Cultural critic and theorist Cary Wolfe began thinking about human– animal relationships as a student when he encountered animal rights activists on his college campus. This experience resulted in an intense sense of “not being able to turn away,” and Wolfe became a vegetarian and devoted activist in his own right. During the same period, he began developing the nonhuman problematic as an object of legitimate scholarly inquiry. On the subject of eating, Wolfe observes that food is a multidimensional and complex problem, shares how his vegetarianism ruined one Thanksgiving dinner, and notes that people have “different kinds of investments” in food. We interviewed Wolfe by Skype on July 14, 2016.
SCOTT CAREY: Could you tell us a bit about yourself? This could include when and where you were born and raised; your formative cultural, intellectual, and political experiences; how you became an academic, whatever you’d like to share.
CARY WOLFE: Well, that’s actually three questions! If I forget any of them, just remind me. I was born in South Carolina and lived there until I was about four or five years old, when I moved to North Carolina. That’s really where I grew up; it’s where I went to high school and did my university work. Even though I was quite prepared to leave and kind of wanted to go somewhere else, I got this great scholarship to go to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. So I went to college and did my master’s degree in Chapel Hill, and then, again, I was looking all over the country for the right PhD program. I had to decide whether I was going to do a PhD or an MFA, because I was both a poet and a scholar and was trying to figure out which one to pursue. I decided to do a PhD, so I was prepared to go anywhere else, again. But just at that moment Duke University experienced a kind of renaissance in the English Department and the Program in Literature; they hired all these fantastic people almost overnight. And I was living ten miles away, and Duke and UNC students could study back and forth with no extra tuition at both universities. So I ended up staying there again and doing my PhD at Duke, which was a fantastic experience.
But let me back up a second. My parents met as high school English teachers in an urban environment outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, in the 1960s. So I grew up in that sort of household—where there was a lot of literature, a lot of ’60s culture. Not really of the hippie variety, but more of the informal, liberal ’60s environment, even in the South at that time. Then my dad eventually became an academic. He first worked for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, where he was the head of their English and Foreign Languages division. He got a PhD, strangely enough, at Duke and went on to be an academic in English education at Old Dominion University in Virginia, specializing in the relationship between writing and learning, especially for kids from kindergarten through twelfth grade. So I grew up in an academic household; I was always around literature, poetry, and music, and art to a lesser extent. To jump back to my experience in school, my graduate school training was really a combination of Marxism and pragmatism. I did a lot of work with Fredric Jameson, Frank Lentricchia, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Franco Moretti, Terry Eagleton, and a long list of other great people.
But one day when I was in graduate school, I was walking through the Pit, one of the central areas of the UNC campus, and I stopped by the student animal rights group table. And they had all these pamphlets and things displayed, including some material about biomedical research that was taking place on, I believe it was, primates, on the UNC campus. I just idly stopped by and started looking at these materials and I remember saying to the people at the table—who later became very good friends of mine—“You guys have got to be kidding. You’re making this stuff up, right?” And they said, “No, it’s going on in that building right there.” And I was in disbelief. I realized much later, especially with my own work with students, that I had been completely in the dark about this entire infrastructure of exploitation and violence toward animals, and it never occurred to me that it existed, really. I wouldn’t call it a “conversion” experience necessarily, but it was definitely an intense ethical sense of not being able to turn away from what I had learned.
So I got really involved in the animal rights movement. And in that part of North Carolina, the so-called Research Triangle, there are a bunch of colleges and universities, including Duke, UNC, and NC State, so there’s a high concentration of PhDs—in fact the highest concentration of PhDs per capita in the United States. So there was a very strong state animal rights group, and that was the core of it. I became very involved in this group called the North Carolina Network for Animals; I was in the newspaper and on television and at protests. I was a hardcore activist for a number of years.
