an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 3, September 2006, ISSN
1552-5112
To the Dogs: Companion
speciesism and the new feminist materialism
Introduction:
Matter Matters
Feminist productions in the fields of literary, cultural and social
studies are almost exclusively – though for good reasons – informed by a
radical constructivism. Drawing on discourse analysis and semiotics, such work
relies predominantly on gender as a category of analysis in order to examine
the social, cultural and psychic construction of subjectivity, while neglecting
questions of biological sex. The general refusal of scholars from those
disciplines to engage with the materiality of bodies, with their physiological,
biochemical or microbiological details, forms and formations, is indicative of
an anti-essentialist stance which is very understandable from a
historico-political perspective: When politicians and scientists have for
centuries recurred to “natural” (because biological) differences to explain and
legitimate social discrimination, oppression and inequality between the sexes
and between human beings of different classes and ethnicities, it was more than
necessary to counter, if not downright deny, biologistic argumentations.
Meanwhile, however, the hostile attitude towards the natural sciences and
empirical research has “naturalised” itself and the socio-cultural framing of
bodies and gender has simply become the counterpart of the ideology known as
biological reductionism, insofar as influences of the environment and society
as well as individual technologies of the self count as the determining factors
now that, in their turn, can be acted upon by the feminist subject.
As a consequence of this
disciplinary division of labour, scientific debates between and within
different academic fields remain trapped in the dead-end street of the dualisms
nature/culture, essentialism/constructivism, materiality/discourse and
sex/gender. Judith Butler’s attempt (in Gender Trouble and even more so
in Bodies that Matter) to dissolve the sex/gender dichotomy by negating
the preceding materiality of gender or, conversely, by postulating sex as a
discursive and performative construct, is not particularly fruitful for
transdisciplinary models of explanations and research questions beyond the
nature/culture or nature/nurture divide.[1] I am not arguing for the abandonment of the (de)constructivist
method in gender studies – on the contrary: as I will argue in more detail
later, I would like to foster a much broader and literally deeper understanding
of the constructedness of bodies as “material”. This understanding would result
in an approach that balances the overemphasis of discursive analyses not only
by including aspects of bodily (self-)experience, how bodies are present in
space and time, and the social practices of the corporeal, but also brings in
the weight of biological dimensions in the construction of subjectivities –
without, however, reinforcing naturalist-essentialist assumptions. If this
engagement with corporeal material(ities) fails to take place in gender
studies, then, as feminists from various research cultures have emphasised for
over a decade now, feminism runs the danger of playing into the hands of a
regressive politics. According to Elizabeth Wilson, whom I quote here as a
representative of a growing number of proponents of a new materialist feminism,
feminist scholars should give up this anti-biologistic and broadly
anti-technoscientific stance precisely in order to keep feminist theory
progressive and differentiated:
if our critical habits and procedures can be redirected so that biology and
neurology are not the natural enemies of politics – that is, if we defer gender
theory from the start – then we will find a greater critical productivity in
biology than theories of gender would lead us to believe.[2]
With her call
One of the pioneers of
a new materialist-feminist direction in gender studies, molecular biologist
Anne Fausto-Sterling, has convincingly shown that with regard to the
construction of sexuality, categories of difference do not only inscribe
themselves on the surface of bodies, but go literally beneath the skin: “events
outside the body become incorporated into our very flesh.”[6] At every
moment of one’s lifespan, socioculturally-shaped behavioural patterns as well
as reactions of the neural system to external signals affect one’s muscles,
bones, nerves and even the architecture of one’s cells. In other words, cells
are in a never-ending process of (re)formation and enter into material
relations with their internal environment (affecting the very inside of a
system/body) as well as its external environment or outside (influencing
cultural practices, norms and values of a society). Given these dynamic processes, it does not make sense
any longer – if ever it really made – to oppose nature to culture as contenders
in shaping bodies and subjectivities. Rather, as Fausto-Sterling proposes, we should
talk of a “biocultural systems in which cells and culture construct each
other”.[7] Already the choice of the word system
implicitly signals a shift in paradigm from a reductionist towards a system-oriented
thinking that can be observed for quite some time already within biology. As I
hope to show later with recourse to so-called Developmental Systems Theory,
to adopt the central premises of a systems approach would also be fruitful for
feminist gender studies and cultural analysis more broadly as well as for the
forging of truly interdisciplinary or, rather, transdisciplinary research
projects.
