Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?

In chapter 1, I addressed some of the similarities and differences between animal studies today and women’s studies when the latter emerged as an academic field in the 1970s. The comparison between these fields (as well as minority and ethnic studies) is especially revealing when we turn to the matter of visibility and visual representations. In the early days of women’s studies, as of ethnic studies, there was a pronounced drive to make women and minorities visible as participants, authors, and makers of culture rather than mere consumers or enablers. This task was to be done not only by focusing on misrepresentations, but also, more important, by bringing women’s and minorities’ voices into the academy to write and represent themselves. Previously marginalized or silenced, these groups were no longer to be confined to the status of object but rather were to be subjects or authors of their own representations; their voices were speaking loudly and demanded to be heard.

The situation with animal studies is somewhat similar, but there are clearly important differences. Animals, too, have been either invisible or locked in representations authored by humans, representations that moreover have justified their use and abuse by humans. Indeed, their invisibility has been of an equally insidious kind for us—the invisibility of factory farms and of the experimentation and abuse that chimps have suffered. One scientist’s response to the 2001 birth of the first genetically modified primate was: “We’re at an extraordinary moment in the history of humans.”¹ But what about in the history of chimpanzees? Do they not have a history? Well, not in the sense that Hegel gave to that term. Nietzsche, too, wrote that animals live “unhistorically,” knowing neither “the meaning of yesterday or today.”² Nietzsche would, however, regard this lack of knowledge as a gift.

Although such historical invisibility must certainly contribute to the status of nonhuman animals as expendable objects, how to bring them into a visibility that might rescue them from a horrific fate is less than clear. And this problem is, for better or for worse, a dilemma for us humans because even though artwork by chimps or elephants has produced much cash for some dealers lately, we cannot expect to find a chimp authoring his or her own self-representation—at least not in the languages we recognize.

The question then becomes what sort of visibility we are trying to create. Or the question may be whether it is possible to render nonhuman animals visible without fixing their meanings. With regard to the issues over the representation of women, it became clear that promoting any particular image of woman, even a so-called positive image, could be counterproductive—counter to essentializing tendencies that would confine women into a preconceived mold or function. In a similar fashion, the representation of various nonhuman animals poses the question of how they might be seen on their own terms rather than seen as fitting into categories imposed upon them by humans. This is a question of ontology and aesthetics, if not of ethics—and there may be times when the demands of one realm may be at odds with the demands of another. From an aesthetic perspective, one might condemn sentimentality—something the representation of animals has often been associated with. From another angle, there is only so much torture or suffering that humans are willing or perhaps able to see and pay attention to. Representations of torture or suffering may thus in a contradictory way be another way of allowing us not to see the animal—to look away.

Do we in fact see “the animal” rather than an animal? The animal is a term that Derrida has reminded us not to use: “Animal is a word that men have given themselves the right to give.… They have given themselves the word in order to corral a large number of living beings within a single concept.”³ The question of animals’ ontology is a blind spot in philosophy, even as, Derrida shows, it is a question on which the ontology of Man has been constructed. Not unlike the term woman or slave, animal is a term that men have given others so as to name themselves the agents of history, freedom, thought. But are animals only lacking? Is their nature or “being” only an impoverished form of human “being”? Clearly not, and the issue becomes how to see and represent their being outside our terms of reference and without claiming an essentialized otherness. To put the term animal under scrutiny is to accept that the differences between animals may be far greater than what we all share and that we may be more like some animals than they are like each other. It is also to acknowledge that there may be something of “the animal” that we long to know and represent, if only because we believe (or perhaps deny) that we share that something with them.

Here I first address the difficulties of thinking “that something,” which is to say, of thinking animal being, before I turn to two very different artists who have attempted to represent animals’ being.

Can the very act of thinking be regarded as an impediment for understanding the being of animals? Thomas Nagel’s much cited 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” succinctly describes the problem: “Certainly it is possible for a human being to believe that there are facts which humans never will possess the requisite concepts to represent or comprehend.… Reflection on what it is like to be a bat seems to lead us, therefore, to the conclusion that there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in a human language. We can be compelled to recognize the existence of such facts without being able to state or comprehend them.”⁵ Arguing the inner life of bats or of animals in general is thus to argue something that human language is not equipped to express, perhaps like arguing the existence of the soul or of God.

