Animal Rhetoric – Response/Reaction Paper
John Muckelbauer
I must confess that when I first heard theory folks talking about “animality,” I
instinctively responded with skepticism. I say that my response was “instinctive” in
order to emphasize that my skepticism was not a reasoned position that I had arrived at
through some kind of protracted deliberation. Indeed, I had not yet read anything on the
topic of animality and really knew nothing about the contours of such inquiry, nor its
conceptual stakes.
At the same time, however, to call my response “instinctive” does not mean that it
was simply devoid of reason or logic (as an aside, let me note that what will be in
question here is the relation between my response and the logic of my response. For
instance, did the logic precede my response, follow it, or were they somehow immanently
linked? Is there only one logic (“the logic”) and what is its relation to me (do I either
have it or not, or is there a middle ground of logic)? And finally, wouldn’t any attempt to
respond to these questions already presume an answer (in the form of presuming some
pre-existing relation between thought and action) – as if only a certain style of
“instinctive” response would enable us to distinguish an instinctive response from
something else? It seems to me that these are crucial questions of “animality” – and not
only because they introduce the proverbial “chicken and egg” scenario). For instance, the
logic of my skeptical response might sound something like this:
Because of the ways that the academic industry functions, academic fields (and,
lest we forget, the people whose work constitutes these fields, namely, us) have
compelled themselves to mechanically produce an ever-changing and ever new product
line. And this is no less the case for “theory” than for other niche markets: sometimes it
has introduced new theoretical “methods” (new criticism, deconstruction, postcolonialism), sometimes new “contents” (sexuality, techno-science, globalization), but
always with designer brand names: Deleuze, Levinas, Badiou. In any case, the
appearance of “animality” on the theoretical scene (brought to you by Giorgio Agamben,
Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway) sounded to me like the new fall line of theoryware, a clear sign that the “Empire” franchise had “jumped the shark” and was now
officially consigned to reruns in syndication.
But this should not imply that my instinctive logic viewed the turn to animals as
arbitrary, as if any other theoretical product would have sufficed. First of all, an interest
in the category of “the animal” makes a great deal of sense in the context of a larger
developing ecological movement (a movement whose relation to technoscience and,
more specifically, to the increasing visibility of techno-digital interests within the
humanities is itself worth considering). But also, in many ways, the category of
“species” (now) seems almost like the necessary next term in what Judith Butler
describes as the “embarrassed etc.” of identity politics: class, gender, race, sexuality,
able-bodiedness, species, etc. (in fact, animal rights philosopher Peter Singer has argued
something quite similar to this).
So if my instinctive response to the theoretical appearance of animality was
skepticism, this is not because it seemed arbitrary or “faddish” at all. Quite the opposite.
Instead, it was because this “fad” seemed to make so much sense on so many levels, as if
a whole series of forces – intellectual, political, historical, and economic – had assembled
themselves in such a way as to almost necessitate this program (perhaps this is the case
with all fads). So my “instinctive” resistance was precisely to the fundamental logic of it
all, to the mechanicity – one might even say the insincerity – of the entire apparatus. Not
that particular individuals were insincere, of course, but that the whole things seemed to
have been so clearly programmed on some structural level that any particular individual’s
genuine sincerity was…I don’t know…just cute, deserving a good belly rub.
I was skeptical then.
Since that time, I have read some of these works and even become deeply
intrigued by them (especially Derrida’s lectures). But in order not to lead you astray, I
should also confess that there is no conversion narrative here (through which a sustained
engagement with the actual discourse of animality rid me of my skepticism). This is not
a story of how my encounter with sincere, authentic reasoning somehow covered over the
tracks of a structural logic that I instinctively distrusted, allowing me to somehow rise
above my skepticism. I remain entirely skeptical. Instinctively so.
And yet, it seems to me that skepticism about the mechanical necessity of animal
studies is something quite different from rejecting the value of this theoretical line. To
my mind, this is an important distinction: the recognition that any given formation is
structured by a necessary and even mechanical logic need not simply translate into a
(negative) claim about its value (again, I’ll claim that this is a central issue for animality,
not only for the “field”). In this case, for instance, despite my sustained skepticism, it
seems quite obvious to me that rhetoric needs its animals.
Ever since the cicadas offered a sonic canvas on which Phaedrus and Socrates
articulated their fetish for logos, rhetoric has made its way on the backs of animality. In
work after work, scholars proceed as if a certain understanding of the human – one that
distinguishes its rational, communicative response from the supposedly mechanical, nonliguistic reactions of animals – is beyond question. Indeed, the frequency and force with
which rhetoric scholars have more or less explicitly reiterated rhetoric’s commitment to
logos might make a lesser man (and yes, we are trafficking in the problems of sexual
difference and hierarchy) question how reasonable this connection actually is. That is,
swerving from Burke’s frequently repeated definition of man, judging from rhetorical
scholarship, the human appears simply as the animal that is relentlessly and anxiously
obsessed with defining itself in relation to symbol systems.
But rhetoric needs animals not only because the constitutive understanding of
rhetoric is premised on a strict separation of the human from the other animals, but also
because an attempt to take the animal seriously (as something other than an inferior
version of the human) could involve nothing short of a fundamental reorientation of the
intellectual lineage associated with rhetoric – not an abdication of this lineage, but a
reorientation: can one even imagine an animal rhetoric? (not a rhetoric “of” animals, but
an animal rhetoric? – and not merely as an early stage of evolutionary development, as in
Kennedy – one of the rare efforts that even bumps up against this question – odd, isn’t
that?).
To conclude far too schematically, among the early and possible moves of such a
reorientation would be the following:
1) putting into question the classical distinction between (instinctive, animal) reaction and
(thoughtful, human) response (which is what I have been trying to do here). To be clear,
I am referring here to a “putting into question” or a “problematizing” (rather than to a
rejection or a dialogue).
2) Attending to non-symbolic “communication” between and among species, conceiving
a model of communication that does not take symbolic communication as primary and
definitive – that is, thinking communication as something other than the communication
of a meaning.
3) It might also mean loosening the stranglehold that communicative rationality still
maintains on our sense of the civic imaginary (despite the incessant amount of evidence
to the contrary), as well as
4) fundamentally attempting to reconceive difference (between and within species) as
something other than a clumsy hierarchy. That is, it is not a question of giving speech,
rationality, or any other hitherto withheld quality (including rights) to animals. It’s just
as asinine (and therefore human, all-too-human) to imagine that a chimp is a somewhat
inadequate approximation of a human as it is to imagine another person as a failed
version of me (which, by the way, so many people seem to be).