Systems
theory, as well as feminist neo-materialism, introduce concepts and topics into
gender and cultural studies that do not, at first sight, have anything to do
with the human species nor directly touch upon gender or the woman question but
could enrich feminist theorising and sharpen the argumentation of all
emancipatory movements. Among such seemingly inappropriate themes I clearly
favour the “animal question” (in analogy to and critique of Heidegger’s focus
of the question of being as the question of technology) which I consider as
having the greatest theoretical as well as political potential of fundamentally
redirecting the humanities and which, for this very reason, is placed at the
centre of the present essay.
More
concretely, this essay follows the imperative to engage concepts and theories
from the life sciences in order to revise dominant posthumanist paradigms. I
find – and this might seem slightly provocative, even though I certainly do not
want to put poststructuralist feminism and certain tendencies of posthumanist
theory on the same qualitative and political footing – that a feminism that
focuses almost exclusively on the sociocultural construction of gender and
gender roles similarly impoverished as a posthumanism that can only imagine the
hybridity of human existence in the figure of the cyborg and endeavours to
separate the material body from the immaterial mind to gain heroic
invulnerability, perfection and immortality. After my critique of what is
currently referred to as “cybernetic” or “popular” posthumanism, I will present
the anti-speciesist approaches literary critic Cary Wolfe has developed in line
with Jacques Derrida’s thinking of the animal as well as briefly introduce the
new manifesto of biologist and historian of science Donna Haraway. I conclude
with a modest proposal directed mainly at scholars from the humanities to give
up their largely anthropocentric stance and participate in the building of the
posthumanities by drawing on yet another paradigm shift that currently marks a
number of fields; i.e., the shift from questions of being to questions of
becoming.
Posthumanism has
gone to the dogs
In many respects, my contention (that posthumanism has gone to the dogs)
is both correct and false. As a part of postmodernist anti-humanist movements
of thought and poststructuralist theory, posthumanism first appeared on the
academic stage in the late 1960s, primarily in literary departments of
And
yet it seems to me that posthumanism casts quite a poor figure: its formula has
become something of a cliché and bites its own tail. When I speak of the
posthumanist formula, I mean the grand narrative of technological and cultural
progress that leads from hierarchical differentiation in traditional humanism,
which is strongly associated with the Enlightenment, to at least the
possibility and “active utopia” of non-hierarchical difference in posthumanism.
My discontents with this story rests less on the somewhat banal observation
that the androcentric, ethnocentric and anthropocentric premises of traditional
humanism are not dead yet, but on the observation that these premises are also
haunting narrations that purport to be anti- or post-humanist, be it
literature, film or the arts and the sciences more broadly. To put it
schematically: posthumanist texts are often all too humanist.