Nagel’s primary interest in his essay is not the bat’s subjectivity, however. His concern is to refute reductive theories regarding the mind’s relation to the body—theories that if we can know the brain in some measurable, material way, we can understand how the mind works. What is remarkable in his essay, however, is that the bat stands in no simple relation to or for a body. “It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic.”⁶ It will not help because the bat is more than a body, just as consciousness is understood to be more than the body, though nevertheless grounded in it. Here Nagel stalls a tradition in Western philosophy that would align mind with “the human” and the body with “the animal.” Aristotle, for example, wrote, “Where then there is such a difference as that between soul and body, or between men and animals, (as in the case of those whose business is to use their body, and who can do nothing better), the lower sort are by nature slaves and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master.”⁷ Descartes identified the animal as mere body in order to show that animals functioned essentially as machines; “they have no reason at all, and… it is nature which acts in them according to the disposition of their organs, just as a clock, which is only composed of wheels and weights is able to tell the hours and measure the time more correctly than we can do with all our wisdom.”⁸ Although Nagel’s choice of a bat reflects a modernization in the metaphor of machine such that animals may be said to have a complicated computer technology rather than a clock’s spring mechanism, his point is that however alien the bat’s body and physical habits, however much they may function like a computer, we cannot deny that “there is something it is like to be a bat.” Bats have conscious experience, and if we humans have difficulty imagining that experience, the lack is our own. “I am restricted to the resources of my own mind,” Nagel asserts, “and those resources are inadequate to the task.”⁹

Erasing a human–animal divide along the lines of consciousness or subjectivity, Nagel puts the onus on us humans to recognize the limits of our own subjectivity, which is to say our own lack.¹⁰ In this approach, his essay can also be understood as a counter to Heidegger’s much cited distinction between the animal that is “poor in world” and the human who is “world forming.” For Heidegger, in other words (and here he is in line with the humanist tradition), it is the animal that is lacking because “it” does not have language. Indeed, for him, the animal is a “that” and an “it,” not a “who” or a “he or she” and, as such, is denied subjectivity. This denial and hence the animal’s “poverty” are due to the animal’s so-called lack of language because language is what affords humans access to things “as such.” Speaking of a lizard basking in the sun on a rock, Heidegger writes that the “rock is not given for the lizard as rock… the sun in which it is basking is not given as sun.”¹¹ The lizard is not able to inquire into the rock’s or the sun’s properties. The lizard has a relationship to the rock and sun, but that relationship is an impoverished one because the lizard cannot consider rocks or sun or warmth or comfort in the abstract way that language allows for. Understanding things as things, the world “as such,” is the distinct property of human Dasein. This knowledge of things “as such” is another way of saying that Dasein is “world forming,” able to abstract meaning from nature and apply it in varied contexts. To be world forming is to be a creator of culture, understood as a framework of symbolic meaning overlayed upon nature, a reconstruction of nature in the mind. This is the world in which humans dwell—one whose meaning is of our own creation. Nonhuman animals, for Heidegger, are considered to be unable to detach their consciousnesses from their environments in order to perceive them in any abstract way.

This view, which runs through philosophy and anthropology alike, can be critiqued from a variety of standpoints, including recent scientific research establishing that a variety of nonhuman animals participate in the creation and reproduction of culture.¹² Here I am less interested in such research undertaken to show how like humans nonhuman animals can be and more concerned with views that destabilize the view that we humans have of ourselves and of our world. Would it not be more appropriate, for instance, to say that knowledge of the rock or sun “as such” is specifically human knowledge, but not knowledge “as such.” This criticism is similar to one raised by Elizabeth Costello in J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, who points out the blind spots of a long line of philosophers:

Insofar as knowledge of things “as such” is knowledge arrived at through reason and language, must we not say that such knowledge is one tendency of human ways of knowing? That objects cannot be known independently of their perceiving subjects is at the center of the work of the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, who takes over where Kant had his failure of nerve. Whereas for Kant the idea that a nonhuman animal can be understood to be a subject was unthinkable, for von Uexküll it is imperative not to address animals “merely as objects but also as subjects, whose essential activities consist in perception and production of effects.”¹⁴ Each and every animal constructs “its” own subjective universe, its Umwelt, in which objects are perceived and responded to according to the functional or perceptual signs or tones they emit for each individual subject.¹⁵ Von Uexküll gives the example of a dog who has been trained to jump on a chair when given the command “chair.” When the chair is removed and the command given, any other object on which the dog can sit assumes the meaning or “canine sitting tone” of “chair”—couch, crate, shelves.¹⁶ There is no chair in itself. This is also true for humans for whom objects such as a stone can change meaning without changing their physical characteristics. The stone may mark a path or, when thrown, be marked as a missile or weapon. Because there are thus as many “worlds” as there are subjects, Uexküll describes each human and nonhuman animal as existing as if in a bubble that another subject may enter, but only at the risk that “all previous surroundings of the subject are completely reconfigured.”¹⁷

