Richard Nash
Two skunks, one day, by the roadside stood,
As an old Chevrolet passed by;
And the smell that it left was far from good,
And a tear stood in one skunk’s eye.
“Oh, why do you weep?” the other skunk cried;
“Oh, why do you shiver and shake?”
“Because that smell,” the first replied,
“Is like mother used to make.”
G. Zabriskie, “Two Skunks”
My credit card called me today. It wanted to remind me – in that annoyingly impersonal, unflappable, slightly condescending human voice it has – that I needed to pay it. It gave me precise instructions, which in order to placate it, I dutifully followed to the best of my ability, pushing the button required at the moment indicated, through three or four levels, before it gave up on me and abruptly terminated the conversation by instructing me to call it back at a given number and then hanging up. When I returned its call, I eventually worked my way out of the automated maze, and after a short wait was put through to a courteous operator who spoke clear and articulate English with an inflection that struck my untrained ear as vaguely Pakistani. We conducted our transaction, with him pleasantly (but insistently) offering me products and services; and I, straining to match his courtesy, just as insistently declining these offers. Throughout the transaction, my refusals were strengthened by my irritated awareness that anything purchased would not be purchased from the kindly, precise, efficient fellow now making the offer, but from the hypocritical, overly pleasant machine who had first called me. I tend to be slow to anger when speaking with people, but I notice that I get irritated much more rapidly when conversing with machines.
That last sentence I wrote is the kind I grew up reading in sci-fi narratives of fifty years ago, but today it pops up on my monitor as a straightforward narrative of a widely held, non-idiosyncratic observation of affect in contemporary culture. In fact, if one Googles “anger automated voice,” one will get not only the expected news stories documenting how widespread this new source of irritation is, one will also get citations to the burgeoning literature on how to build anger-detection protocols into the automated voice caller, to make it more responsive to the anger being generated.
I begin this chapter with this moment of machine-provoked affective response to underline what was intended to be my opening comment: N. Katherine Hayles’s influential text, How We Became Posthuman, is already a decade old. When it first appeared, that title seasoned its implicit argument with a dash of audacity: posthumanism was not the brave new territory to be explored by the coming generation, it was the fait accompli whose history now demanded to be written. And the ubiquity of the term in literary-critical studies during the past decade, as well as our increasingly techno-mediated culture, testify to the accuracy of that title choice. (As I write this, the online MLA International Bibliography lists 170 publications that include the word “posthuman” in the title, none published before 1991, and all but a dozen published in the past decade. However, using the hyphenated “post-human,” the MLA International Bibliography generates fewer than twenty-five titles. I also note in passing that while “posthuman” proliferates in titles all around me, when I attempt to use the word in this text, my word processor silently separates it into two words –“post human”–and I have to take care to override manually my cyber-supplemented lexicographic superego.) In a world where “social networking” is more likely to refer to an activity conducted alone in a room with a computer than at a cocktail party or some other collective gathering; where “friending” is a verb form that requires a specific software application; and where twitterers tweet quotidian events like unreflective Prufrocks, our posthuman condition seems clearly established, and its currency in the fields of literary and cultural criticism fully comprehensible.
An important corollary question – particularly important for the next generation of literary critics – is demanded by that reconfiguration: what will be the new role of literary criticism in particular and cultural criticism more generally in the redefined academy? Literary studies developed into a core discipline of the humanities, but do universities need a posthumanities, and if so, what role does literary study play within such a reconfigured academy? That is no idle question, as liberal arts universities increasingly tilt their budgets and their priorities away from a traditional balance of “arts and sciences” and toward a new partnership of science and business. As the “new corporate university” expands away from the traditional humanities, it may be adapting to a new posthuman condition, but it will therefore become all the more important for literary studies to articulate its relevance to a posthumanities university, and to defend against the counterclaim that as we continue becoming posthuman, the discipline that long defined itself as central to the humanities now continues in becoming more peripheral.