This
should come as no surprise either. N. Katherine Hayles already shows in her
genealogy of the posthuman, that it was no coincidence that the posthumanist
redefinition of human nature or, to be precise, the definition of what she labels cybernetic posthumanism, happened
during and after the second World War: at a time of general – but especially
male – anxiety and insecurity, the visions that Norbert Wiener and others
presented at the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics between 1943 und 1954 were
aimed not only towards providing a position of dominance and control to the
humanist subject in crisis but also to bring order and stability into chaos
with the help of an information theory that was strongly based on the principle
of homeostasis.[11] Hayles regards the posthumanist paradigm, developed
during this time and radicalised over the next decades as a kind of world-view
that is premised on four major assumptions: (1) “Life“ does not inevitably
depend on being embodied in a biological substrate; i.e. information triumphs
over materiality; (2) (self-)consciousness is a relatively recent phenomenon in
the evolutionary history of humankind and quite insignificant with regard to
human nature and identity; (3) the human body is a prosthesis and can thus be
extended and its parts replaced ad infinitum; (4) intelligent machines
are the „natural“ descendants of homo
sapiens.[12] This latter point finds one of its most prominent proponents
in Hans Moravec in whose “family history” robots figure as the “mind children”
of human beings, “built in our image and likeness, ourselves in more potent
form”.[13] The description is characteristic of the desire of
cybernetic posthumanists to maximise and perfect the human in a modular
fashion. Even though cybernetic posthumanism contributes to the deconstruction,
decentring and fragmentation of Enlightenment notions of the unitary and
autonomous subject, its vision of a disembodied or postbiological future is
ultimately but the continuation and reinscription of the Cartesian tradition of
thought in new discursive clothes.
The above version of
posthumanism, which Hayles considers a “nightmare“[14] and which is referred to in cultural criticism[15] as “popular posthumanism,” is diametrically opposed
to the attempt of a growing number of theoreticians to forge a critical
posthumanism or, as Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus have proposed
recently, a metaposthumanism, with the prefix “meta-“ signalling a critically-distanced
stance and not a totalising one (as in metaphysical thought); namely: “theory's
disposition to step back from the general breathless excitement over the
digital, the cybernetic, and the technologically prosthetic to cast a sober eye
over posthumanist orthodoxy.”[16]
What is equally
sobering, however, is the fact that the most radical metaposthumanists (and the
humanities more broadly) do not quite manage to make an epistemological break
with liberal humanism, insofar as their writing is also marked by an
unquestioned “speciesism”; i.e., in the definition of ethicist Peter Singer who
popularised the term three decades ago in his book Animal Liberation, “a
prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s
own species and against those of members of other species.”[17] Both postcolonial, feminist and queer theories and
discussion of subjectivity, identity, and difference as well as the claims on
the right to freedom by new social movements have recourse to an Enlightenment
concept of the subject whose conditio
sine qua non is the absolute control of that subject over the life of
nonhuman others/objects. The rhetorical strategy of radically separating
non-white, non-male and non-heterosexual human beings from animals in order to
have the subject status of these members of the human species recognised was
and is successful and also legitimate – given that the racist, sexist and
homophobic discourse of animality or an animalistic „nature“ has hitherto
served to exclude most individuals of those groups of people from many
privileges – but the speciesist logic of the dominance of human animals over
nonhuman animals has remained in place. If we fight racism and (hetero)sexism
because we declare discrimination on the basis of specific and identifiable
characteristics – such as “black“, “woman” or “lesbian“ to be wrong and unjust,
then we should also vehemently oppose the exploitation, imprisoning, killing
and eating of nonhuman animals on the basis of their species identity. Moreover,
if our research and teaching as cultural critics endeavours to do justice to
the diversity of human experience and life styles and feel responsible towards
marginalised others, should we then not seriously think about Cary Wolfe’s
question „how must our work itself change when the other to which it tries to
do justice is no longer human?“[18]
Wolfe
is not making a claim for animal rights here – at least not primarily. This is
also why his book puns on “rites/rights“: Animal
Rites is the intervention of the anti-speciesist cultural critic who
scrutinizes the rituals that human beings form around the figures of animals,
including the literary and cinematic enactments of cannibalism, monstrosity and
normativity. Wolfe subsumes all of these stagings under the heading the
discourse of species, with “discourse“ understood in the sense of Michel
Foucault as not only a rhetoric but above all as the condition for the
production and ordering of meaning and knowledge in institutions like medicine,
the law, the church, the family or universities. In addition, Wolfe wants to
sharpen our awareness that a speciesist metaphysics has also a deadly impact on
human animals, especially because speciesism is grounded in the
juridical state apparatus: “the full transcendence of the ‘human‘ requires the
sacrifice of the ‘animal‘ and the animalistic, which in turn makes possible a
symbolic economy in which we engage in what Derrida [calls] a ‚non-criminal
putting to death‘ of other humans as
well by marking them as animal.“[19]
The dog
lies buried in the singular: “The animal – what a word!”, Derrida
exclaims: “[t]he animal is a word, it is
an appellation that men have instituted, a name they have given themselves the
right and authority to give to another living creature [à l'autre vivant].” [20] In order to problematise this naming, Derrida has
created the neologism l'animot:
I would
like to have the plural of animals heard in the singular. […] We have to
envisage the existence of ‘living creatures’ whose plurality cannot be
assembled within the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to
humanity. […] The suffix mot in l’animot should bring us back to the
word […]. It opens onto the referential experience of the thing as such, as
what it is in its being, and therefore to the reference point by means of which
one has always sought to draw the limit, the unique and indivisible limit held
to separate man from animal.
