Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
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).
QL85.A49 2009
179’.3—dc22
2008045750
ISSN: 1573-4226
ISBN: 978 90 04 16867 1
PART ONE
POTENTIAL ENCOUNTERS
PART TWO
MEDIATE ENCOUNTERS
PART THREE
EXPERIMENTAL ENCOUNTERS
PART FOUR
CORPOREAL ENCOUNTERS
PART FIVE
DOMESTIC ENCOUNTERS
PART SIX
LIBIDINAL ENCOUNTERS
The editors would like to thank all those who helped with the prepara-
tion 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 ques-
tion 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 apolo-
gies 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
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, mean-
while, 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 confronta-
tion that paralyzes both sides”, a standoff that serves only to suppress
2 tom tyler
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 ago-
nist 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).
introduction: the case of the camel 3
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 anthropol-
ogy, 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 meet-
ing between discrete parties, which ceases at the moment they combine
or separate. The nature of such a meeting, which precludes both uni-
fication 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 understand-
ing 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).
4 tom tyler
5
See for instance Ad-Dam r ’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).
introduction: the case of the camel 5
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).
introduction: the case of the camel 7
References
Ad-Dam r , Mu ammad ibn M sā. 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 9
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)Huma-
nities.’ In What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
PART ONE
POTENTIAL ENCOUNTERS
Tom Tyler
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.
14 tom tyler
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 imper-
sonal 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 non-
human being, as did the Christian anthropomorphite heretics. Secondly,
it refers to the over-enthusiastic ascription of distinctively human activi-
ties 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 seri-
ousness” who have most objected to anthropomorphic language in the
discussion of animals. The entomologist John Kennedy, a vocal critic
3
This text is cited in the OED, and briefly discussed in Midgley (1983, pp. 128–9).
4
For an engaging discussion of evolution and ‘design’, which meticulously avoids
this pitfall, see Dennett (1995, especially Part I).
if h orses h ad h ands . . . 15
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).
16 tom tyler
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 par-
ties 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).
if h orses h ad h ands . . . 17
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).
18 tom tyler
alike blinded them to his truly impressive talents. Hans was ‘clever’,
after his own fashion, and the error had been to characterise his abili-
ties 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 anthropo-
morphism. First, it has been argued that discussion of animals will inevi-
tably 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 selec-
tion, 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 anthropomor-
phize . . . 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
12
See also pp. 28–32.
13
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 damned-
est 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 primatolo-
gist 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
if h orses h ad h ands . . . 19
scientists they find themselves obliged to provide a plausible (i.e. evolutionary) explana-
tion 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”, “anthropo-
centric” 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
20 tom tyler
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 occa-
sions 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 some-
thing rather special about humans, bursting as they are with a host of
unique qualities that we can’t resist attributing to other beings. If occa-
sion 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 designa-
tion 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 distinc-
tive 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).
22 tom tyler
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 con-
vergence 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 extra-
terrestrial 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.
if h orses h ad h ands . . . 23
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 superior-
ity. 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 spa-
tial 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 narcis-
sism, an obsessive love of self. Just as the narcissist is self-absorbed, self-
centred, 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 ani-
mals 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 else-
where (Tyler 2005).
24 tom tyler
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 . . . 25
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
Pamela Banting
1
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 trans-
lated 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)
hoof marks, paw prints and the problem of writing wildly 29
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.
30 pamela banting
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 abil-
ity 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
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
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 call-
ing 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 con-
tains 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 intima-
tions of animal rhetorics—an owl’s interrogative hoots, elk’s conversa-
tional 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 apply-
ing metaphors of human language use to animals the same way voice-
over 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 stay-
at-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 tradi-
tion 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 care-
ful 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) traf-
fics 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).
36 pamela banting
ridicule the voice and experience of a writer who spent most of his life
outdoors, was a well-respected naturalist with several honorary doctor-
ates 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 nonfic-
tion—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 signify-
ing—forms” (Manes 1996, p. 26).10
9
Similarly, in his article ‘Fabricating Nature: A Critique of the Social Construc-
tion 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. Ecofemi-
nist 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
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).
