1A: Human and Animal Partnerships

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“‘A mid-air love consummation. That is the splendid love-way’: Birds and Posthuman Intimacy in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow,” Tali Banin (English, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, talibanin6@gmail.com)

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In the last decade posthumanism has begun to prove productive in the analysis of modernist literature. Posthumanism’s inception arguably dates back to a crisis in humanist identity at the turn of the 20th century and, tellingly, various literary texts of that period poignantly try to reevaluate the position of the human vis-à-vis the nonhuman, considering and even embracing nonhuman alterity. Attempting to join this critical inquiry, I ask how a shifting definition of the human/animal binary can be employed to unsettle the humanist perspective on love and intimacy. Laden with the heritage of Romantic and earlier traditions, love is ideologically inflected and regulated by longstanding systems of beliefs and ideals. Can the animal help envision a different form of love, a “posthuman intimacy”? Focusing on birds, particularly eagles, in D. H. Lawrence’s 1915 novel The Rainbow, I examine those instances in which human and bird “leak” one into the other in scenes of intimate embrace. At various points, bird imagery is used not to invoke established literary tropes but rather to draw on the bodily movements of birds in shaping the movement and action of the human characters during their embrace. Thus, for example, Lawrence finds in the real-life bald eagle courtship ritual, a dazzling midair display called “cartwheeling,” a fulfillment of his idiosyncratic ideal of love: “mutual unison in separateness.” At the end of the eagle ritual, the birds split and fly off in separate directions — they must disengage to avoid a fatal fall. Lawrence’s characters struggle with and ultimately subvert the cultural ideal of love as a perfect union, a complete fusion in which the lover’s individuality is sacrificed and replaced by joint identity with the other. By inviting the eagles to inform the embrace of his protagonists, Lawrence promotes an intimacy that incorporates a constitutive component of separation, thus defying one of the basic tenets of romantic ideology.

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“End Stories: Deaths Against Animal Studies,” Susan McHugh (English, University of New England, smchugh@une.edu)

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Comparison of animal slaughter to human genocide is among the most reviled animal-rights strategies, yet in the past few decades novelists, filmmakers, and human rights activists have started to revisit the histories of neglected human cultural atrocities to ask how they intersect with anthropogenic extinctions along with more deliberate acts of killing animals. How has this become possible? Selecting a few case studies from a storytelling revolution gone global -- including those of Inuit with semi-feral working dogs in the frozen north, Maghrebi tribespeople with various species of wild and domestic ungulates in the deepest Sahara, Native Pacific peoples and sea creatures in the tropics – I locate within them some vibrant if unlikely forms of resistance to the forces of destruction, along with lessons to be learned by those seeking to revitalize animal studies as an academic project.

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“Relational Redemption and Theologies of Dog Training,” Katharine Mershon (Divinity, University of Chicago, kpflaum@uchicago.edu)

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“Relational Redemption and Theologies of Dog Training,” foregrounds a reciprocal model of redemption by exploring a collection of first-person narratives written by feminist scholars and dog trainers, Vicki Hearne and Donna Haraway. Although they draw on religious rhetoric and practices in different ways, both describe their animal training experiences as a redemptive process that creates a form of interspecies communication, which affects both the human and the dog. Yet this process is not as straightforward as the structure of redemption narratives might suggest. Dog training entails continuous communication failures, and I argue that understanding redemption via failure provides a more useful means of reorienting ourselves to redemption in ways that allow for the recognition of race, gender, and species difference. Narratives of failed redemption make space for the diversity and individuality of both humans and dogs, thereby resisting the myth of homogeneity that is built into the structure of redemption narratives.

 

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1B: Robot Humanities

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“Art ‘Reveals Your Soul’: The Artistic Other in Speculative Worlds,” Tammy Durant (Literature and Language/Gender Studies, Metropolitan State University, Tammy.Durant@metrostate.edu)

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Whether it’s Samantha’s musical compositions (Spike Jonze’s Her), Rachel’s piano playing (Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner), or Data’s odes and paintings (Star Trek Next Generation), the artistic nonhuman is a staple of speculative fiction and film. As often as not, scenes of human judgement fast follow scenes of nonhuman artistic activity, as human viewers of the art question whether nonhuman art can be original, profound, and revelatory. Such scenes impress upon the audience, of course, a bittersweet recognition, through all the apparent difference, of the nonhuman’s essential humanity. As Tommy and Kathy learn when creating works for Madame’s gallery, art “reveals your soul” (Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go).  In the midst of narratives which otherwise quite radically probe ontological possibilities in cutting-edge variety and detail, this trope of the emotionally deep Artistic Other encourages a Romantic, nostalgic, and essentialist reading of artistic production (associated with humanist theories of the soul, of the Cartesian subject, of creativity, of imagination, of originality, of depth and meaning).

 

My paper points to the paradox inherent in such readings of the humanized and humanistic Artistic Other, given that contemporary postmodern ideas about artistic production are much more likely to invoke surface, simulacra, irony, gesture, concept. The tension inherent in the figure of the Artistic Other in the age of the Death of the Artist creates a ground for the cultural reenactment of the tragic loss and possible recuperation of Western art.  The paper ends with a consideration of what nonhuman artistic production in speculative worlds can teach us about valuing animal or A.I. artistic production in this world.

