Animality

Octopus is a force to be reckoned with

2012-01-22T08:06:00.000-08:00

Camo: "Two deep-ocean species of cephalopod, an octopus and a squid, can go from transparent to opaque in the blink of an eye, a new study finds." (active camouflage)

Smarts: despite a walnut size brain (distributed through its arms and head), the octopus displays tool use and play and some basic language skills.

Technology: manipulates stones and shells for tools.

Seals have dark eyes... an abyss of revolution

2012-01-19T19:29:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Tali Ford for pointing to me this un/cute song about seals with some great lyrics including:

you've taken to hanging out on that rock about a mile from shore
given what I know about that rock mainly that it's populated by seals
I strongly suggest to you that you not hang out there anymore
'cause the seal is a wily and a vicious creature
and the seal will bite you if you give him half a chance
yeah the seal has a mind set on violence
and the seal is the sworn enemy of man

Long live the revolution.

beta-test for t-shirt

2012-01-14T19:16:00.000-08:00

Animal forgetting...outside of history

2012-01-12T09:06:00.000-08:00

I'm working through Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations II

Here is a wonderful moment from chapter 1:

Consider the herds that arefeeding yonder: they know not the meaning of yesterday or to-day; they grazeand ruminate, move or rest, from morning to night, from day to day, taken upwith their little loves and hates, at the mercy of the moment, feeling neithermelancholy nor satiety. Man cannot see them without regret, for even in thepride of his humanity he looks enviously on the beast's happiness. He wishessimply to live without satiety or pain, like the beast; yet it is all in vain,for he will not change places with it. He may ask the beast—"Why do youlook at me and not speak to me of your happiness?" The beast wants toanswer—"Because I always forget what I wished to say": but he forgetsthis answer too, and is silent; and the man is left to wonder.

[a bit further on]

Thus the beast lives unhistorically, for it gets up in the present like a number without any odd fraction left over; it does not know how to play a part, hides nothing, and appears in each moment exactly and entirely what it is. ... However, with the smallest and with the greatest good fortune, happiness becomes happiness in the same way: through forgetting or, to express the matter in a more scholarly fashion, through the capacity, for as long as the happiness lasts, to sense things unhistorically.

Return of the Repressed: Contagion

2011-12-15T06:15:00.000-08:00

75 percent of newly emerging infectious diseases originate in animals.
"Animals carry viruses. The reason they are getting into us is that we are chopping down trees, building farms next to forests and trading wild animals," said Dr. Jonathan H. Epstein, a wildlife veterinarian with EcoHealth Alliance, which commissioned the study. "Everything comes back to human activities."

I've said it before and say it again: our own bodies, our human animality, are the exploit. Our bodies are the portal by which the animals will triumph over us. Indeed our animality conjoins with the animal revolution to overthrow humanism.

btw: fittingly, this is my 100th blog post on the animal revolution. I'm working on writing a book Animal Revolution: Events to Come. Hope to get it in a publishable form by 2013.

Arm the Animals (now a fashion)

2011-12-05T07:13:00.001-08:00

For the revolutionary in all of us, Arm the Animals t-shirts, stickers, and misc fashion items. The animals don't care if you are wearing it, but it is good to warn other humans of the coming revolution.

Why animals will have the last laugh

2011-11-21T05:32:00.001-08:00

"On this planet, extinction is the norm – of the 4 billion species ever thought to have evolved, 99% have become extinct. In particular, five times in this past 500 million years the steady background rate of extinction has shot up for a period of time."

Nietzsche's reflection on this undermines anthropocentrism and our "gift" of reason:
"Insome remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering ininnumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which cleveranimals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendaciousminute of 'world history'—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn afew breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die."

Other animals will survive...some animals. They will have the last laugh. Martin Rees, Britain's Royal Astronomer and former president of the Royal Society puts the odds at 50% that humanity will survive beyond 2100.

"Pressured to Name Leader, Occupy Denver Elects Dog"

2011-11-10T03:19:00.000-08:00

The Occupy Wall St movement has taken a revolutionary sentiment to the streets. When capitalism fails the 99%, they want it known. But on Nov. 9th, the movement took an animal revolutionary turn. In Denver the mayor asked protesters to elect a leader "to deal with City and State officials." The protesters were hesitant and then obliged by electing Shelby the 3 year old border collie. One protester explained "She's the youngest leader of a revolution in history and the first of any occupation so far, but she's smart, so people know she won't make any situations. We just have to make sure she doesn't get arrested."Now with a dog as your leader, you can lift your legs and take a piss on the current system.

Animals of the world: Occupy Earth. It is yours, and it is not fair that the humans, the so very few, weigh so heavily upon it.

Apocalyptic Animals

2011-10-14T00:31:00.000-07:00

Do animals sense an end and limit to human culture and history? Attacks by animals are on the rise.

The final frontier of the human is the nonhuman. If we conquer the nonhuman then it is not a final frontier but rather a repetition of the human conquest that takes place in every space we explore. (See species extinction.) We plant the flag of culture across space and time and call it history and civilization. The final frontier is final only when we get over ourselves. It is final when we give ourselves over to the nonhuman, when we go native in the frontier, when we arrange our human world according to that which we are not. Do we have the hospitality to let the nonhuman change the parameters of culture and reconfigure how we dwell?

when the domestic gets out of hand... On Going Native

2011-08-31T09:43:00.000-07:00

"There are an estimated four million to five million feral hogs in the United States"
We domesticate them, transport them, and create biodiverse environments. Now they are an invasive species once outside the pens we've created. NY Times article details some of the devastation of animality gone feral.

Yvonne the cow as difference

2011-08-27T13:46:00.000-07:00

How can we think difference in itself? It is a question posed by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition. Examples of D's thinking are hard to come by since the question bears upon the unrepresentable. Animality offers a mode of engaging difference in itself. Cows are domesticated beasts but for Yvonne the cow, domestication is merely a camouflage. She has not only taken herself out to pasture, she kept running and is in full on wilderness. Some in Germany are hunting to kill her. The State says she posses a threat since her corporality, her animality that was used for commercial gain in milking, has turned into a possible weapon should she step onto a road and get hit by a car. Others, animal welfare folk, want to bring her into the fold and give her a safe home. But Yvonne is having none of this dialectics. She has receded into the wildnerness and humans can't find her. Recall Heraclitus: "Nature loves to hide." But really, must we seek it? Can it not be into and of itself. Allowing Yvonne to be is a recognition of a difference in itself, one that cannot be domesticated but roams of its own accord.

Aliens and thought

2011-08-27T13:39:00.000-07:00

Aliens are in the news often these days and with good reason. They are figures of an unknown animality with an unknown consciousness and reasoning that confronts humans and humanism. Bloggingheads.tv has a good video dialogue on the subject. Aliens confront the limits of human reason and biology with an unknown. This unknown and unknowable is played out in animality as well in the work of Thomas Nagel (essay "What is it like to be a bat" references aliens) and Uekull (whose Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Men ends with astronomers gazing at the stars and the life they could hold).

Animality lurks everywhere!

2011-07-30T04:39:00.000-07:00

- April 2011 Fish and Wildlife Services of the U.S. announce the extinction of cougars in New England.

- July 26th 2011 a cougar shows in Connecticut having walked 1,500 miles from the Black Hills of South Dakota. Apparently this cougar had been reading the Fish and Wildlife Services reports and wanted to repopulate the area or just prove the government surveyors wrong.

- So, what should be done with this beast who walked so far? What are the possibilities of re-population, what are the rewards for his heroism of traversing long, treacherous distances? After being spotted among the homes and estates of Greenwich, CT, it is struck and killed on Wilbur Cross Parkway and becomes another animal victim on the road of American progress.

- His body, his presence and his death haunt us still. The NY Times's David Baron writes: "if a cougar can walk from South Dakota to Connecticut, a cougar could show up anywhere." No safe is immune from the possibilities of animality. The virtual of the animal lurks and can erupt and tear the fabric of the social surface at any moment.

2011-07-25T10:35:00.000-07:00

Public and Private Life of Animals (1877), illustrated by Grandville: "Weary of insult, ignominy, and the constant oppression of man, we, the so-called Lower Animals, have at last resolved to cast off the yoke of our oppressors, who, since the day of their creation, have rendered liberty and equality nothing more than empty names." (And see the cautionary final chapter, too.)

Herzog on Nature's revolt against the human

2011-07-07T08:05:00.000-07:00

Animal Portraiture

2011-07-06T10:55:00.000-07:00

Noted photographer David Salter visited a national park in North Sulawesi, Indonesia in order to photograph the endangered Celebes crested macaque monkeys. The animals seem friendly enough. They are not afraid of humans and seemed wonderfully curious about Salter and the human technologies he lugged into the forest. The photographer put down his camera momentarily only to have a female macaque break from the group and take the camera. The machine was passed among the animals. A dexterous beast became fascinated with his reflection in the camera lens and somehow managed to take a snapshot self-portrait. The sound of the camera click scared the rest of the macaques but curiosity overcame caution as the animals took up the camera again and snapped a few more pictures. Salter explains “At first there was a lot of grimacing with their teeth showing because it was probably the first time they had ever seen a reflection. . . . They were quite mischievous jumping all over my equipment, and it looked like they were already posing for the camera when one hit the button.” Ultimately, the animals snapped over a hundred pictures before the photographer got his camera back. Salter seemed pleased with the results: “I wish I could have stayed longer as he probably would have taken a full family album.”