38 pamela banting
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 episte-
mology 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 societ-
ies 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.
40 pamela banting
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 pos-
sible; 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 meta-
significant 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 com-
pletely over the literal meaning of signs to some transcendental signi-
fied—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 post-
structuralist thought is to interrogate some of its European content in
terms of other geographies, in North American, Canadian, Western-
Canadian, 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
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
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——. 1999. Switchbacks: True Stories from the Canadian Rockies. Toronto: McClelland &
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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 ani-
mals 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 unrecog-
nized 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,
46 mediate encounters
POST-MEATEATING
Carol J. Adams
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 dol-
phins 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 activ-
ist 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’:
48 carol j. adams
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 eat-
ing 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
50 carol j. adams
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).
post-meateating 51
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 consump-
tion 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).
Table 1 Binaries
Modern Postmodern
• transforms the referent of • transforms the referent of culture
nature
• animals are absent referents • ‘cultural beings’ are referents
• factories modeled on • farms modeled on factories
slaughterhouses
• farms owned by individuals • factory farms owned by corporations
• zoos • conservation and p/reservation
• animals as machines • machines as animals
• vivisection in universities • biomedical research by corporations
• in vivo research • in vitro research
• ‘pollo-vegetarians’ • mock meat
• viruses • prions
• animal rights • animal rites
• product liability • product ‘libel-ity’
3
Susan Squier discusses these transformations in her essay ‘Fellow-Feeling’, in this
volume.
post-meateating 55
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 humanocen-
tric 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.
4
See ‘Animal Rights > Animal Rites’, below.
post-meateating 57
5
See, for instance, the infamous effects of thalidomide, taken by pregnant women
in the 1950s and 1960s.
58 carol j. adams
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)
60 carol j. adams
7
Another way exists, as Josephine Donovan and I have sought to establish (2007).
post-meateating 61
No Particular Relief
I am not claiming that the modern period was a ‘better’ time for nonhu-
man 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 postmod-
ern 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
66 carol j. adams
Times had to be very specific in explaining them and why they were
needed. The patents were for the development of antibodies to coun-
teract 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.
post-meateating 67
Fig. 3.4 ‘Ursula Hamdress’ from Playboar (reprinted in The Beast: The
Magazine that Bites Back, 10 (Summer 1981), pp. 18–19)
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.
70 carol j. adams
10
On the dynamics of discussions between vegetarians and meat eaters, see my
Living Among Meat Eaters (2009), especially pp. 91–122.
post-meateating 71
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 Scien-
tific Subjectivity.’ In Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations. Edited by
11
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.
72 carol j. adams
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
Randy Malamud
1
GFP Bunny, http://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html (accessed 15 September 2007).
2
Wetterling Gallery, http://www.wetterlinggallery.com (accessed 6 January 2007).
americans do weird things with animals 75
3
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).
76 randy malamud
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 talk-
ing 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 ani-
mals 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
americans do weird things with animals 77
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).
78
randy malamud
from beavers, civet from the civet cat) . . . or it can be putrid. Presum-
ably 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 mal-
leable, dispensable in the cause of art (as they are dispensable also in
the causes of commerce or human convenience). Yolacan’s photog-
raphy 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).
80 randy malamud
9
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 avail-
able at http://img131.imageshack.us/img131/176/hiverparis19557kr.jpg (accessed
15 September 2007).
americans do weird things with animals 81
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 pic-
ture 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 control-
ling 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 sug-
gestion 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.
82 randy malamud
11
‘Trunk Show.’ W 34 (1) ( January 2005): 76–101.
americans do weird things with animals 83
Fig. 4.2 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 mea-
sured 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 butcher-
ing is unique to human beings,” she writes (1996, p. 50). Butchering,
84 randy malamud
Fig. 4.3 Sketch for a fashionable elephant. Drawing by tailor from Helmut
Lang, made-to-measure studio (2004)
12
See also Adams’ ‘Post-meateating’ in this volume.
americans do weird things with animals 85
In fact, I believe it is not the case that the tropes of American mate-
rial 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 reconfigura-
tion. 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
13
Siegfried & Roy, http://www.siegfriedandroy.com (accessed 6 January 2007).