But the interesting thing is that while that was going on, I realized more and more that my academic training in Marxism and pragmatism really didn’t have much to say about the plight of nonhuman life. That eventually became a very productive divergence; it’s what led me to help invent, over many years, what would later be called animal studies, or human–animal studies. Because at that time there was no freestanding theoretical vocabulary that was taken seriously with regard to nonhuman life. In the academy, if you were talking about animals it was taken for granted that you were talking about some sort of symbol or metaphor for a human problematic. In many cases this was in the form of the grotesque, or monstrosity—like Dracula, that type of stuff. But it wasn’t a freestanding theoretical problematic in the way that feminism clearly was, or that queer theory became. It took a number of years to build that vocabulary and, in a kind of “Trojan horse” way, bring it into the ivory tower. Fast-forward twenty-five years and it’s a different world. People in all different kinds of disciplines take seriously how we relate to nonhuman life—how we represent it, how we talk about it, and so on. So that’s the relationship between my official academic training and my background and how I got here.
And I remained active in that way for a long time. When I took my first professorial job, at Indiana University, I was on the Board of Directors for the county Humane Society there. There wasn’t really a formal animal rights group in that area, so that was the center of the humane community. Through that I ended up being the Humane Society’s appointee to the city’s Animal Control Commission, which was a very interesting experience, to say the least. I continued doing that kind of work until I moved to my second academic position, at the State University of New York, and at that point my academic life was becoming increasingly time consuming and demanding. And honestly, I was burned out. This is what happens to activists. The people you’re opposing, they get paid to do what they do as an eight-hour-a-day job. What you’re doing, you’re doing after hours on top of your regular job. So I reached a point when, between the increasing demands of my academic life and being burned out by my activist life, I just decided, I’m putting a whole lot into this now in a different way, in my writing, lectures, and teaching.
In terms of growing up as a southerner in the United States, the thing I want people to understand is that the South is actually a really heterogeneous region. The part I grew up in—the so-called New South or Upper South, the North Carolina–Virginia bandwidth—was actually pretty progressive politically when I was a kid. North Carolina was a solid, progressive Democratic state for decades and decades, going all the way back to a lot of legislation that came out of World War II that helped the textile mills and tobacco farms. I think they’d had only one Republican governor in forty years when I was a kid, something like that. And other parts of the South are the same way. The part of the South I grew up in, especially because of the universities and everything, was a lot more like the rest of the country in many ways.
I had a roommate in college in North Carolina who was from Camilla, Georgia, which was about as far south as you can go and still be in Georgia. He got married when I was in college; I went down there for his wedding, and I had never been to the Deep South. I was actually in shock, because it was so unlike the part of the South that I’d grown up in. I went down there and I said, “Oh, I get it: five rich white families run the county and everyone else lives in shacks.” It was almost like going into a feudal environment. The takeaway from this is that, for a lot of people who haven’t lived there, it’s hard to realize just how different various parts of the South are from each other. So I didn’t have a stereotypical, quintessential southern upbringing in that sense. Although my grandfather and great-grandfather—my grandfather, 105 years old, and still alive—they were both Baptist preachers. So I had this interesting mix of some really traditional elements and some really progressive elements in my background.
SAMANTHA KING: Did your animal activism mark your first foray into activism, or did you do other kinds of political work before that?
CW: No, that was my first experience as an activist. It really was an ethical leap. I didn’t really have a fully formed and articulated platform that I was working from. It was more of a “hold your nose and jump off the cliff” situation, in which I didn’t have a fully articulated ethical platform, but I knew that this stuff was wrong, and it bothered me enough that I wanted to do something about it. All the complex theoretical apparatuses I developed came later, beginning in the early ’90s and continuing to the present. That was my first and really only experience as an activist, but it’s not one that you forget. I have a soft spot in my heart for activists because I understand what they do and what it takes. Even if I disagree with them, I respect them because I understand what’s involved.
SC: What do you see as the primary purpose of your academic work— why do you do what you do?