Portraiture is a rather unique and uniquely human art. From portrait paintings to photography, the portrait tells a story about the outward social status of the human represented (often surrounded by possessions) or the inner psychological state of the subject (think brooding author photos on book covers). In short, portraiture is about having standing—as a social being amid others or about the privileged interiority of the human subject. In other words, you are some one and you think about things.

Occasionally we find pet portraiture which reflects not simply on the animal him/herself but on the human owner and the social standing of the animal for the individual and the culture.

Portraiture reinforces what Emmanuel Levinas calls “face.” Having face means you are an ethical being who recognizes others and your ethical and social duty toward others. When portraiture captures faces, they are also depicting face. The image acknowledges social and moral standing of the human being depicted. So powerful is the concept of portraiture that James Mollison took brilliant, large, crisp photos of great apes as a gesture of cross-species social and moral standing (see James and Other Apes, 2005). The apes are still waiting on their social standing (perhaps via the Great Ape Project with its curious acronym GAP).

Now enter the Celebes crested macaques who take matters in their own hands. Since humans won’t grant face nor portraiture to animals, they do so for themselves. Levinas never granted that animals had face but the macaques in their portraits grimace as if to say: “I don’t need you to grant that I see you as a being toward which I should be social. Here human, here is a picture of me and by me. Here are others I’ve taken of my group. Am I social? Look around. Am I moral? Ask your neo-Darwinian scientists and they will tell you what I already know but you refuse to believe: I am and I be through my sociability. Survival of the fittest is survival of fitting into an ecology and a society here in the wilds.” And so it is that the macaques grasp technology to reconfigure portraiture.

They are not the only beings to run with a camera. See the Umwelt of the camcorder octopus and the flight of a camcorder stealing seagull. See too Sir Edwin Landseer parodying our concept of portraits and sociability in The Monkey Who Had Seen the World (1827).

2011-06-13T08:51:00.000-07:00

Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant!

Ant-swarming city, city abounding in dreams,
Where ghosts in broad daylight accost the passerby!

Charles Baudelaire "Les Sept Vieillards" [The Seven Old Men]

RIP Fred the Baboon squad leader

2011-03-31T17:08:00.000-07:00

Fred was known as a ringleader of baboons in a tourist area of Cape Town, South Africa and was infamous for his ability to open closed car doors. He was euthanized because of his aggressive tactics.

More than 400 baboons roam Cape Town's outskirts, particularly the popular scenic sites along the coast. They are a protected species but have a number of run-ins with humans.

Bovril for Strength

2011-03-19T16:36:00.001-07:00

Spy Animals

2011-01-15T13:36:00.000-08:00

Cats, Squirrels, Hawks, Insects and more at Huffington Post.

Sample:
In the 1960’s, the CIA reportedly explored surgically inserting microphones and transmitters into cats, a project dubbed “Acoustic Kitty.” Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti told The Telegraph that the project "slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They made a monstrosity." The first wired cat was, according to the Guardian, released for spying and took just a few steps towards its target before the cat was run over by a taxi. The CIA concluded that the project was impractical for intelligence gathering.

What is the voice of the inhuman?

2011-01-12T12:38:00.000-08:00

I will begin with the punch line and lure: have a look at Scrambles of the Earth. The premise of the site begins with a cd of music sent in the 1977 Voyager spacecraft into outer space. The site claims the music was found by aliens who remixed it to their liking in order to make the sound more hip: “Aliens want state-of-art mega-hip scene. But music on Voyager record is hundreds of years old! No synthesizer, no drum machine, no dance remix! No wondering that, in ten year, not a one alien has called! Aliens hear old tunage, [then] puke out all kidneys from ear-pain. [They] say: 'Gaia beings are coma-toast lamo Gilligans.'” The samples on the website are haunting and aptly described by Rich Doyle’s concept of the alien: “the very essence of the alien presence … [is] its characteristic ability to proliferate and mutate, disturbing the various taxonomical categories that we bring to bear on ‘them.’” So, from aliens to animals… where do we go from here?

Wittgenstein's lion: “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him”(Wolfe Zoontologies 1). The lion problem is an issue of speaking and sound which is related to voice but different. In this problem the concern is social community, the discourse community in which language is fashioned to human (or nonhuman) experience of being-in-the-world or as Wittgenstein says "To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life." A lion’s sense of being is different and its use of language would be different—even, as Wittgenstein says—unintelligible.

Rather than speech and language I'm interested in voice (which I’ll enter as a new keyword in this animal revolution lexicon). Voice precedes speech and enables it but not just humans have voice: “Yes, there’s no speech without voice, but there is such a thing as voice without speech. And not just for animals, but for us as well" (Vox Clamans in Deserto 38). Nancy characterizes voice as singular difference--each voice, he claims, is more unique than a fingerprint. So, it is not a common ground since voice is not a ground but a plurality. It is a sort of shared difference.

Can we use this capacity to address the other in an address, admittedly, that would be outside of discourse community and outside of language?! It would be an odd address, indeed, and Nancy hints at it throughout his essay and particularly at the end where voices resonate and call out to the other from one other to an/other. Voice cannot hear but can voice; it can throw itself and articulates what it means to be bodily thrown into the world, a being who is situated in a world (more on this in a moment). Hearing voice transports the listener, possesses and intoxicates to listener who may well give voice in response—the Dionysian Nietzsche (see Birth of Tragedy) and even Nancy assert.

This is where we get to aliens, so hang on. First it is useful to understand Nancy's claim that "Every voice cries out in the desert. . . . the desert of deserted existence, prey both to lack and to absence”(41). The voice is corporeal but not by way of taking in (food, air) nor by expelling (vomit and shit) but as an opening and opening up, opening the body in and unto the world. By way of example, he quotes a poetic passage from Julia Kristeva about a baby crying which ends with "The voice springs from this rejection of air and nutritive or excremental matter; so as to be vocal, the first sonorous emissions not only have their origins in the glottis but are the audible mark of a complex phenomenon of muscular and rhythmic contractions that is a rejection implicating the whole body.”

Secondly, animals and aliens have bodies which give voice. Each voice is different—its own patters. Yet in each singular instance, the voices cry out, the bodies open themselves, throw the voice into the air and within hearing of the other:"The voice cries out in the desert because voice itself is the desert that unfolds at the very heart of the body, beyond words." It is rather important that this is an opening and unfolding beyond words since (recalling Wittgenstein) if the alien and animal speak, we could not understand them. But outside of understanding and beyond speech and words, what we can hear and become enthralled by is the voice of the other. Listen those who have ears to hear—as the biblical passage goes. And transported, carried (dare I say abducted? Or is this another matter?) and recognizing this opening, we give voice in return.

Nancy is not a lone voice in the desert crying out. He takes up a particular line of thinking from Kant, Bentham, and Levinas on the look and the cry of animals.

Kant: "Just as Descartes had the paradoxical opinion of animal-machines, so must I likewise say of humans and of myself as well, only to a greater degree: if that one howls like a machine, then I speak like one. Because of the similarity between our external behaviour and that of the animal, I judge that the inner condition of the other involves thinking and sensing like mine, for my behaviour is regarded by it just as it is regarded by me.I therefore have just as much cause not to take him as a machine as to take myself as one.” [p. 3 of Naragon, Steve.“Kant on Descartes and the Brutes” in Kant-Studien, 81: 1-23 (1990)]

Bentham: "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” Bentham, Jeremy. Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, second edition, 1823, chapter 17, footnote.

Levinas tells the story of the dog named Bobby who greeted the prisoners at the Nazi concentration camp and treated them with respect and dignity. The "mere” dog’s treatment of these humans stood in stark contrast to the treatment by other humans. And so the question asked is can animals have what Levinas calls "face” by which he means recognition within the (human) community as a moral citizen and toward which one has moral obligations. While Levinas disconcertingly says Bobby and animals should not be given this recognition, other philosophers have taken up Bobby's cause and argued otherwise. The look and regard of the animal—and I would add voice of Bobby—calls for recognition by us. (Here David Clark, "Towards a Prehistory of the Postanimal: Kant, Levinas, and the Regard of Brutes.” Unpublished manuscript. Critchley on Levinas is rather good: see Infinitely Demanding)

What voice offers us then is an ungrounded ground—a multitude of singularities—which calls to the other. Voice as the opening in the self is, as Nancy suggests, the space where the self is beside itself, leaves itself and in hospitality offers its openness to the world. We sense this vibration (here the play of sensation and sensibility works well) and in the hospitality of sense, sense surrenders itself to the foreign.

Radioactive Rabbit

2011-01-02T12:42:00.000-08:00

A radioactive rabbit was trapped on the Hanford nuclear reservation, and Washington state health workers have been searching for contaminated rabbit droppings.