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“Lovely Machines: Robots at the End of the World,” Bill Hutchison (English, University of Chicago, hutch@uchicago.edu)

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Robot love stories are nothing new, but since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in 1929, rarely has falling in love with a robot on-screen led to anything but tragedy. No matter the physical verisimilitude, the ineffable emotional equipment required to return love is typically depicted as absent in the robot. While relationships with robots can be consummated – as with Pris, the “pleasure model” of Blade Runner or Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Data who is “fully functional” and “programmed in multiple techniques” – they cannot be requited. Humans have not discovered how to make robots that love us back, and so we seduce ourselves with machines by producing fantasies of seduction machines.

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Using Alex Garland’s 2014 film Ex Machina as my primary case study, I track the intersection of technological development, corporate personality, and the desire for intimacy. In the contemporary moment, I argue, intimacy with robots has become apocalyptic – loving a robot means the end of the world. It is, quite literally, the end of the line, rendering moot the question of reproductive viability. However, true to its etymological roots, the apocalypse is also revelatory, disclosing a new world whose futurity is impossible to grasp or reckon with. The apocalyptic affairs I take up in this paper reveal a catastrophic view of intimate connection, in which technological mediation is no longer a point of disconnection or mistaken intimacy but is itself the new object of desire. Robot love stories are not world-ending simply because someone wants intimacy with a robot, but because such stories are a way of imagining the end of intimate possibility altogether.

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“Big Data, Automation, and Animal Wellbeing: Will Driverless Vehicles Break for Squirrels?,” Jo Ann Oravec (Information, Technology, and Supply Chain Management, University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, oravecj@uww.edu)

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Humans have made personal decisions that affect animal wellbeing for millennia, signaling these decisions through such modes as religious expressions and even bumper stickers (for example, “I brake for animals”). The advent of driverless cars (autonomous vehicles) has introduced a new assortment of decision making processes involving wildlife as well as domesticated animals; related issues emerge with the control structures associated with automated farm equipment, wind turbines, and other exposed mechanical devices.  Many of the algorithms involved in these systems are proprietary and kept secret (Pasquale, 2015).  Machine learning (artificial intelligence) is often incorporated in these automated systems, providing little direct guidance as to how specific instances will be handled since the systems are designed to acquire knowledge and thus change their operations over time.  This paper explores the social and legal decisions involved in whether or how automated systems will take the wellbeing of animal life into account.  Issues as to what indeed constitutes “animal life” (what animals are considered as worth “braking” for) will also emerge as assumptions are made about animal wellbeing.  For example, are domesticated animals (presumably wearing collars with sensors) to be treated differently than wildlife?  The paper examines issues involving these initiatives from the perspectives of those using as well as designing these systems.  It will attempt to articulate how economic factors are construed in the systems’ design and implementation. Community-level discourse as to how potential or recorded damage to wildlife could affect ecosystems could also play a role in system-related discourse.

 

An ethical motto that is often associated with Google is “don’t be evil” (Oravec, 2013, 2014).  Designing complex automated systems so they avoid certain identified negative outcomes (“evil”) and are understandable for their participants as well as function as intended are goals that are often unattainable.  This paper explores the responsibility of system designers and manufacturers to be transparent about the assumptions (if any) that are embedded in automated systems as to how animal life is construed and how or whether these original assumptions are being altered through machine learning processes.  Insights about the impacts the systems may have upon animal wellbeing could emerge over time rather than be apparent early in their implementations, possibly resulting in severe damages to wildlife before any legal or political processes converge to deal with these ill effects.  However, information may still be exchanged about animal welfare in informal ways: sharing of insights about how the systems deal with animal life may primarily be construed in terms of “folk knowledge” (Gelman, 2011). Narratives about animal wellbeing are already routinely shared through such informal modes as face-to-face interaction and social media (Michael, 2004). 

 

How, if ever, will the assumptions embedded in complex automated systems with artificial intelligence controls be made transparent and exposed to public scrutiny?  The paper also addresses the related ethical and legal concerns faced directly by the participants in these systems-- such as those in the “driver’s seats” of autonomous vehicles, who sometimes are provided with override capacities.

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Talking Lunch: “Why Teach Animal Studies?”

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Moderator: Joela Jacobs (German, University of Arizona, joela.jacobs@email.arizona.edu)

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In this lunchtime discussion, we will talk about the potential and the challenges of teaching Animal Studies in various environments. How can an emphasis on animals attract freshmen or invigorate a graduate seminar, and how does the idea or representation of “the animal” take shape across disciplines? What works and doesn’t work in a large core/GenEd course or in online classes, and how can animal studies come alive through hands-on experiences with a smaller group? How do class conversations about animals productively intersect with issues of social justice and equity? The discussion will focus on topics chosen by the attendees, and everybody’s experiences and contributions are welcome.