CW: That’s a really hard question. I do what I do for lots of different reasons. One reason is that I really enjoy it—that is, my research, scholarship, and writing—and find it very fulfilling. I enjoy working with students and graduate students and watching the changes they go through. And not just in relation to the ethically complex or hot issues we’re talking about today. If I had to sum up what I try to do in my work, including work with students, I’d see it as a process of existential exposure: You have to be very careful not to over-manage or over–stage-manage. Especially through my work with students, I have realized that people come to these issues, and work through these intellectual and ethical questions, very much on their own timetables. Over the years, I’ve had some students who were extremely resistant to questions involving animals and ethics; often they were raised in a very traditional situation with very traditional viewpoints. But I’ll see them five, six, seven years later and they’ll tell me it took them years to work through for themselves the relationship between what they do in their everyday lives—what they eat or what products they use—and the kinds of ethical issues we are talking about here. For that reason, teaching really is an art form, especially with these kinds of hot issues like animal rights, or reproductive rights. As a young professor I had to learn a lot about how you can push students, but also how much space you need to give them in terms of their own relationship to these questions. Because a lot of students will just shut down if you put it all out there at one time, very intensely; it is almost too much to process. There is a kind of paralysis that students can experience when they start trying to confront how everyday life—the shampoo they buy, cleaning products they use, food they eat, or car they drive—is completely wrapped up in this structure of violence and exploitation toward nonhuman life. It’s almost too much to deal with and then they just say, “To hell with it. I can’t think about it. I’m not going to worry about it” and they just go back to the status quo. What I try to do in my teaching, and in my research, is create an experimental space, a laboratory space, in which this kind of existential and intellectual transformation can happen, but is not dictated. The skills you have to use to make that happen, and the settings, may vary widely, but I think that is what characterizes my work with students, and my work as a scholar. I am very much drawn to work that is not about closure, and not about achieving right answers, and not about drawing direct lines between philosophical foundations and political actions that derive from them, but actually work that is quite the contrary. We just did a project in the Posthumanities series called Manifestly Haraway—Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg” and “Companion Species” manifestos, together with about a four-hour-long conversation between the two of us—and I was reminded during those exchanges that this is something Donna and I have in common: how we think about the relationship between the ethical, political, and intellectual dimensions in the work we do.
SC: Thank you. Not everyone speaks to teaching when responding to that question.
CW: Well, I’ve learned so much about all the things we are talking about from twenty-five years of working with students; I can’t imagine discussing any of this stuff without talking about my work with students. There is a lot that I have learned, processed, and then brought into my own theoretical work on the basis of working with students—including my critique of animal rights philosophy in the book Animal Rites, and later into my work on posthumanism. That partly derived from my work with students; I recognized that there was something they were resisting in animal rights philosophy that they were right to resist. But they didn’t really have the theoretical vocabulary to describe it; they just felt like, “I’m being pushed into a corner here in a way that I don’t like.” So I took that up and then later worked through it in my own research and in my writing.
SK: Your students’ resistance to traditional animal rights theory—was this resistance around its normativity, or its moral prescriptiveness?
CW: I think that was a big part of it. I think another part of it has to do with the specific transferential psychodynamic of the classroom space. Students don’t really like being told what to think, and to that I say, “Good for them.” So part of the resistance just comes from that. Because if you think about the humanist articulation of animal rights philosophy—in either Singer’s utilitarianism, or Regan’s Neo-Kantian version—it is a kind of “if P then Q” propositional structure. And at a certain point you can see the students saying to themselves, “That’s not how ethical life is. It doesn’t work that way; people don’t live that way.” This is where, if you compare what counts as ethics from the humanist side of animal rights philosophy—let’s say from the Singer/Regan line— with the absolutely opposed account of ethics from contemporary continental philosophy and poststructuralism, Derrida for example, people often think, “Well, Derrida is the crazy outlandish contemporary French philosopher who is all esoteric.” But actually Derrida’s account of what ethics is and how it works is much more in tune with what the students think ethical life is, and that is, as Derrida puts it, “confronting the ordeal of undecidability” in every ethical instance without having a formula in your back pocket that you can just whip out, prescribing what is the right thing to do in any particular situation. So it is actually the contemporary continental philosophers—and not just Derrida, but I would say Foucault, and Lyotard, and others—whose descriptions of ethics actually match up with what the students think about the complexity of ethical life. I think that is a big part of what they were resisting: the reductive, oversimplifying, and propositional analytical nature of the ethical argument from the humanist side. Something in them was saying, “No, this actually isn’t how people confront, think about, and live through ethical challenges and complexities.”
