Traditionally, animals have been viewed as having limited faculties. Their poverty of caulties is supposedly evident in their 'lesser' ability to reason, in their language, and in their use of tools. Their skills are lessened by measuring them against every standard in which we consider ourselves superior, and by this superiority, we differentiate ourselves from them. In each case, the animals are measured by our yardstick and come out wanting. I characterize the supposed inferiority of their abilities by a shorthand called "living on the surface". According to a long cultural and philosophical tradition, animals do not engage in the self-reflexive thought that provides humans with individual and cultural depth of being; instead, animals are said to live on the surface of things. Surfaces are seen as as fleeting appearances, mere shadows lacking the substantiality found in the 'depth' of human interiority. xvi
At stake is the ability to think about the Other, those agents and being radically different from ourselves. How are we to understand that which differs from our capacity to comprehend? The conjecture of this book is that such thinking is possible within particular parameters. Foremost, it is a thinking that arises from the event, action and encounters with the animal others. xvii
The artists considered in this book are not concerned with mimesis or representing animals according to natural history tradition or a kitsch assimilation of animals into our world as tamed or cute or defeated; rather, these artists have unmoored themselves, even ever so slightly, from the cultural grounds of meaning and the solidification of being over becoming. They have become unmoored in order to take seriously the world of the animal on its own terms. In other words, these artists take seriously the problem of animal phenomenology. xx
Engaging in the even that is this question itself is an invitation to a becoming, to a crossing over that restructures what it means to think and what it means to be human, in particular to be human alongside other animals.
By recognizing the impossibility of knowing from the fur of the Other, animal phenomenology asks us to think of our own fragility. The problem announces in advance that our worldview has limits that prevent our pursuits (and our claims arising from them) from being all-encompassing. Instead, in what could be a profound ecological gesture, this question that inscribes within itself its own failure or impossibility allows us to think of human fragility. xxii
Perhaps to ask what is an animal phenomenology concedes too much to humanism. It grants too much to the arguement that there is a divide between humans and all other animals. yet in making this concession, the question as lure proves useful by drawing us into an abyss where 'all other animals' become a wide array of different ways of being. Such a variety - being manifest in so many ways - wears thin the walls of a human / animal divide. Eventually one might ask what are animal's phenomenologies, and the misnomer of a singular animal phenomenology could be put aside. I have maintained the singular question of an animal phenomenology as an opening gambit in what culture calls 'the animal'; it is a play of stakes that eventually open onto more complex questions involving the plurality of animals lurking within the pages of this book. xxiii
Damien Hirst's best-known works grapple with the seemingly alchemical, violent transformation of life to death and opaque to knowable as animals become meat. To understand the significance of such alchemy, the chapter traces meat as the metaphysical moment when the animal is killed for raw material, and human meaning; nature is laid bare, made lifeless and exposed in order to be subsumed within cultural intelligibility. At the same time, the notion that nature can be made fully present to us is worth reconsidering: how do metaphors of nature hiding and nature revealed ground our understanding of animals, and how might we begin to think outside of this predominant approach to nature? xxviii
In as much as the animal world is unknown to us, it remains as what Rainer Maria Rilke calls a "nowhere". Yet as explored and recovered from the artists' works nanoq: flat out and bluesome and (a)fly, their artworks reveal a "nowhere without the no." We cannot know this 'no' through direct investigation and interrogation of the animal or its dwellings; indeed, only by upending the groundedness of home and recalling the stray (animals) in our own dwelling we can obliquely glimpse another's abode. Rilke claims that '[w]e know what is outside us from the animal's face alone. Following Snaebjornsdottir and Wilson a they track the animal world, we can begin to understand an "outside us" that is in our very midst.