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2: Insisting on Animal Difference

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“Animal law, justice and ethics: the re-constitution of human-animal relations,” Nicole Anderson (Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies, University of Macquarie, nicole.anderson@mq.edu.au)

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Drawing on the widespread practice of capital punishment of animals in the Middle Ages, the aim of this talk is to demonstrate that human ethics either do not or cannot apply to animals, or is applied anthropomorphically, so that the co-constitution of the human and non-human animal (both morally and socially) is denied or is acknowledged but only conditionally and within the bounds of humanist discourse. In this sense there is potential danger for the human and non-human animal to end up not only without relation to each other, but where the differences between animal species are reduced to the same so that the domination of the human over the animal prevails.  However, if we attempt to re-think our ethical relations between human and animal away from its predominant one-directionality (i.e. only humans can be ethical, not animals, and which is evident in the contemporary ‘rights’ discourse surrounding animals) by  destabilizing these humanist and human-centric assumptions underpinning our ethical practices and positions on animals, then we may be able to re-imagine an alternative vision of human animal relations in and through the notion of a contextual-relational morality (not ethics). This kind of morality reveals that not only are our relations with animals always already co-constituted, but non-human animals have been instrumental in human moral development.

 

“At Its Limits: A Report from the Animal Revolution wherein resistance exceeds understanding,” Ron Broglio (English, Arizona State University, ronbroglio@gmail.com)

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The following is a report of animals in revolt as further proof of animals not heeding human mandates of dwelling. This spring quarterly report will focus on the failure of animals to heed our symbolic and semiotic systems which we impose upon them. It has come to light that our meaning-making cannot contain the larger world outside the human which rushes in at unexpected moments carrying a message from elsewhere incompatible to our own. Contained in this report: escapees from an Oklahoma slaughterhouse seek refuge, Pope Francis’s dove attacked and denied transcendental signification, US Airways Flight 1549 and a battle for the airways, and the curious incident of several carthorses and their philosophical ramifications.

 

"Museum of Nonhumanity: On Making Animality History," Terike Haapoja (Independent Artist, mail@terikehaapoja.net)

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Museum of Nonhumanity is a project by Gustafsson&Haapoja, a collaboration between visual artist Terike Haapoja and author Laura Gustafsson. The touring full size museum presents a history of the distinction between humans and other animals, and the way that this artificial boundary has been used to oppress human and nonhuman beings. The Museum also hosts lecture programs in which local civil rights and animal rights organizations, academics, artists, and activists will propose paths to a more inclusive society through an intersectional approach.

Museum of Nonhumanity approaches animalization as a nexus that connects xenophobia, sexism, racism, transphobia, and the abuse of nature and other animals. A species definition of “human” and “animal” in animal studies discourses is misleading, framing out essential traditions of thought that emerge from the traditions of the oppressed and the animalised. Thus before talking about post-Human, we’d need to enter the era of post-Animal: an era where animalisation of humans and other beings is history.

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3A: Species/Biodiversity Loss

 

“Fracking the Pastoral: Mathew Henderson’s The Lease,” Sarah Beth Dimick (English/Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, Northwestern University, sarah.dimick@northwestern.edu)

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Are oilfields pastoral landscapes?  Are they sites of the anti-pastoral?  The necropastoral?  This paper engages environmental scholarship on pastoral literature to reflect on poetic portrayals of fracking, both as an extractive process and as a cultural phenomenon.  Focusing on the Canadian oil fields in Alberta and Saskatchewan, I argue that oil reserves force a new consideration of the pastoral, updating entrenched environmental ideologies for the Anthropocene.

 

“Loss of potential chimney swift (Chaetura pelagica) nest and roost sites over ten years in a college town,” Alexis Smith (Biological Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago, athabascae@gmail.com)

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When settlers cleared North American forests, chimney swifts (Chaetura pelagica) began nesting in the settlers’ chimneys. In spite of this adaptation, the species is declining and is currently classified as Near Threatened. According to the IUCN, the chimney swift’s most significant threat is the decreasing availability of suitable chimneys. However, there have been few empirical studies to evaluate the rates or drivers of chimney loss. Understanding the drivers of chimney loss can inform and improve chimney swift conservation initiatives, and may even help to identify potential stakeholders.

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This study investigates the hypothesis that university-related gentrification, sometimes called “studentification”, is one driver of chimney loss. Using archived Google Earth Street View, existing chimneys and chimneys lost between 2007 and 2017 were identified in a 5 km2 square encompassing a university campus (FSU, Tallahassee, FL). Of 380 chimneys present in 2007, 87 were destroyed by the end of 2017 (22.9% lost in 10 years). Two of the most important causes of chimney loss in the study area were college student accommodation (creating student housing, parking lots, or university facilities) and re-roofing (repairing the existing roof without maintaining the chimney, likely to reduce the cost).

 

This study will continue to investigate chimney loss in college towns throughout the chimney swift’s range, but a closer look at a single town allows for exploration of the social losses that coincided with this habitat loss. For example, some of the houses demolished to make way for student housing and parking were spaces where the local punk community held shows, potlucks, and meetings. One of the chimney-dense areas most at risk of future university encroachment is the historical, primarily black neighborhood of Frenchtown. These examples illustrate that our futures are intertwined, and that cultural, historical, and biodiversity conservation efforts could be stronger if our efforts are combined.

 

“Choral, a work in progress,” localStyle: Marlena Novak (Film, Video, New Media & Animation, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, mnovak1@saic.edu) and Jay Alan Yim (Composition and Music Technology, Bienen School of Music, Northwestern University, jaymar@northwestern.edu)

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The collaborative localStyle was founded in Amsterdam by Marlena Novak and Jay Alan Yim. They use the senses to trigger reassessment of existing situations, beginning in 2003 to address issues of climate change and resource extraction, and expanding since 2006 to focus on non-human others via themes such as the mating behavior of hermaphroditic marine flatworms, the sonification of electric fish from the Amazon, experimental Eurasian blackbird grammar, and the presumptive logic underlying human taxonomic systems. Their intermedia works—which includes experimental 3D, video, sound, interactivity, live performance with electronics, audience participation, and resistance gardening—have been presented in museums, galleries, and alternative venues in more than forty cities worldwide. Novak is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation; Yim teaches at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music.

