Interview: Karl Steel
Stop acting like an animal.
Surely, you've heard that before. Probably spoken from a parent to a child. There's a more sinister version of that exclamation, however, directed by one 'self' to an 'Other': Those people are animals. If you think that type of reasoning is absent from today's sociopolitical discourse, I challenge you to read the comment threads of any given news story about Islam or Africa, particularly if there is a so-called "terrorist threat" involved.
What do we mean by such comments? More importantly, how are "human" and "animal" discursively constituted, so that the domination-by-ridicule of animals at the hands of humans, if not animals directly, is fashioned into an instrument of alterity? And how can posthuman (humanimal?) interventions deterritorialize subjectivity from the terrain of anthropocentric metaphysics? In the conversation that follows, medieval scholar and critical animal theorist Karl Steel thinks through these problems, agitating the comfortable distance that people have placed between themselves and their zoological counterparts.
Q: In a discussion of anthropophagy several years ago, you posited that accounts of the savor of human flesh reify the divide between human and animal, perhaps the most fundamental form of alterity. Can you expand a bit on how this distinction historically impacted concepts of human identity?
A: Identifying human/animal as a fundamental form of alterity means reaffirming the importance of this binary. Indifference may do more than study to undo human pretensions to absolute (rather than contingent, relative, local, etc.) superiority. I'd like to think my work finally aims as just such indifference.
Stories of anthropophagy create human difference. To tell stories about anthropophagy and not to tell stories about nonhuman slaughter reaffirms human life as the only life worth memorializing. In Precarious Life and Frames of War, Judith Butler talks about how obituaries produce a distinction between life and nonlife, between the life that will have been grieved for and the life that will not matter. Stories of anthropophagy ensure that eaten humans receive their obituaries, that they remain human by receiving what is proper to them as humans.
The rare references to the savor of human flesh in medieval texts call it the most desirable meat. A fifteenth-century hunting manual says that a wolf that tastes human flesh would rather starve than ever again eat anything else (Emily Dickinson says much the same thing about the tiger, and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia says the same thing about people); there are several other such affirmations. By imagining that others yearn to eat them, humans interpassively (see Zizek) sustain their sense of human superiority. Whatever doubts humans have in their own particularity, they sustain themselves by imputing certainty to the anthrophage supposed to believe, who stupidly, directly believes in us.
Q: Have anthropophagic discourses functioned to dehumanize 'the Other' sociopolitically? If so, how, and do you feel that the subsequent dehumanization effectuates a concurrent denial of materiality?
A: Certainly anthropophagic discourses dehumanize as much as they humanize. But they also produce an imagined subject of unconstrained enjoyment, one indifferent to the fundamental prohibitions; nonhuman anthropophages are imagined as subjects that refuse their proper, subjugated place. Horror and envy and perhaps admiration mingle in any story of anthropophagy.
The reason for the horror is obvious: Humans would rather not recognize themselves as materials available for consumption, for use. Only a few humans indifferently abandon their corpses to birds, the sky, the ocean, and so forth (see Timothy Morton for more). When most die, they have themselves burned up; their survivors pickle them with chemicals; they have them sealed into little subterranean homes; they save their organs from putrefaction by giving them to other humans. At the same time, medieval religious texts frequently dilate on human consumability. They love to talk about worms. But this talk, because it aims to shock, of course preserves human particularity, since it presents the very condition of being flesh as a violation.
Q: If concepts of 'the human' have often been predicated upon the subjugation of animals—a subjugation that continues in myriad forms, today—how can humanity be reimagined along less anthropocentric lines, and what impact would this have upon the mass individualization of culture, if any?
A: I would like to think so, but from my vantage point, it's hard for me to imagine. A reimagination of humanity requires a reimagining of the differential allocation of socially significant vulnerability (again, Butler). I don't know if I want to preserve myself (wherever I located "myself") because I know I'm vulnerable, or because I think that as a human, I deserve it. The former—evidence of the "nonpower at the heart of power" (Derrida)—strikes me as a place to begin thinking as a posthuman; the latter position is indefensible, both intellectually and as a constitutive feature, since to be a human with all that this implies means constantly to be under threat. That constitutive indefensibility is why humans as humans spend so much effort defending themselves (speech, culture, soul, etc.). Being human means defending humanity.