Although Uexküll does distinguish between “simple” and “complex” or “multiform” environments in order to describe the relative number of objects and cues that may be meaningful for some animals (such as for the tick, who responds to only three stimuli or “carriers of significance”: odor, temperature, and skin type), he also describes each world as perfectly self-contained and constructed for the security of its inhabitant. “All animal subjects, from the simplest to the most complex, are inserted into their environments to the same degree of perfection.”¹⁸ “Simple” would thus, for Uexküll, indicate a quantitative rather than a qualitative comparison. Whether the same may be true for Heidegger has been a matter of much debate. As Derrida describes in a close reading of Heidegger, the German philosopher alternately writes that animals are “weltarm” and “weltlos”: poor in world and without world. The former would seem to represent a comparative difference with human Dasein in terms of “privation” or “lack” of world. The latter implies a difference in kind or essence—no comparable world at all. As Derrida writes, “It is not that the animal has a lesser relationship, a more limited access to entities, it has an other relationship.… But the difficulties are already piling up between two values incompatible in their ‘logic’: that of lack and that of alterity.”¹⁹

The significance of these two values becomes especially apparent with regard to the fundamental question for Heidegger: finding access to the essence of life, to the Being of beings. If animals are “poor in world,” it is because, in Heidegger’s view, they have limited access to Being “as such”; they do not and cannot question Being or life in the way that humans (and especially philosophers) do. However, if each and every animal (including human animals) lives in its own noncommunicating bubble, then we must assume we can have access only to the being of our own world and not to the being of others—including other animals. This is as much a privation for humans as it is for other animals.

In this respect, animals present us with the absolute problem of alterity—the difficulty or near impossibility of seeing or, perhaps even more so, hearing, smelling, sensing from the place of the absolute other. As Derrida emphasizes, Heidegger cannot or will not accede to a position, “however fabulous and chimerical it might be, that thinks the absence of the name and of the word otherwise, and as something other than a privation.”²⁰ Indeed, Heidegger writes against a romantic tradition from Jean-Jacques Rousseau through Rainer Maria Rilke that would see human consciousness as an obstacle to a deeper knowledge of and oneness with the world, a oneness that is not doubled by the filter of self-consciousness.²¹ This was Rousseau’s dream in the “Fifth Reverie,” when while he is out in his boat on the lake, all inward thoughts are stilled by the outward rhythms of the water. “The ebb and flow of the water, its continuous yet undulating noise, kept lapping against my ears and my eyes, taking the place of all the inward movements which my reverie had calmed within me, and it was enough to make me pleasurably aware of my existence, without troubling myself with thought.”²² In Rilke’s “The Eighth Elegy,” human consciousness, because of its dependence on representational thought, is similarly associated with alienation from Being or what he calls “the Open”—that which, he says, is “so deep in animals’ faces.” In fact, Rilke suggests that it is only through animals that we have any knowledge at all of “the Open.”

What Rilke thus privileges as an animal’s ability to see beyond the phenomenal world Heidegger sees rather as instinctual “captivation” or more literally a state of benumbedness (Benommenheit) that has no possibility of opening the world “as world.” According to Eric Santner, Heidegger downgrades the “uninhibited movement within the Open” that Rilke privileges to an “instinctual captivation (Benommenheit) by an environment,” an “absorption in the Umwelt” that must be distinguished from the “intentional comportment within the openness of a Welt” that characterizes human reflection. In opposing Umwelt (literally the surrounding world) and Welt (understood as a world of our making), Heidegger seeks to distinguish “man’s engaged absorption in a space of possibilities—in a historical form of life or world—from an animal’s absorption in its environment.”²⁴ Instinct/thought; captivation/historical agency; nature/culture—the distinction animal/ human cannot be made without recourse to an oppositional and anthropocentric thinking that essentializes both animal and human while ignoring the space of overlap between them.²⁵

