further animalia, this time without pictures

More utterly hilarious Cliché War fallout from "The March of the Penguins" here.  Penguins, yes, those deceptively difficult to caricature creatures in a savage land whose greatest feat is having mastered the cocktail party effect.  I've since updated my previous post, in case you only skimmed the horrendous bloglines version (many thanks to S. for pointing out that penguins don't actually "prune" themselves, as in spontaneously lop off their own limbs, so much as "preen," etc.)  What follows are a few more thoughts on 'the animal', patched together from a further reading of John Berger and then turning toward Agamben.  Apologies in advance for their somewhat scattered, well bloggish quality.  Any comments or criticisms more than welcome.

Berger again:

What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseperable from the development of langauge in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves.  Yet the first symbols were animals.  What distinguishes men from animals was born of their relationship with them. The Iliad is one of the earliest texts available to us, and in it the use of metaphor still reveals the proximity of man and animal, the proximity from which metaphor itself arose...

This seems an important point, regarding the proximity of metaphor with the animal at its birth.  There also seems a danger inherent to any too-quick recourse to origins, whether etymologic or anthropologic (or some combination thereof).  A danger, naturally, of naturalizing away or foreclosing prematurely on the future, and which extends beyond the mere hubris of anthropomorphism.  But is it hubris merely?  Perhaps our love/hate relationship with anthropomorphism is itself a kind of naturalizing shield, once again endlessly thematizing something we would rather not look at too closely.  Berger notes:

Anthropomorphism was the residue of the continuous use of animal metaphor.  In the last two centuries, animals have gradually disappeared.  Today we live with them.  And in this new solitude, anthropomorphism makes us doubly uneasy.

Are we uneasy precisely because to be reminded of our differences (such as through exaggerated projections of sameness–the gambling farm animals at the table) is also in a sense to conjure this originary proximity, and vice versa?  The fact remains that there is no pure division, despite what Descartes maybe wished to believe, and despite the numerous ways in which the world of culture and commerce still reflects to some degree a Cartesian worldview, albeit one now largely metastasized and soulless.

The decisive theoretical break came with Descartes.  Descartes internalised, within man, the dualism implicit in the human relation to animals.  In dividing absolutely body from soul, he bequeathed the body to the laws of physics and mechanics, and, since animals were soulless, the animal was reduced to the model of a machine. The consequences of Descartes's break followed only slowly.  A century later, the great zoologist Buffon [sic], although accepting and using the model of the machine in order to classify animals and their capacities, nevertheless displays a tenderness towards animals which temporarily reinstates them as companions.  This tenderness is half envious. What man has to do in order to transcend the animal, to transcend the mechanical within himself, and what his unique spirituality leads to, is often anguish.  And so, by comparison and despite the model of the machine, the animal seems to him to enjoy a kind of innocence.  The animal has been emptied of experience and secrets, and this new invented "innocence" begins to provoke in man a kind of nostalgia.  For the first time, animals are placed in a receding past.

So far so good.  The roots of our projection are laid bare; having diagnosed ourselves as part machines, we look back to "the animal" for a kind of redemption, somewhat jealous and bitter.  Perhaps we would even like to punish the animal not a little bit, for our sins.  Hence the anthropological machine, in which we inadvertently trap ourselves, and misread both the human and the animal most miserably. However Berger then claims that "eventually, Descartes's model was surpassed:"

In the first stages of the industrial revolution, animals were used as machines.  As also were children.  [Well, perhaps they had no "human rights" as such, but were they really thought of as machines pure and simple?]  Later, in the so-called post-industrial societies, they are treated as raw material.  Animals required for food are processed like manufactured commodities.... This reduction of the animal, which has a theoretical as well as economic history, is part of the same process as that by which men have been reduced to isolated productive and consuming units.  Indeed, during this period an approach to animals often prefigured an approach to man.  The mechanical view of the animal's work capacity was later applied to that of workers.  F.W. Taylor who developed "Taylorish" of time-motion studies and "scientific" management of industry proposed that work must be "so stupid" and so phlegmatic that he (the worker) "more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ok than any other type."  Nearly all modern techniques of social conditioning were first established with animal experiments...Today behaviourists like Skinner imprison the very concept of man within the limits of what they conclude from their artificial tests with animals.  [Again, my emphasis]

