FINAL ASSESSMENT GUIDELINES
2,500 words (Intermediate), 4,000 words (Finalist). Due (via Tabula) on Friday of Week 1 of T3. This summative assessment should focus on one, or at most two, of the following major texts or groupings of texts that we have read together this term. It should settle on a reading method/ philosophical approach, and explain that approach through reading(s) of the relevant philosophical text(s) that we have discussed together. This might be the place to give some sense of personal investment in your question of the animal. The principle text(s) should then be given a sustained reading (with good overview as well as close reading of relevant passages) demonstrating how your question of the animal can be used to open up the central concerns of the text(s), and vice versa, how the text opens up and complicates the question of the animal that you are asking. On rare occasion–if you did well enough on the midterm essay–I may approve a nonstandard, “creative” approach to the assessment.
Major texts/ possible topics:
1) Andrew Peyvetsa (trans. Dennis Tedlock), “The Boy and the Deer”/ethnographic texts (including fairy tales and children’s stories)
2) Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meat
3) Clayton Eshleman, Juniper Fuse (and animals in visual art more generally)
4) Animal Poetry and ‘zoopoetics’: Hughes, Kinnell, Merwin and others (consult me for suggestions)
5) Franz Kafka, “Josephine the Mouse Singer” (as becoming animal or read otherwise?)
6) J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (including philosophical responses)
7) Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (and the training relationship)
8) J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (how the question of the animal is central to the novel’s human concerns)
9) Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (how does the figure of the android, or how to virtual technologies more generally, open up the question of the animal?)
10) Wildlife documentaries (Winged Migration, March of the Penguins, Planet Earth, Blue Planet, Frozen Planet, etc.: how does the question of the animal help us read such productions critically—for their potent intersection of ideology, technology, cultural and capital production, conservation value, etc.) NOTE: any essay on cinematic media needs to focus on close reading of one film with reference to other, related films. It will be expected that you pay attention to the cinematic form, as part of your analysis.
11) Reading of another group of related films (whether tales of animal companionship, such as Grizzly Man or The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill; ‘documentaries’ advocating animal rights/ welfare, such as The Cove, Blackfish, The Elephant in the Living Room; or fictional films where the animal plays a central role, such as Rise of the Planet of the Apes, The Life of Pi, Killer of Sheep, Au Hasard Balthazar, or The White Reindeer). Again (see NOTE above), any essay here should focus on one film (no shallow overview with plot summaries, please) with reference to one or more other, related films. Also, using film as your text will put more pressure on the theoretical component of the essay, which should be particularly well developed.
12) Alexis Wright, The Swan Book
13) Another topic not covered here (such as the cultural and social presence of animals in advertising, or as spectacle, or in zoos, or laboratories, or feral animals, etc.). However, in this case, an appropriate major primary text needs to be identified, and my approval is not guaranteed. An essay about ‘issues’ in general, that does not work closely with a focused group of texts both aesthetic and philosophical, will not be acceptable. On rare occasion–if you did well enough on the midterm essay, if the topic meets with my approval, and if you are able to draw significantly on texts in the syllabus–I may approve a final essay on a primary text not included in the syllabus.
Jacques Derrida, “Eating Well”
J.M. Coetzee: The novelist and the animals (journalist piece with interview)
MIDTERM ESSAY GUIDELINES
1,000 words (Intermediate students only). Due (via Tabula) on Friday of Week 7 of T2. This short essay should focus on a question about the animal that persists for you under one of the animal rubrics we will have considered by the time you write your essay: TALKING ANIMALS; CHILDHOOD, SEXUALITY, MONSTERS; WILD ANIMALS; MEAT OR EATING SOULS; RELIGION, CULTURE, ETHICS; ANIMAL LETTERS; PREHISTORY, AESTHETICS, ANIMAL ART; BECOMING ANIMAL; ANIMAL SUBJECTS, ANIMAL RIGHTS.
(The group of topics separated by semicolons can count as a single rubric, or you may choose to pursue a question that comes under just one of those topics. To further focus the essay, you may choose to focus on case studies and examples about one kind or species of animal, though this is optional.)
Your essay should pursue its question by concentrating on one of the theoretical texts and on one of the aesthetic texts we have considered that you find relevant to that rubric. (Please limit yourself to texts on the syllabus we have already considered.) Additionally, you should read/ watch all of the texts assigned for the session that includes the rubric you are considering and refer to at least three of these texts (in addition to the primary theoretical and aesthetic texts) in the course of writing your essay. You may also (but are not required to) refer to one outside text (a text not on the syllabus).
You do not need to answer the question, but your essay should clarify in what ways it remains a question for you and illuminate one or more potential avenues for unfolding the question. The emphasis should be on working out the conceptual approach, along with a bit of close reading of the aesthetic text, to illustrate your understanding. (By “close reading” I mean a paragraph that dwells on one short section or moment, scene, passage or stanza, from your primary text.) Please support your general claims with quotation and, where possible, with some close reading of key moments in your primary aesthetic text.
The style, structure and approach of the essay is up to you: you may use the first person pronoun (“I”) and write in an experimental or in a conventional manner. Please think for yourself about what it means to be a writing animal and let that thinking influence your prose. Whatever choices you make (short paragraphs, long paragraphs, “objective” or “subjective” style, an academic use of technical terms or plain vocabulary) should come from some reflection on what you feel to be appropriate for your pursuit of the question as a writing animal. Please therefore leave time to revise your essay, with some attention to style as well as substance. Also please leave time to proof read your essay.
Please adhere to MLA style, in citation and convention of mechanics, with in-text parenthetical citation and a list of Works Cited. And don’t forget an informative TITLE that focuses your reader’s attention from the start. The academic convention of two-part title, “General Title: More Specific Indication of the Essay’s Contents” is one, but not the only, approach. Please do not include your name anywhere on the essay, just your student number. If you have questions about your choice of topic and approach, please come to see me during office hours before Reading Week.
ADVICE ON WRITING ESSAYS
Writing the English Paper
Proofreading Tips
Elements of the Academic Essay
Eight Ways
Crafting a Question
DISGRACE NOTES
Quotations are keyed to page numbers of 2008 Penguin Books edition of Disgrace
and to 2001 Princeton University Press edition of The Lives of Animals.
Exchange on p. 74 (of Disgrace): kindness to animals through commonality or difference? (or both?)
Why is the novel not titled Shame?
“They can smell your thoughts, the smell of shame.” 142
“disgrace of dying” 143
Allusion to political process of reparations. 7, 133
Change without reform? Like welfare without moralizing?
nature/instinct/punishment 90
scapegoating 91
“They do us the honor of treating us like gods and we respond by treating them like things.” 78
Some thoughts:
Literature (and arts more widely) doing what (rationalist) philosophy can’t: addressing the wound, finitude, vulnerability, embodied thought.
Perhaps related: end of language/ communication beyond “language” — literature often attempting the impossible, to say by what of words what can’t be said by words alone (and not just the ineffable).
“More and more often he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa.” 117
Fiction as itself a skeptical mode of thinking (cf. Marjorie Garber’s response to The Lives of Animals): the clarity of Coetzee’s “fiction for old men,” or death bed fiction for the Enlightenment. But is there a post-humanist mode of fiction—a storytelling not predicated on the liberal subject (a free and rational actor)? Not predicated on the sacrifice of the animal to the cogito?
What of the trace this sacrifice leaves within the human?
Posthumanism: taking up the four intellectual “decenterings” (Copernican, Darwinian, Marxist, Freudian), in context of the Anthropocene.
Lacan: imaginary, symbolic orders, and Derrida’s critiques.
How does narrative (beginning, middle, end; prelude, theme, climax, coda; contradiction, resolution) function within the trace that the question of the animal opens within the human?
Dog man, dog psychopomp 146
Cf. for instance feminist critique of this universalism. (why does Coetzee speak through a woman in The Lives of Animals?)