And yet, as Georgio Agamben points out in his deft reading of Heidegger, it is around the issue of captivation (understood as a kind of boredom) where Heidegger is most at pains to distinguish if not oppose animal instinct and human Dasein but is also confronted with a profound likeness between them. Humans are also riveted by things or beings that are not revealed to us, things that “refuse themselves,” and this happens above all when we are bored. “Boredom brings to light the unexpected proximity of Dasein and the animal. ‘In being bored, Dasein is delivered over (ausgeliefert) to something that refuses itself, exactly as the animal, in its captivation, is exposed (hinausgesetzt) in something unrevealed.’”²⁶ In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger devotes a number of chapters to a “profound” kind of boredom that he identifies with what he calls man’s fundamental “Stimmung,” a word that has been translated as “mood” or “attunement.” “Attunement” signals a state that is both emotional or psychological and physical; it is our (varying) capacity to be affected by or tuned by our environment and especially to be tuned or more emphatically “gripped” by that of which we are unaware. Boredom would thus reveal an animal attunement—a passivity or even vulnerability—at the core of Dasein, which, like the animal’s “poverty in world,” is synchronal with an inability to know that which affects it. Where human and nonhuman animals begin to separate is at the point where humans become aware of their boredom, where they wake up to the “not-open” of animal being within and without their human being. The difference for Heidegger, in other words, is that humans become aware of the animality they cannot know “as such.”

Perhaps this begins to explain why animality or captivation is such a contested site—alternately regarded as what must be transcended in order to be human and what must be (re)discovered in order to truly know the Being of being or, more simply, what it means to be ourselves as human animals. Heidegger himself writes that “life is a domain which possesses a wealth of being-open, of which the human world may know nothing at all.”²⁷ Efforts to know or to open up such wealth are fraught not only because the instruments of reason are inadequate, incommensurable with the coordinates of Being, but also because captivation and knowledge appear to be incompatible—one destroying the other. Attunement is not only that of which we are not conscious, but that which is destroyed by any attempt to be made conscious or thought. “Not only can an attunement not be ascertained,” asserts Heidegger, “it ought not to be ascertained, even if it were possible to do so. For all ascertaining means bringing to consciousness. With respect to attunement, all making conscious means destroying, altering in each case, whereas in awakening an attunement we are concerned to let this attunement be as it is, as this attunement.”²⁸

How is it possible to awaken our attunement (and by extension our animality) without destroying it? An attempt to answer this question might be offered by Bill Viola’s 1986 video I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like. Those who are familiar with Viola’s later works such as Fire, Water, Breath and The Passions might find the terms attunement and captivation more suited to describe these works’ depictions of what David Ross calls “suspended states of awareness” in which mind and body are literally absorbed into environments of fire or water or distorted by emotional turmoil. In those later videos, the effect even for the viewer is, as Ross writes, “immersive—closer to that of floating under water than to watching a film.”²⁹ Already in I Do Not Know, however, what can be called an “aesthetics of attunement” brings to light the extent to which what is often referred to as the “transcendent” or “sublime” of Viola’s works is deeply grounded in the physical and sensate world that we share with animals. Described on the DVD jacket as “an epic journey into the inner states and animal consciousness we all possess” and conceived while Viola was an artist in residence at the San Diego Zoo, I Do Not Know links captivation to meditation and both to the power of the video camera to focus attention on what is unthought or on the elements that give rise to thought. In the words of the thirteenth-century Eastern spiritualist Rumi, whom Viola likes to quote, “You have seen the kettle of thought boiling over, now consider the fire.”³⁰ Shot at the zoo, in wildlife preserves, and during a fire-walking ritual at a Hindu Temple in Fiji, the “fire” that Viola considers here is that of the bodies experiencing heat, wet, light, sound—bodies without which thought would not boil over. As Nagel asks of the bat, so Viola asks what it is like to be an embodied (animal) consciousness and attempts to render that experience through an intense state of witnessing made possible by the video camera.

One of the most memorable and unusual scenes of Viola’s video is an inordinately long take of a buffalo urinating in a field. Seemingly unaware of the action that his or her body is performing even as this act clearly prevents that body from doing anything else, this buffalo might be the perfect representation of an animal’s captivation, its submission to a life of which it is unconscious. We may even ask if there is a subject of this action, if such bodily actions are those of a subject or, rather, as Descartes might insist, if they are simply mechanical reactions that bear no relation to consciousness. The difference between conscious or voluntary action and involuntary bodily reaction constitutes for Descartes the difference between being human and being animal. And yet we humans also spend much time performing involuntary bodily functions that we may learn to control but not dispense with, functions that serve no purpose other than merely to keep us alive. As Heidegger describes with regard to boredom, time during such functions becomes long or, as Langweile, the term for “boring” in German, suggests, long and drawn out. It is the ongoing time of the past or present perfect rather than the time of completed action. It is not the time that we plan, but because it may be habitual and recurrent, it is nevertheless the time that, like Heidegger says of the gaze of boredom, “penetrates us and attunes us through and through.”³¹ Viola thus confronts us with an experience of peeing and “being in time” that is at the intersection of animal captivation and human boredom.