The 'outside' or animal's perspective has been strikingly described by the early twentieth-century scientist Jakob von Uexkull, a founding figure in ethnology and biosemiotics. In A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, Uexkull moves beyond mechanistic biology to develop a line of inquiry into the animal's sense of its surroundings - something close to an animal phenomenology. Uexkull presents an infinite variety of perceptual worlds that are as different as the animals themselves. Each animal species holds its own point of view and its own point of view and its own distortions of the actual earth. These perspectives reflect how the body of the animal has evolved over ages to adapt to the earth and to meet the animal's needs. We are left with the understanding that there is no single unitary world and no unified space or time; instead time moves differently for each species, and each animal senses and shapes space quite differently. The work of Snaebjornsdottir and Wilson illustrates the heterogeneity of animal worlds put forth by Uexkull. xxx
In meat there is a transformation from living to dead, from hidden to revealed, and from indigestible to edible. As the maker of this change, meat has a visceral materiality. The material form of dead animal flesh is haunted by the trace of a life transformed into an object through the violence of death. The willful life on an animal becomes an object that shows little ability to resist human understanding, manipulation and consumption. 1
It is a double reaction often provoked by Hirst's work: a repulsion at the materiality of the piece, and an intellectual curiosity about the animal and the making of the work. Hirst succinctly describes this: "Animals become meat. That's abstract." 3
Thus God gave the nature to his creatures, Adam must give the name: to shew they were made for him, they shall be what hee will unto him. If Adam had onely called them by the names which God imposed, this had been the praise of his memory: but now to denominate them himselfe, was the approval of his judgement. At first sight he percieved their dispositions, and so named them as God had made them. He first saw all their insides, we his posterity ever since, with all our experience, can see but their skinnes.As Erica Fudge notes in Perceiving Animals, Adam's ability to name the beasts is equated with his ability to see deeply. Such a gift was given to him by God. Through naming animals, the whole of the animal is made present to Adam and is knowable. Adam knows animals thrugh and through. For Bacon and his contemporaries, banishment from Eden resulted in our inability to perceive animals and thus through perception, understand them. 7
The shark decomposed because it was not adequately preserved. Getting the formaldehyde solution to penetrate through the skin of the animal and into its insides proved a difficult task that was never fully accomplished. Consequently, the animal began to decay from the inside out; its skin wrinkled, and the tank became murky. [...] After its initial display in 1992, the tank became increasingly clouded with decayed flesh, and the shark seemed to sag a bit. So in 1993, the gallery had the shark opened up and its flesh cut out. In place of the inner flesh, the gallery put a fiberglass form and molded the shark skin around it. Hirst was not satisfied with the results: "It didn't look as frightening. You could tell it wasn't real. It had no weight." Interesting here is Hirst's investment in the animal interior as that which was never meant to be seen. His investment in an unseen interior is contrary to his other natural history works in which the insides are intended to be viewed. Vistors to the Saatchi Gallery were not told about the change, and most thought they were looking at an entire shark. Because the audience saw what they believed was a shark, and not a hollowed-out shark, Hirst's comments are curious. Others apparently did not see a massive animal corpse with no weight, so why was it an issue for him? And why would the lack of innards prevent the animal from appearing just as frightening?
Contrary to his work with dissected animals, opening up the shark to insert an artificial form violates the integrity of The Physical Impossibility of Death. In this particular piece, Hirst seems interested in preserving a place for the animal interior as something seperate from the human world, something not to be opened. In this instance, because nature loves to hide, it is allowed to hide. Perhaps it does not hide fully- the shark's death was comissioned after all. However the work can be seen to pivot around the idea that the dead shark "knows" something that is "physically impossible" for the "mind" of the human viewer. 16-7
More striking is he claim by the German Romantic philosopher and natural scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. For Goethe, nature is visible, but we do not have a mind that can see her. As Valentine warns the wayward Faust:
We snatch in vein at Nature's veil,
She is mysterious in broad daylight,
No screws or levers can compel her to reveal
The secrets she has hidden from our sight.