14
Big Cat Rescue, http://www.bigcatrescue.org/cats/wild/white_tigers.htm (accessed
15 September 2007).
88 randy malamud
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 near-
fatal 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 con-
trol 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 power-
mongering 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 contem-
plate 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 audi-
ence 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
americans do weird things with animals 89
of the Impossible’); and then, when the animal attack comes, the audi-
ence 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 cap-
puccino 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).
90 randy malamud
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.
92 randy malamud
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 wild-
ness, 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 cel-
ebrate 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
americans do weird things with animals 93
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 anthro-
zoological 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, occasion-
ally, 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-think-
about-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, some-
what unsuccessfully, to broach the topic of animal consciousness (Nagel 1974).
americans do weird things with animals 95
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 contri-
bution 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 Contempo-
rary 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), Octo-
ber: 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 Janu-
ary 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
Robyn Smith
1
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 hold-
ing with tradition here.
100 robyn smith
Scientists began their investigations into the ‘as yet unknown’ substance
in food with animal feeding experiments using diets consisting of puri-
fied 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 pol-
ished 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,
rat feeding experiments in early vitamin research 101
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 quanti-
ties and qualities of proteins, different salt mixtures and carbohydrates
and fats of various types, McCollum attempts to piece together the by-
ways 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. McCol-
lum 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 mea-
sures 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 pol-
ished rice. The excellent growth curves make it clear that for growth the
102 robyn smith
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 repeti-
tion, 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; McCol-
lum states that the results of his accumulated repetitions in difference,
104 robyn smith
“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.
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 sys-
tem, just as the juggling act is constituted in the dissolution of material
and human agencies.
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 invis-
ible 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 revolv-
ing 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 repro-
duction, rather than simply the work of scientists upon rats. First of
all, the rats’ agency is apparent in the need for the flywheel. Rat fer-
tility 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,
rat feeding experiments in early vitamin research 107
throughout the experimental system, the ‘as yet unknown’. The rhythm
of the exercise wheel is fundamental to the development of the much-
desired ‘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 phenom-
ena 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:
108 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 experimen-
tal 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 con-
sists 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).
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 Men-
del 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
rat feeding experiments in early vitamin research 109
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 metabo-
lism 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 concep-
tualization 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 concern-
ing 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
110 robyn smith
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 actual-
ized. This exchange of correspondence occurred while Mendel was on
summer vacation and is a particularly compelling site of investigation
rat feeding experiments in early vitamin research 111
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 spe-
cific 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 inhibit-
ing 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
2
Thanks to the editors of this volume for their initiative. I am happy to acknowl-
edge 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.
114 robyn smith
References
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
Donna Haraway
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.
118 donna haraway
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 understand-
ing 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 practi-
cally 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 jus-
tified 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
120 donna haraway
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 Onco-
Mouse, whose work was to serve as a breast cancer model for women.
Commanded by her suffering and moved by Lynn Randolph’s paint-
ing, 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 power-
ful, 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-
sharing and response in experimental laboratories 121
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 unprec-
edented 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
2
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
sharing and response in experimental laboratories 123
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.
124 donna haraway
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 com-
mand, “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 relent-
less 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
sharing and response in experimental laboratories 125
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.
126 donna haraway
expensive, hard work—as well as play—, of staying with all the com-
plexities 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 physi-
ological 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 arrange-
ments 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
sharing and response in experimental laboratories 127
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 neces-
sities 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.
128 donna haraway
7
I am grateful to Adam Reed for giving me Cixous’ essay and for his evident pain
and care in reading it.
sharing and response in experimental laboratories 129
an obedient love, but one that might even recognize the non-compliant
multiplicity of insects. And the taste of blood.