From a slightly different perspective, to watch Viola’s video and, in particular, to watch this act of the buffalo urinating are to be reminded that the grand metaphysical questions of time and consciousness cannot be considered independently of the bodies that allow them to be materialized, bodies that give them sensation, meaning, as well as duration. Such bodies, furthermore, are inseparable from the specific environments or “naturecultures” in which they develop and evolve. Unfolding in time, subjectivity is a function of the body and of the body’s environment—a view that, we shall see, Viola both adopts and ironizes in the middle section of his video. As anthropologist Tim Ingold persuasively writes, “By taking the animal-in-its-environment rather than the self-contained individual as our point of departure—it is possible to dissolve the orthodox dichotomies between evolution and history, and between biology and culture.”³² Ingold develops what he calls a “dwelling perspective” in order to pursue Heidegger’s deconstruction of an opposition between dwelling and building or between residing in the world and being “world forming.” “We do not dwell because we have built,” says Heidegger, “but we build and have built because we dwell, that is because we are dwellers.… To build is in itself already to dwell.… Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.”³³ When we are at home in our bodies, we can build homes in which we will find comfort and relief.

Dwelling, like captivation, emphasizes the inseparability of subjectivity, bodies, and environment. The first part of Viola’s film brings us to gaze upon the impermanence of these relations as they unfold in time and toward death. Changes in weather, light, and sound register on bodies, whose tactile materiality is brought into sharp focus. As Catherine Russell writes, Viola’s contemplation is “immersed in the transience of life.… He embraces mortality, violence, and decay as the means of transcending the existential divide between consciousness and nature.”³⁴ But his is not a morbid view of death, not that anticipation that, according to Rilke, colors all experience of life such that “we, only, can see death.”³⁵ The film displays severed heads and corpses in the fields, but they are not evidence of a past waiting to be written into history or transformed into meaning.³⁶ Rather, the corpse is viewed as corpse—nature or the real that resists history as it resists being drawn into narrative. Birds, flies, maggots disregard death to eat from its flesh. Ingold might say that history itself is recognized as a natural process, built upon a temporality of death, decay, and regeneration. To dwell in this time is to come to subjectivity not through language or historical agency, but simply through being a body in time. I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like thus reminds us of the what that is at the foundation of every who and of the ways in which we humans try to distance ourselves from this what.

What am I like? The frustration of knowledge announced in Viola’s title is immediately translated into a problem of perception. While an unidentified tribal music plays, camera work turns the world upside down and sideways for the viewer, and landscapes appear first outside and then reflected inside the lake waters, becoming their internal rather than external ground. As the music stops, the sounds of water lapping and dripping against unknown surfaces makes inside and outside, up and down, indistinguishable, as in Rousseau’s boat dream, until we are literally shocked into blackout, only to emerge into a dark cavernous hole. Plato’s cave may come to mind, reminding us again of the faulty nature of our perceptions, if not of the “irreality” of the images on the screen. More to the point, these images are images of a world that appears unknowable “as such”: bulbous, wet objects may be read as coral or as pulsating body parts. In this first, introductory section of the film, we are as a child before a world whose meaning escapes us. We are drawn into it and long, perhaps, to touch and feel what is around us, and we are reminded that without a sense of self, without knowing “what I am like,” I am unable to have a “meaningful” relation to the world around me. Jacques Lacan explains something similar in his essay “The Mirror Stage” when he writes that the child must have an image of self in order to relate in a meaningful way to his or her surroundings. One of the functions of the mirror, in other words, is to “establish a relation between the organism and its reality—or as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt.”³⁷ That relation, however, is established through a sense of self that is deluded because the mirror (or the mother’s look) reflects a false image of a unified and coordinated person who is able to master his or her environment. This act of self-recognition (or misrecognition, Lacan will go on to say) on the child’s part is, moreover, one that Lacan contrasts with the gaze of a young monkey. “This act, far from exhausting itself as in the case of the monkey, once the image has been mastered and found empty, immediately rebounds in the case of the child in a series of gestures in which he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates—the child’s own body and the persons and things around him.”³⁸ Where the monkey gives up and lets the image and Umwelt be, the child dramatically displays his (Lacan’s pronoun) mastery over that environment and the objects in it.