Q: Political conflicts, like the War on Terror, are increasingly justified as species emergencies, whereby human life writ large is said to be at stake. Does the essentializing of humans and animals along binary lines inhibit not only cultural hybridization, as 'the Other' is ascribed the same subjugated status as the animal, but also the hybridization of lifeworlds in a manner that emancipates new relations between humans and animals?
A: Yes, absolutely. It also inhibits the recognition that socially significant relations often don't arrange themselves along species lines. Pets matter. And so does pet grief. I'm working on a piece right now about a knight who accidentally kills his loyal dog and, in his grief, goes on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, or disappears into the woods, or drowns himself in his fish pond (see "Canis: The Dog File"). Suicide, social and otherwise. His reaction is an anomaly, sure, but the narrative never scorns him for his reaction; rather, it scorns his wife and servants, who stupidly think the dog can't count for that much. Unlike the knight, they don't know that lifeworlds are necessarily hybridized already. That's the nature of life. Of worlds. The de-essentializing of the human/animal binary (and indeed a host of other binaries) requires us to recognize what's already there (see Haraway, or Ralph Acampora, Corporal Compassion).
Q: The subjugation of animals is often represented as a violent act, an act of butchery. How did this play out in the medieval imaginary and what impact did such violence have upon the development of human security?
A: Perhaps to its discredit, How to Make a Human doesn't do much to distinguish between training and violence because it sees as primary that humans can unilaterally choose what to do with their animal servants and companions. In extremis, a human can separate himself from a chivalric circuit by killing and eating his horse.
To answer your question more directly, the human system seeks to monopolize legitimate violence (cf. Weber). Within human zones of control, wolves would be eradicated and raptors struck dead by saints' curses. The Penitentials—guides to Christian behavior widely produced and disseminated from the sixth to early thirteenth centuries—forbid humans to eat carrion, which they define, in essence, as meat from animals that humans did not intend to kill. Humans who eat carrion in effect condone the violence of nonhuman predators, transforming themselves into partners, rather than masters, of wolves, pigs, chickens, and indeed cliffs. A worthy posthumanism might, thus, require us to become carrion-eaters.
Q: Finally, you've dabbled in object-oriented ontology, which places humans, animals, and other objects on an immanent plane. Understanding that object-oriented ontology, like all ontologies, is not monolithic, how has this emergent philosophy assisted in your critical reevaluation of human privilege?
A: "Dabbled" is exactly right. It has helped Peggy McCracken and I think through a story from the fourteenth-century romance Perceforest about fish knights (see the epilogue to Postmedieval 2.1). These animals, knights, things are at once cultural and instinctual, individualized in their honor and herdlike in their tactics, organic and—being naturally armored and armed—inorganic, and terrestrial and oceanic. The human knight's encounter with the poissons chevaliers might be understood as the encounter of the critical animal theorist with object-oriented ontology: he no longer knows where to stand, or what to do, or who not to eat.
That said, while I recognize that, for example, the peasant-cart-oxen-field-climate-medievalist assemblage challenges the fantasies of a lonely humanism and perhaps emits a call to which we might respond if only we could hear it right, I'm not quite ready to give up on the distinction between interests and tendencies, vulnerability and breakability, wounds and damage, and so on in an incomplete enumeration of the ways we presume that life differs from nonlife. We will see where my work takes me over the next few years.
Karl Steel is Assistant Professor of Medieval Literature at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. His first book, How to Make a Human, will be released this fall. You can find more of Steel's work at www.inthemedievalmiddle.com and academia.edu/KarlSteel, and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/karlsteel.
