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.)

Evolution of a Goat Revolution

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

March, 1947. From Orwell's Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm (two years after the English Edition was published):

"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."

Revolt of the Beavers

Let the Revolution Begin

the fist, the paw

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).

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

The Event & The Differend

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.”

Return of the Urban Animal

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."

Thanks to Angela Ellsworth for calling my attention to this--humans are walking the tracks of the coyote in a meandering becoming-other creating political alternative cartographies. 

Landmine Detecting Rats!

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.

from William Blake's Milton

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.

Octopus Armor

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

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).

Addendum: the military practices its field war zone medical "tissue training" on goats. Video footage shows "shears and scalpels being used to inflict wounds and amputate the legs of anesthetized goats so trainees can practice war zone emergency techniques"

Cattle on strike!

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 dogs commute for food.

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.

Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article2372125.ece#ixzz0VHfw34PR

signs of an animal revolution

Thanks to the astute philosopher David Clark for this.

Burns "To a Mouse"

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!

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

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)

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!

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

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.