Viola’s film evokes not so much the monkey’s recognition of the emptiness of self-image, but rather the consequences of its absence. Lack of self-confirmation results in an environment or Umwelt that cannot be mastered. As the camera emerges from the waters onto a field of grazing buffalo, the landscape appears blurred, moving in and out of focus, as if evaporating in the summer heat or as if the film itself, instead of securing a view, gives way to the elements of nature. When the film is clearly in focus, our attention is directed to a series of animal eyes and to their gaze that looks beyond the viewer without the possibility for meeting or, consequently, for recognition. The first eye is that of a dead buffalo—an eye we barely make out as eye through the voracious buzz of the flies around it. Our unimportance with respect to this eye and the process of nature in which it participates is emphasized again as the camera focuses in on the eyes of various birds and fish, none of which seems to see its viewers or to return our gaze. Video thus appears to join the countless institutions and technologies that fail to engage the animal’s look. “At most,” says John Berger, speaking of animals in zoo, “the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.”³⁹ This sideways look, he explains, is the ultimate consequence of their marginalization. “That look between animal and man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society, and with which, in any case, all men had always lived until less than a century ago, has been extinguished.”⁴⁰ But is it their marginality or our own? Viola’s evocation of nature’s disregard for our look (if not for the sense of sight in general) would suggest the latter. How small indeed does the filmmaker appear when, apparently attempting to capture the animal’s gaze, he comes to see his own reflection in an owl’s eye. Rilke describes a similar sensation of being reflected in the eye of a black cat:

Ignoring or distancing himself from that “prehistoric fly” in the third section of the video, entitled “The Night of Sense,” Viola moves fully into the artist’s masterful gaze, here presented with a self-critical irony. Staring emotionlessly at the images he has filmed and now projects on a tiny video player, he replicates the tradition of picturing or the “world conceived and grasped as picture” that Heidegger critiques in his essay “The Age of the World Picture.”⁴³ Heidegger links the growth of modern Western science to a new objectification of the world by and before a viewer who frames what is to be seen in order to study and measure that world according to human instruments of observation. Such instruments are made evident in the texts lying next to Viola’s video player, texts on anatomy and on “stimulus and response.” As such, picturing renders the world knowable in relation to the viewing subject standing outside it; there is no allowance made for the possibility that the world or, more specifically, I would add, the animals within that world might return the gaze or have a viewpoint of their own. Thus, for Viola the artist, the cat crying outside the artist’s study is nothing more than a nuisance, not a fellow being to acknowledge.

Heidegger’s “world picture,” like Lacan’s mirror stage, thus describes a similar dialectical and illusory relation between self and world through which the modern subject is born. As “man” frames and thereby creates a picture of the world, so does he become “the relational center of that which is as such”—in other words, the author of the world and its contents.⁴⁴ “He” stands over it as its master, as what allows it to come into being. The discourse of science that Heidegger refers to is one that Viola clearly identifies with—it is the discourse that has produced those very masterpieces that Viola so often refers to in his videos and that is invoked in the still life of fish and wine glass set before the artist in this work. But as that still life turns into dinner, and Viola begins to carve into the fish flesh and eat it, we see also that this discourse has turned artworks into objects of consumption, whether for body or for mind. The potential violence of science and the complicity of video are evidenced at the end of this section and the transition to the fourth when a dog leaps to attack the camera, instigating what Catherine Russell has called “a nightmare of aggressive technology.”⁴⁵ Strobes flash madly to the beat of loud, electronic pulses, revealing the briefest glimpses of landscapes, fire, live animals, dead animals, a zebra’s stripes. The metaphorical resonances of what it means to shoot with a camera appear literalized.

And yet just as Viola focuses on the places where extremes meet and become an unknowable in-between, so might it be that at the moments of its most aggressive violence the video camera also turns its own instrumentality upon itself, revealing its own power to engage the viewer viscerally, with no other objective than to dwell in this engagement with light, sound, and time. Whereas the third section begins by showing the destructive potential of a “modern” art form that confirms Enlightenment Man as center of a world that opens before him and for him, the fourth ends by revealing that same art form as one that turns back on the artist and viewer, destroying any certainty of point of view. As Russell writes, “Technology effectively becomes a representation of the limits of knowledge and vision.”⁴⁶ We are captivated but unsure of what it is we see. Moreover, the very physical effects of Viola’s camera work, rousing if not assaulting our eyes, our ears, and our very instinctive reactions to time and to pain, demonstrate to us not only that art engages a disembodied “free play of the imagination” (as Kant claimed), but that such play takes place in and through a body’s involuntary perceptions. This body, the buzzards and maggots make clear, depends on its environment for sustenance.