Feminist critique of Coetzee: the role of women in Lurie’s learning experience?
(Similar to the role of animals in Enlightenment? Subtending the Cogito? Objectionable? Is Coetzee in any way a feminist?)
“There must be some niche in this system for women and what happens to them.” 98
Cf. exchange with Lucy 160-161
On old men and young women 190
Different disgrace (and shame) for men, women, animals?
What about the perspectives of the black South Africans in Disgrace?
Blacks’ attitudes to dogs, in post-Apartheid South Africa:
“where dogs are bred to snarl at the mere smell of a black man” 110
Reversals: they were not raping, they were mating. 199
Some more thoughts:
Race, gender, class, species intersectionalities.
Can a dialectical subject (made of oppositions, of theses, antitheses, syntheses) hold across multiple intersection(alitie)s?
Can what we hold in common with (as) animals (cf Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life”) that is our vulnerability and mortality be a place of final solidarity?
Elizabeth Costello “exhibiting, yet not exhibiting . . . a wound” 26 (Lives of Animals)
“bringing the slaughter-beasts home to acquaint them with the people who are going to eat them” 124 (Disgrace)
“Should he mourn?” 127
Breaking bread 167 (& in Lives of Animals)
Questions of “kind”/kin 194
Or does the question of the animal undo any possible positive (humanist) identifications, forcing us to un-think the subject and linguistic constructions?
As in the power of figures, metaphors, analogies. (Holocaust, cf. Babe the Pig scene).
Or does it lead to solidarity with what some Marxist ecocritics call a rising “biotariat”?
Haraway: non-essential assemblages.
Two further approaches literature (and the arts more generally) can contribute:
Play: cf. Montaigne on playing with his cat (“An Apology to Raymond Sebond”).
Cross-disciplinarity: fiction can bring different disciplines into conversation, as they must do, around the question of the animal.
ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE EARNS ANIMAL RIGHTS
Of interest, perhaps!
Dolphins deserve same rights as humans, say scientists
India Declares Dolphins To Be “Non-Human Persons”, Dolphin Shows Banned
VICKI HEARNE, ADAM’S TASK: CALLING ANIMALS BY NAME
Quotations and notes (keyed to page numbers of 2007 Skyhorse Publishing edition).
this book is not about what a good thing authority is, but about the taint in our authority. xvi
Wittgenstein’s remark, “To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.” 4
terrible grammar 7
moral understanding 8
the curiously superstitious notion that to have no reason to believe a proposition is the same as having a reason to assert that the proposition is false 12
genuine mastery of anything entails sound philosophical thought of one sort or another 13
what the trainers have in mind 14
The trainers’ language was . . . the right language, the philosophically responsible language. 14
questions that located the boundaries of language in regions often understood to be remote from language. 16
working temperament 18
command of language 20
Talking entails care and care-taking. 21
the wolf regards the human being as a wild animal 23
A trained dog, a dog with a vocabulary, is sane and trustworthy. 24
to probe—to prove—the relationship between human and dog in a way that reaffirms the personhood of each. 25
This is what the stories do for trainers, enabling them to dissolve problems instead of solving them, so that they can get on with their work with dogs . . . 27
The dog’s apparent command of human language may be limited, but his respect for language commands him now, with his handler, as deeply as only a few poets are commanded. 30
The poet’s condition and the dog’s is that through obedience to whatever condition of language happens to lie at hand, they can move for a while through flame, even the frozen flame of despair at the condition of language. 31
hot fuzziness 33
What is offended is the dog trainer’s assumption that language or something like vocabulary gives mutual autonomy and trust. I grieve, but not for Washoe behind her bars. It is language I grieve for. 34
We don’t talk with four-year-olds about [politics and art], yet we can place what they saying a continuum that includes political discourse. 35
a complete dog-human relationship 38
language does not prevent murder 39
I may be thrown into confusion, may suffer, as Othello did, from skeptical terror, and may want to deny Washoe’s personhood and her language rather than acknowledge the limits of language—which can look like a terrifying procedure. 40
what kind of story we are constructing, and what kinds of stories are possible. 40
abandoning the “cover story,” as Cavell calls it, and hoping instead to come up with a fiction that would make sense of what we try to say, about her and to her, realizing that there may be no such fictions about fully wild animals 41
getting absolute obedience from a dog . . . confers nobility, character, and dignity on the dog 43
Koehler says that the dog has the ‘right to the consequences of his actions.’ What does this mean? Or what does it mean to be able to mean such a remark? 44
To be able to mean the remark, to take the responsibility for meaning it, is to be committed to imagining the natures of the commitments involved 44
human authority is corrupt to the core 44
Irritable, nagging, coaxing tugs and jerks are punishments, as beatings are. The self-esteem of the handler gets into them, with the result that, by obeying or failing to obey, the dog takes on responsibility for the handler’s emotional well-being, as we can make children or spouses responsible for our souls. 45
Biting is a response to incoherent authority. 45
you have to earn the right to say, “Hans, down!” 46
humaniacs (and “kindly” people) 46
“paradise,” a region of clarity in which language never refers beyond ourselves and our intentions 47
command and recognition 47
Something very like a myth or story of expulsion from such a paradise stands behind the trainer’s attempt to make sense of a life in which we must say, “Joe, Fetch!” 47
to fail in obedience is to fail in authority. 48
One may say that before the Fall, all animals were domestic, that nature was domestic. After the Fall, wildness was possible, and most creatures chose it, but a few did not. 48
The gap the dog insists on between us and the stick represents the gap between our ability to command, give advice, and so forth and our ability to acknowledge the being of others. This is the taint in our authority. 48
It is the full acknowledgment of language that closes the gap. 48
A refusal to give commands or to notice that commands are being given is often a refusal to acknowledge a relationship, just as is a refusal to obey. 49
the unbearable “tone of one speaking in the name of a position one does not occupy, confronting others in positions of which one will not imagine the acknowledgment.” 49
we have failed to be sufficiently anthropomorphic. 49
Freedom is being on an “okay” command. 54
introducing pieces of linguistic behavior 54
literary tradition 55
Dog training is one of the arts concerned with the imitation of nature, which is to say, the second inheritance of nature. 55
“Obey” itself comes from a word meaning “to hear.” 56
Naming is an advanced activity of language 58
the public nature of language (Wittgenstein) 58
Natural bites are people whose approaches to dogs (and perhaps to people as well) are contaminated by epistemology. . . . they cast about for some premise from which they can draw an inference that will give them certainty about the dog’s behavior. 59
And dogs read this with the same uneasiness we fell when we walk into a room and find that our spouse, or a friend, has plainly been sitting around inferring something about us—welcome has been withheld. This creates in people an answering skepticism, an answering terror. 60
dogs are astonishingly good at demolishing skeptical terror 60
animal humor 61
imagining the personhood of animals 62
And if I were to offer to shake hands and speak with anyone who came within reach I would be regarded as insane. 63
Salty’s hardness springs rather from the courage to insist that it really matters how we talk. It looks hostile in places, just as Wittgenstein, writing out of stunning courage, looks a bit hostile in places. 64
“Fetch!” cannot be said meaningfully unless it is said with reverence. 65
it is the willingness to obey that confers the right to comment 66
the immense imaginative burden of authority. 66
fanatics don’t seem to have noticed that the world really is fallen, and that acknowledgment of this is as essential to our lives as that acknowledgment of human separation is to the prevention of tragedies in human love. 66
society/community: It is possible some sort of society with a wolf, but forming a community with one is at the outer edge of the likely. 67
There is more than grammar in the symmetries and reciprocities of the training relationship. 68
Trainers tend to talk about the importance of corrections being impersonal . . . it would also capture something to say that corrections should be as personal as possible, that they should be expressions, not of opinions, but of the trainer’s nature. 68
a reason for trying to get the feel for the dog-human language game is that it sharpens one’s awareness of the sketchiness of the tokens of English. 71
When we learn a language game, we learn to read the darkness. 72
dishonesty 72
