and animals; to look at people as animals.5 4 One may worry that in fact human scientific discourse is in some sense already asking these kinds of questions of animals, in a trope that takes the form of invasive interrogation of and experimentation upon their otherness. My intention for this dialogue that I propose with the other animals commences from a stance of humility, not imperious power. 5 In this vein, see Parallax 12.1 (2006), a special issue entitled ‘Animal Beings,’ where editor Tom Tyler asks, “What kind of animal . . . is this human being? In what

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Nonhuman animals have not been as corrupted nor as implicated in the humanistic fiasco as we human animals have been, so their virtues, their survival instincts, their ways of being, may be better suited as models to take us through the millennium. And the cultural history of our relationship with animals is such a crucial element of our cultural history as a whole, a vivid testimony to our existence, for better or worse, for better and worse, as citizens of the planet.6 If we survey all this with an eye toward critiquing the record of our interactions with other species, a lot of other pieces fall into place, and we might become saner members of our ecosystem. The specific phenomenon that inspired this essay is a series of photographs of old women wearing blouses made from dead chickens. Reading a story about this in the newspaper one morning, I said, out loud to myself, “Americans do weird things with animals.” The photographer is a Brooklyn artist named Pinar Yolacan, and her series is entitled ‘Perishables.’7 Yolacan sewed these blouses herself, out of raw tripe and chicken skin and other assorted pieces of the birds. I presume that my reader will indulge my premise that this is weird. Let me speculate as to what might be going on in these photographs, what the ‘artist’ might mean here, or think she means. Indeed, people do wear dead animals in socially and fashionably acceptable ways: leather, fur, down; so why not chicken? These blouses are obviously meant to disgust us on some level—but why? The ways in which people use animals are, certainly, arbitrarily culturally conditioned, and Yolacan might have thought it would be interesting to make us reflect on why people regard certain exploitative uses as beautiful and valuable while we respond viscerally to others as disgusting. Perhaps we are meant to wonder what it would feel like, and smell like, to be these women wearing these chickens. Maybe Yolacan is inviting us to think about our sensory relationship to animals. Again, it can be delicate, beautiful: the smell of charred flesh wafting through a restaurant, if that’s your fancy; perfumes from secretions that are harvested from animals (musk from deer, ambergris from sperm whales, castor kinds of animal being does the human animal engage? What is it to be, rather than to represent, an animal?” The issue pointedly “addresses the question of human beings as animal beings” (2006, p. 1). 6 See Kalof (2007), and the six-volume series of which she is general editor, A Cultural History of Animals (Oxford: Berg, 2007). 7 Rivington Arms, http://www.rivingtonarms.com/exhibitions/2005/perishables.php (accessed 6 January 2007).

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.1b

Fig. 4.1c

Pinar Yolacan, Untitled, from the series ‘Perishables’ (2004, courtesy of the artist and Rivington Arms)

Fig. 4.1a

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from beavers, civet from the civet cat) . . . or it can be putrid. Presumably these pictures mean to evoke the putrid end of the scale, and yet, the women who are the human subjects of these photographs actually do look somewhat dignified, and seem as if they fit at least somewhat in these skins, and there’s even a certain beauty about the forms, the clothes, which are not at all unlike some styles of haute couture. So we come back to the question of how we relate to animals, how we use them, how they appear in our culture—what do we do with them? What boundaries or guidelines (if any) are there that mediate what we do with animals? What ethical guidelines? What aesthetic guidelines? What fashion guidelines? What ecological guidelines? I think the answer is, few to none. Yolacan’s photos pretty clearly cross the line, but that line is already far afield. There are few guidelines, few rules about what we can’t do with animals, and this is weird—or, this facilitates and legitimates weirdness. Any extant guidelines are cultural conventions, and artists like Yolacan show these to be malleable, dispensable in the cause of art (as they are dispensable also in the causes of commerce or human convenience). Yolacan’s photography is weird, I think, in a self-conscious, showy way. Other weird things that people do with chickens—on factory farms, for example, as Peter Singer describes in Animal Liberation (2002, pp. 95–118)—are more covert, things we wouldn’t want to look at or think about while nibbling on drumsticks, but they are fundamentally of a kind with this public artistic weirdness, situating a nexus of all the weird things we do with animals. They all supplement each other, and they all contribute to the anthropocentric hegemony that keeps animals subaltern. I wonder, as I look through Yolacan’s lens at a woman and a chicken, a woman in a chicken: where’s the chicken? Yes, it’s there, but there’s no there there. The only chickenness in these images is negative: the absence of a chicken, the mockery of a chicken, the destruction of a chicken, the perverse human transformation of a chicken.8 I am not suggesting that it is the burden of every artwork to interrogate the chickenness of the chicken, but I am ecologically offended by the pervasive failure of human culture, and Yolacan’s work conveniently exemplifies this aporia, to acknowledge with any serious engagement the integrity, the consciousness, the real presence, of other animals in our world.

8 Carol J. Adams’ important formulation of the “absent referent”, by which animals “in name and body are made absent as animals”, is germane here (1996, p. 40).

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‘Perishables’ calls to mind another weird, famous juxtaposition of animals with human fashion: a photograph called ‘Dovima with Elephants,’ from 1955, by Richard Avedon. (One of the best-known fashion photographs ever published, the picture may be easily found through a Google image search, though the Avedon estate denied permission to reprint it here.)9 Dorothy Virginia Margaret (Do Vi Ma) Juba was a high-powered supermodel in the 1950s. In the photograph, Dovima stands in the middle of the frame, striking a pose of lavish elegance: her left foot points forward in a lithe step, her right obscured by the large trailing creamy sash wrapped around a tight, sleek black pantsuit by Dior. Her arms are spread as if she were in a ballet about to take flight. Behind her are four elephants (one of whose body appears intact; the other three are only partly in the frame); she places her right hand on one elephant’s trunk, and appears to touch another elephant’s ear just lightly with her left hand. The elephants are not static: three of them have legs lifted, giving a sense of movement and energy. The group stands on a wooden platform covered with a layer of straw and, less immediately visible, chains that are attached to the legs of at least three elephants. The trope here is beauty and the beast. Avedon represents the elephants’ chained raw power, subservient to the delicate princess; and so animality becomes transformed into a fashion accessory. The tension in this encounter that empowers Avedon’s image involves a contrast, a contest: between the beauty of nature and the beauty of human cultural artifice. Who’s more powerful in this shot? Who’s more beautiful? (These two questions are really the same question in the discourse of fashion photography.) That’s what Avedon is asking. What I’m asking is, why are we even playing these games? Why are we so wrapped up in the discourses and fetishes of interspecies power relationships, which displace the discourse of ecological relationships? In humanism, we play out these discourses of power by cloaking them in our uniquely human tropes of aesthetics—fashion, art, and so forth; and this, I suggest, is our fundamental hubristic flaw. The discourse of ecology embodies its own power dynamics, but it doesn’t play games like this. Power is a real force in nature, and ecology integrates the realities of power struggles, but that kind of power has a much greater The full title is ‘Dovima with the Elephants—Evening dress by Dior, Cirque d’Hiver, Paris,’ and it appears in Avedon (2005). A good online reproduction is available at http://img131.imageshack.us/img131/176/hiverparis19557kr.jpg (accessed 15 September 2007). 9

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logic and function than this kind of power. This power that Avedon and Dovima manifest here—power over the elephants, power over nature—is just . . . weird. Fashion writer Annalisa Barbieri writes that this photograph to me typifies what fashion photography should be about . . . There are people that criticize fashion photography and say that it’s not depicting reality, but I think it should always be inspirational and aspirational. I love the scale of this picture. I love the fact that she looks almost as tall as the elephants and the way the sash is done lends a very long line to her . . . Having also worked with animals in fashion photography I know that there must have been a crew of several dozen to actually control them and I wonder how many takes they must have used to get this picture right. I just love the sheer scale of it and I think if more people did more things like this, instead of the reality that is creeping into fashion photography, we’d have far more beautiful images to look at. (Barbieri, no date)

Barbieri looks at the picture and infers control: dozens of people controlling the animals, though beyond the frame of the photograph—it looks as if it’s just Dovima, and Avedon, and Dior controlling the elephants. But the controlling human presence is, as Barbieri demonstrates, profoundly implicit in this image. Consider the composition. Dovima is, of course, in the middle, and her corporeal presence is unmolested. But three of the four elephants’ bodies are cut off: is this an anticipation of Damian Hirst? Perhaps that is an unlikely overreading, but perhaps not—we cut animals in half, cut their parts off, separate them, disfigure them, at will. What Hirst does with his animals is the logical culmination of the ethos underlying the framing, the cropping, the composition, of the animal images seen in Avedon’s work. Dovima’s hand rests on an elephant’s trunk, which is raised and seems to be in motion: as if the animal is responding with a semiotic erection. Another elephant’s trunk is cropped out, and Dovima’s sash suggestively replaces this trunk. We don’t need Freud to detect the suggestion of emasculation: the lithe woman is more phallically powerful than the great big animal. Through the marvels and powers of culture, of fashion, her dick trumps ‘his’.10 Dovima has the flashiest phallic-icon in this picture.

10 In fact the elephants are probably female, like most circus elephants, as bull elephants are too difficult to control, but still, the semiotics of animal representation often, as here, ignore literal biological realities.

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Elephants are ‘cool’ because they have trunks—that’s their selling point in pop cultural iconography. A reductive semiotic commodification condenses the animal into a synechdoche, one part representing the whole, that becomes the distinctive selling point. A giraffe is a neck; a zebra is a stripe; a camel is a hump. Dovima outdoes the elephants at their own game: her sash is the animal’s trunk. Her pose, her presence, is inspired by them, and I suggest that something is simultaneously taken from them, and they thus become much less necessary in this tableau: they are a backdrop, a reference point, but no longer subjectively significant in any sense. Their chains are almost incidental to their figurative captivity in this photo (they’re chained in so many other ways), but nevertheless confirm their literal imprisonment, and our power and desire to chain them: the power we presume, the power we assume, by being able to keep them captive, and allow this weird woman with a weird name to stand right by them, for a clever photo, despite the danger that there should be in this tableau. Confirming Freud, the dangerous animals have indeed been exterminated, and what we see here are the pale simulacra, the ghosts, of their oncedangerous spirits. Half a century later, with a postmodern sideways glance at Avedon’s touchstone, W, a high-end fashion magazine, offered a spread featuring elephants dressed by top designers.11 Karl Lagerfeld used 90 yards of tweed to make a pair of Chanel suits, an ensemble including matching hats and earrings. Manolo Blahnik designed lace-up shoes. Helmut Lang designed a black satin-striped cotton jersey tank top and a beaded bra. A New York Times article about this spectacle quotes the photographer, Bruce Weber, saying: “The wonderful thing about elephants is they love to work, so it wasn’t like we were forcing them to wear clothes” (Horyn 2004). Weber reiterates the myth of the contented slave—a cultural lynchpin of slavery—in earlier American history. I’d respond to Weber: it’s not like you weren’t forcing them to wear clothes, it’s not like they asked for them. The Times article included an image of Lang’s design sketch for one of the ‘models’ named Tai. The sketch depicts an elephant overlaid with lines: measuring lines, for taking the dimensions of the cloth, but these lines also suggest chains, not unlike the chains in Avedon’s photograph. Indeed, Lang’s lines are chains, and the measuring lines

11

‘Trunk Show.’ W 34 (1) ( January 2005): 76–101.

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Fig. 4.2

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Bruce Weber, ‘Tai and Rosie in Dior,’ W magazine (© Bruce Weber, 2005. All rights reserved)

at the borders of the sketch form a kind of symbolic cage. Every frame becomes a cage, for animals in human culture. Lang’s sketch is, seen another way, an elephant chopped up into pieces, which is what people are prone to do with animals. We chop them, we crop them, into the pieces that comprise Yolacan’s blouses and accessories, or the measured pieces, 156 inches, 186 inches, 181 inches, that we use to assault these elephants in W, to hide their animality—to cloak them, to mock them, to reduce them to human fashion. We force them to model our postlapsarian shame of our natural bodies. We make them wear the ridiculously uncomfortable shoes that we wear, because we are slaves to fashion and misery loves company. Clothes make the man, they say. Now clothes make the animal too: or make the animal a man—similar but lesser; as if they would want to be like us. Is the ideal that every elephant, one day, should have a designer outfit? To wear on their outings to buy ice cream cones perhaps? In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol Adams explains how dismembering animals is a step toward objectifying them. “The institution of butchering is unique to human beings,” she writes (1996, p. 50). Butchering,

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Fig. 4.3

Sketch for a fashionable elephant. Drawing by tailor from Helmut Lang, made-to-measure studio (2004)

fragmenting a large, impressive creature into small, unthreatening, standardized pieces that are unrecognizable as the original animal, is, Adams writes, a way of rendering animals being-less. In a slaughterhouse an animal proceeds down a ‘disassembly line,’ losing body parts at every stop. This fragmentation not only dismembers the animal, it changes the way in which we conceptualize animals. (p. 47)12

After butchering, the name of the animal changes (from ‘cow’ to ‘beef ’, from ‘pig’ to ‘pork’, ‘ham’ and ‘bacon’), and “only then can consumption occur” (p. 48). The same is true for cultural butchering and consumption, which is what Yolacan and Avedon and the fashion designers are all doing with these animals: metaphorically butchering and consuming them in a way that results in the desecration of the animal’s original, inherent, authentic ecological being. For an instance of the textual

12

See also Adams’ ‘Post-meateating’ in this volume.

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fragmentation of animals, consider the disassembly (flensing) of the whales in Melville’s Moby-Dick: the descriptions of how the whalers cut up and used every last morsel of the whale (1967, pp. 348–51 [Chaps. 94 and 95]) have been conventionally regarded as an example of human ingenuity and resourcefulness, a puritanically obsessive efficiency; I read this, on the other hand, as a monomaniacal destruction of the whales’ integrity. Sadly, these readings are not mutually contradictory: human ingenuity and violence against animals are complementary facets of the same sensibility. This is all weird. Two images posted on the now-dormant website petpics.com speak to our fantasies of framing animals in tropes of human cultural commodification, figuratively (and here, literally) putting animals in boxes. One kitten looks out at us from a Pop-Tarts box, and another spills out of a Tampax package. I wonder about the staging of these photos: were they as complicated and as laboriously organized as the photograph of Dovima’s elephants? Were they spontaneous and kitten-originated experiences? ‘Hank, Fluffy just crawled into a box—grab your camera so that we can put this on petpics!’ These pictures certainly have no need of the extensive power-wielding crews that Barbieri imagines beyond Avedon’s frame, and yet, in terms of the cultural subordination of animals, I suggest an equivalence: these seemingly innocuous, casual pictures of cats in boxes embody as much weird force as Avedon’s classic image. I wonder if the specific commodities referenced here are significant. Pop-Tarts are yummy, processed, convenient junk food. Tampax are a product designed to make the messy course of nature more manageable. Both these products represent quick, easy, commodified responses to biological imperatives: hunger and menstruation. Both come in individually wrapped units, in lots of different flavors. Both have a physiological downside—the risk of diabetes and dietary dysfunctions on the one hand (if you eat too many Pop-Tarts); toxic shock syndrome on the other hand (though that has supposedly been obviated in the latest generation of ‘feminine products’)—but the drawbacks are, of course, far outweighed by how compelling the products are. In these images, the boxes are ‘recycled’ in a way that suggests that our animals, especially when they’re at the peak of their cuteness—and are therefore most valuable, in the currency of American cultural aesthetics—mesh well with the discourse of American consumerism. (Imagine if you really could buy cute kittens in assorted flavors and styles, as you do with Pop-Tarts and Tampons.)

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Fig. 4.4a & 4.4b Kittens peek from boxes on www.petpics.com (acessed 1 Feb 2005; site currently under rehabilitation.)

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In fact, I believe it is not the case that the tropes of American material consumption facilitate the well-being of animals. The discourse of consumerism is dangerous to animals, and counterproductive in terms of advancing our ecological understanding of anthrozoological relations. The pet owners who put these kittens in the packaging depicted here, or captured their images when they rambled into the boxes of their own accord, suggest that these animals, like all animals, are somehow to be consumed—not literally to be put in our stomachs or in our vaginas, but still in some way to be consumed: to be put inside of us, inside our culture, where they will be momentarily convenient, yummy, useful, but will finally end up, in short order, getting flushed down a figurative toilet as garbage or shit. Siegfried & Roy do weird things with animals. They are animal ‘trainers,’ showmen, illusionists, who ran a show on the Las Vegas strip for thirty years featuring a kitschy mélange of flamboyance, magic, and animals. The keynote animals in their act were royal white tigers. According to their website, there were only two hundred of them extant in the world in 1998, mostly in captivity, and “58 of them are Siegfried and Roy’s White Tigers of Nevada.”13 White tigers are very rare—they are, in a sense, freaks: it’s countersurvivalistic for a tiger to be white, both in the jungle and in a culture that fetishizes the fashion of exotic whites; they have been widely poached for their pelts and body parts, which command tremendous prices on the black market. (The black market for white tigers: there are some very interesting semiotics lurking in there.) The result of inbreeding, these tigers are rare in the wild, and more likely to be born in zoos and captive breeding programs.14 White Tigers of Nevada: weird! The very nomenclature bespeaks proprietary control (all of Nevada owns them), a perverse geographical reconfiguration. They are not “of Nevada” . . . except that they are now. Siegfried & Roy have made them “of Nevada”; note the power of naming. And of course, given their name, White Tigers of Nevada belong where else but on the Las Vegas strip? In October 2003, a White Tiger of Nevada named Montecore lunged at Roy Horn during the show and dragged him offstage. The tiger wrapped his jaws around Roy’s neck, making cuts that crushed his

Siegfried & Roy, http://www.siegfriedandroy.com (accessed 6 January 2007). Big Cat Rescue, http://www.bigcatrescue.org/cats/wild/white_tigers.htm (accessed 15 September 2007). 13 14

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trachea as well as deep puncture wounds on the back of his head; his heart stopped for a minute and he was resuscitated. Bleeding from a cut artery restricted the oxygen flow to his brain, leading to a nearfatal stroke. Doctors had to remove part of his skull and sew it into his abdomen to relieve swelling on the brain until it could be replaced weeks later. The entertainer was left partially paralyzed and lost control of his speech. During the attack, most of the audience thought that this was all part of the show—part of the illusion. Their show was cancelled indefinitely, though their website suggests that it might be resuscitated at some point in the future. The tiger was not killed, as one would normally expect when an animal mauls a person. Roy himself commanded that the animal’s life be spared, in a display of his magnanimous love for the tigers despite Montecore’s beastly behavior (Silverman 2005). My reading of this story, at first, was, simply and unkindly, as Dante would say, contrapasso: what goes around comes around; the powermongering that Roy visited on these tigers redounded back on him. It seemed self-evident to me that this is what happens when people play with fire: it seemed like a sign that we shouldn’t be doing this sort of thing. But as a parable in my cavalcade of anthrozoological weirdness, I think Montecore’s attack—might I say, “Montecore’s revenge?”—begs more detailed scrutiny. Indeed, in the popular reaction to this incident, the moralism that seemed so obvious to me (i.e., Roy had it coming) was not at all widespread (Marquez 2003). Roy himself said that he thought the tiger might have been protecting him (from what?)—trying to drag him to safety (BBC News 2004). Roy seems unable to contemplate what seems pretty clear to me, that the tiger might have hated being a White Tiger of Nevada and performing twice a night on the strip, and this was how he manifested his feelings. A mauling, or at least the possibility of a mauling, is in the subtext of every carnival show. That’s what people pay hundreds of dollars per ticket to see: a non-mauling, on most nights, though they know, deep down, that there might be, or even should be, a mauling. So the audience finally got what they expected, what they knew and perhaps on some level even hoped would happen someday, but at the same time, as I noted, the audience responded as if this were simply part of the show. This illustrates our conflicted and obtuse behavior as a cultural audience, our head-in-the-sand, willful self-deception with regard to animals and what we do with them. We’re flirting with danger, thrilled by the spectacle of human mastery (Siegfried & Roy’s slogan is ‘Masters

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of the Impossible’); and then, when the animal attack comes, the audience does not revise their paradigms accordingly, does not acknowledge that one might reasonably have expected an animal revolt to happen. Animal shows, circuses, and carnivals, other than this one, were not cancelled or outlawed after Montecore’s attack. In the media, Roy is staging a comeback. Maria Shriver interviewed him on a television news magazine show that offered, in the words of its promo, “an intimate look into his harrowing experience . . . chronicling Roy’s journey, including never-before-seen footage and new details about his against-all-odds recovery.”15 Roy’s narrative is, loosely, in the mode of the great white hunter tales of African adventure: the wily, persevering hero is threatened but not overcome by the wild animals’ brute force. Frank Buck was the most prominent adventurer in this genre, in the 1930s. But today, the narrative setting has shifted to Las Vegas instead of the ‘dark continent,’ into a flashy indoor arena instead of the jungle, and the tigers are white instead of the usual camouflage variegation. It’s all very precious and tame instead of wild and woodsy, and most interestingly, instead of the macho khaki-attired he-man Frank Buck, the heroes are a sequined gay couple. Their website features the tigers in their resituated ‘habitat.’ An image of a tiger traipsing through their living room has a caption reading Here you can see one of our magnificent Royal White Tigers making himself at home in our Jungle Palace. Although the tigers generally prefer to roam in the lush greenery, occasionally they like to silently pad from room to room, paying us a personal visit.

The Jungle Palace is Siegfried & Roy’s residence, which features, as another webpage explains, “a hand-painted Sistine Chapel Dome. . . . It enhances the baroque splendor of one of our favorite areas—a cappuccino bar with antiques and collectibles from around the world.” In this fantasia-habitat, antiques, profanely miscontextualized artistic reproductions, cappuccino, and tigers all feature as constituent elements of its global queerness. This is the setting for the contemporary version of the conflict between man and nature. We’ve driven the real animals in the real jungle to the brink of extinction, and so we breed them and hoard them in Nevada and then play out our perverse contests with them in 15 Siegfried & Roy, http://www.siegfriedandroy.com/news/entry.php?id=139 (accessed 6 January 2007).

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these extravagantly tacky culturally mongrelized Las Vegas sets. The icon of Las Vegas is its pastiche of skyline, bricolage gone berserk, with the Brooklyn Bridge replica next to the Eiffel Tower replica, next to the Empire State Building replica: all of which serves to reinforce the kind of geographical and cultural dislocational bastardizing that results in White Tigers of Nevada. Unlike the Frank Buck versions of this story, neither man nor beast died in Las Vegas. But I think this was the last installment in this genre; I don’t think it can happen this way again. Let’s call this contest a draw, but next time, I predict, the animal will win. I don’t know where exactly the battle will play out, or which people and animals will be involved, or how the animal’s triumph will be figured, but I think that, on the brink of the posthuman age, there is a narrative compulsion for the outcome that I’ve predicted. Putting gay men at the center of this kind of story is a sign that it is nearly exhausted: the heteronarrative versions that mainstream culture prefers have been largely used up. Turning from real animals to animated animals, Finding Nemo, Disney’s 2003 film, typifies American children’s cartoons that are lately becoming considerably more intelligent, more thoughtful, more sensitive to ecological and anthrozoological issues. The film is a big improvement on the days when the cartoon canon was comprised of alliterative animals—Road Runner, Porky Pig, Donald Duck, Woody Woodpecker, Mickey Mouse—who had no discernable relevance to the creatures they purported to represent. Antz (1998), an animated Dreamworks movie starring Woody Allen as the voice of a neurotic but lovable ant, is another thoughtful encounter with animals. In these films, animals are dignified with agency and complex characters. Their narratives are elaborated in a way that at least considers some degree of parity between human consciousness and animal consciousness, human emotion and animal emotion. But here’s the rub: after Antz, sales of ant farms (Foucauldian voyeurism run amok) went through the roof. Ants do not belong in ant farms any more than white tigers belong in Las Vegas or kittens belong in Tampax boxes or chickens belong on the torsos of old women. After Finding Nemo, sales of clownfish skyrocketed (Walton, 2003). The dynamics of consumption show consumers to be completely oblivious to the message of the films. Let me spell this out, at the risk of belaboring the obvious: Finding Nemo—starring, in the title role, a clownfish—is a movie whose clear, unmistakable point is that fish don’t like being in aquariums, and will go to enormous lengths to avoid this fate. It is a

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movie that anthropomorphizes (perhaps inaccurately but nevertheless movingly)16 the family connections in animals and the extent to which animals value liberty, equality, and fraternity as we do, showing that they have comparable aspirations for integrity, self-control, pleasurable existence. Audiences seemed to understand what Finding Nemo was dramatizing, and seemed to enjoy seeing this, but then apparently integrated that message into their cultural consciousness by going out and buying a clownfish. What are they thinking? What is it like for a family that owns a clownfish? Do the kids look at the fish and think of Nemo and his family? Does ‘their’ fish remind them of the movie? Are they able to see the fish, think of the movie pleasurably, and yet not comprehend that their actions are anathema to its narrative? The clownfish is so distinctive looking, and the animators created such an accurate figure that so closely resembles the living model, which would lead me to hope that the empathy which the film inculcated for the animated fish would transfer over to the real fish that looks just like the cartoon. But alas, not so. How does this cognitive-ethical process work? What allows people to indulge in such blatant hypocrisy? Is it that the Disney fish is a Hollywood fish, and the ones we buy are somehow less deserving of our benevolence? Maybe real fish even deserve to be imprisoned, because they’re not movie stars? Does the cultural attention to one token, isolated animal somehow justify, or even demand, the oppression of thousands of others? Something along these lines explains what happens in zoos—audiences fetishize a small, manageable, distinct canon of animals, and then rationalize that they’ve given their ecological quota of loving attention to animals, so screw all the others. Perhaps people fetishize these animals because they’re such freaks: a panda bear in Atlanta! A giraffe in San Diego! Displaced, caged, chained. Maybe we do actually perceive the difference between zoo specimens and real wild animals, and we ‘protect’ the zoo animals while we devastate the populations of wild animals precisely because they are wild animals: we feel guilty that we’re destroying their habitats, so if we eliminate them all they cease to be a problem. Maybe we oppress animals simply

16 I think anthropomorphism is acceptable, in measure, as a means to an end, in fostering empathy with animals. Tom Tyler’s opening essay in this volume examines the implicit ethics of the concept of anthropomorphism.

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because we still believe in the great chain of being and see it as our duty to keep the inferior species inferior. Maybe we’re jealous of their wildness, their transcendence of the trials of modern industrial life. Maybe we want to drag them down to our level. Maybe we are playing out Freud’s observation that a civilized society is one that has conquered all the wild animals. Any or all of these reasons might explain why people pretend to celebrate the figure of one animal, like Nemo, and then massacre, capture, destroy, imprison, all the others. Weirdly, we show our admiration for these ants and fish by bringing them into our lives as subalterns—but still, they’re in our homes, and they should be grateful for that. We Americans fetishize our homes, we fill them with a lot of stuff that we own, and we seem to want to integrate animals into that paradigm, however much it means absolutely disregarding or destroying their own paradigms. Only we have paradigms, we believe. Or, while we may be aware of their paradigms, we decide that those don’t matter. We pay lip service to respectful and environmentally-conscious considerations of animals in movies like Finding Nemo that broach independent animal subjectivity—the authenticity of the animal apart from any human construction—but then we buy more clownfish. Cassius Coolidge’s famous image ‘A Friend in Need’ (c. 1870 and still going strong over a century later) of dogs playing poker typifies the retrograde consciousness that a more enlightened cultural public will, perhaps, someday transcend in their desire to understand better the integrity, authenticity, subjectivity, and sentience of other animals. Americans do weird things with animals. Such kitsch douses us with images of animals that are profane and irrelevant, clogging up the limited space in our minds that we have for thinking seriously about species other than ourselves. Coolidge’s image has been reproduced endlessly, in cigar ads and on calendars and on throw rugs and in velvet. Dogs can’t sit on chairs in the way that Coolidge depicts. They wouldn’t want to. But Coolidge has made them. Dogs can’t play poker. They wouldn’t want to. But Coolidge has made them. The punch line of this painting, and the aesthetically ethical harm of it, is the disjunction between what is depicted and our knowledge of the reality that dogs can’t sit on chairs and smoke cigars and play poker. Dumb dogs. But we have made them do so. Clever us. At the risk of sounding like a priggish killjoy—I know this is just supposed to be a fun painting—the more I think about it, the more I see a kind of violence here that is not so dissimilar from

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Fig. 4.5

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Cassius Coolidge, ‘A Friend in Need’ (c. 1870)

Yolacan’s chicken-blouses or Hirst’s rotting corpses. What Coolidge does with his dogs here strikes me as tremendously presumptuous. Like the behaviorists who teach orangutans to buy ice cream and the couturiers who drape elephants in jewelry and tweed pantsuits, Coolidge reifies the fantasy that ours is the best of all possible worlds, and other species could do no better than to emulate humans, however ridiculous they might seem in so doing, and however foreign our humanity may be to their animality. I would be less offended by Coolidge if he, or other artists, also created art that involved human animals in the guise and context of nonhuman animals (and did so without intending aspersion on the ‘swinish’, ‘beastly’ humans so represented), if there were a reciprocity that bespoke a sincere desire to broach the species barrier and see how the other half lives; but that wouldn’t sell many cigars, would it? Why did the chicken cross the road? This question has challenged Americans for generations. It is, arguably, the single question that we most often ask about animals. I believe we should be asking a lot of questions, a lot of different questions, about animals, and that we get distracted from the more important questions we should be asking—questions like how might we avoid a tsunami, and what is it like to be a bat—because we spend so much time asking this question over and over.

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The humor plays out as follows: Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side; the answer is funny because it is not funny. It is obvious. Why does anyone cross the road? To get to the other side. But the joke lies in the presumptive disjunction between chicken and road. That is to say, the riddle is indeed framed, initially, as an anthrozoological problem: with the underlying tensions about the danger that there might be in a chicken’s crossing the road, and even, as Thomas Nagel might wonder,17 what it is like to be a chicken crossing a road, why the chicken might want to cross the road, what goes on inside the mind of a chicken. But then the riddle’s answer is a cold dousing refutation of the anthrozoological teaser. To get to the other side: duh. Why does anyone cross the road? To get to the other side. So a chicken is just like anyone else: this is, I think, the weird thing that Americans think about animals that this riddle presupposes. A road to an animal is like a road to a person—which, of course, is not the case. Ask any deer, or armadillo, or possum, or whatever species proliferates in your local brand of roadkill. Yes, people get killed on roads too, but for people, that’s an accepted risk that we understand when we use roads. We benefit from the roads, as well as, occasionally, suffering from them. And we might have houses on one side of the road, and stores on the other side, so, again, we benefit by crossing the road. But animals encounter only the risk and none of the benefits. If a chicken is actually on the road, she is on a large truck on its way to or from the abattoir in a metal container with airholes that emits feathers and smells and always reminds me of the trains on the way to the concentration camps. My point is simply that a road to a chicken is a very different thing from a road to a person; and the riddle that draws its humor from the repudiation of this premise is just another example of the weird and blinkered and self-obsessed, anthropocentric perspective that Americans have on animals. Gary Larson’s The Far Side presents a cartoon version that embodies an existential challenge to the not-very-funny-the-longer-you-thinkabout-it riddle. A chicken stares across a two-lane desert highway at a large road sign that reads, ‘THE OTHER SIDE,’ and then beneath, ‘Why do you need a reason?’ (1993, p. 79) The chicken in this cartoon,

17 Nagel’s famous philosophical essay ‘What is it Like to Be a Bat?’ attempts, somewhat unsuccessfully, to broach the topic of animal consciousness (Nagel 1974).

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we should note, is not crossing the road; maybe she is about to, or maybe she is stuck in an existential stupor brought on by Larson’s deconstruction of the hackneyed joke. Larson inspires my own contribution to this trope. This is what I’d call the take-home message, and it may seem like a simple, weak, tepid, anticlimactic conclusion, but I promise, it’s not. It’s powerful: a posthumanist rejection of the fantasy of human omniscience with regard to animals. Why did the chicken cross the road? I don’t know. References Adams, Carol J. 1996. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum. Avedon, Richard. 2005. Woman in the Mirror. NY: Harry N. Abrams. Baker, Steve. 2006. ‘ “You Kill Things to Look at Them:” Animal Death in Contemporary Art.’ In The Animal Studies Group, Killing Animals. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 69–98. Barbieri, Annalisa. (no date.) ‘Exploring Photography: Personal Tours.’ Victoria & Albert Museum website. http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/photography/ guide.php?guideid=gu017 (accessed 6 January 2007). BBC News. 2004. ‘Roy Horn Describes Tiger Mauling.’ 16 September. http://news .bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3663512.stm (accessed 11 January 2008). Freud, Sigmund. 1969 (1930). Civilization and its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton. Fudge, Erica. 2002. Animal. London: Reaktion. Horyn, Cathy. 2004. ‘The Outfit’s Great, but Do I Look Fat?’. New York Times, 7 December: B10. Kalof, Linda. 2007. Looking at Animals in Human History. London: Reaktion. Larson, Gary. 1993. The Far Side Gallery 4. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel. Marquez, Miguel. 2003. ‘Roy of Siegfried and Roy Critical After Mauling.’ CNN, 4 October. http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/10/04/roy.attacked/ (accessed 11 January 2008). Melville, Herman. 1967 [1851]. Moby-Dick. Edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. New York: Norton. Mott, Maryann. 2005. ‘Did Animals Sense Tsunami Was Coming?’. National Geographic News (4 January). http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0104_ 050104_tsunami_animals.html (accessed 15 September 2007). Morrissey, Philip. 1997. ‘Lines in the Sand.’ Artlink 17 (3) (September): 20–23. Nagel, Thomas. 1974. ‘What is it Like to Be a Bat?’ Philosophical Review 83 (4), October: 435–50. Revkin, Andrew C. 2004. ‘Asia’s Deadly Waves: Gauging Disaster; How Scientists and Victims Watched Helplessly.’ New York Times (31 December), p. 1. http://www .nytimes.com/2004/12/31/international/worldspecial4/31wave.html (accessed 3 January 2008). Silverman, Stephen M. 2005. ‘Tiger Star Roy Horn Checks into Clinic’. People, 20 June. http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,1074186,00.html (accessed 11 January 2008). Singer, Peter. 2002. Animal Liberation. New York: Ecco. Spalding, Linda. 2003. A Dark Place in the Jungle: Following Leakey’s Last Angel into Borneo. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press.

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Tyler, Tom. 2006. ‘Introduction.’ Parallax 38: Animal Beings 12 (1) ( January–March): 1–3. http://www.cyberchimp.co.uk/research/introduction.htm (accessed 10 January 2008). Walton, Marsha. 2003. ‘ “Nemo” Fans Net Fish Warning. CNN ( June 30). http://edition .cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/06/30/coolsc.nemo.fish/index.html (accessed 10 January 2008).

PART THREE

EXPERIMENTAL ENCOUNTERS Both essays in this section complicate a normative account of animals in experimental laboratories as simply being objects or passive victims acted upon by a more or less detached scientist (ab)using his or her nonhuman ‘other’. The encounters described here testify, rather, to the distribution of agency across species as well as to the affective interaction, synchronisation of movement, and other corporeal responses between human and nonhuman ‘labourers’ in the process of knowledge formation. While it cannot be denied that the lab animals are significantly ‘unfree’ participants and that suffering is borne asymmetrically in the event, these experiments show that human and nonhuman animals, as well as machines, are woven together in an instrumental economy in which ‘we’ live in and through the use of one another’s bodies. Contributing an example from the first decades of the 20th century of this kind of co-constitutive entanglement across machinic, animal and human materialities, Robyn Smith demonstrates in ‘Affect, Friendship and the “As Yet Unknown”: Rat Feeding Experiments in Early Vitamin Research’ how the co-presence of human and nonhuman agencies in experimental systems turns the site of the encounter into a “zone of intensity” in which the boundaries between human and animal, inside and outside, self and other become blurred. Such dissolutions, Smith insists, are the conditio sine qua non for the emergence of new knowledge. The experiments under discussion make clear that tracing—indeed building—the pathways of cellular metabolism, which subsequently led to the discovery of what would later be called ‘vitamins’, was facilitated by the experimental system itself: being in the company of rats, nurturing them with familiar food substances, touching them and observing their general health and well-being, hearing the sounds of the exercise wheels in which they turn round and round, the scientists got a ‘sense’ of the animals. These sensory experiences, the repetitive actions and the coming together of different rhythms all contributed to opening up lines of flight to future knowledge and to a sense of the subject as a collective rather than a discrete and bounded entity. While Smith is concerned with how experimental systems affect the human partner in an assemblage and lead scientists to the ‘as yet

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unknown’, Donna Haraway broadens the analysis of experimental encounters by addressing not only epistemological and ontological issues but also the ‘hard’ ethical and political questions that ensue from the complexities and contradictions of living and dying in the age of technoscience. Her essay ‘Becoming-with-Companions: Sharing and Response in Experimental Laboratories’ opens with Nancy Farmer’s novel A Girl Named Disaster, in which an animal caretaker in Mozambique places his arm into a cage of biting tsetse flies in order to experience the ‘as yet unknown’ and then to share this painful knowledge with the guinea pigs in the lab. This scene functions as the starting point for Haraway’s careful reflections on the nature of the work of animals and their people in the scientific practices of medical and veterinary research. She calls for the recognition that labour, use and instrumentality are not necessarily evil but inherent to all embodied and mortal beings. Organisms are located in a web of ‘critters’, sharing a material-semiotic ecology that also includes an obligation (for the human animal) to engagement with the suffering produced by unequal instrumental relationships. Drawing on J.M. Coetzee’s novels Disgrace and The Lives of Animals, as well as the philosophy of Derrida, the essay provides a template for what a responsible ‘sharing of suffering’ should entail. Haraway calls for a re-reading of the command ‘Thou shalt not kill’ as ‘Thou shalt not make killable’, in a bid to work against human exceptionalism and the singular categories of ‘Animal’ and ‘Human’. (MR)

CHAPTER FIVE

AFFECT, FRIENDSHIP AND THE “AS YET UNKNOWN”: RAT FEEDING EXPERIMENTS IN EARLY VITAMIN RESEARCH Robyn Smith In 1911, Thomas B. Osborne (1859–1929), a researcher at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, and Lafayette B. Mendel (1872–1935), a biochemist at Yale University, while performing feeding experiments intended to determine the nutritive quality of isolated amino acids, reported that they believed there to be some “as yet unknown” dietary factor in milk which was essential to maintenance and growth in mammals.1 They wrote, “as a maintenance diet our food lacked something other than protein and energy” (Osborne and Mendel 1911, p. 60). Without investigating it further, Osborne and Mendel integrated this ‘as yet unknown’ factor, in the form of protein free milk extract, into the basic diet of their lab rats in order to bring their protein feeding experiments to successful conclusion. Several years after these vexed musings on ‘as yet unknown’ food factors, other researchers in the field of biochemistry took up the problem, and began feeding experiments with rats, stating explicitly that their investigation was for Osborne and Mendel’s ‘as yet unknown’ factor, and by 1913 this ‘as yet unknown’ substance had a name and a concept—that is, vitamins. The history of vitamins can illuminate the more general significance of the ‘as yet unknown’ for accounts of scientific practice and objects. These explicit statements about the importance of the ‘as yet unknown’ are striking because they highlight that experimental systems are established in order to elicit the unknown, or to allow researchers to plunge into the unknown (Rheinberger 1997). Scientists develop experimental

The third author of this piece was Osborne and Mendel’s research assistant Edna Ferry. Within the history of vitamins literature this research is typically considered to be the work of Osborne and Mendel only. Although this is perhaps unfair I am holding with tradition here. 1

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systems that actively create changing and problematic environments which force them to pose problems and think; i.e., in their experimental systems scientists create, for themselves, encounters with the ‘as yet unknown’. While other cultural and social practices, science fiction or comic books for example, might also cultivate encounters with the ‘as yet unknown’, the material practices of experimental sciences are distinct from the materiality of other cultural and social practices because of the ways experimental systems engage and implicate the material world. Hence, the focus of this essay is on the ways in which specific experimental practices engage the material world and generate an encounter between scientists and the ‘as yet unknown’. To this end I will consider the establishment of feeding rations, repetition and rhythm within the experimental systems and, finally, the scientists’ sense of the animals’ well-being as established through touch and visual observation as specific aspects of the rat feeding experiments used by scientists investigating the ‘as yet unknown’ food factor. Building and Learning a Maze Scientists began their investigations into the ‘as yet unknown’ substance in food with animal feeding experiments using diets consisting of purified known food substances, isolated proteins, carbohydrates and fat. I contend that the scientists effectively use known food constituents to construct rat metabolism as a kind of maze. In the development of various diet formulations, the scientists use that which was already known to construct a site in which to lose themselves. This maze allows them to enter and perform, for themselves, the rats’ metabolism. For example, in his 1915 article, ‘The Nature of the Dietary Deficiency of Rice’, E.V. McCollum considered the relation between polished rice and purified foodstuffs. He reported, Lot 329 . . . in Period 1 illustrates the failure of nutrition of rats fed polished rice supplemented with purified food stuffs. The inclusion of 2 per cent casein in a ration closely similar to that of Lot 317 does not lead to growth. In period 2 the reduction of the amount of rice to 50 per cent of the ration did not lead to improvement in the condition of the animals. Period 3 illustrates the marked stimulus to growth exerted by combining wheat embryo with rice. (1915, p. 200)

And later,

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This ration is similar to Lot 329 but carried more casein (5 per cent) and 5 per cent of Merck’s lactose. There is no noticeable improvement as a result of these modifications of the diet. These results indicate that lactose itself is unnecessary during growth. This is also borne out by feeding experiments with egg yolk alone on which good growth is attained. Egg yolk contains no lactose. (1915, p. 203)

In supplementing polished rice with purified food stuffs, various quantities and qualities of proteins, different salt mixtures and carbohydrates and fats of various types, McCollum attempts to piece together the byways and routes of the biochemistry of rat nutrition. In his various diet formulations McCollum constitutes rat metabolism as a kind of maze and proceeds to make his way through it. First, salt mixtures do not provide a point of exit; then neither does the quality of protein. McCollum creates the lines of rat metabolism along which he will journey by using the known components of nutrition to instigate blockages. These various diets are a means by which to both build and to go along with rat metabolism. They are a means by which McCollum can enact the rats’ metabolism. In constituting the rations of purified food substances at his lab bench, McCollum enters into rat metabolism. These are not chemically isolated substances on his lab bench. Rather, for McCollum, they are the interiority of cellular processes. McCollum presented his findings in a series of growth measurement charts with a brief explanation of the diet used and the significance of the growth presented, for the constitution of the diet. In the above quote it is not, for example, the sufficiency of nitrogen which McCollum measures from the isolated food-stuff. His results are not chemical formulas. Rather, his results are presented in growth charts and his measurement is “failure of maintenance”. To find out what the isolated substances are, McCollum uses the feeding rations to enter the rats’ metabolism and effectively learns what the isolated substances do. Using different nutrients to block the various processes of rat metabolism, McCollum does not identify the constituents and processes of rat biochemistry. Rather, he enters into and performs them. In another experiment, McCollum makes a path for himself through the mineral content of the diet, and the metabolism of minerals by rats: In this ration the mineral content was adjusted by salt and free mineral acid additions so as to approximate closely the mineral content of polished rice. The excellent growth curves make it clear that for growth the

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In this instance, McCollum replicates the mineral content of polished rice with artificial mineral mixtures. By building these mineral blocks of rat metabolism himself and observing that they were not sufficient to keep his rats alive and well, McCollum can be sure that the mineral content of the diet is not the route through rat metabolism. The boundary between the subject and the environment is dissolved and McCollum can inhabit the field of potential connections with rat metabolism almost as though he were feeling his way along the walls of the maze. To speak of observation and representation is insufficient here, insofar as McCollum was not identifying the components of metabolic processes; he was not making a map of rat metabolism. He was not picturing to himself the interaction of already known chemical constituents. Rather, he used feeding rations of purified food substances to create for himself rat metabolism. McCollum did not have the chemical markers he would need to ‘see’ the path of the foodstuffs. And yet, this blindness did not separate him from the world, or render it inaccessible to him. Rather, it is because of this blindness that McCollum is engaged with and by the world in the way that he is. Because he did not have the tools of chemical analysis, McCollum’s experimental system produced a dissolution of the boundary between the scientist subject and the materiality of rat metabolism. It is not the identity of the chemical reactions that McCollum pursues with his feeding rations, but their unfolding. In constituting food rations for his rats, therefore, McCollum is afforded a kind of indwelling in the processes of rat metabolism. McCollum’s skill and knowledge as a chemist are no longer simply skills of analysis. Rather, the feeding experiments produce a back and forth between McCollum’s lab bench rations and his lab animal metabolism so that what occupies McCollum at his lab bench are the processes of metabolism and their emergence. Scale and Repetition Most of the experiments designed in search of this ‘as yet unknown’ factor were massive and it is striking to consider simply the work of feeding the rat colony every day. The size and the repetitious nature of the task highlight that, even if the work was begun everyday with purposeful intent, such intent would quickly be lost to the rhythm and