As I propose in what follows, this clearly defined caesura of the
„anthropological machine”,[21] which according to Giorgio Agamben was already set in
motion by the old Greeks and the messianic thinkers and then accelerated by
scientific taxonomies and the birth of anthropology, can be bridged with the
help of a zoontological approach and companion
speciesism.
Posthumanist zoontologies
The desperate cry of the historical person Joseph
Carey Merrick (in the movie The Elephant
Man of 1980), “I am not an animal! I am a human being! I...am...a
man!” – for recognition of his human identity through
which he claims his right to social integration and personal integrity, is very
understandable and hurts. But his words nevertheless reflect the poverty of the
humanist stance, insofar as traditional humanism can only secure the “proper”
essence of humanitas via a rigid separation from animalitas. If one reads the reports by the victims and
witnesses of the tortures in the military prison of Abu Ghraib, it seems to me
that it is precisely the continued insistence and reinforcement of the
animal-human boundary that legitimises the committed atrocities:
Some of the things they did was make me sit down like a dog, … and … bark like
a dog and they were laughing at me … One of the police was telling me to crawl
… A few days before [this], … the guy who wears glasses, he put red woman's
underwear over my head … pissing on me and laughing on me … he put a part of
his stick … inside my ass … she was playing with my dick … And they were taking
pictures of me during all these instances. … [Another prisoner] was forced to
insert a finger into his anus and lick it. He was also forced to lick and chew a shoe. … He was then
told to insert his finger in his nose during questioning … his other arm in the
air. The Arab interpreter told him he looked like an elephant. [They were]
given badges with the letter ‘C’ on it.[22]
The US soldiers reduce their prisoners to their corporeal being, to
animal being, and then make fun of this “bare life“[23] Instead of accepting their own vulnerability and
mortality that they share with their victims as well as with other living
beings, the torturers use the “systematic bestialization“[24] of the prisoners to strengthen their own sense of
freedom and autonomy and to concomitantly withdraw the right to protection
guaranteed by the humanitarian rights of the Geneva Conventions; after all, as
barking dogs, crawling insects and ‘elephant men’, these ‘creatures’ cannot
respond to the name, the word, the interpellation “human.“
The implicit and
explicit analogies between racism, sexism, homophobia that accompany the above
description of the torture methods, confirm that the power of the “discourse of
species” to affect human others depends on the prior acceptance of the
institution “speciesism;” i.e. on taking for granted that the inflicting of
pain and the killing of nonhuman animals by human animals does not constitute a
criminal act but, on the contrary, is legal. This is why Derrida speaks of the
“carnophallogocentrism“[25] of Western metaphysics. And here Wolfe’s argument
comes full circle:
[Since] the humanist discourse of species will always be available for
use by some humans against other humans as well, to countenance violence
against the social other of whatever
species – or gender, or race, or class, or sexual difference. . . we need
to understand that the ethical and philosophical urgency of confronting the
institution of speciesism and crafting a posthumanist theory of the subject has nothing to do with whether you like
animals. We all, human and nonhuman alike, have a stake in the discourse and
institution of speciesism; it is by no means limited to its overwhelmingly
direct and disproportionate effects on animals.[26]
Wolfe’s
own analytical tool for what is a decidedly anti-speciesist strand of
posthumanist thinking is zoontology, a term that is both fully
deconstructive of Enlightenment anthropocentrism and simultaneously
self-deconstructing: on the one hand, the term signifies the recognition that
animals (zoon is Greek for ‘animal’) are worthy of ontological
investigation or, put differently, that ontology is not just about the ontology
of the human. On the other hand, however, the term makes it clear that taking
the question of the animal seriously calls into question the very being (that
is, the ontology) of ontology itself; in other words, ontology is itself
revealed to be a humanist approach to ethics and politics.[27] Being fundamentally humanist, a purely