Posted by Kris Coffield at 6/10/2011 7:46 PM 
Categories: Interviews
Tags: Karl steel anthropophagy critical animal theory
Categories: Interviews
Tags: Karl steel anthropophagy critical animal theory
I just have to ask--does this guy have any pets?
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Donna Haraway argues that companion species function against binary categories by bringing together humans and non-humans, mining how "an ethics and politics committed to the flourishing of significant otherness is learned from" taking animal/human relationships seriously, particular with respect to the role of these relationships in slaking historical gaps. Since Steel is a medievalist, I assume he would argue similarly and I wonder what historical gaps are filled in, in his view? As he says, lifeworlds are always hybrid, so the narratives behind those lifeworlds is always co-constituted.
Another ceoncept from Haraway that I think is pertinent to this interview is that of the cyborg. Haraway, in my view, distances herself from excavating the full potential of cyborgs by not further questioning animal cyborgs. It seems to me that something cyborg-like is created by the extension of the public cybersphere to animals, especially social networking. We have catbook, logbook, horsebook; there's the lolcat craze; to drive the point home, many recent animated films invoke animals (Shark's Tale, Kung Fu Panda, Up, etc.). Perhaps animals cannot be as cyborg-like as humans, but what does that say about the divide between animals and humans that's mentioned in the interview? Or does the inclusion of animals within human social networks and personification of animals in blockbuster films signify a whole new animal-human-technology nexus, a new form of hybridized culture? In such a culture, how does technology accelerate the creation of animal-human identities/relations or break them down? Something to consider in my humble opinion, though this is still a very new topic to me.
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Animals have always been instruments within culture. It's not just that a horse is described as component of a knighthood, for example, but are an extension of the knight himself. I wish I could recall a specific tale, but I believe I've read descriptions of knighthood from the premodern era that situate the horse within the concept of the knight, in a way that knight and horse are one unit, completing each other or something greater than either individual part. Obviously, that idea didn't linger. We think of a horse-and-buggy of exactly that, a "horse" AND a "buggy." Horse racing is another example. The rider and the horse are separate entities, the rider literally and figuratively controlling the horse. Where the break occur?
What I find most interesting about this interview are the implications for human security. I disagree with Steel's statement that "to be a human with all that this implies means constantly to be under threat." Threats are contingent. I think Foucault has ably demonstrated the instrumentalization of threats for panoptic purposes, to justify the imposition and expansion of a disciplinary society. If being human entails being under constant threat, does this not necessitate the disciplining of society, of the bipolitical order, as Foucault (and Julian Reid in another recent interview on this site) contend? If constitution of humanity is based on vulnerability from threat, why have political projects geared toward the eradication of threats led to endless war - war that takes the lives of humans and animals alike, I might add? Missiles make no distinction between animals and humans, nor do the militarized regimes that deploy such weapons. Life, as constituted by these regimes, becomes almost purely logistical. If we can conceive is different forms of government suborning the constitution of human life to different ends, can the same be said for animals? Can we explore animal lifeworlds to critique the delimitation of conditions of possibility managed by, say, liberal regimes? Futhermore, can we speak about animals vitally resisting control of their life's potential, such as when circus animals attack? How has that worked historically and what does that say about our understanding of threat and security?
Not trying to be overcritical! Sorry if I'm out of line!
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I don't think Karl is trying to devolve one universal into another. I think he simply means that being human involves the capacity for vulnerability. I haven't read about Butler's idea of 'significant social vulnerable' - maybe someone can explain that? Governments organize threats, organize populations through biopower if we're citing Foucault. That's a play on the inherent vulnerability and fragility of life, but localizing threats to individual bodes, animal or human, subverts the problem of recapitulating universals, I think.
Then again, maybe not. Julian Reid discussed external threats to neoliberalism, like the state's recognition of certain actors as terrorists, and global threats, like climate change. In either case, the emergency is supposed to concern all of humanity, the response is to a future catastrophe, the permanent state of crisis allows the state then stakes claim over the processes of an individual's become to prevent individuals from becoming any more of a threat to themselves, and the state through themselves, than they already are. I see both sides.