For such a long time, a strong feature of disciplinary self-definition was inevitably to some degree traditional, preserving in a curatorial fashion a body of texts that expressed traits and doctrines that were deemed to have particular cultural value in establishing “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed,” particularly with respect to those features of the human condition that were deemed to be essential. The last half-century (that period during which Hayles notes we became posthuman) has witnessed a dramatic change in disciplinary self-definition, moving away from the preservation of a narrowly defined core set of canonical texts that express an essential humanity to emphasize instead a set of interpretive practices and theoretical commitments, a critical toolkit that can be used productively to examine a range of texts and their constitutive role in cultural formations. What has, I believe, been rather slower in development – but will ultimately be of even greater significance to the fundamental reorganization of humanities within the academy – is the development of a revised attention to ecological criticism. Where traditional humanism defined culture around the privileged category of the human, the era of the posthuman coincides with an intellectual reorientation to a world in which we are responsive agents within nature-culture networks. The paradigm of dominion, in which the world was a resource at the disposal of the human, is giving way to a paradigm of responsive interaction and mutual interdependencies; and our critical practices need to reflect and respond to that altered orientation. It is in this context that recent attention to animality and animal studies offers dramatic potential for expanding and altering critical practice.
The title figure in the most canonical novel in American literature is a whale. That is a simple statement, almost ludicrous in its naïveté, which makes it all the more marvelous to consider the critical history of Moby Dick, which managed so successfully, for so long, to develop complex valuable interpretive arguments in which the non-human animal at the center of that narrative was read as so many things other than a whale. That the author went out of his way to intrude on conventional fictional narrative in order to educate his reader about whales and whaling has long been a subject of critical interest, much of it not terribly concerned with cetology itself. My point here is not to digress into the critical history of Melville’s major novel, but to point out that a simple alteration in focus can produce dramatically revisionist accounts of familiar texts, even when remaining within familiar methodological paradigms (the MLA informs me that two recently defended dissertations appear to take up this particular challenge). That whales mattered to Melville, and that, therefore, how whales mattered to Melville can matter significantly to his readers, is a simple, straightforward, but not necessarily simplistic work of critical revision.
This is the indirect impact of how a more ecologically alert revision of a humanist tradition requires us to revise our framing of questions in literary and cultural history. Opportunities here abound, and can lead in a variety of rewarding directions. For a generation, historians have been influenced by the important work of Harriet Ritvo, Joan Thirsk, and by Keith Thomas’s ambitious Man and the Natural World. In books like his influential Horse and Man in Early Modern England and more recent The Horse Trade of Tudor and Stuart England, Peter Edwards has broken important new ground in economic history by recovering a fuller appreciation for the role companion species play in human historical development. Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton’s discussion of the traffic in horses and equestrian art in Global Interests: Renaissance art between East and West locates the same species in the context of a revisionist art history that expands consideration of cross-species interactions to their commercial and diplomatic engagement with international traffic, a theme that receives considerably fuller treatment in Donna Landry’s Noble Brutes: how eastern horses transformed English culture.
My momentary focus on the horse (which could be extended to include a significant body of recent critical literature) is not simply a function of my own current research agenda, but a choice intended to highlight how recent critical work has begun two important moves. The first is to differentiate meaningfully between different disparate manifestations of non-human animal life (rather than simply speaking of “the animal” as an undifferentiated “other” to the human). The second is to illustrate how, as this work develops, it expands both our awareness of the long-standing web of cross-species relating that has constituted an important, largely ignored (and often only sparsely recorded) component of a historical development explicitly tagged as “human” history, and at the same time how this work is distributed over a range of sub-disciplinary interests that coalesce in cultural studies: literary, economic, diplomatic, aesthetic, transnational, etc. With her contribution to the important collection edited by Nigel Rothfels, Representing Animals, and in her own Perceiving Animals: humans and beasts in early modern English culture, Erica Fudge offers an engaging and accessible modeling of the case for a cultural history that considers seriously the transspecies nature of cultural formation. Within the history of science, Anita Guerrini’s Experimenting with Humans and Animals pursues a similar vein by examining how the human–animal barrier (a special case of species boundary) constitutes a special frontier in the history of experimental medicine, and its historical reliance on human and animal experimentation. Her work is explicitly historical, choosing to articulate what has been the history of a fraught aspect of human–animal relations that inform current ethical debates, rather than enter into those debates directly. But these ethical debates do, of course, constitute a significant component of recent work in animal studies.