 

We are currently developing a project comprising 89 video display panels and an 8 channel audio system. The focal point is the symbiotic relationship between coral polyps and the photosynthetic dinoflagellates that provide the majority of their nourishment. Not only is this emblematic of mutually beneficial hybrid plant-animal interactions, but reefs worldwide are ecosystems in crisis: warming oceans threaten corals at a rate faster than many species can adapt, creating the potential for catastrophic loss. A newly-developed quantitative global index for coral bleaching events (2013, 2016) by Luisa Marcelino’s research group at Northwestern University holds out the promise of identifying species better adapted to survive. Their research also points to coral polyps as architects, as the fractal properties of their skeletons redistribute light as a photosynthetic resource within the colony. Incorporating this data as a parametrical driver of the electronic soundscape will be one of the positively-oriented facets—in the face of Anthropogenic climate change—of the multimedia design.

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3B: Alternative Apocalypse

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“Of Boars, Ostriches, and Horses: Nuclear Radioactivity and ‘More-Than’-Animals IN Fukushima,” Philipe Depairon (Art History, Université de Montréal, philippe.depairon@umontreal.ca)

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A common theme that runs through the depictions of nuclear landscapes is the absence of human and, as vegetation invades buildings, the “victory” of Nature over Mankind. In fact, the pictures we have of Hiroshima and Chernobyl, Hiroshima and the Bikini Islands, are not only devoid of humans, but also of animals; this absence has been accordingly understood as reinforcing an aesthetics of ruins, which offers the viewer a post-human version of a pristine and unstained Nature. This ideology has recently been challenged by various photographs of the 2011 nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima. Amongst the images of the evacuation zone, photos of animals freely roaming the city have raised questions concerning their status and their future. In this sense, the absurd snapshots of an ostrich running on the deserted streets have thus brought forth the question of what happens to these beings during and after a nuclear fallout, and how we consider them. Furthermore, works such as Kazuma Obara’s series depicting a horse breeder makes clear the tragedy underlying the lack of consideration of the animals that must be left behind to die of a slow death. However, the photoreports of the rising population of radioactive boars has shed a different light on these beasts. They not only thrive without any human to hunt them, but their meat has become dangerous in itself, having absorbed nuclear radiations in their very particles, thereby constituting a potential menace to humankind: they are “more-than” animals.

 

“What is This ‘Post-’ in Post-Environmentalism?,” Sean Meighoo (Comparative Literature, Emory University, sean.meighoo@emory.edu)

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Although the term “post-environmentalism” only seems to have entered public discourse following the appearance of Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus’s controversial essay “The Death of Environmentalism” in 2004, the term emerged much earlier with the publication of John Young’s book Post Environmentalism in 1990.  Instead of focusing on the recent series of scholarly debates surrounding this term, though, I would like to turn my attention to two pieces of work that appeared even earlier than Shellenberger and Nordhaus’s essay or Young’s book: Joni Mitchell’s song “Big Yellow Taxi,” released on her album Ladies of the Canyon in 1970; and Talking Heads’ song “(Nothing But) Flowers,” released on their album Naked in 1988.

 

While the term “post-environmentalism” is not mentioned as such in either one of these pieces, I want to suggest nonetheless that “(Nothing But) Flowers” presents what we could call a post-environmentalist response to the environmentalist anthem “Big Yellow Taxi.”  Whereas Mitchell’s sparsely arranged song is driven by a lone acoustic guitar and features the famous lyrics, “They paved paradise / And put up a parking lot,” Talking Heads’ densely layered song is driven by multiple electric guitar and other instrumental tracks and features the lyrics, “Where, where have they [cars] gone? / Now, it’s nothing but flowers.”  Far from disavowing the environmentalist politics of “Big Yellow Taxi,” however, “(Nothing But) Flowers” reiterates them – or repeats them with a difference – by offering us an ironic take on the practical realities of living in a post-environmentalist world.  It is in this sense, then, that a close reading of both Mitchell’s and Talking Heads’ songs can provide a critical approach to the politics of post-environmentalism itself.

 

“Dying Earths and the Time that Remains,” Timothy S. Murphy (English, Oklahoma State University, timothy.murphy@okstate.edu)

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Arising at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century from the paradoxical juxtaposition of Darwinian evolutionary theory and Kelvin’s emergent thermodynamics within a cosmological framework, dying earth narrative often straddles the line dividing the rationalism of science fiction from the magic of fantasy. Dying earth narrative depicts the end of the world in extremely slow motion, and as such it corresponds to Giorgio Agamben’s explication of messianic time as operational time, the time it takes to construct an image of time, thus the time that remains to us before we enter into eternity according to Christian eschatology. Agamben glosses messianic time as “the time that time takes to come to an end,” but also as “the time that we ourselves are,” as distinct from chronological time, “the time in which we are.” However, in dying earth narrative, the time that remains will give way not to the eternity announced by the messiah but to the extinction of all life. In H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1896), the earth dies incrementally, as a consequence of the inexorable processes of physical law to which all life is subject but that humans may still aspire to master through science and, indirectly, progressive politics. The novel’s depiction of human and animal devolution serves as a warning to readers: act now to prevent this future, before it’s too late. In William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (c.1903) and M. John Harrison’s Viriconium saga (1971-1985), physical law itself gradually corrodes as the future stretches into deep time, undermining and eventually foreclosing human aspirations to intellectual and practical mastery over and even adaptation to the cosmos, the planet and even the social order. In all these narratives, the encounter of human narrators with non- or abhuman agents displaces the anthropocentrism of conventional science fiction and fantasy, posing new challenges to and opening up new possibilities for thought, storytelling and even politics that are potentially more responsive to the demands of the Anthropocene than the technocratic solutions on offer today.

