Readers may remember a climactic moment in the film version of The Wizard of Oz when Toto, the dog, pulls the curtain (literally) on the Wizard, revealing not a posthuman, disembodied technogod, but a bumbling and balding man. I’d like to think of this moment as an allegory of animal studies’ relation to posthumanism and of posthumanism’s place in animal studies. Toto, of course, is the driving force behind Frank Baum’s narrative because it is Dorothy’s love for the dog that leads her to run away and escape the dreary, moral landscape of Kansas and its arbiter, Miss Gulch. “It was Toto who made Dorothy laugh, and saved her from growing as grey as her surroundings,” wrote Baum in the original version of the story,1 and in the film version we can assume that it was such laughter that made Toto a “menace to the community” who, in Miss Gulch’s eyes, had to be eliminated. Only those animals who serve humans in a quantifiably productive manner are allowed in Kansas, and both humans and animals are slaves to Gulch and the land much as the Munchkins were slaves to the wicked witch of the East before her death.
With Toto, then, Dorothy escapes to the Land of Oz, a land where technology, in the form of the Wizard, is believed to be the cure for all ills or to make up for all lacks—a land that is peopled largely by hybrids or cyborgs, where, as Dorothy’s three friends illustrate, the line between human (Dorothy), animal (the lion), mineral (the scarecrow made of straw), and machine (the tin man) is unclear and not always significant. Here, moreover, each of the friends will find “moral standing” before the Wizard. A “bad wizard” but a “good man,” he will grant each of their wishes: for the scarecrow a brain, for the tin man a heart, and for the lion courage. Or, more precisely, he gives to each the outward symbols of humanity the audience already recognizes that they possess, thereby revealing our dependence on exterior signs for knowing who and what it is to be human. This is why Cary Wolfe calls the human a fundamentally “prosthetic creature” who “has co-evolved with various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that are radically ‘not-human’ and yet have nevertheless made the human what it is.”2
The significance of Toto’s revelatory move lies in delimiting the posthumanism of Oz as one that opposes the dream of the posthuman as a disembodied, transcendent being who rules over the rest of creation and who, alternatively, can absolve itself of rule by eliminating its dependencies (much like Gary Francione’s vision, discussed in chapter 8). Such a dream, as Wolfe also emphasizes, is itself derived from the very prejudices of a humanism and, especially, human exceptionalism that we need to redress by insisting on the intimate entanglement of the human in the material and animal world. That deanimalized dream and its critique have formed the core of this book, in literary works from Kafka’s “Report,” where Red Peter had to whip the animal out of himself in order to leave his cage and join the ranks of humanity, to Mann’s Man and Dog and Coetzee’s Disgrace, whose protagonists strive to manage their own appetites, if not those of their pets, in order to separate themselves from and prove their mastery over the world of nature. And that dream is similarly evident in works of philosophy from Nietzsche’s ruminations on animals to Derrida’s attempts to follow the “animal he is,” like a dog chasing his own tail. To represent nature and the animal world, humanism tells us that we must separate ourselves from it, enclose ourselves in our office—as Bill Viola tries in his video I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like, discussed in chapter 2—in order to know what is out there and to distinguish it from what we think or feel or want to be out there. Only in this way can we achieve what Heidegger also criticizes as the world as picture or spectacle, objectified before us and subject to our measuring tools. From such a perspective, the chimpanzees we see in Frank Noelker’s photographs and who appear to call upon us to respond to their plight must be both scientifically and morally suspect, a trick of anthropomorphic empathy. As Kant declares, our modern morality depends on our becoming insensitive to all that may muffle or distort the voice of morality within us. Viola and Noelker thus represent two opposed epistemological and moral stances to nonhuman animals as recently outlined by Émilie Hache and Bruno Latour. Viola takes Kant’s “moralism” to task to see what happens if we turn animals into a picture in which neither their gaze nor their calls can reach us. Noelker, in contrast, appears to open himself to what Hache and Latour call the “morality” of Gaia, whereby “the earth enters into a moral relationship with us as we begin to ask ourselves how to treat it well.”3 But moralism is not always an easy stance for humans to maintain and demands its own struggle, whose traces are as visible in Viola as in Kant. Kant’s conception of morality creates a problem for moderns, Hache and Latour write; “nature frightens us, it calls out to us with such force that we feel impotent, minute, silent before it. We must learn to become insensitive to its call.”4 We must become insensitive but great and powerful wizards.