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the pace of the work. Therefore, it is worth asking how the materiality of such a massive and repetitive task functioned in the production of new knowledge. The above study, ‘The Nature of the Dietary Deficiency of Rice’, carried out by McCollum in Wisconsin, concludes with a total of 42 charts, each with various aspects of nutritional knowledge blocked. Observations in the rat feeding experiments were taken and recorded frequently. We hear of results obtained from Lot 308, Lot 313, Lot 316, Lot 334, Lot 317, Lot 329, Lot 340, Lot 309, Lot 382, Lot 351, Lot 355, Lot 326, Lot 383 and Lot 324—a total of well over 200 animals (McCollum 1915). This is work in which a scientist could really lose himself. The records of observations read like a Gertrude Stein story, a rose, is a rose, is a rose; the insistence of the observations belies any hope of signification. With such repetition there are no causal relations, no growth in a subject. The scientist as subject does not head-up the action here because there is no master to this narrative. Rather the sequence becomes a logic of affective sense. In their enormous repetition, the experimental systems constitute the virtual possibilities as an insistence; an insistence of that which is outside the limits of knowledge, outside that which is already known. Repetition here enables a worrying and an exploration of the limits of reason. The repetition enables the scientists to wonder at and to provoke that which is outside the limits of our understanding. The effect of the repetitious character of the experimental systems is constituted in part by the differences within the experimental systems. As we saw above, the rat feeding experiments designed in search of the ‘as yet unknown’ substance in food used diets of rations of various purified nutrients to see the effects of these different combinations. The differences between the repeated experiments are sometimes very small, consisting in, for example, the addition of water extracted wheat embryo to a rice diet compared to the addition of acetone extracted wheat embryo to a rice diet. Within these experiments, nutritional science is deployed as a refrain, repeated variously. Because of the repetition of these slightly different experiments, differences accumulate along lines of variation. From this constant repetition of difference emerges the capacity for the precipitation of the future. Through repetition against the unknown a crescendo builds, precipitating an overflow and the emergence of new knowledge. And indeed, the insistence of difference within these experiments facilitate an encounter with novelty; McCollum states that the results of his accumulated repetitions in difference,

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“force us to accept the conclusion that there are necessary for normal nutrition . . . unknown accessory substances” (1915, p. 184; italics in original). The new irrupts upon a substrate of repetition. Rat Metabolism and the Growth of Experiments Through the development and continued use of particular rations, experimental systems feed back on themselves to continue growing through time, and they spawn new studies with similar but different character traits, which also feed back on themselves, and continue growing. Experiments were inspired by and grew out of experiments undertaken earlier by the same scientists or by other scientists, or the experiments are a graft onto the results of someone else’s previous experiments. Consistently in these lab reports, the scientists make statements which indicate that the current experiment was emergent in the “real-time extension” of previous experiments (Pickering 1995). Scientists frequently introduced the logic of their present studies as having arisen as a consequence of the results of previous work. McCollum, for example, suggests that his lab had already produced results concerning corn and wheat and as a result were now turning their attention to rice: In former papers from the laboratory we have made clear the nature of the dietary deficiencies of the corn kernel and wheat kernel as the sole source of nutriment for growing animals. In the present communication we present experimental data showing the specific properties of polished and of unpolished rice as a food, and show the supplementary relationship between these and certain purified and naturally occurring foodstuffs. (1915, p. 181)

As the scientists tell it in the scientific journals, these refrains are autopoetic and auto-catalytic, that is, self-sustaining and differential in their reproduction. If these experimental systems are self-organizing, rather than systems organized by the humans in the system, perhaps the moment of dissolution of human and material agencies can be understood fruitfully as a juggling act. The scientists have several experiments on the go, several balls in the air, the fall of which they must wait through. They must move themselves and conduct their act according to the rise and fall of the rats’ weight, health and well-being as each emerges in time and each experiment is launched in relation to the development of the

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others in the same way that a juggler launches each ball in response to the emergence of the whole juggling act. The scientists’ experimental agency here is one with the emergence of rat metabolism. The real-time extension of the experimental system is necessarily a process wherein the boundaries between known entities are blurred; the material agency of rat metabolism becomes the logic of the experimental process. Such blurring of agencies creates the new boundary of the experimental system, just as the juggling act is constituted in the dissolution of material and human agencies. Rhythm and the Dissolution of Agencies Rat feeding experiments are constituted, in key respects, by the embedding of the different durations of various aspects of the material assemblage. The experimental systems take on a rhythm or several rhythms of their own which lock together, but which are distinct from, the different durations embedded within the systems. For example, within these enormous and enormously repetitive experiments, observations are made and recorded consistently at specific and rhythmic intervals. Osborne and Mendel provide a detailed record of the repetition required of the animal experiments in their first Carnegie Institution publication, ‘Feeding Experiments with Isolated Food Substances’: Rat XII and rat XIII were caged separately on August 9 1909. Fresh food-paste was introduced daily into the food dishes in excess of the amount eaten, which was at first ascertained daily. The body-weights were at first determined every other day, as was the nitrogen of the excreta (urine and faeces). Subsequently it was found adequate to estimate the nitrogen in weekly periods. (1911, p. 19)

The rhythm of these observations is a rhythm of the experimental system that is distinct from any of the various time-frames found within the experiments, such as the rate of growth or metabolism in the rats or the teaching schedules of the researchers. According to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, rhythm can be considered a materiality with particular functions in human imagination and thought. One function of rhythm is “the coordinating function,” whereby rhythm facilitates the coordination of bodily movements of different individuals such that it “allows them, metaphorically speaking to become a ‘collective subject’ ” (Gumbrecht 1994, p. 172). These embedded durations establish timeframes and speeds that are unique to the experiment. These new times and speeds

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are the boundaries of a system that is out of phase with the timeframes and speeds of the formed entities such as the rats, the scientists and the subject of biochemistry, each of which went into producing the system originally. The rhythms of the experimental systems function to lock together the various timeframes within the experimental systems such that the time of the experimental system begins to function as a whole. The rhythms within the experimental systems enable the emergence of a collective subject, which is a blur of nature and culture, a blur of scientific knowledge and animal metabolism. There is a point of rhythm so ever-present as to be practically invisible in rat feeding experiments and in the way we think about human interaction with rats. Notice the rats’ exercise wheel: The exercising cage is an essential part of the colony equipment if fertility is to be maintained and vigorous rats are desired. . . . The cage which we have found very satisfactory is constructed upon a 21 inch bicycle wheel. The excellent ball bearings of a bicycle wheel are essential, for revolving cages are subjected to a very considerable daily use. The recording mechanism frequently registers 5000 revolutions in the twenty four hour period. (Greenman 1923, p. 24)

Close consideration of the revolving wheel allows us to consider the experimental system as a system driven by its own differential reproduction, rather than simply the work of scientists upon rats. First of all, the rats’ agency is apparent in the need for the flywheel. Rat fertility and well-being are sufficiently touchy as to act as agents in the experimental system; the successful experimental system requires the flywheel to maintain itself. The ‘constellating’ of the rat as a technical object here relies upon the rats’ own material agency. However, the flywheel does not only highlight the rats’ agency, but highlights the dissolution of the significance of any one agency and the importance of that which develops in the refrain of human and material agencies. The fly wheel is the perfect site at which to see that the experimental system, and not only the human aspect of the experiment, opens up to become a performance of the rats’ metabolism. The interests of each party are so caught up in the wheel that it is impossible to say where the scientists’ interest and knowledge begins and where the rats’ interest and metabolism begins. According to Gumbrecht, rhythm is significant insofar as it is a phenomenon “without a primary representation dimension” (1994, p. 171). I argue that if, as Gumbrecht asserts, rhythm is a phenomenon without a representative dimension, it is perfectly suited to carrying,

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throughout the experimental system, the ‘as yet unknown’. The rhythm of the exercise wheel is fundamental to the development of the muchdesired ‘fertile and vigorous rats’, which are essential to any successful experiment and it is therefore bound intimately with the scientists’ desire. This is the rhythm of what they desire to know. The scientists’ desire takes on the surge of the cycle of the rats’ wheel and in this way the resonance of the rhythm within the experimental system builds and grows. The rhythm of the wheel, we might say, establishes and perpetuates the wave of the coming to know, throughout the whole experimental system. In establishing this rhythm with the revolving cage the ‘as yet unknown’ and the scientists’ desire pervade the rat colony and the experimental system. The rhythm of the revolving wheel therefore is an essential material if the experimental systems are to solicit the future. Furthermore, Gumbrecht characterizes rhythm as a phenomenon that is experienced as bodily movements. Narrative descriptions, on the other hand, that which is known and can be represented, are phenomena that are experienced as meaning (1994, p. 181). Gumbrecht argues that imagination appears in the tension that is created in movement back and forth between these two levels. This is to say that repeated bodily experiences of rhythm will pull into tension the level of signification available to those involved. The experience of the bodily movement of rhythm is at least not reducible to the signification of any semantic description involved. On the flywheel the pinch of the unknown and that which cannot be represented in the experiment becomes thoroughly mixed with that which is known and is representable. The rhythm of the exercise wheel therefore establishes a rhythm by which that which is unrepresentable or unknown is carried forward throughout the experiment. This tension therefore is productive of imagination. This is not to say that entire structures of signification are brought down, but that in the tension between the semantics of representation and the physical experience of rhythm, bodily movement can access significance which is not part of a narrative sequence. As Gumbrecht understands it, rhythm builds and grows into imagination. Knowledge does not emerge solely from the sense the scientists make of the data they collect for themselves, but emerges from the scientists losing themselves, as a necessary effect of the huge task of rhythmic data collection, and from the interlocking of the various durations and rhythms by the rhythmic drive of the revolving cage. As Alphonso Lingis suggests:

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robyn smith Every purposive movement, when it catches on, loses sight of its teleology and continues as a periodicity with a force that is not the force of the will launching it and launching it once again and then once again; instead it continues as a force of inner intensity. (1998, p. 61)

It may very well be that the scientists placed the rats on the wheels to the end of maintaining the health of their subjects. However, very quickly, as is apparent to anyone who has ever watched a rodent in a wheel and dissolved in laughter at its absurdity, the logic of the process is carried away by the momentum. The absurdity marks the extremity of the self-reference that the revolving wheel performs in the experimental systems and just as logic is carried away, so intentionality is pulled into the orbit of absurdity, where the anomalous is cultivated. This small piece of equipment is a function by which the experimental systems are coordinated as a whole and through which a collective subject emerges. The rats’ exercise wheel is precisely the point at which to see that rhythm allows for the undoing of the human and material agencies constituting the system and that insofar as it performs this function, this rhythm allows the system to function as a whole with internal time-frames and durations and thereby enables it to function as a productive experimental system. If the experimental system consists of a juggling act of purified diets, here we can see that the real trick is juggling while maintaining the balance of the experiment on a unicycle. Certainly we can see the establishment of a closed system through the traffic in differential at the outer limit of the balls in the air and the revolving wheel as the “the little bobbles of the balls and the wobbles of the unicycle have repercussions for each other and . . . become linked . . . into a system” (Livingston 2006, p. 84). Touch and Texture, Sight and Vitality At the time of the formulation of the problem of the ‘as yet unknown’ in food, the techniques of chemical analysis were insufficient to the task of determining or isolating the chemical constituents of the accessory food factor(s). Stanley Becker has argued that because Osborne and Mendel did not recognize the significance of such an insignificant amount of chemical substance they were unable to ascertain the presence of vitamins in their rats’ food (Becker 1968, p. 157). The significance of this observation is two-fold. First, Osborne and Mendel could not conceive the importance of such an insignificant quantity of chemical

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to nutrition, and second, they did not have the technology to isolate the substance, even if they could conceive of the need to do so. These biochemists could only re-construct the pathways of cellular metabolism that were detectable at the time with the tools at hand. The only test for the presence or absence of the unknown food ingredient was a biological test, or an animal feeding experiment. Central events in the assemblage of the experiment are observations by the scientists. Observation in a scientific experiment means hosting different and various sensations, which demand the opening and closing of various points of entry and exit and exposing various surfaces to the ‘as yet unknown’. According to Ludwick Fleck, “There is no universally accepted system of measurement in biology” and within the feeding experiments measurements are also assessments of the animals’ “vitality” and “well-being” (Fleck 1979, p. 63). Observations of well-being and a standard of well-being were practical tools in the experimental system. Noting and recording the well-being of the lab rat was a method for containing and interpreting new results. Well-being therefore was such a powerful tool for biological analysis because it enabled the conceptualization of the ‘as yet unknown’ food substance in a manner that mathematical or chemical analysis would not have allowed. The animals’ well-being and vitality, which cannot be measured other than through a ‘sense’ of the animal, became both a resource and a result within laboratory research. In the publications concerning the ‘as yet unknown’ food factor at the time, the discussions in the results sections are of coat texture and general appearance, activity level and well-being as it ‘seems’ to the scientists. The significance of the scientists’ ‘sense’ of the experiments as a material aspect of the experimental systems and the emergence of new knowledge appears in their observations of the animals’ general health and well-being. For example, “The appearance of these rats was very miserable. They were rough coated and emaciated” (McCollum 1915, p. 183). The coat of the rat, therefore, no longer marked the boundary of the rat from the scientist, rather it is a zone of intensity within the rat/scientist hybrid, the blur of static that comes with rubbing a dry coat, which allows the scientist to form a line with the rats’ interior. Such a statement recalls an image of a sorcerer stroking her cat, stroking her rat, as she ponders the future(s) she might devise. In rubbing the rats’ coats the scientists blur the boundary of the animal body and encounter their interior and the functioning of the intermediate metabolism. The lines of both the subject and the object are redrawn, as scientists make observations

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concerning the rats’ coats to describe the influence of an unknown chemical in the intermediate metabolism of the rat. In taking time to rub the rats, they break off from commonly accepted standards of scientific activity to suspend themselves over the abyss of the unknown, to feel that intensity on their skin. When sitting and rubbing their rats, the scientists are in a state of suspension. They are worrying the problem—suspended between points of knowledge and points in time, between what they have known and that which they do not yet know. This state of suspension is the site of the power to disrupt the narrative line of nutritional knowledge. Although we have this information presented to us as a result in publication, we must understand that at the time the scientists’ repetitious contact with the rats (in feeding, measurement or stroking) really was an invocation of the future. The sense the scientists glean from stroking their rats is not only of rough-coat or soft-coat. They are interested in rough or soft fur only insofar as it bears with it the traces of the rats’ metabolism. In petting the rats, the scientists do not only trace the outline of the animals, rather this touch is an exploration of the interiority of the rats’ metabolism and its unfolding. The scientists were testing the future with these animals. “The mortality of the young was somewhat high, a fact for which we have as yet no adequate explanation” (McCollum 1915, p. 189). The rats’ future was not bright. “They failed to make any growth, and died within two months” (McCollum 1915, p. 182). Friendship in Science I have argued to this point that the intertwining of human and material agencies in experimental systems establishes a zone of intensity, a field of possibility which functions to host the future and solicit the new. In this final section I maintain the argument that new knowledge emerges in a refrain of human and material agency, but I pursue this interaction through the actualization of the vitamins. Here a specific interaction of the human and material agencies will highlight the process by which knowledge and objects move from being incipient to being actual. An exchange of correspondence between Osborne and Mendel in the late spring and early summer of 1913 details nicely a refrain of human and material agency through which the vitamins become increasingly actualized. This exchange of correspondence occurred while Mendel was on summer vacation and is a particularly compelling site of investigation

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as the human agency here consists in the expression and negotiation of friendship between the two men. The exchange follows the publication of McCollum’s ‘successful’ rat feeding experiments three weeks before Osborne and Mendel published their ‘successful’ rat feeding experiments. McCollum’s publication caused much excitement in Osborne and Mendel’s laboratories and it is fortuitous for the historical record that Mendel was on vacation at the time because it meant that he had to communicate with Osborne by letter, thereby leaving a written record. McCollum’s perceived insurgency into ‘their’ field mandated that Osborne and Mendel stop and take stock of the substance of their current experiment. What I want to show here is that a good deal of relationship maintenance was also undertaken and, without knowing how ‘necessary’ the emotional work was, certainly the trust and intimacy in their friendship were contributing factors to the development of the scientists’ work with the rats and the ‘as yet unknown’ in food. In these letters, both the friendship and the rat compel Mendel in his work, even while on vacation. In response to an initial letter from Osborne, Mendel writes: You are not ‘bothering’ me when you write. I always like to hear from you. Nor am I making any serious ‘change of thought’ here: in fact I am putting in several hours a day trying to ‘catch up’ with the literature which I have neglected in the past few months. I find, however, that the problems in which I used to be interested—purine metabolism, parenteral absorption, lymph, etc.—all seem ‘tame’ to me now when the center of my interests has so long been pivoted on our common problems of the rat. (Becker 1968, p. 241)

Tame—more on the order of a pet mouse than a swarm of rats; not nearly so intense, certainly not of the same affect. And what renders the problem so intense is the back and forth of the friendship (‘our common problem’) and rat physiology, the back and forth between human and material agency impresses Mendel as particularly intense, as compared to other aspects of research. On July 9, 1913, Osborne wrote to tell Mendel about a piece by McCollum in the Journal of Biological Chemistry: We have just received the July number of the Journal of Biological Chemistry and are greatly interested in McCollum’s paper which I should suppose you had seen before it was printed. If not, I will say that he might just as well have supplied his data from our notebooks as from his. His results agree with ours in all respects and he has discovered that butter makes them grow. (Becker 1968, p. 237)

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In stating that McCollum has discovered that “butter makes them grow”, Osborne provides a peep into the process of actualization of a scientific object. Allow me to step back a moment. In the letter, Osborne refers to data that Mendel and he have built together. Osborne says that McCollum has their data. He then goes on to say “and he has discovered that butter makes them grow”. Notably, McCollum does not actually use this phrase; this clearly then is Osborne and Mendel’s result. McCollum’s data correspond to their data and McCollum’s discovery corresponds to their discovery. This is the purpose of Osborne’s letter to Mendel. It is not to inform Mendel of some discovery made by McCollum that is a surprise to Osborne. He wrote to Mendel out of frustration and disappointment, “It seems to me a pity that we should be in competition with McCollum in this line of work” (Becker 1968, p. 237). The point I want to make concerns what this letter and its tone tell us about the process of actualization. The process of actualization involves these kinds of discussions among friends concerning butter and its effects on rat growth (in this case). The conclusion reached between them that butter makes rats grow is a grasping, a reach which grows up between human and material agency. It has occurred to (or, for) them that butter makes the rats grow. The statement, “butter makes them grow” is obscure; its significance is elusive. This example shows nicely the obscurity of the process of actualization and the extent to which this process is one of feeling, practical experience and mood. Osborne and Mendel understood the implications of such a statement because they were friends. The actualization of this scientific object is linked to aspects of knowledge production that are non-empirical, which cannot be pointed up. This tenuous result, “butter makes them grow”, could be sustained in actuality and become a scientific result only because the friendship at work could sustain it as such. The development of a phrase such as this occurs with the development of a mood, a sense of intimacy between Osborne and Mendel and within their laboratory. Insofar as it clearly is an idiomatic expression for them, it stands in for their common experiences in the lab and invokes for each of them a sense of belonging. The statement suggests that the science undertaken in Osborne and Mendel’s lab is highly personal. Science here is a particular form of experimentation, a particular arrangement of tools and materials. Osborne and Mendel’s friendship, the intimacy they develop through their lab work provides a carrier for the emerging thought-style, the emerging understanding of “accessory

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food factors”. It was because of the intimate bond between them that they could nurture this incipient result into actuality. The tendencies and potential of the ‘as yet unknown’ are being pulled through the refrain of friendship, lab bench relations and rat physiology. The specific effect of this statement, “butter makes them grow”, as one that is apparently well-worn and serves as a marker for a whole set of results and experiences in the lab has the effect of dissolving the subjects into the object of investigation, the rats. By naming these tendencies within the rat-human relations, “butter makes them grow”, Osborne and Mendel begin the process of inhibiting other tendencies so that the accessory food factors are increasingly actualized. “Butter makes them grow” is a nascent limit, a budding postulate, not yet expressed in the biological theories or accumulated knowledge at the time. Insofar as McCollum’s paper upsets them, this “butter makes them grow” is becoming a restrictive postulate. They are upset because McCollum has reached the same limits they have reached in developing the problem. “Butter makes them grow” is a style-permeated structure of the problem. It is the budding of the norms of what will be considered a scientific problem and how it will be considered correct to deal with those problems. In this instance, the emergence of the norms of scientific rigour emerges via the work and the intimate specificities of a friendship. To conclude, I suggest we can understand the zone of “the ‘as yet unknown’ ” as a “continuous but highly differentiated field that is ‘out of phase’ with formed entities” (Massumi 2002, p. 34). Such a notion is compelling here because this phrase, “out of phase”, speaks to a blurring and a fading of the boundaries of objects, the suspension of boundaries across their own divides. Productive experimental systems function as “weaver[s] of morphisms” (Latour 1993, p. 137). Scientists inhabit the ‘as yet unknown’ through the suspension of the division between the self and the environment or, in this case, the scientists and their animals. Relationships within experimental systems are productive of this encounter with the ‘as yet unknown’ precisely insofar as they effect a suspension of identity.2

Thanks to the editors of this volume for their initiative. I am happy to acknowledge the support of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada. Thanks also to José Lopez and Rob Mitchell who read and commented on early drafts of this paper. 2

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Becker, Stanley. 1968. The Emergence of a Trace Nutrient Concept through Animal Feeding Experiments. PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin Madison. Doyle, Richard. 2003. Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fleck, Ludwik. 1979. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Greenman, Milton Jay, and Fannie Louise Duhring. 1923. Breeding and Care of the Albino Rat for Research Purposes. Philadelphia: The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Histology. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 1994. ‘Rhythm and Meaning.’ In Materialities of Communication. Edited by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer, 170–186. Stanford.: Stanford University Press. Hopkins, Frederick Gowland. 1912. ‘Feeding Experiments Illustrating the Importance of Accessory Factors in Normal Dietaries.’ Journal of Physiology 44 (5–6): 425–460. ——. 1922. Newer Aspects of the Problem of Nutrition. New York: Columbia University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lingis, Alphonso. 1998. ‘Bestiality.’ Symploke 6 (1): 56–71. Livingston, Ira. 2006. Between Science and Literature: An Introduction to Autopoetics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McCollum, Elmer Verner. 1913. ‘The Necessity of Certain Lipids in the Diet during Growth.’ Journal of Biological Chemistry 15 (1): 167–175. ——. 1915. ‘The Nature of the Dietary Deficiencies of Rice.’ Journal of Biological Chemistry 23 (1): 181–230. Osborne, Thomas Burr, Lafayette B. Mendel, and Edna Louise Ferry. 1911. ‘Feeding Experiments with Isolated Food-Substances.’ Vol. 156 [pt. I–II]. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington. Pickering, Andrew. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

CHAPTER SIX

BECOMING-WITH-COMPANIONS: SHARING AND RESPONSE IN EXPERIMENTAL LABORATORIES Donna Haraway Reading the young-adult novel A Girl Named Disaster by Nancy Farmer, I was arrested by a relationship between an old African Vapostori man, who cared for guinea pigs used for sleeping sickness research in a little scientific outpost in Zimbabwe around 1980, and the tsetse flies, trypanosomes, cattle, and experimental lab rodents. In their working hours, their skin shaved and painted with poisons that might sicken the offending insects with their protozoan parasites, the guinea pigs were held in tight little baskets while wire cages filled with biting flies were placed over them. The flies gorged themselves on the guinea pigs’ blood. A young Shona adolescent girl, Nhamo, new to the practices of science, watched. “It’s cruel,” agreed Baba Joseph, “But one day the things we learn will keep our cattle from dying.” He stuck his own arm into a tsetse cage. Nhamo covered her mouth to keep from crying out. The flies settled all over the old man’s skin and began swelling up. “I do this to learn what the guinea pigs are suffering,” he explained. “It’s wicked to cause pain, but if I share it, God may forgive me.” (Farmer 1996, p. 239)

Baba Joseph seems to me to offer a deep insight about how to think about the labor of animals and their people in scientific practices, especially in experimental labs. The experimental animal science inhabited in this chapter is largely medical and veterinary research in which animals bear diseases of interest to people. A great deal of animal experimental science is not of this type; and for me the most interesting biological research, in and out of labs, does not have the human species much in mind. The notion that ‘the proper study of man is mankind’ is risible among most of the biologists I know, whose curiosity is actually for and about other critters. Curiosity, not just functional benefit, may warrant the risk of “wicked action.” Baba Joseph, however, is worried about sick cattle, coerced guinea pigs, and their people.

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The animal care taker is not engaged in the heroics of self-experimentation—common trope in tropical medicine histories (Herzig 2005)—but in the practical and moral obligations to mitigate suffering among mortals where that is possible and to share the conditions of work, including the suffering of the most vulnerable lab actors. Baba Joseph’s bitten arm is not the fruit of a heroic fantasy of ending all suffering, or not causing suffering, but the result of remaining at risk and in solidarity in instrumental relationships that one does not disavow. Using a model organism in an experiment is a common necessity in research. The necessity and the justifications, no matter how strong, do not obviate the obligations of care and of sharing pain. How else could necessity and justice ( justification) be evaluated in a mortal world where getting knowledge is never innocent? There are, of course, more standards for evaluation than this one; but forgetting the criterion of sharing pain to learn what animals’ suffering is and what to do about it is not tolerable anymore, if it ever was. It is important that the ‘shared conditions of work’ in an experimental lab make us get it that entities with fully secured boundaries called possessive individuals (imagined as human or animal) are the wrong units for considering what is going on. That does not mean that a particular animal does not matter, but that mattering is always inside connections that demand and enable response, not bare calculation or ranking. Response, of course, grows with the capacity to respond; i.e., responsibility. Such a capacity can only be shaped in and for multi-directional relationships, in which there is always more than one responsive entity in the processes of becoming. That means that human beings are not uniquely obligated to and gifted with responsibility; animals as workers in labs, animals in all their worlds, are response-able in the same sense as people; i.e., responsibility is a relationship crafted in intra-action through which entities, subjects and objects, come into being (Barad 2007). “Intra-acting, people and animals in labs are becoming with each other in a subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters. If this structure of material-semiotic relating breaks down, or is not permitted to be born, then nothing but objectification and oppression remain. The parties in intra-action do not admit of pre-set taxonomic calculation; responders are themselves co-constituted in the responding and do not have in advance a proper check list of properties. Further, the capacity to respond, and so responsibility, should not be expected to take on symmetrical shapes and textures for all the parties. Response cannot emerge within relationships of self-similarity.

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Calculation, such as a risk-benefit comparison weighted by taxonomic rank, suffices within relations of bounded self-similarity, such as humanism and its offspring. Answering to no check list, response is always more risky than that. If an experimental lab becomes a scene only of calculation in relation to animals or people, that lab should be shut down. Minimizing cruelty, while necessary, is not enough; responsibility demands more than that. I am arguing that instrumental relations of people and animals are not themselves the root of turning animals (or people) into dead things, into machines whose reactions are of interest but who have no presence, no face, that demands recognition, caring, and shared pain. Instrumental intra-action itself is not the enemy; indeed, I will argue below that work, use, and instrumentality are intrinsic to bodily webbed mortal earthly being and becoming. Unidirectional relations of use, ruled by practices of calculation and self-sure of hierarchy, are quite another matter. Such self-satisfied calculation takes heart from the primary dualism that parses body one way and mind another. That dualism should have withered long ago in the face of feminist and many other criticisms, but the fantastic mind/body binary has proved remarkably resilient. Failing, indeed refusing, to come face-to-face with animals, I believe, is one of the reasons. We are in the midst of webbed existences, multiple beings in relationship, this animal, this sick child, this village, these herds, these labs, these neighborhoods in a city, these industries and economies, these ecologies linking natures and cultures without end. This is a ramifying tapestry of shared being/becoming among critters (including humans) where living well, flourishing, and being ‘polite’ (political/ethical/in right relation) mean staying inside shared semiotic materiality, including the suffering inherent in unequal and ontologically multiple instrumental relationships. In that sense, experimental animal research is, or can be, necessary, indeed good, but it can never ‘legitimate’ a relation to the suffering in purely regulatory or disengaged and unaffected ways. The interesting questions, then, become what might responsible ‘sharing suffering’ look like in historically situated practices? The sense of sharing I am trying to think about is both epistemological and practical.1 It is not about being a surrogate for the surrogate, or

1 My thinking about what sharing suffering might mean was worked out partly in an extended email dialogue in July 2006 with Thom van Dooren, an Australian scholar and writer on the worlds of seeds in technoscientific agriculture.

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taking the place of the suffering ‘other’ that we need to consider. We do not need some New Age version of the facile and untrue claim that “I feel your pain.” Sometimes, perhaps, taking the place of ‘the victim’ is a kind of action ethically required; but I do not think that is sharing and, further, those who suffer, including animals, are not necessarily victims. What happens if we do not regard or treat lab animals as victims, nor as ‘other’ to the human, nor relate to their suffering and deaths as sacrifice? What happens if experimental animals are not mechanical substitutes, but significantly unfree partners, whose differences and similarities to human beings, to each other, and to other organisms are crucial to the work of the lab, and indeed, are partly constructed by the work of the lab? What happens if the working animals are significant others with whom we are in consequential relationship in an irreducible world of embodied and lived partial differences, rather than the Other across the gulf from the One? In addition, what does ‘unfree’ mean here in relation to animals who are in an instrumental relation with people? Where is our zoological Marx when we need him? Lab animals are not ‘unfree’ in some abstract and transcendental sense. Indeed, they have many degrees of freedom in a more mundane sense, including the fact that experiments do not work if animals and other organisms do not cooperate. I like the metaphor ‘degrees of freedom’: there really are unfilled spaces; something outside calculation can still happen. Even factory meat industries have to face the disaster of chickens or pigs who refuse to live when their cooperation is utterly disregarded in an excess of human engineering arrogance. But that is a very low standard for thinking about animal freedom in instrumental relations. To be in a relation of use to each other is not the definition of unfreedom and violation. Such relations are almost never symmetrical (‘equal’ or calculable). Rather, relations of ‘use’ are exactly what companion species are about—the ecologies of significant others involve mess mates at table, with indigestion and without the comfort of teleological purpose from above, below, in front, or behind. This is not some kind of naturalistic reductionism; this is about living responsively as mortal beings where dying and killing are not optional or able to be laundered like stolen money by creating unbridgeable gaps in the pathways through which the flows of value can be tracked. Flows of value can be tracked, thanks to Marx and his heirs; but response has to go into trackless territory, without even the orienting sign posts of reliable chasms.

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None of this lets me forget that I called the lab animals ‘unfree’ in some sense not undone by remembering that relations of utility are not the source of that ascription. Baba Joseph did not say that understanding the animals’ suffering made the wickedness of causing them pain go away. He said only that his God “may forgive” him. May. When I say ‘unfree,’ I mean that real pain, physical and mental, including a great deal of killing, is often directly caused by the instrumental apparatus, and the pain is not borne symmetrically. Neither can the suffering and dying be borne symmetrically, in most cases, no matter how hard the people work to respond. To me that does not mean people cannot ever engage in experimental animal lab practices, including causing pain and killing. It does mean that these practices should never leave their practitioners in moral comfort, sure of their righteousness. Neither does the category of ‘guilty’ apply, even though with Baba Joseph I am convinced the word “wicked” remains apt. The moral sensibility needed here is ruthlessly mundane and will not be stilled by calculations about ends and means. The needed morality, in my view, is culturing a radical ability to remember and feel what is going on and performing the epistemological, emotional, and technical work to respond practically in the face of permanent complexity not resolved by taxonomic hierarchies and with no humanist philosophical or religious guarantees. Degrees of freedom, indeed; the open is not comfortable. Baba Joseph did not replace the guinea pigs; rather, he tried to understand their pain in the most literal way. There is an element of mimesis in his actions that I affirm—feeling in his flesh what the guinea pigs in his charge feel. I am most interested, however, in another aspect of Baba Joseph’s practice, an element I will call ‘non-mimetic sharing.’ He did not get bitten in order to stand in as experimental object, but in order to understand the rodents’ pain so as to do what he could about it, even if that were only to witness to the fact that something properly called forgiveness is needed even in the most thoroughly justified instances of causing suffering. He did not resign his job (and so starve? or ‘just’ lose his status in his community?) or try to convince Nhamo not to help out in the lab with Dr. van Heerden. He did not ‘free’ the guinea pigs or worry about the flies. Joseph encouraged and instructed Nhamo’s curiosity about and with animals of all sorts, in and out of the lab. Still, Joseph had his God from whom he hoped for forgiveness. What might standing in need of forgiveness mean when God is not addressed and sacrifice is not practiced? My suspicion is that the kind of forgiveness that we fellow mortals living with other animals

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hope for is the mundane grace to eschew separation, self certainty, and innocence even in our most creditable practices that enforce unequal vulnerability. In an essay called ‘FemaleMan© Meets OncoMouse™,’ I confronted a genetically engineered lab critter, patented under the name OncoMouse, whose work was to serve as a breast cancer model for women. Commanded by her suffering and moved by Lynn Randolph’s painting, The Passion of OncoMouse, which showed a chimeric white mouse with the breasts of a woman and a crown of thorns in a multi-national observation chamber that was a laboratory, I argued: OncoMouse™ is my sibling, and more properly, male or female, s/he is my sister . . . Although her promise is decidedly secular, s/he is a figure in the sense developed within Christian realism: s/he is our scapegoat; s/he bears our suffering; s/he signifies and enacts our mortality in a powerful, historically specific way that promises a culturally privileged kind of secular salvation—a ‘cure for cancer.’ Whether I agree to her existence and use or not, s/he suffers, physically, repeatedly, and profoundly, that I and my sisters might live. In the experimental way of life, s/he is the experiment . . . If not in my own body, surely in those of my friends, I will someday owe to OncoMouse™ or her subsequently designed rodent kin a large debt. So, who is s/he? (Haraway 1997, p. 79)

It is tempting to see my sister OncoMouse™ as a sacrifice, and certainly the barely secular Christian theater of the suffering servant in science and the everyday lab idiom of sacrificing experimental animals invite that thinking. OncoMouse is definitely a model substituted for human experimental bodies. But something the biologist Barbara Smuts calls co-presence with animals is what keeps me from resting easy with the idiom of sacrifice (Smuts 2001). The animals in the labs, including the oncomice, have face; they are somebody as well as something, just as we humans are both all the time. To be in response to that is to recognize co-presence in relations of use, and therefore to remember that no balance sheet of benefit and cost will suffice. I may (or may not) have good reasons to kill, or to make, oncomice, but I do not have the majesty of Reason and the solace of Sacrifice. I do not have sufficient reason, only the risk of doing something wicked because it may also be good. I am trying to think about what is required of people who use other animals unequally (in experiments, directly or indirectly, in daily living, knowing, and eating because of animals’ labor). Some instrumental relations should be ended, some should be nurtured—but none with-

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out response; i.e., nonmechanical and morally alert consequences for all the parties, human and not, in the relation of unequal use. I don’t think we will have ever a general principle for what sharing suffering means; but it has to be material, practical, consequential; the sort of engagement that keeps the inequality from becoming commonsensical or taken as obviously ok. The inequality is in the precise and changeable labor practices of the lab, not in some transcendent excellence of the Human over the Animal, which can then be killed without the charge of murder being brought. Neither the pure light of sacrifice nor the night vision of the power of domination illuminates the relationships involved. Inequality in the lab is, in short, not of a humanist kind, whether religious or secular, but of a relentlessly historical and contingent kind that never stills the murmur of nonteleological and nonhierarchical multiplicity that the world is. The question that then interests me is how can the multi-species labor practices of the lab be less deadly, less painful, and more free for all the workers? How can responsibility be practiced among earthlings? Labor as such, which is always proper to instrumental relations, is not the problem; it is the always pressing question of nonsymmetrical suffering and death. And nonmimetic well being. Jacques Derrida has been lurking in this reflection for quite some time, and it is time to invite him in directly. Not least, Derrida eloquently and relentlessly reminds his readers that responsibility is never calculable. There is no formula for response; to respond is precisely not merely to react, with its fixed calculus proper to machines, logic, and—most Western philosophy has insisted—animals. In the lineage of those philosophers with and against whom Derrida struggled all his life, the Human only can respond; animals react. The Animal is forever positioned on the other side of an unbridgeable gap, a gap that reassures the Human of His excellence by the very ontological impoverishment of a life world that cannot be its own end or know its own condition. Following Lévinas on the subjectivity of the hostage, Derrida remembers that in this gap lies the logic of sacrifice, within which there is no responsibility toward the living world other than the human (Derrida 1991). Within the logic of sacrifice, only human beings can be murdered. Humans can and must respond to each other and maybe avoid deliberate cruelty to other living beings when it is convenient in order to avoid damaging their own humanity, which is Kant’s scandalous best effort on the topic, or at best recognize that other animals feel pain

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even if they cannot respond nor in their own right obligate response. Every other living being except Man can be killed, but not murdered. To make Man merely killable is the height of moral outrage, indeed, it is the definition of genocide. Reaction is for and toward the unfree; response is for and toward the open.2 Everything but Man lives in the realm of reaction and so calculation—so much animal pain, so much human good, add it up, kill so many animals, call it sacrifice. Do the same for people, and they lose their humanity. There is a great deal of historical demonstration of how all this works; just check out the latest list of current genocides-in-progress. Or read the rolls of death rows in U.S. prisons. Derrida got it that this structure, this logic of sacrifice and this exclusive possession of the capacity for response, is what produces the Animal; and he called that production criminal, a crime against beings we call animals: The confusion of all nonhuman living creatures within the general and common category of the animal is not simply a sin against rigorous thinking, vigilance, lucidity, or empirical authority; it is also a crime. Not against animality precisely, but a crime of the first order against the animals, against animals. (Derrida 2002, p. 417)

Such criminality takes on special historical force in the face of the immense, systematized violence against animals deserving the name exterminism. As Derrida put it: [ N ]o one can deny this event any more, no one can deny the unprecedented proportions of the subjection of the animal. . . . Everybody knows what terrifying and intolerable pictures a realist painting could give to the industrial, mechanical, chemical, hormonal, and genetic violence to which man has been submitting animal life for the past two centuries. (Derrida 2002, pp. 394–95)3

This kind of “Open” is elucidated in Agamben’s reading of Heidegger (Agamben 2004, pp. 49–77). Agamben is very good at explicating how the “anthropological machine” in philosophy works but, bare life (zoe) notwithstanding, he is no help at all, in my view, for figuring out how to get to another kind of opening, the kind feminists and others who never had Heidegger’s starting point for Dasein of profound boredom can discern. 3 Sue Coe has produced vivid graphic art on just these matters (Coe 2000). See also her website: http://www.graphicwitness.org/coe/coebio.htm. Coe works within a framework of animal rights and uncompromising critical prohibition against eating or experimenting on animals. I find her visual work compelling, but the political and philosophical formulations much less so. Extended to the critique of speciesism, the logic of humanism and rights is everywhere; and the substance of moral action is 2

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Everyone may know, but there is not nearly enough indigestion.4 Within the logic of sacrifice that undergirds all versions of religious or secular humanism, animals are sacrificed precisely because they can be killed and then ingested symbolically and materially in acts saved from cannibalism or murder of the brother by the logic of surrogacy and substitution. (Derrida understood that patricide and fratricide are the only real murders in the logic of humanism; everybody else to whom the law is made to apply gets covered by courtesy.) The substitute, the scapegoat, is not Man but Animal. Sacrifice works; there is a whole world of those who can be killed because finally they are only something not somebody, close enough to ‘being’ in order to be a model, substitute, sufficiently self-similar and so nourishing food, but not close enough to compel response. Not the Same, but Different; not One, but Other. Derrida repudiates this trap with all the considerable technical power of deconstruction and all the moral sensitivity of a man who is affected by shared mortality. Judging that the crime that posits the Animal is more than idiotic (a bêtise), Derrida goes much further: ‘[T]he gesture seems to me to constitute philosophy as such, the philosopheme itself.’ (Derrida 2002, p. 408) Derrida argues that the problem is not human beings’ denying something to other critters—whether that be language, or knowledge of death, or whatever is the theoretico-empirical sign of the Big Gap popular to the moment—but rather the death-defying arrogance of ascribing such wondrous positivities to the Human: The question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what respond means. And how to distinguish a response from a reaction. (Derrida 2002, p. 377)

Taking as given the irreducible multiplicity of living beings, Homo sapiens and other species, who are entangled together, I suggest that this question of discernment pivots on the unresolved dilemmas of killing and relationships of use.

denunciation, prohibition, and rescue, such that inside instrumental relations, animals can only be victims. Still, I need her flaming eyes to burnish my knowledge of hell—an inferno for which my world, including myself, is responsible. 4 The statistics for animals killed worldwide by people for use in almost every aspect of human lives are truly staggering; and the growth of that killing in the last century is, literally, unthinkable, if not uncountable. Not to take all this killing seriously is not to be a serious person in the world. How to take it seriously is far from obvious.

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I am afraid to start writing what I have been thinking about all this because I will get it wrong—emotionally, intellectually, and morally— and the issue is consequential. Haltingly, I will try. I suggest that it is a mis-step to separate the world’s beings into those who may be killed and those who may not, and a mis-step to pretend to live outside killing. It is the same kind of mistake that saw freedom only in the absence of labor and necessity; i.e., the mistake of forgetting the ecologies of all mortal beings, who live in and through the use of each other’s bodies. This is not saying that nature is red in tooth and claw and so anything goes. The naturalistic fallacy is the mirror image mis-step to transcendental humanism. I think what I and my people need to let go of if we are to learn to stop exterminism and genocide, either through direct participation or indirect benefit and acquiescence, is the command, “Thou shalt not kill.” The problem is not figuring out to whom such a command applies so that ‘other’ killing can go on as usual and reach unprecedented historical proportions. The problem is to learn to live responsibly within the multiplicitous necessity and labor of killing, so as to be in the open, in quest of the capacity to respond in relentless historical, non-teleological, multispecies contingency. Perhaps the commandment should read, “Thou shalt not make killable.” It is not killing that gets us into exterminism, but making beings killable. Baba Joseph understood that the guinea pigs were not killable; he had the obligation to respond. I think that is exactly what the sexually harassing, middle-aged scholar of poetry, David Lurie, understood in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Working with a vet whose duty to untold numbers of stray and sick animals was fulfilled by killing them in her clinic, David brought the dog he had bonded with to her for euthanasia at the end of the novel. He could have delayed the death of that one dog. That one dog mattered. He did not sacrifice that dog; he took responsibility for killing without, maybe for the first time in his life, leaving. He did not take comfort in a language of humane killing; he was at the end more honest and capable of love than that. That noncalculable moral response is what distinguishes David Lurie in Disgrace for me from Elizabeth Costello in The Lives of Animals, for whom actually existing animals do not seem present. Elizabeth Costello, the fictional Tanner Lecturer in Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, inhabits a radical language of animal rights. Armed with a fierce commitment to sovereign reason, she flinches at none of this discourse’s universal claims; and she embraces all of its power to name extreme atrocity. She practices the enlightenment method

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of comparative history in order to fix the awful equality of slaughter. Meat eating is like the Holocaust; meat eating is the Holocaust. What would Elizabeth Costello do if she were in the place of Bev Shaw, the volunteer animal caretaker in Disgrace, whose daily service of love is to escort large numbers of abandoned dogs and cats to the solace of death? Or in the place of Disgrace’s Lucy Lurie, whose face-to-face life with dogs and human neighbors in post-apartheid South Africa arrests the categorical power of words in mid-utterance? Or even of David Lurie, Lucy’s disgraced father, who finally inhabits a discourse of desire at least as fierce and authentic as Elizabeth Costello’s distinction-obliterating discourse of universal suffering? How do the relentlessly face-to-face, historically situated, language-defeating suffering and moral dilemmas of Disgrace meet the searingly generic, category-sated moral demands of The Lives of Animals? And who lives and who dies—animals and humans—in the very different ways of inheriting the histories of atrocity that Coetzee proposes in these novels’ practices of moral inquiry? (Coetzee 1999 and 2001)5 I suggest that it follows from the feminist insight that embraced historically situated, mindful bodies as the site not just of first (maternal) birth but also of full life and all its projects, failed and achieved, that human beings must learn to kill responsibly. And be killed responsibly, yearning for the capacity to respond and to recognize response, always with reasons but knowing there will never be sufficient reason. We can never do without technique, without calculation, without reasons; but these practices will never get us into that kind of open where multispecies responsibility is at stake. For that open, we will not cease to require a forgiveness we cannot exact. I do not think we can nurture living until we get better at facing killing. If the plant molecular biologist Martha Crouch was right that some of the pleasures of lab science that tend to make practitioners less able to engage in full cosmopolitics come from a kind of Peter Pan-like permanent preadolescence, where one never really has to engage the full semiotic materiality of one’s scientific practices, then maybe sharing suffering is about growing up to do the kind of time-consuming,

5 The Tanner Lectures represent a common, powerful, and in my view powerfully wrong, approach to the knots of animal and human killing and killability. It is not that the Nazi killings of the Jews and others and mass animal slaughter in the meat industry have no relation; it is that analogy culminating in equation can blunt our alertness to irreducible difference and multiplicity and their demands.