The regional director of the Office of Radiation Protection, Earl Fordham, said Thursday that no contaminated droppings have been found in areas accessible to the public.

The Tri-City Herald reports that officials suspect the rabbit sipped some water left from the recent demolition of a Cold War-era building used in the production of nuclear weapons.

The rabbit was trapped in the past week and was highly contaminated with radioactive cesium.

(from Salon.com)

This is similar to the radioactive boar post earlier this year as a return of the repressed.

The Revolution is lean...

2010-12-16T04:29:00.000-08:00

Over 60% of Americans are overweight and 20% obese. Our pets have the same problem. They are getting obscenely large in all the wrong places for the same reasons humans are hefty: overeating and lack of exercise. These animals are now part of the cultural community and family of the human with all its residual ill effects.

Thanks to Ashley Porter for suggesting this site.

Militarized Dolphins

2010-12-08T06:01:00.001-08:00

These are my field notes from an excellent essay on the strange history of military dolphin experiments.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/5503

Dolphin’s militarized

They could be very useful as antipersonnel self-directing weapons. They could do nocturnal harbor work, capture spies let out of submarines or dropped from airplanes, attacking silently and efficiently and bringing back information from such contacts. They could deliver atomic nuclear warheads and attach them to submarines or surface vessels and to torpedoes and missiles.

Dolphins and Other aliens:

dolphin laboratory could provide a model system for “breaking through” to a nonhuman mind. In the era of Sputnik this meant actual extraterrestrials, which may sound crazy now, but these issues lay on the cutting edge of national concern in those days: if we met the little green men (or, more likely, started receiving radio signals from deep space that looked to carry nonstochastic levels of information), what would we do?

One of these visionary “Dolphins” was a brilliant young Harvard astrophysicist named Carl Sagan, who made his way down to St. Thomas several times in these years to meet Lilly’s dolphins and muse about alternate forms of life in the cosmos.

If dolphins prove as intelligent as the initial studies suggest, then “for a long time presumably they will be in the position of the Negro races in Africa who are attempting to become Westernized”

see “we shall not be moved” blog entry.

Gregory Bateson visits Lilly:

Bateson laid out a sweeping theory of cross-species language development: human beings, in his view, possessed a language disproportionately preoccupied with stuff. This was our joy and our pain, since the evolution of such thing-centered linguistic abilities had gone hand in hand with the extraordinary material culture of Homo sapiens, from moldboard plows to supersonic cruise missiles. Yet in Bateson’s view this same evolution had left us with a grotesquely impoverished intelligence in the domain of social relations: those intersubjective complexities, he averred, “are very poorly represented in language and consciousness.” Homo faber was, in this sense, “stunted,” and the consequences, for Bateson, were clear: war, social conflict, pervasive psychological maladjustment.

Permit a human-sized intelligence to develop over millions of years in a highly social animal, which—on account of its aquatic evolution—possessed no hands, and thus no real capacity to manipulate a material culture, and it was reasonable to hypothesize that the cognition of such a creature would be radically, fundamentally, pervasively social. Theirs would be a language not of things but of beings. As Bateson put it to Lilly, “If I am right, and they are mainly sophisticated about the intricacies of interpersonal relationships, then of course (after training analysis) they will be ideal psychotherapists for us.”

/See in ecology of mind chapter: Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication.

Out of Africa... the swarm, the herd, the revolution

2010-12-03T18:10:00.001-08:00

Evolution of a Goat Revolution

2010-10-28T06:05:00.001-07:00

The article "Man vs Goat" develops the stages of an animal revolution from animals intended to serve us to pests an nuisances, to killers. The revolution is patient, the animals wait, but then strike quickly. Excerpts from the NY Times article of 10/28/10:
Olympic National Park, Washington

Veteran hiker from nearby Port Angeles, Bob Boardman, ran into an aggressive mountain goat on a popular trail in this park, the scenic centerpiece of a peninsula the size of Massachusetts. The goat pursued the hiker, using its two pointed horns to gore Boardman in the thigh.

In the last minutes of his life, Boardman tried to warn others of the danger, witnesses said.

They licked the bushes for salt from our sweat and urine. They nudged at the packs. They came close to enough to scare us. And when we tried to shoo them, they would not leave.

The Park Service spent years trapping the animals, tranquilizing them with shots fired from helicopters and then airlifting them to the Cascades. But that only spread the problem around.

With every passing year, the goats lost whatever fear they had of man. This was aggravated, of course, by knuckleheads who insist on feeding wild animals, which breaks down barriers.

But all of this was our handiwork. The goats were introduced to give humans something to hunt. A sport. A game. A chase. For almost 100 years, we never feared them. Now, they’ve stopped fearing us, and are even pursuing us.

Animal fArmS

2010-10-17T21:42:00.000-07:00

From Orwell's Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm:

"I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat."

How to read signs of the animal revolution

2010-10-06T20:36:00.000-07:00

“Of course, in order to practice this style of reading as art, one thing is above all essential, something that today has been thoroughly forgotten—and so it will require still more time before my writings are ‘readable’—something for which one almost needs to be a cow, at any rate not a ‘modern man’—rumination.”
--Fredrick Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

Bull in a china shop...

2010-09-21T06:03:00.000-07:00

When fables, proverbs, and idioms come to life, it is a sign of an animal revolution in the making... they warned us these days would come:

"The animal escaped from an auction market next to GB Antiques Centre in Lancaster, Lancashire, on Monday and barged its way into the shop, which was packed with 200 people.

Police had to shoot the animal in order to save customers and stock - china and all. It was herded to an area of the centre and blocked in using two antique organs before a police marksman opened fire. A woman was treated in hospital for a bruised shoulder after the incident. 'Hundreds of items will have been destroyed, at a cost running into thousands of pounds,' Mr Blackburn said."

Really, the owner could have invited the bull for tea. Where is his hospitality? Is it reserved for humans alone, and only for select humans...not very hospitable then is it? The absurd idea of inviting the bull for tea once it is in the china shop is a figure for saying: what does the animal want and why don't we think of its desire, which is to say, why can we not be hospitable. Here think of Derrida on hospitality:

it [hospitality] already broaches an important question, that of the anthropological dimension of hospitality or the right to hospitality: what can be said of, indeed can one speak of, hospitality toward the non-human, the divine, for example, or the animal or vegetable; does one owe hospitality, and is that the right word when it is a question of welcoming – or being made welcome by – the other or the stranger as god, animal or plant?”

Vox Clamans in Deserto

2010-09-17T15:38:00.000-07:00

Complete with animal voices--dogs barking, a donkey wandering across stage, all in Jean-Luc Nancy's essay/play meditation on body, voice, and speech.
"Voice has nothing to do with speech. Yes, there's no speech without voice, but there is such a thing as voice without speech. And not just for animals, but for us as well. There's voice before speech. Because I know you, I recognized your voice as you were coming toward me, long before I could make out what you were actually saying." (from Vox Clamans in Deserto by Nancy)

This links with David Clark's work on Derrida & Levinas where Clark claims the animal give voice (to pain) and so are moral subjects deserving recognition. What do aliens and animals say? How could we understand this foreign language? Bodies--the necessary component of voice--are the "exploit" (as Eugene Thacker would say). They are the way out of the hermeneutic circle of cultural meaning; they level us, take us away from speech (words, language), into a body (see Nancy's The Birth to Presence) that takes us elsewhere ... toward an animal revolution.

So, voice is a split decision, it splits between cultural speech) which does not need voice and the cultural obligation of moral rights to those who have a voice, those who can be heard.

Eugene Thacker's After Life

2010-09-14T11:40:00.000-07:00

Thacker's book is out with Chicago UP in November 2010. Here is a bit from the introduction to entice those interested in the non-human world.

Revolt of the Beavers

2010-09-12T14:37:00.000-07:00

Let the Revolution Begin

the fist, the paw

2010-08-29T16:25:00.000-07:00

Frank Cieciorka is attributed with the first creation of the modern fist of protest--a hand devoid of body--clenched in defiance and anger. Lincoln Cushing gives a brief history of the image. An adjacent philosophical concept beginning with Martin Heidegger is the hand, a concept explicated by Jacques Derrida in Geschlecht II. Heidegger designates the human hand as different from animal claw and paw. The animal hand can only grasp, only take. The human hand can extend in giving and in the giving that is thinking, opening up to "the open" (a clearing where humans let beings be).

If there is to be an animal revolution, what will be the Frank Cieciorka image equivalent for the animals? And how to undo Heidegger's anthropocentric writing of the hand? Can a paw mark be a giving and an openness (what H calls an openness to the open of which we have no concept because we are stuck being human)?

Addendum 8/31/10: Mark Lussier handed me the Aug. 16, 2010 Time Magazine. Note this on Heidegger's comment that only the human hand can open, can give, can open onto the open: "A 2008 study by primatologists Frans de Waal and others at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlant ashowed that when capuchin monkeys wre offered a choice between two tkenes--one that would buy two slice of apple and one that would buy one slice each for them and a partner money--they chose the generous option, provide the partner was a relative or at least familiar. The Yerkes team believes that part of the capuchins' behavior was due to a simple sense of pleasure they experience in giving, an idea consistent with studies of the human brain that reveal activity in the reward centers after subjects give to charity." (43).