As fields or areas of inquiry emerge as a meeting ground for common academic study, there is often a period during which nomenclature and terminology sorts itself out somewhat unevenly, and debate, division, and discord frequently accompany the process, quite often productively. Such a moment seems now to be in play around the question of whether one identifies one’s intellectual work as better labeled as “animal studies” or “animality.” In a rough-and-ready parsing of these terms, the former is more typically claimed by those whose interest in the topic is grounded squarely in animal-rights discourse and activism, while the latter term is more typically invoked by those who identify their interests with posthumanist efforts to theorize the non-human subject. Clearly, those are not so much opposing positions as overlapping commitments with differing emphases. One of the most rigorously sustained and influential discussions of the relation between these different emphases in addressing the ethical dimension of the theoretical problems posed by “the question of the animal” has been Cary Wolfe’s Animal Rites. While clearly sympathetic to the aims and methods of such projects as the Great Ape Project, or revisions of the U.S. Animal Welfare Act, or a variety of arguments that seek to extend rights to animals by expanding the notion of personhood on which rights discourse depends, Wolfe is at the same time acutely aware of the degree to which such efforts remain grounded in the same ideological bedrock that was the foundation for the centuries of humanist philosophy that denied those rights on the basis of an unquestioned articulation of human exceptionalism:
What this means, then, is that such projects which strategically invoke ethical models and theories that are rhetorically very powerful precisely because they are relics, because they are “residual” (to use Raymond Williams’s well-worn term), are in fact, in intellectual terms, the easy part. What is harder, I think, is the project I have tried to make a start on in this book: to address, squarely within the purview of postmodern theory, the theoretical and ethical complexities that attend the question of the animal in several registers. This means considering not only that we share our world with non-human others who inhabited this planet before we arrived on the scene and will in all likelihood far outlast the tenure of Homo sapiens but also that we – whoever “we” are – are in a profound sense constituted as human subjects within and atop a nonhuman otherness that postmodern theory has worked hard to release from the bad-faith repressions and disavowals of humanism – whether in Deleuze and Guattari’s invocation of the multiplicity of the subject “becoming-animal” in their critique of psychoanalysis, in Derrida’s insistence on the fundamentally “inhuman” quality of language itself and the subjection of “the living” in general to the force of the trace, in Donna Haraway’s focus on the multiplicity and situatedness of the subject and in myriad other ways.
(Wolfe 2003: 192–93)
Perhaps the most ambitious of recent efforts in contemporary philosophy to confront “the question of the animal” in ways that re-engage the problem of ethical relating across species boundaries without resorting to a reassertion of an ideology that presumes human exceptionalism is Jacques Derrida’s final essay, The Animal That Therefore I Am. In this deeply influential and wide-ranging essay, ostensibly on “the autobiographical animal,” Derrida tracks himself as he follows the philosophical tradition of confronting the animal other from Plato to Levinas. It is a typically labyrinthine and dizzying text, one that recurs repeatedly to the trope of tracking, following, hunting, and hunted; and it is animated by a persistent return to Bentham’s revision of the familiar separation of human and animal by the boundary of reason and speech, a revision that asked, instead, “Can the animal suffer?” That question – what the capacity for suffering means to thought – marks an important conjunction where the ethical demands of animal studies meet the boundary-defining work of posthuman animality studies.
One of the more compelling confrontations staged in The Animal That Therefore I Am comes when Derrida faces off (as it were) with Levinas over the latter’s contention that ethical relations depend on the notion of a face-to-face encounter in which one is able to recognize the difference of the other without reducing to a version of sameness. Such a notion of ethical relations is one that could readily be extended to relations across the species boundary, and in a particularly moving account of his time in a Nazi prison camp, Levinas seems to make such an extension; yet in interviews, he chose to back away from extending the notion of an ethical “face” to non-human animals:
I cannot say at what moment you have the right to be called “face.” The human face is completely different and only afterwards do we discover the face of an animal. I don’t know if a snake has a face. I can’t answer that question. A more specific analysis is needed.