What I'm curious about is the evolution of the zoo. Were animals showcased in historic times as they are today? What have zoos done to define the boundary between animal and human, and how have they set an example for the herding of humans into camps, both physical and imaginary?
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"Processes of an individual's becoming"; sorry for the typo. Another thing: How were diseased animals - as in, animals with rabies or encephalopathy - dealt with in medieval times? I'm thinking in terms of the distinction that have been in medical science, the life sciences. I understand empirical research wasn't as advanced as it is today, but perhaps there's something there...?
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While discussing this thread with a colleague, this evening, we came to the same conclusion: What if you flip the subject of certain questions that have been asked, moving from animal to man?
In a sense, that's what Karl Steel is attempting to produce - de-essentialized subjectivities that deploy interspecies relations in the imagining of alternative political and aesthetic sensibilities. Stepping outside of one's own skin is a difficult task, however, when it involves not only a discursive injunction, but a voluntary dehumanization. To get to the materialism of 'the human', where transformative political work can begin, we must first realize that in articulating (or interrogating) claims from an anthropocentric perspective, we perform 'humanity' itself, the normative historicity (Butler's "chains of iteration") that grant discourse the power to enact what it names. 'Human' is more than just a species indicator, it is also a fundamental identity marker, a promise to universality and solidarity that catalyzes political action. How else could governments speak of "species emergencies" and be narratively recognized? Critiques of any identity, then, including 'human', reveal the failure of identity formation to fulfill that promise.
A paradigm shift may be helpful in unraveling the failed promise of 'the human' and the political functions it has birthed - human nature, human rights, human beingness. For example, instead of asking how diseased animals were dealt with historically, we might ask how 'life' was constituted such that certain animals appeared as 'sick' or certain conditions were labeled 'illness'. Instead of asking how animals are imbricated within putatively human technospheres, we might ask how technospheres penetrate animal spaces.
I don't think Julian Reid would necessarily object to such lines of flight, as they deliberately subvert the martial ordering of biopolitics under liberal regimes by prompting a self-conscious shedding of logistical accounts of life. Logisiticization inheres homogenization of life, and life's capacity for proliferation, along the informational lines Reid elegantly elucidated; what counts as life is that which can be disciplined to respond to the permanent crisis always immanent to the (il)liberal life. Absolutely, animal lives are also disciplined within neoliberal regimes, but control of animal populations is not the objective of these regimes, so long as the animal/human binary is maintained - is it any wonder that lifeforms resistant to liberal accounts are described in terms typically reserved for animals and, indeed, are treated in the same manner as animals, a la Guantanamo Bay (the human zoo)? After all, animals signify the nonnarratizable, instinctual, traumatic.
Blurring these boundaries highlights a suppressed materiality that challenges informationalized biopower, along with its genealogical heritage. To that end, medieval deterritorializations of animal identity might be extremely helpful.
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So...to be clear and oversimplified, Kris, you're saying that within liberal regimes, the state has extended the category of "animal" to include accounts of life resistant to its own account, the one its citizens are disciplined into accepting without hesitation? Within liberal regimes, terrorists are not metaphoric animals, but are literally collocated as such? That's a heck of a claim. My question, I guess, would be what's more informationalized, the liberal citizenry or the resisters who must be rounded up and tagged?
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I think he means that the liberal account of life is informationalized, thinking with Reid, and the "tagging" - the carceral mechanics - are an attempt at corralling other lifeforms under that informational gaze, rather than acknowledging their agonistic existence.
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Yes, Liz interpreted my comments correctly. Furthermore, accepting that there is a performative element to the discourse grounding identities, I would argue that the ability of liberal regimes - or, perhaps, any governmentality - to establish what qualifies as human 'being', or Reid's 'species life', occurs not only through rearticulation of state practices, but also through processes of exclusion. As Butler indicates, exclusions, in this case of 'the animal', haunt the signification of 'the human' by the state as abject boundaries, transgression of which brings subjects into the realm of the traumatic. A deliberate communion with the traumatic or nonnarratizable, however, challenges the ability of the state to manage and normalize crises, produce subjectivities defined by emergency and warfare, whereby states of emergency are made present by their managed absence.