2010-08-26T11:01:00.000-07:00

Fireflies
So, the question of politics becomes the question of survival of fireflies, which begin to disappear from Europe in the 1950s. For fireflies disappear along with collective ideologies. They disappear along with pollution and the collapse of the political imagination. Fireflies are tiny markers of resistance, the suicide bombers of the insect world. If Lyotard’s ‘Résistance’ were ever to be brought into being, it would have to involve fireflies. Lots of them. It would be a posthumous show about something that no longer exists or is disappearing. Or about something that does not yet exist.

In his movie, Zidane, Philippe Parreno & Douglas Gordon keep coming back to images of moths, flying transfixed in the stadium floodlight. Indifferent to human display, they seem to support neither Villareal nor Real Madrid. They seek only their destruction in a tiny blaze of heat and light.

From Critchley in Art & Research, 3.2

2010-08-23T20:46:00.000-07:00

Radioactive Boars, a return of the repressed

2010-08-05T17:56:00.000-07:00

Yeah, we forgot all about Chernobyl. We just up and abandoned the site but animals haven't. They inhabit our disasters and return them to us in new strange fur and teeth forms. Wild boars in southern Germany have been feeding off the plant life and roots deep in the ground that have absorbed radiation. These boars then take to the countryside and city looking for food and generally causing a ruckus. They are not only vicious, they are radioactive! Techne and animality return to foil the human.

If, as Nietzche claims, our strength is our ability to forget (or as Freud might say, our ability to repress), then these boars leverage against our strength. We've forgotten the radioactivity while they absorb it and live it only to return it to us. Super-boars for the comic books?

More info from Spiegel online and NPR.

Aliens & Animals, the Other to rational man

2010-05-11T08:48:00.000-07:00

Recently the cyborg Stephen Hawking has warned that aliens coming to earth would not be coming in peace.

“We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach. . . . If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.” Think here of T-Bone Burnett’s “Humans from the Earth.”

And yet, aliens are a necessary supplement which help us think what it means to be human. David Clark builds out this point with his stellar essay “Kant’s Aliens.” As he explains, in the final pages of Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View Kant considers that the only way to understand a species is by comparison to others. In order to know man as a terrestrial rational animal, he should be compared to a non-terrestrial rational creature:

“The highest concept of species may be that of a terrestrial rational being, but we will not be able to describe its characteristics because we do not know of a nonterrestrial rational being which would enable us to refer to its properties and consequently classify that terrestrial being as rational. It seems, therefore, that the problem of giving an account of the character of the human species is quite insoluble, because the problem could only be solved by comparing two species of rational beings on the basis of experience, but experience has not offered us a comparison between two species of rational beings”

As Clark mentions, Kant’s “off-world interest go back to Kant’s first major work, the cosmological treatise entitled Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens [1755]” (see the “Appendix” on “the inhabitants of the stars”).

Clark nicely connect this to “This is an almost Nietzschean question—one asked, we might recall, by

Friedrich in the essay ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense’ that spookily begins by imagining what “man” might look like through the pitiless eyes of an alien zoologist.” Indeed, this opening passage from Nietzsche has been an inspiration for the revolution!

Now dear reader, if you have wandered into reading this far, consider that each animal is in its own umwelt, its own world. Indeed, animals are aliens to us—as is our own animality. We can measure humans and “thinking otherwise” by weighing ourselves against the scale of these creatures. Kant is concerned with rational beings and measuring ourselves against a “nonterrestrial rational being”; yet why privilege reason and who is to say that alien reason would be anything like our own? What is this alien "to come" and land among us? Are they already here? (and yes, see my Lovecraft post.)

Octopus films his stealth underworld

2010-04-19T10:02:00.000-07:00

Great footage of an octopus taking a camera from a diver and filming with it so the viewer gets a bit of octopus umwelt. He next goes for the diver's spear gun. Clearly the cephlopod wants to televise the animal revolution.

For more on the revolutionary behavior of octopus, see my entry on Octo-armor and another on an octopus flooding an aquarium floor.

Perhaps the revolution will be televised?

The Event & The Differend

2010-04-10T05:35:00.000-07:00

The animal revolution is an event. To understand what this means, consider Bill Readings on Lyotard’s concept “the event." Lyotard's event “disrupts any pre-existing referential frame within which it might be represented or understood. The eventhood of the event is the radical singularity of happening, the ‘it happens’ as distinct from the sense of ‘what is happening’” (Introducing Lyotard xxxi). He goes on to say “The event is the occurrence after which nothing will ever be the same again. The event, that is, happens in excess of the referential frame within which it might be understood, disrupting or displacing that frame” (57).

Of course, the concept needs to be developed for the revolution. To do so, (note to future self), look at Lyotard’s The Differend (p 79-80 & X). This event and its wake: “It is not in their power to pass over in silence what they cannot speak about. Insofar as it is unable to be phrased in the common idioms, it is already phrased, as a feeling. The vigil for an occurrence, the anxiety and the joy of an unknown idiom, has begun” (80).

Lyotard’s “differend” takes into a logic of the supplement which exceeds and undoes the laws of the current regime. How is one to express the error of anthropocentrism within a humanist world? One would need a new world and new language: “To give the differend its due is to institute new addressees, new addressors, new significations, and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression and for the plaintiff to cease being a victim. . . . The differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be.” If, following Hiedegger, language is the house where humans dwell, then a new language calls for new tenants. The event as “unstable state” wrecks the house of language and simultaneously constructs something new, a new house and new residents, “new addressees, new addressors, new significations, and new referents.”

shaman & salmon

2010-03-28T04:35:00.000-07:00

As reported in the NY Times: "more than two dozen Native Americans embarked from here [San Francisco] on a spiritual mission to New Zealand, where they will ask their fish to come home to California."
"The fish in question is the Chinook salmon, native to the Pacific but lately in short supply in the rivers of Northern California, home to the Winnemem Wintu — a tiny, federally unrecognized and poor tribe"

The whole story involves technology, politics, polis, and animality. The Chinook were important for the spiritual and material prosperity of the tribe. Salmon thrived until the Shasta Dam was built in the 1940s. After that, the fish population steadily declined. As techne and fortunes would have it: "the United States government once bred millions of Chinook eggs from the McCloud River and shipped them around the world in hopes of creating new fisheries, including a batch that went to the South Island of New Zealand, where the fish thrived."

The tribe apologized to the salmon for allowing the dam to be build and not doing more to preserve the fish dwelling. The called to the salmon to come home. And so, we wait...

Drunk Pennsylvania man tried to revive dead opossum

2010-03-28T04:20:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is the title from the Associated Press for the Times Tribune article. The police, the law, the State calls to him, hails. But this fellow--Donald Wolfe--is out of it, out of bounds. The police, the law, the State see a drunken man trying to revive a dead opossum; they see him gesticulating over the road kill. But for another angel, the animal revolutionary knows what this is about: it is a Dionysian rite in which the mangled body of the god/animal is brought into contact with the human.

"The trooper says one person saw Wolfe kneeling before the animal and gesturing as though he were conducting a seance, while another saw the mouth-to-mouth attempt. Levier says Wolfe was 'extremely intoxicated" and "did have his mouth in the area of the animal's mouth, I guess.'" Yes, a seance but who is calling to whom? Intoxicated Wolfe refuses the proper name, the social name, and reverts to its material animality... in animal state he is called by the non-State player, the animal before him, he follows after. Where will this lead? Can the opossum's spirit be translated? The police fail to investigate the opossum's death and do not ask it any questions. Their omission is itself a tale.

Return of the Urban Animal

2010-03-25T07:51:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir for noticing this. In I Like America and America Likes Me, for three days Joseph Beuys lived in a gallery space with a coyote in the Rene Block Gallery at 409 West Broadway in New York. The piece was a gesture of pidgin language between world and across politics (German, American, and animal).

You could say that a reckoning has to be made with the coyote, and only then can this trauma be lifted.

A reckoning, indeed. Now, the coyote is back in New York. Is this an offspring from the coyote Beuys met? Is the critter looking for Beuys or his artistic descendants? Does he want a rematch? There is more reckoning to be done--more thinking, more reconciliation, more aktion in an Event "to-come."

Landmine Detecting Rats!

2010-03-05T06:37:00.001-08:00

The Revolution knows how to burrow. From the organization APOPO come rats trained to find and dig mines. These HeroRats are trained to be sent into fields and detect and dig for mines. Other specialty rats sniff out tuberculosis. "APOPO’s mission is to train and disseminate sniffer rats to save human lives- by detecting landmines and disease."

My dear reader: rats + mines. Is this not the sign of a revolution. Once they nourish active rebellion, where can a human hide that a rat will not sniff out, burrow, bury. Think Willard (either the 1972 version or the 2007 version). And yes, think swarm as in Ben (1972).
My thanks to Jane Prophet for pointing out this moment of revolution.