(cited in Atterton and Calarco 2004: 49)
This disavowal of Levinas’s, his refusal to part entirely with human exceptionalism, forms the central feature of Derrida’s specific analysis of Levinas’s ambivalence on the question of the animal (Derrida 2008: 106ff.), but it is also difficult not to see the entirety of The Animal That Therefore I Am as responding directly to Levinas. For Levinas opens the door that he refuses to cross with his episode of the dog, Bobby, who, in effect, by recognizing their humanity, saved Levinas and his fellow prisoners of war from dehumanizing treatment. It is specifically the dog’s response to brutalized humans that protects those humans’ humanity from being erased by their brutalizing human captors. Such a response across species lines would seem to require a reciprocal acknowledgment, but Levinas betrays Bobby in the end by withholding a recognition of an animal face. Derrida’s essay, in pointed opposition, is initiated by his encounter with his cat in the bathroom. Naked before his cat, and contending with his own feeling of shame, he contemplates, “What if the animal responded?” And in that gap that opens up around the distinction between “response” and “reaction,” Derrida begins working away from a Cartesian mechanistic account of animal being, through Bentham’s consideration of “can the animal suffer,” that will lead to his explicit analysis of Levinas. Derrida contemplating his cat – and acknowledging the cat’s response – stands as the stark (naked) counter-narrative to Levinas disavowing the face of the dog whose response to his humanity had helped him hold on to it.
Bentham’s question that means so much to Derrida –“Can animals suffer?”– is an important one. But perhaps it is also worth reflecting on how Derrida works his way there through his shame at his nakedness before the animal:
War is waged over the matter of pity. This war is probably not ageless but, and here is my hypothesis, it is passing through a critical phase. We are passing through that phase, and it passes through us. To think the war we find ourselves waging is not only a duty, a responsibility, an obligation, it is also a necessity, a constraint that, like it or not, directly or indirectly, no one can escape. Henceforth more than ever. And I say “to think” this war, because I believe it concerns what we call “thinking.” The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there.
(Derrida 2008: 29)
The path that leads from shame to pity is both interesting and important. At the same time it is important to recognize that it is not only not the only path, but also not one that should be followed blindly. As valuable as pity can be, it can also be pernicious; and certainly at times, some skepticism may be warranted as to the ego that authorizes it. Donna Haraway, while recognizing many virtues in Derrida’s analysis, may be described as wryly amused by his certainty that the little female cat who contemplates him in the bathroom shares the fascination that is voiced as shame. One must, I think, agree with Haraway when she writes that “whatever else the cat might have been doing, Derrida’s full male frontal, human nudity before an Other, which was of such interest in his philosophical tradition, was of no consequence to her” (Haraway 2007: 23).
As important as the question of pity is, I believe Haraway is right in pressing us to move beyond it (and the self-involved projections that it will always encourage) to other equally challenging and complicated questions:
The question of suffering led Derrida to the virtue of pity, and that is not a small thing; but how much more promise is in the question, Can animals play? Or work? And even, can I learn to play with this cat? Can I, the philosopher, respond to an invitation or recognize one when it is offered? What if work and play, and not just pity, open up when the possibility of mutual response, without names, is taken seriously as an everyday practice available to philosophy and to science? What if a usable word for this is joy?
(Haraway 2007: 105)
Haraway’s attention to companion-species relating is productively insistent in acknowledging the ecological stakes in choosing between Darwinian evolution and Judeo-Christian myth: the logic of dominion that has for so long governed human–animal relations derives its force from that old Adamic myth. When one prefers as a better story the narrative of evolution, one is confronted with the evidence that animals and humans are not mutually independent entities, but that evolution operates at a level of systemic interaction in which changes in one organism trigger changes in other organisms within the habitat. That world of mutual interdependence and interrelation will require us to acknowledge that thinking about humans is a form of, and requires more from, thinking about animals.
Derrida dates the war being waged over pity to the past two centuries, when doctrines of sentiment at the end of the eighteenth century mounted a serious challenge to Cartesian notions of the beast-machine, presenting the case for cross-species sympathy, advocating the view that animals responded as well as reacted, and ushering in the first public policies and legislations protecting animals from human cruelty. David Perkins has sought to contextualize Romantic literature within this change in attitude toward animals and the ideologies of sentiment that produced it. More recently, Tobias Menely, in a dissertation now being revised as a monograph, “historicizes the logic of feeling that characterizes sympathy as disturbingly sentimental when its recipient is an animal” (Menely 2006). These are important contributions to what I believe Derrida is right to characterize as a two-century struggle over the limits of compassionate sympathetic identification, and the perceived differences between reaction and response.