The fifth and final section, “The Living Flame,” appears at first to be the most ethnographic but is also the most visceral. Here the tribal music and drumbeats heard at various instances during the video come home to accompany a range of rituals performed by barely clothed men: fire walking, flagellation, and the slow piercing of folds of skin with skewers the size of kebabs. Intellectual distance is reduced to a minimum to make pain into a lived and not simply observed experience. Just as the first sections of the film have no frame, nothing to allow the viewers to locate where or what it is we are watching, so does this ethnography fail to give us any information or account of what or who is being filmed. Information is clearly not the point. Moreover, in its failure as ethnography this section brings us retrospectively to reevaluate the frustrated knowledge and vision of the earlier sections on animals. In the same sense that the fourth section is a failed ethnography, so is the first third of the film a failed anthropology—failed in that it offers no occasion for “Man” to recognize himself, even by recognizing what he is not. It is in this sense that Viola’s footage works as much to jam “the anthropological machine” as to participate in it. Agamben uses the term the anthropological machine to refer to the process whereby the “human” is defined through opposition to or exclusion of what is nonhuman or animal. Ethnography has been one of the tools by which some humans are identified as more animal and less human, if not nonhuman. As Agamben explains with regard to a premodern taxonomy, Homo sapiens is an “optical machine” for producing man’s recognition of himself. He “must recognize himself in non-man in order to be human.”⁴⁷ But that machine must always focus on a fundamental likeness or what Agamben calls a “zone of indeterminacy,”⁴⁸ where the distinctions between human and nonhuman or human and animal are not so clear, where indeed they must be produced.

Recognition of the human is what Viola’s film refuses from the beginning and in its very title. It refuses to participate in the anthropological project of separating zoe from bios, animal or bare life from political, historical, or, in this case, aesthetic life. Rather, it prefers to dwell in those spaces of betweenness or indeterminacy out of which such distinctions between animal and human, as between life and death, are produced. These spaces, moreover, are the ones that the anthropological machine would prefer to ignore. From peeing to possession rituals, Viola focuses on life as lived in present time, experienced rather than managed. Such experience can be understood only as an intense investiture in that animal life for its own sake, captivation with “captivation” in the sense of an animal that is “ecstatically drawn outside of itself in an exposure which disrupts it in its every fiber.”⁴⁹ This physical exposure and response to one’s environment is what we see in every flicker of the eye, cocking of the neck, and ruffling of the feather. These representations of “being in the world” do not depend on the separation of human and animal worlds, on nature and history. They do not represent Being as a project, but rather as the physical sensation of being alive and of being constantly drawn outside oneself to the environment and to the Other in that environment—whether that Other is predator, prey, or fellow traveler. If art or the artist that Viola himself represents has a project, then it might be understood more simply as “letting be”—to let be so as to be capable of being captivated by Being as by “bare life.”⁵⁰

In the final section or coda of the film, “letting be” is once again temporarily abandoned as we are brought to witness another masterful display of video technology. The camera dives into the water to scoop up a large fish that attaches to the lens as it flies into the air and soars above the landscapes revolving beneath. This fish, which recalls the fish in the previously viewed “still life,” appears more still than ever and, indeed, dead against the revolving, moving landscape. In this literalized primacy of figure to ground, we might see an allegory of “the world picture” or of a Cartesian idea of vision as an operation of thought or “techne” that builds its own image of the world independently of that world. The ritual drumming heard during the film’s previous section renders a stark contrast between that section’s felt, physical intensity and this section’s visual abstraction. The film, however, does not end here. The fish is brought gently to rest on its ground, from there to be immersed in “the soil of the sensible.”⁵¹ At this point, the music stops, as does the camera’s movement, each replaced with the sounds and motions of nature, which reanimate the fish. No longer an object or symbol carved out of space, it becomes that which is reformed and reclaimed by the nature around it—flies crawl, and birds peck to slowly expose its flesh, then its bones. The appearance of a deer with head and ears cocked to focus on that which neither he (or she) nor we can see or know directs the viewer to the world beyond that of the camera, outside the frame. Rather than mastering time and form, the camera becomes the agent of deformation, accelerating so as to make visible the ravages of time and eventually the inevitability of disappearance.