We shall not be moved

2010-02-28T04:10:00.000-08:00

Ever since Edmund Burke called the ruckus crowd of England a "swinish multitude" there has been a push from the masses to bite back. See, for example, "Pigs' meat: or, lessons for the swinish multitude" (1793) by Thomas Spence. There is even a Spence "Pigs' Meat" coin/token "For the Rights of Man" from 1795. (Yes, Hardt and Negri are late to the multitude game.)

Things get tricky next; follow me on this: the American slave song "We shall not be moved" was once inscribe across the neck of a Sussex pig Rye pottery piece (circa 1900). Why? Because, as the lovely man on the BBC Antiques Road Show explains "everyone knows the Sussex pig will not be moved"! (See episode: Antiques are examined at Highcleare Castle in England. Also, here is a contemporary Sussex Pig from Rye pottery). The pottery piece is often used as a drinking jug--alcohol optional. So, here we have the inebriated masses--the swinish multitude--drinking from their pigs' meat pig jars inscribed with "we shall not be moved" echoing slave songs.

God Proposes, Man Disposes (Sir Edwin Landseer)

2010-02-21T05:22:00.000-08:00

Cover for the Animal Revolution book ("to come") & or its album cover. Who will construct the anthem for the revolution? what non-human sounds are to be played? [cue Lovecraft's Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li! from At the Mountains of Madness which he takes from Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym].

Olympics and Animality

2010-02-13T16:37:00.001-08:00

Okay, folks, the Vancouver Olympics 2010 is surrounded with Orcas including the mascot and inspiration for the medals. We want to contemplate the otherness of the animal and its aura. Techne (digital imaging) enhances the contmplation: "the eyes of the world watched as northern lights, polar bear and a pod of orcas, who magically appeared when the floor appeared to crack like ice, transforming to ocean, became a spectacle to behold."

The opening speeches are redolent with rhetoric about global peace and unity. Not included in this is the violence of domestication and training of wild animals. Indeed as essays in Zoontology explain, animals are subject to Foucaultian control just as humans are. Hey Phelps, want to compete with an Orca? The point being, animals are not part of the games and if they were, they would overturn human supremacy.

from William Blake's Milton

2010-02-09T09:32:00.001-08:00

terrific Lions & Tygers sport & play/ All Animals upon the Earth, are prepard in all their strength/ To go forth to the Great Harvest & Vintage of the Nations.

Architecture for the animals

2010-01-12T15:11:00.000-08:00

Following my bat house entry, here is the next moment for pondering a post-human phenomenology: what do other animals look for in a dwelling? Super Kingdom approaches this question.

Or as a (post)Heideggerian might ask, how do animals dwell. Yet to be written: Building, Dwelling, Thinking of the Non-human [a riff off of Heidegger's essay and (later) Tim Ingold.)

2010-01-04T14:27:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Charlie Blake for this anthem toward animlity: "angels are bestial; man is the animal."

Founding Father bites like an animal

2010-01-04T14:24:00.001-08:00

George Washington's false teeth were made from animal teeth:
"He had several sets of false teeth over the years, but they were not made of wood. For at least one set, Washington's dentist, Dr. John Greenwood, used a cow's tooth, one of Washington's teeth, hippopotamus ivory, metal and springs." Talk about becoming animal?! The res-publica has now created a line of flight for animality.

Octopus Armor

2009-12-16T17:07:00.000-08:00

Yes, this on the heels of Lester Shubin's death... Octopuses has learned to arm itself.

techne: "The coconut-carrying behavior makes the veined octopus the newest member of the elite club of tool-using animals"

armor: "An octopus would dig up the two halves of a coconut shell, then use them as protective shielding when stopping in exposed areas or when resting in sediment."

(note: link includes cool video of this event)

RIP Lester Shubin

2009-12-16T16:56:00.000-08:00

Dear Lester, your work here on earth is done. You've supplied the animals with functional gear for the revolution. Indeed, animals haunt the techne produced by Shubin and they will put it to good ends.

Shubin is responsible for the invention of the Kevlar bullet-proof vest. He had heard about the substance developed by DuPont, a material which is light as nylon but tough as steel. He began testing it as an armor. He first tried it on a gel then on goats. . . . ah, the unfortunate goats deformed and lost in this... they will haunt the materials for the revolutionary future(s).

Shubin is also responsible for bomb-sniffing dogs. Yes, we've militarized the beasts. (Think the comic We3).

Cows send tweet messages on Twitter

2009-12-11T11:44:00.000-08:00

Local Woodstock, Canada dairy now has its cows twittering out their dairy diary. You can follow the day in the life of the beasts!

A stroll in the woods gone bad...

2009-11-29T04:21:00.000-08:00

"Swedish police say they've cleared a man who was arrested for allegedly murdering his wife after deciding the culprit was most likely a moose.

Police spokesman Ulf Karlsson says 'the improbable has become probable' in the puzzling death last year of 63-year old Agneta Westlund. She was found dead after an evening stroll in the forest."

Cattle on strike!

2009-11-01T04:31:00.000-08:00

A popular children's story carries the seeds of revolt: Click, Clack, MOO by Doreen Cronin (author) and Betsy Lewin (illustrator). You can follow the video version of the story in the link above.

The cattle get a hold of an old typewriter in the barn. They begin to type demands to the farmer: give us electric blankets for cold nights. The farmer refuses and the cows bar him from the barn and refuse to give up their milk.

Besides the tale of humane treatment to animals, besides better treatment creating higher milk yields, there is a more complex story of language, animals, and revolt using technology.

Wild sheep in Iceland are captured

2009-11-01T04:19:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir for calling this to my attention. As she describes it "In the north east of Iceland they found a small flock of 'wild' sheep that had become a special breed, 'mountain sheep. Sheep are not allowed to be wild so they had to be hunted, caught and killed - view the death of the wild Icelandic sheep. Apparently 5 sheep escaped but another trip is being planned to exterminate them.

The idea that humans make the final call on what is "allowed" to be wild and what must be domesticated and/or slaughtered is the hubris of humanism. Call in the commando sheep.

Wild dogs commute for food.

2009-10-28T18:27:00.000-07:00

Scientists believe the phenomenon began after the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, and Russia's new capitalists moved industrial complexes from the city centre to the suburbs.

Following the post-Soviet ice skating bear who mauled his trainer, there is this. It seems the revolution is catching on among the animals.

Russian bear begins the non-human revolution

2009-10-27T10:38:00.000-07:00

This is the post-soviet animal revolution. A bear on ice-skates mauls a trainer and kills a handler. He has learned well from the Stalin years that there is blood in the future to come. No doubt the bear died but it was a martyrdom of the animal revolution to come.

signs of an animal revolution

2009-10-27T10:34:00.001-07:00

Thanks to the astute philosopher David Clark for this.

2009-07-28T17:07:00.000-07:00

Bat Tower and Architectures to come

2009-07-10T14:45:00.001-07:00

Nagel posses the question "What is it like to be a bat?" Heidegger claims that humans become human through their building-dwelling-thinking triad. Now, what happens when one builds for another species? Do we become more human or more animal?

These questions are posed by the monolithic and haunting Bat Tower in Sugarloaf Key (mile marker 17 in the keys). The tower was built in 1929 with the notion of using bats to eat the misquotes and other pests and so combat malaria in the area. The tower was built by Richter Clyde Perky, a fish lodge owner, according to designs from Charles Campbell, a pioneer of bat studies. Bats were bought in from Cuba and Texas to inhabit the tower but eventually flew away and disappeared. No one knows what happened to the bats and the tower stands awaiting bats of the future haunted by bats of a mysterious past.

Some great images of the tower are available online.

Beasts terroised Julius Caesar. Now the are back... in Devon

2009-06-21T05:34:00.000-07:00

This was the front page headline for The Times April 22, 2009 as I arrived in Liverpool to give a talk on animal incidents at the Animal Revolution symposium at Hope Liverpool.

The article is actually a good political history of cattle. It notes taht the last auroch died in the royal Jaktorow forest in Poland. Heinze Heck conducted Nazi experiments to genetically back-breed modern cattle to the aurock wildness: "The heard has Herman Goering, the head of Hitler's Luftwaffe, to thank for its existence. Goering hoped to recreate a primeval Aryan wilderness in the conquered territories of Eastern Europe" (15).

The Heck cattle were imported into Devon by Derek Gow, a conservationist who also led the fight to re-introduce the beaver into the UK (after several hundered year without the dam animal). He brought them over from a anture reserve near Amsterdam where 600 Heck cattle roam. The animals are particularly fast and a bit agressive. Gow "intends to breed tehm, selecting the more placid animals that are less likely to react to curious pekinese as though it were a maurauding carnivore." Backbreeding to an "original" but breeding out the agression of nature... a curious shifts in standards here for the benefit of humankind.

Burns "To a Mouse"

2009-06-18T07:39:00.000-07:00

Inspiring stanza:

I'm truly sorry Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

City of Pigs

2009-06-17T03:37:00.000-07:00

In Book II of Plato's Republic, Glaucon call's Plato's simple and unadorned city a "city of pigs" that needs to be humanized by moving from stark necessities to luxuries (including art). He is sort of prodding Plato about human nature. So, the swinish multitude in Plato?! Here is the excerpt, see

---But, said Glaucon, interposing, you have not given them a relish to their meal.