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expensive, hard work—as well as play—, of staying with all the complexities for all of the actors, even knowing that will never be fully possible, fully calculable. Staying with the complexities does not mean not acting, not doing research, not engaging in some, indeed many, unequal instrumental relationships; it does mean learning to live and think in practical opening to shared pain and mortality and to what that teaches. The sense of cosmopolitics I draw from is Isabelle Stengers’. She invoked Deleuze’s idiot, the one who knew how to slow things down, to stop the rush to consensus or to a new dogmatism or to denunciation, in order to open up the chance of a common world. Stengers insists we cannot denounce the world in the name of an ideal world. Idiots know that. For Stengers, the cosmos is the possible unknown constructed by multiple, diverse entities. Full of the promise of articulations that diverse beings might eventually make, the cosmos is the opposite of a place of transcendent peace. Stengers’ cosmopolitical proposal, in the spirit of feminist communitarian anarchism and the idiom of Whitehead’s philosophy, is that decisions must take place somehow in the presence of those who will bear their consequences. Making that ‘somehow’ concrete is the work of practicing artful combinations. Stengers is a chemist by training, and artful combinations are her métier. To get ‘in the presence of ’ demands work, speculative invention, and ontological risks. No one knows how to do that in advance of coming together in composition. (Stengers 2004) For those hemophilic dogs in the mid-twentieth century, their physiological labor demanded human lab people’s answering labor of caring for the dogs as patients in minute detail before addressing questions to them as experimental subjects. Of course, the research would have failed otherwise, but that was not the whole story—or should not be allowed to be the whole story as the consequences of sharing suffering nonmimetically become clearer. For example, what sorts of lab arrangements would have to be made to minimize numbers of dogs needed? How to make the dogs’ lives as full as possible? To engage them as mindful bodies, in relationships of response? How to get the funding for a biobehavioral specialist as part of the lab staff for training both lab animals and people of all levels from principal investigators to animal room workers?6 How to get humans with hemophilia or humans who

6 Training animals of a huge range of species from octopuses to gorillas to cooperate actively with people in scientific protocols and husbandry, as well as training human

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care for people dealing with hemophilia involved in care of the dogs? How to ask in actual practice, without knowing the answer through a calculus of how much and whose pain matters, whether these sorts of experiments deserve to flourish anymore at all? If not, whose suffering then will require the practical labor of nonmimetic sharing? All of this is my own imagined scenario, of course, but I am trying to picture what sharing could look like if it were built into any decision to use another sentient being where unequal power and benefit are (or should be) undeniable and not innocent or transparent. The Belgian philosopher and psychologist Vinciane Despret argued that “articulating bodies to other bodies” is always a political matter. The same must be said about disarticulating bodies to rearticulate other bodies. Despret reformulated ways for thinking about domestication between people and animals (Despret 2004). My essay inhabits one of the major sites where domestic animals and their people meet: the experimental laboratory. I have made side trips into the agricultural animal pen and abattoir, propelled by the cattle in Baba Joseph’s story, beasts loved and cultivated intensely by Nhamo and her people, beasts used cruelly by the tsetse flies and their trypanosomes, and beasts turned into efficient, healthy enough, parasite-free, meat-making machines in the death camps of industrial agribusiness. The language of nonmimetic sharing and work is not going to be adequate, I am sure, even if it is part of a needed toolkit. We require a rich array of ways to make vivid and practical the material/ethical/political/epistemological necessities that must be lived and developed inside unequal, instrumental relations linking human and nonhuman animals in research as well as other sorts of activities when our humanist or religious soporifics no longer satisfy us. Human beings’ learning to share other animals’ pain non-mimetically is, in my view, an ethical obligation, a practical problem, and an ontological opening. Sharing pain promises disclosure, promises becoming. The capacity to respond may yet be recognized and nourished on this earth.

caregivers to provide innovative behavioral enrichment for the animals in their charge, is a growing practice. Trained animals are subject to less coercion of either physical or pharmaceutical kinds. Such animals are calmer, more interested in things, more capable of trying something new in their lives, more responsive. Previous scientific research, as well as a bit of finally listening to people who work well with animals in entertainment or sport, has produced new knowledge that in turn changes moral possibilities and obligations in instrumental relationships like those in experimental animal laboratories.

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I end in the company of another arresting writer, Hélène Cixous, who remembers how she failed her childhood dog by abject betrayal. She only knew she loved him, only knew how to love him, only recognized how he loved, many years later. Bitten hard in the foot by her crazed dog, Fips, who had been brought to the insanity of the bite by the daily pelting of rocks into the family’s compound in Algiers after World War II, the twelve-year-old Cixous, subject like all her family to the insupportable pain of the death of her father and the repudiation visited on the scapegoat outsiders by the colonized Arabs all around them, could not face the awful fate of her dog. No complexity of lived history saved her family from the label of doubly hated French Jews. The Cixous family, like the colonized Arabs, were made categorically killable. No grace of a happy ending saved Fips from the consequences. After the leashed dog savaged the girl Hélène, who seemed to the dog about to step on him, holding onto her foot in the face of desperate beating to make him let go, Cixous could no longer face Fips. The dog, ill and neglected, died in the company of her brother; Hélène was not there. As an adult, Cixous learned to tell the story of Job the Dog: The story ends in tragedy . . . I wanted him to love me like this and not that . . . But if they told me I wanted a slave I would have responded indignantly that I only wanted the pure ideal dog I had heard of. He loved me as an animal and far from my ideal . . . I have his rage painted on my left foot and on my hands . . . I did not make light in his obscurity. I did not murmur to him the words that all animals understand . . . But he had ticks, big as chickpeas . . . They ate him alive, those blood drinking inventions created to kill a victim entirely lacking in possibilities to escape them, those proofs of the existence of the devil soft vampires that laugh at the dog’s lack of hands, they suckle it to death, Fips feels his life flow into their tribe of stomachs and without the chance of combat . . . I did not accompany him. A foul fear of seeing the one I did not love strong enough die, and as I would not give my life for him, I could no longer share his death. (Cixous 1998)7

My story ends where it began, with the dilemmas posed by blood-sucking insects, when the logic of sacrifice makes no sense and the hope for forgiveness depends on learning a love that escapes calculation but requires the invention of speculative thought and the practice of remembering, of rearticulating bodies to bodies. Not an ideal love, not

7 I am grateful to Adam Reed for giving me Cixous’ essay and for his evident pain and care in reading it.

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an obedient love, but one that might even recognize the non-compliant multiplicity of insects. And the taste of blood. Coda: Rearticulating My friend and colleague Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi read ‘Sharing Suffering’ in manuscript and forced me to come face-to-face with, as she put it, “the hardest case for the theory of co-presence and response”, challenging me to respond to the following question: I want to know what you would say when someone buttonholes you and says: I challenge you to defend the slaughter of lab animals in biomedical experiments. No matter how carefully you guard them from extraordinary pain, in the end, they are subject to pain inflicted by you for the social goods of: knowledge-seeking in itself, or applications for human purposes. You did it. You killed the animals. Defend yourself. What do you say then?8 I wrote her back: Yes, all the calculations still apply; yes, I will defend animal killing for reasons and in detailed material-semiotic conditions that I judge tolerable because of a greater good calculation. And no, that is never enough. I refuse the choice of ‘inviolable animal rights’ versus ‘human good is more important.’ Both of those proceed as if calculation solved the dilemma, and all I or we have to do is choose. (I have never regarded that as enough in abortion politics either. Because we did not learn how to shape the public discourse well enough, in legal and popular battles feminists have had little choice but to use the language of rationalist choice as if that settled our pro-life politics, but it does not and we know it. In Susan Harding’s terms (Harding 2006), we feminists who protect access to abortion, we who kill that way, need to learn to revoice life and death in our terms and not accept the rationalist dichotomy that rules most ethical dispute.) I act; I do not hide my calculations that motivate the action. I am not thereby quit of my debts, and it’s more than just a debt. I am not quit of response-ability, which demands calculations but is not finished

8

Email from Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi to Donna Haraway, July 15, 2006.

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when the best cost/benefit analysis of the day is done and not finished when the best animal welfare regulations are followed to the letter. The space opened up by words like “forgive” and “wicked” remains, although I grant that overripe religious tones cling to those words like a bad smell, and so we need other words too. We have reasons, but not sufficient reasons. To refuse to engage the practices for getting good reasons (in this case, experimental lab science) is not just stupid, but criminal. Neither ‘the greater human good trumps animal pain’ camp nor the ‘sentient animals are always ends in themselves and so cannot be used that way’ camp sees that the claim to have Sufficient Reasons is a dangerous fantasy rooted in the dualisms and misplaced concretenesses of religious and secular humanism. Obviously, trying to figure out who falls below the radar of sentience—and so is killable—, while we build retirement homes for apes, is an embarrassing caricature of what must be done, too. We damn well do have the obligation to make those lab apes’ lives as full as we can (raise taxes to cover the cost!) and to get them out of the situations into which we have placed them in. Improved comparative biobehavioral sciences, in and out of labs, as well as affective political/ethical reflection and action, tell us that no conditions will be good enough to permit anymore many kinds of experiments or practices of captivity for many animals, not only apes. Note, I think we now know that at least in serious part because of research. But again, those calculations—necessary, obligatory, and grounding action out loud and in public—are not sufficient. Now, how to address that response-ability (which is always experienced in the company of significant others, in this case, the animals)? As you say, Sharon, the issue lies not in Principles and Ethical Universals, but in practices and imaginative politics of the sort that rearticulates the relations of mindsbodies, in this case critters and their lab people and scientific apparatuses. For example, what about instituting changes in lab daily schedules so that rats or mice get to learn how to do new things that make their lives more interesting (a trainer to enhance the lives of subjects is a little thing, but a consequential one). Besides getting good human child care attached to labs, I’d love to see all those jobs open up for good animal trainers. I imagine the lab people having to pass a positive-methods training proficiency test and lab-oriented biobehavioral ecology test for the species they work with in order to keep their jobs or get their research approved. Experimenters would have to pass such tests for the same reasons that bosses and workers

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have to get it these days that sexual harassment is real (even if the regulatory apparatus often seems to be a caricature of what feminists meant); namely, that unless retrained, people, like other animals, keep seeing and doing what they already know how to see and do, and that’s not good enough. Of course, thinking reforms will settle the matter is a failure of affective and effective thinking and a denial of responsibility. New openings will appear because of changes in practices, and the open is about response. I think this actually happens all the time with good experimenters and their critters. For most of this essay, I have concentrated on instrumental, unequal, scientific relations among human and nonhuman vertebrates with sizable brains that people identify as like their own in critical ways. However, the vast majority of animals are not like that; nonmimetic caring and significant otherness are my lures for trying to think and feel more adequately; and multi-species flourishing requires a robust nonanthropomorphic sensibility that is accountable to irreducible differences. In a doctoral exam committee with my colleague, marine invertebrate zoologist Vicki Pearse, I learned how she looks for ways to make her cup corals in the lab more comfortable by figuring out which wave lengths and periods of light they enjoy. Getting good data matters to her, and so do happy animals; i.e., actual animal well-being in the lab. Inspired by Pearse, I asked some of my biologist friends who work with invertebrates to tell me stories about their practices of care that are central to their labor as scientists. I wrote: Do you have an example from your own practice or those close to you of how the well being of the animals, always important for good data, of course, but not only for that, matters in the daily life of the lab? I want to argue that such care is not instead of experiments that might also involve killing and/or pain, but is intrinsic to the complex felt responsibility (and mundane non-anthropomorphic kinship) many researchers have for their animals. How do you make your animals happy in the lab (and vice versa)? How do good zoologists learn to see when animals are not flourishing? The interesting stories are in the details more than the grand principles!

Michael Hadfield, Professor of Zoology at the University of Hawaii and Director of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory (the Pacific Biosciences Research Center), responded: What your questions draw to mind for me lies more in my work with the Hawaiian tree snails than our small beasts at the marine lab. I have worked

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donna haraway very hard to provide laboratory environments for these endangered snails that approach a field setting as closely as possible. To that end, we buy expensive ‘environmental chambers,’ wherein we can set up day lengths and temperature-humidity regimes that approach those of the snails’ field habitats as much as possible. We also try to provide a leafy world and the mold they scrape from leaves in abundance. Most importantly, we provide all of this in a predator-free world, to ‘save’ them from the aliens [introduced highly destructive species like predatory snails and rats] that are eating them up in the mountains. I also find the snails to be beautiful and their babies to be ‘cute,’ but that’s not very scientific, is it? For many reasons—not least being their legally protected status—we work very hard to keep from injuring or killing any of the snails in the lab. I truly want to see these species persist in the world, and what we do in the lab is the only way I know to make that happen, at present. We are now caring for more than 1,500 tree snails in the lab, at great expense and personal effort, with the goal of staving off even more extinctions than have already occurred. A major part of this is keeping the snails as healthy and ‘natural’ as possible (‘natural,’ because they must someday go back to—and survive in—the field). If that’s ‘keeping them happy,’ then it’s our driving force.

How do we see (assuming we are ‘good zoologists’) that our animals are not flourishing? Ah, well, usually it’s when they die. Snails and worms don’t emit cries of anguish, nor typically show signs of illness for very long before they die. For the tree snails, I watch the demographic trends in each terrarium very carefully (we census them at least bi-weekly) to note whether there are births, if death rates are greater than birth rates, etc. At the first hint of something wrong, I force the lab crew to immediately stop and review every step in the maintenance-culture regime. We often have to check an entire environmental chamber (10+ different terraria, with several species) to see if something is wrong with the entire environment. And we take immediate steps to remedy situations, even when we don’t fully understand them. E.g., I recently concluded that my lab group was over-filling the terraria with leafy branches from o’hia trees at each cleaning/changing session. They had concluded that, since the snails’ food is the mold growing on the leaves, the more leaves the better. I explained that the snails needed more air flow through the terraria, and that their activities were strongly regulated by light, little of which reached the centers of the leaf-crammed terraria. So, we’ve fixed that and are now looking for the next problem and ‘remedy.’9

9 More details on this snail research can be found in Hadfield, Holland and Olival 2002.

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We are face-to-face, in the company of significant others, companion species to each other. That is not romantic or idealist, but mundane and consequential in the little things that make lives. Instead of being finished when we say this experimental science is good, including the kind that kills animals where necessary and according to the highest standards we collectively know how to bring into play, our debt is just opening up to speculative and so possible material, affective, practical reworlding in the concrete and detailed situation of here, in this tradition of research, not everywhere all the time. This ‘here’ might be quite big, even global, if abstractions get really well built and full of grappling hooks for connections. Maybe even Baba Joseph and Cixous would think so, if probably not the ticks and tsetse flies. Perhaps best of all, in the lab and in the field, Hawaiian tree snails might actually have a chance to live naturally because an experimental invertebrate zoologist cared to respond and share suffering in nonanthropomorphic, nonmimetic, painstaking detail. References Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1998. Stigmata, Escaping Texts. New York: Routledge. Coe, Sue. 2000. Pit’s Letter. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. Coetzee, J.M. 1999. Disgrace. New York: Viking. ——. 2001. The Lives of Animals. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Derrida, Jacques (with Jean-Luc Nancy). 1991. ‘ “Eating Well,” or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.’ In Who Comes After the Subject?. Edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, 96–119. New York: Routledge. ——. 2002. ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’. Critical Inquiry 28 (2): 369–418. Despret, Vinciane. 2004. ‘The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthro-zoo-genesis.’ Body and Society 10 (2–3): 111–134. Farmer, Nancy. 1996. A Girl Named Disaster. New York: Orchard Books. Hadfield, M.G., B.S. Holland and K.J. Olival. 2004. ‘Contributions of ex situ Propagation and Molecular Genetics to Conservation of Hawaiian Tree Snails.’ In Experimental Approaches to Conservation Biology. Edited by M. Gordon and S. Bartol, 16–34. Berkeley: University of California Press. Haraway, Donna J. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium: FemaleMan©_ Meets_OncoMouse™. New York: Routledge. Susan Harding, Susan. 2006. ‘Get Religion’. Unpublished manuscript. Herzig, Rebecca M. 2005. Suffering for Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Pemberton, Stephen. 2004. ‘Canine Technologies, Model Patients: the Historical

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Production of Hemophiliac Dogs in American Biomedicine.’ In Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History. Edited by Susan R. Schrepfer and Philip Scranton, 191–213. New York: Routledge. Smuts, Barbara. 2001. ‘Encounters with Animal Minds.’ Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (5–7): 293–309. Stengers, Isabelle. 2004. ‘The Cosmopolitical Proposal.’ Unpublished version.

PART FOUR

CORPOREAL ENCOUNTERS Investigating discursive, material and operational entanglements between human and nonhuman animals in early modernity and modernity, respectively, the two essays in this section contribute stories and histories of embodiment and intercorporeality that together provide an ‘organic’—rather than technology-driven—genealogy of how we became posthuman. Moreover, the explicitly historical approach pursued by both scholars brings to the fore what, in the history of science from the Enlightenment onwards—anatomy and primatology in the case of their fields of investigation—has remained largely invisible, to wit, the relevance of animals in scientific (r)evolutions. We are also witness to the enormous efforts undertaken to efface the dependence on animal bodies in order to produce and maintain a bordered humanity. Laurie Shannon’s essay ‘Invisible Parts: Animals and the Renaissance Anatomies of Human Exceptionalism’ reties the knots between humankind and all other kinds with the help of the notion of a “common creatureliness”. The ideas of cross-species relatedness appearing in Shannon’s sources from the 16th and 17th centuries range from the observation of bodily analogies to the vision of an all-inclusive form of quasi-political participation that the author terms a “zootopian constitution.” Contrasting Harvey’s “cross-species analogical reasoning” favourably with the anthropocentric perspective of Vesalius (who had charged Galen with being “deceived by his monkeys”, and called for a fully human anatomy), Shannon dissects her material to render visible the work of animals not only in the Renaissance production of ‘the human’, but also in the fabric of ‘knowledge’ itself. She reads the debates evolving around the issue of whether or not, and to what degree, human and animal anatomies are ‘more kin than kind’ (as their contemporary Shakespeare would put it) as symptomatic of “a crisis of authority in Renaissance learning and medical science”. This crisis had a literary and ideological afterlife in two texts by the seventeenthcentury authors Robert Burton and Thomas Browne, where the only response to the troubling demonstration of interspecies connectedness is to speculate that there must be some ‘invisible parts’ to ground the ‘truth’ of human exceptionalism.

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More ‘Invisible Histories: Primate Bodies and the Rise of Posthumanism in the Twentieth Century’ are made present by Jonathan Burt. The author seconds Carol J. Adam’s critique of the replacement of ‘real’ animals by images in late capitalism and explores the potential as well as the limits of animal-centred histories for the natural sciences, the humanities and for critical reflection in general. More specifically, Burt contributes to the current redefinition of the history of human-animal relations in the twentieth century, with important consequences for understanding a posthumanist thematic prior to the articulation of posthumanism in the 1990s. His focus is a particular body of work on primates by Solly Zuckerman from the 1930s and early 40s which had two separate strands, one concerned with sexual reproduction and cyclicity, the other with the effects of weaponry on bodies. Zuckerman’s reading of primate social behaviour reveals how the dynamic interactions between the scientist and the animals altered both species socially and physiologically. While Burt concedes that these alterations may lead to a rethinking of the human-animal divide, he concludes with a cautionary warning, suggesting that the dissolution of species boundaries should not be celebrated as “the ideal end point for this repositioning”. Rather, corporeal encounters between living organisms should in his view be regarded “with something of a worthwhile questioning, if pessimistic, eye”. (MR)

CHAPTER SEVEN

INVISIBLE PARTS: ANIMALS AND THE RENAISSANCE ANATOMIES OF HUMAN EXCEPTIONALISM Laurie Shannon ‘Human exceptionalism’—the idea of a bordered humanity cordoned off by some exclusive and defining feature from the entire balance of all other creaturely kinds, while they, in turn, are herded into the contracted fold of ‘the animal’—is an excessively familiar habit of thought. Such gross classifications of ‘the’ human and ‘the’ animal often persist even in contexts intended to trouble them. When, for example, The New York Times referred to studies of the percentage of DNA shared between chimps and humans (a 98% overlap), the writer concluded that either chimps are 98% human or even Catherine Deneuve is “98% chimpanzee” (Gates 2006). But what might it have meant, instead, to describe Deneuve, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein (the offered paragons of that paragon of species, Homo sapiens) as only “2% human”? As Donna Haraway’s wonderful gloss on Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern proposes, contemporary biological evidence suggests that “we have never been human” (Haraway 2008; Latour 1993). I extend that claim into the domain of cultural history here by exploring early modern comparative anatomy as an important chapter in the long story of interspecies relations. Before contemporary genetic and evolutionary paradigms charted biological and genealogical kinships among the species, what understandings traversed the border of the human to govern the sense of cross-species relatedness? If we understand uninterrogated notions of ‘the human’ as a kind of lingering stagecraft of the Enlightenment, what species arrangements preceded that historically-specific severance of man from beast? This essay particularly concerns cross-species comparative thinking in the expanding practice of dissective anatomical demonstration in early modernity, and so it charts one historical component of the discursive ‘human/animal divide’ we have inherited. In this effort, however, it explores a history of human/animal connectedness

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as much as it does the history of their categorical separation.1 In the European and Anglophone west, of course, theological models have long prevailed to urge a radical difference in kind between humans and the other animals. This theological separation still operates in ethical discourses (especially in contexts of medical testing) that depend on a species-hierarchy of sacrificial value.2 The categorical and political dispensation in Genesis had decreed that humans held both earthly dominion and an immortal soul as unique entitlements from God. In its early modern manifestations, ‘the human’ was defended by this strong official border, even though the possibility of escaping its pale and falling into bestiality remained a persistent moral risk (Bach 2005). Cultural studies scholars Bruce Boehrer (2002) and Erica Fudge (2002) have demonstrated that, despite these official accounts in the period, at the level of signification the mutually-erosive interpenetrations characteristic of any binary opposition apply in this one too. That is, the boundaries of the ‘human’ and ‘animal’ are foundationally blurred by the fact that neither enclosing concept can proceed without utter dependency on the other as its negative case. The seventeenth-century elephant in the room in any genealogy of creaturely binarism, of course, is the model developed by René Descartes, who is worth classifying in this connection as a philosopher-anatomist. In a series of writings from The Treatise of Man (written before 1637) to The Passions of the Soul (1649), Descartes re-understood the divide set in Genesis in newly philosophical terms. He separated a thinking, “cogito” figure of man apart from his now notorious figure of “la bête machine.” It is fair to describe the cogito ergo sum doctrine as a still-operative definition of the human species. This cogito, or rational soul, is itself a gene-spliced hybrid of Aristotelian and Christian thought. But as a crucial substrate for the highly-quoted philosophical

In managing the metrics of sameness and difference between ‘humans’ and ‘animals,’ there seems to be nothing but situated perspectives. We are ‘continuists’ and ‘discontinuists,’ depending on circumstances. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith so precisely describes this kaleidoscopic situation, “once . . . our human distinctiveness is unsettled by . . . our animal identity, there is no point, or at least no more obviously natural point, beyond which the claims of our kinship with other creatures . . . could not be extended; nor, by the same token, is there any grouping of creatures, at least no more obviously rational grouping, to which such claims might not be confined” (Smith 2004, p. 2). 2 Experimental psychologist turned animal rights activist Richard D. Ryder first dubbed this kind of deeply embedded bias “speciesism” in 1970; Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals translated “speciesism” into the philosophical and ethical languages of utilitarian analysis. 1

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resolution of the theological problem of skepticism (“I think therefore I am”), the Cartesian account also offers a blunt severance of man and beast. Reckoning the reasoning powers of a rational soul as uniquely human, it limits all nonhuman animals to the machinic programmings of instinctual response, calling them nature’s “automata” and likening them to clocks and robots (Descartes 1968 and 1970; printed in Regan and Singer 1976, pp. 13–19). Scholars debate Descartes’ particular liability for the larger politics of species that this view entailed. Some apologists, for example, argue that Descartes’ philosophical commitment to the beast-machine idea was not central to his published writings (since it appears mainly in letters) and that he did not go so very far as to justify vivisection on its explicit basis, as some of his followers did. More deconstructive readers have disclosed the potential ‘posthumanity’ of Cartesian subjectivity itself, despite its historic role as the epicenter of modern humanness, by assessing the way Cartesian mind/body dualism renders even the human body a machine.3 While debate will continue on the philosopher-anatomist’s accountability for the excesses of Cartesianism, the broad outlines of his dispensation of the faculties of instinct and reason has had enormous impact, especially as an intellectual legitimation of what is also the most convenient view for humanity to hold. Whether expressed flat out as a biblically-derived theology of the soul or as a Cartesian allocation of reason, humanity is normally distinguished from all other creatures in absolute terms—when the question of human status is posed directly. This essay, however, takes a different tack. It pursues, instead, modalities of cross-species relatedness—before and apart from Descartes. What working concepts grouped humans and animals together, despite Descartes’ foray into categorical separation? When and for what purposes have we been more and less human by Haraway’s measure? If we became, perhaps, ‘as human as we ever will have been’ as a result of the seventeenth-century scientific paradigms that were themselves preconditions for the Enlightenment, what might the prehistories of the problem suggest for us about the future of interspecies relations? In particular, I am interested in ideas of relatedness that range from cross-species bodily analogy (central to this essay) to a pan-species

3 See Harrison 1992; see also Cottingham 1978; for an account of Cartesian philosophy as containing a kind of posthumanism avant la lettre, see Badmington 2003. (I am grateful to Manuela Rossini for this reference.)

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participation in something like a larger political form or what I label a ‘zootopian constitution.’ I would like to mention three modes of relatedness across species before turning to the specifically anatomical matters of corporeal analogy, bodily substitution, and comparison at issue in Renaissance anatomical research. First among them is the classical vocabulary of the soul, as relayed in early modern texts of natural history and philosophy. The Aristotelian account held that there are three main kinds or levels of soul animating living things: the vegetative soul, the sensitive soul, and the rational or intellective soul.4 This order of souls can surely be viewed as tending towards exclusivity and distinctiveness at the human top of its hierarchy. But it can also be read in the opposite way, to emphasize the degree to which supposed higher life forms partake of or participate in all the forms beneath them. In this sense, all living things defy full categorical enclosure because they are, naturally speaking, compounds. Francis Bacon, for example, refers to “the participation of species,” arguing that “no natural being seems to be simple, but as it were participating and compounded of two. . . . man hath something of a beast; a beast something of a plant; a plant something of an inanimate body; so that all natural things are in very deed biformed” (Bacon 1997, p. 215). In this expression of the Aristotelian system of souledness, we see a mutual partaking of kinds of soul—at least that is the view from the top of this scale, looking down. The dispersedly soulful Aristotelian universe obviously understands ‘soul’ in quite different terms from Christian discourses. The persistence, however, of the term ‘animal’ (a nominalization of an adjective derived from the Latin anima, for soul, spirit, or breath) suggests just how what I call a ‘zoopolitan’ sense of souledness we retain at some sedimentary level, perhaps despite ourselves: ‘animals’ are called, everyday, by a name that designates a certain kind of soul. A further kind of cross-species relatedness, one loosely connected to Aristotelian biological questions of anima, concerns the humoral system: those elements and fluids understood to be the foundational components of matter and of organisms in particular. The humoral language that pervades colloquial period accounts of character and embodiment and

4 Although customarily these three are cited alone, Aristotle lists five kinds or “powers” of the soul: the vegetative, the sensitive, the appetitive, the locomotive, and the intellectual (De Anima, 414a29–32).

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persists in contemporary attributions of a hot temper or cold-bloodedness derives predominantly from the humoral system described by the ancient medical writer, Galen. Gail Kern Paster’s work on the humoral body makes a powerful case that, since animal and human bodies are made of the same humoral ‘stuff,’ “identification across the species barrier was compelling for . . . early moderns” (Paster 2004, p. 150).5 In effect, then, a humoral constitution animalizes humans as much as the reverse, exactly as the contemporary revelations of the genetic code with which I began seem to do. As Paster shows, this substantial identification serves to ground the pervasive likening of humans and animals in early modern culture. A humoral framework of bodily and emotional likeness, as we will see, does not necessarily settle the question of human-animal relatedness when it comes to what we might distinguish as the articulated or anatomized body. Indeed, the underlying humoral likeness that Paster describes offers a certain running contradiction to a developing desire to distinguish species anatomically. Lastly, we can describe a third kind of relationship across species as ‘creatureliness,’ or even ‘co-creatureliness.’ Creatureliness names all things, animate and inanimate, as created things—fellow artefacts from the hand of a benevolent divinity whose creative powers were made evident through what we now call biodiversity. Christian hermeneutic traditions developed the notion that ‘nature’ was, in essence, as legible as the Bible and fully consistent with it; in this context, nature was termed ‘the Book of Creatures,’ and its denizens were to be attended with the respect accorded to the letters and characters of scripture. Julia Lupton’s essay, ‘Creature Caliban,’ explores the construction of this single classification encompassing both humans and nonhumans. The concept of the “creature,” she writes, “presents above all a theological conceptualization of natural phenomena [and] marks the radical separation of [all] creation from Creator” (Lupton 2000, p. 1).6 Sheer status as a ‘creature’ in the world entails a certain degree of legitimating entitlement, since all creatures reflect godly intention. Unduly harming the world’s creatures contravenes religious strictures that require broad assent to all manifestations of divine intention or authority. In other words, all creatures are ‘meant’ to be here. In fact, Paster also rightly makes the case that these gestures—even of “identification”—cannot accurately be reduced to anthropomorphism (see p. 145 and note 30). 6 For a contemporary philosophical account of creatureliness (one addressing only Homo sapiens), see Santner 2006. 5

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this creaturely discourse represents a kind of undertow in the otherwise human-exceptionalist application of Genesis, yielding a pious anticruelty perspective.7 The dominant reading of Genesis, as an origin of human sovereignty, could be set against competing scriptural moments, like the exhortation directed to nonhuman life forms to be fruitful and multiply and the dedication of “every greene herbe” for the mutual use of “euery thing . . . which hath life in it selfe” (Genesis, 1:20–22). By placing animals even potentially on a par with humans, these arguments acknowledge the relevance, relatedness, and even quasi-constitutional standing of animals. With these three broad discourses of engagement across the border of the human in the background—Aristotelian souledness, the humoral system, and fellow creatureliness—I turn to take up the evolving status of comparative anatomy in early modern medical contexts. I will look at key moments in a relay of animal considerations: the sixteenth-century reception of the classical medical treatises of Galen, the groundbreaking anatomical publications of Andreas Vesalius, and Englishman William Harvey’s physiological account of the circulation of the blood in “living creatures.” In any history of our conceptions of the human, Renaissance humanist and scientific approaches to knowledge serve an out-sized role, and as the liberal arts spawned Renaissance Man, so Renaissance anatomy produced a human body for modernity.8 Early modern anatomists and physiologists, however, were faced with a persistent question, one made urgent by the scarcity of legitimatelyacquired human cadavers and one that was intellectually compromised by the moral presumption of convenient access to animal bodies. That question concerned how and whether animal and human bodies pertain to one another; whether they exist in some state of analogy. How exactly was information drawn from the dissection of pigs, dogs, apes, and others relevant, and by what logic did it contribute to a proper knowledge of the human form?

7 This, despite more orthodox attempts to rebut concerns of this nature; see, for a major example of such a rebuttal, Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part II, Question 64, Article 1 and Question 25, Article 3. In another context, I explore the status of such ‘animal rights,’ or what we might more historically term ‘creaturely entitlements,’ in early modern legal trials of animal defendants. See ‘Hang-Dog Looks,’ in Shannon 2010 (forthcoming). 8 As Jonathan Sawday has stressed, this took on literally theatrical dimensions in the production and demonstration of the human body in the so-called ‘anatomy theaters’ that were established throughout the course of the Renaissance (Sawday 1996).

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This essay proposes that a contested analogy between human and animal bodies served as a crux in the evolution of anatomical science (as well as a border skirmish between bipeds and quadrupeds in particular). Analogy itself, after all, is a paradigm of relatedness and, I argue, an abstract form of what Haraway has figured for us as “companion species” relations (Haraway 2003). The analogical status of the animal in the science of anatomy generated a debate that illustrates how early modern medical scientists proceeded in their work—regardless of whether they were observation-oriented empirical researchers or textbased ‘medical humanists’ faithful to ancient writings and engaged in producing perfected editions of ancient medical writers. In particular, this zoo-analogical conundrum complicates Renaissance relations to these sources of knowledge (most consequentially, Galen). Conflicts about animal comparison thus presented nothing less than a crisis of authority in Renaissance learning and medical science. As I hope further to show, the shifting status of animals in anatomical research illustrates the intimacy of an emerging knowledge of man with the work of the various ‘companion species’ central to that knowledge—non-human animals whose bodies literally enabled a new production of ‘the human.’ As a last note, I will touch on the literary and ideological afterlives of this anatomical crisis of authority and comparison in texts of two seventeenth-century English authors, Robert Burton and Thomas Browne. Their language conveys how human exceptionalism must retreat to a speculative domain of ‘invisible parts’ in response to the interspecies dynamics of anatomical demonstration. In other words, debates about animal anatomical comparison flush ‘the human’ out of the domain of demonstrability and into a realm of naked proposition. “Comparisons are Odious” In 1608, the Englishman Edward Topsell published his expansive translation of Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner’s mid-sixteenth-century, multi-volume Historiae animalium (itself a structural imitation of Aristotle’s writings on the subject). In typical natural historical style, most of the animal entries depend on cross-species comparisons for description, and so they illustrate the profoundly open-ended structures of classificatory knowledge in general, as a perpetual metric of likeness and difference. For example, Topsell describes how the hyena has a “body like a Wolfe, but much rougher haired, for it hath bristles like a Horses mane all along his back” (Topsell 1608, p. 340). Topsell’s entry for the

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Ape, though, depends on comprehensive comparisons to the human body. “Apes,” he writes, “ do outwardly resemble men very much . . . in their face, nostrils, ears, eye-lids, breasts, armes, thumbes, fingers and nails, they agree very much” (p. 3). The concept of ‘agreeing’ offers a working sense of what analogy might entail: a certain working likeness not necessarily requiring an identity that is absolute in a philosophical sense. And so Topsell also gives a painstaking measure of the differences between men and apes, citing detailed bodily disparities—for example, the relative size of specific muscles that operate particular limbs and digits, as well as the form of the liver and the “hollow vein holding it up, which men have not.” These anatomical details of features below the skin that Topsell cites clearly derive from what Jonathan Sawday has described as a new, intellectual “culture of dissection” (Sawday 1996, p. 2 and passim). Tracing the influence of anatomization and the partitive thinking it spawned, Sawday highlights the ways that knowledge increasingly took the form of an “anatomy” of a subject’s parts (these compendia often explicitly reflect the influence of medical practice, as in Robert Burton’s 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy). Not surprisingly, Topsell’s animal encyclopedia names the sixteenth-century Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius as his source for this differentiating information, referring to the magisterial De humani corporis fabrica (Fabrica) of 1543.9 Topsell’s perspective on Vesalius’ contribution is of special interest here. “Vesalius sheweth,” he writes, “that [the apes’] proportion differeth from man’s in more things than Galen observed” (Topsell 1608, p. 3). Topsell’s notation of Vesalius’ revision of received classical learning suggests how well-known, even notorious, that revision was. I turn now to this Vesalian intervention in the status of Galenic authority, because the question of species pervades it. Scholars have disputed how to balance the extent of Vesalius’ reliance on Galen against his corrections and challenges to aspects of the Galenic system (Saunders and O’Malley 1950, p. 58). Despite the historical fact of loud opposition by contemporaries to Vesalius’ claims against Galen, current research concludes that, in the main, Vesalius held to very

9 I refer to the accessible online English version of this text: On the Fabric of the Human Body, An annotated translation of the 1543 and 1555 editions of Andreas Vesalius’ De Humani Corporis Fabrica, eds. and trans. Daniel Garrison and Malcolm Hast, (http://vesalius .northwestern.edu/). Subsequent references to the Fabrica will be paginated to the 1543 edition that is indicated in the online translation.

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broadly Galenic assumptions.10 Certainly Vesalius artfully obscures the tension between authorities and empiricism when he justifies his own investigative practice by invoking the empirical methods of Galen himself (that is, Galen’s own use and recommendation of the practices of vivisection and dissection).11 What is central for these purposes is that, to the extent Vesalius does challenge Galen’s learning or refute his authoritativeness, the status of animal anatomical comparison lies at the very heart of his critique. Vesalius’ rise from a position as a young anatomical demonstrator (opening bodies below while an academic lecturer with clean hands spoke from a podium above) to a star professor with a dramatic and new pedagogical method at the University of Padua has been a key exhibit in ‘great man’ theories of the Scientific Revolution and of medical progress.12 Such heroic-individualist narratives have come under due scrutiny; even so, Vesalius’ academic moment is worth specifying. On the one hand, Vesalius’ medical-humanist colleagues stood firm in their belief that Galen’s unadulterated text could be recovered through diligent comparisons of extant manuscripts and good humanist textual editing (often with a view toward purging material added by Arab writers in the course of their preservation of these texts). On the other hand, less text-centered colleagues of Vesalius also noted discrepancies between the Galenic body and the actual evidence developed through anatomical demonstration. In one attempt to account for this, Vesalius’ one-time teacher, Jacobus Sylvius of Paris, went so far as to imply (in a sort of reverse-evolutionary model) that perhaps human anatomy had degenerated since Galen’s time (Sylvius 1541; cited in Garrison 2003).

10 Medical historian Andrew Cunningham argues that the entire anatomical project of the Renaissance should be viewed less as a program of modernization and self-authorizing observation and more as a return or ‘resurrection’ of ancient values. (Cunningham 1997). 11 In the preface to the Fabrica, addressed to “The Divine Charles V,” Vesalius emphasizes that he “joined Galen in urging medical students by every means possible to take on dissections with their own hands.” (Vesalius, p. 4r). 12 Katherine Park makes the persuasive contextualizing claim (to a degree against Sawday’s) that the conduct of anatomies, as such, did not represent the total revolution in practice or breaking of taboos about “opening the body” that has often been alleged; instead, we must speak of an alteration of the terms and conditions under which those events could occur (with all of the social implications the publicity of the anatomy theater held, in contrast with the more domestic environments Park describes) (Park 1994).

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Vesalius offered a simpler but much more disruptive explanation of these discrepancies: Galen, he alleged, had simply failed to examine human cadavers and so had erroneously cross-attributed numerous details he found in animals to human anatomy.13 In other words, Galen assumed cross-species analogy; he assumed that the bodies of apes, dogs, and livestock were directly relevant evidence of the human bodies for which they substituted. As C.D. O’Malley describes Sylvius’ teaching at the University of Paris, the academic practice of anatomical demonstration greatly depended on such animal substitutions, silently incorporating them without an account of exactly how they pertained: “Sylvius lectured . . . from Galen’s book entitled the Use of parts, in which anatomical description was drawn from animals and projected to the human; then to illustrate the presumed human anatomy Sylvius dissected [a] dog” (O’Malley 1964, p. 300). Several key features of Galenic anatomy were flashpoints for the Vesalian exposé of the Galenic body as, in fact, a menagerie. The best known is the case of the rete mirabile. As Daniel Garrison describes, “long-standing reliance on animal specimens had led to . . . the belief that human blood was purified by a ‘marvellous network’ or rete mirabile in the neck. Such a plexus is found in sheep and certain other ungulates (where is cools the blood) but not in humans” (Garrison 2003). In the Fabrica, Vesalius admits “I cannot sufficiently marvel at my own stupidity; I who have so labored in my love for Galen that I have never demonstrated the human head without that of a lamb or ox, to show in the latter what I could not in the former, lest forsooth I should fail to display that universally familiar plexus” (Vesalius, p. 642; my emphasis). A lamb or an ox, in these dramas of theatrical presentation, was a stage prop required to complete a demonstration of ‘the human.’ In a subtle—and visually witty—further instance of correction, Vesalius takes up Galen’s location of certain canine skeletal features in the human skull. At the beginning of the chapter entitled ‘On the Twelve Bones of the Upper Maxilla, Including the Bones of the Nose’ (Book 1, ch. 9), a striking image appears. A human skull, without its lower mandible, rests on top of the skull of a dog.14 Vesalius introduces the chapter by alleging that “[w]e have placed a canine skull below the

13 See Gouwens, ‘Human Exceptionalism’; I am very grateful to Professor Gouwens for sharing this forthcoming essay with me. 14 This illustration appears again in chapter 12 of Book I.

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Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Basel, 1543), Book I, Chapter 9 (© Professor Daniel Garrison, Northwestern University)

human so that Galen’s description of the bones of the upper maxilla may be more easily understood by anyone.” But what Vesalius means is that Galen’s description may be understood to be demonstrably wrong, by the contrast the image provides. As Saunders and O’Malley argue, “the primary purpose of the illustration was to reveal that Galen had described the premaxillary bone and suture of the dog as though present in man”—showily illustrating that Galen was not familiar with the particulars of human maxillo-facial anatomy (Saunders and O’Malley 1950, p. 58).15 Garrison and Hast explain that “In most vertebrates, including non-human primates, the os incisivum represents a separate element, the premaxillary bone, in the upper jaw; in the human, the premaxillary bone fuses with the maxilla by the third intra-uterine month. In the human, however, a ‘palatal sign’ of separation between 15

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Stepping back from this sort of detail for a bird’s eye view of the larger Vesalian conception of anatomical research, we see that the Fabrica stresses that the proper object of learning is the human, referring to “demonstrations of the human fabric,” to “the structure of man,” and to man as “the most perfect of all creatures . . . fitly called a microcosm by the ancients” (Vesalius, p. 4r). This work is not to be understood as finished by the ancients. Vesalius scoffs at the infallibility accorded to Galen: “no doctor has been found who believes he has ever discovered even the slightest error in all the anatomical volumes of Galen, much less that such a discovery is possible” (Vesalius, p. 3r). As historian Kenneth Gouwens points out, Vesalius attributed Galen’s errors “overwhelmingly to Galen’s reliance upon apes” (Gouwens 2008). Here Vesalius’ specifically human orientation informs his sharpest critical language against classical precedent, as he uses Galen’s authority to undercut Galen himself. Vesalius asserts, “it is just now known to us from the reborn art of dissection, from a careful reading of Galen’s books, and from the welcome restoration of many portions thereof, that he himself never dissected a human body, but was in fact deceived by his monkeys” (Vesalius, p. 3r). Deceived by monkeys—who are always characterized in natural histories as, at once, cunningly deceptive and incompetently imitative—Galenic anatomy had literally aped the human instead of demonstrating it. Avowing that Galen had “departed much more than two hundred times from a true description of the . . . human parts,” Vesalius called instead for a fully human anatomical science; addressing his patron Charles V, Vesalius stressed the moral importance of “research in which we recognize the body and the spirit, as well as a certain divinity that issues from a harmony of the two, and finally our own selves (which is the true study of mankind)” (Vesalius, p. 4r). In this anthropocentric model, self-study is part of the species-being of man, as Vesalius recites a commonplace that appears, in this context, as a form of species-narcissism. Here, the self-study that would later become patently subjective and skeptical for Montaigne—I “my selfe am the groundworke of my

os incisivum and the rest of the maxilla may persist until the middle decades as the sutura incisiva.” O’Malley notes that although designed to advertise a Galenic fallacy, “This very illustration convicted [Vesalius] of an error, since it displays the ethmoidal labyrinth as a separate bone, a mistake corrected some years later by Fallopio” (O’Malley p. 153).

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booke; it is then no reason thou shouldest employ thy time about so frivolous and vaine a Subject” (Montaigne 1933, p. xxvii)—is quite literally navel-gazing in an anatomical sense. In this respect, Vesalius fell short of a true interest in the philosophical implications of comparative anatomy. Both the earlier Leonardo (who made numerous comparative anatomical illustrations, especially comparing the limbs of man to those of quadrupeds, though these were not known in his time) and the slightly later Pierre Belon (who cross-articulated the skeletons of a man and a bird in the mid-sixteenth century) seem to have invested more consequential meaning in the animal body than Vesalius did (See Cole 1975, pp. 49–62). From this standpoint, then, the Vesalian “revolution” in empirical anatomy was also, in its desire to separate the human from animal forms, a species-narrowing conceptualization of the study of the terms of corporeality in the mid-sixteenth century. Working Likeness With the early seventeenth-century work of William Harvey (who was trained at Vesalius’ institution, the University of Padua), anatomical method visits the question of likeness and relevance across species again. Harvey had been demonstrating his account of the circulation of the blood since about 1616; his Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (referred to as De motu cordis) was published in Germany in 1628. During Harvey’s lifetime, an English translation entitled Anatomical Exercises Concerning the Motion of the Heart and Blood of Living Creatures also appeared (in 1653).16 Of special interest here is the fact that this volume renders the “animalibus” of Harvey’s Latin title—and indeed, perhaps half of the Latin declensions of “animal” in the text—as “Living Creatures” or some variation on those terms. Though a fuller philological discussion of this fact is needed, it seems fair to say that Harvey’s unnamed translator, in effect, gives us a seventeenth-century

16 Geoffrey Keynes, Harvey’s twentieth-century editor, offers a defense of the seventeenth-century translation over the one produced by Robert Willis in 1847 (which uses the English word “animals” in the title and elsewhere) (Harvey, 1995 [1653], pp. 198–99). The most recent edition—by Gweneth Whitteridge—also largely favors the 1653 translation, and it recasts Harvey’s original title as An Anatomical Disputation, while restoring the creaturely ending: Concerning the Movement of the Heart and Blood in Living Creatures.