I'm speaking strictly of security within (il)liberal regimes. Whether or not similar practices transpired during the medieval period, I don't know. Nonetheless, I'm keen to investigate relations between humans and 'the inhuman' genealogically, as the materiality of the inhuman is what animals, to me, have come to embody in the virtual age.
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Not to divert the discussion, but I'm struck by the confluence of anthropophagy and modern cultural phenomena, especially the omnipresent vampiric literature, television and cinema that's being made these days. Given Steel's comments, can we argue that the valorization of vampire narratives is an attempt to reaffirm our own humanity in an age when we feel like the constitution of our humanity is under threat from other ways of being? Is this how vampire narratives functioned historically?
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What I would want to add to this conversation, and to the interview with Karl, especially in relation to issues of biopower, national "security," and the like, is that it's possible that even moving beyond [or breaking down] the human-animal, human-inhuman binary toward the idea of always already hybridized life-worlds may signify thinking that is too dependent, still, on the idea of whole bodies that, hybridized or not, constitute "persons" worthy of "dignity," "rights," grief, whathaveyou, at the precise moment when Foucault's account of biopower--or let's say, his *prediction* about a coming biopower--starts to break down itself under the pressures of transnational black-market economies where the human and other bodies are partitioned and parceled and sold, as well as new biological sciences which also partition and "mine" and "grow" and alter pieces and "parts" of bodies, human, animal, and otherwise, as well as new techno-sciences aimed at creating artificial intelligence and artificial "life." As Haraway herself has written, Foucault's "named a form of power at its moment of implosion. The discourse of bio-politics gives way to techno babble."
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Couple of questions to build on Eileen Joy's comment. First, what do techno-based animal interaction games/apps like Farmville do to open or close human/animal binaries? Anyone have thoughts on this?
Second, have animals been used or viewed differently in totalitarian regimes than putatively democratic ones? Just curious. I'm new to this whole line of thought and apologize if I'm misunderstanding the claims being made.
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Anthropophagy is about the savor of human flesh, so I get how it both humanizes and dehumanizes at the same time, in terms of representing someone as monstrous while elevating the superiority of humanity at the expense of other lives - human flesh tastes better, naturally, because humans ARE better. I wonder, though, if cross-breeding humanistic and animalistic discourses calls for a new ethic of eating. I don't think it's too much of an interjection to say that recentering animals as philosophical subjects sympathizes with vegetarianism (and its derivatives, veganism and fruitarianism), in that animal lives are made equal partners with humans in political projects. To finish the point, it's ironic that we devour, in almost a communal fashion, lives to whom we seek to extend basic rights - see the debates over cruelty on chicken and cattle farms, for example - while refraining from enfranchising with rights forms of life we seek to protect, like the green environment, forests, natural aquifers, etc.
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@Michael: no, no pets. no children either. both by choice.
it's a question of responsibility that I don't want.
@Peter: In terms of 'historical gaps,' I don't see the Middle Ages as filling in a gap. I see its intellectual edifices as committed to human superiority in a way that continues: here I think of Augustine at the one end and Aquinas at the other. Medieval mainstream Christian thought shaped the modern human, contra other possibilities in various non-canonical scriptures and contra the skeptic tradition.
Its influence is still with us to the degree that we believe humans to be uniquely rational, linguistic, uniquely meant to be treated as ends not means, etc.
However, the Middle Ages also offers a wealth a fantastic literature that is, unlike modern fantastic literature, not relegated to the genre ghetto. In other words, there's a 'mainstream' of fantasy in which humans and nonhumans interact in bizarre and thrilling ways: they breed, they love, they speak, the rely on each other. Unconstrained by the tyranny of realism, medieval literature offers a route past the continuing force of medieval Christian humanism.