Coda: Rearticulating
8
Email from Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi to Donna Haraway, July 15, 2006.
130 donna haraway
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 sen-
tience—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 biobehav-
ioral 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 captiv-
ity for many animals, not only apes. Note, I think we now know that
at least in serious part because of research. But again, those calcula-
tions—necessary, obligatory, and grounding action out loud and in
public—are not sufficient.
Now, how to address that response-ability (which is always experi-
enced 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 get-
ting 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
sharing and response in experimental laboratories 131
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 con-
centrated 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 respon-
sibility (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
132 donna haraway
9
More details on this snail research can be found in Hadfield, Holland and Olival
2002.
sharing and response in experimental laboratories 133
References
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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 Propaga-
tion 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
134 donna haraway
CORPOREAL ENCOUNTERS
Laurie Shannon
1
In managing the metrics of sameness and difference between ‘humans’ and ‘ani-
mals,’ 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 Ani-
mal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals translated “speciesism” into the
philosophical and ethical languages of utilitarian analysis.
renaissance anatomies 139
3
See Harrison 1992; see also Cottingham 1978; for an account of Cartesian phi-
losophy as containing a kind of posthumanism avant la lettre, see Badmington 2003. (I
am grateful to Manuela Rossini for this reference.)
140 laurie shannon
4
Although customarily these three are cited alone, Aristotle lists five kinds or “pow-
ers” of the soul: the vegetative, the sensitive, the appetitive, the locomotive, and the
intellectual (De Anima, 414a29–32).
renaissance anatomies 141
5
Paster also rightly makes the case that these gestures—even of “identification”—can-
not 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.
142 laurie shannon
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).
renaissance anatomies 143
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.
renaissance anatomies 145
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 revolu-
tion 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).
146 laurie shannon
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.
renaissance anatomies 147
Fig. 7.1 Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Basel, 1543), Book I,
Chapter 9
(© Professor Daniel Garrison, Northwestern University)
15
Garrison and Hast explain that “In most vertebrates, including non-human pri-
mates, 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
148 laurie shannon
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, refer-
ring 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 criti-
cal 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-narcis-
sism. 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).
renaissance anatomies 149
Working Likeness
16
Geoffrey Keynes, Harvey’s twentieth-century editor, offers a defense of the sev-
enteenth-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.
150 laurie shannon
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 Vesa-
lius 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).
renaissance anatomies 151
18
For an exhaustive list of Harvey’s animal references, see Cole, 1957.
19
“. . . 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).
152 laurie shannon
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.
renaissance anatomies 153
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 begin-
nings 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 Democri-
tus’ 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 common-
place of natural historical writing and moral commentary: the notion
154 laurie shannon
22
See Shannon 2009 (forthcoming).
renaissance anatomies 155
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 inte-
gral, 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
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. Geof-
frey 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.
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——. 1988. ‘The Organic Soul,’ in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed.
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Saunders, J.B. and O’Malley, C.D. 1950. The Illustrations from the Works of Andreas Vesalius
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Sawday, Jonathan. 1996. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renais-
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Shannon, Laurie. 2010 (forthcoming). The Zootopian Constitution: Animal Agency and Early
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CHAPTER EIGHT
Jonathan Burt
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 con-
sequences 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 ‘posthu-
manism’? 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?
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 human-
centred 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).
primate bodies and the rise of posthumanism 161
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 preoc-
cupation 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, con-
trol 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 scientific-
ally 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 per-
fectionist evolutionary assumptions behind the development of machine
intelligence: It is not clear that hybridity inherently confers an evolu-
tionary advantage. In fact, in many respects, it may confer a negative
one (cp. Pearson 1997, p. 222). Underlying this is an implicit critique
primate bodies and the rise of posthumanism 163
2
Harlan Sprague-Dawley is founded in 1931, Carworth in 1935 and Charles River
in 1947.
164 jonathan burt
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.
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).