I grew up in a household that valued poetry and animals, and the doggerel verse that serves as an epigraph to this chapter is an extemporaneous composition of the minor American poet and advertising executive George Zabriskie. To the best of my knowledge, it was never published, but in my family it was recited on more than one occasion with some pleasure. As I have grown and the culture has aged, my pleasure in that poem has only grown alongside us. The beast-fable dialogue stages wittily an opposition between those twin “others” of the human (machine and animal) who have emerged as our constituent companions in a postmodern era that was only faintly anticipated by my parents’ generation. And the sly mixture of (olfactory) sense and (mawkish) sentiment still satisfies with its ironic double articulation that offers a link to a larger community even as it undercuts our pretension to access that community. As we seek a more democratic, more ecologically responsible framing of the world than the ideology of human dominion that we inherited, we find ourselves checking those impulses against a skeptical concern neither to anthropomorphize the animal nor to bestialize the human. In his elegant attempt to wrestle directly with concerns toward which Zabriskie’s doggerel verse was only willing to gesture playfully, Giorgio Agamben articulates the space of “bare life”:
Both machines are able to function only by establishing a zone of indifference at their centers, within which – like a “missing link” which is always lacking because it is already virtually present – the articulation between human and animal, man and non-man, speaking being and living being, must take place. Like every space of exception, this zone is, in truth, perfectly empty, and the truly human being who should occur there is only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their re-articulating are always dislocated and displaced anew. What would thus be obtained, however, is neither an animal life nor a human life, but only a life that is separated and excluded from itself – only a bare life.
(Agamben 2004: 37–38)
What follows in Agamben’s text is a distillation of the important work of the early twentieth-century ethologist Jakob von Uexkull and his notion of umwelt. The simple insight of the umwelt is that one only has access to the world through one’s sensorium; and therefore, since different organisms have different sensory apparatuses, we occupy different, overlapping umwelts in the same world. I am returned to the question of what a Chevrolet smells like to a skunk, every bit as important as the question of how trans-specific maternal attachment is. We are members of a community larger than our politics, entangled in a world that exceeds the reach of our senses. This may make the task of re-articulating our sense of who we are impossibly difficult, but that should not keep us from the attempt.
How much larger is that community? How far beyond our senses does it reach? Let’s keep in mind that when Derrida stands naked before his cat, the philosophical reflections that follow may not be triggered simply by the human– feline dyad. Each of those organisms is itself a carrier of multiple parasitic organisms. One of the more prevalent parasites in the world’s cat population is Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite whose natural host is the cat, but who parasite ecologists have found is particularly adept at migrating to other organisms and affecting their behavior. In rodents, for instance, studies show that the parasite triggers more risk-taking behavior, thereby feeding the cat population. Projections indicate that the incidence of Toxoplasma gondii in the human population may reach as high as half the world’s population. And Kevin Lafferty, a parasite ecologist at UC-Santa Barbara, has published research showing a statistically significant correlation between regions of high parasite infestation and what appear to be cultural behavioral traits. The large possibility suggested Lafferty’s research is that some aspects of what we identify as cultural behavior may be triggered by other organisms in the environment. The specific case of Toxoplasma gondii and its influence suggests that the parasite affects men and women differently: “Research has shown that women who are infected with the parasite tend to be warm, outgoing and attentive to others, while infected men tend to be less intelligent and probably a bit boring” (“Cat parasite” 2009).
What Lafferty’s research opens up as an avenue for exploration in cultural studies is every bit as exciting as what it may offer to respondents to Derrida. Perhaps it is the stultifying influence of Toxoplasma gondii – I do share a residence with three cats – but I can’t help thinking that: for all the ways in which the mechanical and the technological prompt us to reimagine our borders and boundaries; for all the ways that the feedback loop between my internal affect and the triggering mechanism of the automated voice that called me (and even more dizzying to contemplate, the next generation of those automated dialers who will have their own feedback mechanism to “respond” to the affect my voice communicates to my machine caller) implicates me in a more complex apparatus than the one contained by my body’s boundaries; for all these ways that we are becoming posthuman; for all that, the most mysterious, the most compelling, and ecologically the most important for all of us to participate in understanding is the complex web of animate – including, but not limited to, animal – life that includes us and exceeds us.
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