Whether we are learning to become insensitive to the more-than-human world or learning how to acknowledge it, the contest between moralism and morality is present in these pages in characters’ and authors’ various efforts to shut out or screen the voices calling them or, alternately, to acknowledge and learn how to respond to their call. Screening, as we saw with Temple Grandin, is a central force behind modernism and humanism’s construction of normative subjectivity. Modern or Kantian morality would explain that the lack of screening is what drives Mann’s Tobias Mindernickel or Poe and Maupassant’s narrators to madness, if not into impassioned violence. Irrational violence, in this view, is derived from our animal ancestors. We become moral (and modern) by distancing ourselves from “the animal” and thus reducing the possibilities for becoming violent ourselves. The fallacy of this view, exposed as much by Virginia Woolf as by recent scholarship, proves that we may never have been fully modern in this way.5 Although anthropologists debate whether there is not a specifically human form of violence (such as genocide), and animal lovers protest that dogs exhibit the best of humanity (such as honesty, faithfulness, and the ability to love), we must realize that the word on nature versus culture will never be final. As Priscilla Patton writes, “Violence, like love, results from genetics interacting continuously with environment and learned behaviors: another nature-and-nurture issue. Violence and abuse of others are not just impulsive acts, but also highly socialized behaviors”6 (think of the turnaround made by the wicked witch’s flying monkeys after she melts).
Exposing the illusory autonomy of the human and embracing the deep, confusing, and scary entanglement of human, animal, and machine in the world of naturecultures has been the project of a certain postmodernism, as we have seen in the work of Hélène Cixous and Sam Taylor-Wood. In its embrace of a sublime deconstruction, however, that project carries its own risk of drawing us into a state of such overwhelming intensity and conceptual confusion that we are unable to retrieve any ethical stance—whether moralist or of moralism. It displaces the categorical imperative by abolishing boundaries between all the categories of identity—whether of species, of life and death, or of nature and culture. In a similar manner, insofar as posthumanism emphasizes the prosthetic nature of the human, it may unwittingly protect us from acknowledging a distinctly human agency in the invention and use of technologies that destroy nonhuman animals with whom we have coevolved.
The question, then, is how to listen to those voices, how to acknowledge the pleasures and uncertainties of our intimately shared worlds, without being so overwhelmed that we lose the possibility of naming the injustices that are waged in the name of the human. In this regard, we should understand posthumanism not as the death of humanism, but as a necessary rethinking of humanist frameworks, including rethinking what thought is, what agency and autonomy are, in order to further humanism’s noble aims. Posthumanism, like Oz, is both post- and prehumanism (and in some instances pre- and postmodern) in that it returns us to the moment of struggle when we can hear those voices surrounding us (the scarecrow, the tin man, the lion, but also the good and bad witches) and can decide to listen to them attentively because they demand and in some instances deserve a response. Indeed, to say that “we” must respond implies some certainty about who that “we” is and thus calls upon the humanist, even if she wishes to respond in a posthumanist, ethical fashion. Such an ethics, then, is one that acknowledges the importance of hearing those voices while understanding that any response will also be a reaction, a function of inherited, unconscious, as well as learned and intended behavior. It is hubris, though, if not bêtise, to believe that our thinking can fully escape humanism or that our thinking does not in the end come back to us as humans (however unspecified the term). We should recall what Elizabeth de Fontenay says on this subject, which I quoted earlier in this book: “We cannot entirely purge ourselves of anthropocentrism” (and here I see anthropocentrism and humanism as intimately linked) “except by taking ourselves for the God of Leibniz who is capable of seeing from all possible perspectives. This egoist, or even speciesist point of view (if one accepts the term) … is the effect of our finitude before being the mark of our power.”7
Dorothy, it would appear, understands and respects this finitude, which is perhaps why her only desire (after seeing that the scarecrow, tin man, and lion have received what they asked for) is only to return home to Kansas. Whereas in Baum’s version of the story the masculine trio accept offers to rule over sections of Oz—the Emerald City, the Winkies, and the forest, respectively—Dorothy refuses sovereignty in Oz and returns with Toto to Aunt Em’s farm. What, if anything, she will change on the farm or in Kansas we will never know. But in waking up to the certainty of connection and closeness between this world and the world of Oz, haunted and perhaps also delighted by the way those three “human” faces from Oz are present at her bedside, she offers an image of hope. “It is not useless to be reminded,” Fontenay also writes, “that a ‘being with animal’ does not happen on its own and that allowing the animal to haunt our world, to trouble us by its alterity, is perhaps the only way to be truly with the animal, without either instrumentalizing or falsely lending that animal a human face.”8 There is work to be done on the farm; humans and animals must find or be given food and drink and shelter from the next storm, and, at least for the moment, they all are in it together. Having returned from Oz together, Dorothy and Toto may have lost the security of the home they once had, but they are in a better position to make their new home more livable for all.