The Idiot

I've not published but given a few talks on the role of humor as a mode of political resistance--this is the modality of the Field Marshal. Coupled with this is the role of the idiot, akin to Bartleby the scrivener, who "prefers not" or who cannot speak in a mode which is intelligible in our world. Enter Lyotard and the differend:  “It is in the nature of a victim not to be able to prove that one has been done a wrong. A plaintiff is someone who has incurred damages and who disposes of the means to prove it. One becomes a victim if one loses these means. One loses them, for example, of the author of the damages turns out directly or indirectly to be one’s judge. The latter has the authority to reject one’s testimony as false or the ability to impede its publication.” (8) What would it mean to give the victim standing? Lyotard goes on to say: “To give the differend its due is to institute new addressees, new addressors, new signification, and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression and for the plaintiff to cease being a victim.“ (13).

For further resources, consider: "We know, knowledge there is, but the idiot demands that we slow down, that we don’t consider ourselves authorized to believe we possess the meaning of what we know" –Stengers "Cosmopolitical Proposal". 

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. 

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

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.

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!

nonhuman tones

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.

Stupidit. Derrida on Deleuze and animals

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.