True, I replied, I had forgotten; of course they must have a relish-salt, and olives, and cheese, and they will boil roots and herbs such as country people prepare; for a dessert we shall give them figs, and peas, and beans; and they will roast myrtle-berries and acorns at the fire, drinking in moderation. And with such a diet they may be expected to live in peace and health to a good old age, and bequeath a similar life to their children after them.

Yes, Socrates, he said, and if you were providing for a city of pigs, how else would you feed the beasts?

But what would you have, Glaucon? I replied.
Why, he said, you should give them the ordinary conveniences of life. People who are to be comfortable are accustomed to lie on sofas, and dine off tables, and they should have sauces and sweets in the modern style.

Yes, I said, now I understand: the question which you would have me consider is, not only how a State, but how a luxurious State is created; and possibly there is no harm in this, for in such a State we shall be more likely to see how justice and injustice originate. In my opinion the true and healthy constitution of the State is the one which I have described. But if you wish also to see a State at fever heat, I have no objection. For I suspect that many will not be satisfied with the simpler way of way They will be for adding sofas, and tables, and other furniture; also dainties, and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes, all these not of one sort only, but in every variety; we must go beyond the necessaries of which I was at first speaking, such as houses, and clothes, and shoes: the arts of the painter and the embroiderer will have to be set in motion, and gold and ivory and all sorts of materials must be procured.

Correlary to Are You Being Served--they are killing us

2009-06-14T10:23:00.000-07:00

Kathy Ferston has an good essay called "Shattering the Meat Myth: Humans are Natural Vegetarians." She assembles a series of authorities on the matter including:

Dr. William C. Roberts, editor of the American Journal of Cardiology, "Although we think we are, and we act as if we are, human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us, because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores."

Roberts ain't saying anything most nutritionists don't already know. He is just saying it with more studies and institutional backing. Ferston's other authorities include some noteworthy anthropologists. What interests me for this blog entry is that "they end up killing us."

Given the very high percent of Americans and Europeans who are overweight, the problems of incorporation of cattle can even lead to issues of morphological change of humans in the 21st century. That is to say, we manage cattle and we eat them, manage and manger. Because we eat them we shape and manage them a particular way. Incorporation as eating is managed by corporations as businesses. Corporate chains from fast food icons such as McDonalds to steak houses such as Longhorn (which serves more polled than horned cattle) make demands on breeders and farmers. So, we change the beast according to these demands. Yet, they change us as we digest globally homogenized and overly processed animal products.

The Attachment (are you being served?, part 2)

2009-06-14T06:44:00.000-07:00

With the painting The Attachment (1829), Sir Edwin Landseer joined William Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott in memorializing a dog who stayed by the side of his master when he died from a fall off of a cliff in the Lake District. As William Hunt (or was it Charles Lamb?) commented, what do they think the dog eat for the weeks he was alone at his "master's" side? Yes, the master!

Are you being served?

2009-06-14T06:32:00.001-07:00

This from Eugene Thacker: "To Serve Man" episode from the Twilight Zone (also parodied in The Simpsons). Intelligent aliens arrive on earth to "serve" the human race. . . to help them or to eat them? How will we be assimilated into the [u.f.o.] verticality from the alien Other?

nonhuman tones

2009-06-04T13:57:00.000-07:00

Marcus Coates and Chrome Hoof are teaming up at The Coronet Theatre on Friday June 5, 2009.
Does the animal revolution have a music? Would this be it?

Like a note from the future, the already formed hauntings of future animal messages arrives to us in protean forms. Who are these carriers of the animal futures? not men, quite, nor animal but suffused with chrome, electricity, fur, and wobbling voice they come.

Bull Figher gets the point

2009-05-29T20:12:00.000-07:00

Isreal Lancho is gored by a bull. "Spanish bullfighting fans witnessed the ultimate ring horror on Wednesday when matador Israel Lancho was gored." Is this really the ultimate ring horror? Have you asked the bulls killed regularly in the ring? Ask this bull how he felt about the event? Who is talking to the bull on this one?

For the fighter, things are serious: "According to press reports, Lancho had a 25 centimeter-deep stomach wound that surgeons operated on."

Humans kill & eat Neanderthals

2009-05-17T04:57:00.000-07:00

This from the Observer confirming human animality at a brutal scale and with ecological results that echo present concerns:
One of science's most puzzling mysteries - the disappearance of the Neanderthals - may have been solved. Modern humans ate them, says a leading fossil expert.

The controversial suggestion follows publication of a study in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences about a Neanderthal jawbone apparently butchered by modern humans. Now the leader of the research team says he believes the flesh had been eaten by humans, while its teeth may have been used to make a necklace.

Fernando Rozzi, of Paris's Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique, said the jawbone had probably been cut into to remove flesh, including the tongue. Crucially, the butchery was similar to that used by humans to cut up deer carcass in the early Stone Age. "Neanderthals met a violent end at our hands and in some cases we ate them," Rozzi said.

The idea will provoke considerable opposition from scientists who believe Neanderthals disappeared for reasons that did not involve violence. Neanderthals were a sturdy species who evolved in Europe 300,000 years ago, made complex stone tools and survived several ice ages before they disappeared 30,000 years ago - just as modern human beings arrived in Europe from Africa.

2009-04-27T18:26:00.000-07:00

After a US Airways Flight was struck by a flock of Canadian Geese (illegal immigrants that they are), a recent study shows bird attacks are on the rise nationally.

Ballinrobe Bull in the market

2009-04-27T18:17:00.000-07:00

A bull in Ballinrobe busts lose from his fate as beef and heads for town. He enters the local market and runs through the aisles. Now the customers and workers are the meat being targeted. The farmer comes after the beast only to be run off by the bull he was looking for.

Swine Flu and Cross-species contagions

2009-04-26T07:46:00.000-07:00

Having some time ago written in Technologies of the Picturesque about the anxiety of innoculating humans with cow pox to cure small pox, I've often mused on cross-species contagions. Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel sees European adaptation to livestock diseases over the centuries as key to the Euro invasion of the Americas. Native American populations unaccostumed to these animals and their diseases died as a result of this germ warfare.

Today, we are all susceptible: avian flu, swine flu.... We've used pig parts to enhance humans--pig hearts, harvesting pig parts to fit in us. Now, the connectedness to swine has, like a return of the repressed, come back to haunt us (in ways similar to mad cow disease affecting humans). Spawn, spore, rhizome. I am Legend. We're woven into the animality of animals as they to us beyond cultural appropriations.

Revenge of the Easter Bunnies... a rabbit swarm

2009-04-19T04:18:00.000-07:00

Bioinvasion of released pets. The once companion animals now stake their claim on the terrain: "Green iguanas released decades ago now splash in the pools of Palm Beach. Peacocks roam free in parts of Miami, Burmese pythons are spreading through the entire state — and here, on this two-mile shoelace of beachfront land, the bunny problem keeps multiplying.

Dozens of rabbits, the spawn of Easter gifts from as far back as 2002, now run wild in a field of two-story condominiums. "

Interface

2009-04-16T08:51:00.000-07:00

I find compelling this picture of Bo Obama sniffing a microphone. Yes, there is a leash but what strikes me is his interface with his celebrity status (made evident by the media as if he were on stage). What does Bo do with all the mics around? He leans in, sniffs. Dogs see the world differently. Here is a big moment for potential animal revolutionary media attention. Bo could announce an animal revolution and broadcast using the media outlets. Instead, he sees the mics and sniffs. What is important to us is for dogs something to sniff, eat, or pee on. The revolution will not be televised.

The Enemy Within--Hedgehogs

2009-04-11T12:10:00.001-07:00

The Colbert Report recently released the news: Hedgehogs are the new terrorist threat. They carry a number of incurable diseases that can be passed on to humans. We have seen animals pass on diseases to humans before, plagues and infestations. The hedgehog burrows its animality within the heart of our domesticity. Beware.

Monkeys seize moment to escape

2009-04-09T16:08:00.000-07:00

In Portland, Macaques, or snow monkeys bust out of the Oregon National Primate Research Center intending no longer to be breeding monkeys. According to the AP: "HSU has long been criticized by animal-rights groups, who say the research monkeys are mistreated."

Poultrygeist

2009-04-05T04:29:00.000-07:00

"The chicken, the chicken has declared jihad on us all." Chicken-headed humans and lots of feathers in this B horror film. In Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, possessed humans and humans with chicken heads invade a fast food restaurant and begin cutting up, gutting, deep frying and otherwise mutilating and eating humans. (Thanks to Eugene Thacker for pointing me to this). Think of Agamben and Battaille's headless humans and the teleology of the human end of days on earth, add infectious disease (by zombie possession), plus feathers as friction.

2009-04-04T04:28:00.000-07:00

Apparently the sports talk radio host Tony Kornsheiser has been broadcasting news of the animal revolution on his radio show. His animal incidents--real and imaginary--get the word out that the animals are not pleased with human encroachment and domination of non-human environments.