 

 

 

Plenary Performance

        

“Don’t Feed the Animas: Finnegan’s Lustre in Gene Clusters-The reflective vocabulary of anatomy in All Organisms Living (AOL)," Adam Zaretsky (Marist College)

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The vocabulary of All Orgnisms Living (AOL) anatomy does not ground life’s reflective qualities at the four corners: language, lustre, gene mapping and logic. Electric­muta­gonads reek undue to the femurs produced in the Thai Gulag Uteri granted by the textual raptor. Language, luster, gene mapping and logic are all beyond human comprehension. Comprehension is a convenient white lie. Accordingly, your dystopian Electro­ Mutagen might Use us to explain the UN 'one feed e­muta­gonad' that has been wired under the rubric of the real. Comprehension is a myth perpetuated by SchizoPhobics. Somalis find the whole thing an undue and claustrophobic thugee show launched by the textual raptor undoing ruffled haunches in exchange for pilot paychecks. Forms distain use­value over the millenial symbolisms. Grammatology is reared against in the arts. Electric­muta­gonads reek undue to the femurs produced in the Thai Gulag Uteri granted by the textual raptor. Poetry is a shrill deathknell to the sensical. Over do it with tactical linguistic culling. Coerce leftists on the inbound rim. Keep the right tied to reactionary harnesses. See if life can endure streusel modernism once again. If we are to take the Schizogenesis of anatomy as a form of art or poetry, we will have to loosen our retentive grammars and feed the anima that naming provides. Bring on the hula, knitting, the CIA, facial tics when presented with pussy. Changes should enter Irreverant Anterior Proteins if salvation is undue to Sicily's thugs or the Thai "gnaw Suva" which Tacky­lingus entails. Thawing helps interrupt inborn television cues, suppressing reverence of public bulletins. Often enough, clearing soot from Techilingus reveals a deep well of alternatives (ask siblings who thaw GIs during stripteases.) Comparing novel nomenclatures of neologism in gene families and luster groupings, we arrive at the mirror of our own anatomy and non-human reflective capabilities at the limit of literature’s relation to the empirical process: parrahesia. Lauditory thaw provides a wry anti­usury footer often unseen in stunted turnkey scenarios.           

 

 

 

4A: Capitalist Objects

 

“Ontological Remix: Options for Output,” Kira deCoudres (Independent Artist, kiradecoudres@gmail.com)

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Ontological Remix is a practice-based philosophy 

that uses modern media editing tools to analyze methods of bodily distortion. 
By cueing loop patterns, selective cut n’ paste tactics, 
and messy mash-ups, a science of the sensible arises, 
questioning our chosen perceptual limits. 

Warning: Presentation may include trace elements of 
Live Performance and Media Art Mixing. 

The body is a fleshy board of input and output options. 
Plug in a nose, the body can smell and output snot
Unplug an ear, give more attention to tactility and vision

The capacity of your senses render you but a tuning fork
But what, exactly, are you tuned in to? What are you turned into?

 

 “Experiments in Mutual Aid: Staging Continuous Economies of Cooperation,” Garrett Leroy Johnson (Media Arts and Sciences, Arizona State University, gljohns6@asu.edu)

 

In the early part of the 20th Century, the philosopher-scientist and political activist Pyotr Kropotkin produced a theory of “mutual aid” based on observations of animal and insect communities For Kropotkin, some form of mutual aid was practiced by “all classes of animals,” citing examples of mutual protection, sociability, and associations. Tracing Malthusian competition through Darwinian individualism, Kropotkin divests from survival of the fittest, opening up the conversation onto collectivized economies of labor and resources in both nature and culture. Translating into human political economies, mutual aid disrupts capitalistic notions of property, value, and exchange -- articulating what might later be called post-scarcity anarchism. Without insisting that competition or cooperation are pre-given, naturalistic, rules of operation for organisms and systems, we might regard them as tendencies which find themselves amplified under different conditions. These tendencies point to some open questions:

 

In a time when competition permeates the mental, social, economic dimensions of the West, what does mutual aid suggest to a post-capitalist imaginary? To our evacuation from the anthropocentric human subject? What are the sufficient techniques of experimentation to problematize cooperative economies within and without the dominance of financed capital? How can we consider the roles, phenomenologies, and materialities of non-humans towards thinking a non-anthropocentric economies? What other implications can we flesh out in other domains, institutions, and technologies? In this presentation, I’ll relate some initial experiments using responsive media which amplify the lived experience of mutualistic economic dynamics: abundance, cooperation, and continuous transaction.