The investigation of animal consciousness, like the investigation of human consciousness, is centrally an investigation of language 74
In dog training, commanding is made possible because dogs and people are domestic 75
What gives us the right to say “Fetch!”? Something very like reverence, humility and obedience, of course. We can follow, understand, only things and people we can command, and we can command only whom and what we can follow. 76
a general gendence we have to suppose that there are creatures somewhere out there who are relieved of the limits of knowledge that we must deal with continually and thus relieved of the burden of personhood. 78
one way of understanding training is as a discipline in which one learns more and more about a certain steadiness of gaze, a willingness to keep looking, that dismantles the false figures, grammars, logic and syntax of Outsiderness, or Otherness, in order to build true ones. 79
the mind’s lust for the literal, what Wittgenstein called “grammar” and Frege “speaking,” misleads us in ways we can find out about. 81
a failure to trust language itself. 81
having the right answer . . . depends in part on two individuals who speak the same language, share the same form of life. 82
moral failures 83
letting knowledge come to an end 85
Tracking training creates the kind of knowledge all talking does, or ought to do—knowledge of the loop of intention and openness that talk is, knowledge in and of language. 85
“reading” a dog (as conversation) 86
This reading, or conversing, begins with the human in command. 86
high seriousness 87
courage of convictions 88
calling forth of the powers of significance 89
“We do not know the meanings of the words. We look away and leap around.” (Cavell) 93
When [dogs] learn the meanings of the words, have imagined the forms of life that give utterances such as “Find it!” meaning, they have not learned something from us, exactly—not learned something that we knew ahead of time. 93
Trainers like to say that you haven’t any idea what it is to love a dog until you’ve trained one 93
everything that is commanded between us (passive tense) 94
How can the “find” of the command refer to anything when I can’t know the activity the verb expresses? 96
it seems to me clearly that syntax is prior to semantics . . . And relationships require syntax. 97
It is in learning to believe her that I learn a particular kind of doubt of my own eyes . . . This is how there comes to exist for me, in our conversations about tracks, a kind of knowledge not possible in any other way. 99
It is a mystery to me that mechanomorphism is so often felt to be more philosophically chaste than anthropomorphism 99 (footnote)
having no reason to believe something is not the same thing as having a reason to doubt it. 100
the restrictive apparatus of my (visual) assumptions. 101
psychic imperialism 103
When you say “Find it!” you have to mean it well. 104
I was saved from believing my eyes by the new palpability’s that had come to me through the varying tautnesses in the line. My body, moved forward by those articulations, remained in that way adjacent to the dog’s thought. . . . Meaning accelerated and I followed. 105
In tracking, I do not lose myself and become Belle 105
There is a glow at the origin of speech, but our words carry farther than we can see. . . . speaking is always a questioning that wants to be a calling, an invocation, an appeal to obedience which may fail . . . And we may fail; the creature we ask may indeed respond, hear, obey, but we may then fail to obey. In fact, we usually do . . . it is only in the dog’s answering illuminations that you know whether you have said anything at all . . . if the dog doesn’t answer, then that is that, for the moment at least, for language. 106
the handler must become comprehensible to the horse, and to be understood is to be open to understanding, much more than it is to have shared mental phenomena. 107
So we are still poking at the edges of the biggest mystery of all about language—that it exists. 107
the horse’s drive to make sense of things is as strong as ours—call it “reason,” in the way Hume had in mind when he remarked that reason is just another instinct. 108
our skepticism is largely entangled in the visible. 110
On a horse, though, until you learn not only to read what your skin tells you but also to be, as it were, kinesthetically legible yourself, you are deprived of the very skepticism that is part of the matrix of thought . . . confiding ourselves to what we know in order to know it. 110
nothingness is the absence of language, for it is language which gives us the world 111
inhabiting the world knowable to horses 111
the conversation with a horse 111-112
Stanley Cavell: “Is what your horses are telling you something like this, that what is preventing their being known is not too much skepticism but too little? . . . There is something about horses . . . that challenges as it were sooner than other cases the (skeptic’s) idea that the problem of the other is the problem of knowing the other. . . . It is something about horses . . . that sooner makes us wonder what we conceive knowledge to be. . . . There is something specific about our unwillingness to let our knowledge come to an end with respect to horses, with respect to what they know of us. . . . The horse, as it stands, is a rebuke to our unreadiness to be understood, our will to remain obscure.” 114-115
true knowledge is that which springs . . . from the emptiness on the other side of knowledge, the true skepticism that really has gone far enough to be a genuine discovery of the mind’s method, the method of doubt. 116
the machinery of doubt needs to be reimagined; it is or has become as fruitless to doubt that the higher animals have minds as it is for me to claim to believe that the skeptic exists while doubting that the skeptic has a mind 116
my knowledge of you, my interpretation of your words . . . is the articulation of the ways your words interlock mine, and it comes to an end somewhere outside of your skin. 116
Without a name and someone to call her by name, [my dog] couldn’t enter the moral life. 168
“calling” an animal 170
obedience training is centrally a sacred and poetic rather than a philosophical or scientific discipline. 171
I have too much to be silent about. 176
to be kind to a creature may be to be what we call harsh (though not cruel), but it is always to respect the kind of being the creature is 190
a particular form the failure of respect takes . . . tends to be coupled with a lot of talk in which words like “kindness” appear, together with a refusal to imagine the limits of our knowledge of others. 191
Don’t use cats, they’ll screw up your data. 225
The cat’s job includes making us aware of the invented nature of our expectations. 226
ailurophobia 231
I want to say somehow that intimacy is thinking. It is thinking about something, something other than just the parties engaged in the conversation. 234
some busy ranch of isolation that is not intimacy and is not thinking 234
Cats do not declare their love much, they enact it . . . they show the structure of their understanding 235
They stalk the web of our imaginations as carefully as they stalk prey 237
cats are more adept than we are at evading monolithic propositions of character 237
they slip sideways 237
The trouble with “do” strokes is that you can never get enough of them . . . . “Be” strokes, by contrast, can last practically forever . . . . if you manage to acknowledge the kind of mind I have accurately, then it is my nature you have acknowledged, something that is by and large immortal so long as I am. “Be” strokes are the only kind cats are normally interested in . . . . Emotional M&Ms are either ignored or resisted 238
[the cat’s] intuitive understanding that approval is almost inevitably the flip side of disapproval. 238
positivism of meaning, and the pathetic fallacy 239
When a cat looks at us, there is always in the looking the reminder that a cat can look at me or at a king and in both cases equally from the chosen poise of that particular angle of grace and speculation. 241
the cat’s revisionary impulses 242
It is impossible for a writer to stay ahead of a cat. 242
Cats live in a kind of ever-changing song or story in and of the Gap. 244
J.M. COETZEE, THE LIVES OF ANIMALS, “REFLECTIONS”
Four questions:
Marjorie Garber: “In these two elegant lectures we thought John Coetzee was talking about animals. Could it be, however, that all along he was really asking, ‘What is the value of literature?'”
Peter Singer: “The fact that a character doesn’t exist isn’t something that makes it hard to imagine yourself as that character. You can imagine someone very like yourself, or like someone else you know. Then it is easy to think your way into the existence of that being. But a bat, or an oyster? Who knows? If that’s the best argument Coetzee can put up for his radical egalitarianism, you won’t have any trouble showing how weak it is.”
Wendy Doniger: “It is language, not food, that ultimately separates us from the animals, even in myths. Only by speaking their language will we really be able to know how we would think and feel if we were fish or horses.”
Barbara Smuts: “I firmly believe–and my experience with other animals supports this belief–that treating members of other species as persons, as beings with potential far beyond our normal expectations, will bring out the best in them, and that each animal’s best includes unforeseeable gifts.”