166 jonathan burt
The significant part of the story for our purposes comes with what
happens next. Zuckerman’s notebooks in which he put down his obser-
vations from Monkey Hill are fairly sketchy and not particularly system-
atic. 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 influenc-
ing 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?
primate bodies and the rise of posthumanism 167
4
For a more detailed account see my essay ‘Solly Zuckerman, the Making of a
Primatological Career in Britain, 1925–1945’ (Burt 2006).
168 jonathan burt
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170 jonathan burt
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 spe-
cies 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 chick-
ens. 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
172 domestic encounters
FELLOW-FEELING
Susan Squier
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:
174 susan squier
Fig. 9.1 Women and their hens, poised between two meanings of fellow-
feeling. The Back Garden Hen (1917). Reproduced with the permission of Rare
Books and Manuscripts, Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State
University Libraries.
fellow-feeling 175
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 rela-
tions. 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 mid-
nineteenth 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
176 susan squier
1
See also Roger Ebert’s review of this “loving, moving, inspiring, quirky docu-
mentary” (2006).
fellow-feeling 177
[ 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 con-
ceive 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 hor-
ror 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 expe-
rience 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 him-
self 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’ ” (Sug-
den 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 gather-
ing in societies and producing wealth, species membership constitutes
a boundary-marker. There seems in Adam Smith no suggestion that
fellow-feeling 179
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 poul-
try 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).
180 susan squier
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.
Betty MacDonald
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 econ-
omy 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 com-
panies 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
186 susan squier
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, dismem-
berment 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 accompa-
nying it, I wondered how to bring Linda Lord’s very different expe-
rience 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
fellow-feeling 187
much, and that’s how it went. But I don’t think they really realize just
what one eye—how it limits you in a lot of things. And it hurts you for
good jobs, too. (Chatterley and Rouverol 2000, p. 59)
Linda’s comments recall Adam Smith’s analysis of how a physiologi-
cally-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
fellow-feeling 189
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 industrializa-
tion, 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
[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 farm-
ing 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
194 susan squier
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 well-
being 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 contempo-
rary 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. Cam-
bridge, 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: Meta-
phors, 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.’ Car-
bondale 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
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2007).
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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-Milk-
No 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.
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(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.
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(Suppl 1): 252–281.
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Fellow-feeling.’ Economics and Philosophy 18: 63–87.
CHAPTER TEN
Steve Baker
Fig. 10.1 Lucy Kimbell, One Night with Rats in the Service of Art, invitation card
(2005). Courtesy of the artist
198 steve baker
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, tech-
nology 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 occa-
sions: 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 conversa-
tions 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 installa-
tions . . . ” 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 bas-
tardized 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
lucy kimbell’s NOT KNOWING about rats 199
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
lucy kimbell’s NOT KNOWING about rats 201
no one had challenged me. Within practice-based research, you can get
away with quite a lot. You are allowed not to know, for quite a lot longer
than you are elsewhere in the world. (2005, p. 9)
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 fellow-
ship 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).
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 proj-
ect—“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:
lucy kimbell’s NOT KNOWING about rats 203
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 some-
thing 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).
204 steve baker
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.
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).
Fig. 10.3 ‘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
208 steve baker
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 explor-
ing 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)
lucy kimbell’s NOT KNOWING about rats 209
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 vari-
ous 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” environ-
ments—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:
lucy kimbell’s NOT KNOWING about rats 211
Yes, no, it is similar, because also definitely built into “Is your rat an art-
ist?” 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.
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.
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 com-
ments 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 delib-
erately aligning herself with an animal rights position, nor indeed of
214 steve baker
Noting that “rats do not live long in human years,” and that discus-
sion 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)
216 steve baker
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:
lucy kimbell’s NOT KNOWING about rats 217
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 crea-
ture 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 mod-
est, 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 not-
knowing 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).
218 steve baker
References
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 cross-
species 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 nar-
ratives 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
220 libidinal encounters
Monika Bakke
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.