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“Towards a Sociological Noumenon, or an Object-Friendly Sociology,” Ryan Alan Sporer (Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago, rspore2@uic.edu)

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In this paper I chart out intellectual lineages within sociology that complicate the primacy of the “social fact”. I begin with the philosophical origins and disciplinarity demands of sociology, showing the construction of Standard Social Science Model, while inconveniently the continued presence of nonsocial variables. The ascent of sociology as discipline would refuse nonhumans a consequential existence with the social world.

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The paradigmatic shift of the cultural and linguistic turn not only ignored the non-social world, it subsumed it into representations. However, dissidents emerged to question this absolutism of language. They hoped that the “acknowledgement of material agency [could] help us escape from the spell of representation” (Pickering 1985:13).

 

Popping up in three corners of sociology was Environmental Sociology which challenged the Human Exceptionalism Paradigm; Sociology of Knowledge and Technology’s (or Science and Technology Studies) challenged the exclusive focus on human agency; and feminist approaches to scientific knowledge production problematized the body in discursive and material ways. These approaches challenged the anthropocentricism of sociology, while avoiding the claim of reductionism. More recently has been proliferation of subfields that continue this project: the “greening of Marxism”, Critical Realism, Animal Studies, Disaster Studies, and Sociology of Emotions.

 

Moving beyond the “social construction of reality”, this current motley crew of Object-Friendly Sociology theories focus on “social production” (Fox and Alldred 2017). In general five lessons have been taught through their critical work. They are: nonhumans make durable social worlds possible; humans are entangled with nonhumans as they perform their representations like a dance; nonhumans possess an agency that is temporally emergent, as is humans; humans and nonhumans can navigate one another in similar ways; and although there are differences in agencies, there is no separation. Taken individually or together these works push towards a Sociological Noumenon.

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4B: The Political (Construction of the) Animal

 

“A Tragedy of Kinds: King Lear (with Sheep),” Laurie Shannon (English, Northwestern University, shannon4444@gmail.com)

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In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, the word “kind” appears in places where contemporary speakers would use “species.” This paper considers the philosophical classification of “human being” in Shakespeare’s King Lear (1603-06), stressing the play’s specifically comparative zoographic framework and its grounding in earlier natural historical traditions that enumerated human and animal attributes in surprisingly complex ways across kind (even to humanity’s detriment). The main classical source for such creaturely-comparatist lore is Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis (77-79 AD), widely influential in Latin learning and vernacular translations alike. The talk proposes that Shakespeare’s use of cross-species comparison achieves a lively “human negative exceptionalism” before Cartesian interventions on behalf of an idea of “Man” in the mid-seventeenth-century. With this groundwork in Shakespeare’s text, the talk focuses on a contemporary play, a tragedy of kinds, that takes up King Lear with similarly multi-species motivations. Analysis of Missouri Williams’s extraordinary King Lear with Sheep – staged in London in 2015, and, as the title says, with sheep – suggests not only how viable it is for humans to consider human being through animal eyes, but also how cogent a species critique can stem from it. Did this performance remain a “tragedy”? By its lights, the talk classifies humankind (then and now) as the tragic animal – with the help of the one biped and the nine wooly and crowned four-footed tragedians who put on King Lear with Sheep.

 

Title “Inventing Animals: The Cultural-Political Negotiation over Animality in Modern China,” Guangshuo Yang (History, Northwestern University, gy@u.northwestern.edu)

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Why study the history of animality? Because too often we take the category of “the animals” for granted. My paper historicizes animals as a constructed cultural category based in diverse and often competing cosmologies and epistemologies. I trace the translingual genealogy of the modern Chinese term for animals, dongwu (lit. “animated object”), exploring its transformation from an arcane word of classical Confucianism to the naturalized denotation to non-human animals. Situating the rise of the term in China’s semi-colonial position at the historical juncture, I argue that dongwu’s epidemic authority derived from its association with modern science helped its displacement of other categories of animals rooted in local customs, Confucian ritual systems, imperial legal codes, and native scholarship. This linguistic and conceptual shift strengthened the anthropocentrism in native thoughts, providing new formulations of political projects of social engineering, which justified the violent exploitation of peoples, animals, and the environment in terms of Social Darwinism. On the other hand, fearing their marginalization in a secularizing country, religious groups spearheaded by Buddhists seized animal protection as a crucial battleground to reclaim their relevancy vis-à-vis Chinese modernity. Courting both believers and laity, their enchanting vision of animality resonated with the Chinese citizenry, which was anxious about political and social chaos. In addition, the invention of “animals” offered new cultural norms and symbolic capital for the politics of legitimacy and respectability, which were consequential for the development of Chinese nationalism, the construction of the state apparatus, the role of religion, and the rise of scientism. By recovering the plurality of past animality, we may be better positioned to imagine the future possibilities of non-humans.

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“Defining Anthropocentrism,” Sam Schulte (Committee for the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, University of Chicago, samlschulte@gmail.com)

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What are we talking about when we talk about anthropocentrism? Foundational works in the still-developing and diverse Animal Studies corpus demand an engagement with the idea of the nonhuman beyond that of a simple other. This can be described broadly as a rejection of the notion that 'Man is the Measure of All Things' along epistemological, political, and ethical lines that de-center human being as the primary frame for understanding the world. For this reason, anthropocentrism as a key concept in animal/nonhuman studies (along with anthropomorphism) often forms the basis for critique of work insufficiently engaged with the limitations of human perspective. Given the rhetorical importance of this concept and its pervasiveness across the disciplines used to engaged questions of the human-nonhuman boundary, I offer a technical definition of the term in the interest of adding specificity and clarity to these critiques. This paper defines anthropocentrism functionally as 'the horizon of perspective whose conditions of possibility are limited according to ego-subjectivity' and, in addition to arguing for the validity of the definition itself, explores how anthropocentrism operates as a limitation on the set of inferences that can be made about both humans and nonhumans. 