So if the Cartesian model has been "surpassed," it is perhaps only inasmuch as its immediate material consequences have thrived and spread, to stain the whole terrain; the menace of the mechanical analogy has not failed to extend itself to humans, and in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways it is now the content of our experiences and secrets in addition to our very bodies, that is increasingly under threat.  Biopolitics, as they say. And how do we––"we" the petty bourgeois poised to inheret the earth––cope with this situation?  Well, we "complete" our identities with pets:

In the past, families of all classes kep domestic animals because they served a useful purpose...The practice of keeping animals regardless of their usefulness...[as] pets...is a modern innovation, and, on the social scale on which it exists today, is unique.  It is part of that universal but personal withdrawal into the private small family unit, decorated or furnished with mementoes from the outside world, which is such a distinguishing feature of consumer societies. The small family living unit lacks space, earth, other animals, seasons, natural temperatures, and so on.  The pet is either sterilised or sexually isolated, extremely limited in its exercise, deprived of almost all other animal contact, and fed with artificial foods.  This is the material process which lies behind the truism that pets come to resemble their masters or mistresses.   They are creatures of their owner's way of life. Equally important is the way the average owner regards his pet.  (Children are, briefly, somewhat different.)  The pet completes him, offering responses to aspects of his character which would otherwise remain unconfirmed.  He can be to his pet what he is not to anybody or anything else.  Furthermore, the pet can be conditioned to react as though it, too, recognizes this.  THe pet offers its owner a mirror to a part that is otherwise never reflected.  But, since in this relationship the autonomy of both parties has been lost (the owner has become the-special-man-he-is-only-to-his-pet, and the animal has become dependent on its owner for every physical need), the parallelism of their separate lives has been destroyed.  (About Looking)

Berger has been blowing a little hard here and he backs off for a minute to resume contact with the original subject, namely:  language:

The cultural marginalisation of animals is, of course, a more complex process than their physical marginalisation.  The animals of the mind cannot be so easily dispersed.  Sayings, dreams, games, stories, superstitions, the language itself, recall them.  The animals of the mind, instead of being dispersed, have been co-opted into other categories so that the category animal has lost its central importance.  Mostly they have been co-opted into the family and into the spectacle... The animals transformed into spectacle have disappeared in another way.  In the windows of bookshops at Christmas, a third of the volumes on display are animal picture books.  Baby owls or giraffes, the camera fixes them in a domain which, although entirely visible to the camera, will never be entered by the spectator.  All animals appear like fish seen through the plate glass of an aquarium.

Berger goes on to describe how this spectacle is both technical and ideological.  Technical, because the quick camera shutter captures the animal in a frozen moment otherwise inaccessible, or "invisible" to us.  Ideological because it is always the animals that are observed:  "The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance."  (Indeed, anyone who's spent any real time with a dog or a cat knows what sensitive observers they are.)

The absinthian irony is that we are also subjects to this spectacle, perhaps even inescapably so.   Our language is the very act of domestification.   To say, "I speak" is madness, to domesticate.   We are fish behind the glass, in collective cages of our own forgetting.  Additionally, in dutifully confusing the spectacle for reality, partly because of its economic and social power, perhaps, partly for its seduction and illusion of archival permanence, we resign ourselves to performing the role of 'fish,' something which is not, in the end, at all true to (the potential of) the fishly.    Animals nevertheless represent a chance for humanity, and not only to re-think the positioning and firmness of this glass but also in our relations.   But if and only if the horizon of both these concepts, 'animal' and 'human' is understood to lie outside of their ceaseless and circular Disneyfication.   That the non-human is not simply the animal, nor vice versa.   That the concept of "human rights" might very well one day extend to animals as well.   Most of all, that it is not the "emptying" of experience and secrets that makes for "innocence" but rather their very existence, that which gives "innocence" any meaning at all.   (Without secrets, there can be no innocence as such; the word itself would cease to signify.  In short, "innocence" is not the correct word to describe a lack of linguistic self-consciousness; that is bathos.)

