4.02.2006
Electric Animal (Film and Media Studies)
Title
Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Field
Film and Media Studies
Summary
"This investigation seeks to gauge the effects of animal discourses on select philisophical and pyschoanalytic texts, the history of ideas, various creative ventures, and theses of technology of this period." (2) "it is this sequence of events - the appearance of a dehumanized human being and the disappearance of the animal - that will frame and focus the following text." Animals are thought not to have language and therefore are fundamentally different from humans. "Humanity began to constitute itself within a world of human differences, and subsequently, the animal was metamorphosed into another creature. In turn, the animal came to inhabit a new topology of its own, and humanity was left to mourn the loss of its former self. The mouring is for the self - a self that had become dehumanized in the very process of humanity's becoming human." (18) The animal is a fundamental figure / subject of modernity, they are grafts to the human body, techne that trasmit. More on this soon. So Lippit begins with the philosophy chapter. The animal lacks language, but what of its cry? For Descartes, the animal was fundamentally not human, all it could do is mimic. However, for Roussau, what the animal lacked was not intelligence but imagination - mimesis was what man had and animal didn't. Ok, but the animal cry - for Hegel it is like this: "[it] initiates a dialectics of death from which it[the animal] is nonetheless excluded." (45) It is excluded because animals can't die. They have no language, they aren't individuated. They merely get replaced by any of the infinite others - think of the undifferentatedness of the word "animal" we are using here, right? "In the era of modernity, therefore, the animal is relegated to the interstices of ontology. Neither present nor absent, the animal hangs in the dialectical moment that marks the begining of human history. In this manner, the animal becomes an active phantom in what might be termed the crypt of modernity. Ineradicable, the animal continues to haunt the recesses of the modern human being, appearing only to reestablish human identiy in moments of crisis. Because modern philosophy fails to eliminate entirely the residues of the animal, its texts continue to inscribe the secret history of the animal as phantom."(54) So in the next chapter we move to these modern philosphers, Heidegger and Nietzche. "Animal being forces humanity to acknowledge the finitude of world: that is, animals tear humanity away from the imagined totality of the world [by positing other ways of being, other worlds]. In this way, the Nietzchean and the Heideggerian animal meet at a point beyond language, world, and memory - at a point beyond mortality. The point beyond world is marked for Nietzche by forgetting, for Heidegger by erasure; and for both Nietche and Heidegger, that beyond is recalled by the figure of the animal. For Nietche, however, the world beyond represents a "robust health," and the possibility of a new beginning, a "new promise," whereas for Heidegger it is a saddened and darkened affair." (72) Lippit then moves to a discussion of psychoanalysis, but he must first work through Darwin. Science and the Enlightenment suddenly became unfurled, was this the death of philosophy? (Yes.) We also need to work through Bergson to get to psychoanalysis."Bergon's focus upon 'duration,' the perpetual movement and becoming of things, ideas, and entities in time, as an essential structure of being...will also serve as a potent catalyst between Darwinian evolution and the unconscious dynamic." (83) But what makes this change, move? It has to posited autonomous, outside, a genuine exteriority - he posits the cinematograph. Freud's unconscious is like that too, and it totally fucks with enlightenment subjectivity because it divides the mind - "Dislocated from the body and timeless, yet intrinsically bound to the psychical functions of human beings, Freud's unconscious opens the possibility of a bridge between the animal and human worlds, which are vigorously kept apart in philosophical discourses." (97) Lippit focuses on Freud and Breuer's experiments with animal magnetism and hypnosis. The unconsious is like the animal - "it remains alive through the process of perpetual rejuvenation."(105) The unconscious is completely outside the subject (but it also the subject's core) so it shows that there can be no completion of the subject/consciousness without the foreign object (the animal). Lippit notes Breuer's struggle with this through his analogizing of the electrical nature of unconscious, its excess "is marked by the electrical system and its magnetic, prelinguistic efficacy." (114) Ok, then we get to Deleuze and Guattari and rhizomes - animals are like rhizomes, they are connective and dissolve into another, re-constitute another and they embody the theory of becoming - "animals are the perfect embodiment of multiplicity, since they, unlike human beings, can never be reduced to individual beings."(131) Lippit then does a reading of three authors, Lewis Carrol, Franz Kafka, and Akutagawa Ryunosake - "In their work, the literary language of the novel is transformed, as is the role of the imaginary subject, in a process that, following Deleuze and Gauttari, can be described as the becoming-animal of literature."