SC: Thank you. Speaking of complexities—you’ve been a leading figure in the development of posthumanism as a philosophical and ethical framework. Could you discuss how you continue to find this approach useful, and what you see as the promises and/or constraints of posthumanism?
CW: I’ll answer this partly in terms of my own work, but also in terms of being editor of the Posthumanities series at the University of Minnesota Press. First of all, we can all agree that posthumanism is an official academic logo now. It’s like Coke or Pepsi, or Miller or Budweiser. Forces of academic incorporation being what they are, that’s true of posthumanism and that’s true of animal studies. There is nothing I can do about it; it doesn’t matter what I think about it— that’s just the way it is. Something we could discuss at length from a sociological point of view is that academic knowledge in higher education depends very directly, as Niklas Luhmann and other people have observed, on the production of novelty. If we all agreed, “You know what, we got the posthumanism, that’s the final word on everything, we’re done,” then none of us would have any reason for being, none of us would have jobs. So posthumanism as a concept, as a logo, is caught up in the broader economy of academic knowledge production.
Having said that, what I like about the term posthumanism is precisely that it is capacious enough, and it is not particularly prescriptive. This goes back to my earlier answer about how I work: I think it creates a space in which you’re not prescribing how people must think about any particular question. You are drawing attention to the fact that whatever it is we’re doing as scholars, you always have to think about it not just on one level, but two levels. The first level is what is the ostensible content of the problematic that you’re working on. In that regard, animal rights is obviously an anti-anthropocentric position. But on the second level— how do you think that anti-anthropocentrist animal rights philosophy ends up being quite traditionally humanist in some ways. What I like about the framework of posthumanism is that it creates a space in which whatever we’re doing, whatever questions we’re taking up, they have to be confronted on both of those levels. Not just content, but also the theoretical, methodological level of how we are thinking these questions.
The other thing I would say with regard to how the “post” in posthumanism is functioning is that it’s not a rejection of humanism, which I think would be a really facile position to take. There are many aspects of the legacy of humanism we may find admirable—for example, some ethical imperatives we have inherited from it. What posthumanism does is draw attention to the fact that how those imperatives are taken up on the theoretical/methodological level by humanism actually undercuts and short-circuits these imperatives, and animal rights philosophy is a classic example. You want to say “Yeah, we all agree we should figure out how to value nonhuman life.” But the way animal rights philosophy does that within a humanist framework—whether you’re talking about Singer or Regan—actually ends up reinstating a very familiar normative picture of what subjectivity is, and it’s only on that basis that nonhumans have moral standing.
So, to summarize some of the positive aspects of the posthumanism “rubric,” there is a way in which it’s intentionally contentless! It simply allows a space in which these two imperatives always have to be taken up—whether you’re talking about work in feminism, animal studies, queer theory, environmental ethics, or anything else. This is why for me, as I say in What Is Posthumanism?, animal studies is just a subset or a subproblem of this broader challenge of what it means to do posthumanist work. I like that capaciousness and lack of prescriptiveness about it. If you look at the list of titles in the Posthumanities series, I think this is what you find. You see work from people who are self-identified object-oriented ontologists; you see work from people like Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret, who are coming at the relationship between human and nonhuman life from a very important commitment to feminism and gender. You see Mick Smith’s book Against Ecological Sovereignty. So, as a series editor, what I wanted was a context and a rubric that were capacious enough that the crosstalk between books which sometimes appear completely unrelated can continue to grow, and build, and evolve, and emerge, as we publish more titles in the series. We’ve just published the thirty-ninth volume, and I think that’s exactly what we’ve seen happening. All the books look different if you go back and read them a few years later, in light of other books that have come out in the series since. That’s a way, I hope, that the “logoization” and branding of posthumanism can continually be destabilized, and undercut, and the framework can be kept fresh.