ontological approach seems to be incommensurable with an anti-speciesist
posthumanist theorising that should also do justice to various ‘species’ of
human beings. Based on these premises, Wolfe calls for a more intensive
philosophical encounter with the material and multiple embodiments of the
subject rather than a continued concern with “anthro-ontological” questions
about the nature or identity of “Man”.[28] This shift in focus would also imply a reopening of
the question of ethics and humanism (and posthumanism) that places what Derrida
calls “the living in general“[29] at the centre of critical attention. Moreover, this
new emphasis would have the humanities engage the question of animal rights
(and rites) in order to precisely discuss issues of sameness/identity and
difference with regard to human beings outside humanist parameters. With The Companion Species Manifesto (CSM), Donna Haraway joins this
critical-posthumanist project and has – quite literally – gone to the dogs.
Revisions of
feminist slogans: from “Cyborgs for earthly survival!” to “Run fast; bite
hard!”[30]
The central question of Haraway, whose socialist and feminist “Cyborg
Manifesto” has been highly influential in various academic disciplines and
beyond, is the following: „how might an ethics and politics committed to the
flourishing of significant otherness be learned from taking dog-human
relationships seriously”.[31] In the age of technoscience, cyborgs can no longer
guide us, it seems: “I appropriated cyborgs to do feminist work in Reagan’s
Star Wars times of the mid-1980s. By the end of the millennium, cyborgs could
no longer do the work of a proper herding dog to gather up the threads needed
for critical inquiry.”[32]
Haraway’s
“dog writing” begins – as many of Haraway’s stories – with a personal and quite
intimate confession:
Ms Cayenne Pepper continues to colonize all
my cells – a sure case of what the biologist Lynn Margulis calls symbiogenesis.
[…] I'm sure our genomes are more
alike than they should be. There must be some molecular record of our touch in
the codes of living that will leave traces in the world, no matter that we are
each reproductively silenced females, one by age, one by surgery. Her red merle
Australian Shepherd's quick and lithe tongue has swabbed the tissues of my
tonsils, with all their eager immune system receptors. Who knows where my
chemical receptors carried her message, or what she took from my cellular
system for distinguishing her self from other and binding outside to inside?
We have had forbidden conversation; we have
had oral intercourse; […] We are training each other in acts of communication
we barely understand. We are, constitutively, companion species. We make each
other up, in the flesh.[33]
The
exchange of organic tissue between the woman Donna and the dog Cayenne, as well
as the assumption inherent to this manifesto that humans and dogs co-evolved,
are indeed very good examples of the mentioned Lynn Margulis’ thesis, insisted
upon again in her recent book Acquiring
Genomes (co-authored with her son Dorion Sagan)
that “we people are really walking assemblages, beings who have integrated
various other kinds of organisms”.[34] Known as endosymbiosis
or symbiogenesis,
Margulis’ theory presents an alternative to the Darwinist idea of the so-called
modern synthesis
according to which biodiversity and the emergence of new species in the course
of evolution stems from the natural selection of random gene mutation. For many
decades already and rejecting the militaristic and capitalist rhetoric of survival of the fittest,
Margulis has defended the thesis that the eukaryotic cells of plants and
(non)human animals owe their existence to prokaryotic
(nucleus-free) bacteria which “devoured” each other millions of years ago: new
types of cells and organs, and even new species, evolved, first, through the
mutually parasitic co-habitation of bacterial cells and, later, through the
exchange of genetic material between different living entities. In other words,
biological newness and growing complexity is the result of absorbing genes that
did not originally belong to a system but are then a permanent component in the
genome of the life form. As organisms who have always already
“alien” material in their flesh and blood, “we” are not the autonomous and
self-contained individuals of modernity who can fashion themselves in their own
image and are separate from other living entities.