(136) "In each case, the impending collapse of the subject, the corruption of the ideal of a stable subject, precipiates in some form the appearance of animal or otherwise nonhuman creatures. In each instance, the breakdown of language accompanies or implements a bodily crisis that is only resolved by transforming oneself into another form, by adapting to the new environment that surrounds one."(160) This work pushes the relation between language and animals over, it kills literature. (well, sorta). Now the animal has some radical form of language and the human language has to adapt. The new technology of adaptation is technological media. "The technological media can be seen as the afterlife of that language - animals survive language in the cryogenic topographies of technological reproduction. In the twentieth century, language becomes,after literature, a form of technology."(161) "One might posit provisionally that the animal functions not only as an exemplary metaphor by, within the scope of rhetorical language, as an originary metaphor. One finds a fantastic transversality at work between the animal and the metaphor - the animal is already a metaphor, the metaphor an animal. Together they transport to language, breathe into language, the vitality of another life, another expression: animal and metaphor, a metaphor made flesh, a living metaphore that is by definition not a metaphor, antimetaphore - 'animetaphor.'"(165) Photographs (and here we get a discussion of Barthes (who else?) and Bazin and Eisenstein) are also like animals - they also are incapable of death because the reproduce. So we have animals, unconscious, and photographs - all analogous in their not dying. "Cinema, which builds a hallucinatory space, can be seen as a cryptic topography in which animals and the reproductive media converge, forming a Deleuzian rhizome."(184) "The technological crypt resembles its psychic counterpart to the extent that both preserve the radically absent other in a state tht can be defined as neither life nor death." (189) Cinema is a metaphor for the impossible metaphor, the animetaphor. "Cinema is like an animal; the likeness a form of encryption. From animal to animation, figure to force, poor ontology to pure energy, cinema may be the technological metaphore that configures mimetically, magnetically, the other world of the animal."(196)
Keywords
Animals, Death, Vanishing, Spectral, Human, Modernity, Metaphor, Change,
Other Thoughts
"Animals enter a new economy during the modern period, one that is no longer sacrificial in the traditional sense of the term but, considering modern technological media generally and cinema for specifically, spectral." (1)
"Modernity can be defined by the disappearance of wildlife from humanity's habitat and by the reappearance of the same in humanity's reflections on itself: in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and technological media such as the telephone, film and radio." (3)
"Animals are exemplary vehicles with with to mediate between the corporeality of the brain and the ideality of the mind." (6)
"The fullest manifestaion of Heidegger's world is non other than the future: to have world is to have a future." (65)
"By tracking the animal across the philosophical spectrum, one discovers the systematic manner in which the figure of the animal comes to portray a serial logic: the animal is incapable of language; that lack prevents the animal from experiencing death; this in turn suspends the animal in a virtual, perpetual existence. The figure of the animal determines a radically antithetical counterpoint to human mortality, to the edifice of humanism." (73)
"Not only do animals enter the world [in the rhizosphere], they figure a communicational medium, a technology of being." (132)
"Instead of structure, then, one is left with a multiplicity of openings and orifices that continuously absorb, introject, incorporate, excorporate, dissolve, transform, and resurface the world ad nauseam. That vision of language as a perforated and solvent body can also be read in terms of animal being, which lacks density, finitude, and definite borders." (160)
"When the metaphoricity of the metaphor collapses, the concept becomes a metonymic thing that can be eaten. the animetaphor is, in this sense never absorbed, sublated or introjected into world but rather incorporated as a limit, an absolutely singular and cryptonymic idiom. The animetaphoric figure is comsumed literally rather than figuratively...The animal returns like a meal that cannot be digested, a dream that cannot be forgotten, an other that cannot be sublated. The animametaphore can be seen as a kind zoon, inhabiting the edges of figurative language, making absence of subjectivity."(170)
"Because animals are unable to achieve the finitude of death, they are also destined to remain 'live,' like electrical wires, along transferential tracks. Unable to die, they move constantly from one body to another, one system to another."(192)
This is one of the top three weirdest books I have ever read. There is a lot of stuff about eating and excreting in here, I didn't really summarize it, but I'd like to come back to it some time after quals.