DELEUZE AND GUATTARI, “BECOMING-ANIMAL”
not resemblance (nor a correspondence, nor an identification)
becoming-molecular vs molar powers (family, career, conjugality)
alliance (not evolution: make kin not kids)
assemblage / war-machine (gang?)
affects / nonhuman sexuality
deterritorialization
“Becoming can and should be qualified as becoming-animal even in the absence of a term that would be the animal become.”
‘Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding foliations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing through filiation [inheritance]. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, “appearing,” “being,” “equaling,” or “producing.”‘
“a block of becoming that takes hold of the cat and the baboon, the alliance between which is effected by a C virus [hepatitis].” [between the Horseshoe bat and the pangolin and the human]
“becoming communicative or contagious”
“to involve is to form a block that runs its own line ‘between’ the terms in play”
“It may very well be that other agencies, moreover very different from one another, have a different appraisal of the animal.”
PP. 38-39, Animals Reader
“either stop writing, or write like a rat” [mouse?]
“A fearsome involution calling us toward unheard-of becomings.”
myth/ genus, classification, or State animals
tale/ demonic, pack or affect animals
40
“affects and powers, involutions that grip every animal in a becoming just as powerful as that of the human being with the animal.”
hybrids: “Unnatural participations or nuptials are the true Nature spanning the kingdoms of nature.”
inter-kingdoms
“This is the only way Nature operates — against itself.”
“There are as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis . . . We know that many beings pass between a man and a woman . . . they cannot be understood in terms of production, only in terms of becoming.”
“These multiplicities with heterogeneous terms, cofunctioning by contagion, enter certain assemblages.”
41
“it is by means of this anomalous choice that each enters into his or her becoming-animal”
“the anomalous is neither an individual nor a species; it has only affects”
“Lovecraft applies the term ‘Outsider’ to this thing or entity, the Thing”
“It is a phenomenon, but a phenomenon of bordering” [contact?]
“all that counts is the borderline-anomalous”
43
“From the howling of animals to the wailing of elements and particles.”
“the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities. Each multiplicity is defined by a borderline functioning as Anomalous, but there is a string of borderlines, a continuous line of borderlines (fiber) following which the multiplicity changes.”
“A fiber stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or an animal to molecules, from molecules to particles”
“A fiber strung across borderlines constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization.”
46
“Not following a logical order, but following alogical consistencies or compatibilities”
“Schizoanalysis, or pragmatics, has no other meaning: Make a rhizome. . . . experiment.”
47
“the plane of consistency cuts across them all, intersects them in order to bring into coexistence any number of multiplicities, with any number of dimensions.”
vibration: “Each advances like a wave, but on the plane of consistency they are a single abstract Wave whose vibration propagates following a line of flight or deterritorialization traversing the entire plane”
48
FRANZ KAFKA, “JOSEPHINE THE SINGER”
‘gliding paradox’: “Kafka’s gliding paradox overloads his narratives with negations, pushing the sentences to the limits of sense and signification, until they begin to deconstruct themselves: “Our singer is called Josephine. Anyone who has not heard her does not know the power of song. There is no one who is not carried away by her singing, a fact deserving of all the more appreciation since, by and large, people of our kind are not music lovers [als unser Geschlecht im Ganzen Musik nicht liebt]”
— Kári Driscoll, “An Unheard, Inhuman Music: Narrative Voice and the Question of the Animal in Kafka’s ‘Josephine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk'” (p. 10)
CLAYTON ESHLEMAN (1935-2021): IN MEMORIAM
each year I teach a course called Question of the Animal, in the third week of which students and I catapult ourselves into the Upper Paleolithic, with Clayton Eshleman as our psychopomp, as he guides us through his wonderfully ‘mutifoliate’ thesis of Magdalenian parietal art as a ‘multiphasic’ crisis of therioexpulsion, the separating out of the animal from the human, worked out on prehistoric cave walls Clayton himself visited across southern France (conveniently located next to some great wine country). Clayton’s book, Juniper Fuse, also, of course, offers an ars poetica, truly Olsonian in its adherence to method as matter, “a focused movement forward through material that would keep open to associative sidetracks.” the book itself demonstrates his belief that a poet sees both into and through a poem, that “a poem could end up being a display of its core and branch meanders.”
these terms refer to hominid marks on an incised ox rib dating back between 200,000 and 300,000 years, on which “a hominid appears to have made a curving slash on the bone (referred to by [Alexander] Marshack as a ‘core meander’), and then to have placed this cutting instrument on the end of the slash and made another curving cut (referred to as a ‘branch meander’).” taking a lead from these curves and from the caves, Clayton notes that he “attempted to find a way to branch out in my poetry while keeping a core at work within the meandering.” we usually spend some time with Clayton’s assertion that “to be human is to realize that one is a metaphor, and to be a metaphor is to be grotesque (initially of the grotto).”
Clayton derives his sense of the grotesque not just from Montaigne and Thomas Mann, but from Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelaisian “grotesque realism.” this connects with our discussions about the schizoid relation to animals, with which (whom) we relate at one and the same time metaphorically and metonymically (good to eat/ good to think with). (we begin the course by reading Andrew Peynetsa’s tale of “The Boy and the Deer” — as translated by Dennis Tedlock — a Zuñi story about someone caught between the “daylight” world of humans and the “raw” world of animals, spirits and dead people.) the caves offered a place to dream, in rupture with the daylight world outside, engaging the discontinuity at the heart of metaphor.
Clayton suggests in some places–following Hillman and Norman O.Brown in their thesis about the role of symbolic self-rebirth–that failure to engage this abyss, and to realize our metaphoric lives, instead obstinately reducing all to daylight reality, sits at the root of the mass extinction underway, already visible in the ghost species depicted on the cave walls.
if “cave imagery is an inseparable mix of psychic constructs and perceptive observations,” Clayton proposes, “Instead of solely employing rational documentation (as have the archaeologists), it struck me that this ‘inseparable mix’ might be approached using poetic imagination as well as thorough fieldwork and research.” Juniper Fuse thus is case for climbing up into caves and dreaming, a brief for poem as investigation, and a splendid defense of poetry. as well as a terrifying crawl into the darkness of the Abri du Cro-Magnon/ shelter of the “Big Hole People.”
just so, all this week we were in the caves with Clayton. instead of briefly consulting my notes, as I usually do — my edition of the book has become a palimpsest of annotations, like the cave art and markings whose proximity belies their widely spaced chronology — I somehow, and despite the press of other obligations, was impelled to reread the text carefully. (many of the riches of the book are in its endnotes.) I was planning to write Clayton this weekend to tell him of our adventures. but now he has climbed up into the cave of dreams for the last time. and instead I am inscribing his memory on this digital wall. “Only what is in shadow matters truly, eternally.”
I’ve included below the last six pages of the introduction to Juniper Fuse, worth reading and pondering and rereading. my thoughts go out to Clayton’s partner Caryl and his beloveds.
(FB post of 31 January 2021)
MICHAEL POLLAN, THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA, “THE ETHICS OF EATING ANIMALS”
[NOTES: basically my underlinings. I’ve bolded key words and phrases.]
- STEAKHOUSE DIALOGUES
“a recipe for cognitive dissonance, if not indigestion”
“Eating meat has become morally problematic, at least for people who take the trouble to think about it. Vegetarianism is more popular than it has ever been, and animal rights, the fringiest of fringe movements until just a few years ago, is rapidly finding its way into the cultural mainstream. I’m not completely sure why this should be happening now, given that humans have been eating animals for tens of thousands of years without too much ethical heartburn.”
“For the most part our culture has been telling us for millennia that animals were both good to eat and good to think.”
“It may be that as a civilization we’re groping toward a higher plane of consciousness. It may be that our moral enlightenment has advanced to the point where the practice of eating animals—like our former practices of keeping slaves or treating women as inferior beings—can now be seen for the barbarity it is, a relic of an ignorant past that very soon will fill us with shame.”