'The Animal Revolution: The idea that animals -- who are threatened by the expansion of the human population, and the encroachment of cities and suburbs upon their habitats -- are revolting against humans. Examples include rabid otters chasing golfers on the course, captive lions on top of a Mexican meat processing plant killing a man attempting to feed them, cats growing wings as the precursor to an animal air force, alligators banging on doors in South Florida and the "rat in the mouth" story. Brennan frequently fills the news updates with animal-centric stories'.

Thank you, Kornsheiser, for getting the word out to the revolutionary masses. Like Castro in the mountains before the revolution, the liberation radio is filling the airwaves with word of a revolution to come and, indeed, already underway. Perhaps this is why the show is currently off the air, the humans are on to us. Time to set up a new base camp.

WE3: animal+techne, posthumanism in action

2009-04-02T10:48:00.000-07:00

"A dog, cat, and rabbit have been adapted by military scientists into automated fighters, resembling cyborg robots with animal heads. When the project is about to be shut down, the three escape. Here, they’re not seeking a home so much as continued survival, even in their tortured state. Their quest for freedom and the way they no longer fit anywhere — they’re not animals, not soldiers, and distinctly not human — is immensely sympathetic. The result is a condemnation of a military/industrial system that warps living things and then discards them without thought of the potentially devastating results."

Review at Comics Worth Reading. The DC Comics website for the graphic novel. Anntennea art journal issue 9 has an interview with Grant Morrison (the comic's writer) who worked with Frank Quitely (illustrator) on this project.

Pets trip up humans when they are not looking

2009-03-27T12:43:00.000-07:00

More than 86,000 Americans wind up in the emergency room every year because of falls related to cats or dogs. That’s about 1% of all fall-related ER visits. This according to the CDC's Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report. The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal cover the report.

We will not be rent asunder

2009-03-18T06:16:00.000-07:00

Calling themselves "Flavoristas" the capitalist machine tries to co-opt the bestial revolution and its herds http://www.freethemeat.org/

We will not be daunted. Animals of the umwelts, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.

"to come"

2009-03-09T19:03:00.000-07:00

"A male chimpanzee in a Swedish zoo planned hundreds of stone-throwing attacks on zoo visitors"

"There has been scant evidence in previous research that animals can plan for future events. Crucial to the current study is the fact that Santino, a chimpanzee at the zoo in the city north of Stockholm, collected the stones in a calm state, prior to the zoo opening in the morning."

Fredrick Young has provided the following comment on this event:
"A beautiful passage on your animality blog! Yes, the chimp in the Stockholm zoo (zoe) collecting stones, planning an attack on the futurity of a passive Dasein. A strategy of waiting, stocking, mobilizing zoe against bios--a formation of an animality-to-come as a fictive concealment as poor-in-world, yet strong in stone (weltlos.) The chimp will get behind Dasein's 'being-thrown.' A stones thrown as a constellation exploding (jetzeit)the horizon of questions, Being-in-the-world, and living toward a goal, full of merit or in depression or angst. The Chimp missive of the future to come will hit the mark of a calculated future of 'man.' The animalities-to-come investing in Stockholm syndrome futures as an epistemology of new prison writing. A being-with of resistances concealed in human form by Negri, X, King, Gramsci, Goldman, etc. The assemblages repeat the 'with' each time differently casting the 'being' by folding back into its old ontic-ontological traditions of arrest..."

Calif. aquarium blames flooding on curious octopus

2009-02-27T08:56:00.000-08:00

They blame the soaking they discovered Tuesday morning on the aquarium's resident two-spotted octopus, a tiny female known for being curious and gregarious with visitors. The octopus apparently tugged on a valve and that allowed hundreds of gallons of water to overflow its tank.

Aquarium spokeswoman Randi Parent says no sea life was harmed by the flood, but the brand new, ecologically designed floors might be damaged by the water.

Mad Cow And Alzheimer's Have Surprising Link

2009-02-25T18:42:00.000-08:00

Prions is the link. Have these animals infected us or we them. Biological warfare.

Funeral for a Wild Squirel

2009-02-24T19:14:00.000-08:00

If we can make safety gear for small animals, the revolution should also remember its dead.

Chimp attack!

2009-02-20T17:05:00.000-08:00

Chimpanzee attacks "owner."
de Waal "I don't know where people would find these animals or why you would want to have them. Even if a chimp were not dangerous, you have to wonder if the chimp is happy in a human household environment."
[update: congress gets involved by passing the Captive Primate Safety Act]

Birds are on the move

2009-02-19T05:26:00.000-08:00

After the US Airways Flight 1549 which I discussed on 2/7/09, the New York Times reports that we are tracking birds by putting lightweight "backpacks" on them. In a separate article, we are finding out that because of global warming, birds are moving further north: "The boreal chickadee has moved 280 miles north, almost out of the range of the lower 48 states. The marbled murrelet, a seabird that breeds inland, has moved 360 miles north. The wild turkey has gone about 400." Such shifts in biotopes makes evident the nomadic character of the Animal Revolution.

Cryptozoology

2009-02-19T05:17:00.000-08:00

The wonderful thing about cryptozoology is that it works with virtual worlds, alternative time scales, biotopes that run parallel or occasionally intersect our own. University College London has a list of ongoing events and ways of thinking about this topic.

Bloody Revolution starts in France

2009-02-07T08:25:00.000-08:00

And now the Chef of State is the one bitten:
"Former French President Jacques Chirac was rushed to a hospital after being mauled by his pet dog who is being treated for depression." The dog named Sumo is a white Maltese poodle. Does your dog bite? The Fox New story continues: "has a history of frenzied fits and became increasingly prone to making "vicious, unprovoked attacks" despite receiving treatment with anti-depressants." Well, being told where to walk, when and if one can walk, when to pee, when to eat... one can become a bit frenzied. Add to this pedegree overbreeding (both human and dogs) and it becomes a bit rough out there.

Hat tip to Malamud on this one. Rumor has it that Randy Malamud is increasingly siding with the animals and will turn on humans once the Revolution is under way.

Other incidents in the Animal Revolution

2009-02-07T04:25:00.000-08:00

Chuck the groundhog bits NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg's finger. Chuck has redefined groundhog's day. It is about the groundhog, not the humans. Stay out of the animal layer. Interestingly, Chuck lives with his human handler, Doug Swartz. He was wild and orphaned and was taken in by the Staten Island Zoo. "Chuck has free range of the house and uses a litter box. But you know, groundhogs are very aggressive."
"Hit birds. We lost thrust in both engines." US Airways Flight 1549 struck by a flock of large birds (type yet to be determined). As humans, we're happy for the survival of the passengers and crew. But what happened to the birds? I've yet to see a funeral for them. My suspicion is the birds knowingly attacked the plane in order to assert their airspace over NYC. [Update: birds where Canadian Geese. Yet to be determined if they were the migratory sort or were local. If migratory, imagine the international wars involved here. NY Times says they are tracking birds by putting backpacks on them.]
Randy Malamud has a forthcoming essay "Americans do weird things with animals or why did the chicken cross the road?" in Animal Encounters. His premise is "it is morally, intellectually, and ecologically preferable not to do weird things with animals. By 'weird,' I mean contra natura; silly; irrational; counterproductive or retrograde, in terms of envisioning a relationship that people could have with animals that would be more fulfilling and better suited to our role as one speices among many in a complex and vast ecology" (75). Malamud lists things we do to animals. Among the list are Sigfried and Roy's 58 White Tigers of Navada. In October 2003, one of the tigers--named Montecore--"lunged at Roy Horn during the show and dragged him offstage. The tiger wrapped his raw around Roy's neck, making cuts that croshed his trachea as well as deep puncture wounds on the back of his head" (87-88). The notion that "Roy had it coming" was not very commonly held.
Hippo eats dwarf. Okay, this is an internet hoax story, but is recalls what Malamud says--"A mauling, or at least the possibility of a mauling, is the subtext of every carnival show" (88).

My thanks to Randy Malamud for the conversation that listed out these above incidents.

Stupidit. Derrida on Deleuze and animals

2009-01-30T05:50:00.000-08:00

My chapter from On the Surface about Marcus Coates explores the issue of stupidity and a way of thinking outside the discourse and tyranny of reason. Since then, I've happened upon some other works on stupidity worth considering. Stay tuned for updates.

Avital Ronell Stupidity
Derrida on Deleuze and becoming animal and stupidity: "The Transcendental 'Stupidity' ('Betise') of Man and the Becoming-Animal According to Deleuze" in Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis. The Derrida essay is a print version from a conference. A video clip of his paper is online.

The animal revolution is stupid, bete. It cannot appeal to reason--all too human reason--since it is reason that has kept the animal at bay, has kept the animal at arms length (denying an animal call to arms). Reason keeps the animal at the margins. The blunt instrument of stupidity is a hammer against the walled hermenutic circle of reason and sensibility. The animal revolution is unsensible.

Signs of the Animal Revolution

2009-01-29T03:26:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Bryndis Sneabjornsdottir who pointed me to this:
There is a Dutch political party for animals! "Animal interests should no longer continually be subordinated to economic interests." Indeed, there is, as Derrida points out, a "General Economy" beyond the limited economy and circulation of all too human interests.