Hadot notes that "her real veil consists in having no veil; in other words, she hides because we do not know how to see her, although she is right before our eyes. Visibility and knowability are turned upside down. While dissection opens the invisible to make it visible and intelligible, Goethe claims that nature is already in the light of day through it remains obscure to us: it is visible - already opened up- but never knowable. Following Goethe's claim, opening up an animal does not equate to knowing the animal. Light does not equal knowledge in this case, and prescence is still sort of absence or mystery. If dissection is meant to open a space for full presence and knowledge - by which we knows / consume the animal flesh - then Goethe has created a different sort of architecture of knowing. Here nature is open but remains invisible, unintelligable. 20-1
Snaebjornsdottir and Wilson examine moments of friction between the animal and human worlds and frictions evident within cultural perception of how to negotiate the nonhuman, including hunting, urban development, and conservation. By examining moments of friction between us and animals, these artists make visible space of the Other that resides as an open secret. We have seen this secret in chapter 1, where nature's "veil consists in having no veil; in other words, she hides because we do not know how to see her, although she is right before our eyes." 58
Animals look back at us, and in this look, the centre and periphery as well as the interiority (of the human) and exterior (of the animal) gets misplaced. Traditionally, sight is possession at a distance: we take in to human interiorit and reason the object of our gaze. When the animal looks back, the hegemony of human vision becomes confounded. The implication is that there is an "interior exterior" to the human, and that we are the subject now made object of an alien look. 58
The animal scrutinizes him [man] across a narrow abyss of non-comprehension. This is why the man can suprise the animal. Yet the animal - even if domesticated - can also surprise the man. The man too is looking across a similar, but not identical, abyss of non-comprehension. And this is so wherever he looks. He is always looking across ignorance and fear. And so, when he is being seen by the animal, he is being seen as his surroundings are seen by him.
Animals look at us, and we are confounded by their radical otherness as well as the fact that we may be objects in their world as much as they are objects in ours. When animals look back at us, we must grant that there may be something of the animal's "self" we do not know. 59
Snaebjornsdottir and Wilson work in the margin between the animal world and the human world. They do not provide a perspective from the animal's point of view, nor solely from the human's. In this they differ from artists such as Per Maning, whose black-and-white video Breather (2000) depicts cattle in a field seemingly videoed from a grazing cow's point of view. With photographs from (a)fly, we are suspended and left to wonder, to question what it means to dwell and just who is dwelling with whom? To appreciate the liminal in their work, it is worth considering how this art opens up the world of the animal but refuses to represent, to speak for, other species.
The diligent reader of Uexkull's work and the attentive viewer of (a)fly perceive the loss of unitary space and time and come to see that our own human world is yet another bubble with distortions and ommisions. Uexkull presents an infinite variety of perceptual worlds that are "manifold and varied as the animals themselves"; each animal species holds its own point of view and its own distortions of the actual earth. These perspectives reflect how the body of the animal has evolved over ages to adapt to the earth and meet the animal's needs. We are left with the understanding that there is no single unitary world, and no unified space or time; instead, time moves differently for each species, and each animal senses and shapes space quite differently. For our 'pets', how long is the time between our going to work and our coming home? How are corners and ledges shaped for a cat, and shaped by it? Here in our most intimate place - our home - we find that our bubble and our world overlaps with anothers. 70
Heidegger's most discussed topography of the animal's world appears in his 1929-30 seminar published as The Fundemental Concepts of Metaphysics: "the stone is wordless; the animal is poor in world; man is world-forming." Animals certainly have environments (Umwelt), but they are not aware of their environments in the same way that humans are. Derrida summarizes Heidegger's position by explaining: "As for the animal, it has access to entities, but, and this is what distinguishes it from man, it had no access to entities as such." Heidegger's lizard, for example, sits on a rock and enjoys the sun, but it does not know the rock as rock, nor sun as sun. Heidegger goes so far as to explain that "[w]hen we say that the lizard is lying on the rock, we ought to cross out the word 'rock' in order to indicate that whatever the lizard is lying on is certainly given in some way for the lizard, and yet is not known to the lizard as a rock." The animal is caught up in a series of relations to other entities without an ability to remove itself from the "captivation" that such a series presents. 86