“as the sway of tradition in our eating decisions weakens, habits we once took for granted are thrown up in the air”
“Whatever the cause, the effect is an unusual amount of cultural confusion on the subject of animals. For at the same time many of us seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to other species, in our factory farms we’re inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history. One by one science is dismantling our claims to uniqueness as a species, discovering that such things as culture, tool making, language, and even possibly self-consciousness are not, as we used to think, the exclusive properties of Homo sapiens.”
“There’s a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals today in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side.
“Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig—an animal easily as intelligent as a dog—that becomes the Christmas ham.”
Berger: “That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had brought the vivid daily reminder that animals were both crucially like and unlike us”
“Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away.”
Singer: “Equal consideration of interests is not the same as equal treatment, he points out; children have an interest in being educated, pigs in rooting around in the dirt. But where their interests are the same, the principle of equality demands they receive the same consideration. And the one all-important interest humans share with pigs, as with all sentient creatures, is an interest in avoiding pain.”
Bentham: “The question is not Can they reason? Or Can they talk? But Can they suffer?”
“To exclude the chimp from moral consideration simply because he’s not human is no different than excluding the slave simply because he’s not white. In the same way we’d call that exclusion “racist” the animal rightist contends it is “speciesist” to discriminate against the chimpanzee solely because he’s not human.”
“Either we do not owe any justice to the severely retarded, he concludes, or we do owe it to animals with higher capabilities.
This is where I put down my fork. If I believe in equality, and equality is based on interests rather than characteristics, then either I have to take the steer’s interest into account or accept that I’m a speciesist.”
“Is it possible that history will someday judge us as harshly as it judges the Germans who went about their lives in the shadow of Treblinka? The South African novelist J. M. Coetzee posed precisely that question in a lecture at Princeton not long ago; he answered it in the affirmative. If the animal rightists are right, then ‘a crime of stupendous proportions’ (in Coetzee’s words) is going on all around us every day, just beneath our notice.”
“Why should we treat animals any more ethically than they treat one another?”
“To the ‘they do it, too’ argument the animal rightist has a simple, devastating reply: Do you really want to base your moral code on the natural order? Murder and rape are natural, too. Besides, we can choose.”
“Wouldn’t life in the wild be worse for these creatures?”
“We alone are (as Kant pointed out) the moral animal, the only one capable of even entertaining a notion of ‘rights.’ Hell, we invented the damned things—for us. So what’s wrong with reserving moral consideration for those able to understand it?
Well, right here is where you run smack into the AMC [Argument from Marginal Cases]: the moral status of the retarded and the insane, the two-day-old infant and the advanced Alzheimer’s patient. These people (“marginal cases,” in the detestable language of modern moral philosophy) cannot participate in ethical decision making any more than a monkey can, yet we nevertheless grant them rights. Yes, I respond, for the obvious reason: They’re one of us. Isn’t it natural to give special consideration to one’s kind?
Only if you’re a speciesist, the animal rightist replies.”
“the principle of equal consideration of interests demands that given the choice between performing a painful medical experiment on a severely retarded orphaned child and a normal ape, we must sacrifice the child. Why? Because the ape has a greater capacity for pain.”
“Giving up our speciesism can bring us to an ethical cliff from which we may not be prepared to jump”
“And yet this isn’t the moral choice I’m being asked to make here. (Too bad! It would be so much easier.) In everyday life the choice is not between the baby and the chimp but between the pig and the tofu.”
“This is why meat eating is the most difficult animal rights case.”
“But if humans no longer need to eat meat to survive, then what exactly are we putting on the human side of the scale to outweigh the interests of the animal?”
“what happens when the choice is, as Singer writes, between ‘lifetime of suffering for a non-human animal and the gastronomic preferences of a human being?’ You look away—or you stop eating animals.”
- THE VEGETARIAN’S DILEMMA
“I’m also willing to eat animals without faces, such as mollusks, on the theory that they’re not sufficiently sentient to suffer. No, this isn’t “facist” of me: Many scientists and animal rights philosophers (Peter Singer included) draw the line of sentience at a point just north of scallop.”
“eating meat is simply more convenient. It’s also more sociable”
“What troubles me most about my vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from other people and, odd as this might sound, from a whole dimension of human experience.”
“I’m inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners.”
“I also feel alienated from traditions I value”
“These ritual meals link us to our history along multiple lines—family, religion, landscape, nation, and, if you want to go back much further, biology. For although humans no longer need meat in order to survive (now that we can get our B-12 from fermented foods or supplements), we have been meat eaters for most of our time on earth.”
“Meat eating helped make us what we are in a physical as well as a social sense.”
“Under the pressure of the hunt, anthropologists tell us, the human brain grew in size and complexity, and around the hearth where the spoils of the hunt were cooked and then apportioned, human culture first flourished.”
“The notion of granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal, amoral world of eater and eaten—of predation—but along the way it will entail the sacrifice, or sublimation, of part of our identity—of our own animality.”
“we should at least acknowledge that the human desire to eat meat is not, as the animal rightists would have it, a trivial matter, a mere gastronomic preference.”
[NOTE THAT THE EDITION SKIPS FROM SECTION 2 TO 4: THE SECTIONS, WHICH RUN TO 7 IN THE BOOK, APPEAR TO BE MIS-NUMBERED BY THE PUBLISHER. IN MY NOTES HERE THEY ARE NUMBERED 1 TO 6.]
- ANIMAL SUFFERING
“That animals feel pain does not seem in doubt.”
“The offending argument, which does not seem unreasonable to me, is that human pain differs from animal pain by an order of magnitude. This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language and, by virtue of language, our ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine what is not. The philosopher Daniel Dennett suggests we can draw a distinction between pain, which a great many animals obviously experience, and suffering, which depends on a degree of self-consciousness only a handful of animals appear to command. Suffering in this view is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.”
Examples: castration, the dentist . . .
“As humans contemplating the suffering or pain of animals we do need to guard against projecting onto them what the same experience would feel like to us.”
“Which brings us—reluctantly, necessarily—to the American factory farm, the place where all such distinctions promptly turn to dust. It’s not easy to draw lines between pain and suffering in a modern egg or hog operation.”
“To visit a modern Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) is to enter a world that for all its technological sophistication is still designed on seventeenth-century Cartesian principles: Animals are treated as machines—“production units”—incapable of feeling pain.”
“And what you see when you look is the cruelty—and the blindness to cruelty—required to produce eggs that can be sold for seventy-nine cents a dozen.”
“A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture”
“This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism—the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society.”
“(It is no accident that the nonunion workers in these factories receive little more consideration than the animals in their care.)”
- ANIMAL HAPPINESS
“And yet there are other images of animals on other kinds of farms that contradict the nightmare ones. I’m thinking of the hens I saw at Polyface Farm, fanning out over the cow pasture on a June morning, pecking at the cowpats and the grass, gratifying their every chicken instinct.”
“To many animal people even Polyface Farm is a “death camp”—a way station for doomed creatures awaiting their date with the executioner. But to look at the lives of these animals is to see this holocaust analogy for the sentimental conceit it really is.”
“In the same way we can probably recognize animal suffering when we see it, animal happiness is unmistakable, too, and during my week on the farm I saw it in abundance.”
“For any animal, happiness seems to consist in the opportunity to express its creaturely character—its essential pigness or wolfness or chickenness. Aristotle talked about each creature’s “characteristic form of life.” At least for the domestic animal (the wild animal is a different case) the good life, if we can call it that, simply doesn’t exist, cannot be achieved, apart from humans—apart from our farms and therefore from our meat eating.”
“To think of domestication as a form of slavery or even exploitation is to misconstrue that whole relationship—to project a human idea of power onto what is in fact an example of mutualism or symbiosis between species.”
“Domestication is an evolutionary, rather than a political, development.”
“It is wrong, the rightists say, to treat animals as means rather than ends, yet the happiness of a working animal like the dog consists precisely in serving as a means to human ends. Liberation is the last thing such a creature wants.”