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Plenary Roundtable: "Why Do Animal Studies?"

 

Five scholars at the forefront of Animal Studies and the Environmental Humanities converse about the questions, approaches, and work that excite them. Is Animal Studies, as an academic subfield, dead or dying, or has it simply grown to include more, and more diverse, objects? How, if at all, might the semi-liquid categories of the quasi-, post-, anti-, non-, and para-animal illuminate the shifts, and even breaks, to which our conference is responsive?

 

 

 

5A: (Not) Eating Animals

 

“The Capitalist Zoo,” Stephen Eisenman (Art History, Northwestern University, s-eisenman@northwestern.edu)

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Every step in the development of capitalist agriculture in the 19th and 20th centuries was accompanied by a widening of the moral divide between humans and animals, wild no less than domesticated. The more animals were segregated from humans, the more people came to accept the “thingification” of animals, to cite Erich Fromm. Whatever associations domesticated animals once had with agrarian life and face-to-face society disappeared as meat became available in large quantities in butcher shops and then supermarkets. Whatever symbolism the lion, elephant, bear and ostrich may once have carried, was erased as zoo animals became an abstract genus-species associated with a particular distant colony or nation. In 1848, Karl Marx, writing from London, (site of the first, modern zoo), described how modern capitalism removed the “halo” from “every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.” The same may be said about animals. The capitalist zoo stripped of its halo every animal hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It converted the elephant, the lion and the tiger into mere circus attractions. It changed the dolphin, the whale and the seal into acrobats, paid with wages of dead fish. The nature of the bond between humans and animals – forged in the communal age and altered by tributary society -- was thus profoundly transformed by the growth of capitalism and capitalist agriculture, and the modern zoo can only be understood in that context.

 

“Fellow, Matter, Meat: Technology, Ideology, and the Contradictory Construction of Animals in the 21st Century,” Alba Tomasula y Garcia (English, University of California, Berkeley, albat@berkeley.edu)

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In 2013, lawyer Steven Wise filed papers on behalf of Tommy, a chimpanzee, suing his owner for violating Tommy’s right to not be abused as a legal, if nonhuman, “person.” In the same year, around 150 billion animals, many of them described as “protein conversions units,” were bred and slaughtered in conditions designed with the assumption that those animals are malleable, consumable objects. We live at a time when even cognitive neuroscience increasingly shows the difference between human and animal existence to be narrower than previously thought; simultaneously, advances in fields such as genetics make it possible—and permissible—to “edit” animal bodies as if they were written manuscripts. Inherent in this paradox is the fact that the lives of animals are increasingly defined by progressively dichotomous theories, and their concomitant technologies, over what animals “really” are. While it may be possible to scientifically prove that animals are “people” too, the scientific control we exert over their bodies (even down to the molecular level) also suggests that animals are not, after all, much more than a collection of protein. Drawing on the work of theorists such as Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe, Nicole Shukin, and others, this paper will contrast the construction of animals in zoological studies with the construction of animals in industrial practice to argue that the technology through which we interact with beastly life gives rise to perceptions on the “essential” nature of animals, more than “pure” beliefs about the “essential” nature of animals drives ideology and our subsequent treatment of them.

 

 “Looking Back and Forward: The National Vegetarian Museum,” Kay Stepkin (Founder, National Vegetarian Museum, info@vegmuse.org) and Connie Johnston (Geography, DePaul University, CJOHN238@depaul.edu)

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In considering the culture of food in meat-loving Western societies such as the US, the role and history of plant-based diets is frequently viewed as a mere footnote.  This role and history may be seen as especially marginal in the context of the city of Chicago, the former “hog butcher for the world”.  However, vegetarianism (and veganism) have temporal roots that reach back to before the nascent environmental and animal rights movements of the 1960s and 70s and geographic roots here in the city that once regularly housed more than 100,000 animals awaiting slaughter.  In the present day, the vegetarian movement is exploding: gaining adherents, strength and respect.  In this presentation, we will discuss why unearthing, recording, and preserving this history matters, especially in today’s world, and how the narrative of vegetarianism’s history—here in Chicago and beyond—can shape how our society understands its endurance and future.