222 monika bakke
2
Historically, in the sense of capital punishment; now, in the sense of social con-
demnation and exclusion, and as simply physically dangerous.
human-nonhuman libidinal relations 223
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 simi-
larities 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 possibili-
ties 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 rever-
berate in our orgasmic strokings, our squirrelly fingers race up and down
the trunk and limbs of another, our clam vagina opens, our erect cobra-
head penis snakes its way in. Our muscular and vertebrate bodies tran-
substantiate 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 perspec-
tive. 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 prosti-
tutes 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
224 monika bakke
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)
human-nonhuman libidinal relations 225
5
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.
226 monika bakke
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 ani-
mals 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 ungrace-
ful 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_ani-
mal_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 uni-
formly 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).
human-nonhuman libidinal relations 227
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.
228 monika bakke
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.
230 monika bakke
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 “het-
erosexual 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 Hus-
band 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 emo-
tional 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.
12
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).
human-nonhuman libidinal relations 231
Among the reasons commonly given for the persistence and omnipres-
ence 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
232 monika bakke
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 func-
tions to perform; as such they are most open and receptive:
if libidinal impulses are fundamentally decomposing, desolidifying, liquefy-
ing 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 inter-
course 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 human-
animal 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 human-
animal 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
human-nonhuman libidinal relations 237
Fig. 11.3 Oleg Kulik, from Family of the Future series (1997). Photograph
courtesy of XL Gallery, Moscow
Fig. 11.4 Oleg Kulik, sketch for ‘Family of the Future. Kamasutra’ (1998).
Photograph courtesy of XL Gallery, Moscow
human-nonhuman libidinal relations 239
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”.
240 monika bakke
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 pro-
voke the abdication of conscience” (1962, p. 109). Living vertiginously
means living on the edge of sustainability, being “on the edge of too-
muchness” (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 non-
humans—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.
242 monika bakke
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 Inter-
view 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
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 non-
human 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 21st-
century naturecultures, AMoT offers more politically promising represen-
tations 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 writ-
ings. Moreover, the essay reflects my larger endeavour to intervene in two
domains of cultural theory and practice by taking animal encounters seri-
ously: 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, forthcom-
ing in Gender Goes Life, edited by Marie-Luise Angerer and Christiane König (2008).
244 manuela rossini
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 so-
called “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 writ-
ing”, the Companion Species Manifesto I quoted from above, it is tongue-
kissing 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
2
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.
symbiogenesis and metamorphosis 245
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.
246 manuela rossini
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 techno-
phobic 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 Post-
humanisms. The quote is from their forthcoming introductory volume to the series.
symbiogenesis and metamorphosis 247
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.
248 manuela rossini
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.
symbiogenesis and metamorphosis 251
9
This sentence appears on the first, unnumbered page of the book.
symbiogenesis and metamorphosis 255
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.
symbiogenesis and metamorphosis 257
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 Uni-
versity 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. Trans-
lated 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, Lit-
erature, 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 Min-
nesota 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.