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English gloss on the Latin term for living beings; in period idiom, the animalia of Harvey’s study suggested not so much ‘nonhuman animals,’ but the broader sense of ‘creatures’ discussed above. With this wider range of study, a shifting sense of the categories within which anatomical research is organized emerges in De motu cordis. This has complicating effects on claims for the uniqueness of the human—and at about the same time that Descartes specifies the terms of an absolute border between human and nonhuman animals by enshrining rational capacity as the human signature. While Vesalius had called—in classically Renaissance terms—for an anatomy of man, Harvey instead envisions what I am calling a ‘zoopolity’ of bodily forms: an organized grouping of bodies and functions that pointedly includes animals. In the Harveian universe, human and animal figures alike reveal one shared circulatory process. Harvey’s research certainly included acts of vivisection that are monstrous acts from a number of perspectives, both early modern and 21st century. But his account of the circulation of blood and related aspects of the heart’s function makes no apology for its cross-species analogical reasoning. Instead it depends openly and explicitly on animals, not just as comparisons, not just as silent substitutions for the human, but as direct evidence of relevant truths about embodiment. Harvey’s De motu cordis opens its dedication to Charles I of England with this bold start: “the Heart of creatures is the fountain of life, the prince of all, the Sun of their microcosm” (Harvey 1995 [1653], p. vii). The vast majority of references to the body as ‘microcosm’—like the one from Vesalius just cited above—refer to the human body as such, in its condition as a paragon and compressed expression of the universal and/or the divine. Here Harvey repopulates the familiar microcosm metaphor, using it to encompass all creatures. At the same time, he speaks quite differently about his scientific object, describing his discovery not in terms of the truths of humanity, but of “these new things concerning the Heart” (Harvey 1995 [1653], p. viii). He glosses Vesalius’ titular reference, in the Fabrica, to the fabric of the human body with his own frequent reference, instead, to “the fabrick of the heart” (Harvey 1995 [1653], i.e. p. 101).17 Harvey’s broad reference to numerous “living creatures” constitutes a broad taxonomic class that exceeds the

17 “Hoc itaq; loco . . . solumodo, quae in administranda Anatome circa fabricam cordis & arteriarum comparent, ad suos vsus & causas veras referre enitar” (Harvey 1628, p. 63).

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demographic embrace of Vesalian articulation. And, indeed, Harvey’s experiments encompass a wide array: doves, eels, shrimp, sheep, adders, dogs, oxen, whales, embryos, chickens, snails, and worms to name some of them.18 In this sense, the perspective of Harvey’s research on a different kind of object—the heart—groups living creatures together as related, rather then dividing them as distinct as the lens of species might require. The heart, we might say, is a shared language. By making an organ and its functioning the object of research, rather than the nature of a given species, Harvey brings animals back to the table, (admittedly, it is the dissection table). But this time their role is explicit, and they are legitimized as directly relevant evidence. “Those things which are before spoken by former Authors concerning the motion and use of the heart,” Harvey writes, “do either seem inconvenient or obscure, or admit of no compossibility”; and he concludes “therefore it will be profitable to search more deeply . . . and to contemplate the motions of the arteries and heart, not only in man, but also in all other creatures that have a heart; as likewise by the frequent dissection of living things, and by much ocular testimony to discern and search the truth” (Harvey 1995 [1653], p. 15, my emphasis).19 Animals reveal their proper share of this truth; in this database, they belong. Repeated invocations of “creatures,” “living Creatures,” and “living things” in the English translation of De motu cordis suggest, with powerfully cumulative force, that the right set for inquiry includes more, not less, in the way of animal kinds. Along with the celebrated early modern scientific turn to ‘ocular’ proof, we also find assertions of animal relevance and of a broadly zootopian vision of cross-species analogy. This is not to assert a politically utopian vision, but only to name a categorical configuration of bodies that suggests a quasi-political form extending beyond a bordered humanity. For Harvey, an anatomy based singly on human information seems provincial rather than scientific. “They are to be blamed in this,” he writes, “who whilst they desire to give their verdict . . . look but into man only.” And here his language becomes even more overtly a question of the political form of our relation to animal knowledge-providers. Those who “look but into man only,” he charges, “do no more to the For an exhaustive list of Harvey’s animal references, see Cole, 1957. “. . . non solum in homine sed & aliis vniuersis animalibus cor habentibus contemplari: Quin etiam viuorum dissectione frequenti, multaque autopsia veritatem discernere, & inuestigare” (Harvey 1628, p. 19). 18 19

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purpose than those who, seeing the manner of Government in one Commonwealth, frame [a notion of ] Politics, or they who, knowing the nature of one piece of land, believe they understand agriculture, . . . as if from one Particular proposition they should go about to frame Universal arguments” (Harvey 1995 [1653], p. 41).20 Here, even the highly generalized abstraction of ‘the human’ has been diminished to a figure for the particular and defrocked of its claims to represent a universal kind of truth. Beyond the fact of his practicing the most extreme kinds of vivisection exclusively on nonhumans and the sure preservation of a categorical difference in that respect, Harvey’s cardiology neither valued nor tried to prove a firm distinction between ‘human’ and ‘animal.’ His object was not ‘man’ but “living creatures” and the features those creatures demonstrate jointly as members of a larger category or class. In contrast to the political dispensation of Genesis, Harvey’s science resists a knowledge based solely in human exceptionalism. The “Universals” Harvey sought are not to be found within the confines of the human. For Vesalius and Harvey, then, comparative anatomical questions were not a sidelight on Renaissance science, but the scene of a broadly significant struggle over observation, the structure of learned authority, and—most interestingly for our purposes—claims for the theological and rational uniqueness of the human. The Literary Afterlives of Animal Dissection I end with a consideration of one detail in Robert Burton’s multi-edition 1620s volume, The Anatomy of Melancholy (The Anatomy).21 Burton’s text gathers almost everything said or known about melancholy into one massive tome. For him, melancholy serves—among other things—as a complex index of humanity by means of its close relation to classical and Christian ‘folly,’ itself a great alternative to reason as the signature feature of the human. As Foucault so memorably put this view, “the

20 “In hoc peccant, qui dum de partibus animalium . . . pronunciare, & demonstrare, aut cognoscere volunt, unum tãtum hominem, eumque mortuum introspiciunt, & fictanquam, qui vna reipub. forma perspecta disciplinam politicam componere, aut vnius agri naturam cognoscentes, agriculturam se scire opinantur: Nihilo plus agunt, quam si ex vna particulari propositione, de vniuersali Syllogizare darent operam” (Harvey 1628, p. 33). 21 The Anatomy of Melancholy was presented in five lifetime editions (1621, 1624, 1628, 1632, and 1638) and one posthumous edition containing corrections by Burton in 1651.

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head that will become a skull is already empty” (Foucault 1973, p. 16). The Anatomy’s table of contents maps the state of knowledge on its subject—it even operates as an allegory for knowledge itself. Sawday notes the formal influence of anatomical thought on the structure of this work, describing it as exemplary of the partitive approach to knowledge produced by the “culture of dissection” he describes. While a full account of The Anatomy is beyond the purposes of this essay, an episode recounted in the lengthy preface, ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader,’ pertains to the species problem made evident in Vesalius and Harvey. A striking anecdote portrays the anatomist’s technique as frustrated, rather than as triumphantly comprehensive or exhaustively successful. In this story of the frustrated anatomist, we see the beginnings of a more severe kind of ‘disciplinary’ division of knowledge. As Sawday describes the early modern situation, “what was to become science—a seemingly discrete way of ordering the observation of the natural world—was, at this stage, no more than one method amongst many by which human knowledge was organized” (Sawday 1996, p. 1). Burton’s passage, however, shows the signs of a developing mutual inconvenience in the seventeenth century between scientific inquiry and theological commitment (two modalities of thought that Descartes had apparently hoped to keep together, by leading his argument from doubt, through reason, to faith). In Burton’s prefatory material, he explains his reasons for adopting the nom de plume of “Democritus Junior” and thus invoking the rascally sage from the turn of the fourth century BC, Democritus of Abdera—also known as the laughing philosopher. He adopts the banner of Democritus to mark a shared mockery of human folly. His satirical and anti-social behavior causes the original Democritus’ neighbors to think him a madman; in the story retailed here, they call in no less a figure than Hippocrates for a diagnosis. This embedded (and apparently spurious) story of the doctor’s visit is highly suggestive of the dilemma that animal anatomical comparison precipitated for any ongoing, seventeenth-century human-exceptionalist view. When Hippocrates and the villagers go to Democritus, they find him “without hose or shoes, with a book on his knees, cutting up several beasts” (Burton 2001, p. 48). After spending some pages figuratively anatomizing human follies, Democritus argues that people are “like children, in whom is no judgment or counsel, and resemble beasts, saving that beasts are better than they . . . being contented with nature” (Burton, pp. 50–51). Here Burton’s Democritus voices a commonplace of natural historical writing and moral commentary: the notion

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that animals cannot fail their species-being as humans can, insofar as they do not sin or err. I have elsewhere termed this perspective one of “human negative exceptionalism,” where humans present, for once, the negative exception that proves the rule of animal virtue.22 Given this only partly ironic commonplace about animal relative perfection, we may ask, why seek to find the ground of a folly designated human within the bodies of beasts, as Democritus is doing? Scattered around him lie the dissected bodies of animals reduced to parts, as he seeks an anatomical cause for (human) folly. As he himself acknowledges, “I do anatomize and cut up these poor beasts, to see these distempers, vanities, and follies, yet such proof were better made on man’s body” (Burton, p. 51). Indeed. If animals lack whatever organ puts one in need of moral or satiric correction, we might ask further, why would one want such an organ? Here we begin to see that the ‘folly’ in Democritus’ example is structurally indistinguishable from the soul that, in Christian contexts, must err to be redeemed, as a text like Erasmus’s Praise of Folly explores in such spectacular detail. In either instance, animals apparently have no such organ; whether this function/capacity is thought of as folly or as an immortal soul, it remains the monopoly of man. As Katherine Park points out regarding the Aristotelian tradition, the highest faculties of soul (intellect and will) “did not require physical organs and could therefore subsist after the body’s death; peculiar to man, these . . . faculties . . . differed distinctly from the functions of the organic soul, which humans shared to a greater or lesser degree with plants and animals” (Park 1988, p. 464). What Burton’s seventeenth-century narrative shows is that this monopoly, humanity’s signature feature, that ‘part’ that sets it apart from all others, can neither be located nor demonstrated. Though it comes as no surprise, to us, that a core tenet of religious belief cannot be independently verified, the soul’s non-detectability had not necessarily posed a problem in the context of Aristotelian and other earlier scientific modes, as Park points out. In the emerging epistemic contexts of a science that increasingly enshrines verifiability and ocular proof, however, what once passed more simply as an article of faith is at least partly reclassified in a new category made inevitable by scientific procedures. Along with the soul as such, humanity finds itself in this new category: the category of the not proven. Animal comparison, it seems

22

See Shannon 2009 (forthcoming).

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crucial to note, plays the central part in this new status for ‘the human’ as an unverifiable proposition or ‘Scotch verdict.’ As a tail-end to these considerations, here is Thomas Browne, from the Religio Medici (published in 1643, a hundred years after Vesalius’ book): In our study of Anatomy . . ., amongst all those rare discoveries . . . I finde in the fabricke of man, I doe not so much content my selfe, as in that I finde not, that is, no Organ or instrument for the rationall soule; for in the braine, which we tearme the seate of reason, there is not any thing of moment more than I can discover in the cranie of a beast. . . . Thus we are men, and we know not how. (Browne 1968, p. 43)

The soul is wholly immaterial here, inorganic; it is alleged to be integral, but, in a powerful new way, it cannot be found or seen; it has become, oxymoronically, an invisible part. While the problem of a scientific demonstration of the soul is an enormous subject unto itself, it might suffice here to note the contribution of comparative anatomy in precipitating the problem. Looking at the brain, at “the cranie of a beast,” observational science cannot verify an absolute difference or locate a signature animal deficit. We can call the continued assertion of bordered human difference a form of historically ongoing theology or faith. But we can also see that the impact of animal analogy in anatomical science forces claims for ‘the human’ more overtly into the category of sheer assertion. In a universe of demonstration, the pure assertion has become more evidently just that. “Thus we are men,” asserts the human apologist, Thomas Browne, but this avowal takes place in a new kind of tension with his conclusion that “we know not how.” Pressing a human-exceptionalist retreat to the ideological ground of invisible parts in an environment of anatomical demonstration, it seems to me, is no small impact on the history of knowledge—for mere beasts who are thought to lack reason. References Aquinas, Thomas. 1918. Summa Theologica: Chicago: Benziger Brothers. Bach, Rebecca Ann. 2005. ‘ “We are beasts in all but white integrity”: Animal and Renaissance Sexuality,’ unpublished paper delivered at the Shakespeare Association of America conference, Victoria, Canada (12 April). I am grateful to Professor Bach for sharing this unpublished text with me. Bacon, Francis. 1997 [1609]. The Wisdom of the Ancients. Montana: Kessinger Publishing. Badmington, Neil. 2003. ‘Theorizing Posthumanism,’ Cultural Critique, 53 (Winter), 10–27.

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Boehrer, Bruce. 2002. Shakespeare Among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England. New York: Palgrave. Browne, Thomas. 1968. Religio Medici, in Sir Thomas Browne: Selected Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Burton, Robert. 2001. The Anatomy of Melancholy. New York: New York Review Books. Cole, F.J. 1957. ‘Harvey’s Animals,’ Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 12 (2), 106–13. Cottingham, John. 1978. ‘A Brute to the Brutes?: Descartes’ Treatment of Animals,’ Philosophy 53: 551–61. Cunningham, Andrew. 1997. The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients. Aldershot: Scholar Press. Descartes, René. 1970. Descartes: Philosophical Letters, trans. and ed. Anthony Kenny. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ——. 1968. Discourse on Method, in Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol. I, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane. London: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1973. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Vintage Books: New York. Fudge, Erica. 2002. Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gates, Anita. 2006. ‘TV Review | “Chimpanzees: An Unnatural History”: An Up-Close Look at a 2 Percent Difference,’ New York Times, November 4, 2006. Garrison, Daniel. 2003. ‘Animal Anatomy,’ http://vesalius.northwestern.edu/essays/ animalanatomy.html (accessed December 2007). Gouwens, Kenneth. 2008 (forthcoming). ‘Human Exceptionalism,’ in The Renaissance World, ed. John Jeffries Martin. London: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Harrison, Peter. 1992. ‘Descartes on Animals,’ The Philosophical Quarterly, 42 (167), 219–227. Harvey, William. 1995. The Anatomical Excercises: De motu cordis and De Circulatione Sanguinis in English Translation, ed. Geoffrey Keynes. New York: Dover Publications. ——. 1976. An Anatomical Disputation Concerning the Movement of the Heart and Blood in Living Creatures, ed. Gweneth Whitteridge. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications. ——. 1628. Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanginis animalibus. Frankfurt: W. Fitzer. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lupton, Julia Reinhard. 2000. ‘Creature Caliban,’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (Spring), 1–23. Montaigne, Michel de. 1933. ‘The Author to the Reader,’ in The Essayes of Montaigne: John Florio’s Translation. New York: Modern Library. O’Malley, C.D. 1964. ‘Andreas Vesalius, 1514–1564,’ Medical History 8 (4): 299–308. Park, Katherine, 1994. ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy,’ Renaissance Quarterly 47: 1–33. ——. 1988. ‘The Organic Soul,’ in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paster, Gail Kern. 2004. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Regan, Tom and Singer, Peter. 1976. Animal Rights and Human Obligations. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Santner, Eric. 2006. On Creaturely Life: Rilke | Benjamin | Sebald. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Saunders, J.B. and O’Malley, C.D. 1950. The Illustrations from the Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels. New York: Dover Publications. Sawday, Jonathan. 1996. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge. Shannon, Laurie. 2010 (forthcoming). The Zootopian Constitution: Animal Agency and Early Modern Knowledge. ——. 2009 (forthcoming). ‘Poor, Bare, Forked: Animal Sovereignty, Human Negative Exceptionalism, and the Natural History of King Lear.’ Shakespeare Quarterly. Singer, Peter. 1975. Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals. New York: Random House. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. 2004. ‘Animal Relatives, Difficult Relations.’ differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 15(1), 1–23. Sylvius, Jacobus. 1541. In Hippocratis et Galeni Physiologiae partem anatomicam isagoge. Christian Wechel; Jacob Gasell. Topsell, Edward. 1608. The History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents . . . collected out of Conrad Gesner and other Authors. E. Cotes: London. Vesalius, Andreas. 2007. On the Fabric of the Human Body, An annotated translation of the 1543 and 1555 editions of Andreas Vesalius’ De Humani Corporis Fabrica, De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Website. eds. and trans. Daniel Garrison and Malcolm Hast. http://vesalius .northwestern.edu/ (accessed December 2007).

CHAPTER EIGHT

INVISIBLE HISTORIES: PRIMATE BODIES AND THE RISE OF POSTHUMANISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Jonathan Burt History is inefficient as a method of processing meaning; it cannot keep up. . . . (Halberstam and Livingston 1995, p. 3)

We have not to date been particularly well served by the history of animals in the twentieth century. At least as far as anglophone writing is concerned, there is a lack of studies that endeavour to connect analyses of human-animal relations across different levels, from direct interaction to more abstract levels of representation or institutionalisation. There are, of course, exceptions to this picture: Donna Haraway’s work I take to be outstanding (Haraway 1997 and 2008), whilst many other studies currently considered for publication or in press, but the work available so far is not integrated yet into a more general understanding of the animal in modernity yet. Where we are better served are often those studies that are continuations of narratives that have their origins in the nineteenth century, or earlier, such as in zoo history (Rothfels 2002), photography (Brower 2005) and film (Burt 2000) to some extent, as well as the histories of ethics (Singer 1975 and 1999; Midgley 1983; Armstrong and Botzler 2003), and institutions of animal welfare such as the Society & Animals Forum (formerly PSYETA). But sometimes it seems as if there is a gap between the death of Queen Victoria and the arrival of Peter Singer filled only by John Berger’s much cited thesis (Berger 1980), usually with a complete absence of critical reflection, of the replacement of the ‘real’ animal by its image in late capitalism. Despite being sometimes helped out by historians of science—though they are not usually interested in the broader implications of their work for animals per se—, key areas that redefine human-animal encounters in the twentieth century, in agriculture and industry after World War I, in the laboratory from the early 1900s, warfare and military science, the consequences of the tension between conservation and rights activism in the interwar period, and the extensive use of animals in

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the visual and plastic arts in the period up to the late 1960s, are still underexplored. Even though this situation is improving, it raises two interrelated questions. The first is: why do we have the animal histories that we currently have or, to put it differently, why has there been something of a blind spot for the very period which has had such staggering consequences for animals in the contemporary world? The second is: do human-animal interactions in twentieth-century history, especially the encounters between animals and scientists in the fields of primatology, biology and cybernetics, have anything to offer, challenge, or elucidate as regards the assumptions of world views and cultural productions appearing, for a number of decades already, under the label of ‘posthumanism’? Certainly, from an initial perspective of both the behavioural and experimental sciences, animal history offers a number of caveats for the more utopian sentiments of posthumanist manifestoes. Does this go further though? Do aspects of the history of animals in the twentieth century underpin posthumanist thinking in ways that posthumanism is also, for whatever reason, blind to? Animal History Meets Posthumanism It is not clear from the diversity of texts that concern themselves with posthumanism how coherent it is as a field of thought.1 It represents a curious hotch potch with its strands of science fiction, military and space science, computing, disembodied minds, postmodern philosophy, offering on its more optimistic outings the possibility of transcending categories like essentialism, the subject/object boundary, a humancentred world, history, speciesism, and possibly death itself, as Robert Pepperell prophesises: “Posthumans will be persons of unprecedented physical, intellectual, and psychological ability, self-programming and self-defining, potentially immortal, unlimited individuals” (Pepperell 1995, p. 175). And despite its effort to avoid ‘masterdiscourses,’ one cannot help but sense a counter tendency that might tempt other kinds of enslavement, as the following claim suggests: “The human body itself is no longer part of the ‘family of man’ but of a zoo of posthumanities”

1 For a short overview of current trends in posthumanist theory, see the forthcoming introductory volume of the book series Critical Posthumanisms (Callus and Herbrechter 2008).

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(Halberstam and Livingston 1995, p. 3). Such statements encourage one of the main suspicions of posthumanism that one finds in writers like philosopher Keith Ansell Pearson, that if posthumanism is a working out of postmodern philosophies of difference at the level of material embodiment (whether biological, technological, or a combination of the two), then we have to take seriously the possibility that posthuman propositions about transcending difference will realise themselves in just that: the posthuman as übermensch (Pearson 1997). Visions of the globalisation of ‘humachines,’ to use a neologism of Mark Poster’s—“not a prosthesis but an intimate mixing of human and machine that constitutes an interface outside the subject/object boundary”—likewise raise similar questions about what regions of the world ‘humachines’ will disseminate from and where to (Poster 2004, p. 318). Posthumanism shares with postmodernism a similar set of ethical binds concerning the articulation of theory in practice. There are also other classic dilemmas such as whether the products of biotechnology envisaged by the cyborg-favouring posthumanists would either continue the ideals of anti-sovereignty and borderlessness or, on the contrary, produce something more frighteningly autocratic. However, posthumanism is at its weakest when it takes some convenient version of humanism, inverts its elements, and pretty much just plugs it in. Posthumanist figurations, as Manuela Rossini observes, are often “all too human(ist)” (Rossini 2005). Whilst paying so much attention to the dislocation of the human, the easiest bit of the equation, posthumanism also needs to confront the fact that there is a deeply-embedded science history that is far less easy to redirect, or dislocate, and in contact with which one cannot but inherit a large amount of problematic cultural baggage. Posthumanists who advocate the end of history allow for this inheritance to be screened out and forgotten. The present essay seeks to render those histories visible again. They matter. Historically, the roots of posthumanism, its official genealogy if you like as it has been described by scholars such as Katherine Hayles, Peter Galison and Andrew Pickering, are located in the Second World War. This period is seen as a significant turning point, “away from the organism viewed through the prism of medicine and the clinic to new sciences of information and control dominated systems” (Galison 1994, p. 259). Important re-organisations of science take place in the direction of integrated systems of human and machine for military purposes, for instance Norbert Wiener’s work on anti-aircraft control, and we witness the growing significance of the computer and radar. Operatives

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and their machinery come to be jointly analysed as interlocking and interlocked systems. Interestingly, animals do haunt the edge of this narrative of the rise of posthumanism: Early robotic devices were named after animals—William Walter’s Tortoise, Norbert Wiener’s Moth and Bedbug, and Claude Shannon’s very basic maze-solving device, which was named ‘the rat’; in many ways Shannon’s experiments were a direct electronic translation of those rat maze experiments of the early 1900s that were central to the emergence of J.B. Watson’s behaviourism. Particularly relevant here are the altered rats that Watson used such as the blind, anosmic and whiskerless rat that features in the concluding experiment of his monograph on mazes and that Watson described as an automaton (Watson 1907). Humberto Maturana and other biologists working on the visual cortex of the frog in the late 1950s, and later the colour vision of birds and primates, drew conclusions from that research which contributed to notions of autopoiesis. Two separate issues arise here: one concerns the human/nonhuman interface, in other words hybridity, and one concerns the relative status of the organic and the machine in the history of posthumanism, where the latter is seen as more important than the former. Hybrid Bodies and Practices Bruce Clarke, in a very interesting article on the science fiction story The Fly, remarks with regard to posthumanism that “the common effect of its several definitions is to relativize the human by coupling it to some other order of being” (Clarke 2002, p. 171). If we see hybridity as one of the most important defining features of posthumanism, as its preoccupation with nonhuman interfaces suggests, then we need to confront hybridity as it is played out in science history, especially given that it traditionally tends towards practices of optimisation, perfectibility, control and, in the case of domesticated animals, docility. Given the links between hybridity and eugenics especially in early twentieth-century animal science, we are alerted to the fact that hybridity is both scientifically and culturally not a celebration of difference but a quest for purity via processes of isolation and elimination. As an aside one might note another point made by Ansell Pearson about what he sees as the perfectionist evolutionary assumptions behind the development of machine intelligence: It is not clear that hybridity inherently confers an evolutionary advantage. In fact, in many respects, it may confer a negative one (cp. Pearson 1997, p. 222). Underlying this is an implicit critique

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to the effect that, as posthumanism derives largely from the humanities and science fiction, it suffers from a lack of proper address to the hard sciences on which its projects are nevertheless heavily dependent. I mentioned earlier Watson’s experiments with rats by way of introducing a parallel history to that of posthumanism: the pathway by which we have moved into the post-animal era, which in certain areas of human-animal interaction we have actually been living in for a while. At the same time that Watson was experimenting with his rat automata, the science of cross-breeding rodents and the isolation of characteristics led, in Vienna from about 1904 and in Chicago from 1906, to the creation of pure-bred lines of laboratory rats (Burt 2006, ch. 4). Seen as replaceable cogs in a global experimental machine, rats were also caught up in complex representational structures that slid back and forth between the languages of automata and anthropomorphism. In a manner that anticipates the idea of the posthuman as an accelerated information processor, H.H. Donaldson described the rat’s nervous system in his 1915 monograph on the animal as a speeded up version of the human (cp. Burt 2006, p. 16). These interlinked and sometimes contradictory symbolic connotations also tended toward a kind of ‘identity overload’, which hints at the kind of shape the pathological dimension to hybridity might take. In Freud’s ‘Rat Man Case,’ published in 1909, Ernst’s paralysis when it came to decision making was in sharp contrast to the maniacal, proliferating associations he made between the rat and, amongst other things, aspects of anal eroticism, worms, children, the penis, syphilis, dirt, money, and even marriage. This symbolic hyper-inflation anticipates a more recent rodent/hybrid connection in posthumanism’s history: Haraway’s account of Oncomouse. She writes: Oncomouse™ and its academic-corporate family [i.e. Du Pont] are like civic sacraments: signs and referents all rolled into one fleshy mystery in a secularized salvation history of civilian and military wars, scientific knowledge, progress, democracy, and economic power. (Haraway 1997, p. 85).

By the time we get to the 1930s and 40s the development of private commercial companies to produce laboratory animals is well under way.2 Early facilities for the commercial breeding of laboratory rats

2 Harlan Sprague-Dawley is founded in 1931, Carworth in 1935 and Charles River in 1947.

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resembled battery poultry units, whereas now they contain some of the most controlled environments on the planet and look like the set of a science fiction film. Nowadays, from Charles River for instance, you can purchase alongside the transgenic rats, rats with various types of mechanical implant or rats with some of their organs partly or totally removed. But it seems to me that the time when the post-animal stage is really reached is when it is animal matter rather than the animal body that is hooked up into technical apparatus, the body becoming irrelevant. The MEART project by the art and science collaborative research laboratory SymbioticA, just under a century on from the first breeding of laboratory rats, is one of the best examples of this. For this artistic-scientific project, a layer of rat neurons were taken from an embryonic rat cortex and grown over a multi-electrode array. These cells were then connected to a computer and stimulated by information provided by a web cam, which was in turn filming visitors in an art gallery. A recording was then made from the stimulated neurons which sent a signal to a robotic arm that subsequently created the imagery. This is a global project: the rat neurons are in Atlanta, Georgia, and the robotic arm is in Perth, Western Australia. To sum up the first half of this essay just briefly: although the Second World War may mark a turning point in the science that is considered to frame the posthuman project, animal science has continued on a trajectory right through this period to the point where the organic/ machine interface has been radically realised. Furthermore, despite the fact that the human-machine interface may have excited greater attention—perhaps because it seems less messy (who wants to think about the gory details of laboratory science anyway if at all possible)—, hybridity as both a scientific and cultural practice entails the same sorts of issues, whatever version of the nonhuman one is dealing with; for optimisation read purification, for accelerating information processing read the reconfigured animal body. Solly Zuckerman and the Mimicry of the Nonhuman I want to turn now to the another important facet of posthumanism which again has significant exemplars in early twentieth-century behavioural science as well as art: the mimicry of the nonhuman. The example I want to use to explore mimicry comes from an episode in the history of primatology, Solly Zuckerman’s work with Hamadryas

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baboons. While it is not an episode that is integral to the development of ideas about the posthuman as such, it nevertheless enables us to see human-nonhuman relations at work in a scenario at the intersection between scientific research and public culture with important consequences for the realisation of posthumanist theory in practice. I will begin with Zuckerman’s own account of animal mimicry: when a monkey performs a series of acts in a manner that accurately reflects the recently exhibited behaviour of a fellow animal, it is not necessarily copying . . . it may simply be responding to a common stimulus independently, but in such a way that it accurately simulates the behaviour of another monkey . . . ‘imitation’ within a social group of animals consists essentially in the continuous modification of one animal’s environment by the activities of the others (Zuckerman 1981, pp. 169–171).

Very briefly, the background story is this: In 1925, the London Zoo established a community of Hamadryas baboons as part of a project to move away from cage-based exhibits.3 Further baboons, including 30 females, were added in 1927. The result of this project led to an animal society that was given over to an exaggerated intensification of sexual conflict between males as well as general sexual display behaviour. This led, over a five-year period, to the violent deaths of the females, the males largely dying of disease. As Zuckerman describes it, the females died as prizes fought for by the males. The injuries inflicted were of all degrees of severity. Limb-bones, ribs and even the skull had been fractured. Wounds had sometimes penetrated the chest or abdomen, and many animals showed extensive lacerations in the ano-genital region . . . two died shortly after miscarriages apparently precipitated by the fighting. (Zuckerman 1981, p. 220)

The data that Zuckerman took from his observations of the Monkey Hill provided the cornerstone of his The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes published in 1932, the first major synthesising scientific study of the roots of primate behaviour. Zuckerman’s main thesis was that the sexual relation was the key to the structures of social groups; i.e., mammalian society took its different forms from how different reproductive physiologies were configured.

3 A detailed account of this undertaking can be found in my essay ‘Violent Health and the Moving Image: The London Zoo and Monkey Hill’ (Burt 2002, pp. 258–292).

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The significant part of the story for our purposes comes with what happens next. Zuckerman’s notebooks in which he put down his observations from Monkey Hill are fairly sketchy and not particularly systematic. In fact, they offer more for zoo historians in their recording of the horrors of the exhibit, especially as regards violence and deviant sexual behaviour, than for the historian of science. However, Zuckerman’s thesis effectively followed his eye which was particularly drawn to two of the most striking features of the Hamadryas: their marked sexual dimorphism (the large dominant adult males with their thick manes of hair as opposed to the smaller females), and the extraordinary scale of the swelling and purple-red colourings of the ano-genital region of the female in oestrus. In the 1930s Zuckerman became involved in the nascent science of endocrinology, moving from his observation of sexual cyclicity in primates to its manipulation. Whether using monkeys or, sometimes, rats, Zuckerman’s endocrinological work was largely geared to influencing the female reproductive cycle. The administration of hormones to primates produced all manners of striking visual effects. At one point his collaborator Alan Parkes wrote to Zuckerman in 1935, bemoaning the lack of sufficient male hormones for experiments, and saying that “within a few months there should be lbs of male hormone and then we will have a real shot at fur coats, green balls, and sunset backsides” (Parkes 1935). There was no doubting the social and commercial relevance of this research: In 1940, Zuckerman was asked to test a new synthetic oestrogen on monkeys by the Medical Research Council as a prelude to trials by B.D.H., Boots and Glaxo on ovariectomized women. By this time Zuckerman was also working on a parallel project, this time for the military, which in some ways continued the exploration of one of the central questions running through all of Zuckerman’s work: the relationship between what is seen on the surface of the primate body and what happens internally. These experiments included the exposure of animal bodies to high explosives in bomb blast experiments, to projectiles and bullets for the analysis of soft tissue and bone damage, and to hammer blows to the head to calibrate the forces necessary to induce concussion, all of which were deemed crucial to understanding the nature of wounding and death. Such understanding was of special significance for two of Zuckerman’s main questions: How did death occur from bomb blast when there were no visible outward signs of wounding on a dead body? Furthermore, how was it that the tiniest fragment of a projectile could sometimes produce extensive damage inside the body?

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In the concussion experiments done between May 1940 and August 1941, rhesus monkeys were strapped vertically to a board with their heads and backs exposed to blows from a pendulum which could strike at measurable velocities.4 Blows of varying degrees of weight and velocity on the head and back were intended to reproduce the impact experienced when a body was thrown by the force of an explosion, or pushed by trench walls collapsing against it. Reporting on these experiments in August 1940, Zuckerman noted that because of the low velocities involved, “no lasting physiological effects are produced” but in another set of experiments with blows of increasing intensity, the effects were more serious: After the third and subsequent blows the animal had bouts of violent shivering. Its pupils became somewhat dilated, and its nipples showed an extreme pallor which usually passed off between blows. After the sixth blow the animal closed its eyes as though fatigued but it still reacted strongly to the noise. (Zuckerman and Back 1940)

There are many ways of reading Zuckerman’s project but overall we can see how primatology functions here as a form of cross-species interaction, and we are not so far from some of Haraway’s ideas about the co-constitution and co-evolution of human and nonhuman animals. And in some ways one can say that after these events neither captive baboons, nor primatologists, certainly not Zuckerman, will ever be the same again. There are different levels to the mimicry of the nonhuman here. At an overt level we can interpret Zuckerman as a kind of überbaboon. This is certainly a conclusion that can be drawn from the way he behaved in his own (human) family: from his marriage onwards, he made it clear to his wife that his work and career would come first; he treated his son with disdain to the point that would embarrass his friends; and was equally dismissive of his daughter’s boyfriends. But more seriously, as Zuckerman’s own definition of animal mimicry quoted at the beginning of this section makes clear, the cross-species mimicry within this episode in the history of primatology is a function of a parallel response to the same stimulus: the ano-genital region of the female. This leads, as I quoted above, to ‘the continuous modification of one animal’s environment by the activities of others.’ In this perspective Zuckerman’s primatological work pretty much translates or imitates the significant visual aspects of the spectacle of Monkey Hill into For a more detailed account see my essay ‘Solly Zuckerman, the Making of a Primatological Career in Britain, 1925–1945’ (Burt 2006). 4

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an experimental scientific project. Later primatologists, many of them female, will reveal the crudeness of Zuckerman’s thesis with field studies that demonstrated the significance of the actions of far from powerless female baboons in the maintenance of baboon social structure (Smuts 1986). Ironically, Hans Kummer will challenge Zuckerman’s thesis using a mimetic idea. Kummer wrote on the role of sex in the formation of baboon society that initial social units often began with a young male taking or adopting a younger female, and that dyad would then simulate, or imitate, the behaviour of mother and child, though with the gender of the mother reversed. (Kummer and Kurt 1965, p. 82) In conclusion: what I am trying to show with Zuckerman is a particular conformation of mimicry of the nonhuman and its consequences for cross-species interactions. But this isn’t a catch-all thesis by any means. There was other endocrinological research, for instance, going on in the late 1920s on rhesus macaques which did not arise from the observations of a Monkey Hill, and scientists had been hitting animals on the head with hammers since 1874. More importantly, some boundaries in the Zuckerman example between human and baboon stay rigidly intact in terms of the relation between controller and controlled, whilst others, such as general structures of sexually governed versus sexually governing, male behaviour of humans and animals mirror each other in a very particular series of shifting relations within the zoo and the laboratory. Roger Caillois, who also wrote about mimicry, humans and insects in the mid 1930s, saw an understanding of mimicry as touching on the edges of language and thought. His extraordinary passage on the headless praying mantis, “without any centre of representation” that could “assume the spectral stance, engage in mating . . . and (this is truly frightening) lapse into a feigned rigor mortis . . . that the mantis, when dead, should be capable of simulating death” (Caillois 2003, p. 79), he took as an illustration of the human death drive, a consequence of the desire to dissolve the edges of the human and its ‘outside’. Caillois would have been well aware of the traumatic implications of animal mimicry as articulated in Freud or surrealists such as Max Ernst, whose bird alter ego Loplop was such an important way of dealing with his problems of sexual and artistic identity. However seriously we want to take these animal-based examples, whether as warnings, allegories or something more integral to the constant rethinking of the human throughout the twentieth century, my final thought is that, in examining an outlook that seeks to reposition the human, the practices and activities around the human/nonhuman divide need to be much more carefully thought

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through. Perhaps it would be best not to see the dissolution of such boundaries, and I’m thinking of technology here too, as the ideal end point for this repositioning. History may be slow, as my opening quotation stated, but I think it sees the complexity of interactions between living organisms with something of a worthwhile questioning, if pessimistic, eye. Of course, as for our environmental and epidemiological futures, monkeys and rats have a lot to tell us about that too. References Armstrong, Susan and Richard Botzler. 2003. The Animal Ethics Reader. London: Routledge. Berger, John. 1980. ‘Why Look at Animals?’ In About Looking. London: Writers & Readers. Brower, Matthew. 2005. ‘Trophy Shots: Early North American Photographs of Nonhuman Animals and the Display of Masculine Prowess.’ Society and Animals 13:1: 13–31. Burt, Jonathan. 2000. Animals in Film. London: Reaktion Books. ——. 2002. ‘Violent Health and the Moving Image: The London Zoo and Monkey Hill.’ In Animals in Human Histories: The Mirror of Nature and Culture. Edited by Mary Henninger-Voss, 258–292. Rochester: University of Rochester Press: Rochester. ——. 2006. ‘Solly Zuckerman, the Making of a Primatological Career in Britain, 1925–1945’. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37: 295–310. ——. 2006. Rat. Reaktion Books: London. Bruce Clarke, Bruce. ‘Mediating The Fly: Posthuman Metamorphosis in the 1950s.’ Configurations 10 (1): 169–191. Caillois, Roger. 2003 [c. 1934]. ‘The Praying Mantis: From Biology to Psychoanalysis.’ In The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader. Edited by Claudine Frank, 69–88. Duke University Press: Durham. Callus, Ivan and Stefan Herbrechter. 2008. Critical Posthumanism. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Donaldson, H.H. 1915. The Rat. Philadelphia: Wistar Institute for Anatomy and Biology. Galison, Peter. 1994. ‘The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision.’ Critical Inquiry 21 (1): 228–266. Halberstam, Judith and Ira Livingston, eds. 1995. Posthuman Bodies. Indiana University Press: Bloomington. Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium: FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™. Routledge: New York. ——. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hayles, Katherine N. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kummer, Hans and F. Kurt. 1965. ‘A Comparison of Social Behaviour in Captive and Wild Hamadryas Baboons.’ In The Baboon in Medical Research: Proceedings of the First International Symposium of the Baboon and its Use as an Experimental Animal. Edited by H. Vagtborg, 65–80. University of Texas Press. Midgley, Mary. 1983. Animals and Why They Matter. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Parkes, Alan. 1935. Letter to Solly Zuckerman, 20 January, 1935. Alan Parkes file, Solly Zuckerman Papers, University of East Anglia Archives, Norwich, U.K. Pearson, Keith Ansell. 1997. ‘Life Becoming Body: On the “Meaning” of Post Human Evolution’, Cultural Values 1 (2): 219–240.

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Pepperell, Robert. 1995. The Post-Human Condition. Intellect: Oxford. Pickering, Andrew. 1995. ‘Cyborg History and the World War II Regime,’ Perspectives on Science 3 (1): 1–48 Poster, Mark. 2004. ‘The Information Empire’, Comparative Literature Studies 41.3: 317–334. Rossini, Manuela. 2005. ‘Figurations of Posthumanity in Contemporary Science/Fiction—all too Human(ist)?’ In Literature and Science. Edited by Tomás Monterrey. Revista canaria de estudios ingleses 50: 21–36. Rothfels, Nigel. 2002. Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Singer, Peter. 1975. Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. New York: Avon Books. ——. 1999. Practical Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smuts, Barbara B. 1986. Sex and Friendship in Baboons. Piscataway: Aldine Transaction. Watson, John B. (1907). ‘Kinaesthetic and Organic Sensations: Their Role in the Reactions of the White Rat to the Maze.’ Psychological Review Monograph Supplement 8 (33): 1–100. Zuckerman, Solly. 1981 (2nd ed.). The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes. Routledge and Kegan Paul: London. Zuckerman, Solly and A.S. Back. 1940. ‘The Effects of Impacts on the Head and Back of Monkeys.’ (Typescript, August, 1940). SZ/OEMU/9, Solly Zuckerman Papers.

PART FIVE

DOMESTIC ENCOUNTERS Human culture, in all its many forms, has developed and often depended on the taming of wild animals. The essays in this section address encounters with animal species that have been domesticated. Animals who have been drawn into human society, and brought under direct human control, provide diverse products and services. Numerous species are farmed to supply food, in the form of meat and milk, eggs, honey, and other edible substances, as well as fabric and fibres such as silk and wool, leather and hair, fur and feathers. Beasts of burden have been put to work to provide transportation, labour, and military might. The superior senses of many birds and mammals have proved advantageous to individuals and to whole societies. Animals have been kept as pets and companions, and have furnished ornaments made from bone and pearls. In recent years they have increasingly been subjected to scientific experimentation and research. The essays that meet in this section concern two of the most numerous and yet rarely encountered creatures in contemporary western culture. The first focuses on what we can learn from domestic encounters, the second on the lack of knowledge they signal. In her essay ‘Fellow-Feeling’, Susan Squier tracks changes in the American chicken farming industry over the last century and a half as reflections of shifting economic models. Squier begins with the poems and veterinary advice of Nancy Luce, who wrote in the late nineteenth century when chickens were typically kept by women, and for whom little contradiction existed between her heart-felt attachment to the hens and the economic benefits they provided. A marked contrast is provided by Betty MacDonald’s humorous account of chicken farming in the 1940s, as the industry shifted to intensive, systematic practices overseen increasingly by men, and she herself learned to loathe chickens. Finally, Linda Lord’s experience working in a poultry processing plant of the 1970s precluded all empathy for the birds she came to treat entirely instrumentally. Returning to the early work of Adam Smith, Squier argues that his notion of “fellow-feeling” is an integral part of social relations, and must be included in any economic model which

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attempts to account for the multiple forms of exchange between humans and other animals. In the fellow-feeling born of her own, everyday encounters with chickens, Squier finds a means of understanding the well-being and wealth generated by an intimate association between moral feeling and non-industrial agricultural practices. Rats, meanwhile, though often overlooked as a domesticated species, are used today for a wide variety of human purposes: as subjects in laboratory experiments, as companion animals, as food, and even in artistic practice. Steve Baker’s essay ‘ “Tangible and Real and Vivid and Meaningful”: Lucy Kimbell’s Not-Knowing About Rats’ considers two instances of aesthetic encounter. Kimbell’s Rat Fair drew large crowds to Camden Arts Centre in London, and included such activities as rat face painting (for humans), a rat beauty parlour (for rats), the sale of rat-related merchandise, and a popular ‘Is your rat an artist?’ competition. Her related performance lecture, One Night with Rats in the Service of Art, reflected on the process of conceiving works of art involving rats. As Baker explains, Kimbell’s work addresses the nature of art’s distinctive contribution to cultural knowledge about animals, and the place of living animals in contemporary works of art. Baker highlights the importance of curbing the impulse to make swift judgements and evaluations that are likely to capture and constrain potential modes of engagement. A key part of Kimbell’s “aesthetic experiments”, he argues, is their provisional and precarious nature, their exploratory vulnerability deriving from an acknowledged starting point of ignorance. Knowing—about art, about animals, about the more-than-human—derives always and ultimately from a position of not-knowing, whose productive possibilities should be kept open. (TT)

CHAPTER NINE

FELLOW-FEELING Susan Squier No sentiment or fine feeling enters into the life of the modern hen in an intensive poultry farm. Hatched early in the year, she is reared with one object, to lay eggs before the winter sets in. Once she lays, systematic feeding and exercise keep her at work. —Anon., The Back Garden Hen, p. 12

I’d been raising chickens for a while—sitting with them in the morning as they scratched for insects in the dirt, making sure they were safely on the perch when I closed them in at night—when I began to think about fellow-feeling. A kind of empathy, born in the intimate encounters that are so much a part of chicken farming: pouring the birds scratch grain and clean water as they mill noisily around my feet; enjoying the variety of their sounds, from soft clucks of contentment to urgent churrings when they turn up a worm; grabbing them by the legs and swinging them off the perch at night and holding them squawking upside down, their wings flapping, so I could dust pyrethrum (a lice remedy) on their butt feathers and under their wings; watching the hens lift and fluff their wing feathers to shelter their chicks. Fellow-feeling: the sense that my chickens are fellow creatures. Chickens as fellow creatures? There was no question about that to Miss Nancy Luce, who also raised chickens more than a hundred years ago on the little island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. I’d come across Miss Nancy in the archives of the university where I teach. Photographs of her with her chickens jostled with a pamphlet she wrote, and a few short papers about her in a dusty manila folder in the Special Collections room. Small-scale farmer and poet, she raised chickens in her backyard in West Tisbury, Massachusetts during the 1860s and ’70s. To the tourists who visited her in hired livery carriages, drawn to her as a local curiosity, she sold hens’ eggs and the privately printed pamphlets of her own poems. An article filed with her papers told a grim tale:

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Fig. 9.1 Women and their hens, poised between two meanings of fellowfeeling. The Back Garden Hen (1917). Reproduced with the permission of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University Libraries.