The simple fact that human beings are above
all organic and mortal bodies as well as the observation that “multidirectional
gene flow – multidirectional flows of bodies and values – is and has always
been the name of the game of life on earth,”[35] provided
Haraway with additional reasons for abandoning her alter ego, the cyborg, and for convincing her
readers that dogs might be the better guides through the thickets of
21st-century technobiopolitics. Haraway’s intensive attention to dogs – she and
Cayenne train each other for participation in agility competition – does not
mean, however, that the figure of the cyborg has completely lost its usefulness
as a feminist model of analysis; widening Margulis’ notion of symbiogenesis, we
may say that cyborgs are companion species, too, who live together with human
beings in a kind of “symbiotechnogenesis”. Organic and technical companion
species form a ‘family’ of material-semiotic figures that should help us in
formulating posthumanist alternatives to discriminating and humanist and
strictly dualistic definition of the human and of male/female. Beyond romancing
the relation between animal and human, also beyond an uncritical technophilia,
and in the interest of a radically democratic politics, Haraway urges us to
embrace positive configurations of the unavoidably close encounters between
humans, animals, machines, and various hybrids in a technoscientific era in
order to react quickly and effectively to negative and predominantly neoliberal
discourse – run fast,
bite hard.
Articulating a critique of the subject of
classical humanism and modernity does not necessarily have to be synonymous
with declaring the death of the human subject in an irresponsible postmodernist
spirit. In the age of globalised technoscience, the apocalyptic discourse of
the “end of man” needs to be reconsidered precisely in the name of humanity and
human rights. To counter this prevalent rhetoric, however, one does not have to
remain within the liberal-humanist tradition of separating “I“ from “world“,
nor follow the moral-philosophical stance as “cultivated“[36]
by Martha Nussbaum, for example, but to contribute to a culture that
accentuates processes of transcorporeality and in which human beings are not
(in) the centre of the universe: human and non-human bodies are in constant
exchange with each other and with their environment; they constitute each other
through relationality and dynamic interactions.
The above premise is the starting-point of Developmental Systems Theory
(DST),
which I include as a branch of neo-materialism: with regard to the development
of biological system, DST
rejects gene fetishism or biological determinism, but does not privilege the
influence of the environment on the system neither, as if each system was a tabula rasa;
rather, DST insists
that a (re-)combination of genes within a system and environmental factors that
impact on the system from without, co-produce a unique and, above all, an
incalculable result. This perspective enables a thinking beyond the dead-end
street of nature-versus-culture without abandoning the interpretative paradigm
of constructivism. Biological beings are indeed ‘constructed’ but, as Susan
Oyama, who coined the term DST,
observes:
not only in the sense that they are actively and discursively construed
by themselves and others, but also in the sense that they are, at every moment,
products of, and participants in, their own and others’ developmental
processes. They are not self-determining in any simple sense but they affect
and ‘select’ influences on themselves by attending to and interpreting stimuli,
by seeking environments and companions, by being susceptible to various
factors, by evoking reactions from others.[37]
The politically and ethically
relevant potential of DST consists in the argument that system and
environment condition each other: power, control and agency do not reside with
either side, neither with the self nor with the other, but prove to be multiple
and distributed. What we experience as “I” is thus a self that was and
continues to be fashioned in a relational process that is not grounded in a
negative difference between self and other – be it nature, an animal or a human
being of a different gender, ethnicity or religion, etc. By the same token, DST also strongly mitigates against a definition of information we
encounter above all in Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence research:
information as a binary code of ones and zeros, a blue print, fixed programme
or stable representation of what something or someone unavoidably and eternally
is. A systemic and process-oriented approach opens up lines of research
flights that do not only take genetic determination into account but also
seriously attend to the economic, social and cultural factors in the emergence
and evolution of bodies; a perspective that also shifts the analytical focus
from being/Being to becoming.