SK: Yes, I certainly appreciate that aspect of the series. Shifting gears a bit to your personal practices—can you describe your approach to eating or otherwise consuming animal products?
CW: Sure. When I was an animal rights activist—I think it was in 1988—I became a lacto-ovo vegetarian, and I have been since. I have never been a vegan and actually, I’ve never been tempted or felt compelled to eat a vegan diet. Five or six years ago, I started eating some fish again, mainly because I travel so much for work, and I’m taken out to dinner so much by people in all the different places I go. I just reached a point where I realized it was easier on them and on me if we weren’t always in the position where I’ve got to go somewhere where I can have a salad or eat the dreaded “pasta primavera.” Which is really just overcooked pasta and overcooked vegetables tossed with olive oil. When I eat fish now, it’s usually shellfish if at all possible. With lacto-ovo products, I try to ensure they come from production processes and environments where you can have at least reasonable confidence that the animals are living humane lives—what I would call the normal lives they ought to be living, which is obviously not the case for industrial food production.
All the stuff I am describing is a lot easier to do now than it was twenty-five or thirty years ago. When I first became a vegetarian, if you didn’t live in a city, or in a college town that had your stereotypical “health foods” market, you were in trouble. It was not that easy to do. Now, of course, you can go anywhere—I mean almost anywhere at least—in the States and I think in Canada too, and there are entire sections of the grocery store catering to people who don’t eat meat and have other kinds of dietary preferences.
For me, this is in a context of realizing that food and diet are a really multidimensional and complex problem: psychically, existentially, affectively, politically, ethically. In terms of your impact on nonhuman life, what you eat leaves everything else in the dust in terms of impact; that is demonstrably true. But that actually turns out to be just a small part of the story when it comes to what you eat, and why. I know people who don’t eat meat, not because they care about animals, but for environmental reasons. I know other people who don’t eat meat simply because aesthetically and viscerally they don’t like eating meat; they find it gross. There are so many different dimensions to how and why you consume what you do, so I always felt that in my relationship with food, my own ethical principles are always unfolding in a context, and are always only part of the issue. And people who travel a lot, especially in non-Western countries, confront this all the time. They might say, “I’m going to some part of the world and I haven’t eaten meat in twenty-five years, but if I go there and I’m served this for dinner and I don’t eat it, I’m seriously offending my hosts.” So it’s just a way of reminding ourselves that drawing lines, as some “beautiful soul” vegans sometimes do, takes place in a context. As Derrida pointed out long ago in what is still a really important and fantastic text, “Eating Well,” in the industrialized West, “normal everyday life” is absolutely predicated upon an inescapable structure of violence against nonhuman life, one that we are all implicated in, vegans included. That doesn’t mean that somebody who eats at McDonald’s three times a day isn’t doing more violence than somebody who is a vegan—they are. It simply means that it’s not differences in kind that we are talking about here; it’s a continuum that takes place within this larger context. On the other hand, I think David Wood’s wonderful critique of Derrida and “Eating Well” in his essay “Comment ne Pas Manger” is relevant here. He basically says that Derrida may be too quick to generalize all forms of violence as being somehow equivalent. So Derrida can write all this stuff about nonhuman creatures and then say, “Let’s go eat steak tartare for dinner.” David’s point was that there are qualitatively different kinds of violence that take place in these different practices, and they can be identified with some precision. So it’s not about being clean versus not being clean; it’s about confronting the complexities of these gradations in an ongoing way, in your everyday life—and always in a situation that is very thickly contextualized. That’s how I think about the relationship between my principles, choices about what I eat, and the larger context in which those are carried out.
SK: I sense some ambivalence in your last answer, in terms of consuming animal products—could you speak to that?
