From many vantage points, “biopolitical subjectivity” is a contradiction in terms: in current critical accounts, biopolitics is about populations, sovereignty, and violence, but most often not about subjectivity. My book has tried to offer a corrective of this view in two senses: first, in linking the emergence of biopolitics historically to the emergence of liberal subjectivity and, second, by suggesting ways in which subjectivity is the battleground as well as the by-product of biopolitics. As its by-product, subjectivity both affirms and undermines biopolitics, just as biopolitics affirms and undermines certain notions of the subject. The end result of these deliberations is that we need to reconsider what we might mean by subjectivity not just as an object of critique, but also as a range of possibilities. As my book title announces, my focus of interest here is not biopolitical theory and its concerns with populations per se. Rather, I have examined the mediating role of “biopolitical subjectivity” in American literature and culture—and vice versa, the impact of animal representations on our understanding of biopolitics and subjectivity.
Margot Norris has pointed out that literary studies entered the interdisciplinary field of animal studies belatedly.1 Although that belated arrival has recently been made up for by the wealth, in terms of quantity and quality, of publications in literary animal studies, my book has been suggesting ways in which literary animal studies not only contributes to but also critically intervenes in and reshapes the field of animal studies, first and foremost perhaps by challenging the field’s sense of its own progressive telos. Literary—or, more broadly, cultural—animal studies challenges monolithic accounts by which the early modern period instated a human/animal divide that was unchallenged before Bentham’s concern with suffering and Darwin’s account of evolution. The narrative I have been mapping tracks an ongoing dialogue about interspecies relationships, where distinctions between as well as connections among species are a strategy for the exercise of biopower and a tactic for exercising other forms of biopolitics.
I have been suggesting that we might trace a set of relationships in which we do not know—a priori or, for that matter, a posteriori—what or who “the animal” or “the human” is because such definitions emerge in a complex matrix of intimacies and representations; that is, they enable us to abandon the realm of ontological difference and locate us productively in the terrain of epistemological uncertainty. To the three ways in which “recent histories of animals” have approached their enterprise—namely, “intellectual history, humane history, and holistic history”2—this book adds history of sexuality. Animal love forms an affective spectrum that connects bestiality with puppy love and presses us beyond the human–animal dyad in ways that encourage us to specify—though not, I would insist, to taxonomize—how we are seeing the partners of the relationship. Part of the issue here is that these partners are socially constructed: the structure of witnessing that is integral to bestiality makes these relationships public in that we are talking not only about the direct partners of the (sexual) relationship, but also about the witnesses to these affective encounters: the White House Press Corps’ documentation of the new dog’s arrival at the White House in 2009 is paradigmatic of the strange publics we construct around animal intimacies. That public dimension is an upshot not only of the legal cases, but also of animal representations more broadly speaking: we are implicated in these affective relationships.
Those affective relationships, as I have described them, branch into the ugly, in Sianne Ngai’s sense of the term: they place us in a terrain of affective and political “equivocality.” In fact, those ugly feelings are precisely the meeting ground between the political and the aesthetic: Ngai points out that, with the exception of “theories of modern sovereignty and the state, it is the discourse of philosophical aesthetics, rather than that of political philosophy or economy, in which emotions have traditionally played the most pivotal role.” One of the examples she singles out for analysis is the “American cultural discourse that from the antebellum period forward has found it compelling to imagine the racialized subject as an excessively emotional and expressive subject (a situation in which the affect I call ‘animatedness’ becomes especially problematic),” particularly because that concept becomes the focus of “various kinds of symbolic struggle.” For Ngai, a particular challenge lies in understanding “the politically charged predicament of suspended agency from which all those ugly feelings ensue.”3
We need to rethink our practices of textual engagement if we are going to account for our affective relations, including our ugly feelings, with animals. This book has aimed to develop a theory of embodied reading that argues for the importance of animal representations in American literature. It also claims that the numerous and various presence of animals constitutes a way of negotiating the conditions of subjectivity under biopolitics. It offers a way to understand subjectivity in relation to embodiment and in relation to the discourse formations that abstract and concretize such embodiment. By “animal representations,” then, I do not mean just instances in which an animal appears in a text. More important I mean that animals appear in texts as disruptive presences that challenge our understanding of textual significance and figuration. “Animal representations” are an interface where the literal and symbolic meet and unsettle the terrains of modern taxonimization. That is what my Latinate title Animalia Americana playfully wants to capture.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines animalia as “the kingdom of living organisms that comprises the animals, now usually including only metazoans but formerly also including protozoans.”4 But, of course, what has interested me is precisely the second element of this definition: that these classifications and categories are unstable and that literature marks and produces that instability. In developing that analysis, I have assembled a menagerie and written a bestiary. But we know that menageries grow unwieldy and that bestiaries always call for further additions. One recurrent call in animal studies is for the field to imagine itself beyond its current expanse: “Any attempts to wrestle with our questions of ethics and politics and animality will have to move beyond our comfortable companions of cats and dogs and contemplate what it means to become familiar with the full (or, at least, with an expanded) spectrum of animot,” says Richard Nash.5 I hope that my book opens up the possibility for such further engagements, but I also wonder about the sense that to talk about animals, one has to talk about a “full … spectrum.” Although such a call is aimed at generating a sense of differentiation and diversity, it nevertheless seems in danger of replicating a universalizing impulse. It seems to me that the “spectrum” we should be after is understanding the complexities of intimacies, subjectivities, and encounters. That approach can remain attentive not just to its inclusions, but also to its exclusions, and it can leave open a space for alterity that is not violently abjected nor systemically incorporated, but viably “other.”
As Jeffrey Cohen has suggested, animals “function as reference and reflection, insubstantial allegories in which we discover ourselves. Yet such a transformation of animal bodies into merely human semblance ignores what might occur between animals and humans, what processes, desires, identities might circulate in the interspace where animal and human differences come together or come apart.”6 In ignoring that interspace, we are missing a crucial part of our cultural history, its normative mechanisms as well as its more radical possibilities. But what are those possibilities? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari differentiate between three types of animals: the “individuated animals, family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own petty history,” which they distinguish from “animals as they are treated in the great divine myths, in such a way as to extract from them series or structures, archetypes or models,” and then finally the third kind, “demonic animals, pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a becoming, a population, a tale.”7 I worry that the celebratory strand in this approach misses some of the complexities of what it means to “become animal” when you are a slave and when “becoming a population” is a lived experience of biopower. Instead of seeing the becoming-animal as a telos, I have picked up on another suggestion that Deleuze and Guattari make: although they focus on this third category, the becoming-animal, they indicate that an animal can be “treated in all three ways.”8 That mobility of registers seems to me truest to Anat Pick’s reminder that “championing ulterior subjectivities does not in itself generate a new ethics if the question of power is left unaddressed.”9
This project, then, sets out to unsettle constructed divides that hold philosophy apart from embodied life, that support biopolitical systematization, and that reproduce normative categories of gender, family, and sexuality.10 The challenge of these constructions is subsumed under the diverse interdisciplinary inquiries emerging as “animal studies” that question the separation of humans from (other) animals. This order of things has had profound social consequences in terms of racial hierarchy, social discipline, human procreation, domestic arrangements, population management—that is, for the activities Foucault describes as “biopolitics.” This book locates the intersections of these activities in the terrain of animal representation and meditates on the indebtedness of human feeling to animal embodiment. But that indebtedness is also a key biopolitical strategy dedicated to the strategically incomplete expulsion of behaviors and affects that define human beings and animals. That double bind has significant consequences, ranging from the creation of the abject body to the generation of alternative subject formations.