This turn in thinking towards the dynamics and processuality of the
world, reality and subjectivity has already been proposed by philosopher of
science Alfred North Whitehead in a lecture series of 1927-28[38] and finds its continuation
in the rhizomatic, molecular or nomadic philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari who have inspired further generations of thinkers and scholars of all
tendencies. In the framework provided by philosophical nomadism, as Braidotti
summarises, the human subject is “fully immersed in and immanent in a network
of non-human (animal, vegetable, viral) relations”.[39] In ethical and political
debates this symbiotic embeddedness and embodiment of the human in a material
network of complex and multiple relations as well as the continuity and mutual
dependency between human and non-human environment needs to be taken into
account much more than it has been hitherto: anthropocentrism needs to be
abandoned and, as Braidotti urges, be replaced by “biocentric egalitarianism”
and “trans-species solidarity” so that an attitude of ecological empathy and
intimacy across the species barrier can be fostered which is also likely to
impact positively on the relationship between the diverse members of the human
species.
In all the approaches introduced so far the biological
body is given agency: genetic mutation and evolution, for example, occurs
through an organism’s adaptive response to its surrounding elements and its
changes. The definition of corporeal matter as (co-)creative principle allows
ridding also the sexual body (sex) of the passivity attributed to it in gender theory so far. For
neo-materialist feminist research practices the sex/gender divide clearly loses
its relevance and analytical potential. Instead, the “sexuality/sex nucleus”
and the category of sexual difference – i.e. the material, sexualised structure
of the subject, are given importance (again).[40] This refocusing of sex and the celebration of
sexuality in all its forms of expression seems particularly urgent in these
days of patriarchal and homophobic conservatism which in the West shows itself
in an enormous hostility to sex. When – probably as part of the backlash
against new definitions of sexuality by homosexual, transsexual, transgender
and other queer forces – reproductive, heterosexual sex and artificial
reproduction without sexual intercourse is given priority in neoliberal,
late-capitalist countries, then a space of jouissance needs to be reopened in
critical theories.
In
the pleasurable sexual act, humans literally become the animals they have
always been, as Alphonso Lingis observes in a beautiful “zoopoetic” text: “When
we … make love with someone of our own species, we also make love with
the horse and the calf, the kitten and cockatoo, the powdery moths and the
lustful crickets” and, when having an orgasm, "[o]ur impulses, our
passions, are returned to animal irresponsibility”.[41] Lingis’ perspective is diametrically opposed to Freud
and followers: in accordance with its concomitant speciesist trajectory,
Freudian psychoanalysis would interpret such fantasies of becoming-animal as
the manifestation of the “perverse” desire to blur the boundaries between human
and animal, a perversion that could be cured therapeutically by taming the
animalistic side of the human, by eradicating all that is not “purely” human.
In the words of Braidotti:
…non-human drives for multiple encounters, wild bodily
motives, heightened sensory perception and unbridled sexual activity, have to
be assimilated or incorporated into a well-organised and functioning organism
and by analogy, into well-regulated and normal orgasms.[42]
This
mainstreaming of sexual acts corresponds to the central split Foucault
identified in his history of sexuality at the onset of modernity in Western
societies; i.e., the split between ars erotica and sciencia sexualis.
Philosophical nomadism of Deleuze and Guattari provides an antidote to these
scientific and phallogocentric discourses and normative constraints in that it
cherishes desire as an affirmative and productive force. It is above all the
concept of “becoming-animal” developed by these two thinkers that provides us
with an altogether different way of viewing the human-animal relation. In
contrast to Freud, Deleuze and Guattari do not attempt to domesticate and thus
humanise the drives and fantasies that bring human beings closer to animals.
