Charlie Blake, Claire Molloy and Steven Shakespeare (Eds) (2012) Beyond Human: London and New York: Continuum. ISBN: 978-1-4411-5011-0
Charlie Blake, Claire Molloy and Steven Shakespeare (Eds) (2012) Beyond Human: London and New York: Continuum. ISBN: 978-1-4411-5011-0
Charlie Blake, Claire Molloy and Steven Shakespeare (Eds) (2012) Beyond Human: London and New York: Continuum. ISBN: 978-1-4411-5011-0
CM REVIEWS 2012
The force of articulation for Shakespeare lies in the fact that this
'putting together' cannot be thought without recourse to a
transcendent principle. This is not a principle that organises or
guarantees, rather it is thinking without Bruno Latour's 'crossed-out
God' (1993: 13); the persistence of Christian theology in secular
modernity under the guise of the 'laws of nature' which are then held
in unquestioned opposition to equally law-bound categories like
'society', secured by Cartesian dualism. Tracing a line from Aristotle,
through Kant, Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari, Shakespeare
performs a brief archaeology of articulation which finds that 'putting
together' must necessarily refer, in the end, to something that is
'unconditioned'; something that is outside the system of
articulations and that enables it to remain dynamic. His proposition
is that we thus cannot consider ontology without 'the shadow of
God'. If, as he claims, articulation is what 'makes the organic
possible' (250) then, like Haraway's cyborg, it 'gives us our politics'
(Haraway, 1991: 150).
It is this sense of articulation which can be read as a sub-text across
the twelve essays which comprise the collection concerned, as they
are, with the marks and traces of species and machine symbiosis in
cultural and social production. Ron Broglio asks, 'when the animals
take up arms, what would induce them to spare the lives of humans?'
(17), a question which illustrates his proposition that the rational,
socially well-behaved human and the animal are articulated on the
plane of 'idiocy', which is both opposed to 'common sense' and its
undermining condition. Idiocy correlates with animality and
animality with the unruly body. In the refusal of Diogenes, for
example, to communicate other than through his body, the shaky
foundations of cultural norms are dealt a severe blow as the
materiality of the body imposes itself, strategically, between thought
and what it hopes to express. Broglio's 'Incidents in the Animal
Revolution' include sheep rolling over cattle grids to get to greener
pastures, an octopus flooding a public Aquarium by opening a valve
in its tank, a groundhog that bites the hand of a prominent politician
and a chimpanzee throwing rocks at zoo visitors (to give just four of
his examples). These are incidents of 'corporeal speech' (17), a
speech which communicates but which does not signify (like direct
action without the placards). To be attentive to corporeal speech
would be to acknowledge a shared vulnerability (of the body) but
also the vulnerability of a social system that 'keeps the animals at
bay'. The animal revolution, then, is an upheaval in social relations,
which occurs when shared vulnerability breaks through to challenge
the 'civic human' (18).
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References
Fuller. S. (2011) Humanity 2.0: What it Means to be Human Past,
Present and Future. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave/Macmillan.
Haraway, D. J. (1991) 'A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology,
and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century' in Simians,
Cyborgs & Woman: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free
Association Books.
Haraway, D. J. (1992) 'The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative
Politics for Inappropriate/d Others' in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary
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