I don't take Haraway's cyborg as technological in a straightforward sense, but rather as a site of thought to contest notions of corporeal primacy, authenticity, and originality. That said, the piece McCracken and I wrote about fish knights does describe a medieval technobiotical critter that I think you would recognize as a cyborg in the sense you're describing (e.g. "the fish knights exhibit characteristics of cyborgs; they arrive not as individuals but as a faceless swarm; they go to their deaths automatically; they die bloodlessly, wordlessly, without pleading, apparently
without any emotion but implacability" (98): but the knight who first treats them as edible animals, or as automatons, eventually comes to recognize them as having a face).
@Brigitte: you're absolutely right. on the horse as extension of knight, or the knight as 'centaur,' in essence, see the words for knight in other European languages: ritter (German); chevalier (French); caballero (Spanish); eques (Latin): all of these words have to do with horses and with riding. A knight without a horse is nothing. For more on this, see JJ Cohen Medieval Identity Machines and Susan Crane, "Chivalry and the Pre/Postmodern" (postmedieval 2.1). I'm not sure when the break happened, but I do think of the way that drivers think (consciously or not) of cars as extensions of their bodies. They duck when they drive under bridges; they panic when caught in traffic; they explode if their car is wounded. Etc. A few works acknowledge this: Ballard's Crash, the film Tetsuo. Others I imagine.
What I mean by 'under threat' is that if the definition of being human means 'being uniquely rational, linguistic, immortally ensouled, worthy of socially significant grief, etc.,' then the concept of the human is always under threat by the evidence of these qualities in n
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whoops. cut off.
What I mean by 'under threat' is that if the definition of being human means 'being uniquely rational, linguistic, immortally ensouled, worthy of socially significant grief, etc.,' then the concept of the human is always under threat by the evidence of these qualities in nonhuman others. How did (and do?) humans convince themselves of their uniqueness? Augustine says that we know we're rational because we subjugate nonhuman animals and because they can't subjugate us. But this renders being human contingent on successful and ongoing domination. If that domination gives way, so does the human itself. In such a system, the human will necessarily be anxious, desperate to reaffirm its uniqueness, threatened, etc. Such a system requires the reenactment of superiority and indeed the imagined state of being under threat in order to justify this reenactment. Hence endless war. The human needs vulnerability as much as it needs superiority: one goes with the other. Hope that responds to some of your questions. Hope it's coherent! I say this better in my article “How to Make a Humam” (in Exemplaria in 2008).
@Aaron: for Butler, she means, basically, what wounds is a society willing to grieve for? How does this choice of a grief object constitute that society and its borders?
There were definitely medieval zoos, in a sense. Charlemagne and Henry III both had elephants (see here). I believe Robert Bartlett has written about such things at length. But these weren't public zoological parks: they were private animals meant to spectacularly display royal power. We can do a lot, I think, by looking at the way that the military aristocracy invested itself in animals, whether through heraldry, claims of animal/monster descent (as in the Melusine legend), etc.
Something akin I think to the way that certain kinds of men claim that their domestic dogs are part wolf or coyote.
In re: diseased animals: I honestly don't know! I do know in a sense, in that I've read medieval veterinary manuals, which involve, say, prayers said for horses; and I know Edward I of England sent his prize hawks on pilgrimage to heal them; the place to look for biopolitics of domestic animal populations would be husbandry manuals: see for example here, "Let all the lord's sheep be marked with one mark, and let no ewes be milked after the feast of our Lady, for they will mate more tardily another year, and the lambs shall be worth less" (115, 117), which polices ovine pleasure and lactation in terms of capital and sacred time. Surely this requires a biopolitical analysis!
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last bit...
@Kris: well put! thanks!
@Jerel: I find that convincing. Another approach: vampires tend to be singular, immortal, vulnerable above all to visibility (in the sun); they are more human than humans themselves. Hence vampires as a object of fantasy: people want to be them, to be with them. The zombie is the flip side of that, mere life, the Real of life; in a political sense, they are the revenge of the megaslums, of the constitutive excess of neoliberalism and international capitalism.