CW: I would be happy to. My feeling is, in the culture I live in, the world I live in, I can eat like a king without killing animals. That’s not the case for other people, in other situations. They live in a different context, and their relationship to nonhuman life, and the taking of nonhuman life, for the purposes of consumption and survival, is very different from my own. It’s one of the great benefits of living in the industrialized West: I have the ability to make myself feel a lot better about the violence that I do to nonhuman life because I have access to choices that other people don’t have. This is something Donna Haraway and I have talked about a lot and have a point of agreement on, and it also jives with my experiences with students over the years. The issue in many ways is not, “Will death eventually befall the various creatures that we are talking about?” because the answer is yes. If I had to sum up in one sentence the point of view I have gleaned from twenty-five years of teaching undergraduate students: For them, it seems that whether an animal dies is less important than the animal’s quality of life when they are alive. Similarly, for Donna, the real issue is that you shouldn’t institute a discursive technology or any other kind of technology that automatically, taxonomically makes certain forms of life killable but not murderable, simply by virtue of that designation. As she puts it, the issue is less “Thou shalt not kill”—because killing is, after all, unavoidable— than “Thou shalt not make killable” by some kind of taxonomic or— to put a finer point on it, coming out of biopolitical thought—racial designation. In my own relationship to these kinds of questions, this is what I have tended to focus on: that I live in a situation and culture where I have the luxury of not having to kill animals or have animals killed for food. I’m convinced that it’s possible to eat eggs and dairy products from animals that are not being made killable for that purpose—and who are in fact sometimes, at considerable expense, being afforded the kinds of lives they ought to be able to lead, in terms of exercising their own capacities, potentialities, and desires. I think that it’s possible to do that.
When it comes to the question of eating fish, I feel a lot less bad about eating shellfish than I do about eating a piece of salmon, or some other kind of fish. Why? Because I’m convinced that by-and-large, shellfish don’t know what’s going on, and a salmon, or a trout, does know what’s going on. And there is a complicated section of my book Before the Law about this. By “going on,” I mean having the capacity to care in some kind of self-reflexive way about what’s happening to you and being done to you, something that is not just a stimulus-response sort of mechanism. So for me qualitatively, ethically, there is a difference between eating a salmon and eating a clam. That doesn’t mean we can go and kill all the clams. That doesn’t mean that clams are now made killable, that we should treat them as simply a brute “resource.” It means I try consistently to think about the different forms of life, what they require, what they care about, and how my actions affect them. Of course, we know from the history of science, as I point out in Before the Law, that those designations are constantly going to change and shift. In my own lifetime they have moved dramatically in terms of how we think about nonhuman life. So these are some of the things that I think about in terms of this ambivalence—and we haven’t even talked about the environment, or labor issues, or racial issues, that are bound up in industrial food production, which we could get into for hours.
SK: That’s interesting. I’ve been thinking a lot about seafood and fish for the last couple of weeks because I’m going on vacation next week to the Maritime provinces, and there will not be vegetarian food available in many of the places we are visiting. So when I look at menus, I’ll be thinking of your salmon/clam example.
CW: It’s going to be like “fish with fish,” I would guess. To come back to this question of taxonomy—that’s where a term like seafood is just as blunt an instrument as the distinction between human and animal. Which is, conceptually, such a blunt instrument as to be of no use whatsoever. What we are really talking about here is different forms of life, and different ways of being in the world that cannot be described adequately by these kinds of terms. Whether we’re talking about seafood or other forms of nonhuman life—and this is where I completely agree with Derrida’s approach to these questions—we’re really talking about thickening and complexifying the terrain in which we think about nonhuman life. And in that terrain I have a lot more in common with an orangutan than an orangutan has with a starfish, or with a mosquito, or even with a rodent. So clearly the vocabulary human and animal is of no use in describing this complex topography of different ways of being in the world, and how those affect the kinds of ethical choices we’re talking about.
SC: It’s certainly complex terrain. Could you tell us a story about a time where your dietary practices have been the subject of awkwardness, celebration, or hostility?