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Her life a village tragedy, her publishing office an old leather trunk, her confidants hens, and her poetry unique, poor Nancy Luce lived out her sixty-nine years of poverty and ill-health in a humble farm-house on Tisbury Plain (Martha’s Vineyard), and for forty-nine of those years, after her parents died, without human companion. (Clough 1949, p. 263)

But for me, what stood out was the companionship Nancy Luce shared with her chickens. Although she raised them for their eggs, they provided something else beyond that simple transaction. Something perhaps unquantifiable, something in the zone of fellow-feeling. The ‘something else’ that gave me pause in Nancy Luce’s story has puzzled economists, too, ever since the writings of Adam Smith. The ‘father of economics’ was also interested in the idea of fellow-feeling. It featured prominently in his treatise on The Moral Sentiments (1759), where he explored the workings of this complex emotion, central (he argued) to a fully functioning human community. The ability to feel for other people, to experience sympathy, empathy, and concern for fellow human beings, was to Smith an essential component of civil society for it constituted the interdependence at the basis of social and economic relations. Yet in his foundational articulation of modern economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), written seventeen years later, his focus on emotional complexity is replaced by the notion of economic self-interest that would shape Western culture for centuries. Smith put it vividly in Book I, Chapter II: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. (Smith [1776] 1904, 1.2.2)

From benevolence to self-interest, from humanity to self-love: rural sociologists and agricultural historians like Deborah Fitzgerald and Steve Striffler have vividly traced the agricultural journey from the midnineteenth century small flocks of farm women like Nancy Luce to the giant poultry farms of the late twentieth century, where low-wage, often immigrant workers produce profit for distant shareholders (Fitzgerald 2003; Striffler 2005). The contemporary practice of poultry production is carried out in vertically-linked corporations, whose giant grow-out buildings, each holding 20,000 birds, stretch across the landscape of the southern United States. As Striffler points out in a discussion of one of the biggest corporate mergers in poultry production history, the

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Tyson Foods buyout of Holly Farms chicken, the poultry business is now about generating profit, not serving people. The folks who produce, process, and consume chicken for Holly, Tyson, and ConAgra were and are not only completely irrelevant to the merger; under the current system, they are oddly incidental to food itself. (Striffler 2005, p. 71)

It is a familiar story by now: chicken farming has been transformed from a casual, undocumented part of the small farm economy to the largest contemporary agricultural industry. Yet there are indications that times are changing in the chicken business. Recently I read in the Times that Tyson Foods has committed to converting twenty of their processing units to the production of antibiotic-free chickens to be sold fresh to customers (New York Times, 2007). Large-scale poultry corporations like Tyson seem to be reframing the image of their massive operations, perhaps spurred on by the popularity of agricultural writers like Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, Joel Sallatin and Michael Pollan. Or perhaps—as the Times recently speculated—it was the other way around: Many of these writers say they are responding to the increased public appetite for food’s back story. As they reveal their personalities, histories, and insights, they bridge the distance between the people who grow food and the people who eat it. (Bowen 2007)

Today’s “farmers who write” not only remind me of farmer-poets like long-ago Nancy Luce; they may be reminding consumers that there is another way of raising our food. Many of the writers own or operate farms themselves—small ones, or even medium-sized ones—and sell their goods “directly to the public, either through farmers’ markets or community-supported agriculture programs, or C.S.A.’s, in which customers purchase shares of a farm’s harvest.” (ibid.) Taggart Siegel’s award-winning documentary, ‘The Real Dirt on Farmer John’ (2005) explores the emotional implications of this shift as it reveals the strong connection forged between Angelic Organics, a Chicago-area C.S.A. started by ‘Farmer John’ Peterson, and its 1,200 shareholder families. As one of the farm workers observes, “people come here to remember what some of the basic things in life are: where your food comes from, your neighbors, who your farmers are” (Independent Lens, no date)1

See also Roger Ebert’s review of this “loving, moving, inspiring, quirky documentary” (2006). 1

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As I sat with my chickens in the early morning sun I found myself wondering what Adam Smith would make of this moment in agricultural production. How would he explain the changed relation these writers are documenting to the crops we farm (animal as well as vegetable) and the changes in the structure of our agricultural economy? Would he see any connection between the emotions they plumb in their writing, and the economics of agriculture they are transforming? In short, could there be an economic meaning to fellow-feeling? I found myself thinking once again of Nancy Luce, as well as Betty MacDonald, and Linda Lord. All three women were involved in chicken farming between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Two of them could be described as “farmers who write,” and although the third seems to have lacked the leisure time for writing, a skillful interviewer has given vivid voice to her contemplative powers. What role did these women attribute to fellow-feeling in their agricultural experiences? Their narratives trace an arc of decline for the powerful moral sentiment so central to human community. While Nancy Luce, as a small-scale chicken farmer in the mid-nineteenth century, seemed to mingle fellow-feeling and economic good sense, by the mid-twentieth century chicken farmer Betty MacDonald finds herself alienated from her chicks and chickens, as she struggles to manage the unwieldy scale and schedule of her intensive egg farm. And at the turn of the twentyfirst century, Linda Lord—a low-wage worker in a poultry processing plant—displayed no fellow-feeling at all for the chickens she was killing, and precious little for her fellow-workers on the factory line. If fellowfeeling led to community, and thus to a successful economy, as Adam Smith suggested several centuries ago, the experiences of these women suggest that a reinvented economy is a prerequisite for reinvigorated communities and a return to fellow-feeling. We will turn to Miss Nancy Luce, Betty MacDonald and Linda Lord in a moment, but first let’s consider what fellow-feeling meant at the time of the birth of Western economics. In his classic study, The Theory of Moral Sentiments ([1759] 1976), Adam Smith argued that fellow-feeling was an essential ingredient in social interactions, providing the social glue that made all other aspects of society, and especially the economy, possible. Smith saw this sentiment as foundational to the accumulation of wealth, because it induced the commitment to the human collective that was the prior condition of any economic transactions. As he saw it, fellow-feeling produced empathy and sympathy particularly with those less fortunate than we are:

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susan squier [ T ]his is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels . . . (Smith [1759] 1976, I.1.3)

Fellow-feeling induced a kind of somatosensory mirroring of the suffering of another person, in Smith’s description. We have a visceral reaction to the pain of others; we register it in our nerves and empathize with them based on our sense of sharing the same painful feelings in the same body parts. “Persons of delicate fibres and a weak constitution of body” may feel “an itching or uneasy sensation in the correspondent part of their own bodies” when they see “the sores and ulcers which are exposed by beggars in the streets.” The sentiment is frequently targeted to specific bodily regions: The horror which they conceive at the misery of those wretches affects that particular part in themselves more than any other; because that horror arises from conceiving what they themselves would suffer . . . if that particular part in themselves was actually affected in the same miserable manner. (Smith [1759] 1976, I.1.3)

Significantly, Smith’s examples cross a number of social categories and incorporate a broad range of humanity in the deeply embodied experience of fellow-feeling. In his recounting, this may include empathy even with people outside the customary circle of gentlemen, such as a scabrous street beggar or, as he puts it later in his analysis, a woman in childbirth or a man suffering from insanity (Smith [1759] 1976, I.I.11, and VII.I.7). The one boundary fellow-feeling could not cross, in Adam Smith’s model, seems to have been that of species. Fellow-feeling in Smith’s terms seems premised on the awareness of bodily similarity. An injured leg speaks to a leg that might be injured; skin that is suppurating or inflamed resonates to skin that is still smooth. And while Smith himself grants the limits in fellow-feeling that a man may experience for a woman in the pangs of childbirth, his “theory of sociality” incorporates fellow-feeling as a support for “the ‘two great purposes of nature’: ‘the support of the individual, and the propagation of the species’ ” (Sugden 2002, p. 84). We need social organization in order to create the security and material goods necessary for human populations to grow and thrive. Since the human species must be propagated by gathering in societies and producing wealth, species membership constitutes a boundary-marker. There seems in Adam Smith no suggestion that

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the propagation of other species not as wealth but as objects of our fellow-feeling can have any survival significance. What would Adam Smith have made of the story of Miss Nancy Luce? Miss Nancy Luce When she published her book of poems and advice for chicken doctoring in 1875, Miss Nancy Luce wrote at the dawn of the United States poultry industry. The United States Department of Agriculture (U.S.D.A.) had been signed into being only thirteen years earlier; the first poultry magazine in the nation (The Poultry Bulletin) had begun publication only five years earlier; the American Poultry Association had been organized only two years before; and it would still take another eleven years for the Hatch Act to create the agricultural extension agencies so powerful in defining modern chicken farming (Hanke, Skinner and Florea 1974, pp. 52, 35, 36, 52). The field of agricultural education joined the triad of educational institutions established with the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862, along with land grant colleges and state agricultural experiment stations. The U.S. Congress defined the mission of agricultural extension education in the Smith-Lever Act of 1914: “To aid in diffusing among the people of the United States useful and practical information on subjects relating to agriculture.” (Cash 2001, p. 433). Reflecting the existing agricultural understanding of chicken raising as ancillary to the main work of a scientific farm, agricultural extension education from its inception framed chicken farming as a project particularly suited to women. The first speaker at a Farmer’s Institute to address the topic of poultry raising was Mrs. Ida Tilson, of West Salem, Wisconsin, who spoke of her success raising chickens (Hanke et al. 1974, p. 65). Newly appointed agricultural extension agents appealed to woman’s long history as poultry farmers, arguing that the farm wife “Above all . . . wanted her flock to contribute to the family income. She had confidence in its ability to do so.” (Hanke et al. 1974, p. 66). The first poultry inventory in 1840 estimated that there were 98,984,232 head of poultry being raised in the USA, and women dominated poultry production in the nation until the end of World War II, when “large-scale egg and broiler production [had] gradually pushed women out of the poultry industry.” (Sachs 1996, p. 107).

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Fig. 9.2 Miss Nancy Luce and two beloved hens. Reproduced with the permission of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University Libraries.

From her vantage point at the beginning of this process of agricultural transformation, and clearly comfortable in the gender-sanctioned role as chicken farmer, Miss Nancy Luce claimed authority both as an interpreter of chicken behavior and as a healer of their ills. Moreover, she wrote of her chickens as companions in the struggle for subsistance rather than as products, although her exhortations to her readers suggest that her sensitivity to animal welfare may have been an increasingly rare quality even in her era of farm foreclosures and consolidations. Her poems—many of them addressed to her chickens—speak vividly of her fellow-feeling for the suffering of others, both animals and humans. Consider, for example, ‘Poor Little Heart,’ verses she dedicated to her favorite hen, Pinky: Poor Tweedle, Tedel, Bebbee, Pinky. She is gone. She died June 19th, 1871, at quarter past 7 o’clock in the evening, with my hands around her, aged 4 years. I never can see Poor little dear again. Poor Pinky, that dear little heart, She is gone, sore broke in her, Died in distress, Poor little heart, O it was heart rending. O sick I do feel ever since, I am left broken hearted, She was my own heart within me, She had more than common wit.

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Poor Pinky’s wit, and she loved me so well, Them was the reasons, I set so much by her, And I raised her in my lap too. * * I hope I shall never have a hen, to set so much by again, From over the sea, she was brought to me, one week old, I raised her in my lap, She loved me dreadful dearly. She would jam close to me, Every chance she could get, And talk to me, and want to get in my lap, And set down close. And when she was out from me, If I only spoke her name, She would be sure to run to me quick, Without wanting anything to eat. She was sick and died very sudden, Only two hours and a quarter, About fifteen minutes dying. Bloody water pouring out her mouth, And her breath agoing, Poor little heart. O dreadful melancholy I do feel for my dear, She laid eggs till three days before her death, She laid the most eggs, this four years around, Than any hen I have on earth. * * Consider how distressing sickness is to undergo, And how distressing in many ways, My parents’ sickness, a number of years, Caused them to sell cows, oxen, horses, and sheep, English meadow, clear land, and wood land, Consider how distressing sickness is in many ways. (Luce 1875)

The fellow-feeling expressed by Miss Luce’s heart-felt poetic narratives of her hens’ illnesses, almost maternal in their semiotic murmurings, is echoed in a slightly different form in the veterinary advice manual, ‘Doctoring Hens,’ that she packaged as an appendix to her volume of poetry.

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susan squier Human, do understand how to raise up sick hens to health. Some folks do not know how to doctor hens, they doctor them wrong, it hurts them, and it is dreadful cruel to let them die. It is as distressing to dumb creatures to undergo sickness, and death, as it is for human, and as distressing to be crueled, and as distressing to suffer. God requires human[s] to take good care of dumb creatures and be kind to them, or not keep any. (Luce 1875)

Her tone is urgent, pragmatic, and specific. For a blocked oviduct, serious enough to kill a hen, she makes a no-nonsense appeal to womanly resourcefulness: “someone has a small finger, and common sense, take the skin of egg out of her, then she is all right” (Luce 1890, p. 27). For an intestinal obstruction she confidently recommends massaging the hen’s stomach, giving a dosage of Epsom salts gauged by the smell of the hen’s breath, and then hand-feeding the ailing bird. “Folks bring hens to me in this disease, to the point of death, been sick a long time, I cure them in five days . . .” (Luce 1875). Miss Nancy Luce exhibited empathy for the birds who were her companions. The final verse of the poem ‘Poor Little Heart’ makes that clear when it asserts the similarities between animal and human suffering, just as her advice manual compares veterinary and human medical ailments and treatments. There seems to be little boundary between medical and veterinary matters, or between the hen’s anatomy and her own. Nancy Luce suffered from illness much of her adult life; without much of a leap we could imagine the blocked oviduct or the intestinal obstruction as her own. Nor does she see any gap between sentiment and economic practicality: for a chicken farmer, tender care will be profitable. As she explains, I bought a young hen last year, she was dreadful wild, and when one week was at an end she came to me, and let me take her up, she keep still, and eat out of my hand, she remains gentle every since, and a good hen to lay eggs. (Luce 1875)

In Nancy Luce’s view, the simple practice of keeping animals entails the obligation to provide them with humane treatment. In short, fellow-feeling is central to Nancy Luce’s psychic economy: it is how the energy she expends in the relationship with her chickens, and with the broader human society to which she sells their eggs, is regulated and replenished.

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Betty MacDonald As a child of the 1950s I loved MacDonald for her wonderful Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series of children’s books. As an adult, raising chickens, I love her for The Egg and I, the hilarious account of her struggles as a chicken farmer on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington just after World War II (MacDonald 1945). Reaching the top of the U.S. nonfiction lists within a year of its publication in 1945, this memoir captures a woman’s experience of chicken farming at the conclusion of the agricultural transformation whose early glimmerings Miss Nancy Luce documented. Chickens and eggs had an ever-growing consumer market during and after the Second World War, for they were the only products of animal agriculture not subject to wartime rationing. By 1945 chicken farming was being reinvented as a task for men, particularly for war veterans hoping to establish a profitable place in the postwar economy. Poultry keeping took on a systematic, scientific cast, as new methods of flock management and feed ratio aimed at producing a larger product more quickly and economically. This is the world entered by Betty MacDonald and her husband Bill, an ex-Marine war veteran, once they decide to take the plunge into chicken rearing. Fellow-feeling for chickens is definitely a man’s emotion for the MacDonalds. When, on their honeymoon, Bob begins to talk about his experience raising hens and his interest in returning to chicken farming, his feeling for chickens combines ardor and economics. As Betty tells it, Bob speaks of his job as a supervisor on a large chicken ranch, . . . with the loving care usually associated with first baby shoes. When he reached the figures—the cost per hen per egg, the cost per dozen eggs, the relative merits of outdoor runs, the square footage required per hen—he recalled them with so much nostalgia that listening to him impartially was like trying to swim at the edge of a whirlpool. (MacDonald 1945, p. 38)

The humor in The Egg and I lies in Betty’s sentimental education as a wife-turned-chicken farmer. While Bob’s feelings for his chickens are tender, Betty’s take a different turn. Before married life, her only contact with chickens had been watching Layette, her grandmother’s Barred Rock hen, lead her brood of “fourteen home-hatched fluffy yellow chicks through the drifting apple blossoms” (MacDonald 1945, p. 138). As her farming experience increases, and her feelings ripen and twist, the

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daily farm grind gradually vanquishes the memory of Layette: “This sentimental fragment of my childhood was a far cry from the hundreds and hundreds of yellowish white, yeeping, smelly little nuisances which made my life a nightmare in the spring,” she explains wryly. And she learns “to Hate Even Baby Chickens” (ibid.). Many intertwined factors produce Betty’s dislike for the chickens she and Bob raise on their wilderness chicken ranch. MacDonald’s memoir extracts the humorous meaning from each of them: her experience as an aspiring writer who subordinates her goals to those of her husband out of a sense of wifely duty, the travails of new motherhood in their isolated rural setting, and her lonely life on their isolated farm far from a supportive community. But most significant, and most vividly dramatized on the MacDonalds’ farm, are the changing scale and gendered character of post World War II chicken raising. Unlike Nancy Luce, Betty and Bob MacDonald are enmeshed in modern intensive poultry farming, in which a high volume of hens requires efficient feeding and watering, careful record keeping, and the rigorous culling of unproductive layers. In this new agricultural model, the farmer is implicitly, often explicitly, gendered male. Implicitly demonstrating her acceptance of this model, Betty describes Bob as “the best chicken farmer in our community” because he is “scientific, he [is] thorough, and he [isn’t] hampered by a lot of traditions or old wives’ tales” (MacDonald 1945, p. 146). Like other modern poultrymen, he separates “breeding and egg raising,” understanding them as “two separate industries.” He studies egg prices and calculates the ratio of input (feed) to output (eggs). And he has definite opinions about what makes a poultry farm succeed or fail: “the secret of success in the chicken business for one man was to keep the operation to a size that could be handled by one man.” (ibid.). The relation between the sexes on a farm is as clear as the species hierarchy: any farm wife who would work side-by-side with such a paragon must be, Betty MacDonald quips, “part Percheron” (ibid.). The gendered transformation of poultry farming MacDonald represents with such humor also had serious implications, particularly for working class women. Traditionally, the ‘egg-money’ had been held separate from the general farm income. It was the private property of the wife, to use as she wished. Thus, raising chickens provided farm wives not only with the power to amend the farm diet when necessary, but also with precious economic and occasionally even social autonomy. When the rise of extension education in poultry farming destabilized this arrangement in the 1930s and 1940s by introducing the predominantly

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masculine scientific farming model, women lost a large measure of control over their lives. Rather than enjoying the security of being able to provide for themselves, they were now subject to the vagaries of an economic system in which they had no significant part. Little wonder that women enjoyed less fellow-feeling for their chickens, entrapped as they both were in an economy that showed increasingly little concern for any creatures caught in its instrumental and disinterested gears. We find the long-term impact of this economic trend on women, and on the broader communities they anchored, in my final example: the experiences of poultry worker Linda Lord. Linda Lord Like Nancy Luce and Betty MacDonald, Linda Lord’s story is intimately shaped by her surroundings. However, rather than rural Martha’s Vineyard with its occasional summer visitors or the lush but lonely Olympic Peninsula, Linda’s territory is hardscrabble Belfast, Maine. The chickens she encounters aren’t in her front garden or her parlor as Nancy Luce’s were, or in whitewashed poultry houses, like those adjacent to Betty MacDonald’s wilderness cabin, but in a dimly lit factory where they are brought to be stunned, killed, scalded, plucked, singed, and packed for shipping. The poultry industry had been a prominent part of the Maine economy since the time of Nancy Luce, producing mostly eggs in the 1860s but by the 1930s, when Betty MacDonald was getting into chickens on her northwest coast island, shipping “New York Dressed” chickens to out-of-state buyers (Chatterley and Rouverol 2000, p. 97). After World War II, poultry had become Maine’s most important agricultural crop. Even when Maine’s poultry industry consolidated into only a few large processing firms, Penobscot Poultry held on, remaining as one of only two Maine broiler producers (ibid., p. 98). Around 1971, Penobscot Poultry was found to have been dumping pollutants into Penobscot Bay along with another company. Both companies were fined, and Penobscot’s corporate reputation suffered. Later in the decade the company’s environmental problems continued, when polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were found in the flesh of chickens from three Maine poultry plants, Penobscot among them, leading to the destruction of 1.25 million birds. The error was finally attributed to one flawed batch from a Ralston Purina feed mill, rather than to

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Penobscot Poultry, but the damage was done (ibid.). The industry was further challenged by the deindustrialization facing Maine’s struggling economy along with much of the rest of the Northeast. By the 1980s, the state had begun the forced transition to a tourist economy. Historians hold differing opinions about the factors that contributed to the final closure of Penobscot Poultry in 1988, but among the mix of causes were financial problems, mismanagement, and the intensifying demands of vertical integration. We can see all of those elements at play in a vivid interview and photographic essay compiled in the plant’s last days by Cedric R. Chatterley and Alicia J. Rouverol. Their subject is Linda Lord, a woman who started working for the plant after her high school graduation, and continued working there for more than twenty years. Lord held many positions at Penobscot Poultry. They ranged from the low pay job of poultry transferring, or putting the killed and plucked birds on shackles for the eviscerating line, to the ‘top pay’ position of poultry sticker, working in the room they called the “blood tunnel” or “hell hole,” killing the stunned birds by putting a knife through “the vein right in by the jaw bone” (Chatterley and Rouverol 2000, p. 6). Linda’s encounters with chickens were dominated by death, dismemberment and disability, rather than the breeding, laying and hatching that animated the stories of Nancy Luce and Betty MacDonald. As I read her interview, and gazed at the powerful photographs accompanying it, I wondered how to bring Linda Lord’s very different experience of chicken farming—factory farming, as it was for her—into conversation with the stories of the other women. Her interview gives poignant articulation to the complex psychic and material economies of industrial chicken farming. Although (or more likely because) she hit the top of her personal pay scale as a sticker in the blood tunnel at $5.69 an hour, Linda has a clear grasp of the economic realities of her form of employment: The way I look at it now, the chicken business here in the state of Maine is just about phased right out. Because it’s costing too much for us, for the grain to be shipped. You have to pay electricity, you have to pay the fuel. You know, it’s a sad thing really, because it’s put a lot of people right out of work. (Chatterley and Rouverol 2002, pp. 12, 34)

But what were her specific experiences of fellow-feeling? I wondered. She acknowledged sympathy for her fellow poultry workers based on the physical injuries they shared. Whether she was standing on the

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Fig. 9.3 Linda Lord on the Killing Floor (© Photograph by Cedric N. Chatterley, 24 Feb 1988. All rights reserved)

assembly line hanging dead poultry, or stretching—awash in blood—to grab stunned chickens off a moving overhead line, Lord was prey to the same problems that characterized all of the people who “work on the lines”: warts, tendonitis, and blood poisoning. There’s an ailment specific to the industry, Lord explains: You have like a rash break out all over you from the chickens . . . which eventually will blister right up with little pus sacks, and the skin will peel right off your hand, and they call it—“chicken poisoning” is what they call it. (Chatterley and Rouverol 2000, p. 5)

Linda has suffered from blood poisoning, and she is blind in her right eye as a result of an accident on the assembly line, an injury for which she finally got a partial settlement after three years working with the workmen’s compensation lawyers at her union. It was no victory, though, as Linda points out. Even drawing on the brutal calculus of compensation, the disability money she received from the company didn’t offset the economic cost of her injury when it barred her from other employment possibilities once the plant closed: They had a way that if—you know, the loss of a finger was so much, and a loss of a hand was so much, or an arm was so much, or an eye was so

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Linda’s comments recall Adam Smith’s analysis of how a physiologically-registered sense of fellow-feeling leads us to empathize—through our bodies—with the ailments of others. Yet there were distinct limits to this emotion for Linda. Responding to an interviewers’ question, she made it clear that whatever connection she felt to her fellow workers based on shared physical vulnerability was tempered by economic realities: her straightforward need for this job and knowledge that the actions of fellow-workers may jeopardize that income. In the late twentieth-century climate of scarce jobs for low wages, Linda took her job in the poultry processing plant because “that was just about the only place that was hiring . . . And I wanted a job.” (Chatterley and Rouverol 2000, p. 2) SC You know, the first day we photographed the hell hole, we were a little taken aback. It’s a pretty gruesome scene in there. How did you feel about it when you began to work in there? LL I was the type of kid growing up that nothing bothered me—blood or anything like that. So when I signed up for that job—of course I’d been in there and I’d watched and I had tried some, you know, on my breaks and stuff . . . So I knew what I was getting into, and it didn’t bother me, and I preferred working by myself than working by someone that might cause trouble for you on the line. SC How could people cause trouble for you on the line? LL Oh, throwing stuff, you know, not doing their bird, but trying to blame it on you . . . And if someone wasn’t doing their job on a bird, they could trace it back. SC So you thought that maybe the disadvantages of working with other people were big enough that you rather would have stuck it out by yourself in that room. LL Yeah. (Chatterley and Rouverol 2000, p. 7)

In contrast to Nancy Luce, who roughly a generation earlier urged people to realize that “It is as distressing to dumb creatures to undergo sickness, and death, as it is for human [sic],” Linda Lord’s relations with chickens are instrumental rather than emotional, and focused not on their generative capacities (the eggs they lay or the companionship they offer) but on their destruction. She attributes her skill as a chicken sticker to a lack of fellow-feeling for the birds themselves, a trait that seems to have been nurtured by her employer. Penobscot Poultry embodies the rationalization of life in the way it compartmentalizes its poultry production. Chicks are incubated and

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hatched in one division, laying hens are housed and eggs collected in another division and broilers grown, slaughtered and processed in a third division. Workers’ lives are similarly compartmentalized, as we learn from Linda’s experience as a poultry worker. The industrialization, consolidation, and final deindustrialization of regional poultry production has not only reframed and narrowed the meaning of labor for agricultural workers, but has also arguably eviscerated the meaning of community to the town of Belfast. Reading her story and musing angrily on the injustice of our contemporary economic paradigm, I found myself wondering whether a return to Adam Smith’s writings could shed light on this economic and social transformation, and maybe even give some hope of an alternative model. Adam Smith Economists have long struggled to reconcile Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and its explorations of sympathy, empathy and fellow-feeling, with the book he published seventeen years later, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Indeed, as they have tried to show that Smith’s ideas of empathy and sympathy are compatible with notions of rational choice theory, economists have painted a picture of economic relations reminiscent of those encountered by Linda Lord at Penobscot Poultry. They have argued that human beings are guided not by feelings but by rational preference, and that individuals’ deeds are shaped by a rational assessment of the utility of possible choices of action. Thus, as Sugden explains, rational choice economist John Harsanyi and game theorist Ken Binmore have reinterpreted the sentiment of fellow-feeling as a rational expression of preference leading to choice. They explain a person’s decision to engage in altruistic activities, though on the surface seemingly of little personal utility, by quantifying the impact of that choice upon the individual’s quantity of pleasure (Sugden 2002, p. 67; Harsanyi 1955; Binmore 1994; Binmore 1998). More recently, critical economic sociologists and feminist economists have issued a strong challenge to such a notion of rational choice economics. Framing a critique of neoliberal economics that offers an alternative economic theory attentive to issues of social justice, economist Robert Sugden refuses the reinterpretation of fellow-feeling as preference. Instead, he argues that Adam Smith’s notion of “fellow-feeling”

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models not merely utilitarian preferences but the interaction between different human beings’ mental states. Sugden reminds us of the full import of Adam Smith’s phrasing: fellow-feeling is to be understood as one person’s lively consciousness of some affective state of another person, where that consciousness itself has similar affective qualities (Sugden 2002, p. 71)

While these similar qualities could consist in either the shared pain or joy that we may feel in response to another’s experiences, the crucial point is that whatever the emotion shared, the experience of fellowfeeling itself produces pleasure. As he argues, being linked to another’s consciousness and sharing their affective experience, whether of pain or of pleasure, is inherently positive. The converse is also true: failure to share another’s feelings can cause us distress, irritation or even pain. As Sugden observes, With what I believe to be psychological acuteness, Smith points to . . . the unease and irritation we feel when we find we cannot sympathize with someone else’s apparent sentiments of distress (Sugden 2002, p. 73).

As Sugden reinvigorates Smith’s analysis, it becomes apparent that fellow-feeling is an integral part of our motivation to live in society: we desire to feel with others. Because the sentiment persuades us to bind ourselves to the demands and restrictions of society, it is “an essential part of the technology by which relational goods—that is, social relations that have subjective but non-instrumental value to the participants—are produced” (Sugden 2002, p. 81). Understood in this light, Smith’s discussion of fellow-feeling in the context of moral development moves us beyond simple instrumentalism into the realm of the psychic economy, delineating the broader motivations for our participation in society. To Smith the value of social relations exceeds the merely instrumental. Feminist economists Jenny Cameron and J.K. Gibson-Graham have gone even farther than Sugden, broadening the economic realm to include marginalized groups and modes of transaction previously viewed as non-economic (Cameron and Gibson-Graham 2003). Redefining the economy “as an open-ended discursive construct made up of multiple constituents,” they suggest that we employ additional categories of economic analysis such as production and reproduction, caring and nurturing, gift relations, environmental stewardship and social cooperation, all to further the feminist goal of improving the

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representational adequacy of our economic models. They show how we can introduce what they call “alternative axes of differentiation within the economy”—that is, new models for explaining how difference is produced and maintained—to disrupt our conventional assumption that human activity is divided into the economic and the non-economic. We can map the true diversity of economic relations and practice by including alternative forms of transaction and calculation, different modes of laboring and paying for labor, and a range of different kinds of economic organization with different relations to surplus labor. This exercise in representing alternative modes of economic analysis can help us see how we might move toward “an economy in which the interdependence of all who produce, appropriate, distribute and consume in society is acknowledged and built upon” (Cameron and Gibson-Graham 2003, p. 153). This rather abstract economic analysis may seem a long way from the dense materiality of the farming experience, but it enables us to tease out the multiple forms of fellow-feeling and the multiple economies at play when Nancy Luce praises her hen Pinky in verse both for her affection and for her impressive egg production. Indeed, once we think of economics as simultaneously incorporating many contradictory notions of value and different kinds of transactions, we can understand Miss Nancy’s egg business as just one of several forms of exchange in which she participates. These also include her care for her hens in return for their affection and companionship, the sale of her pamphlets of poetry and medical advice, and her provision of medical care for her neighbors’ chickens in the hope that she will receive their good will in return. The different forms of economy and the different forms of fellowfeeling are linked to each other, in fact. The illness and physical collapse of her mother and father are devastating in classical economic terms because they lead to the failure and sale of their farm, crops and woodland. But more than that, they also have a devastating effect on Nancy Luce’s psychic economy, for they force her to live in a way that robs her of valued social approbation. Her biographer’s note that, although some summer visitors came to her house to buy eggs and books of poetry, “many used to drive ‘up-island’ to scoff, and . . . [others] plagued Nancy, baiting her to see what she would do or say”, acquires poignant significance in light of Adam Smith’s observation:

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In addition to the loss of sustenance, Nancy Luce is subject to the brutal loss of community respect, embodied in the mockery of her fellow human beings. Attention to issues of empowerment and environmentalism, introduced by feminist economists Cameron and Gibson-Graham, enables us to tease out the complex costs of modern chicken farming for Betty MacDonald and Linda Lord. We understand that Betty MacDonald’s position as helping hand on the chicken farm managed by her husband reinforced her already-entrenched sense of disempowerment as a woman, while her ability to tolerate the chaos and hard work provided the theme for her best-selling memoir. We can see how Linda Lord’s poultry processing work both empowered and disempowered her: how she took pride in being “the first woman in the industry to have a job in the sticking hole” and “the only one that stuck it out killing birds and stuff,” but felt stigmatized by her work-acquired disability and later the loss of her job (Chatterley and Rouveral 2000, p. 71). We can also identify the suffering that the PCB-tainted feed mill caused Linda Lord as well as her whole town of Bethel Maine when it triggered the environmental disaster and economic collapse that led to the closure of Penobscot Poultry. Moreover, the broader framing of the economy that Cameron and Gibson-Graham advance in their feminist critique gives us the analytic perspective to identify not only the suffering caused by a conventional economic model, but also the well-being that can be produced by alternative economic structures. So, let me close with a word about the alternative economies that enable Betty MacDonald and Linda Lord to achieve what Linda has called “content” (Chatterley and Rouverol 2000, p. 81). When the rains of another autumn lead Betty to muse that “Husband and wife teamwork is just fine except when it reaches a point where the husband is more conscious of the weight his wife’s shoulder carries than of the shoulder itself ” (MacDonald 1945, p. 285), Bob MacDonald implicitly acknowledges the importance of exchanges of caring, nurturing and community to Betty’s psychic economy by buying a modern chicken ranch nearer Seattle. After roughing it in the woods of the Olympic Peninsula, the prospect of modern agriculture is a welcome one. Betty is ecstatic:

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[it] seemed to me that from now on life was going to be pure joy. We sat at the kitchen table and . . . figured assets and liabilities. At least Bob did. I was busy figuring how many hours a day I would save by having modern conveniences. (MacDonald 1945, p. 287)

She exclaims happily, “I suppose that with lights in chicken houses and running water and things we wouldn’t have to get up until about seven or half past” (p. 287). Her plea for some relief from drudgery seems to fall on deaf ears, however, for Bob responds with the input/output perspective of agricultural efficiency discourse: “Chickens have to be fed anyway and the earlier you feed ‘em the sooner they start to lay” (p. 287). We aren’t completely back in the mode of masculinist scientific farming, however. It seems that the very act of writing The Egg and I has rekindled a sense of fellow-feeling, a kind of solidarity, with the chickens that are MacDonald’s subject. For Betty’s last words—spoken as direct authorial address to the reader—suggest that the adventure of The Egg and I has given her a new solidarity with her chickens: “Which just goes to show, a man in the chicken business is not his own boss at all. The hen is the boss.” (p. 287). While Betty MacDonald’s economic privilege enables her to find a mode of chicken farming that will accommodate her other commitments (especially the writing that the experience catalyzed and that would become her life’s work), Linda Lord has fewer options after the closing of Penobscot Poultry. She gets a job as pieceworker in a rope factory in Belfast, where she “average[s] between $6.50 to $6.75 to $6.80” an hour, which she knows is only temporary, because “sooner or later my age is not going to hack this pace that is going at Crowe Rope” (Chatterley and Rouverol 2000, p. 77). When an interviewer asks, “if working for a living is just to bring the dollars in, what are the areas of your life that you do get enjoyment from and that do mean a lot to you?” Linda’s answer gives us a glimpse of those additional categories of economic analysis theorized by Cameron and Gibson-Graham that provide value in her life and enable her to say, “In a lot of ways, I’m content” (Chatterley and Rouverol 2000, p. 81): Well, I love my animals. And I’ve got my trike and my motorcycle. And I like to hunt, and I like to fish, and I like to camp. . . . And I just love nature. (Chatterley and Rouverol 2000, p. 80)

The trans-species connections rediscovered by Betty MacDonald and Linda Lord at the conclusion of their encounters with industrial farming may seem to test the species limit integral to Adam Smith’s notion of fellow-feeling, which he argues functions to serve our two innate

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desires, “self propagation and the propagation of the species” (Smith [1759] 1976, III. I. 55, Note 2). Yet perhaps it is our anthropocentrism rather than Smith’s conviction that has given rise to that inference. As Margaret Schabas points out, to Smith it is language and our propensity to “truck, barter, and exchange” that set us apart from all other species and give rise to commerce and trade. But in every other respect, we are seamlessly joined to the richer oeconomy of nature. (Schabas 2003, pp. 273–74)

Human beings share with other animals the moral sentiment of sympathy, according to Smith, because the feeling itself is produced, independent of consciousness, by the physiology of the nervous system. With the Physiocrats before him, Schamas argues, Smith believed that agricultural labor was the major origin of natural well-being and social wealth, and therefore he grounded his analysis of economic phenomena in nature, both physiological and biological (Schamas 2003, p. 272). Returning to Adam Smith’s theories with the new perspectives introduced by feminist and critical economists, we can now understand the importance of conceptualizing the agricultural economy broadly enough to recognize its vital variety. As Cameron and Gibson-Graham have shown, such an economy has room—indeed must make room—for “multiple constituents” (Cameron and Gibson-Graham 2003, p. 153). Such an economy will understand that there are multiple sources of value, both social and environmental. As the stories of Miss Nancy Luce, Betty MacDonald and Linda Lord reveal, the varieties of work in chicken farming, like the different sites in which the work takes place, and the range of possible transactions that can result from it, will shape the extent to which any of us is able to experience the fellow-feeling that Adam Smith saw as foundational to community-building, and thus to a successful economy. Each agricultural model, like each kind of encounter with chickens, generates its own distinct capacity for fellow-feeling, its own specific notion of community, and I would suggest, its own template for economic success. As I sit out with my chickens at the end of a long day; when I collect the handful of brown or white eggs in the early evening; when I augment my flock with a bantam hen and chicks bought at the poultry auction in Big Valley, where the Amish buggies jostle with the pickups and mini-vans; when I crate up some of my hens and cockerels to take to the Mennonite butcher in the next valley; and even when I serve those hens to my friends in the form of a thick chicken-corn chowder,

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I think from time to time of that little book, The Back Garden Hen, with its grim assertion that “[no] sentiment or fine feeling enters into the life of the modern hen in an intensive poultry farm” (Anon. n.d., p. 13). Right there in that pamphlet we can find an economic system under construction, and constriction. Only eight pages before that dismissal of sentiment, the author recalls his or her own experience raising back garden hens: “The profits were pleasant, but the real pleasure lay in the hours of happiness the hobby made possible.” (Anon. n.d., p. 7). Economists have overlooked their own founder’s attention to the way moral feelings and agricultural practices combine to produce both wellbeing and wealth, as embodied by the diverse models of chicken raising currently making a precarious place for themselves in the shadow of the modern factory farm. Like the farmer-writers of our contemporary moment, Nancy Luce, Betty MacDonald, and Linda Lord reveal that we have much to gain if we embrace the broader economy of fellow-feeling. References Anon. 1917. The Back Garden Hen: How Thirteen Hens Paid the Rates. Manchester: The Daily News and Leader. Berry, Wendell. 1996. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. Berkeley, CA: Sierra Club Books. Binmore, Ken. 1994. Game Theory and the Social Contract. Volume 1: Playing Fair. Cambridge, MA: MIT. ——. 1998. Game Theory and the Social Contract. Volume II: Just Playing. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Bowen, Dana. 2007. ‘Old MacDonald Now Has a Book Contract.’ New York Times (20 June), p. D6. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/20/dining/20farm.html (accessed 13 January 2008). Cameron, Jenny and Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2003. ‘Feminising the Economy: Metaphors, Strategies, Politics.’ Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 10 (2): 145–157. Chatterley, Cedric N. and Rouverol, Alicia J. 2000. ‘ “I Was Content and Was Not Content”: The Story of Linda Lord and the Closing of Penobscot Poultry.’ Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Clough, Ben. 1949. ‘Poor Nancy Luce.’ The New Colophon II (Part Seven): 253–265. Ebert, Roger. 2006. ‘The Real Dirt on Farmer John’ (Review). Chicago Sun-Times. http:// rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060119/REVIEWS/ 60117003/1023 (accessed 11 September 2007). Fitzgerald, Deborah. 2003. Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hanke, Oscar August, Skinner, John L., and James Harold Florea. 1974. American Poultry History 1823–1973. Madison, WI: American Printing and Publishing. Harsanyi, John. 1955. ‘Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility’. Journal of Political Economy, 63: 309–321.

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Independent Lens. no date. ‘The Real Dirt on Farmer John: Community Supported Agriculture.’ http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/realdirt/ (accessed 11 September 2007). Kingsolver, Barbara, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver. 2007. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. New York: Harper Collins. Luce, Nancy. 1875. ‘Poor Little Hearts,’ A Complete Edition of the Works of Nancy Luce, Of West Tisbury, Duke’s County, Mass., containing God’s Words-Sickness-Poor Little Hearts-MilkNo Comfort-Prayers-Our Savior’s Golden Rule—Hen’s Names, etc. New Bedford: Mercury Job Press. MacDonald, Betty. 1945. The Egg and I. New York: Harper & Row. New York Times. 2007. ‘Tyson to Sell Chicken Free of Antibiotics.’ The New York Times. (20 June). TimesSelect website. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/20/business/ 20tyson.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin (accessed 13 January 2008). Pollan, Michael. 2006. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin. Sachs, Carolyn. 1996. Gendered Fields: Rural Women, Agriculture, and Environment. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Sallatin, Joel. 1993. Pastured Poultry Profits. Swope, VA: Polyface. Schabas, Margaret. ‘Adam Smith’s Debts to Nature.’ History of Political Economy, 35 (Suppl 1): 252–281. Smith, Adam. [1776] 1904. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: Methuen. The Library of Economics and Liberty website. http://www. econlib.org/LIBRARY/Smith/smWN.html (accessed 27 June 2007). ——. [1759] 1976. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. London: A. Millar. Striffler, Steve. 2005. Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Sugden, Robert. 2002. ‘Beyond Sympathy and Empathy: Adam Smith’s Concept of Fellow-feeling.’ Economics and Philosophy 18: 63–87.