I confess that this entire post (and congratulations if you've endured this far) has been the working up to a loose question about Agamben.  Specifically, whether he retains a certain proto-Catholic or latently Cartesian prejudice.   Here is the passage in question, one, I dare say, where he is once again wishing to side with a certain Blanchot and against a certain Derrida.  (Why hasn't anybody written about these tensions explicitly yet?   Derrida's later texts remain so full of discreet points of difference, and pleas to so many thinkers––my guess is that most of them won't even be noticed much less commented on for years.   Though of course that is precisely what Agamben is doing here, (on page 92), and in likewise discreet manner, in which case it is worth noting that Derrida responds back again in Acts of Religion and elsewhere, but then again these are only the antics of philistine pseudo-theorists so you needn't worry about it all that much).   Agamben:

Insofar as the animal knows neither beings nor nonbeings, neither open nore closed, it is outside of being; it is outside in an exteriority more external than any open, and inside in an intimacy more internal than any closedness.  To let the animal be would then mean:  to let it be outside of being.  The zone of nonknowledge–or of a-knowledge–that is at issue here is beyond both knowing and not knowing, beyond both disconcealing and concealing, beyond both being and the nothing.  But what is thus left to be outside of being is not thereby negated or taken away; it is not, for this reason, inexistent.  It is an existing, real thing that has gone beyond the difference between being and beings. However, it is not here a question of trying to trace the no longer human or animal contours of a new creation that would run the risk of being equally as mythological as the other.  As we have seen, in our culture man has always been the result of a simultaneous division and articulation of the animal and the human, in which one of the two terms of the operation was also what was at stake in it.  To render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new–more effective or more authentic–articulations, but rather to show the central emptiness, the hiatus that–within man–separates man and animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness:  the suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man.

And if one day, according to a now-classic image, the "face in the sand" that the sciences of man have formed on the shore of our history should finally be erased, what will appear in its place will not be a new mandylion or "Veronica" of a regained humanity or animality.  The righteous with animal heads in the miniature in the Ambrosian do no represent a new declension of the man-animal relation so much as a figure of "great ignorance" which lets both of them be outside of being, saved precisely in their being unsavable.  Perhaps there is still a way in which living beings can sit at the messianic banquet of the righteous without taking on a historical task and without setting the anthropological machine into action.  Once again, the solution of the mysterium coniunctionis by which the human has been produced passesm thrgouh an unprecedented inquiry into the practico-political mystery of separation.  (The Open, Trans. Keven Attell, 2004)

Comments

[Amie]

Matt, so before even trying to address the many questions and texts you mention, I'd like to simply note whether Herzog's recent film, which YH wrote about, might have something to say about this from Berger:
"Baby owls or giraffes, the camera fixes them in a domain which, although entirely visible to the camera, will never be entered by the spectator. All animals appear like fish seen through the plate glass of an aquarium."
As you note:
"Berger goes on to describe how this spectacle is both technical and ideological. Technical, because the quick camera shutter captures the animal in a frozen moment otherwise inaccessible, or 'invisible' to us. Ideological because it is always the animals that are observed: 'The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance.'"
Doesn't the Herzog film suggest that animals are not just content to be observed, they have a gaze as well, which is not insignificant when it looks at the human, and sees 'food', something it can kill and consume? And, is such a gaze absent -- however mediated -- in the human? What happens when the plate glass of the aquarium does not merely separate or reflect but is exposed, exposes the human/animal to death, the one and the other?

[Matt]

Amie, That's an interesting question. I haven't seen the Herzog film, but it sounds fascinating, and darkly funny (or tragic--tragic w/o the 'epic' perhaps?)

If the film suggests such a thing, maybe it does so, to some degree, in spite of the medium (certainly in spite of Timothy Treadwell's ambitions for the medium) or in a manner photographs, with their unique claim to frozen time, could not? But movie film is frozen time as well. Is it significant that the grizzlies captured therein are still forever observing Treadwell and not us?