CW: Yes, actually. My number one example is when I became a vegetarian and went back home for Thanksgiving dinner with my parents for the first time, and my mom was so upset. I mean she was almost in tears. I couldn’t figure it out, because I had been thinking through all these animal rights arguments. For me, none of it was personal at all. It was philosophical in the most abstract sense: “Here’s why I no longer eat animals, and I can walk you through it all.” But for my mom it was deeply personal, and she was offended. I gradually realized that to her, it felt like an attack on her being a good mother. This goes back to what I was talking about earlier with the different kinds of investments people have in food, and in sharing meals, and especially traditional meals. It was an important experience for me, because a kind of light bulb went on; I realized that whenever you are talking about these ethical issues around food and eating, the worst kind of fantasy you can have is that they all make sense. I saw in my mom’s response things that, to me, were just completely irrational. Yet to her, this represented a violation of a mother–son bond symbolized by, and built around, sharing certain kinds of food that she, since I was born, had lovingly prepared for the family on these special occasions. That was a really important learning experience for me. She eventually got over it, and of course now I’ve gone back many times since, and in fact last Christmas I made a full vegetarian holiday feast, and everybody was happy and it’s like “hahaha.” But the first time we went through this, it was really traumatic.
I’ve also noticed something else, at the other end of the spectrum. When I travel and give talks and do seminars, people are always taking me out to dinner, and often they are really uptight about it; they will ask, “Would you be offended if I ate this?” I get this kind of response all the time, and there is a way in which it is understandable for people who have read my work; they are being polite. But it goes back to what I was saying about students: I just tell people, “Look, relax. I’m not going to tell you what to eat. These are things you have to come around to in your own time.” If you want 8 million reasons, you can go read my stuff, but 8 million reasons is never going to equal your doing the right thing either. I confront this all the time—this kind of trepidation—often about taking me out to dinner, and whether I’ll be offended if they sit across the table from me and eat a pork chop. And my feeling is, “Just shut up and order dinner and eat, okay?” Now if they told me I could not have a glass of wine, then I would be upset!
SC: I’m sure many of us share that sentiment! We’ve discussed the relationship between your work and eating practices; could you tell us if—and how—your work has shaped your relationship with companion animals, or vice versa?
CW: It probably is belaboring the obvious, but it has so deepened my relationship to the nonhuman creatures that I share my life with. Partly emotionally, partly affectively, although in a sense, that’s the easy part. I think the emotional, affective bond that most people naturally have as children with nonhuman creatures in a way is always already there.
I think what it has done for me more is to make me take the challenge of understanding nonhuman life more seriously. When I lived in Indiana, I became very seriously involved in dog training (this is part of how Donna Haraway and I bonded) and I worked with one of the top dog trainers in the country. He was one of the U.S. Navy’s top canine people, but he also worked with the Navy’s marine mammal project in San Diego. So he worked with dolphins, sea lions, and some other kinds of creatures doing all sorts of interesting work like underwater bomb detection and dismantling. And he worked with dogs doing search-and-rescue stuff, bomb-sniffing—all kinds of stuff. So I got really involved working with him during that period when I taught at Indiana. Through this work—and this is one thing I think both Donna and I shared—I got schooled in animal behavior, and learning how to perceive the world, or trying to perceive the world, as a particular form of nonhuman life experiences it. The experimental nature of the training scenario will confront you time and again with your own anthropocentric biases about how the world is experienced. If you don’t acknowledge that, you won’t be a very good trainer and you just won’t get very much done. You’re forced to deepen and really decenter your understanding of how different creatures, including human beings, experience the world. And that “schooling” happens through both working with animals and also reading about animal behavior, and studying evolutionary, and ecological, and biological materials about nonhuman life.