CHAPTER TEN

“TANGIBLE AND REAL AND VIVID AND MEANINGFUL”: LUCY KIMBELL’S NOT-KNOWING ABOUT RATS Steve Baker A card, an invitation, around four inches by six, printed on both sides. On the pink side, in a typeface sprouting elaborate arabesques, are the words One Night with Rats in the Service of Art, and smaller text identifying this as the title of a “performance lecture” to be given by Lucy Kimbell at Camden Arts Centre in London on the evening of August 31, 2005. In it, she proposed to share “the results of her aesthetic experiments with rats,” and announced: “Raising issues about ethics and aesthetics, this event will appeal both to those disgusted by rats and to those disgusted by experiments on rats”. On the black side of the card, in

Fig. 10.1

Lucy Kimbell, One Night with Rats in the Service of Art, invitation card (2005). Courtesy of the artist

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the same typeface, where the glossy black arabesques seemed to mimic rats’ tails, was the announcement of a Rat Fair in the same venue four days earlier. But this account already risks getting ahead of itself. The “rather beautiful” invitation card, as the artist rightly calls it, seems nevertheless to be an appropriate place to start because it is one of the few tangible artefacts relating to this complex and fascinating but highly elusive art project. Lucy Kimbell describes herself as “an artist and interaction designer” whose recent work “disturbs evaluation cultures in management, technology and the arts” (Kimbell 2007). One Night with Rats in the Service of Art is in fact her only animal-themed project to date, though the project’s concern with the ways in which rats get enmeshed in human evaluation cultures certainly connects it to other aspects of her art and design practice. After the initial delivery of the performance lecture in August 2005, versions have been given on at least two further occasions: at the Rules of Engagement sci-art conference in York in September 2005, and at the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process at Goldmiths College, London in March 2006. The interview with the artist on which this essay draws heavily (hereafter Kimbell 2006a) was conducted immediately after the Goldsmiths lecture. The performance lecture is in part a description of the nature of her art practice. Having to explain in meetings and telephone conversations with all manner of people with an interest in rats that she was “a practice-based researcher”—hardly the most self-explanatory term to those not involved in the contemporary arts—she summarized her side of such conversations as follows: “The outcomes of my research might be performances, events, yes, artworks. These can be art. No, no drawings, no photographs, no paintings, no sculptures. No, no installations . . . ” For the benefit of the lecture audience, she explained: In previous projects I have referred to what I do as “somewhere between Bad Social Science and live art.” Social scientists in particular seemed to appreciate what I did because it resembled what they did, but using bastardized methodologies, using humour and failure. (Kimbell 2005, p. 4)

Like a lot of her interactive projects, One Night with Rats in the Service of Art was very much “about showing the entanglements,” as she puts it, between its various elements (Kimbell 2006b). In this case those elements included her encounters with rats and various groups of humans, from laboratory scientists to the so-called “ratters” who keep and display fancy rats as a hobby, as well as animal rights activists and art audiences. What

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would happen, she wondered, to her understanding of the widespread human distaste for rats as she moved between these people’s spaces, bringing together “different kinds of knowledge, desire and disgust”? This was to be her “aesthetic experiment” (Kimbell 2005, p. 11) A Poem, and the First of Several Drawings Disarmingly, Kimbell’s performance lecture begins with a 42-line “cute” poem about one of her early visits to a mouse and rat show, the tone of which is clear enough from the first four lines of the final stanza: And this is what I took away The sound of rats, the sound of play People playing, with each other The rats a sort of rodent cover (Kimbell 2005, p. 2)

Its principal formal purpose within the lecture seems to be to wrong-foot any and all of its likely academic audiences, as cute rhyming couplets have no more legitimacy in the discourse of contemporary art than they do in that of science. From there, however, the lecture (illustrated by PowerPoint images) moves to the first mention of a particular drawing—a drawing by an artist who proposes to make “no drawings, no photographs, no paintings.” Kimbell introduces it as “a piece of work I want to make but have not yet been able to make”: It’s called the Rat Evaluated Artwork or REA. I did this drawing more than a year ago and I imagined it as a gallery piece, sitting on tables, with many tubes and wheels, a closed environment for rats and for the spectators who might watch them, offering diversions and decision points for rats, and diversions and decision points for humans. (2005, p. 3)

The rats’ decisions, as they selected which routes to take through this enclosed maze, were to include aesthetic evaluations as to whether this artwork was itself something “beautiful,” or “mildly interesting,” or “sensationalist”. Simultaneously flippant and serious from the outset, this was another example of her working, as she says, “somewhere between Bad Social Science and live art.” Here, as in so many other instances of contemporary art with animal concerns of one kind or another, it is important to hold back from judging too quickly any “ethical” (or unethical) stance that the work may seem to adopt. In this particular case, it is important to understand

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Fig. 10.2

Lucy Kimbell, Rat Evaluated Artwork, detail (2004). Courtesy of the artist

both the place of the Rat Evaluated Artwork in the overall trajectory of the One Night with Rats in the Service of Art project, and the journey through her ideas and experiences on which Kimbell will take her audience in the course of the performance lecture. To ask whether the project is actually about rats, or merely about art, is to ask the wrong kind of question. And as philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers insists, “there are no good answers if the question is not the relevant one” (Stengers 2004, p. 97). The drawn, collaged and written elements that make up the REA “drawing” date from early or mid-2004. Over the next two years, her ideas for the realization of this artwork hardly changed at all, other than realizing that she really couldn’t bring herself to make it. In the 2006 interview she described it thus: The Rat Evaluated Artwork is conceived of as a gallery installation which is physical in form, perhaps with some digital add-ons or bits of electronics that apparently measure or track a rat’s movement within it, with some

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textual meaning attached to those measurements, for example how fast an animal might be running in a wheel, but it’s really conceived of as a visual art piece, so it is an artwork. It requires, in that conception of it, a live animal or live animals to be in it, to move through the tubes and various decision-points while an audience is there, and for the audience first of all to observe those movements and decisions, and also to see these faintly ridiculous attached meanings, and I still want to do it in a way—that’s my lack, or loss, that I can’t quite bring myself to do it. (Kimbell 2006a)

Kimbell’s account of this projected artwork raises important themes which will each call for attention in the course of this essay: the nature of art’s distinctive contribution to cultural knowledge about animals; the circumstances of living animals in works of contemporary art; the role of the ridiculous in formations of knowledge; and the work of loss. Knowing About Not-Knowing Kimbell’s own awareness of and attentiveness to her working methods allows her to be surprisingly forthright about the limitations of her knowledge. In the performance lecture she announces early on that “I knew nothing about rats other than that they were both objects of disgust and fear in Western culture and objects of respect—as survivors, fast breeders, quick adaptors.” At the point where she started contacting scientists, however, she was fully conscious that the two-year university fellowship and the research council funding she had secured to support the project were seen as validating her enquiry, even when expressed in terms such as these: “Hello, I just want to know what you know about rats. Hello, I don’t even know what I want to know exactly but will you let me be here and watch and ask some questions?” (2005, p. 3). It was essentially this same open and wide-eyed (but far from naïve) approach that paid off in Kimbell’s early contact with some of the “ratters.” In the autumn of 2004 she paid several visits to the home of a woman in Essex who kept rats: “She had agreed to let me try to train them aesthetically. Neither of us was clear what this meant . . .” (2005, p. 9). Reporting on these early contacts with both ratters and scientists, Kimbell tells her audience: I had noticed myself using the term “experimental” as in . . . “I’m not sure what I’m doing—it’s a kind of experiment.” It was a way of avoiding saying what I was doing, since I didn’t know what that was, and so far,

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In reality, of course, this has nothing to do with “getting away with” anything. As an artist operating without confident access to the skills and traditions of a conventional artists’ medium (such as painting or photography), her projects have no obvious formal starting point: In a sense, like anyone else, I’m just trying to understand the world, or look at the world and create some meaning for myself . . . and because I have always crossed disciplinary boundaries, I kind of feel that I don’t have a claim to any one knowledge.

Unsurprisingly, finding herself sixteen months into the two-year fellowship before she felt clear as to what she was actually doing, she reports “I was quite anxious through this project, it wasn’t easy being in this place”—although, at the same time, “sometimes I loved it” (Kimbell 2006a). Getting into Other People’s Worlds One Night with Rats in the Service of Art repeatedly reflects on, and questions, the nature of Kimbell’s own practice: “I seemed to have this liberty as a practice-based researcher; but what was it that I was researching, other than my ability to get into things, like buildings with animal rights protestors outside?” (Kimbell 2005, p. 4). Part of an answer might be that she was researching her way around obstacles such as the need to conceptualize and articulate the project—“probably too early on”—in order to secure funding for it. One early funding application included the explanation: “By setting up activities that resemble (but differ from) the activities of scientists and breeders, the artist wants to illuminate the ambiguities within rat breeding and experimentation and reveal philosophical questions about what makes us human and rats animals.” Its philosophical and hierarchical presumptions exemplify her tendency to operate in what she engagingly calls “Stalinist super-project mode” in the early stages of research (Kimbell 2006a). In order to move on from this rather defensive and calculating manner of operating, a casting-off of confidence and preparation was necessary. In its place came something more open. As she explains:

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This is the thing about practice: once I started actually forcing myself to do something, like going to that woman’s house in Essex, where I just forced myself to go, it made it tangible and real and vivid and meaningful, through practice. And instead of “the design”—what’s the perfect design or perfect project?—I was just doing a thing, and seeing what it was like. And that moves you forward, not the design, not the conceptualization of it. (2006a)

In Kimbell’s account of her own practice, the refrain of doing something simply to see what it was like, to see what happened, is an important reflection of her curiosity-driven approach. Without reading anything specific into the coincidence, the words call to mind Derrida’s famous observation about the striking manner in which his own cat, free of philosophical agendas, seemed to look at him: “just to see” [ juste pour voir] (Derrida 2002, p. 373). Seeking to explain why her research for the rat project took her both into scientific laboratories and into rat shows, Kimbell’s immediate response was: “It seemed important to go and be in both and see what happened.” Of both of these environments, she has observed “I was amazed about how far people let me go into their worlds” (Kimbell 2006b). She found the ratters’ world “a closed community although quite welcoming” (2006b), and also found the scientists she encountered to be helpful, especially the experimental psychologist Rob Deacon, who works on rodent behaviour, and who became actively involved in aspects of her project. Asked about whether these different worlds shared any of their knowledge, Kimbell responded: I don’t think they do, very much, which was why I did very quickly become interested in the practices of these two groups that I looked at in depth. . . . I was particularly struck when talking to the ratters by how much biological knowledge they had, and some home-made animal psychology. Some of those people breed rats, and try and bring out particular lines, in the way that dog breeders do. So there’s a sort of homespun science. I did interview somebody about this, and I said, so, where do you find out about things? She said “from the literature,” and what she meant was rat journals, not scientific journals. (2006a)

Deacon, on the other hand, was according to Kimbell “actually very interested in, and recognized, the kinds of intimacy and knowledge that owners and breeders would have.” Of his subsequent involvement in her Rat Fair, she speculates that “he would privilege his knowledge in a way, probably, but he was open to those discussions and actually came along and participated, and wasn’t there to assert his special knowledge” (2006a).

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In contrast to her work with scientists and ratters, Kimbell’s involvement with animal rights activists was slight. Because of her discussions with Deacon, who was based at Oxford University, and her awareness—in the light of the SPEAK group’s sustained campaign opposing the building of a new animal lab on that city’s South Parks Road—of what she perceived as the “likely or possible risks to animal scientists who explicitly experiment on animals plus, in the context of Oxford, anyone associated with Oxford University,” she felt somewhat uncomfortable about how to engage with activists “as somebody not making clear a critical position” (2006a). Eventually she decided to attend a SPEAK rally in Oxford in July 2005 which had been organized to mark the one-year anniversary of the University’s decision to stop building work on the proposed animal lab (SPEAK 2007). She reports that she “felt very mixed there, because I was there ambiguously, a bit like I was at the other events”: So on the one hand I was very moved, in particular by one of the speakers who was talking about his experience of working in an animal lab with primates, and it was very upsetting, it was very distressing to hear what happened to those animals, and the way he described it you could not but be moved by these stories. But at the same time somehow it wasn’t an open debate. So I didn’t come away feeling resolved about what I thought, but I knew I had somehow to make that present in the project. (2006a)

The last point is in many respects the crucial one: “I knew I had somehow to make that present in the project.” Her expectations were perhaps unrealistic (an animal rights rally is not the most likely forum for an “open debate” weighing the arguments for or against animal experimentation), and her actions (taking notes and photographs) apparently caused some concern. Asked whether she was a journalist, her reply that she was an artist may not have been the most reassuring one, and she was probably wise to resist saying (as she had to the ratters and scientists) that she was interested in conducting “aesthetic experiments” with rats! Nevertheless, the point of the research was to feed into her work, to allow something of the viewpoints she encountered at the rally to be “present in the project.” As with many aspects of the performance lecture One Night with Rats in the Service of Art, this is done with both a lightness of touch and with surprising shifts of tone that betray little if anything of her discomfort. “I joined the rally to hear what was being said,” she begins. “It was like a summer fete where the cakes were all vegan.” Within half a dozen lines, however, the lecture’s language has changed markedly:

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Here we are, our bodies protected over the years by vaccinations and drugs most of which were probably tested on animals . . . My body, your bodies, are a charnelhouse; stacked in it are the corpses of millions of rats and mice and guinea pigs and fish and birds and cats and dogs and primates used by doctors and scientists over hundreds of years. (Kimbell 2005, pp. 7–8)

These shifts of tone, and the jolts that they can occasionally deliver, are made possible by the episodic and almost epigrammatic structure of the lecture. Its circlings, refrains and juxtapositions belie the artist’s clarity of purpose. The Rat Fair . . . Early on in the lecture, Kimbell asks in relation to her proposed Rat Evaluated Artwork: Could it be beautiful as well as disturbing, as well as problematic, as well as funny, as well as politically incorrect, as well as entertaining, as well as compelling, as well as unusual, as well as shocking, as well as all the other things that projects like this can be? (2005, p. 3)

Its complexity and instability were simultaneously its strength and its weakness. And returning to the REA midway through the lecture, its precariousness becomes more apparent: “If these visits to labs and rat shows and protests were research, the knowledge I was producing was rapidly erasing the Rat Evaluated Artwork.” As her worldly advisers from various rat worlds had told her, the problems with having busy decision-making rats scurrying around a tubular maze in front of a gallery audience were multiple. Rats are nocturnal, and “ ‘not known for having a Protestant work ethic’, as one scientist put it.” She also began to question whether it was “acceptable to have live animals on display in a gallery for the consumption of audiences,” quite apart from the question of what she would do with the rats after the show (2005, p. 7). The idea for a more ambitious project with rats “came directly out of the Rat Evaluated Artwork,” and prompted Kimbell’s early visits to rat shows and conversations with scientists. “I was initially thinking there would be a live event, a performance lecture live event with some rats in it,” she has said, but a series of conversations with Camden Arts Centre led to an invitation to stage some kind of rat event as part of its plans to draw in a wide public on a summer public holiday weekend. This was to be the Rat Fair, an event distinct from but directly related

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to the performance lecture One Night with Rats in the Service of Art. As Kimbell explains, it was only at this point that things “fell into place,” even though it involved “doing double the project, in a way.” “So,” she says, “the lecture came first, but I had nothing to talk about. I knew I would, but then I made the event, and the event was itself a conversation” (Kimbell 2006a). Characterized thus, the event is another example of her fascination with entanglements, intertwinings, and what she frequently called “sets of relations.” The Rat Fair drew about 450 visitors who, between them, brought along forty of their own rats. A kind of affectionate spoof on rat shows, it was reviewed in positive terms by the editor of the National Fancy Rat Society’s magazine Pro-Rat-a (Simmons 2005), and attended not only by ratters but also by a wider public that was by no means limited to the arts centre’s usual audience. Intended to be “more fun” than a typical rat show, where “the major activity . . . is judging, having a table with a white-coated judge and having this system of evaluating each of these rats” (Kimbell 2006b), the Rat Fair’s attractions and activities included rat face painting (on human faces), a Rat Beauty Parlour, and a “Where’s the nearest rat?” map of Camden. Items for sale included what the editor of Pro-Rat-a called “wonderful knitted garments with holes designed in them for rats to snuggle in” but, as her review acknowledged: “The ‘Is your rat an artist?’ competition was the chief focus of interest” (Simmons 2005, p. 13). . . . and Nineteen Rat Drawings The “Is your rat an artist?” competition invited participant ratters at the Rat Fair playfully to explore the extent to which their own rats might have unrecognized artistic potential. A webcam was suspended over what the review in Pro-Rat-a called “a large pen . . . filled with wood chip, Perspex tubes and wooden objects which rats liked to stand upright on to try to peer over the sides” (Simmons 2005, p. 13). This “drawing area,” as Kimbell calls it, allowed each rat to operate “as a kind of computer mouse” producing a drawing which was “literally a trace of where the rat moved.” These drawings were then judged by Jenni Lomax, director of the arts centre, to decide which one should win “the world’s first Rat Art Award” (Kimbell 2005, p. 12). For Kimbell, this is not just an exercise in absurdist aesthetics: she doesn’t actually regard the rats as artists, as such, but each rat’s agency is of some significance. Unlike a computer mouse, the rat “makes

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‘Rat Beauty Parlour’ at Lucy Kimbell’s Rat Fair, Camden Arts Centre (2005). Photograph courtesy of the artist

Fig. 10.4 ‘Is Your Rat an Artist?’ drawing competition at Lucy Kimbell’s Rat Fair, Camden Arts Centre (2005). Photograph courtesy of the artist

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Fig. 10.5 Jenni Lomax judging drawings at Lucy Kimbell’s Rat Fair, Camden Arts Centre (2005). Photograph courtesy of the artist

the decisions herself. She chooses her own path.” In that sense, she interestingly remarks in the lecture, the drawings “are perhaps best thought of as portraits of curiosity. . . . Openings, tunnels, corridors and holes are all of interest to the artist-rat” (2005, p. 12). Kimbell’s comments in the 2006 interview on the drawings and the “system” that enabled their production are worth quoting and exploring at some length. They illustrate some of the complexities, subtleties and contradictions of her engagement with the whole project, and of the place of living rats in that project. Of the nineteen drawings made at the Rat Fair over a period of four or five hours (each rat being given around ten minutes to move at will around the pen), she says: I can’t really see the drawings on their own, as objects, without seeing the enclosure, the webcam above it, the fact that that’s attached to some specially written software, and remembering the way that I worked with a particular young designer group, called Something, and a rat owner, Sheila Sowter, and her rats, to prototype and test it. The drawings are the output of that, but I think of that whole system as a piece. It was led by me, but involved collaboration: I couldn’t make it on my own. And I really like those drawings . . . But for me they are so clearly tied up with that system that maybe someone that hasn’t seen the system wouldn’t find them interesting. (Kimbell 2006a)

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While far from uninteresting, the status of the drawings themselves is certainly wide open to conflicting interpretations. The animal historian Jonathan Burt, who was close to completing his monograph Rat (Burt 2006a) at the time of the Rat Fair, was invited by Kimbell to be a respondent at the Camden version of her performance lecture, and in conversation the following year he reflected on the relation of the “Is your rat an artist?” drawing system to other rat-related art that he discusses in his book. He praised the project as a whole as “a piece that worked very well with rats . . . being built around the particularity of the creature,” not least because “the rat is a route-finder that spends its whole time moving through networks”—a point that he acknowledged had much in common with Kimbell’s own mode of operation in this project (Burt 2006b). But in drawing an analogy with the MEART (Multi Electrode Array aRT) project developed in the early 2000s, he expressed certain reservations concerning the nature of the art being produced in both cases. “MEART—the Semi Living Artist,” as described on the website of the SymbioticA Research Group that developed and hosted it, “is a geographically detached, bio-cybernetic research and development project exploring aspects of creativity and artistry in the age of new biological technologies” (SymbioticA 2007). Summarizing the project in Rat, Burt explains that it involved a “radical hybridization of rat and machine.” Neurons from an embryonic rat cortex in Atlanta, Georgia were stimulated by a webcam filming the movement of gallery visitors, and a signal was sent by computer from the stimulated neurons to a robotic arm that then “draws pictures” in Perth, Western Australia, which the rat neurons back in the USA could “see” by means of further input they received. As Burt notes, however, the animal body is here so “completely disarticulated” that “it probably makes little sense to talk of the rat in this instance” (Burt 2006a, pp. 110–112). The link between MEART and Kimbell’s “drawing system” is simply that rats figure in both, and that “drawings” are produced by both. Like Kimbell, the SymbioticA group seems fascinated by possible scenarios “in which science and art are integrated,” as Burt puts it. Although he insists that he intends no criticism of Kimbell’s wider project, Burt’s observation is that in both of these unusual examples of drawing-production “the art is really quite simple, because it’s just a response to movement” (Burt 2006b). The issue here, as will be argued more fully below, is that Kimbell’s rat-generated drawings are not in any very useful sense “the art” in One

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Night with Rats in the Service of Art, regardless of the artist’s subsequent fascination with getting the drawings framed, “just to see how those things relate to each other” and “to see what life they might have in a visual art context” (Kimbell 2006a). And in contrast to what Burt sees as the rat’s effective absence from the MEART project, the presence of rats—or rather art’s making-present of rats—will turn out to be central to Kimbell’s project. On the question of the conceptual shift from the original idea for the enclosed Rat Evaluated Artwork to the Rat Fair’s “open” drawing system, Kimbell responded as follows to the challenge that the latter seemed little more than a physical manifestation of the former, but without the confining tubes: Yes, except it’s less stupid. The point about the REA is that it’s ridiculous, whereas the “Is your rat an artist?” drawing system is not ridiculous, and also it inherits directly from science. Of course, all evaluations inherit from attempts by institutions to capture and define and constrain activity of different kinds, so the REA is a kind of scientific mechanism, but the “Is your rat an artist?” drawing system came directly from seeing the Morris water maze being used with an overhead camera and some specific scientific software for watching and tracking how an animal moved, what segment it spent most time in, and so on. (Kimbell 2006a)

The Morris water maze was designed by neuroscientist Richard G. Morris in 1984 and is still widely used as “a behavioural procedure . . . to test spatial memory.” A rat that may have been “applied” with various drugs such as receptor blockers is repeatedly lowered into a small circular pool of water that has no local cues such as scent traces, and its attempts to escape by finding a submerged platform are tracked on camera prior to analysis of the progress of its spatial learning (Wikipedia 2007). Kimbell makes the point that her own non-watery enclosure is thus “a direct appropriation from a scientific technology which is well tested and has been used extensively within experimental psychology,” and that this is one of the means by which the worlds of the scientists and the ratters are juxtaposed in her project. Thinking further about the relation of her two rat “art” environments—the REA and the “Is your rat an artist?” drawing system—she acknowledges certain points of connection, ranging from stupidity to the entanglements of agency. Of the drawing system, she concedes “it is a bit stupid,” and after a pause in which she thinks back to the REA’s proposed “diversions and decision points” both for rats and for humans, she resumes:

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Yes, no, it is similar, because also definitely built into “Is your rat an artist?” is the idea that software and human and rat agency are all involved and intertwined and you can’t separate them, because the owner is trying to entice the rat to move in a particular way, maybe, or some of them sat there trying to hover by the edge to reassure their animal that it was OK, and then the rat was maybe a bit nervous and lurked in that area, you can see that clearly in some of the pictures, the rat is just hanging out in one area, that’s because their owner or human companion was there. And in the REA, it’s the same, the human audience would have some impact on the rats, even though it’s enclosed. (Kimbell 2006a)

The difference between the pieces, in the end, comes down to the shift in Kimbell’s thinking about rats themselves. Still on the subject of the REA, she continues: “But actually, now I know more about rats, they wouldn’t like being in there, so it is impossible, given my current sort of ‘ethical’ position if I had to define it” (2006a). The difference, in other words, is that for her as an artist in 2005 the “Is your rat an artist?” drawing system was makeable, whereas much as she still hankered to find a way to make it, the Rat Evaluated Artwork was not. Aesthetics, Beauty and Ethics One of the decision points—the “ridiculous” decision points—in the proposed Rat Evaluated Artwork’s tubular maze is a junction where one route suggests that the rat has decided that this artwork entails “ethical dilemmas” and the alternative suggests that it entails “no ethical dilemmas”. And near the end of the performance lecture, Kimbell asks of the REA (though with little sense of them being remotely answerable questions): “Could it work aesthetically but not ethically? Could it work ethically but not aesthetically?” (Kimbell 2005, p. 13). In conversation, similarly, she uses the terms ethics and aesthetics with some caution. This is partly because the One Night with Rats in the Service of Art project does not have an explicit or clear-cut ethical agenda, and partly because the kind of artist she considers herself to be is not, first and foremost, a visual artist—a point that also has relevance to her ideas about beauty. Asked about what kind of aesthetic dimension there might be to the rat drawings and to the REA, she responded “I never really have a clear idea what aesthetics means.” Nevertheless, she acknowledged that in “adding these layers of reflexivity, and criticality, and messiness” within many of her projects—qualities which in her view “actually don’t find a lot of success within the art world, but

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Fig. 10.6

Lucy Kimbell, Rat Evaluated Artwork, detail (2004). Courtesy of the artist

social scientists completely love them”—her work certainly does “have an aesthetic” (Kimbell 2006a). This all became a little clearer in her response to a supplementary question about whether or not ideas of beauty had any place in her work. Unlike a number of other contemporary artists whose work on animal themes, though often far from conventionally beautiful, is strongly motivated by a conviction about the beauty of the animals themselves, Kimbell is clear that in this project she “wasn’t interested in asserting some beauty in the rat.” As she explained: I have a strong interest in beauty but I see it as made manifest in sets of relations. . . . I doubt that I used the word beauty when I talked to the ratters or the scientists. I presented them with my ambiguities, my uncertainties, my anxieties, and I used this word experimental which I referred to in the talk, so, “aesthetic experiments,” that was my little loose label, but not beauty, because that would be, I imagined, a step too far for them, to see beauty in these relations that I was imagining and building. (2006a)

Here, interestingly, beauty is understood as something that can indeed be made by the artist, but made from not-knowing, from vulnerability, from precariousness. The idea is not dissimilar to Isabelle Stengers’s comment on an audience’s “wonder” at “the skill of a dancer, understanding how close her gracious moves take her to the risk of falling down, seeing in the dance how close together the double possibility of

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harmony and failure come.” And for Stengers, the individual’s figuring out (and acting out) of how to proceed in such circumstances—which “is always . . . a selective and demanding creation”—is as close as she wants to get to a “definition” of ethics (Stengers 2004, pp. 96–97). In the question period following the Goldsmiths lecture, Kimbell herself commented “I tried to show how perplexed I was in the doing,” and when asked directly about ethics and aesthetics her response was “I don’t know what I mean by these terms,” and more than that, “I don’t want to have an answer to what they are” (Kimbell 2006b). If any single remark epitomizes both the confidence and the integrity of her project, it is probably that one. Cold Language, Warm Language Meeting Kimbell for the first time in 2004, while she was still in “Stalinist super-project mode,” there were no clues that attentiveness to the emotional power of language would come to lie at the heart of her performance lecture. Her “charnelhouse” metaphor has already been remarked on, but it is preceded in the lecture by several comments about science’s linguistic distancing of the animal body. She comments on a PowerPoint image showing “a small creature, alive, but alive for science. Ordered from a catalogue, No Name animal, an instrumentalized animal” (Kimbell 2005, p. 3). She notes the Charles River company describing itself as “a ‘provider of animal models’. Not animals. Animal models,” and she remarks more generally on language that allows scientists to “maintain a distance from the live flesh they work with. In lectures some scientists refer to an animal prepared for a demonstration as a ‘surgical preparation’ instead of a rat” (p. 6). This is not a matter of a comfortable and familiar form of academic critique on Kimbell’s part, but an opportunity directly to counter this scientific usage with what might best be described as warm language. There are numerous examples in the lecture, most effective when they are least expected. The list of facilities she had visited ends with the comment: “Gated communities of scientists and live and dead bits of science, hearts still warm in their hands” (p. 4). And flicking through pages from the Charles River catalogue, she observes: “Rats, it seems, don’t really exist in science, although there are millions of hot breathing bodies boxed in laboratories all over the world” (p. 6). What Kimbell is doing here is nothing as straightforward as deliberately aligning herself with an animal rights position, nor indeed of

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adopting a simplistic anti-science position. It is a matter, rather, of attending to the distinctive modes of operation that her status as “a practice-based researcher” (p. 4) made available to her. This can perhaps be shown most clearly by means of contrast with an academic approach to similar material. In his book Rat, for example, Jonathan Burt observes: there is a parallel between the rat fancy and the development of rat breeds for laboratory science; not only are they two sides of an interconnected practice, but at present fancy rats derive mainly from laboratory stock. Thus scientists manipulate the rat’s body for purposes of experimentation, while devotees and admirers of the rat do so for purposes of exhibition and personal satisfaction. In both instances, the aim is to create an “ideal” rat, whatever the purpose. (Burt 2006a, pp. 134–35)

Kimbell may find little with which to disagree in this passage, but her own commentary on her direct experience of individual scientists and individual judges at rat shows finds more complex and (for want of a better word) humane common ground between them, and works to deny her audience any easy opportunity to demonize them. Of the very first rat show she visited, she reports: “The judge’s comments punctuated the day. Good tail. Good head and ears. Let’s have a look at you then. Cooing, hello sweetheart. Good tail. Good type. Ooh I do like you as well. Ooh you are a messy boy, poo all over you” (Kimbell 2005, p. 5). Elsewhere in the lecture she speaks of being in one laboratory with a rat, “sweet in its box, enjoying being handled by the professor, enjoying being caressed and stroked and cuddled, here, did I want a go, did I want to hold it? I held science in my hands” (p. 3). This use of an embodied or embodying language, which has the general effect of making present (even in their physical absence) the rats’ aliveness is, Kimbell acknowledged, “quite deliberate.” In response to a comment about its further effect of making human responsibility to the rats evident, she agreed: “Yes, absolutely, I was conscious of that when I was writing those things” (Kimbell 2006a). Sometimes the strategy is as simple as asking the same question of herself as of the rat. The sentence in the lecture that follows “I held science in my hands” reads: “Actually it looked pretty small and I wondered how would it cope if I was able, if I was allowed to make the REA and get rats to crawl through it. How I would cope” (Kimbell 2005, p. 3). To borrow the words of human geographer Nigel Thrift, from his essay on the practice rather than the abstract principles of ethics, this

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is a matter of the artist “allowing affects themselves to communicate, as well as ideas” (Thrift 2003, p. 114). Thrift acknowledges the practice of research to be “a profoundly emotional business” that is frequently experienced as “a curious mixture of humiliations and intimidations mixed with moments of insight and even enjoyment,” especially when it involves encounters or interactions with others (2003, pp. 106, 108). In exploring “what a ‘good’ encounter might consist of,” he is fiercely critical of the “tapestry of ethical regulation” that leads university ethics committees—contrary to every creative impulse of research practice—to assume “that there is only one way of proceeding,” and that their proper role is “to render the ethical outcomes of research encounters predictable” (pp. 108, 115, 119). In praising, instead, forms of improvisatory research practice that “perform a space of thoughtfulness and imagination” (p. 114), his words again come remarkably close to describing the encounter staged in Kimbell’s performance lecture. The Work of Loss Noting that “rats do not live long in human years,” and that discussion of illness and death “is part of the way ratters talk to each other,” Kimbell makes this striking and rather unexpected observation about her experience of the ratters: “The individual animals matter to their owners but the real subject of the group’s conversation is loss” (Kimbell 2005, p. 5). The introduction of the theme of loss makes more sense, however, in terms of the work that Kimbell sees One Night with Rats in the Service of Art setting out to do. And she is quite clear that “it is doing some work”: It’s trying to expose the audience not just to the thinking process, but to the lack-of-thinking process that’s involved in a project like this, or actually in most practice, art and design practice, so it’s aiming to take an audience through a story of the cycles of knowing and not knowing that are involved in making something, and the reflexivity is important to show the sense of looking at it at the same time as doing it. It requires work from them to go through that narrative with me when I’m telling the story but also to do the work of coping with the ambiguity, because I don’t answer various things. . . . And so, depending on people’s own place with that, they may find that more or less difficult. And it is a kind of work, I offer them a loss: I’m saying, I can’t do this project, here’s a project I’d like to do, I can’t do it, and I’m not going to do it, here’s lots of reasons, and you can’t have it either. (Kimbell 2006a)

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She is talking here most directly, of course, about the Rat Evaluated Artwork, of which she says towards the end of the performance lecture: “It’s a piece of work I want to make but am not able to make. I can’t make it because I can’t put live animals into a gallery piece, to make them into this kind of spectacle . . . and anyway they would sleep, or sit in the corner instead of wandering round. It wouldn’t work” (Kimbell 2005, p. 13). Asked about whether this exposure to loss involved a kind of mourning process, she took the view that it had more to do with “dealing with lack, lack we all experience as human beings”: So, lack, loss. In a sense you can never have it, you can never have this perfection, or this union, which I’m almost saying I might offer, if I could make the complete artwork, which had rats involved, but I’m saying you can’t, I can’t even imagine it, and I certainly can’t make it. So I don’t think there’s a mourning to be done for that, it’s more an acknowledgement, an observing of the sets of relations that come from that. (Kimbell 2006a)

Kimbell has in mind here both the Rat Fair and the performance lecture. Immediately before showing images of the Rat Fair in the lecture, she had posed the question of whether she could show “rat as rat” rather than as pet or as scientific model, and whether it would be possible to bring together the “knowledges” of these very different rat worlds. The answer, in her view, was itself an enacting of loss: “Because the Rat Fair is the answer, the event was the answer, and if you didn’t go, then, you get something from the images but it’s not the same as being in that room in that moment, in its liveness.” Much the same was true of the delivery of the performance lecture: “The liveness of that is the answer, that there is no answer, and that you can’t really separate them”—the answer and the impossibility of delivering it more fully—“they’re entwined, like we’re entwined with the animals, and the science is entwined with the ratting world even though they might not have a direct dialogue” (2006a). “A Place of Ambiguity” Once the decision had been taken that the Rat Evaluated Artwork could not responsibly be made—because any living rat it used “would still be an instrumentalized animal. Rat for art’s sake” (Kimbell 2005, p. 9)— why did the project as a whole continue to be called One Night with Rats in the Service of Art? Kimbell says of the title:

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I like it because it suggests there might actually be rats there. It brings that fear, so it is provocative. I think “in the service of art” is useful because I’m ultimately claiming this as an art project and therefore there is a home for it. I’m not saying it’s philosophy—it has a home, so I name that home. It seemed right . . . and it makes me laugh. (2006a)

One Night with Rats in the Service of Art might be said to be the sum of its entanglements. It is purposeful, curious, and comfortable enough with the limitations of its grip on things. “I wonder what knowledge, if any, was produced here?” the artist muses towards the end of the lecture. “What came out of these aesthetic experiments?” (2005, p. 12). Reflecting on Kimbell’s project, Burt has said “it’s not confused, that’s not the right word, it’s crossover, it’s mixed, its directions in the end are uncertain, but the reason isn’t the project, it’s because of the animal that she’s chosen”: The rat as a figure, in terms of the history of its representation in the West, is something that eats through things, and collapses a lot of boundaries, and also unpicks language and thought. . . . What she’s doing, in the end, is reproducing something that’s quintessentially what the history of the rat has always been about, which is erosion, and in a sense this creature is determining much more of the project than even she is perhaps appreciating. (Burt 2006b)

His nagging discomfort with the open-endedness of the project is something that Kimbell might appreciate, but would not necessarily share. In its aims, at least, One Night with Rats in the Service of Art is modest, and exploratory: it is not, to borrow Thrift’s words again, “some grandiose reformulation of the whole basis of western moral thinking.” But it may indeed have some relation to the “new ethical spaces” that Thrift envisages arising from attempts, “often for a very short span of time, to produce a different sense of how things might be, using the resources to hand” (Thrift 2003, p. 119). For Kimbell, accepting and embracing the space of her own notknowing about rats served as just such a resource. There is a moment in the performance lecture when she says something very telling about one particular encounter with a scientist. Taken out of that specific context, her comment effectively encapsulates the manner in which her practice-based approach might engage—and allow others to engage—with the experience of the more-than-human world: “What I had to do at that point was hold open a place of ambiguity and be there in it” (2005, p. 4).

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Burt, Jonathan. 2006a. Rat. London: Reaktion. ——. 2006b. Unpublished interview with the author. London, March 10, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).’ Trans. David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28: 369–418. Kimbell, Lucy. 2005. Unpublished text of the performance lecture One Night with Rats in the Service of Art (dated August 31, 2005). Author’s copy. ——. 2006a. Unpublished interview with the author. London, March 8, 2006. ——. 2006b. Artist’s responses to questions from the audience after delivering the performance lecture One Night with Rats in the Service of Art, Goldsmiths, London, March 8, 2006. ——. 2007. Personal website. http://www.lucykimbell.com/biog.htm (accessed August 2, 2007). Simmons, Veronica. 2005. ‘Rat Art in North London.’ Pro-Rat-a 149: 13–14. SPEAK. 2007. Campaign website. Report on July 2005 ‘Freedom March and Rally,’ Oxford. http://www.speakcampaigns.org/news/20050724march.php (accessed July 31, 2007). Stengers, Isabelle. 2004. ‘The Challenge of Complexity: Unfolding the Ethics of Science (In Memorium Ilya Prigogine).’ Emergence: Complexity and Organization (E:CO) 6 (1–2): 92–99. SymbioticA. 2007. MEART project website. http://www.fishandchips.uwa.edu.au/ project.html (accessed August 21, 2007). Thrift, Nigel. 2003. ‘Practising Ethics.’ Using Social Theory: Thinking Through Research. Ed. Michael Pryke, Gillian Rose and Sarah Whatmore. London: Sage. 105–21. Wikipedia. 2007. ‘Morris water maze’. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_water_ maze (accessed July 31, 2007).

PART SIX

LIBIDINAL ENCOUNTERS The two essays coming together at the end of this collection present a climax in three related ways: first, they intensify the corporeal crossspecies encounters explored in the earlier contributions by engaging with theories, stories, histories and practices that foreground the fleshly entanglement of organisms; second, they look forward to the future not only of human-animal relations but of animal studies and other fields of research where the interplay between human and nonhuman companion species is more than a one-night stand; and third, they are also literally concerned with orgasms and other pleasures and joys experienced by human and nonhuman animals as they unleash their libidos and join in sexual acts real and imagined. Especially with regard to the latter theme, the authors are doing pioneering work, insofar as such animal encounters are still largely tabooed, both in society as well as in academia, including animal studies. Committed to formulating desire and sexuality outside the androcentric and anthropocentric frameworks of Western thought and morality, both scholars offer highly sensitive and ‘hot’ subjects for debate without the intention of turning their readers either on or off. The rejection of an androcentric-anthropocentric perspective in favour of a posthumanism that is also decidedly postanthropocentric allows Monika Bakke in her essay ‘The Predicament of Zoopleasures: Human-Nonhuman Libidinal Relations’ to contribute to the revision of the discourse and debate on human-animal intimacy initiated by sexologist Hani Miletski in the late 1990s. This revision entails a shift in language also: from “bestiality” to “zoophilia”—or, to use Bakke’s even broader term: zoe-philia—and “zoosexuality”. To document this shift and the positive implications thereof, her readings focus on narratives by zoophiles as well as visual representations by contemporary artists of libidinal human-animal encounters. One is the depiction of a naked woman fondling a stallion, shown as one sexual act among many in an exhibition of photographic artwork by Andres Serrano titled The History of Sex. The other examples are a photograph and a silkscreen by Russian artist Oleg Kulik from his series “Family of the

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Future”, in which he envisions a future in which dogs and other animals would be happy sexual partners to humans. Bakke portrays and discusses these forms of love and sexuality in a way that should neither provoke disgust nor fuel sensationalism, by contextualising them as part of a history of sex that favours “the feelings, emotions and pleasures experienced by individual animals of all kinds” over issues of natural selection and reproduction. Kulik’s vision of a posthuman future is a reality in the science fiction novel analysed by Manuela Rossini in her essay ‘ComingTogether: Symbiogenesis and Metamorphosis in Paul di Filippo’s A Mouthful of Tongues’. In this fictive world, human and animal bodies as well as technicallyengineered hyperpotent organisms engage in libidinal encounters that leave none of the participants untouched and unchanged. Rossini’s critical-posthumanist discussion of the many Escherian transformations and osmotic fusions resulting from orgiastic sexual intercourse are framed by Susan Oyama’s developmental systems theory, Lynn Margulis’s account of the origin of species and Donna Haraway’s companionspecies approach, the feminist and Deleuzian work of Elizabeth Grosz and Rosi Braidotti on desire and ‘animal sex’, and philosopher Alfonso Lingis’s zoopoetics, among others. Some of these writings also figure prominently in Bakke’s essay. Sharing the postanthropocentric agenda of all of these scholars, Rossini insists that symbiotic couplings between different life forms have not only in-formed the matter and meaning of ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’, but will also be indispensable for the survival and flourishing of all species. Finally, by drawing a parallel between biological and narrative embedding, the author dreams of a not so distant future in which the coming together of human and nonhuman animals, of different texts and textures, concepts and theories will also move the humanities into the age of the posthumanities. (MR)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE PREDICAMENT OF ZOOPLEASURES: HUMAN-NONHUMAN LIBIDINAL RELATIONS Monika Bakke [ W ]e are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes. This does not make sex across the species barrier normal, or natural, whatever those muchmisused words may mean, but it does imply that it ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings. —Peter Singer, ‘Heavy Petting’ [ I ]t is in our passions for the other animals that we learn all the rites and sorceries, the torrid and teasing presence, and the ceremonious delays, of eroticism. —Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions, p. 39

Seeking pleasure1 is among the numerous features that human animals share with other animals. Starting from the premise that all vertebrates are endowed with “the same five basic senses,” Jonathan Balcombe observes that many animals with a similar anatomy and corporeal foundation to human beings must thus also experience pleasures like “bliss, joy, comfort and satisfaction” (2006, p. 13). Western science has so far largely neglected the libido of nonhuman animals, privileging issues of natural selection and reproductive success over the diversity of feelings, emotions and pleasures experienced by individual animals of all kinds (cp. Balcombe 2006, p. 8). Moreover, the Western anthropocentric tradition maintains a strong emphasis that when it comes to human-nonhuman relations, the only true objectives are the satisfaction of human pleasures. One exception is made to this: human beings are not allowed to enjoy sexual pleasure from libidinal encounters with other species. Cultural control over the experience of pleasure

1 With the aim of avoiding speciecism, my use of the term “pleasure” is very general and relates to the libidinal experiences of human and nonhuman animals.

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plays a significant role in the process of constructing and maintaining the human-nonhuman border. And yet, pleasure—which in itself is a troublesome experience, overwhelming the body and haunting the imagination—often escapes this controlling framework. Humans experience pleasure with nonhuman animals as frivolous fun and joy, located within a scheme of anthropocentric cultural codes in which human animals occupy the position of Subject, while nonhuman animals occupy the position of Object. The various pleasures taken from the bodies of animals mostly have an exploitative character, such as eating their flesh, using their skins and furs, using them as a source of labour and entertainment, and other forms of total control based on the master-slave relation such as control of procreation and aesthetic appropriations. All these practices ensure what Jacques Derrida calls the “carnophallogocentrism” of Western metaphysics (1991, p. 25). Even the role of “pet” a human imposes on an animal is highly problematic: In many cases the relation between a pet and his or her owner may look like a happy and pleasurable one for both, but for the animal there is always the risk of being abandoned if the emotional expectations of the owner aren’t met, including the fantasy about unconditional love and continuous cuteness, fluffiness, etc. (cp. Haraway 2003, pp. 11–12). Erotic bliss as the tabooed aspect of human-animal pleasure, by contrast, is noncultural, unspeakable, and possibly even lethal2 for the anthropocentric Subject. As reflected in numerous literary and visual representations, however, these two forms of experiencing pleasure sometimes overlap and merge in acts of human-nonhuman sexual encounters. From an anthropocentric perspective, animal sex is often viewed with both fascination and repulsion. While considered to be primitive, cruel, and even deadly, such sexual acts do not stop human beings from fantasizing about them with an anthropomorphic imagination that projects specific sexual features onto specific animals. A closer look at the physiology of animal sex, especially mammalian, provides an obvious but challenging conclusion: our bodies are similar to those of other animals, and so are our desires. Peter Singer in his controversial article ‘Heavy Petting’ reminds us that

2 Historically, in the sense of capital punishment; now, in the sense of social condemnation and exclusion, and as simply physically dangerous.