Or perhaps you have identified a tendency of Berger's to indulge in the impression of elevating a descriptive claim (one that may very well hold true for stuffed animals, or National Geographic snapshots) to the realm of the universal or the plane of "ideology"?

Still, the animal does not see "food" the way we look at fish and see "food." The animal observes, and attacks and eats, but we "observe," "run" and are "eaten."

I need to think more about your final question, which I'm not sure I understand. Are you suggesting there is a kind of similar equanimity on the part of the animal and the human in relation to death? The glass or lens exposes *us* to "death," maybe, but the fish? The fish whose concept of time is ever-present, without "concept," maybe hellish?

[Mike]

Interesting post. The Cartesian ego may have survived Freud and the behaviorists, but at a cost: the narcissistic Ego of the western consumer has little to do with the mathematical and Thomistic purity of Descartes' Cogito, but is more akin to something produced by the Adam Smith school of psychology, via an IT barons' training institute. Perhaps Skinner's methods and animal psych. is preferable to Descartes or Adam Smith (or Marx) in some sense, at least until the cognitivists chart the neural and genetic pathway of every conceivable perception or thought: and BF himself never denied consciousness but simply realized that a Cartesian or phenomenological instropection--or Freud--would not suffice as any sort of workable method or model.

It's the postmods who are, however obscurely, continuing to uphold the Cartesian or Kantian "subject": at least Skinner and crew--someone like Milgram-- put the subject-organisms into various environments and recorded what they did, instead of hypothesizing on motives or instincts. Reading say Milgram's study on obedience it's hard not to think that the human-subject was represented more accurately by Darwin or Milgram or Skinner than it was by Descartes' rational ego or by philosophy itself.

[Matt]

"Mike," always with the brilliant reading of the "postmods." There is no narcissism and non-narcissism, remember?

[CR]

I'd like to hear more about this "hellish" form of animal "time."

is it because it's immersive and w/o hope of transcendence?

Agamben certainly doesn't think animal time is hellish...

[Matt]

CR, me too. It's a comment Derrida makes in passing in D'Ailleurs, wrt fishes: "What is their experience of time...sometimes I imagine it to be a kind of hell."

Maybe others have a better idea of what this comment means?

[CR]

That's JD's secret messianism coming through. Vs. Agamben, who is suggesting if we could try fish time, we might just like it.

[Amie]

as I remember, the 'hero' animal for Agamben is not a fish, but a tick.

[Matt]

yes, of course! In two and a half extraordinary, economical pages in _The Open_. But it's a cop-out b/c ticks are blind!

Agamben concludes:

""The example of the tick clearly shows the general structure of the environment proper to all animals. In this particular case, the Umwelt is reduced to only three carriers of significance or Merkmalträger: (1) the odor of the butyric acid contained in the sweat of all mammals; (2) the temperature of thirty-seven degrees corresponding to that of the blood of mammals; (3) the typology of skin characteristic of mammals, generally having hair and being supplied with blood vessels. Yet the tick is immediately united to these three elements in an intense and passionate relationship the likes of which we might never find in the relations that bind man to his apparently much richer world. The tick *is* this relationship; she lives only in it and for it....

[Once] a tick was kept alive for eighteen years without nourishment, that is, in a condition of absolute isolation from its environment..[Uexküll] gives no explanation of this peculiar fact, and limits himself to supposing that in that "period of waiting" the tick lies in "a sleep-like state similar to the one we experience every night." He then draws the sole conclusion that "without a living subject, time cannot exist." But what becomes of the tick and its world in this state of suspension that lasts eighteen years? How is it possible for a living being that consists entirely in its relationship with the environment to survive in absolute deprivation of that environment? And what sense does it make to speak of "waiting" without time and without world?"

To which one might add: what becomes of irreducible singularity in such a space "without time and without world"? (And does such a proposition depend on the assumption that there is a knowable world and time in the first place?)