258 manuela rossini
——. 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 theo-
retische 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
hair 7, 33, 42, 143, 166, 171, 248 jaguar 243, 247–55
ham 84 Jameson, Frederic 50
Hamadryas baboon 165–68 jellyfish 74, 253
Haraway, Donna J. 5, 98, 115–34, junk food 76, 85–86
137, 139, 143, 159, 163, 167, 220, Jurassic Park (Crichton) 70
222, 244–47 Just So Stories (Kipling) 1
hare 33
Harmon, Byron 28 Kac, Eduardo 74
Harvey, David 135, 142, 149–53 Kanga 48
Harvey, William 51–53, 64–69 kangaroo 45, 48
Hassan, Ihab 51, 65 Kant, Immanuel 20, 121
Heidegger, Martin 11, 20–23, 122 Kennedy, John 14–15, 18–19, 23
hen (see chicken) Kimbell, Lucy 7, 172, 197–218
herd 34, 40 ‘King Elk, The’ (Russell) 12, 34
Hirst, Damien 74, 81, 93 Kipling, Rudyard 1–3, 8
Historiae animalium (Gesner) 143–44 kitsch 46, 87, 92
History of Sex (‘Red Pebbles’) kitten (see cat)
(Serrano) 219, 234–36 ‘Kleo’ (Russell) 12, 34
Homer 13 Koran (see Qur ān)
Homo sapiens 15, 22, 36, 123, 137, 141, 254 Kristeva, Julia 27
homocentric (see anthropocentrism) Kulik, Oleg 219–20, 234, 236–39
index 263
Siegel, Taggart 176 tiger 45–46, 55, 87–90 (see also White
Siegfried & Roy 46, 87–90 Tigers of Nevada)
sign language 76 Tigger 48
silk 7, 171 tofuturkey 59
Singer, Peter 61, 79, 138, 159, 221–22, Topsell, Edward 143–44
224, 252 tracking 12, 27, 29–33, 35, 39–41
slaughterhouse 45, 49–54, 66, 84, 185–89 transgenic 74, 164, 246
Smith, Adam 7, 171, 175–79, 188–94 Treatise of Man, The (Descartes) 138
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein 138 trout 37–38
Smith, Mick 29 tsunami 75–76, 93
Smith, Robyn 5, 97, 99–114 tuna fish (see fish)
Smuts, Barbara 120, 168 turkey 53, 65–66
snail 131–33, 151 Tyler, Tom 1–9, 11, 13–26, 71, 76,
Snyder, Gary 27, 29, 31, 35–36 91
social science 2, 198–99, 212
sociology 3, 175, 189, 254 Ursula Hamdress 67–68
Socrates 7
sonar (see echolocation) veal 45
soul 138–140, 142, 154–55 vegan 59–60, 204
SPEAK 204 vegetarian 48, 58–59, 70
species narcissism 23 pollo-vegetarian 45, 52, 58–59
speciesism 73, 122, 138, 160, 223, pesco-vegetarian 58
225, 230, 236, 244 Venus d’Urbino (Titian) 67–68
spider 14 Vesalius, Andreas 135, 142, 144–50,
black widow spider 230 152, 155
Squier, Susan 7, 54, 171–72, 173–96 veterinary 17, 98, 115, 124, 171,
squirrel 38, 223 181–82
steak 48 video game (see digital game)
Stengers, Isabelle 126, 200, 212–13 Vietnam war 61
Striffler, Steve 175–76 virtual pet (see digital game)
subaltern 79, 92 virus 15, 52, 59–60
subhuman 16 vitamin 5, 57, 97, 99–114
Sugden, Robert 178, 189–90 vivisection 52, 57–58, 139, 145, 150,
superhuman 18, 21 152 (see also dissection and
Superman 41, 239 experiment)
symbiosis 75, 220, 239–40, 249, 253, 256 von Osten, Wilhelm 16
endosymbiosis 239
symbiogenesis 8, 220, 243–58 W (magazine) 82–83
SymbioticA Research Group 164, 209 Watson, J.B. 162–63
symbolic capital 53–54, 69 whale 22, 77, 85, 151
systems theory 220, 243, 248, 256 White Tigers of Nevada 87–90
Wiener, Norbert 161–62
tail 34, 53, 198, 214 wilderness 12, 28–30, 42, 184–85
Taffy Lovely 67 Winfrey, Oprah 65
Tamagotchi 56–57 (see also digital game) Winnie the Pooh (see bear)
Tampax 85–86, 90 Wise, Steve 56
taxidermy 74 wolf 21, 143, 223
television 4, 34, 45, 76, 89 Wolfe, Cary 2, 256
Thanksgiving 65–66 wool 7, 171
theology 138–39, 141, 152–53, 155 World War I 159
Theory of Moral Sentiments, The World War II 54, 128, 161, 164, 179,
(Smith) 175, 177–78, 189, 192, 194 183–85
Thrift, Nigel 214–15, 217 worm 132, 151, 163, 173
266 index