Bill Viola addresses the idea of picturing by blurring or deforming the images we see so as to dismantle any sense of visual mastery over the seen world. Not only do we not see what an animal sees, but we cannot be sure of what, if any, knowledge comes from sight. As we must consider that our existence is marginal to their gaze, so must we consider that sight is marginal to their world, their Umwelt. But Viola’s refusal to visualize what animals see may itself be a function of the very Enlightenment form of “picturing” that he critiques because picturing demands not only an objective and distanced view of the natural world, but also a view that avoids the charges of anthropomorphism. Although anthropomorphism was a common practice in earlier times, under the Enlightenment any attribution of our own capacities or characteristics to animals was seen to conflict with the scientific and rational capacities that made us human. The urge to identify with and so to anthropomorphize another’s experience, like the urge to empathize with it, has been even more recently criticized as a form of narcissistic projection that erases boundaries of difference. And yet resistance to anthropomorphism can veer into what Frans de Waal calls “anthropodenial,” a “willful blindness to the human-like characteristics of animals, or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves.”⁵²

Photographers and filmmakers seem currently more willing to risk the charge of anthropomorphism because of the moral stakes at hand. It is easier to care about those who are like us in some way than about those we can’t fathom. Frank Noelker’s recent series of chimp photographs, Chimp Portraits 2002–2006, present close-up headshots of chimpanzees who have been retired from lives as research subjects, entertainers, and pets. They are chimps who have lived their lives for us—injected with HIV, sold to roadside zoos, and transferred from cage to cage to be experimented on and examined as specimens. Noelker informs us of this past but photographs his subjects in a way to afford them all the dignity and stature of statesmen. They look intently and self-composedly at the camera.

As the photographic frame mimics the enclosed space of the cages, Noelker binds photography to other modern institutions or practices that would compensate for the loss of the animal in our society, but that, like zoos or pet keeping, become, as John Berger says, only monuments to that loss. “They [the animals] have been immunized to encounter, because nothing can any more occupy a central place in their attention.”⁵⁴

In Chimp Portraits, by contrast, Noelker attempts to revive that look. The term portrait seems incongruous for the images in Captive Beauty; the individual animals are barely able to establish their identities against the habitats that engulf them. That is not the case for the chimps who are photographed in larger-than-life size, with full, frontal heads against an unidentifiable background. And in each portrait we come face to face or eye to eye with their gaze. Such photographs of chimpanzees may be at greatest risk of anthropomorphism, offering us the possibility for seeing ourselves in another species so like us. Noelker accentuates the anthropomorphic by focusing on the eyes—the heavy, soulful, and individualized gazes that he is so skilled at capturing. They look intently, and they look at us, turning their thoughtful, critical, and, some might say, almost human gaze upon us.

It is thus by very different means from what we saw in Viola’s work that the act of looking is put under its own scrutiny in Noelker’s portraits. Steve Baker has described a “balance of seeing and not-seeing” that has been used as a strategy in some documentary photography of animal abuse,⁵⁵ and Noelker seems similarly to give weight to what is not seen—to what is unseen or imagined. We see Tom and Roger and Kenya; we see the different shades and thickness of their fur, the different shapes and colors of their mouths, and above all their different expressions, showing them as distinct individuals. We are also given their stories, a context in which to interpret what we see on their faces, if not to see in them traces of the past. And we are surprised by how they appear unscathed. What we know of their pasts, of the horrific abuses they have suffered, remains invisible and is communicated only in an apparent translation: the text that accompanies each photo. Each of Noelker’s chimps has his or her mouth closed as if to suggest that he or she will not or cannot speak to us. We have only “a report to the academy,” as with Red Peter.

There is, of course, another reason for the closed mouths. The chimps look more controlled, more dignified, more human. This was a calculated decision on Noelker’s part, a risk of anthropomorphism for the sake of the animal war in which anthropomorphism may have a valuable role to play. As some suggest, anthropomorphism is the first step to attributing mind to another being and, hence, to acknowledging an other as a subject capable of pain, pleasure, and will.⁵⁶ Noelker’s strategy fits under the rubric of what I call “critical anthropomorphism.” The individualized portraits do not simply elicit a response of sameness: “Look how like us they are” or even “Look how they must have suffered.” Rather, his photographs, I would argue, force us also to wonder, “What do they see when they look at us?” “What must they think of us?” and, more important, “Who are ‘we’ who have done this to them?” In projecting sameness or similarity upon another species, we feel our gaze come back to us to make us question how well we really know who we are and whether we know what we are capable of.