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there are many ways in which we cannot help behaving just as animals do—or mammals, anyway—and sex is one of the most obvious ones. We copulate, as they do. They have penises and vaginas, as we do, and the fact that the vagina of a calf can be sexually satisfying to a man shows how similar these organs are. (2001, e-text)

In Western modes of addressing the question of the animal, these similarities have been used not to see close relations but, on the contrary, to produce a dichotomy and total alterity in the moral sense. Hence, the notion of ‘animal sex’ has been commonly used in a pejorative sense to describe the most undesirable aspects of human (not animal) sexual behaviour. This apparently speciesist view has been criticized by Alphonso Lingis who suggests that the very quality of animality in human behaviour actually gives our sexuality another dimension, exceeding same species limitations and opening up a myriad of possibilities within the plethora of eroticism. This attitude cherishes cross-species similarities as well as differences. We are animals among other animals, some of whom are humans, and this becomes especially apparent when our bodies get orgasmic: We feel feline and wolfish, foxy and bitchy; the purrings of kittens reverberate in our orgasmic strokings, our squirrelly fingers race up and down the trunk and limbs of another, our clam vagina opens, our erect cobrahead penis snakes its way in. Our muscular and vertebrate bodies transubstantiate into ooze, slime, mammalian sweat, and reptilian secretions, into minute tadpoles and releases of hot moist breath nourishing the floating microorganism of the night air. (Lingis, 2000, p. 38)

My endeavour in this essay is to probe how human-nonhuman libidinal encounters could be reconsidered from a postanthropocentric perspective. This requires a recontextualization of interspecies relations by means of a shift in the concept of sexuality: from sexuality understood in terms of instinct and biological compulsion for orgasmic release to sexuality as plenitude open to otherness. The former, as Elizabeth Grosz states in her analysis of various models of sexuality, is implicit in the claim made by many men who rape, those who frequent prostitutes and those prostitutes who describe themselves as ‘health workers’, insofar as they justify their roles in terms of maintaining the ‘health’ of their clients. (Grosz 1995, p. 294). The latter understanding and attitude, by contrast, escapes reproductive functions and the need for immediate gratification. Against this background of two alternative conceptions of sexual behaviour, I would like to advocate yet another

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shift in comprehending human-nonhuman libidinal encounters: from bestiality to zoosexuality.3 Zoosexuality is a relatively new term, but practices of loving animals and making love with them are certainly not. Attitudes towards sexual relations between human and nonhuman animals depend on the ideas we have about ourselves, our bodies, our position in the environment, our general convictions about sexuality and eroticism, as much as on the specific ways we actually get our pleasures. Crimes of love and lust, ‘the unmentionable vice’ for which in past centuries many humans and nonhumans paid with their lives, are still a taboo. But the marvelous and ordinary stories of vulnerable lovers and passionate encounters with no real futures have been told in literature and art constantly throughout the ages. In this essay, I will look into the specific contemporary phase of the visual representations of human-animal sexual encounters, focusing in particular on the attitudes towards bestiality and zoosexuality reflected in these images. The significance of the present moment should not be overlooked because the rejection of the anthropocentric-androcentric perspective actually enables the shift towards understanding human-animal sexuality in terms of zoophilia, zoe-philia, biophilia, and zoosexuality, which allows us to start to break and seriously question the taboo.4 Ordinary People with Extraordinary Desires It is not enough to say that bestiality has simply got a ‘bad reputation;’ it is still a strong taboo. Not only is it something not to be done, but also something not to be talked about. “Heard anyone chatting at parties lately about how good it is having sex with their dog?” Singer inquires, and the obvious answer is: “Probably not” (Singer 2001). It

3 The term “zoosexuality”, understood as sexual orientation towards animals, has been in use since the 1980s; it was popularized by Miletski’s research in the 1990s (Miletski 2002). 4 “Since zoophilia/bestiality is illegal in a number of countries (e.g. USA, UK),” as Andrea M. Beetz reports, “most of the zoophiles are worried about being ‘outed’ to the ‘wrong’ persons. Even though in Germany zoophilia is not illegal anymore since 1969, most zoophiles still are very cautious, since the social stigma could destroy their private lives, they could perhaps loose their jobs, etc. In Great Britain, zoophilia can still be punished with life imprisonment, though that is probably no longer a realistic threat.” (Beetz 2000, e-text)

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seems that the old Christian prohibition on bestiality5 —considered “a sin too fearful to be named” (Bekoff 1998, p. 92)—has been particularly persistent. Even as a subject of academic interest to sexologists, bestiality is not as well researched as one could expect, given the immense literature on human sexuality.6 However, in the late 1990s, the pioneering contribution of sexologist Hani Miletski brought about significant changes in attitudes, also reflected in the language used to analyze the sexual relations of humans and animals. One example is the strong tendency for a more specific use of the term ‘bestiality.’ which is now mostly understood as the practice of using animals as mere outlets for sexual tension, closely linked to speciesism, and therefore inscribed in the anthropocentric order. Zoophilia, in contrast, is an attitude which situates sex with animals as “the ultimate consequence of love for them, making love with them” (Dekkers 2000, p. 1). Zoophiles, or ‘zoos’ as they are also called, declare their strong emotional attachment to nonhuman animals who become their companions and often also their sexual partners. Sometimes they form life-long relationships with animals or share their erotic practices between human and nonhuman animals. As Miletski states in a report on her inquiries into the zoo community: They tell me they love their animals and would do anything for them. They tell me they won’t have sex with their animals unless the animal shows them, with its body language, that it wants it and enjoys it. (Miletski 2002, p. 175)

In zoosexual relationships animals gain the status of a partner rather than a victim of human lust. For this very reason, many zoos point out the absurdity of denying animals the ability to consent to sexual involvement with their body language, as they have claws, teeth, and hoofs to show their disapproval. It is absolutely crucial, however, to be

See the following passages in the Old Testament: “Whoever lies with a beast, shall be put to death” (Exodus 22:19); “You shall not have sexual intercourse with any beast to make yourself unclean with it, nor shall a woman submit herself to intercourse with a beast: that is violation of nature” (Leviticus 18:28–24); “A man who has sexual intercourse with a beast shall be put to death and you shall kill the beast. If a woman approaches any animal to have intercourse with it you shall kill the woman and the beast” (Leviticus 20:15–16). 6 Miletski, who carried out a study with a sample of 93 zoophiles (1999), notes that there had been only three important studies up to then providing some information on the prevalence and frequency of human sexual interaction with animals: Kinsey et al. (1948 & 1953), Gebhard et al. (1965) and Hunt (1974). Unfortunately, some of the information must be assumed to be outdated now. 5

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aware that there are many more subtle forms of power reationship between the two ‘partners’ than the simple dichotomy of ‘rape’ versus ‘consent’. Still, to assume that the animal is always a victim is based on the logic of bestiality, which paradoxically is the same logic that—in the traditional tales of bestiality in art—almost always made women victims of beasts who were not even supposed to be animals but male humans or human-like male gods. The stereotypical picture of a human involved in sexual acts with animals is “a poor, naive, confused, desperate, uneducated, ignorant farm boy” (Miletski 2002, p. 40) who uses animals as objects to substitute for a human partner, usually of the opposite sex. What adds to this ungraceful image is that occasionally sexual contacts with animals have been reported as violent acts against animals,7 and as animal abuse, which is closely linked to human-to-human violence. 8 Therefore, bestiality has been frequently identified with brutality, depravation and degradation for both humans and animals.9 Contemporary laws in most European countries and in some parts of the US reflect these attitudes, although the charges leveled have been changed from the moral issue of having sex with an animal to the charge of animal abuse. Some countries, however, including Germany, Holland, Belgium, and Denmark, allow sexual relations with animals when the animal consents. Analyzing human motivations for interspecies sex, R.J. Rosenberger in Bestiality (1968) made a very symptomatic distinction, dividing people practicing bestiality into two groups, which could, as I read it, be

7 The sexual act may be dangerous or even deadly for the human partner as well. The famous case of Kenneth Pinyon’s death as a consequence of a sexual involvement with a stallion is the subject of the documentary film Zoo (2007), directed by Robinson Devor, which stirred so much controversy in the USA. 8 For more information about a correlation between human violence and animal cruelty see: http://www.hsus.org/hsus_field/first_strike_the_connection_between_animal_cruelty_and_human_violence/ (accessed August 10, 2007) and: http://vachss .com/help_text/animal_dv.html (accessed August 10, 2007). 9 In Christian Europe until the 18th century sexual contact with animals “was uniformly punished by putting to death both parties implicated, and usually by burning alive. The beast, too, is punished and both are burned”. Such is the testimony given by Guillielmus Benedictinus, who lived at the end of the fourteenth century. But there is actually something particularly worth noting in these horrifying circumstances of human-animal relations, namely the actual putting on trial of not only the accused human but also the animal. The latter was also brought before the court and properly tried. It could be pronounced equally guilty and convicted together with the human partner, but also pardoned, not necessarily together with the human party. For an example of the latter, see the case of Jacques Ferron (Evans 1987, p. 150).

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characterized as ‘repulsive perverts’ and ‘unlucky losers.’ In the latter group, we find all those individuals who practice bestiality clearly as substitution for a human partner. Such persons should be viewed as people who found themselves in very unfavorable circumstances to which they found very provisional and poor solutions; in this case, the incidental errors and weaknesses may be forgiven. When human-animal sex is seen in this way, however, anthropocentrism remains unchallenged because the preference of this group of people would ultimately be to share sexual pleasures with other humans only. The ‘true’ perverts, according to Rosenberger, would be those individuals who make a conscious choice of animals over human partners. Apparently, those humans who avoid sexual contacts with other humans and find such a possibility completely unacceptable represent the worst case. And, indeed, as Miletski points out in her study, some zoos do have such an uncompromising attitude, as e.g. the one confessing: “I am zoo exclusive and the very thought of having sex with a human disgusts me” (2002, p. 171). Contemporary zoophiles whose affection for animals enters the tabooed zone of sexual bliss often identify themselves not with bestiality but with zoosexuality. The latter is understood as a sexual orientation towards animals, and is therefore not considered a condition to be cured, condemned or suppressed, but rather as a variation of the erotic impulse. Zoos report to be sexually attracted to particular species and even to a specific individual animal or a group of individuals. Moreover, there are some features exclusive to animals which some people find attractive: “I am highly turned on by olfactory stimuli, and humans by convention rarely allow themselves to have any natural human aroma” (2002, p. 171). And yet, it is not only physical attraction which matters, since zoophiles often stress that they seek serious emotional attachment to a partner (or partners) whose position more closely resembles that of a spouse rather than a sex toy.10 Nonetheless, the actual social reality still makes interspecies affection an impossible love that has to be hidden from the eyes of others. 10 No country recognizes marriages between humans and animals, since the latter are not subjects recognized by law. However, people do get married to animals, which in the western world is mainly a symbolic act of a commitment, while in India it may be a way to protect a human from an evil eye. As to animals as sex toys, it is curious that sex toys in the form of inflatable animals are advertised as fun and ‘edgy gadgets’ for nonzoos. They provide a fantasy of interspecies sex rather than a real experience, which for the toy users would be too transgressive.

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Recent research into human-animal sexual relations reveals a significant subversive potential of zoosexual attitudes. Practicing bestiality is acknowledging a taboo and then breaking it anyway, willing to bear all the consequences, but practicing zoosexuality is acting as if the taboo didn’t exist and is, therefore, disruptive of the anthropocentric order. Bestiality has been, and still is, inscribed into a model of sexuality based on violence, suppression, prohibition and taboo. Zoosexuality, on the other hand, is not only a way to identify and name a very minoritarian sexual practice but, more importantly, actually evokes a totally different concept of ourselves, our bodies, and our relations with other animals, including libidinal encounters with them. Zoophilia, as love for animals, an attitude underlying any zoosexual act, offers an alternative to phallogocentric models of eroticism. Zoophilia, as described by Lingis, is an all-embracing, wandering impulse that passes through the surfaces of bodies of humans, animals, plants, and even inorganic matter alike. Orgasmic sexual encounter, then, neither empowers the subject nor the human status of a master of animals; on the contrary, as a same-species sexual union, it is ecstatic for the self. Therefore, on the orgiastic note, making a connection between sexuality and other forms of incorporation such as eating, Lingis observes: To be swept away into voluptuous passion is to lose the sense of one’s self, one’s status, one’s reputation, one’s identity, one’s dignity. Take this my flesh and eat me; take this my jism and drink and forget me. (2005, p. 109)

Mistresses and Masters of Animals Despite being a taboo in public discourse, human-animal sex is well represented in European visual culture, especially in popular-cultural productions but also in distinguished collections of classical painting and sculpture, and can be seen as early as on the walls of caves marked by our ancestors in the Bronze Age. But as Midas Dekkers points out, before of all that evidence, “our gaze is averted, our giggles suppressed” (2000, p. 1). Curiously, we seem to be blind to all such messages and have long been unable to confront what is really represented there. We persistently refuse to see animals as animals even though their bodies are fully exposed, often represented in a very sensuous way, depicting movement, surface, and texture, and giving the impression of body

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temperature and smell. 11 The taboo is so strong that we refuse to see what is really there, and we do not name what can be properly named. Surprisingly, throughout the centuries the most paradoxical strategy has proved the most sufficient here: a strong denial in front of undeniable evidence. Dekkers also makes an observation about the prevalence of female and male human partners in visual representations, pointing out that “[c]ompared with reality, in which it is virtually always men who actually copulate with animals, in art the roles are completely reversed” (2000, p. 154). The reason for this, according to Dekker, is the obvious fact that for centuries men alone produced images which reflected only male fantasies: As always a man identifies with the active party: the animal. He is the stallion, the dog, the bull, the lusty monster with its outsized organ which pumps the most insatiable woman full of sperm. (2000, p. 155)

However, if we draw on an ancient understanding of what animals are like and consider that the term ‘bestiality’ in its original meaning referred to people acting like animals with no control over their passions, with no reason, no justice and no respect for others nor for a social order (cp. Bekoff 1998, p. 93, and Clark 2000, p. 88), only male humans who represented themselves as looking and acting like animals, can be called ‘bestialists.’ These persons either forcefully used animals and/or women as objects in order to satisfy their own desires in reality or, through images and fantasies, identified with so-called bestial behavior. Paradoxically then the self-produced image of man is actually that of bestialist and beast at the same time. Here, anthropocentrism has produced the curious figure of bestialist-beast that is always male and which, as I will argue reflects a fear of woman as beast. Continuing his remarks on the predominance of images of women and the lack of images of men in the representations of ‘bestiality themes’ in art, Dekkers suggests that men have always avoided representing themselves as partners for animals because their fantasies would be destroyed by women as beasts (2000, p. 155). Indeed, as Elisabeth

11 In the myth of Leda and the swan, the animal lover acts like a swan with all the consequences of his act. As the result of this interspecies sexual encounter, Leda lays eggs giving evidence to the animality of her partner who fused with her woman’s body.

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Grosz points out in Animal Sex, female beasts or, rather, beasts as women or especially associated with female sexuality, such as the infamous praying mantis and black widow, for example, have a strong presence in totally different types of male sexual fantasies, all of them linking women’s sexuality to death. Grosz argues that by linking sexual pleasure to the concept of death and dying, by making sex something to die for, something that in itself is a kind of anticipation of death (the ‘little death’), woman is thereby cast into the category of non-human, the non-living, or a living threat of death. (1995, p. 284)

Conventional interpretations of human-animal sexual encounters, including the one proposed by Dekkers, are strongly influenced by speciesism and androcentrism; i.e., they take into account neither the specificity of female eroticism nor the autonomy of female desire. Within such an epistemological framework, female sexuality is simply another version of male sexuality and, as Grosz adds, reduced to “heterosexual norms of sexual complementarity or opposition” (1995, p. 279). Miletski, referring to several opinions of ‘male specialists’12 about motivations women may have for getting involved in sexual relations with animals, quotes J. Handy who, in Girls who Seduce Dogs (1977), identifies two syndromes: the first is the ‘The Amusement of the Husband Syndrome’, referring to men who take pleasure from watching their woman partner having sex with an animal; and the second one is the ‘The Failure of the Human Male Syndrome’, meaning that men may occasionally happen to be worse lovers than animals. The latter opinion is also shared by W.W. Waine who suggests that “dogs may be better lovers than men—they last longer, their tongues are larger and rougher, and they love to perform oral sex” (in Miletski 2002, p. 45). Greenwood, however, in Unusual Sex Practices (1963) is not concerned with female sexual practices per se but with worries about “the emotional state of the woman who requires such bizarre stimulation to satisfy her sexual desires” (in Miletski 2002, p. 48); i.e., the conclusion of the male specialist here is that only a mad woman would substitute an animal for a male human lover.

Miletski points out that research on bestiality is mostly out-dated and written in a pseudo-scientific manner which is “actually designed to sell erotic stories under guise of case histories. They pretend to be authoritative, documented, and factual sex studies” (Miletski 2002, p. 55). 12

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Yet, Miletski’s own survey gives evidence that some women—not only men and not in any relation to men—fantasize about having sex with animals as well as about watching other people being involved in such activities (2002, p. 170). Women can be interested in animals as animals, and their desire is neither a form of substitution for a human male lover, nor based on the heterosexual model. The following confession by a female zoophile offers a glimpse at this: I wrote my first (innocuous and innocent as it was) zoo story when I was seven—the girl married her dog in the end. Long before I understood sex, sexuality, morality, or zoophilia, I understood that I had a deep love for animals, a bond that was undeniable—especially for dogs. I don’t believe I ‘chose’ this lifestyle. It is just a part of who and what I am—one part of many. It is natural, consensual, satisfying, and overwhelmingly loving. My dogs are happy—I am happy. My relationships with my dogs add a dimension to my life that would be an aching void without them—they do not, however, replace my relationships (sexual or otherwise) with human beings. My dogs do not understand holidays, movies, books, or the other hobbies I share with human partners and friends. They do not understand music or candlelight or flowers. However, they are never away from me. They comfort me. We play games and enjoy sunny days. We love car rides with the windows down, take long walks, and just snuggle happily and contentedly against one another. The relationships (human and zoophile) are complementary. Both add important dimensions to my life and allow me to care/love in return in different ways. Neither my relationships with humans or animals depends on sex, but both can be enhanced by it. Sex is merely an expression of love—and that’s the bottom line. I love them. (in Miletski 2002, p. 194)

All Together Now Among the reasons commonly given for the persistence and omnipresence of classical bestiality themes in the visual arts—such as Europa and the bull, Leda and the swan, and others—Dekkers lists “quite simply ravishing beauty” (2000, p. 6). Needless to say, ‘beauty’ stands for the sexually appealing body of a woman and/or both bodies either in sexual union or suggesting this possibility, displayed as an object of the male gaze. This androcentric interpretation suggests a bestiality perspective in which the focus is on the release of sexual tension treated as a bodily function. The displayed ‘beauty’ of a woman together with an animal works as vehicle in achieving this goal by a third-party male human. But the phallogocentric interpretative access to the sexual aspect of classical

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images of bestiality excluding female pleasures is strictly controlled and produced by the classical interpretations of the stories from Greek mythology. Hence, the sexual fantasy realm has been open for those who neither wonder about the identity of the two—the animal and the woman—nor about the relation between them, but who always already know that the animal is never an animal while the woman is always a woman. In other words, both the woman’s body and the animal’s body are colonized by male desire, and their own pleasures as a female human or a nonhuman animal are not considered, known or acknowledged. This androcentric attitude finds a continuation today; in the choice of depicting the myth of Europa and the bull on the Greek two-euro coin, for example. As a coin, the image is widely accessible, at least for some part of the European audience, regardless of their cultural and sexual interests, and it actually reflects and repeats the ideology of the origin of European identity based on objectifying women. The image on the coin is a traditional depiction of the myth of the Phoenician princess Europa, who, whilst gathering flowers with her attendants, was abducted to Crete by the god Zeus, who had appeared to her in the guise of a white bull. Having been reproduced from a Spartan mosaic of the forth century CE, its hidden sexual connotation can be grasped only by viewers who are familiar with this myth. However, this particular depiction shows neither apparent violence, nor an explicit sexual act, which nonetheless are crucial elements of the myth. Europa is represented here with her feminine body fully exposed, the cloak dropped down to her legs. She is sitting on the bull sideways, modestly holding onto the animal’s neck (rather than to its horn, which has traditionally been associated with the phallus). She faces the viewer, but she is not in any way confronting him: she is exposed to the viewer’s gaze, not gazing herself. Even her contact with the bull is not visual, as the regime of the gaze carries with it the logic of the story to be continued by male bestiality fantasies. It is my contention that only outside the traditional interpretative context can women actually have a chance to regain representations of their own desires, including as shocking a desire as the one for nonhuman animals. For those not informed and controlled by the classical story of bestiality with its violent connotations, the coin image is a depiction of a naked woman, who enjoys tactile, olfactory and oral contact with a bull. It seems to me, however, that her pleasures as well as the pleasures of the animal cannot be easily dismissed. Alternative stories about blissful sexual encounters between humans and animals

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Greek two-euro coin

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exist and have been represented, including the current shift—from bestiality to zoosexuality—in comprehending human-animal relations. In the remaining part of this essay, I will consider two examples of recently produced images of interspecies sexual relations that question and disrupt the anthropocentric and androcentric interpretative convention described above: the first is the photograph Red Pebbles from the series History of Sex by American artist Andres Serrano; the second is a series of works called Family of the Future, which is a larger collaborative project titled Zoophrenia by Russian artist Oleg Kulik and Russian art critic Mila Bredikhina. Serrano’s photo Red Pebbles, unlike the image on the coin described above, offers a complex critique of the classical representations of the woman-animal sexual encounter: here the sexual act is explicit. Masturbating a stallion the female lover is the active party. Moreover, she is confronting the viewer with her gaze. The first impression of the image evokes the association with the fantasy of woman as beast, the infamous praying mantis assuming the appearance of a woman. With her naked body side by side with the animal, left hand embracing him and right hand holding his penis, she looks back over her shoulder right at the viewer in the most confrontational manner. She is in charge here, recalling the figure of a murderous insect that acts as “the projective vehicle” of a man’s worst fears since “it is not the male subject or the phallus which threatens the female lover but, rather, the female lover who threatens the phallus” (Grosz 1995, p. 282). But Serrano’s photo offers more than this. It is not just about reversing the roles of the animal rapist between a woman and a man. Here, the carnal love affair is actually between a woman and a horse: she is giving the animal pleasure, simultaneously obtaining pleasure herself from this very act: the hand, while in a sense ‘jealous’ of the pleasure it induces in the body it caresses, also participates in the very intensities it ignites in a vagina or around testicles: it does not simply induce pleasure in another, for another, but also always for itself. (Grosz 1995, p. 288)

The woman does not display either bliss or horror, and her piercing gaze seems somehow displaced, insofar as it belongs neither to the pleasurable activity taking place here nor to the phallogocentric tradition of representing such themes. At the same time, it is a very effective intervention separating the voyeur from the pleasurable activity, making him immobile in the Medusa’s manner, likely frustrated, and above all, aware of his intruding presence and violent appetites. And yet, by

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Fig. 11.2 Andres Serrano, A History of Sex (Red Pebbles) (1996). © A. Serrano. Courtesy of the artist and the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

no means is the voyeur an unexpected guest at this interspecies-love playground, as he is known to have ruled here for centuries. On the contrary, the response to his arrival is well prepared and carried out with his own weapon by the subversive power of the joke: the phallus of the animal, located in the foreground and seen in its pre-erect mode is not pointing up but pointing down, which is particularly striking when playfully juxtaposed with a phallic shaped chimney, a petrified phallus, which is part of the distant background. This is not an innocent joke, but a serious manifestation of the priorities clearly articulated here. Another significant aspect of Serrano’s photo breaking with tradition is that both the body of the animal and the body of the woman are not fully exposed but only as much as they are in tactile contact with

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each other. What we can see here is in a kind of pleasure zone, a field of voluptuous intensity as the “orgasmic body cannot be identified with the organic body” (Grosz 1995, p. 287). The bodies no longer operate as complete objects but they become movements and actions, passages of impulses going back and forth with no premeditated goals and functions to perform; as such they are most open and receptive: if libidinal impulses are fundamentally decomposing, desolidifying, liquefying the coherent organization of the body as it performs functional tasks, unhinging a certain intentionality, they are more dependant on the sphere of influence of otherness, on an other which, incidentally need not be human but which cannot simply be classified as a passive object awaiting the impressions of an active desiring subject. (Grosz 1995, p. 286)

Since Red Pebbles is a part of the series History of Sex, zoosexuality is only one rather peculiar and minoritarian sexual interest among many manifestations of sexual desires involving diverse bodies such as female, male, young, old, human, nonhuman, as well as inorganic objects, all in various configurations. Serrano’s History of Sex reveals numerous eccentric, totally individualized stories of desire in its endless variety of ways to pursue pleasure, which cannot be reduced to any functional and normalized sexuality; here the erotic impulse is endlessly flowing, manifesting itself in its all-encompassing plentitude, and not as an effect of suppression and sublimation. Desire alone and away from any functionality of sexual encounters is operating here: desire need not, indeed commonly does not, culminate in sexual intercourse but in production. Not the production of a child or a relationship, but the production of sensations never felt, alignments never thought, energies never tapped, regions never known. (Grosz 1995, p. 295)

The second example of contemporary critical interpretation of humananimal sexual relations as a theme in art is Kulik’s elaborate series of formally diverse works titled Family of the Future, anticipated by his performances Meet My Boyfriend Charles (the latter being a goat) and White Man, Black Dog. The series is significant in two aspects: first, it breaks with the dominant tradition of representing woman (and not man) in sexual union with an animal; and second, it places humananimal sexual relations in the social context of the family, away from the usual androcentric bestiality mode. Here man is neither the one performing an act of violent sex in the guise of an animal, nor is he taking the position of the victim, traditionally occupied by the woman; man and animal are not the same, but they are equal. Against the grain of speciesism and in the spirit of zoosexuality, this heterospecies

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Oleg Kulik, from Family of the Future series (1997). Photograph courtesy of XL Gallery, Moscow

family of the future postulated by Kulik is particularly concerned with the sensuality and pleasure of the human as well as the animal partner, where the latter is not just an object of man’s desire but a companion and a lover. The nudity of both partners suggests their equal status as animals who, despite all the differences between the species, actually have lots to offer each other. Undeniably, their main common interest is the erotic pleasure which Kulik stresses even more directly in a series of drawings titled Kamasutra (also part of the Family of the Future series), focusing on techniques of pleasure for mixed-species couples of the future. The ambiguity of the animal partner’s sex is particularly significant as it challenges the usual heterosexual aspect of the classical representations of human-animal sex in art and, at the same time, insists that sexual difference, likewise in the case of interspecies sexual relations, should not be understood in terms of limitations but of possibilities. As Grosz claims: We await, no longer a science of sexuality, its formalization and abstraction, but an art of sexuality, not its analysis but its celebration as diverse becoming, not knowing and thereby containing it, but elaborating and extending it. (2005, p. 214)

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Fig. 11.4 Oleg Kulik, sketch for ‘Family of the Future. Kamasutra’ (1998). Photograph courtesy of XL Gallery, Moscow

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Family of the Future forms part of a larger project called Zoophrenia by Kulik and Bredikhina, initiated in 1993 with a manifesto consisting of “ten commandments” that situate it in a ‘postanthropocentric’ perspective—as stated in the third commandment: “The future is posthumanistic.”13 Humans should finally step down from the homocentric14 top position since they are no more than just one species among many. The main focus of the manifesto is on the necessity for a change in attitudes towards nonhuman animals, which for Kulik and Bredikhina is to be the essential survival strategy: “Neither the Superman, nor the common man, eagerly hiding the Superman in himself have any future.” It seems that the survival of our own species depends not on optimizing reproduction but, rather, on symbiosis, fusion and exchange with other life forms. Family of the Future serves as an example of an extended family in its broadest sense, as descended from a common ancestor, which reaches all the way back to the most primary life forms. This multispecies family far exceeds the homocentric reproductive unit of the present concept of ‘family.’ Not aggression towards other species but zoophilia or even zoe-philia is the expected and productive attitude in the world of change from which self-centered humans will eventually disappear “in order to give birth to a new concept of the world and to win the right to have a future” (Kulik and Bredikhina). Vital Incorporations, Lusty Connections A necessary requirement for assuming a zoophilic position understood in its broadest sense—not only reduced to the sexual aspect, though not eliminating it either—is to give up the homocentric convictions and revise the notion of the embodied subject. This is a radical move in search of a new model based not only on sexual incorporations but also on incorporations considered at even the cellular level of our bodies. The body is not a sealed vessel but a symbiotic system all the way down to the individual cells, which are themselves evolved in a process involving endosymbiosis, i.e. incorporation on the level of single-cell organisms (Margulis 1981). Indeed, our bodies are environments within environments, “a sort of ornately elaborated mosaic of

13 The project includes installations and performances involving animals and people as well as the most famous ones, where the artist himself acts as a dog. 14 I use the term “homocentric” as a synonym of “anthropocentric”.

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microbes in various states of symbiosis” (Sagan 1992, p. 369). As we move towards a biocentric perspective, the concept of the individual as an autonomous unity needs to be revised: The body is not one self but a fiction of a self built from a mass of interacting selves. A body’s capacities are literally the result of what it incorporates; the self is not only corporeal but corporate. (Sagan 1992, p. 370)

In other words, life is based on connections, networking, and exchange on all levels. We live among other life forms, affecting and being affected by the organic and inorganic environment we incorporate one way or another; “we make love only with worlds” (Deleuze and Guattari 1977, p. 294). Our identities, like our sexual orientations, are never stable; our bodies are multiplicities constantly communicating and merging with the organic and inorganic matter of which we consist. Life itself in its biological vitality as zoe, which now emerges as subject, never stops but moves on in a constant flux regardless of any individual ‘zoological’ loss. This radical, yet crucial, reconfiguration of the subject, as Rosi Braidotti explains, “starts with asserting the primacy of life as production, or zoe as generative power” (2006, p. 110). In this view, the anthropocentric subject is no longer privileged because “[z]oe rules through a trans-species and trans-genic interconnection, or rather a chain of connections which can best be described as an ecological philosophy of non-unitary, embodied subjects” (p. 111). The radical shift from zoophilia to zoephila means that life itself can no longer be considered only a passive object of discourses and actions; on the contrary, it is itself active as it moves on, no matter what and in whatever form and mutation it may momentarily take. For the humanist subject, the rejection of anthropocentrism evokes the predicament of not knowing one’s location in respect to other life forms, as the location of humans with respect to the environment is no longer fixed. This new case of ‘not-knowing’ certainly does not mean being deprived of knowledge or isolated from it; on the contrary, it means being confronted with an excess of new cognitive possibilities, of awareness of the connections and the immensity of interrelations with the environment. Therefore, this highly sensitive anthropocentric subject, now in transition, is no longer able to comprehend and conceptualize its own condition if still operating within the established framework of humanism. The usual response of the anthropocentric subject to notknowing has been fear, more specifically and paradoxically perhaps, not

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a primal fear for one’s life but a fear of life. Zoe goes on no matter what, as Braidotti points out, and “[c]onsciousness attempts to contain it, but actually lives in fear of it. Such a life force is experienced as threatening by a mind that fears the loss of control” (2006, p. 110). Loss of control has been considered in different terms by Roger Caillois, namely as a possible source of pleasure for humans and nonhumans classified as the “pleasure of vertigo” ( whereby a human being or an insect “gratifies the desire to temporarily destroy his bodily equilibrium, escape the tyranny of his ordinary perception, and provoke the abdication of conscience” (1962, p. 109). Living vertiginously means living on the edge of sustainability, being “on the edge of toomuchness” (Braidotti 2006, p. 214), which for some, paradoxically, is a survival strategy, insofar as it may be the only way to actually carry on living. In the moment of vertigo one is even more alive somehow; on the border of life and death life is the most intense. Zoopleasures becoming zoe-pleasures reveal even more clearly the necessity of the endless process of merging of vitality and death. With its disregard for individuality, zoe-philia will always be an outrage for the anthropocentric subject, yet its hidden but permanent existence and recent emergence is also evidence that the humanist subject is already infected by nonhumans—more infected than ever—as it opens up to the immensity of the life of which it consists and in which it can participate with joy. The latter cannot be ignored at any level and at any moment for, as Lingis assures, “joy opens wide our eyes to the surfaces warmed and illuminated but also to the shadows; joy gives us the strength to open our eyes to all that is there” (2000, p. 106). Zoopleasures and zoe-pleasures emerge as contagious and still more deadly than any other pleasures we pursue but this makes them all the more vital. References Balcombe, Jonathan. 2006. Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good. London: Macmillan. Beetz, Andrea, M. 2000. ‘Human Sexual Contact with Animals.’ http://www2 .hu-berlin.de/sexology/GESUND/ARCHIV/BEETZ.HTM (accessed 11 May 2007). Bekoff, Marc. A. ed. 1998. Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare. Greenwood Publishing Group. Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. Transpositions. On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity. Caillois, Roger. 1962. Man, Play, and Games. Thams and Hudson. ——. 1990. The Necessity of Mind. An Analytic Study of Mechanism of Overdetermination in Automatic and Lyrical Thinking and of the Development of Affective Themes in the Individual Consciousness. Venice, Calif.: The Lapis Press.

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Clark, Gillian. 2000. ‘Animal Passions.’ Greece and Rome, 47 (1): 88. Dekkers, Midas. 2000. Dearest Pet. On Bestiality. London: Verso. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. 1977. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schisophrenia. New York: Viking. Derrida, Jacques. 1991. ‘ “Eating Well,” or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.’ In Who Comes After the Subject? Edited by E. Cadava, P. Sonnor, and J.-L. Nancy, 96–116. New York: Routledge. Devor, Robinson. 2007. Zoo. ThinkFilm. Evans, X.E.P. 1987. The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. The Lost History of Europe’s Animal Trials. London: Faber and Faber. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1995. ‘Animal Sex. Libido as Desire and Death.’ In Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism. Edited by Elizabeth Grosz and E. Probyn, 278–300. New York: Routledge. ——. 2005. Time Travels. Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham, London: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press. Kulik, Oleg, Bredikhina, Mila. ‘Ten Commandments of Zoophrenia.’ http://uchcom. botik.ru/ARTS/contemporary/362/RACT/SL8B.HTM (accessed 25 February 2008). Lingis, Alphonso. 2000. Dangerous Emotions. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——. 2005. Body Transformations. Evolutions and Atavisms in Culture. New York: Routledge. Margulis, Lynn. 1981. Symbiosis in Cell Evolution. New York: W.H. Freeman & Co Ltd. Miletski, Hani. 2002. Understanding Bestiality and Zoophilia. Bethesda, MD: East-West Publishing Co. Sagan, Dorion. 1992. ‘Metametazoa: Biology and Multiplicity.’ In: Incorporations. Edited by Crary, J. and S. Winter. New York: Zone. Singer, Peter. 2001. ‘Heavy Petting.’ Nerve website. http://www.nerve.com/Opinions/ Singer/heavyPetting/main.asp (accessed 10 February 2008).

CHAPTER TWELVE

COMINGTOGETHER: SYMBIOGENESIS AND METAMORPHOSIS IN PAUL DI FILIPPO’S A MOUTHFUL OF TONGUES Manuela Rossini During our e-mail conversation a few years ago, Paul di Filippo seduced me into reading his sexually explicit SF novel A Mouthful of Tongues: Her Totipotent Tropicanalia (AMoT ) by describing it as “the most ‘transgressive’ and posthumanist and gender-conscious” text he has written so far. Indeed, published in 2002 and classified in reviews as “erotica”, even “pornography”, AMoT imagines a possible world where ‘monstrous’ mutations and Escherian transformations of all sorts are the order of the day: mainly through orgiastic intercourse with other human or nonhuman creatures, men change into women, women into men, human beings into animal-human hybrids and finally, at the end of the book, into jaguars, flocks of birds and swarms of butterflies. In the light of psychologist Susan Oyama’s developmental systems theory and similar biological as well as philosophical theories of evolution and change that inform my textual analysis, these metamorphic processes can be seen as invitations to the reader and critic to conceptualise (post)human identity as neither predicated upon the constituting logic of man/woman nor sustained by the human/animal abyss. As a radical alternative to the dominant cultural imaginary concerning cross-species sociality in 21stcentury naturecultures, AMoT offers more politically promising representations of the multiplicities and complex assemblages ‘we’ are (becoming). The novel thus lends itself perfectly as material to further explore the construction, deconstruction as well as reconstruction of species boundaries in contemporary literary, philosophical and scientific writings. Moreover, the essay reflects my larger endeavour to intervene in two domains of cultural theory and practice by taking animal encounters seriously: one is the field of posthumanism, the other the field of feminism.1 1 Some passages of this essay have appeared in slightly mutated form in my online publication of 2006 and have also been elaborated into a longer German text, forthcoming in Gender Goes Life, edited by Marie-Luise Angerer and Christiane König (2008).

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While both fields are heterogeneous and pursue different questions and agendas, they share the goal of thinking beyond binary oppositions such as human-machine, human-animal, nature-culture, man-woman, heterosexual-homosexual, etc. Yet, while the former—especially socalled “cybernetic” or “popular” posthumanism—has often been “all too humanist”,2 reinforcing old hierarchies in the guise of the “new” or “post” (Rossini 2005), the latter has also not been able so far to forge analytical tools to do away with the body-mind dualism proven to be so harmful to women and all of Man’s Others. What might help feminists (and any scholar committed to justice and social change) to theorise difference outside oppressive and hierarchical dualistic frameworks, as Donna Haraway suggests in her latest book, is “to come face-to-face with animals” (2008, p. 72). As a consequence of meeting and falling in love with Cayenne (an individual of the Australian Shepherd breed), Haraway herself looks specifically at dogs and dog-human relations in order to learn “an ethics and politics committed to the flourishing of significant otherness” (2003, p. 3). Cyborgs, she adds, are no longer good trainers in this respect: I appropriated cyborgs to do feminist work in Reagan’s Star Wars times of the mid-1980s. By the end of the millennium, cyborgs could no longer do the work of a proper herding dog to gather up the threads needed for critical inquiry. (p. 4)

Many of Haraway’s books and talks include personal stories of intimate encounters as a starting-point for theorising. In the piece of “dog writing”, the Companion Species Manifesto I quoted from above, it is tonguekissing between a human and a canine bitch (a term of honour for Haraway) that seems to have triggered off her critical reflections and implicit recoding of “love” and “sexuality” beyond heterosexual and speciesist grand narratives: Ms Cayenne Pepper continues to colonize all my cells—a sure case of what the biologist Lynn Margulis calls symbiogenesis. I bet if you checked our DNA, you’d find some potent transfections between us. Surely, her darter-tongue kisses have been irresistible. . . . Her . . . quick and lithe tongue has swabbed the tissues of my tonsils, with all their eager immune system

Kate Hayles has used the term “cybernetic posthuman” in her standard work on posthumanism as a technical-cultural phenomenon (1999, p. 4). The label “popular posthumanism” figures prominently in Cultural Critique 53 (Winter 2003), dedicated to posthumanist culture and theory. 2

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receptors. Who knows where my chemical receptors carried her message, or what she took from my cellular system for distinguishing her self from other and binding outside to inside? We have had forbidden conversation; we have had oral intercourse; . . . We are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand. We are, constitutively, companion species. We make each other up, in the flesh. Significantly other to each other, in specific difference, we signify in the flesh a nasty developmental infection called love. (pp. 1–3; italics in original).

The coming together of organic materials described here, as well as the premise of this manifesto that dogs and humans have co-evolved, is indeed an excellent illustration of Lynn Margulis’s central thesis, developed for over three decades, and most recently updated in her book Acquiring Genomes (co-authored with her son Dorion Sagan): “we people are really walking assemblages, beings who have integrated various other kinds of organisms” (2002, p. 19). “Making each other up, in the flesh”, to repeat Haraway, organisms of the human and nonhuman kind always contain within themselves ‘alien’ bits and pieces. This implies that as humans we are not the entirely autonomous, selfcontained and self-creating subjects of modernity we tend to think we are. We cannot fashion ourselves in our own image. By the same token, animals are always already marked by the trace of the human. Hence “companion species” is a far more appropriate term to denote that both human and animal ‘natures’ are essentially relational, made through sharing and the interweaving of self and other, “binding outside to inside”.3 In other words, the notion of “companion species” denotes what Diana Fuss says about Nietzsche’s postulate “human, all too human”: it “syntactically locates at the center of the human some unnamed surplus—some residue, overabundance, or excess.” And this ex-cess, she continues, “may be internal to the very definition of the human, an exteriority embedded inside the human as its own condition of possibility” (1996, p. 4). The same, I would like to argue, applies to the animal, “all too animal”. The simple fact that human beings are above all organic and mortal beings, and that the game of life on earth follows the rule of multidirectional gene flow, were two major reasons for Haraway to distance herself

3 The word “companion” derives from the Latin cum panis, which means “with bread”; a companion is thus someone with whom one literally or metaphorically shares food and other things.

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from her alter ego, the cyborg, in favour of the concept “companion species”—, without fully abandoning the earlier material-semiotic figure. I have followed her move mainly for the additional reason that cyborgs are far too often figured as male and (less so but also) female fighting machines, and very rarely as a mixture of human and animal. On the basis of my readings of cyborgs in films, literature and game culture, I can confirm that such figurations of the icon of posthumanity betray all too clearly what Haraway calls “humanist technophiliac narcissism . . ., the idea that man makes himself by realizing his intentions in his tools, such as domestic animals and computers” (2003, p. 33). Yet, a technophobic stance won’t do either to come to terms with the posthuman condition. What is needed, rather, is a certain degree of scepticism as one characteristic of that Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter call a “critical posthumanism”—“ ‘critical’ in the sense of both its importance as a modulation of cyborg-riddled scenarios and cloning-savvy idioms, and also through is capacity to cue a critique of those scenarios and idioms” (2008, forthcoming).4 For me, one of the main goals of such a critical-posthumanist position would be to be critical of computational or informational theories that reduce the richness of being and organic matter to the poverty of ones and zeros—favoured by most Artificial Intelligence researchers and some Artificial Life researchers also—and to emphasise the very unpredictability, indeterminacy and irreducible multiplicity of human and nonhuman ‘life’, its incalculable différance and excess in the sense mentioned above. In order the better to pursue this revisionary critical-posthumanist project, I have shifted my focus from human-machine interactions to human-animal compositions, drawing on new evolutionary theories and philosophical texts that use concepts originating in the natural sciences for my reading of literary configurations of the human. At the same time, I have investigated works of narrative fiction that enact symbiogenetic accounts of the origins of species (which I will introduce later) and that, consequently, show us worlds inhabited by transgenic posthumans and couplings between human and nonhuman animals. Apart from the more widely discussed SF authors Octavia Butler and Greg Bear, who openly acknowledged their indebtedness to the work

4 Callus and Herbrechter are also the editors of the Rodopi book series Critical Posthumanisms. The quote is from their forthcoming introductory volume to the series.

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of Margulis, one of my finds is the American writer I discuss here, Paul di Filippo. Like Haraway, di Filippo is the author of a manifesto, Ribofunk: The Manifesto, that expresses a discontent with cyborg figurations: “the ‘cyber’ prefix has been irreparably debased by overuse, in vehicles ranging from comic books to bad movies. The tag now stands for nothing in the public mind but computer hacking and fanciful cyborgs such as Robocop” (1998). To balance this picture and to offer above all an alternative to cyberpunk, the SF genre inaugurated by William Gibson’s Neuromancer, di Filippo weighs in with ribofunk, an amalgam of “ribosome” and “funk”. Furthermore, it is a style of writing that is well suited to describe libidinal encounters that produce the spilling of juicy matters and hot rhythms in both human and animal bodies: “Ribofunk must be as sensual as sex, as unsparing in sweat, cum, bile and lymph as the body is prolific in these substances” 1998). This, indeed, is the stuff that the dreams of AMoT are made of. Di Filippo’s ribofunk novel leads us into an urban jungle, somewhere on the American Continent, into a future that is only a few years ahead of us. The protagonist is a 25-year-old woman called Kerry Hackett.5 The story begins with a wet dream (in every sense of the term): in her dream, Kerry finds herself in a rain forest, where she has the sex of her life—with a jaguar. After having a joint orgasm, the human female of the two sexual partners also turns into a jaguar, and they live happily ever after in this lush paradise. Reality, by contrast, is a nightmare: within only a few hours (or minutes of reading) Kerry is raped by her husband, by her boss and by a patrolling soldier. Utterly devastated, Kerry decides to throw herself into a mass of genetically engineered, one hundred percent totipotent cells—the benthic6—in the laboratory of the biotech company she works for as a secretary. Orgastically melting with this hypervital entity, Kerry dissolves yet emerges again as a new life form or, rather, it is the masculine-encoded benthic that absorbs both Kerry’s body and identity as well as her memories and experiences, and, in the process, becomes something more than the sum of Kerry’s reassembled parts:

5 The protagonist’s name is almost an anagram of author Kathy Acker, who died of cancer in 1997 and to whom the book is dedicated. 6 The benthos is an aggregation of organisms living on or at the bottom of a body of water. It is composed of a wide range of plants, animals and bacteria from all levels of the food web.