“The crucial moral difference between a CAFO and a good farm is that the CAFO systematically deprives the animals in it of their ‘characteristic form of life.’”
“As a rule, animals in the wild don’t get good deaths surrounded by their loved ones.”
“A deep current of Puritanism runs through the writings of the animal philosophers, an abiding discomfort not just with our animality, but with the animals’ animality, too.”
“predation is not a matter of morality or of politics; it, too, is a matter of symbiosis.”
“the “good life” for deer, and even their creaturely character, which has been forged in the crucible of predation, depends on the existence of the wolf.”
“The surest way to achieve the extinction of the species would be to grant chickens a right to life.”
“Predation is deeply woven into the fabric of nature, and that fabric would quickly unravel if it somehow ended, if humans somehow managed “to do something about it.” From the point of view of the individual prey animal predation is a horror, but from the point of view of the group—and of its gene pool—it is indispensable. So whose point of view shall we favor? That of the individual bison or Bison? The pig or Pig?”
“Ancient man regarded animals much more as a modern ecologist would than an animal philosopher—as a species, that is, rather than a collection of individuals.”
Berger: “An animal’s blood flowed like human blood, but its species was undying and each lion was Lion, each ox was Ox.”
“the animal rightist concerns himself only with individuals”
“Singer concurs, insisting that only sentient individuals can have interests. But surely a species has interests—in its survival, say, or the health of its habitat—just as a nation or a community or a corporation can.”
“Is the individual animal the proper focus of our moral concern when we are trying to save an endangered species or restore a habitat?”
Example: feral pigs, island foxes and golden eagles on Santa Cruz Island.
“To save the fox, the plan is to kill every last pig, trap and remove the golden eagles, and then reintroduce the bald eagles—essentially, rebuild the island’s food chain from the ground up.”
“a human morality based on individual rights makes for an awkward fit when applied to the natural world.”
Culture/ nature dualism:
“Morality is an artifact of human culture devised to help humans negotiate human social relations. It’s very good for that. But just as we recognize that nature doesn’t provide a very good guide for human social conduct, isn’t it anthropocentric of us to assume that our moral system offers an adequate guide for what should happen in nature? Is the individual the crucial moral entity in nature as we’ve decided it should be in human society? We simply may require a different set of ethics to guide our dealings with the natural world, one as well suited to the particular needs of plants and animals and habitats (where sentience counts for little) as rights seem to suit us and serve our purposes today.”
- VEGAN UTOPIA
“To contemplate such questions from the vantage of a farm, or even a garden, is to appreciate just how parochial, and urban, an ideology animal rights really is. It could only thrive in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world, where animals no longer pose any threat to us (a fairly recent development), and our mastery of nature seems unchallenged.”
“The farmer would point out to the vegan that even she has a “serious clash of interests” with other animals.”
“If our concern is for the health of nature—rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls—then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.”
“it might be okay to eat the chicken or the cow, but perhaps not the (more intelligent) pig.”
“people who care about animals should be working to ensure that the ones they eat don’t suffer, and that their deaths are swift and painless—for animal welfare, in others words, rather than rights. In fact, the “happy life and merciful death” line is how Jeremy Bentham justified his own meat eating.”
“My guess is that Bentham never looked too closely at what actually happens in a slaughterhouse, but the argument suggests that in theory at least a utilitarian can justify eating humanely raised and slaughtered animals.”
“All of which was making me feel pretty good about eating meat again and going hunting—until I recalled that these utilitarians can also justify killing retarded orphans. Killing just isn’t the problem for them that it is for other people, including me.”
- A CLEAN KILL
“I found Temple Grandin’s account both reassuring and troubling. Reassuring, because the system sounds humane, and yet I realize I’m relying on the account of its designer. Troubling, because I can’t help dwelling on all those times ‘you’ve got a live one on the rail.’ Mistakes are inevitable on an assembly line that is slaughtering four hundred head of cattle every hour. (McDonald’s tolerates a 5 percent “error rate.”)”
“the very option of looking—that transparency—is probably the best way to ensure that animals are killed in a manner we can abide.”
“When I was at the farm I asked Joel how he could bring himself to kill a chicken. “That’s an easy one. People have a soul, animals don’t. It’s a bedrock belief of mine. Animals are not created in God’s image, so when they die, they just die.”
“Taking a life is momentous, and people have been working to justify the slaughter of animals to themselves for thousands of years, struggling to come to terms with the shame they feel even when the killing is necessary to their survival. Religion, and ritual, has played a crucial part in this process.”
“In biblical times the rules governing ritual slaughter stipulated a rotation, so that no individual would have to kill animals every day, lest he become dulled to the gravity of the act.”
“For all these people it was the ritual—the cultural rules and norms—that allowed them to look, and then to eat. We no longer have any rituals governing either the slaughter or eating of animals, which perhaps helps explain why we find ourselves in this dilemma, in a place where we feel our only choice is either to look away or give up meat.”
“We certainly won’t philosophize our way to a single answer.”
“Sometimes I think that all it would take to clarify our feelings about eating meat, and in the process begin to redeem animal agriculture, would be to simply pass a law requiring all the sheet-metal walls of all the CAFOs, and even the concrete walls of the slaughterhouses, to be replaced with glass. If there’s any new right we need to establish, maybe this is the one: the right, I mean, to look.”
“meat would get more expensive. We’d probably eat a lot less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals we’d eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve.”
Excerpts From: Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.
QUESTION OF THE ANIMAL (2020) NOTES WEEK 2/
CONTINUATION OF WEEK 1 FRAMING
Before “getting into it” with today’s meaty topics, I’d like to pick up some loose threads from last week, to finish the framing of the seminar. I want to say a bit about a text in the suggested reading, in particular, the excerpt from French anthropologist Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture. I should note that you’ll get a fuller experience of this seminar if you read *both* required and suggested texts. I’ve structured the seminar so that you can do first class work by just reading the required texts for the seminars and the relevant suggested texts (in addition) for your essays, but, again, reading both required and suggested texts as we go will deepen the experience. I’ll try, as time permits, to bring into our discussions concepts and examples from the suggested texts. Feel free to do so, as well, yourselves. Just be aware that not everybody may have read those texts, so you’ll need to provide a bit of context.
As you’ll note by looking at the syllabus, the heart of this module focuses on the Enlightenment legacy for human – nonhuman animal relations. (Or “animot” relations, if we use philosopher Jacques Derrida’s coinage for the “animal word”–the French being a pun on “animal” and “animal word”–in language used to cover all particular relations to particular animals.) That is to say, we’ll be looking at human – nonhuman animal relations as contained within the kind of metaphoric/ metonymic axis I presented last week. The axis defined by what we might call anthropomorphisation vs the axis of what we call naturalism. Which might also be considered an axis between epistemology and ontology, that is to say, between how we think about animals and how we are with (e.g. how some of us eat, use or otherwise relate practically to) animals.
For much of Western, Enlightenment thought, these axes are at orthogonal, that is to say right angles to one another. (It’s part of the culture/ nature split I’ll say more about later, or post-Kantian ontology, where Enlightenment understanding is based on inaccessibility to the “thing itself.”) They are not in alignment. It’s the contradictory relation to the animal we began discussing last week, that we’ll focus on, and by the end of the module we’ll see that this relation extends to all manner of nonhumans, not just to animals, i.e. to androids and the emerging field of “machine life.”
For this reason, in addition to covering all manner of cultural texts (fiction, poetry, film, popular culture and advertising), to explore how the nonhuman animal saturates human culture, the module serves as a bit of an introduction — a rough and tumble kind of whirlwind introduction — to post-Kantian continental philosophy, up to and including deconstruction and the emergence of what has come to be called “posthumanism.”
But I bracket our study with other ways of relating to nonhuman animals, outside of Western, Enlightenment culture, and some of them outside of alphabetic literacy (that is to say, articulated within an oral tradition), and some even outside of determinate, figurative aesthetics (as we’ll discover when we look at prehistoric cave art next week).