 

 

 

5B: Postcolonial/Postsocialist (Not Only) "Animal" Studies

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“Return to the Sources: Non-reduction, from Beekeepers to Camel Herders,” James Hevia and Larissa Jasarevic (History and Global Studies, University of Chicago, jhevia@uchicago.edu, jasarevic@uchicago.edu)

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If you were a beekeeper in Bosnia-Herzegovina, you’d be well-advised to study honeybees. And their voracious global mites. And plants on which their lives hinge. And hive products—honey, propolis, or pollen—on which your medicinal beekeeping counts, the love for the bees aside. And the surplus xenobiotics that snuck into the human-apian artifacts/counterfeits such as wax (+petroleum+lard) foundations. You better know which mushrooms to burn in a smoker, to sooth the apian supersenses, and when to suspect the presence of pesticides, which maim them. Find out the dispersive tendencies of Paenibacillus spores, and still you cannot fool them; you only better read the oozage in the hive cells, spelling out quick contagion and putrid death. Courting life and dodging death, you’d tune in with humidity peaks and temperature drops, wind roses, bloom spells and myriad high contingencies, that draw the juices out of the buried secrets of vegetal origins, or withdraw the open invitations to coupling—proboscis to powder-blushed stamens. What to tell an ethnographer, though? You can recommend her the supers, you can recite the swarm spells, though you and I may not believe them—but we will barely agree on sympathies and qualities that link the earthbound forms with the real—inhuman, non-vegetal, non-animal, intangible—animacy that sustains the worlds. 18,000 worlds, according to Islamic cosmology. ‘Which one matters? Which one will end?’ the ethnographer may ask in order to conduct the relevant study. What to tell?

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If you were a camel herder in northwest British India at the end of the nineteenth century, you’d want your camels to graze on their favorite plants in the drylands between the five rivers of the region.  At least once a week, you’d move them into areas abundant in salt plants so that their complicated digestive system remained in good order.  If you were using your camels for short or longer distance trade, you’d make sure that they were properly loaded and that you worked them no more than two or three days before allowing them to browse and rest. You probably learned a lot about camel-care from elder members of your clan, who taught you how treat irritants like mange, broken bones, and various illnesses with local medicines. When an unusual affliction threatened or when misfortunes struck, you might want to consult others or visit a local Sufi shrine, to make an offering and receive a protective amulet for your animals. You’d also be attuned to the patterns of rainfall, particularly the spring monsoon, and could tell when to move your camels away from soggy areas where biting flies bred for fear that any one of them might spread the dreaded surra disease to your herd. And should an official of the British government be scouting for pack animal, you’d want to head for the depths of the drylands to avoid military impressment.

In this response, an historian and an anthropologist come together to think around primary objects at hand.  Obliged by textual sources and competent interlocutors, impressed by quiet insistence of certain matters of concern, and moved by animal and insective lives—impressed/employed, dead or alive but endangered—the authors each venture a couple of plots and a series of questions that together question the original call for questions— “Why do animal studies?” In short, this is a grounded (but not earthbound) reflection on the implications of non-reductive, all-inclusive, speculatively-inclined turn to more than human and animal inquiry.

 

“Waking Up the British Public with a Roar: Lions, Tigers, and the 1857 Indian Rebellion,” Aisha Motlani (Art History, Northwestern University, aishamotlani2012@u.northwestern.edu)

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The 1857 Indian Rebellion sparked a profound colonial crisis for Britain that led to the dissolution of the East India Company and the imposition of Crown rule. As news of the conflict slowly filtered back to Britain it brought the entire British colonial project into question. The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger was the first visual representation of the 1857 Indian Rebellion (1857-1859) to be widely circulated among a British public eager for information and images of the cataclysmic events taking place so far away. Published in the illustrated satirical magazine, Punch, on August 22, 1857, the engraving was designed by artist and illustrator John Tenniel (1820-1914). It shows a lion pouncing on a tiger that crouches over the lifeless body of a partially-clothed woman and child, an allusion to the rumors of sexual violence perpetrated against British women by Indian rebels that were being circulated in the British press at the time.  This paper examines Tenniel’s animal iconography within the context of British imperial history to show that the engraving’s feline adversaries evoke events and figures from Britain’s colonial past to make sense of the conflicts unfolding in the artist’s present. I also show that Tenniel combined a heightened degree of naturalism in his rendering of lions and tigers with Victorian animal tropes.  In doing so he boosted the emotional impact and the evidentiary status of his engraving while also providing a striking visual exemplar of human-animal interchangeability that became more prevalent in British imperial discourse in the years following the Rebellion.  

 

“Strangeness and Animal Value in Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga and Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker,” Arnab Chakraborty (English, University of Kansas, arnabchakraborty1990@ku.edu)

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My paper argues that  a rhetoric of advocacy is inadequate in negotiating animal value, and examines narrative techniques across two American novels which insist that the “ecological sublime” instead emerges from a realization of precarity across species boundaries. Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga (1975) and Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker (2006) are characterized by a shared investment in the exploration of how local cultural practices are inextricably intertwined with the flourishing of endangered species. Both texts are concerned with a holistic depiction of cross-species interconnectedness and interdependencies, often evoking a sense of the natural sublime in the process. Powers’ novel  calls for a restoration of “strangeness” as a possible solution to human complacency, with regard to both species extinction of the sandhill crane, and traditional appraisals of the neurotypical “human”. On the other hand, Matthiessen’s novel problematizes the same affective category of “strangeness” by refusing to moralize and, consequently, choose between the endangered green turtle and a turtling voyage that was also one of the last vestiges of sustainable fishing practices, before they were substituted by more exploitative and commercial ventures. In conducting a comparative study of both texts, I argue that  “strangeness” and “wonder”, with respect to the animal other, are revealed to be concepts which mean very different things from a postcolonial perspective, in which view, as Ursula K. Heise argues, “biological conservation cannot be conceived apart from the social contexts in which destruction, maintenance, or improvement of natural resources take place”.

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