For Uexkull, the animal's environment is constitution by the "carriers of significance", or "marks", which captivate the animal. All other elements in the world drop off and have no place in the animal world, or what Uexkull calls Umwelt. Thus Heidegger's lizard may know a warm surface though he does not register the rock as rock nor the sun as sun; instead, the animal functions within a world that has carriers or marks of significance. Caught within the series of relations that is their Umwelt, animals simply cannot get outside their surroundings to look around. 86
It is human uprightness - verticality - that sufficiently dis-places us from our surroundings so that we can see the rock at a distance - a rock as rock. Animals do not have this distance: "Their whole being is in the living flesh," as J. M. Coetzee explains. As Derrida has explicated in Of Spirit, "world" is for Heideffer only possible for humans - those beings who have spirit. As much as they are poor in spirirt, animals are left "poor in world." The "uprightedness" of humans is both physical and metaphysical, while animal world is decidedly flat. Without heights and depths, the animals are left with marks on the surface; these marks are a "cross out" that re(marks) in our language the place of their relations. To consider animals and take seriously the roles of surfaces to thought and language means to reevaluate the physical and metaphysical uprightness of humans. 87
When Coetzee's protagonist Elizabeth Costello is asked if life means less to animals than to humans, she retorts that animals do not respond to us in words, but rather with gestures of the living flesh. Its argument from its flesh is the animal's "whole being." 88
The expert knows and follows the rules for correct thinking and production; because the nonexpert does not know the rules he or she is breaking, such an out-of-sorts person can create something new and different. Baker summarizes the power of the outsider by quoting Derrida on invention: "An invention always presupposes some illegality, the breaking of an implicit contract; it inserts a disorder into the peaceful order of things, it disregards the proprieties." Baker goes so far as to claim that such a nonexpert can blur the expert lines between "human completeness" and the unraveling or "opening up" of the human, the "self". In breaking common sense and the sensibility that holds us as a community in common, one already is an idiot - bete, a beast. 104
Dawn Chorus is a video installation with fourteen large screens in a gallery. Each screen shows a person going about mundane tasks while twitching and bobbing and singing like a bird in the wilds. The project began with Coates observing birds in a field in England's Northumberland countryside. With the assistance of wildlife sound recordist Geoff Sample, Coates set up microphones in trees, bushes and brush frequented by various birds. As though an almost daily ritual, the birds seemed to return to the same spots to sing. With fourteen microphones recording from three to nine in the morning for six days, they logged some 576 hours of birdsongs, including songs of robins, whitethroats, wrens, blackbirds, song thrushes, yellowhammers and greenfinches.
Using audio equipment, Coates slowed down the songs so that they easily could be sung or whined or groaned by humans in their natural habitats: the bath, the kitchen, in a taxi, and work and so on. He recruited members of ameature choirs in Bristol to sing these songs and filmed the results. He then sped up this film to match that of the birds' singing in nature. It is then that the videos come to life, as if birds and humans sloughed off hierarchies and different worlds to cross attributes: "Blue Tit is a woman lying in bed, fluttering her eyes and whistling through a puckered mouth. Linnet is an osteopath nodding and blinking furiously and puffing up his chest in the consulting room. 122
In approaching animals and "becoming animal", Coates occasionally refers to a common ancestry we have with other beasts, a common remote past he is tapping into. He could easily have reffered to a common phenomenology, a shared sense of breathing, moving and sensing. There are dangers in such talk: it can overlook massive differences between humans and animals, which result in not giving animals their due in being different from us; it can evoke a physcological unconscious, which then moves the human subject as the animal with greatest depth of conscious and unconscious; it can lead from Sigmund Freud through Jacques Lacan to the privileging of language. 124
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