[CR]

Was just preping some Frankenstein, when I came across the following:

"Alas! Why does man boast of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute; it only renders them more necessary beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us." (100 in the Penguin...)

This when Dr. Frankenstein is being his most Shelleyan (as in PB Shelley, not Mary) - he's about to utter some lines from Shelley's "Mutability...'

Which brings up the interesting thought of the Romantic nostalgia for animal unconsciousness, pure immanence, etc... (See, for instance Tintern Abbey, or anywhere that WW invokes the child is the father of the man routine...) A nostalgia for unconsciousness crossed of course with a nostalgia for a pre-industrial, pre-urban form of life.

The Romantic precedent hints at a backwardness in Agamben's formulation... A nostalgic afterwards after the end of the end of history... Hadn't really thought of this before...

[Amie]

Matt, yes, I was thinking of those - amazing - pages. but what do you mean by cop-out because the tick is blind? I mean, isn't one of the important things about Agamben's reading -- alongwith Heidegger -- that the open, (dis)closedness, etc., are not thought, are not posed in terms of visibility, but rather as the latter's (im)possibility?

CR, I don't know why it would be interesting to read Agamben or JD in terms of 'pure' immanence/transcendance or as nostalgic? I don't even know if this would be (a) reading, when the writers in question have gone to considerable lenghts to (con)test such terms.

[CR]

You're right. Because they contest those terms, I guess they're immune to my comparison. As Derrida would tell you, it's impossible for the object of critique to slip back in entre les lignes.

Agamben, after all, only places us prospectively at the "Shabbat of both animal and man... the messianic banquet of the righteous" at the end of the book.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a big fan of Agamben. It's just that we have to acknowledge the peculiar (if provocative) pattern that his work takes. Constantly attempting to restore something inaccessible in modernity via a sort of sublimation, an erasure. An evaporation.

For instance, the Coming Community, where essentialized community returns as whatever community. Repetition and x-ing out is what Agamben does.

What would humanity be without "humanity."
What would community be without "community."

[Matt]

Amie: You're right it was sort of a cop-out comment. I do think there is something singularly ___ about the 'gaze' of animals, but maybe this should be the subject of a future post.

CR: "See, for instance Tintern Abbey, or anywhere that WW invokes the child is the father of the man routine"

Are you referring to the son giving birth to his own father routine? Is that a routine in Wordsworth...certainly not only in him. I'm not sure I get the connection.

[sergeant schmutz]

I wonder if this sort of discussion would be carried on by say a survivor of Dachau, or a kid whose family had evaporated during Nagasaki, or napalmed during Nam, or had been wiped off the map by Stalin

[Matt]

Doesn't the Herzog film suggest that animals are not just content to be observed, they have a gaze as well, which is not insignificant when it looks at the human, and sees 'food', something it can kill and consume? And, is such a gaze absent -- however mediated -- in the human? What happens when the plate glass of the aquarium does not merely separate or reflect but is exposed, exposes the human/animal to death, the one and the other?

Having now seen the film, I would certainly agree that animals are never just content to be observed, though they lack the precise language for this act of observing, or rather it gets translated into a more instinctual gauge of threat, etc. For instance, Treadwell probably only survived for as long as he did b/c the bears - as some wry Alaskan notes - probably thought he was sick, or something (and thus, you know, not a threat).

To be fair, I'm not sure that's what Berger was saying, and I think the film testifies, in a brutal manner to be sure, to a certain ideological/looking fallacy on the part of Treadwell, one that might be related to Berger's essay as well as the director's own editorial discomfort manifesting itself as ideology, as YH first suggested. But God, what a film.

To wax briefly anecdotal, I've spent several summers in Alaska, mostly seining, some time hiking in - make no mistake - what is the bears' own house, smelling, calling out for, seeing bears etc (though not "with" the bears, or "with my bears" - that's for damn sure). Actually, I'm rather grateful for being scared shitless the entire time. I was 18 when I almost ran - quite literally - into a Kodiak bear. (I'm told that my eyes turned white.)

I can appreciate how that sort of adrenaline could become addictive. Especially, you know, for a recovering self-medicator like Treadwell.