First, a bit of discussion:
How are animals “good to think”?
Mythically, socially, psychologically, aesthetically.
L-S’s comparison of two myths from two different parts of the world. To uncover — universal? — structural principles in human consciousness? (To show how what was called “totemism” is in fact just one out of many possible culture-nature configurations.) Articulated around binaries, empirically observed (logical) oppositions. The “savage mind” is not opposed to or prior to the “civilized mind.” It’s the “untamed” part of all human minds. The “savage mind” preserves its unity through a kind of “bricolage,” by repurposing available structures and materials, the way the indigenous cultures L-S studies seem to invent all manner of recombinations of the discontinuities visible in the natural world in order to understand, organize and enforce social discontinuities in a variety of ways, as varied as there are different cultures around the world. (For examples of bricolage consider, for instance, the varying associations of raw, uncooked rotted; boiled, roasted, smoked, in L-S’s study of the “culinary triangle.”)
I’ll come back to this later, when I discuss Descola, but we can think of “bricolage” as a subordination of ontology to epistemology, of being to thinking (to put it in a very crude, provisional, and, as a philosopher like Heidegger would have us know, ultimately inaccurate way). In other words, we can’t “know” animals (in the Biblical sense of knowing, which is to say have direct relationships with them, but also in the sense of get inside their minds, even to know whether or not they have minds). But we can know what we know about animals–in the end a way of organizing what we know about ourselves. (Epistemology = the study of what we know.) This is the epistemological turn in Enlightenment understanding, based on an irreconciliable split between culture and nature, between the human mind and “things in themselves,” between what is inside and what is out there.
As we’ll discuss this term, it’s also based on withholding the faculty of language from animals.
The difference that L-S introduces, with structural anthropology, similar to the difference Freud introduces with psychoanalysis, is to uncouple the organicism built into the notion that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, or that the growth of the individual somehow reenacts the growth of the species, or even that cultural development progresses somehow from a childlike to a more mature state, or from “primitive” to “civilized.” Rather, all minds are complex.
If so-called primitive cultures seem childlike in the way they entertain stories about talking animals, or about talking with animals, in their habit of anthropomorphizing (with sometimes uncanny combinations of the natural and the supernatural, as evident in “The Boy and the Deer” but also in a fable like “Little Red Riding Hood” and in many folk tales) it is not because they are like children, but because they tap into the same regions of the mind (the “savage mind,” according to L-S) that children’s minds do. The process of “growing up” within Western culture is simply a process of “taming” this mind. For L-S, in fact, the savage mind may be more enlightened than the tamed mind.
In a related way, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams can make sense of a children’s/ folk tale like Little Red Riding Hood, through a process of reading the tale the way the psychoanalyst reads dreams, as operating through displacement and condensation. (As Freud’s disciple Jacques Lacan famously said, the “unconscious is structured like a language.” But Lacan also didn’t think that animals have access to language: so we can’t really learn anything about animals from studying the unconscious. We can learn a lot about how animals organize the human mind.) Again, these processes correspond to the two axes of metonymy and metaphor: dreams work on waking life material by displacing and condensing the source materials. The cure, in “growing up,” as it were, is to recognize the metaphors and displacements (as such). Those animals in your dreams weren’t power meetings with spirit animal presences, just “dream work” with your Oedipus complex. The wolf or horse or unicorn, the “Patronus” in your dream, is just your displaced and/or condensed fear of sexuality, mixed up with ambivalent feelings about your parents.
In this way, Western culture teaches us to disenchant or at least turn down our habits of anthropomorphizing. Even if we indulge in them, we don’t take them seriously. We might consider our canine companion to be a person, and often even treat him like a person (to the point where many people spend more on their pets than some people spend on their children), but in a lifeboat situation, it’s the dog, not our child who is going overboard. Interestingly, Peter Singer’s “animal liberation” will challenge the rationality of this by exposing the assumptions behind our notions of “equal consideration: if a dog is in fact more intelligent than an infant, why do we privilege the infant?
We see this process of disenchantment, the turn toward the vertical axis of metaphorizing our relations with animals, in the development of the fable: “a brief account of animal life presumed to be fictional, which serves as an example that teaches about the human social order” (Schuster). The fable is like a sanitized folk tale, made safe for civilization. See the different versions of the “Little Red Riding Hood” tale, some of which are surprisingly gross and raunchy.
This safety is attained at the cost of a thorough nature/ culture split. (As Michael Pollan notes, while we have industrialized our eating of animals, to the point that humans consume more animals than ever before, we have never been further from direct contact with animals.)
There is a fundamental aporia built into our relation with animals. (Again, largely due to the supposed absence of language as common ground, or a kind of “human exceptionalism” about language.) This holds even where a human seemingly has been able to live “with” animals. As in the case of Timothy Treadwell (who was eaten by the bears he lived so close to over the course of more than a dozen summers) or as in the case of Roy Horn (of the famous circus tiger training duo Siegfried and Roy) who an audience of 1,500 had to see get bitten and dragged offstage by the 400-pound tiger Montecore Roy had been working with happily for years, or as in the case of Pi (see Life of Pi clip). Even with trained circus animals, at a certain point, all communication comes to an end. (For skeptical philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and Vicki Hearne, this aporia is built into human language itself: for such thinkers, what makes language meaningful is the fact that it comes to an end: the terrifying predatory bite at the end of the sentence, as it were.) In any case, you can’t reason with a lion. Those who attempt to do so, to make contact or even cross over, end tragically. Even just commingling with deer, as the “Boy and the Deer” emphasizes, can end in tragedy, with conflicting family allegiances. Predator or prey–there is no middle ground in the animal world. Or is this really the case?
In Life of Pi, we see the boy and the tiger learning to work together (see clip). Of course, there’s a debate, around this story’s twist ending, whether or not the tiger is really just a figment of the boy’s psyche. But one facet of the Question of the Animal is, in fact, technology–“posthuman” perspectives engage the life of machines as much as they do animals–and to what extent the zoomorphic effects of CGI and “motion capture” tap into a meaningful contact with the physiognomy, the modes of being, of animals, in ways that are more than metaphorical. Technology furthermore proposes human-animal hybrids, breaking down phenomenological boundaries between human and nonhuman animals, as Andy Serkis’s Caesar does in Planet of the Apes.
Was Treadwell eaten by a “strange” bear, a “bad bear,” who had moved into the area after his “friends” went of to hibernate? Did Roy suffer a stroke in the middle of the act and thus confuse Montecore? Is the boy’s suicide in “The Boy and the Deer” a matter not of violating boundaries between humans and nonhuman animals, but of a god, the sun, violating human-divine boundaries, or boundaries between the “daylight” and the underworld? In which case, the moral of the tale would be about disruptions within a social order, which happens to be a social order different from that of Western culture, one that includes nonhuman animals, and — significantly — one where animals are not necessarily deprived of language, with extended sense of kinship. (Haraway on “making kin”: “Make kin not kids.”)
We will explore in some detail how philosopher Jacques Derrida deconstructs this human exceptionalism regarding language, within the terms of Enlightenment thought, through the method that has come to be called “deconstructionism,” but before we head in that direction, I’d like to pause a moment to consider how we might understand this alternative world, where humans and animals can be social. Consider how Descola rehabilitates ontology, through the four schemes.
Venatic ontology: eating souls, or being eaten by one! Cannibalism, etc.