@Eileen: thanks for stopping by! and great point. Here I wonder about the boundaries of the rights-bearing subject. Given the human microbiome, given communities at all sizes and speeds of life, how can we speak of individuals? Here I think of a little pop song I wrote (!) maybe 12 years ago whose refrain was "how many pieces could I lose and still be me?"
@Erin: I do wonder (and this goes back to Peter Kent's first comment) whether technological advances in animation have made human/nonhuman hybridity more thinkable than it was, say, 60 or 150 years ago. It's much easier to picture human/nonhuman being, or nonhumans life in its complexity, whether through fiction or through the ethological work on kittens and other videos on youtube. We may be entering a new period of the mainstream fantastic, a return of the promise of medieval romance, that will do much to erode our sedimented humanism.
and finally (!) Bryce: wonderful point. Here I have to think of Bruno Latour's famous call to grant the ozone layer voting rights, and of Jane Bennett's undoing of the presumptive lack of agency of objects. I think of Derrida's 'il faut bien manger,' and the question of the need to eat, to eat well, and how this always necessarily puts us in a nonethical relation to something we mark as object.
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You're right, Karl. My understanding of cyborgs was limited as I put it. Let me take another stab at it, as a question piggybacking on your reply: What does the networking of humans and animals in cyberspace say about corporeal primacy and originality? More than just saying "we like pets, yes we do, we like pets, how 'bout you?" the building of entire communities around animal behavior in the virtual world must signify some change in the agency of animals, just as it does with man. Or put it this way: If we've long viewed human will as superior to animal will, what does it say that we're willfully bringing animals into virtual worlds within our control? Surely humans control those worlds - Farmville, Catbook, et al. - extending the discursive domination of animals. Do these, or can these, worlds also signal a remaking of what a companion species, or companionship, actually means? That's all I'm exploring.
By the way, it's kind of awesome that no one who comments on this site regularly has ever claimed to be a critical animal theorist, yet here we all are invested in this thread, more than we have been in any other, lol.
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@Karl: Actually that makes a lot of sense to me. I've been searching for a common thread linking the conversations taking place on this site lately and 'securing the human' seems to be one of those threads. I see my earlier conceptual error; for threats to be instrumentalized, they must first be made evident. Foucault gets at the notion of regulating bodies according to threat, whereas you discuss threats as constitutive of humanity because humans predicate their 'humanity' on dominating these threats. In other words, one is human to the extent that one can dominate and master the threat posed by the animal Other, thereby justifying one's claim to participation in human endeavors.
To follow up, is there a question of a divided subject here? It seems like your critique of the animal/human binary implicates the alienation of the human from the animal remainder inhered in our willful 'othering' and domestication of animals. To put it another way, you seem to be saying that human domination operates categorically, so that human/animal acts are partitioned into species-driven categories, obscuring the desires of humans and animals themselves. I guess my question, then, would be...how do we emancipate animal desires, and is that even a useful task in your thinking?
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Kris: I think Karl Steel, or Ohio State Press rather, should move the publication date of his book up four days to celebrate your birthday.
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Alexis - I TOTALLY agree. At least it gives me a response to the inevitable question about what I want for my birthday. I can now say, "World peace, an end to human trafficking, AND Karl Steel's new book."
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@Karl - You said "nonethical," not "unethical." Was that deliberate? I'm also not familiar with Latour, so can you explain his discussion of enfranchising environmental objects, which I assume is metaphorical?
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@Karl: as to how, or whether, we can speak of "individuals"--we may not be able to in the "older" terms of discretely-bounded human "persons," but we can't through rights or the protection of some against the harm of others out the window. What we may need to do now is talk about specific "singularities" that occupy certain positions/locations within networks, and the like. No matter how co-implicated/co-dependent/quasi-"person" we might actually be, we still live in a world with *my* house and *your* house, *my* life and *your* life--these are matters of law, as well as of philosophy.
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