So all of that has done more than deepen and complicate my understanding and appreciation of how creatures like dogs experience the world, and why they do the things they do, and the forms of affection and understanding I can share with them that I couldn’t share otherwise. But more important, as I say in What Is Posthumanism?, the final quarry in some ways is that being in relationships with animals also changes how you think about what being human is, and the things you take for granted about what being human is. One way that What Is Posthumanism? opens away from the animal question is in bringing in disability studies; that is what the whole chapter on Temple Grandin is about, that we should probably be reluctant about generalizing how human beings experience the world. I think this comes back to the question you asked me about posthumanism. You might start out with something called animal studies; you might start out with thinking about the entire evolutionary and phenomenological relationship between human life and canine life. But you eventually loop back to a real reluctance to generalize about this thing we call “human,” as Derrida puts it. That’s been a real side benefit of all this, that began with my saying, “Wow, why do dogs do this?” But it eventually circles back to this question of the human, and trying to think about other ways to talk about how creatures like us get on in the world.
SC: You said you have two dogs right now, but have you always had dogs?
CW: I’ve always had dogs and cats pretty much my whole life, although it was really only when I got involved in animal rights activism that I would say my relationship to my companion animals changed dramatically. Up to that point in my life, I had dogs and cats the way that most people do. Most dog owners, and I’m going to say this now as a former serious dog trainer, don’t actually understand anything about canine behavior. They think that the dog experiences the world more or less the same way that human beings experience the world. This is one reason so many adult dogs end up in shelters. And I was that person until I got involved in animal rights activism, and later in working with the Humane Society in Indiana. My relationship to my companion animals really changed and deepened and became something that had a lot more gravity and texture to it precisely because I took it a lot more seriously. I thought a lot more about it. I just learned how to recognize what was going on around me with these nonhuman creatures that I shared my life with.
If I had my way, I would probably live out in the country and I’d have fifteen dogs and thirty cats. I would also have birds, if I could find the right kind of birds that would be okay with living with me. Most bird species are not great to have as companion animals, but I would love to do that and surround myself with that density and variety of nonhuman life. But I just don’t have the life that would allow me to do that right now, too many demands on my time; I travel too much. Even having two dogs is difficult. I don’t like to go away from the dogs for more than three weeks, and then I feel like I need to get back and be in their lives again. Which is hard, but that is my cutoff, three, maybe four weeks. I would love to live that way if I could; maybe when I retire I will. Because—if you have read The Hidden Life of Dogs, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s wonderful book—one of the interesting things about dogs, and cats too, is when they achieve a certain numerical density in the group, their behavior completely changes. So one thing that Thomas saw in her book, one dog, fine. Two dogs, fine. Three dogs, fine. The interactions are still within the identifiable companion animal model of a more or less oedipalized relationship between your companion animal and you. But when you hit five or six dogs, she discovered, they’re actually no longer interested in you; you are no longer the focus. They actually shift into a pack dynamic, and that becomes the center of their emotional and phenomenological lives, and you are just kind of there. The same thing happens with cats, in a different way, when you get into higher numbers. I would love to live in the midst of that and just observe that, but I don’t know if I will ever be able to. I hope so.
SC: That would be fascinating to observe, absolutely. One final question, to wrap up: Is there a key dilemma or question that haunts you?
CW: Now this could turn into an hour-and-a-half answer in itself! I don’t think I have a single dilemma or question that haunts me, in a sort of Derridean, deconstructive way; I tend to think of all of questions of the sort you’re describing as being haunted. So then haunting actually doesn’t become a unique, or special, or unusual state of affairs; it’s where you live always. So for me I would say, you are always in this spectralizing and haunted context, when you think about ethical questions, or political questions, that you actually can’t completely confront frontally. By “confront frontally” I mean confront in a way that you could say, “If I were just diligent enough, or just smart enough, or had a good enough heart, that question could be laid to rest and I could be done.” For me this condition of what you might call “hauntology,” or “spectrality,” is a much more generalized, omnipresent, and unsolvable condition. So then you shift from being haunted by a single problem, a particular question, to realizing that if that’s the context in which we operate, what we are doing is kind of muddling through as best we can. Taking on what we can, and sometimes turning away from what we can’t take on right now. That’s the process. So to me there is a permanent, ongoing spectrality and hauntology that’s not solvable, and not even fully, frontally cognizable. But we do the best we can.