Amy Stein & lines of domestication and wildness

2009-01-27T17:30:00.000-08:00

Chris Pair just introduced me to this interesting work by Amy Stein. She photographs the blurry line of biotopes--between human and non-human worlds. The friction here is palpable. World bump against each other and mark and re/mark upon each other.

See her 2008 book Domesticated.
And recent work on taxidermy and skins called Skin Trade.

Haunted and the turn from domesticated to demon

2009-01-22T06:12:00.001-08:00

From Susan Stewart's On Longing:

Its otherness speaks to the possessor's capacity for otherness: it is the possessor, not the souvenir, which is ultimately the curiosity. The danger of the souvenir lies in its unfamiliarity, in our difficulty in subjecting it to interpretation. There is always the possibility that the reverie's signification will go out of control here, that the object itself will take charge, awakening some dormant capacity for destruction. This appropriation of reverie by the object forms the basis for certain horror stories: "The Monkey's Paw" ...(148)

It awakes the "dormant capacity" not in the object or animal alone but in the "possessor" who is possessed. Eugene Thacker's work with zombies is an example of human animality possessed.

How could I forget this Nietzche from "Truth and Lies in the Non-Moral [extra-moral] Sense":

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

INTERSPECIES art show

2009-01-20T03:23:00.000-08:00

Can artists work with animals as equals? Interspecies uses artistic strategies to stimulate dialogue about the way we view the relationship between human and non-human animals, in the year of celebrations of Darwin's birth 200 years ago.

Private view 6pm, Friday 23 January 2009
at Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK
70 Oxford Street, M1 5NH
Exhibition open
24 January - 29 March 2009, Tue - Sun

www.artscatalyst.org

Interspecies comprises new works by four artists - Nicolas Primat, Kira O'Reilly, Antony Hall and Ruth Maclennan, and existing pieces by Rachel Mayeri, Beatriz Da Costa and Kathy High. All the artists in Interspecies question the one-sided manipulation of non-human life forms for art. They instead try to absorb the animal's point of view as a fundamental part of their work and practice.

Kira O'Reilly presents an action/installed performance featuring herself and a sleeping female pig, Delilah, Falling Asleep With A Pig, taking place at the private view on Friday 23 January, and on Saturday 24 January. The work addresses the ethics of human and non-human animal interaction, acknowledging the implicit ambivalence in the appropriation of animals as a resource. The artist will inhabit a gallery redesigned for the comfort and welfare of a pig. At some point the pig and/or the artist will sleep. Documentation of the event will be shown in the exhibition.

Nicolas Primat is the only artist in the world that specialises in working with monkeys and apes in collaboration with primatologists. He will show video works resulting from his residencies at the Primatology station, CNRS, Marseille, working with baboons, at the Pasteur Institute, Cayenne, Guyana, working with Saimiris (squirrel monkeys) and at the Animal Park of Apenheul, Holland, working with Bonobo apes.

Anthony Hall's work ENKI allows electric fish and humans to commune on the same level, avoiding the use of language as such; instead stimulating a shared empathy through physical connection. The project explores the possibilities of cross species communication and human to fish relationships, in particular the electric fish. Is it possible that a symbiotic relationship between human and electronic fish can be effected through passive and active electronic media?

Ruth Maclennan’s work for Interspecies explores the relationship between a bird of prey and the human being who trains it. Like eagles and falcons, the symbolic life of the hawk exceeds its ‘natural’ life, which is itself encouraged by human intervention—in breeding, nesting and the habitat. This is the latest stage in a project that looks at people, architecture, the city, and landscape, from the perspective of a cyborg ‘hawk-camera’.

Two existing works will also be shown in the touring exhibition: Rachel Mayeri's Primate Cinema, which casts human actors in the role of non-human primates seeking mates, and Beatriz Da Costa's PigeonBlog which provides an alternative way to participate environmental air pollution data gathering, equipping urban homing pigeons with GPS-enabled electronic air pollution sensing devices.

INTERSPECIES Events at Cornerhouse

Sat 24 January, 2 – 4pm
Artists’ Open Forum
Nicolas Primat, Antony Hall, Ruth Maclennan, Rachel Mayeri and Beatriz da Costa
Join us for this open forum, a unique opportunity to meet the artists and discover more about the ideas behind Interspecies.

Sun 25 January, 4pm
Kira O’Reilly in Conversation
Join performance artist Kira O’Reilly and curator Rob La Frenais, as they discuss Kira’s exhibition piece in relation to her work on sleep and dream research with humans and pigs.

Mon 26 January, 6 - 8pm
Wed 28 January, 2 - 4pm
Workshop: Primate Cinema – How to act like an animal
Participate in a performance workshops led by Interspecies artist Rachel Mayeri, exploring how primates communicate. Through discussion and video clips, learn about animal behaviour in the wild and in cinema and find out about primatology. You will get the chance to engage in physical theatre techniques and learn how to improvise movement and social interactions as non-human primates.

Cornerhouse, 70 Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5HN
Box office: 0161 200 1500
Opening hours: Tues – Sat: 11.00 – 18.00 Thurs until 20.00
Sun 14.00-18.00
e: info@cornerhouse.org
www.cornerhouse.org

--

The Arts Catalyst
Toynbee Studios
28 Commercial Street
London E1 6LS
UK
e admin@artscatalyst.org
www.artscatalyst.org

The Arts Catalyst commissions art that experimentally and critically engages with science. We bring together people across the art/science divide and beyond to explore science in its wider social, political and cultural contexts. We produce provocative, playful, risk-taking projects to spark dynamic conversations about our changing world.

Quotes for the Revolution

2009-01-19T06:27:00.001-08:00

Thanks to Erica Fudge's "Left-handed Blow" essay in Representing Animals:

[A]ll rulers are heirs of those who conquered before them . . . There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History,' Illuminations (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 256
All decisive blows are struck left-handed.
Walter Benjamin, 'One Way Street,' Reflections (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 65.

Revolution to be revolutionary comes from outside of history, without proper documentary papers, and without invitation. To anyone reading this blog: please contribute quotations you find useful for the revolution.

Too many possible quotations from Nietzsche perhaps, but for now here is one that comes to mind:

One skill is needed -- lost today, unfortunately -- for the practice of reading as an art: the skill to ruminate, which cows posses but modern man lacks. This is why my writings will, for some time yet, remain difficult to digest.
Fredrick Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, Francis Golffing (trans.), Garden City, New York, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956, p157.

When good animals go bad (an ongoing story)

2009-01-18T05:27:00.000-08:00

I should like to contrast three modes of engagement with animals: appropriation, contact zone, and animal revolution:

1. We know appropriation well and see it often in the state of domesticated animals. We see it too in the way in which we "weigh" upon the earth and cause the extinction of other species or a change in habit and habitat of these species (see Michel Serres Natural Contract regarding "weighing" on the earth and Ursala Heise Sense of Place and Sense of Planet). Looking at Susan Stewart's On Longing and the souvenir she writes: "Such objects allow one to be a tourist of one's own life, or allow the tourist to appropriate, consume, and thereby 'tame' the cultural other" (146). The same could be said of relation to animals by which we appropriate them or become tourists of their worlds.

2. Contact zone. I've written on this in On the Surface using Mary Louise Pratt. Haraway mentions this as well in When Species Meet. The idea here is creating a pidgen language for negotiating umwelts.

3. We see evidence of the animal revolution when "good animals go bad," when the domestic bites the (Heideggarian) hand that feeds it and when the friction of the animal world does not allow for appropriation. The revolution creates noise such that the pidgen language is jammed and translation fails.

UK Animal Art + Symposium

2009-01-15T08:40:00.000-08:00

The Animal Gaze exhibition graciously put together by Rosemarie McGoldrick is now touring. The next round of art (and art workshops) and symposium will be in 2010.

Animals and Art events

2009-01-15T06:23:00.001-08:00

Some contemporary Animal Art events:

Why Look at Animals?
Monday, 19 January / 7 PM / The Power Plant

"Artists and scholars discuss the figure of the animal in contemporary art, culture and politics, with an eye towards forging a creaturely community that crosses species. Syracuse-based Canadian artist duo Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby’s new video Beauty Plus Pity, currently showing at The Power Plant, explores perverse emotional, ethical and existential relationships among adults, children and animals. Matthew Brower is the curator of the University of Toronto Art Centre and an art historian focusing on animals in visual culture. Bill Burns is an acclaimed Toronto-based artist responsible for the Safety Gear for Small Animals project. Moderator Jon Davies is Assistant Curator of Public Programs at The Power Plant and a critic interested in the cultural representation of animals."

[Looks to be a really fine show! On a side note: I've an aversion to the primacy of the visual and the gaze and the 'why look' which keeps animals at a (visual) distance and does not risk our own personhood... or if it 'risks' it does so only by bringing the animal within the social/cultural/psychological discourse of The Gaze with all the language ramifications (Lacan, Freud, and even Merleau-Ponty) associated with this visual/conceptual configuration.]

Also the wonderfully titled posthuman: "Trying to Cope with Things that Aren't Human"