Other QE Works Cited
Bazin, A. Excerpts from What is Cinema? (Film and Media Studies)
Benjamin, W. Illuminations (Film and Media Studies)
Eisenstein, S. Excerpts (Film and Media Studies)
Haraway, D. Simians, Cyborgs and Women (History and Theory of the Body)
Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. Dialectic of Enlightenment (Film and Media Studies)
Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Field
Film and Media Studies
Summary
"This investigation seeks to gauge the effects of animal discourses on select philisophical and pyschoanalytic texts, the history of ideas, various creative ventures, and theses of technology of this period." (2) "it is this sequence of events - the appearance of a dehumanized human being and the disappearance of the animal - that will frame and focus the following text." Animals are thought not to have language and therefore are fundamentally different from humans. "Humanity began to constitute itself within a world of human differences, and subsequently, the animal was metamorphosed into another creature. In turn, the animal came to inhabit a new topology of its own, and humanity was left to mourn the loss of its former self. The mouring is for the self - a self that had become dehumanized in the very process of humanity's becoming human." (18) The animal is a fundamental figure / subject of modernity, they are grafts to the human body, techne that trasmit. More on this soon. So Lippit begins with the philosophy chapter. The animal lacks language, but what of its cry? For Descartes, the animal was fundamentally not human, all it could do is mimic. However, for Roussau, what the animal lacked was not intelligence but imagination - mimesis was what man had and animal didn't. Ok, but the animal cry - for Hegel it is like this: "[it] initiates a dialectics of death from which it[the animal] is nonetheless excluded." (45) It is excluded because animals can't die. They have no language, they aren't individuated. They merely get replaced by any of the infinite others - think of the undifferentatedness of the word "animal" we are using here, right? "In the era of modernity, therefore, the animal is relegated to the interstices of ontology. Neither present nor absent, the animal hangs in the dialectical moment that marks the begining of human history. In this manner, the animal becomes an active phantom in what might be termed the crypt of modernity. Ineradicable, the animal continues to haunt the recesses of the modern human being, appearing only to reestablish human identiy in moments of crisis. Because modern philosophy fails to eliminate entirely the residues of the animal, its texts continue to inscribe the secret history of the animal as phantom."(54) So in the next chapter we move to these modern philosphers, Heidegger and Nietzche. "Animal being forces humanity to acknowledge the finitude of world: that is, animals tear humanity away from the imagined totality of the world [by positing other ways of being, other worlds]. In this way, the Nietzchean and the Heideggerian animal meet at a point beyond language, world, and memory - at a point beyond mortality. The point beyond world is marked for Nietzche by forgetting, for Heidegger by erasure; and for both Nietche and Heidegger, that beyond is recalled by the figure of the animal. For Nietche, however, the world beyond represents a "robust health," and the possibility of a new beginning, a "new promise," whereas for Heidegger it is a saddened and darkened affair." (72) Lippit then moves to a discussion of psychoanalysis, but he must first work through Darwin. Science and the Enlightenment suddenly became unfurled, was this the death of philosophy? (Yes.) We also need to work through Bergson to get to psychoanalysis."Bergon's focus upon 'duration,' the perpetual movement and becoming of things, ideas, and entities in time, as an essential structure of being...will also serve as a potent catalyst between Darwinian evolution and the unconscious dynamic." (83) But what makes this change, move? It has to posited autonomous, outside, a genuine exteriority - he posits the cinematograph. Freud's unconscious is like that too, and it totally fucks with enlightenment subjectivity because it divides the mind - "Dislocated from the body and timeless, yet intrinsically bound to the psychical functions of human beings, Freud's unconscious opens the possibility of a bridge between the animal and human worlds, which are vigorously kept apart in philosophical discourses." (97) Lippit focuses on Freud and Breuer's experiments with animal magnetism and hypnosis. The unconsious is like the animal - "it remains alive through the process of perpetual rejuvenation."(105) The unconscious is completely outside the subject (but it also the subject's core) so it shows that there can be no completion of the subject/consciousness without the foreign object (the animal). Lippit notes Breuer's struggle with this through his analogizing of the electrical nature of unconscious, its excess "is marked by the electrical system and its magnetic, prelinguistic efficacy." (114) Ok, then we get to Deleuze and Guattari and rhizomes - animals are like rhizomes, they are connective and dissolve into another, re-constitute another and they embody the theory of becoming - "animals are the perfect embodiment of multiplicity, since they, unlike human beings, can never be reduced to individual beings."(131) Lippit then does a reading of three authors, Lewis Carrol, Franz Kafka, and Akutagawa Ryunosake - "In their work, the literary language of the novel is transformed, as is the role of the imaginary subject, in a process that, following Deleuze and Gauttari, can be described as the becoming-animal of literature."