For them, the domesticated human and nonhuman animals, the pets and female
crickets on the hearth, belong to the category of oedipal animals.
The incitement to becoming-animal is
often misunderstood: Deleuze and Guattari do not mean that human beings should
really turn into animals or engage in sex with a dog. The idea is, rather, that
while having sex our organs function
like those of animals and, for the duration, manage to escape the
organisational and stratificatory power of societal norms:
Sexuality is the production of a thousand sexes, which are so many
uncontrollable becomings. Sexuality proceeds by way of becoming-woman of the
man and the becoming-animal of the human: an emission of particles. …
Becomings-animal are basically of another power, since their reality resides
not in an animal one imitates or to which one corresponds but in themselves, in
that which suddenly sweeps us up and makes us become – a proximity, an
indiscernibility that extracts a shared
element from the animals far more effectively than any domestication,
utilization, or imitation could: ‘the Beast’”. [43]
Becoming-animal is thus not only a metaphor but
an axis of transformation of the human and, thus, an appropriate paradigm to
use in a critical-posthumanist and anti-speciesist theory that recognises that
it is the animal (or the beast) within us that makes us “all too human”.
Nietzsche’s postulate, as Diana Fuss argues, “syntactically locates at the
center of the human some unnamed surplus – some residue, overabundance, or
excess." Fuss adds that this excess “may be internal to the very
definition of the human, an exteriority embedded inside the human as its own
condition of possibility."[44] In this sense we have never been human
but always already the kind of posthuman mixtures that modern bio and
information technologies increasingly produce and that also grow in numbers in
popular culture. The humanities will still have to develop the adequate
concepts, models and methods for the analysis and ethical intercourse with
those material-semiotic hybrids. But they should do so in dialogue with the
technosciences.
Afterword:
Towards the posthumanities
In
this brief coda, I would like to parallel the growingly obvious kinship between
animals, machines and humans to the hybridisation of knowledge production. To
establish this analogy, I draw on sociologist of science Bruno Latour whose
so-called “symmetrical anthropology“(anthropologie
symmétrique)[45] offers
and impressively enacts a method that does justice to the interactions and
entanglements between nature, culture and representation and that provides
useful categories for transdisciplinary research. Literature, the arts and
other fields of the humanities are an extraordinary resource for qualitative,
cultural and socially-acceptable developments of any modern knowledge society.
However, in order for this enormous potential not be wasted but to become
usable for dealing with pressing tasks and problems of the contemporary world, the
traditional disciplines would have to morph into cultural studies. The required
paradigm shift has already happened in many European institutes and is
reflected in some of these places in their efforts to build bridges between the
natural and humanistic sciences. I do not regard such efforts as a necessary
strategy of survival, nor as chumming up to the “hard" sciences or bowing
to their assumed authority – even though it is indeed my belief that the
humanities only have a future if they collaborate with the technosciences or,
just as the technosciences (and academia in general) need to rebuild themselves
through transdisciplinary research programmes and projects involving artists
and thinkers outside the university walls. As I hope to have demonstrated in
this contribution and as my own engagement with biological and cybernetic
systems theory as well as process philosophy has made me realise, we can find
in disciplines like biology or the neurosciences new paradigmatic models for
the revision of traditional concepts of gender, subjectivity and humanness by
means of which the transformation of the humanities into the posthumanities
could be accelerated. The posthumanities would above all be the home of
post-anthropocentric and anti-speciesist cultural studies whose practitioners
are aware that “culture“ is not “ours“ only but who nevertheless take
responsibility for the consequences of human culture for nonhuman others – for
their sake, for human’s sake and for the sake of retaining the meaning of
humanity and humanism in posthumanism.
an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 3, September 2006, ISSN
1552-5112
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Notes