16 Jan 2020
INTRODUCTORY NOTE (A ROUGH THEORETICAL MAP)
Totemism, Ontology, Epistemology: Some Important Disagreements
It will be critical for this seminar, and good grounding for the theoretical work we will do together, to grasp the difference between 1) early anthropological notions of ‘totemism’ (as espoused by anthropologists like James George Frazer, whose Golden Bough famously influenced T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”), 2) Claude Levi-Strauss’s structuralist revolution (dissolving what Levi-Strauss called the “totemic illusion” for a more epistemological and sociological understanding of totemism as a ‘way of thinking’), and 3) Philippe Descola’s contemporary attempt to do for ‘animism’ what Levi-Strauss did for totemism, i.e. to conceive of animism as a universal aspect of human understanding rather than a primitive ‘belief.’ (Descola occupies the Chair of Anthropology at the Collège de France, the same position Levi-Strauss held, and is very much Levi-Strauss’s successor, despite important intellectual differences.) Central to these differences are 1) whether or not we lend any credence to the distinction between Culture and Nature, a distinction that has been so important to the development of Western thought but one that most humans (according to Descola’s survey) do not subscribe to, 2) to what degree we think language usage offers an important mark of distinction between humans and animals, and 3) whether or not we think a ‘person’ counts as a single or a dual (or otherwise multiple) entity. The distinction between ontological and epistemological emphases also is important.
A ROUGH THEORETICAL MAP: The structuralist revolution at mid 20th-century, that Levi-Strauss was at the forefront of, replaced the ‘metaphysics’ of ontology (from ontos + logos: the study of beings, strongly influenced by the nineteenth century rise of positive sciences, along with ongoing Western continental studies of mind, or ‘phenomenology,’ from Emmanuel Kant through Heidegger) with the more sociological emphases of epistemology (from episteme + logos: the study of knowledge, of how we know what we know, or how we organize our knowledge). Structuralism set the stage for post-structuralism and the kind of ‘archaeology of knowledge’ that Michel Foucault set forth, along with the ‘deconstruction’ of Jacques Derrida. Marxist critics, focused on the divisions of labor and class relations that in their analysis apportion subjectivity prior to any philosophical ‘essence,’ tend to emphasize the epistemological approach, society over nature. In the meantime, ontology has gone in and out of favor, experiencing a recent resurgence with the ‘new materialism’ of philosophers like Timothy Morton (of a group of thinkers focused on something called ‘Object Oriented Ontology’), who made ‘nature’ fashionable for theory again, or of Jane Bennett (Vibrant Matter). Bruno Latour’s materialist studies in science and technology, with his emphasis on a pervasive production of hybrid ‘naturecultures’ that seems to contradict, yet is enabled by, the constitutional separation of society and nature undergirding Western political institutions (and an enforced distinction between science and politics) has been influential in both directions. (This kind of thinking one way while doing another way, a culminating analysis of which has come through psychoanalysis, especially in the linguistic turn to Freud introduced by Jacques Lacan, also may undergird the contradiction I noted in our contemporary, contradictory relation to the animal: never more separate ethically and politically, while seemingly ever more involved imaginatively and scientifically.) Latour has importantly informed the discourse known as ‘posthumanism’ (as developed by thinkers like Donna Haraway, with her “Cyborg Manifesto,” or N. Kathleen Hayles, with her studies of cybernetics and science fiction) interested in the ‘agency’ of nonhumans, whether mechanical (robots) or organic (animals). Posthumanism would be informed in other ways by the deconstructionist thinking of Derrida and others, in ways we will consider later in the term, insofar as it deconstructs the difference between humans and animals that ‘language’ supposedly represents (humans have it, animals don’t, ergo we are fundamentally, ontologically different in ways that makes it okay to kill and eat them). Into all of this comes Philippe Descola, whose thorough critique of the culture/nature distinction in Beyond Nature and Culture brings ontology back in an ethnographic context with his fourfold “schema” of understanding, one that demotes a ‘naturalism’ whose uncritical universality has dominated nearly all Western thought since the age of Enlightenment. As Descola’s study only recently appeared in English translation, it is just now being assimilated by philosophers and theorists in the English speaking world.
Descola’s approach is appealing for the way it bypasses the supposed ‘language’ difference (animism being quite comfortable with talking animals), so that we can better appreciate a multiplicity of human animal relations across a wide variety of cultures, in ways that do not ‘other’ nature and so shore up a supposed ontological gap between humans and the rest of life. His critique puts ‘nature’ in its place as just a particular case of what Descola calls a “general grammar of cosmologies.” (Isabelle Stengers is another thinker who, in the wake of Bruno Latour, has placed new emphasis on ‘cosmology,’ or a more integrated understanding of how humans understand their ‘world.’) Descola’s biggest problem with Levi-Strauss (with whom he agrees on numerous other counts) is that Levi-Strauss has to enforce a division between nature and culture (and thus a fractured cosmos) in order to bring out the universality of complex cultural constructs.
If we apply Levi-Strauss’s ‘structural’ understanding to practices and belief systems, i.e. to symbolic cultures as embedded in language, we can appreciate how supposedly ‘primitive’ peoples do not take ‘nature’ any more literally than do supposedly ‘civilized’ peoples. This was a critical advance, essentially giving birth to modern anthropology. Doing so, however, has entailed withholding symbolism and language from nonhuman animals themselves. When humans speak with animals, in Levi-Strauss’s structuralist understanding, it is a way of ‘thinking’ nature, and ultimately a way of organizing social relations. Animals are as mute as any other ‘thing.’ Descola (following Viveiros de Castro) understands speaking with animals as a way of being, one that extends social relations to other than humans, that acknowledges their subjectivity, and that effectively governs how we relate to such beings, i.e. how to behave in relation to animals we eat, how how to behave in relation to animals that might eat us, etc. Such an understanding also brings nature more directly into the realm of the social, in ways normally taboo to Western culture, i.e. regulating how to treat people we might eat and/or who might eat us (cannibalism). Study Descola’s fourfold scheme to see how the ‘naturalist’ understanding (where we all are physically subject to the same laws of nature, the understanding that governs and has made possible Western ‘science’) is just one possible configuration among others, which also include animist (the reverse of naturalist), totemist, and analogist understandings.
But does Descola’s ‘animism’ in fact sneak metaphysics back into philosophy, if not reassert a new (and possibly dangerous) ideology of nature? Descola claims that subordinating epistemology to ontology is the “price that has to be paid” for this new understanding: “I have accordingly had to reject the sociocentric assumption and opt for the idea that sociological realities (stabilized relational systems) are analytically subordinate to ontological realities (the systems of properties attributed to existing beings). That is the price that has to be paid if animism and totemism are to be reborn with new meanings.” What do you think?
Is the price worth paying to renew our relation with other than human animals (as well as with cultures that value other than human animals differently)? Is the crisis in our relation with the other than human animal severe enough to warrant a drastic overhaul of, if not outright discarding of, theoretical advances rooted in Enlightenment rationality? What of approaches that reevaluate our relation to nonhuman animals within the terms of Western rationality (specifically cognitive science and utilitarianism)? We will consider some of those approaches when we discuss ‘animal rights’ and ‘animal liberation.’
Next week I will follow up this necessarily simplistic review of the theoretical history (I’ve made some strands of thinking seem more distinct than they are, in certain cases, and elided others that might be considered separately) with some more specific thoughts on the differences between Levi-Strauss and Descola.
It’s normal to feel totally confused about all of this right now. But if you can begin to grapple with these admittedly difficult concepts now, you should be in a good place to grasp ‘totemism,’ ‘animism,’ ‘structuralism,’ ‘ontology,’ ‘epistemology’ and so forth, when and as things clarify as we move forward through the term.
For now, do your best to read the Levi-Strauss and Descola excerpts as closely as you can and make note as you go of questions and points of confusion and/or clarity.
A SHORT LECTURE ON TOTEMISM (PowerPoint / PDF)
Lecture references the Identity excerpt from Paul Shepard’s The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (link to PDF here and in Further Resources for Week 1 under READINGS)
ART LINKS
Méret Oppenheim: fur gloves, fur cup and saucer, leather shoes made into a roast
Charlotte Cory’s photo collages
The Stooges, “Now I want to be your dog”
Maurizio Cattelan’s work
Jeff Koon’s bear and bobby
PARROTS & PTSD
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/magazine/what-does-a-parrot-know-about-ptsd.html
animotblog 