(136) "In each case, the impending collapse of the subject, the corruption of the ideal of a stable subject, precipiates in some form the appearance of animal or otherwise nonhuman creatures. In each instance, the breakdown of language accompanies or implements a bodily crisis that is only resolved by transforming oneself into another form, by adapting to the new environment that surrounds one."(160) This work pushes the relation between language and animals over, it kills literature. (well, sorta). Now the animal has some radical form of language and the human language has to adapt. The new technology of adaptation is technological media. "The technological media can be seen as the afterlife of that language - animals survive language in the cryogenic topographies of technological reproduction. In the twentieth century, language becomes,after literature, a form of technology."(161) "One might posit provisionally that the animal functions not only as an exemplary metaphor by, within the scope of rhetorical language, as an originary metaphor. One finds a fantastic transversality at work between the animal and the metaphor - the animal is already a metaphor, the metaphor an animal. Together they transport to language, breathe into language, the vitality of another life, another expression: animal and metaphor, a metaphor made flesh, a living metaphore that is by definition not a metaphor, antimetaphore - 'animetaphor.'"(165) Photographs (and here we get a discussion of Barthes (who else?) and Bazin and Eisenstein) are also like animals - they also are incapable of death because the reproduce. So we have animals, unconscious, and photographs - all analogous in their not dying. "Cinema, which builds a hallucinatory space, can be seen as a cryptic topography in which animals and the reproductive media converge, forming a Deleuzian rhizome."(184) "The technological crypt resembles its psychic counterpart to the extent that both preserve the radically absent other in a state tht can be defined as neither life nor death." (189) Cinema is a metaphor for the impossible metaphor, the animetaphor. "Cinema is like an animal; the likeness a form of encryption. From animal to animation, figure to force, poor ontology to pure energy, cinema may be the technological metaphore that configures mimetically, magnetically, the other world of the animal."(196)
Keywords
Animals, Death, Vanishing, Spectral, Human, Modernity, Metaphor, Change,
Other Thoughts
"Animals enter a new economy during the modern period, one that is no longer sacrificial in the traditional sense of the term but, considering modern technological media generally and cinema for specifically, spectral." (1)
"Modernity can be defined by the disappearance of wildlife from humanity's habitat and by the reappearance of the same in humanity's reflections on itself: in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and technological media such as the telephone, film and radio." (3)
"Animals are exemplary vehicles with with to mediate between the corporeality of the brain and the ideality of the mind." (6)
"The fullest manifestaion of Heidegger's world is non other than the future: to have world is to have a future." (65)
"By tracking the animal across the philosophical spectrum, one discovers the systematic manner in which the figure of the animal comes to portray a serial logic: the animal is incapable of language; that lack prevents the animal from experiencing death; this in turn suspends the animal in a virtual, perpetual existence. The figure of the animal determines a radically antithetical counterpoint to human mortality, to the edifice of humanism." (73)
"Not only do animals enter the world [in the rhizosphere], they figure a communicational medium, a technology of being." (132)
"Instead of structure, then, one is left with a multiplicity of openings and orifices that continuously absorb, introject, incorporate, excorporate, dissolve, transform, and resurface the world ad nauseam. That vision of language as a perforated and solvent body can also be read in terms of animal being, which lacks density, finitude, and definite borders." (160)
"When the metaphoricity of the metaphor collapses, the concept becomes a metonymic thing that can be eaten. the animetaphor is, in this sense never absorbed, sublated or introjected into world but rather incorporated as a limit, an absolutely singular and cryptonymic idiom. The animetaphoric figure is comsumed literally rather than figuratively...The animal returns like a meal that cannot be digested, a dream that cannot be forgotten, an other that cannot be sublated. The animametaphore can be seen as a kind zoon, inhabiting the edges of figurative language, making absence of subjectivity."(170)
"Because animals are unable to achieve the finitude of death, they are also destined to remain 'live,' like electrical wires, along transferential tracks. Unable to die, they move constantly from one body to another, one system to another."(192)
This is one of the top three weirdest books I have ever read. There is a lot of stuff about eating and excreting in here, I didn't really summarize it, but I'd like to come back to it some time after quals.
Other QE Works Cited
Bazin, A. Excerpts from What is Cinema? (Film and Media Studies)
Benjamin, W. Illuminations (Film and Media Studies)
Eisenstein, S. Excerpts (Film and Media Studies)
Haraway, D. Simians, Cyborgs and Women (History and Theory of the Body)
Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. Dialectic of Enlightenment (Film and Media Studies)
# posted by SMRT : 12:03 AM