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manuela rossini Now begins Kerry Hackett’s transubstantiation, a conversion of flesh to more than flesh, a seachange of self. . . . imploding, her facial features vanish inward, as do her breasts. . . . Arms merge into torso, legs fuse, as the forked stick of her humanity backward eggs. . . . The next step of totipotent-directed evolution manifests first as fractally distributed ripples, as if a complex net beneath the grub’s epidermis were shaken from multiple points. Then, reprogramming and redefinition: from distal loci, perfect digits emerge, tender pink toes and fingers with nails already tinted a unique scarab green. . . . Hair rethatches skull, ears appear, and the Kerry-physiognomy, that unique assemblage of cartilage, jelly, muscle and bone, pushes out from inside like an image formed from behind in a toy composed of a million floating microscopic pins. Perfect from toenails to teeth, breathing deeply, the nude Kerry Hackett lies on the cold tiles. . . . Wrapped in virginal white . . . radiating a kind of abnormal, seductive vitality. . . . the pitcher-plant perfection of her reworked body. . . . squirms as if in heat. . . . her drupleted strawberry tongue . . . plainly autonomous and impossibly severed from its roots, poising there like a miniscule predator, toad or lizard. (p. 37)

Di Filippo describes this secular transubstantiation as “directed evolution” and “reprogramming”, which presupposes the existence of information or codes in the cells of an organism through which it will be possible to build an exact copy of the original body (or system) out of a million tiny particles now enclosed in another body (or system). In the course of the novel, however, it becomes clear that the text does not defend those theories labelled “gene fetishism” or “biological determinism” by their opponents. Neither does the text privilege the influence of the environment over the system, as in social or cultural constructivism. Rather, AMoT comes close to Oyama’s developmental systems theory (DTS) or paradigm of “constructivist interaction” (2000, p. 3), in that the novel seems to suggest that the (re)combination of genes within a system and environmental influence outside a system are co-constructing a new organism that is both unique and largely incalculable. Such an approach enables critical thought to move outside the nature-versus-culture or nature-versus-nurture divide while maintaining the interpretive paradigm of constructivism. Biological beings are indeed ‘constructed’, as Oyama remarks, but not only in the sense that they are actively and discursively construed by themselves and others, but also in the sense that they are, at every moment, products of, and participants in, their own and others’ developmental processes. They are not self-determining in any simple sense but they affect and ‘select’ influences on themselves by attending to and interpreting

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stimuli, by seeking environments and companions, by being susceptible to various factors, by evoking reactions from others. (pp. 180–181)

The politically and ethically relevant potential of DST consists primarily in the proposition that system and environment, inside and outside, are mutually determining; in other words, power, control and agency are neither here nor there, neither attributed to the self/subject nor to the other/object but are seen as multiple and distributed. A second important implication of DST is that we cannot legitimately define information as a binary code of ones and zeros, as a blueprint, fixed programme or stable representation of what a living organism will inevitable become and then eternally be. In AMoT ditto, the fact that there occurs another osmosis almost immediately after the symbiosis of the human protagonist with the benthic described above, might well be read as giving literary expression to this insight. The new, totipotent nonhuman substance with “a mouthful of tongues”, outwardly appearing as Kerry, disappears into the body of a certain Senhora Yemana and flies off to Bahia where she hopes to meet the jaguar of her dreams. In the Brazilian jungle she acts polymorphously perverse: mostly upon her initiative, she has sex with men and women, young and old ones, with jaguars and centaurs, soft, hard, vaginal, anal, oral, in all possible and impossible positions, for hours and with seemingly insatiable lust. In the sexual act, humans (of all sexes and genders) literally become the animals they have always been, as Alphonso Lingis observes: Far from the human libido naturally destining us to a member of our species and of the opposite sex, when anyone who has not had intercourse with other animals, has not felt the contented cluckings of a hen stroked on the neck and under the wings rumbling through his or her own flesh, has not kissed a calf ’s mouth raised to his or her own, has not mounted the smooth warm flanks of a horse, has not been aroused by the powdery feathers of cockatoos and the ardent chants of insects in the summer night, gets in the sack with a member of his or her own species, she and he are only consummating tension release, getting their rocks off. When we in our so pregnant expression, make love with someone of our own species, we also make love with the horse and the calf, the kitten and cockatoo, the powdery moths and the lustful crickets. . . . Our muscular and vertebrate bodies transubstantiate into ooze, slime, mammalian sweat, and reptilian secretions into minute tadpoles and releases of hot moist breath nourishing the floating microorganisms of the night air. (2003, pp. 170–172, italics in original)

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The zoopoetics at work here means more than simply representing animals.7 As Steven Connor writes about zoopoetical texts in general: “It means letting animals in on meaning, even allowing the animality of meaning” so that “[animals] would exert distinctive forms of pull and pressure on the work of meaning”.8 If we apply a zoopoetical reading to AMoT, we could say that the representation of ‘animal sex’ (between human animals and between humans and nonhuman animals) function as axes of transformation of what it means to be human or animal, man or woman, etc. As we come (together), Lingis writes in the foreplay to his observations on human sexuality in the same text, “our impulses, our passions, are returned to animal irresponsibility” (p. 172). This is not, however, irresponsibility in the sense of not responding to the partner(s) seduction and touch, but irresponsibility as non-response to the everyday interpellations that turn our bodies into well-functioning, competent and hence efficient wheels in the production machine of capitalism. Nor is it irresponsibility in the sense of the irrational, instinctive and uncontrollable (human) behaviour that in our society is negatively associated with “animal sex”. It is, rather, that the very ‘animality’ of our passions renders human sexuality more sensual and creative, opening up a multiplicity of “libidinal zones”, as Elizabeth Grosz names the localised and particular regions and scenes of “joyous or painful encounters” and “corporeal intensification” where, “through experimentation, practices, innovations, the accidents or contingencies of life itself, the coming together of surfaces, incisive practices, inscriptions”, bodies and the world as a whole are “continually in the process of being produced, renewed, transformed” (1995, p. 199). Libidinal desire is here not described as a human body’s regression and longing for some preoedipal and infantile state, as in Freudian psychoanalysis, but as being propelled forward through interchange with an other that beckons from outside the self, an other that is not necessarily human, not even animal (cp. p. 200).

7 I adapt Derrida’s word “zoopoetics” here, used by the philosopher to describe the preoccupation with animal being(s) in writers like Kafka and others (2004, p. 115). 8 The excerpts are from the online publication on Connor’s website of bits and pieces that were not herded into the covers of his book Fly, published in 2006 within in the Reaktion Animal series.

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In contrast to such a decidedly posthumanist understanding of desire and sexuality, a humanist reading faithful to Freud would interpret Kerry’s dream of having sexual intercourse with a jaguar as the manifestation of a perverse desire to blur the boundaries between humans and animals. The ‘cure’ psychoanalysis would then devise is a taming of the beast through the elimination of all that is improper; i.e. not proper to the human. As feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti writes in her book Metamorphoses: non-human drives for multiple encounters, wild bodily motives, heightened sensory perception and unbridled sexual activity, have to be assimilated or incorporated into a well-organised and functioning organism and by analogy, into well-regulated and normal orgasms. (p. 140)

The domestication and disciplining of individual bodies according to the rule of a scientific discourse of ‘normality’ described here corresponds to the central split Michel Foucault identified in his history of sexuality at the onset of modernity in Western societies; i.e., the split between ars erotica and sciencia sexualis (1990, p. 67). AmoT is a shameless celebration of the former, insofar as di Filippo gets ‘ribofunky’, pouring all his energy into painting the erotic and sexual activities of the novel’s protagonist in the most creative way. At first sight, these portrayals seem to be less an affirmation of Kerry’s libido than the stereotypical outpour from the pen of a sexist author (ultimately di Filippo but also the author-character in the book who tells the story), denigrating female sexuality as animalistic and dangerous for the male member of the human species—especially since he also uses the nickname “She-Beast” for the horny heroine. Confronting di Filippo with my unease in another e-mail after I had made it to through the “sweat and cum” of this ribofunk novel, however, I was assured that the author is primarily concerned with showing the destabilising, border- and category-crossing effects and affects of sexual intercourse for all the involved partners—male or female, human or animal. In this respect, AMoT flirts strongly with the definition of sexuality by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as the ‘becoming-Beast’, so to speak, of Man: Sexuality is the production of a thousand sexes, which are so many uncontrollable becomings. Sexuality proceeds by way of becoming-woman of the man and the becoming-animal of the human: an emission of particles. . . . Becomings-animal are basically of another power, since their reality resides not in an animal one imitates or to which one corresponds

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manuela rossini but in themselves, in that which suddenly sweeps us up and makes us become—a proximity, an indiscernibility that extracts a shared element from the animals far more effectively than any domestication, utilization, or imitation could: ‘the Beast’ . (1987, p. 279; my emphasis)

The incitement to becoming-animal is often misunderstood: Deleuze and Guattari do not mean that human beings should really turn into animals or engage in sex with, say, a dog. The idea is, rather, that while having sex our organs function like those of animals and, for the duration, manage to escape the organisational and stratificatory power of societal norms. Like Deleuze and Guattari, di Filippo seems to subscribe to the point of view, also expressed by Peter Singer, Jonathan Balcombe and others referenced by Bakke in this section of the book, that the “shared element” is the experience of pleasure. By challenging the essentialist argument that human and animal sexualities or, by the same logic though not by analogy, male and female sexualities are completely different, I do not want to say that they are exactly of the same kind—the same species, so to speak. It would be foolish—and dangerous—to believe this. I second Grosz’s claim, rather, that in libidinal encounters both parties are “metamorphosed”, insofar as “both become something other, something incapable of being determined in advanced [sic], and perhaps even in retrospect, but which nonetheless have perceptibly shifted and realigned” (1995, p. 200). There is a concomitant shift in analytical focus here also: from what a body is to what a desirous body does when (be)coming-together with another desirous body, producing a new com-position instead of opposing one another as fixed or given identities. In AMoT the transformative and destabilising power of libidinal encounters with regard to sexual dimorphism, finds an articulation in the following scene, among others: when the metamorphic Senhora Yemana—alias She-Beast, alias Kerry Hackett—is asked by a formerly male character she has just changed into a woman with the use of her own sexual organs, while she herself has turned into a person perceived as ‘male’, “Your womanly essence—how can this develop into my male parts?”, she answers: “I am neither man nor woman . . . I am both and neither” (p. 117). In short, even though impersonating a female human being, she represents a tertiary, anti-essentialist logic. As such, she can be said to function like the boy-actor on the Renaissance stage or, even more so, like the Alien in the Alien movies. The Alien, in Kelly Hurley’s reading, is a posthumanist figuration that enables us “to imagine otherwise”, especially to image human identity beyond the

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constituting logic of genital difference (penis/no penis): “to imagine other (alien) systems of reproduction, other (alien) logics of identity”, to even guide us towards “another (alien) logic of ‘the human’, one predicated only occasionally and incidentally on categories of sexual difference” (1995, p. 211). Senhora Yemana not only modifies her sex and outer shape, but also those of her human and nonhuman partners. In each case, however, the shape shifting is not described in linear or binary fashion, where a person is female or human one minute and male or an animal the next, but as a continuous, symbiogenetic process of mutual transformation. As the story moves forward, the totipotent mass in the human skin of Kerry continues to lose her humanness, becoming more alien or nonhuman with every page. Through a mystical intervention reminiscent of magic realism, the metamorphic process is reversed; that is, a shaman manages to return the metamorphic body into its original benthic state only, however, to initiate the osmosis of a entire indigenous tribe: “Flesh lost its boundaries, neighbor melting into neighbor . . . like an immense stranded jellyfish”. Then this compound, this “featureless lump of living matter”, evolves into a gigantic jaguar “some hundred bodies large” (p. 165). And also in other parts of the world, an increasing number of human beings change into animals. To be precise: each individual person does not transform himself or herself into a single new form of life, but into a swarm. Kerry’s husband, for example, dissolves into “butterfly by butterfly” ( p. 211), another one into “bird by bird” ( p. 213). The numerous descriptions throughout the novel of the mergings, osmotic fusions and disappearances of bodies into other bodies, resonate strongly with Margulis’s theory of symbiogenesis or morphogenesis, according to which eukaryotes (animals, plants, fungi, protists with a nucleus in their cells) owe their existence to bacteria, prokaryotic (nucleus-free) life forms which emerged out of the oceans’ benthos, where they had bubbled each other up, ‘infected’ and ingested each other and, later on, acquired and exchanged genes from and between different species. Such an insistence on symbiotic couplings is diametrically opposed to the militaristic and capitalist rhetoric of survival of the fittest which Darwin had taken over from social philosopher Herbert Spencer as a synonym for “natural selection”, even though The Origin of Species clearly argues that identities and differences emerge exclusively through mutation and interconnectivity between different life forms, and not through competition between individuals and species. Moreover,

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microbes as the ancestors of human cells undermine anthropological (and anthropocentric) truth-claims regarding the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. By confirming the Darwinian thesis that the genealogy of the human starts with nonhuman matter, microbes thus help us to redraw the boundary between nonhuman and human animals. Margulis’s theory of the bacterial origins of new species also serves my larger purpose to use biology not only as a field for Feminist Science Studies but as a source of inspiration for a theoretically and politically relevant understanding of subjectivity, identity and embodiment (cp. Wilson 2002: 285). Bacteria, as sociologist Myra Hird has demonstrated, are a useful category of analysis with which to denaturalise the sex/gender system, to advance queer thinking and, not least of all, an ethics of difference. Since bacteria “recognize and avidly embrace diversity, they do not discriminate on the basis of ‘gender’ differences at all.” Having recourse to another book by Margulis, namely What is Sex?, Hird reminds us that the bacteria that entered our bodies and move freely within them are as “infinitely ‘gender’ diverse, as are most of the species on this planet” (2002: 104). Or, in the words of SF writer Greg Bear, who explicitly draws on the endosymbiotic theory of Margulis: “we’re all different sexes, inside” (2002; my emphasis).9 We may hence conclude that the human body—at least on the level of its material interior—is not sexually dimorphic. Nor is the human body purely ‘human’ but, rather, an intersexual, unstable, unfinished ‘work in progress’ as a result of heterogeneous exchange with its environment. Luciana Parisi takes a step further the implications of the definition of sex by Margulis and Sagan as “a genetic mixing of organisms that operate on a variety of levels” that “in the biological sense has nothing to do with copulation; neither is it intrinsically related to reproduction or gender” (1997, p. 285). Disconnecting sex not only from gender and reproduction but also from bodies as organic entities, she has coined the label “abstract sex” to include in her definition of sexuality the productive coming-together, exchange, amalgamation and creation of the new by elements from all levels of life, not only bacterial and organic but also inorganic, geological or climactic ones, etc. (2004, cp. p. viii). In its abstract form, sex might also include the inhuman matter of language and its equally composing and decomposing agency. Hence, the various metamorphoses through interspecies sex of AMoT could also be read 9

This sentence appears on the first, unnumbered page of the book.

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metaphorically as a metareflection on writing and its potential to undo the humanist subject and its supportive phallogocentric structures, including the sex/gender system and the animal-human divide. The link between sexual promiscuity and language/writing as also always being in excess and producing disruptive ambiguities, can be found in the following passage from Bruce Clarke’s Allegories of Writing: Metamorphic monstrosity represents the uncanny productivity of linguistic reproduction, an illicit fornication in the basement brothel of the verbal imagination always breeding new figures. The promiscuous nature of metamorphic procreation can disrupt any discursive system. Metamorphic episodes . . . insert an unpredictable play into rational structures. (1995, p. 84)

More broadly speaking, the analogy described in this quotation allows me to connect developmental processes of living systems to processes of writing. Again, I follow Clarke who in his posthumanist ‘sequel’ to the earlier book, reads “narratives of bodily metamorphosis as allegories of the contingencies of systems” (2008, p. 11) and as exemplification of the potential of writing to transform given and normative forms of subjectivity and corporeal being. Seen from this perspective, writing can act as a pharmakon in the Derridean sense; i.e. as a material substance entering a body from without and transforming the self—akin to bacteria, in fact. Writing thus resembles the ants on Escher’s Moebius strip: it is a perpetually wandering outcast that dwells neither entirely outside nor entirely inside the logocentric system. As I hope to have shown, this subversiveness of the marginal or liminal characterises not only the narration of AMoT but also the power—the “totipotent tropicanalia”—of the novel’s hypermorphic protagonist. At the end of the book, we read that protagonist Kerry has become a “sphinx-like” creature, half-jaguar, half-woman who engages her former Afro-American colleague Oreesha Presser in oral sex until “the black woman loses her familiar shape also, . . . exchanging it for a form that sisters Kerry’s” (pp. 179–80). When, thanks to the totipotent tongue of She-Beast, “[a] final gestalt of change ripples over both women, extending upward from their animal-human interface, leaving them complete jaguar twins” (p. 180), there seems to be an ontological closure, an end to instability. But it is the nature of the kind of nomadic subjects that metamorphs are to “saunter boldly off ” (p. 180), as it says in the penultimate line of the novel, just as it is intrinsic to narratives to “travel” (Bal 1997, p. 137). And thus the text ends as it began, moving “[i]nto that deep, dark, dangerous dream”. Instead of suggesting a repetition

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of the same, however, there is instead the promise of endless becomings, of coming together and co-habiting the earth as companion species. As a dream ultimately dreamt by the author, and also as a story within a story—in the course of the novel, we actually learn that what we have read so far is the text written by a certain Luis Salvador—AMoT ditto is the kind of self-conscious composition that according to Clarke is typical of all literary metamorphoses. Again, we can construct a parallel between the narratological device of textual embeddedness and the biological theory of (endo)symbiosis that has been central to this essay:10 the situation of text within text corresponds to the situation of a symbiont living within a host, such as bacteria in the gut of human and nonhuman animal. It is thus an appropriate narrative structure for a posthumanist, post-anthropocentric understanding of what it means to be a living organism. Furthermore, by emphasising the dream logic of texts, di Filippo insists that, as he wrote in another e-mail conversation, “everything that manifests in the human sphere of reality starts out as a thought and/or dream!” The reader is reminded that we have the freedom to imagine the future of humanity in our own terms—and also the future of the humanities. Just as I imagine a future where difference can be fully celebrated rather than (ab)used for the objectification and suppression of the other—whether that other be defined in terms of gender, race, sexuality, animal or machine—I dream of the humanities morphing into the posthumanities before long.11 This dream reflects my desire for more appropriate terms and categories of critical and cultural analysis to deal with the complex entanglements between human and nonhuman actors, things and institutions, or when confronted with the kind of subjectivities and new life forms emerging from these encounters. What is needed more than ever is an intersectional analysis and inter- or transdisciplinary (if not post-disciplinary) research teams where various approaches, concepts and actors enter into dialogue, to the mutual benefit and flourishing not only of each field but above all of each of the human and nonhuman animals comingtogether in it.

10 For a thorough coupling of biological and narrative embedding that draws on Mieke Bal’s narratology and systems theory, see Clarke 2008. 11 I would like to draw attention at this point to Cary Wolfe’s book series of this title with Minnesota University Press: http://www.upress.umn.edu/byseries/posthumanities .html.

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References Bal, Mieke. 1997 (2nd ed.). Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. Bear, Greg. 2002. W3. Women in Deep Time. New York: ibooks. Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphoses. Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity Press. Callus, Ivan and Stefan Herbrechter. 2008 (forthcoming). Critical Posthumanism. An Introduction. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Clarke, Bruce. 1995. Allegories of Writing. The Subject of Metamorphosis. Albany: State University of New York Press. ——. 2008. Posthuman Metamorphosis. Narrative and Systems. New York: Fordham University Press. Connor, Steven. No date. ‘The Antient Commonwealth of Flies’. http://www.stevenconnor .com/flies (accessed on 18 July 2008). Cultural Critique 53 (Winter 2003). Special issue: Posthumanism. Edited by Bart Simon, Jill Didur and Teresa Heffernan. Deleuze Giles and Félix Guattari [1980] 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Sciophrenia. Translated from the French by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2004. “The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow)”. In Animal Philosophy. Edited by Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco, 113–128. London: Continuum. Di Filippo, Paul. 1998. ‘Ribofunk: The Manifesto’. http://www.streettech.com/bcp/ BCPgraf/ Manifestos/Ribofunk.html (accessed on 16 March 2008). ——. 2003. A Mouthful of Tongues. Her Totipotent Tropicanalia. Canton: Cosmos Books. Foucault, Michael. [1976] 1990. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1. An Introduction. Translated from the French by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin Books. Fuss, Diana. 1996. ‘Introduction: Human, All Too Human’. In Human, All Too Human. Edited by Dina Fuss, 1–7. New York: Routledge. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1995. Space, Time, and Perversion. New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. ——. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto. Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hird, Myra. 2002. ‘Re(pro)ducing Sexual Difference’. Parallax 8 (4): 94–107. Hurley, Kelly. 1995. ‘Reading Like an Alien’. In Posthuman Bodies. Edited by Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, 203–224. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lingis, Alphonso. 2003. ‘Animal Body, Inhuman Face’. In Zoontologies. The Question of the Animal. Edited by Cary Wolfe, 15–182. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan. 2002. Acquiring Genomes. A Theory of the Origins of Species. New York: Basic Books. ——. 1997. Slanted Truths. Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis, and Evolution. New York: Copernicus. Margulis, Lynn. 1997. What Is Sex? New York: Simon and Schuster. Oyama, Susan. 2000. Evolution’s Eye. A System’s View of the Biology-Culture Divide. Durham: Duke University Press. Parisi, Luciana. 2004. Abstract Sex. Philosophy, Bio-Technology and the Mutations of Desire. London: Continuum. Rossini, Manuela. 2005. ‘Figurations of Posthumanity in Contemporary Science/ Fiction—all too Human(ist)?’ Revista canaria de estudios ingleses 50: 21–36.

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——. 2006. ‘To the Dogs: Companion Speciesism and the New Materialist Feminism’. Kritikos 3, http://intertheory.org/rossini (accessed on 13 July 2008). ——. 2008 (forthcoming). ‘Zoontologien: Companion Species und Ribofunk als theoretische und literarische Beiträge zu einem kritisch-posthumanistischen Feminismus’. In Gender Goes Life. Die Lebenswissenschaften als Herausforderung für die Gender Studies. Edited by Marie-Luise Angerer und Christiane König. Bielefeld: transkript. Wilson, Elizabeth. 2002. ‘Biologically Inspired Feminism: response to Helen Keane and Marsha Rosengarten, “On the Biology of Sexed Subjects” ’. Australian Feminist Studies 17 (39): 283–285.

INDEX abattoir 94, 127 abjectivity 74 Abram, David 31 absent referent 47–49, 52, 58–59, 65–66, 69, 79 Ad-Damīrī 4 Adams, Carol J. 4, 45, 47–72, 79, 83–84 adder 151 Adventures with Wild Animals (Russell) 32, 35 Africa 6, 89, 115, 125 agon (άγών) 1–3, 8 agriculture 100, 117, 127, 152, 160, 172, 174–95 (see also farm) Allen, Woody 90 ambergris 77 America 5, 7, 13, 29, 34, 36, 40, 46, 73–95, 172, 234, 247, 255 American Poultry Association 179 anatomy 6, 67, 135, 137–55, 182, 221 Anatomy of Melancholy, The (Burton) 144, 152 Andress, Ursula 67 androcentric 219, 224, 230–36 Animal Farm (Orwell) 70 Animal Liberation (Singer) 61, 79, 159, 138 animal rights 15, 45, 52, 56, 60–61, 64, 122, 124, 129, 142, 213 animal rights activist 16, 50, 138, 198, 202, 204 animal studies 2–8, 41–42, 57, 219 anthropozoology 2 anthrozoology 2, 46, 73, 75, 87–88, 90, 94 human-animal studies 2 zooanthropology 2 ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’ (Derrida) 18, 39, 122–23, 203, 250 animal welfare 60, 130, 159, 180 animality 23–24, 80, 83, 93, 122, 223, 229, 250 animation (see cartoon) animism 15 ant 90, 92, 255

anthropocentrism 11, 19, 23–24, 30, 46, 75, 79, 94, 135, 148, 194, 219, 221–29, 234, 239–41, 254 homocentric 239 humanocentric 55 post-anthropocentric 219–20, 223, 239, 256 anthropomorphism 4, 11, 13–24, 33– 34, 91, 131, 133, 141, 163, 222 anthropomorphite 13–14, 23–24 humanization 20 anthropozoology (see animal studies) anthrozoology (see animal studies) antler 28 Antz 46, 90 ape 130, 142–148, 165, 221 (see also primate) aquarium 47, 90 Arabia 4, 6 Arctic 29 Aristotle 5, 138, 140, 142–43, 154 armadillo 94 art 3–5, 7, 45, 49, 79, 89, 160, 164, 168, 172, 197–217, 224, 226, 229, 231–39 artist 5, 48, 74, 77, 79, 93, 172, 197–217, 219–20, 234–35, 239 Avedon, Richard 46, 80–82, 84–85 baboon (see Hamadryas baboon) bacon 59, 84 Bacon, Francis 140 bacteria 247, 253–56 Baker, Steve 7, 16, 172, 197–218 Bakke, Monika 7, 219–20, 221–42, 252 Banting, Pamela 4, 12, 27–44 Barbieri, Annalisa 81, 85 Barthes, Roland 27, 41 bat 21–23, 93–94 beak 35, 53, 66 bear 12, 21–23, 29–33, 38–39, 45 panda 91 Rupert Bear 14 Winnie the Pooh 48, 50 Bear, Greg 246, 254 Beast, The 67–68 beast-machine (bête machine) 56, 138–39

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beaver 33, 79 becoming-animal 251–52 bee 30, 32 beef 45, 51, 65, 84 behaviorism 14, 17, 76, 93, 162 benthos 247, 253 Berger, John 50, 159 bestiality 7, 138, 219, 221–42 (see also zoophilia) Bible, The 13, 139, 141 Genesis 138, 142, 152 Old Testament 13, 225 binary 51–52, 67, 138, 244, 249, 253 biomedical research 52, 57–58, 129 bird 7, 22, 30, 32, 38, 41, 59, 66, 77– 78, 148–49, 162, 168, 171, 173– 96, 205, 243, 253 ‘Birth of a Vegetarian, The’ (Mankoff ) 47 Blahnik, Manolo 46, 82 blood 6, 33–34, 38, 49, 115, 128–29, 141–42, 146, 149–50, 181, 187–88, 192 blood poisoning 187 blood tunnel 186–88 bluebird 38 body language 17, 225 bone 7, 27, 37, 146–48, 165–66, 171, 186, 248 Bourdieu, Pierre 53 Braidotti, Rosi 220, 240–41, 251 breed 55–56, 75, 87, 89, 163–64, 184, 186, 201–03, 214, 244, 255 broiler 179, 185, 189 (see also chicken) Browne, Thomas 135, 143, 155 Buck, Frank 89–90 Budiansky, Stephen 16–19, 23–24 Bulliet, Richard 6 Burghardt, Gordon 19, 23 Burt, Jonathan 6, 136, 159–70, 209– 10, 214, 217 Burton, Robert 136, 143–44, 152–54 butcher 35, 49, 69, 83–84, 175, 194 butter 111–13 butterfly 243, 253 Caillois, Roger 168, 241 calf (see cow) Camden Arts Centre 172, 197, 205, 207–08 camel 1–9, 82 dromedary 4 ‘the ship of the desert’ 4 CamelCase 3

Cameron, Jenny 190–94 Canada 12, 29, 32, 38–41, 59 cannibalism 53, 66, 123 capitalism 51–54, 136, 159, 250, 253 car 38, 51–53, 64, 231 carnival 75, 88–89 carnivore 27, 70 carnophallogocentrism 222 Cartesian (see Descartes) cartoon 47, 90–91, 94 Case for Animal Rights, The (Regan) 55 castor 77 cat 16, 39, 74, 79, 85, 109, 125, 203, 205 (see also tiger) kitten 85–87, 90, 223, 249 cattle (see cow) Chamberlin, J. Edward 39 Chanel 46, 82 charnelhouse 205, 213 chicken 7, 16, 46, 53–54, 58, 69–70, 77, 79, 90, 93–95, 118, 151, 171–72, 173–96, 249 (see also broiler, cockerel and poultry) chicken poisoning 187 chimpanzee 16, 137 circus 17, 56, 65, 81, 89 civet 79 Clarke, Bruce 162, 255–56 class 53, 69–70, 184 Clever Hans 16–18 clownfish (see fish) cockatoo 249 cockerel 194 (see also chicken) Coetzee, J.M. 98, 124–25 colonial 42, 54–55 commodity 53, 64–65, 82, 85 community 16, 31, 119, 126, 165, 175–77, 184–85, 189, 192, 194, 203, 213, 225 companion animal 7, 171–72, 175, 180, 182, 188, 191, 211, 225, 237 pet 55–56, 87, 111, 216, 222 virtual pet (see digital game) companion species 5, 32, 98, 115–34, 133, 143, 219–20, 245–46, 256 Companion Species Manifesto, The (Haraway) 143, 222, 244 computer game (see digital game) Connor, Steven 250 consciousness 13, 37, 42, 55, 67, 94, 190, 194 conservation 52, 54–55, 159 consumer 47–48, 53, 56, 59, 64–66, 85, 87, 90, 176, 183 convergent evolution (see evolution)

index Coolidge, Cassius 92–93 cosmopolitics 125–26 cougar 12, 29, 34, 38 cow 13, 45, 48–51, 58–60, 65–66, 69, 74, 84, 115, 127, 181 (see also ox) calf 54, 223, 249 Mad Cow Disease 59–60 CowParade 48–50, 66 coyote 29 creatureliness 135, 141–42 Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease 60 Crichton, Michael 70 C.S.A. (Community Supported Agriculture) 176 cyborg 161, 244–47 Darwin, Charles 137, 253–54 Dawkins, Richard 21–22 De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Vesalius) 144, 147 de Waal, Frans 16, 18–19 Deacon, Rob 203–04 deer 33–34, 77, 94 Dekkers, Midas 225, 228–31 Deleuze, Gilles 126, 220, 240, 251–52 Dennett, Daniel 14, 19, 22, 24 Derrida, Jacques 18, 27–28, 39, 98, 121–23, 203, 222, 250 Descartes, René 56, 138–39, 150, 153 Di Filippo, Paul 8, 220, 243–58 diet 5, 58, 64, 85, 99–104, 108, 184 Caveman diet 64 Neanderthal diet 64 digital game 4, 45, 56, 246 virtual pet 56–57 dinosaur 70 Dior 80–81, 83 Disgrace (Coetzee) 98, 124–25 Disney 46, 90–91 dissection 142, 144–45, 148, 151–53 (see also experiment and vivisection) Djinn 1–3, 8 DNA 60, 74, 137, 244 (see also gene) dog 1, 3, 8, 12, 16, 33, 75, 92–93, 124–27, 128, 142, 146–47, 151, 203, 205, 220, 224, 229–31, 236, 239, 244–45, 252 dolphin 22, 23, 47–48 dove 74, 151 ‘Dovima with Elephants’ (Avedon) 46, 80–82, 85 dromedary (see camel) eagle 64 early modernity

6, 53, 135, 137–157

261

‘Eat My Fear’ (Lynch) 45, 44–49 echolocation 21–22 ecology 31, 35, 73–76, 79–80, 84, 87, 90–91, 98, 117–18, 124, 130, 240 economy 7, 54, 76, 97, 117, 163, 171, 173–96 ecosystem 73, 75, 77 Edenmont, Nathalia 74 eel 151 Eeyore 48 egg 7, 171, 173–96 Egg and I, The (MacDonald) 183–85, 192–93 elephant 46, 55, 75, 80–85, 93, 138 elk 12, 34–35, 38 (see also moose) empathy 46, 91, 171, 173–78, 182, 188–89 endosymbiosis (see symbiosis) Enlightenment 68, 124, 135, 137, 139 Europe 17, 29, 34, 39–40, 53, 138, 226, 228, 231–32 evolution 5–6, 11, 14, 19, 21–22, 137, 145, 162, 167, 243, 246, 248, 254 (see also natural selection) convergent evolution 21–22 experiment 5, 7, 17, 57, 61, 65, 76, 97–134, 151, 159–70, 171–72, 179, 197, 202–04, 210, 214, 250 (see also dissection and vivisection) aesthetic experiments 197–218 extinction 55, 89, 132 Exxon 55 Family of the Future (Kulik) 234, 236–39 farm 7, 45, 51–54, 56, 61, 64, 66, 67, 70, 171, 173–96, 226 (see also agriculture) factory farm 52, 54, 56, 64, 79, 118, 195, 185–89 Farmer, Nancy 98, 115–16, 119, 124 fashion 27, 46, 77–84 faux fur (see fur) feather 7, 27, 32, 64, 94, 171, 173, 249 fellow-feeling 7, 54, 171–72, 173–96 feminism 3, 30, 36, 61, 68, 117, 122, 125–26, 129, 131, 189–94, 220, 243–44, 251, 254 fetishism 15, 56, 73, 80, 87, 91–92, 248 Finding Nemo 46, 90–92 fish 16, 21, 38, 47, 58, 70, 90–92, 193, 205 clownfish 90–92 tuna fish 47

262

index

Fitzgerald, Deborah 175 fly 162, 250 Ford, Henry 51–53 Foucault, Michel 1–2, 152–53, 251 Freud, Sigmund 73, 81–82, 92, 163, 168, 250–51 ‘Friend in Need, A’ (Coolidge) 92–93 ‘Friendly Owl, The’ (Russell) 35 frog 162 Fudge, Erica 74, 138 fur 6–7, 27, 33, 64, 77, 110, 166, 171 fake fur 45, 64 Galen 135, 141–49 Garrison, Daniel 144–47 Gaylin, Willard 15–16 gene 5, 19, 59–60, 74, 122, 137–38, 141, 245, 248, 253–54 (see also DNA) Genesis (see Bible) GFP Bunny 74 Gibson-Graham, J.K. 190–95 giraffe 82, 91 Girl Named Disaster, A (Farmer) 98, 115–16, 119, 124 Gould, Stephen Jay 22 Gouwens, Kenneth 146, 148 Grassi, Lawrence 37 ‘Greater Tuna’ 47–48, 50 Grosz, Elizabeth 220, 223, 229–30, 234, 236–37 Guiliani, Rudi 61, 63 guinea pig 98, 115, 119, 124, 205 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 105–07 hair 7, 33, 42, 143, 166, 171, 248 ham 84 Hamadryas baboon 165–68 Haraway, Donna J. 5, 98, 115–34, 137, 139, 143, 159, 163, 167, 220, 222, 244–47 hare 33 Harmon, Byron 28 Harvey, David 135, 142, 149–53 Harvey, William 51–53, 64–69 Hassan, Ihab 51, 65 Heidegger, Martin 11, 20–23, 122 hen (see chicken) herd 34, 40 Hirst, Damien 74, 81, 93 Historiae animalium (Gesner) 143–44 History of Sex (‘Red Pebbles’) (Serrano) 219, 234–36 Homer 13 Homo sapiens 15, 22, 36, 123, 137, 141, 254 homocentric (see anthropocentrism)

honey 7, 171 hoof 4, 12, 17, 27, 33, 225 horse 1, 3, 8, 13, 16–18, 143, 181, 234–35, 249 ‘How the Camel Got His Hump’ (Kipling) 1 human-animal studies (see Animal Studies) human exceptionalism 6, 135, 137–57 humanism 74–76, 80, 117, 122–24, 130, 161, 249 (see also posthuman) humanities 2, 113, 136, 163, 220, 256 humanization (see anthropomorphism) humanocentric (see anthropocentrism) Hume, David 13 humoral system 140–42 hunting 18, 30–31, 33, 35, 39, 55, 64, 89, 193 hybrid 109, 138, 162–64, 209, 243 ice cream 76, 83, 93 ideology 53–54, 73–76, 135, 143, 155, 232 in vitro research 52, 57–58 Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, An (Smith) 175, 189–94 insect 115–16, 128–29, 168, 173, 234, 241, 249 intertextuality 27–28 intra-action 116–17 Iraq 76 irony 45, 51, 57, 61, 65, 154, 168 jaguar 243, 247–55 Jameson, Frederic 50 jellyfish 74, 253 junk food 76, 85–86 Jurassic Park (Crichton) 70 Just So Stories (Kipling) 1 Kac, Eduardo 74 Kanga 48 kangaroo 45, 48 Kant, Immanuel 20, 121 Kennedy, John 14–15, 18–19, 23 Kimbell, Lucy 7, 172, 197–218 ‘King Elk, The’ (Russell) 12, 34 Kipling, Rudyard 1–3, 8 kitsch 46, 87, 92 kitten (see cat) ‘Kleo’ (Russell) 12, 34 Koran (see Qur ān) Kristeva, Julia 27 Kulik, Oleg 219–20, 234, 236–39

index laboratory 99–114, 120, 127, 131–32, 159, 163–64, 168, 172, 198, 214, 247 Lagerfeld, Karl 82 lamb 47–48, 50, 146 Lamb Chop (puppet) 47, 50 Lang, Helmut 82–84 Larson, Gary 94–95 Las Vegas 46, 87, 89–90 Latour, Bruno 113, 137 leather 7, 64, 74, 77, 171, 175 leopard 19 Lewes, George Henry 14 Lewis, Sheri 47, 50 libel-ity 52, 64–65 libido 7, 219–20, 221–42, 247, 249–52 lice 173 Liebenberg, Louis 39–40 Lingis, Alphonso 220, 221, 223, 228, 241 lion 13 Lives of Animals, The (Coetzee) 98, 124–25 Lolita (movie) 67 Lord, Linda 171, 177, 185–89, 192–95 Luce, Nancy 171, 173–77, 179–86, 188, 191–92, 194–95 Lupton, Julia 141 Lyman, Howard 65 Lynch, David 45, 48–50 MacDonald, Betty 171, 177, 183–86, 192–95 magic 1, 12, 27, 42, 87, 253 Malamud, Randy 5, 46, 54, 71, 73–96 mammal 30, 37, 59, 74, 99, 165, 171, 222–23, 249 Manes, Christopher 36 Margulis, Lynn 220, 239, 244–47, 253–54 Marty, Sid 4, 12, 32, 35–42 Maturana, Humberto 162 McDonald’s 65 McLibel case 65 MEART (Multi Electrode Array aRT) 164, 209–10 meat 4, 7, 45, 47–71, 74, 83–84, 118, 125, 127, 171 mock meat 52, 58–59 media 27, 45–46, 48, 69, 89, 202 Melville, Herman 85 Mendel, Lafayette B. 99, 105, 108, 110–13 metamorphosis 8, 23, 220, 243, 251–56 metaphysics 51, 65, 222

263

Mickey Mouse 61, 90 Middle Ages 4, 6, 24, 39 Midgley, Mary 14, 23, 159 Miletski, Hani 219, 224–27, 230–31 milk 7, 61–63, 99, 171 Milne, Christopher 48 Milton, John 2 mind-body dualism 117, 139, 244 Moby-Dick (Melville) 85 modernism 50–65, 68 (see also postmodernism) mollusc 14–15, 23 monkey 16, 19, 135, 148, 165–69 Montecore 87–89 moose 32, 38 (see also elk) more-than-human 4, 7, 11, 30–32, 41, 172, 217 Morris water maze 210 mouse 38, 61, 74, 90, 111, 120, 130, 163, 199, 205–06 (see also OncoMouse) Mouthful of Tongues: Her Totipotent Tropicanalia, A (di Filippo) 8, 220, 243–58 musk 77 myth 82, 229, 232 Nader, Ralph 64 Nagel, Thomas 22, 94 Narcissus 23 National Cattleman’s Beef Association 65 National Fish and Wildlife Foundation 55 natural selection 18, 220–21, 253 (see also evolution) naturalist 36, 143 nest 27, 32 Nevada 46, 87–90 New Age 64, 118 New York Times, The 48, 51, 65–66, 82, 137, 176 New Yorker, The 47 Nietzsche, Friedrich 20, 245 Nordstrom, Ursula 70 ‘Old Trolls of Lake O’Hara, The’ (Marty) 37–38 Olympia (Manet) 67–68 Olympic Peninsula 183, 185, 192 OncoMouse 120, 163 One Night with Rats in the Service of Art (Kimbell) 172, 197–206, 211, 215–17 orangutan 76, 93 Orwell, George 70

264

index

Osborne, Thomas B. 99, 105, 108–13 Oyama, Susan 220, 243, 248 owl 33, 35, 48 ox 1, 3, 8, 146, 151, 181 (see also cow) pain 54, 98, 115–22, 126–31, 178, 190, 250 panda (see bear) Park, Katherine 145, 154 Parisi, Luciana 254 Passions of the Soul, The (Descartes) 138 Paster, Gail Kern 141 paw 4, 12, 27, 33, 42 pearl 7, 171 Penobscot Poultry 185–89, 192–93 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) 45, 61–63, 69 perfume 77–79 Persimmon (Rauschenberg) 68 pesco-vegetarian (see vegetarian) pet (see companion animal) virtual pet (see digital game) Peterson, John (‘Farmer John’) 176 Pfungst, Oscar 17 phallus 81, 232–35 phallogocentrism 228, 231, 234, 255 (see also carnophallogocentrism) pig 53, 67–70, 74, 84, 90, 118, 142 Pinky 180–81, 191 Plato 7 Playboar 67–69 Plumwood, Val 21, 30, 41 poetry 2, 4, 27, 29, 34, 36, 38, 40, 124, 171, 173, 175–76, 179–82, 191, 199 (see also zoopoetics) pollo-vegetarian (see vegetarian) ‘Poor Little Heart’ (Luce) 180–82 Pop-Tarts 85 porcupine 38 pork 45, 84, 90 possum 94 post-anthropocentric (see anthropocentrism) posthuman 3, 6, 8, 30, 76, 90, 95, 135–36, 139, 159–70, 219–20, 239, 243–44, 246, 251–52, 255–56 posthumanities 220, 256 postmodernism 4, 41–42, 45–46, 82, 47–71, 160–61 (see also modernism) poststructuralism 27–30, 40–42 poultry 66, 164, 171, 173–96 (see also chicken) praying mantis 168, 230, 234 Preston, Christopher J. 39

prey 27, 31 primate 6, 30, 136, 147, 159–70, 204–05 (see also ape) primatology 18–19, 135, 159–70 prion 52, 59–60 product liability 52, 64–65 psychic economy 182, 186, 190–92 psychology 6, 13, 17, 19, 127, 138, 160, 190, 203, 210, 243 Qur ān

4

rabbit 70–71, 74 rat 5, 7, 16, 19, 22, 57, 97, 99–114, 130, 132, 162–64, 166, 169, 172, 197–218 Rat Evaluated Artwork (Kimbell) 199– 201, 205, 210–12, 216 Rat Fair (Kimbell) 172, 198, 203, 205–09, 216 ratter 198, 201–07, 210, 212, 215 raven 30 Regan, Tom 55–56, 61 Religio Medici (Browne) 155 Renaissance 6, 39, 135, 137–57, 252 ribofunk 247, 251 road 6, 46, 94–95 roadkill 94 Rossini, Manuela 8, 42, 139, 161, 220, 243–58 Rupert Bear (see bear) Russell, Andy 4, 12, 32–35, 38, 40–42 Russell, Bertrand 13 sacrifice 118–24, 128, 138 Sagan, Dorion 139, 245, 254 ‘Sage’ (Russell) 12, 32–34 Samson Agonistes (Milton) 2 Sawday, Jonathan 142, 144–45, 153 seal 22 semiotics 30, 32–33, 40–42, 81–82, 87, 117, 125, 181 material-semiotic 98, 116, 129, 246 Sendak, Maurice 51, 70 Serrano, Andres 219, 234–36 sexism 67, 25, 251 Sexual Politics of Meat, The (Adams) 47, 51, 67, 69, 83 Shannon, Laurie 6, 135, 137–57 shark 74 sheep 146, 151, 181 Shepard, Paul 27, 30–32 shrew 22 shrimp 58, 151

index Siegel, Taggart 176 Siegfried & Roy 46, 87–90 sign language 76 silk 7, 171 Singer, Peter 61, 79, 138, 159, 221–22, 224, 252 slaughterhouse 45, 49–54, 66, 84, 185–89 Smith, Adam 7, 171, 175–79, 188–94 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein 138 Smith, Mick 29 Smith, Robyn 5, 97, 99–114 Smuts, Barbara 120, 168 snail 131–33, 151 Snyder, Gary 27, 29, 31, 35–36 social science 2, 198–99, 212 sociology 3, 175, 189, 254 Socrates 7 sonar (see echolocation) soul 138–140, 142, 154–55 SPEAK 204 species narcissism 23 speciesism 73, 122, 138, 160, 223, 225, 230, 236, 244 spider 14 black widow spider 230 Squier, Susan 7, 54, 171–72, 173–96 squirrel 38, 223 steak 48 Stengers, Isabelle 126, 200, 212–13 Striffler, Steve 175–76 subaltern 79, 92 subhuman 16 Sugden, Robert 178, 189–90 superhuman 18, 21 Superman 41, 239 symbiosis 75, 220, 239–40, 249, 253, 256 endosymbiosis 239 symbiogenesis 8, 220, 243–58 SymbioticA Research Group 164, 209 symbolic capital 53–54, 69 systems theory 220, 243, 248, 256 tail 34, 53, 198, 214 Taffy Lovely 67 Tamagotchi 56–57 (see also digital game) Tampax 85–86, 90 taxidermy 74 television 4, 34, 45, 76, 89 Thanksgiving 65–66 theology 138–39, 141, 152–53, 155 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Smith) 175, 177–78, 189, 192, 194 Thrift, Nigel 214–15, 217

265

tiger 45–46, 55, 87–90 (see also White Tigers of Nevada) Tigger 48 tofuturkey 59 Topsell, Edward 143–44 tracking 12, 27, 29–33, 35, 39–41 transgenic 74, 164, 246 Treatise of Man, The (Descartes) 138 trout 37–38 tsunami 75–76, 93 tuna fish (see fish) turkey 53, 65–66 Tyler, Tom 1–9, 11, 13–26, 71, 76, 91 Ursula Hamdress

67–68

veal 45 vegan 59–60, 204 vegetarian 48, 58–59, 70 pollo-vegetarian 45, 52, 58–59 pesco-vegetarian 58 Venus d’Urbino (Titian) 67–68 Vesalius, Andreas 135, 142, 144–50, 152, 155 veterinary 17, 98, 115, 124, 171, 181–82 video game (see digital game) Vietnam war 61 virtual pet (see digital game) virus 15, 52, 59–60 vitamin 5, 57, 97, 99–114 vivisection 52, 57–58, 139, 145, 150, 152 (see also dissection and experiment) von Osten, Wilhelm 16 W (magazine) 82–83 Watson, J.B. 162–63 whale 22, 77, 85, 151 White Tigers of Nevada 87–90 Wiener, Norbert 161–62 wilderness 12, 28–30, 42, 184–85 Winfrey, Oprah 65 Winnie the Pooh (see bear) Wise, Steve 56 wolf 21, 143, 223 Wolfe, Cary 2, 256 wool 7, 171 World War I 159 World War II 54, 128, 161, 164, 179, 183–85 worm 132, 151, 163, 173

266

index

Xenophanes of Colophon Yolacan, Pinar

13

46, 77–79, 83–84, 93

zebra 82 zoë 122, 240–41 zoë-pleasure (see zoopleasure) zoo 17, 52, 54–55, 60, 65, 87, 91, 159–60, 166, 168 London Zoo 165 Zoo (film) 226 zooanthropology (see Animal Studies)

zoology 131–33 zoomorphic 21 zoophilia 219, 224–28, 231, 239–41 (see also bestiality) Zoophrenia (Kulik and Bredikhina) 234, 239 zoopleasure 7, 219, 221–42 zoopoetics 220, 250 zoopolity 140, 150 zoosexuality 8, 219, 224–28, 234–36 zootopian 135, 140, 151 Zuckerman, Solly 6, 136, 164–69