Scribblings with Green Chalk

Waving frantically and mouthing “no” is about all I can do. These days, I can’t help feeling like a bull an elephant in a china shop. I cross out the bull in accordance with the Polish version of the saying, where the elephant is the culprit. The elephant conveys my inept reaction to the red rag.

Here’s the menagerie of my thoughts at this moment. The earlier assertion that cats won’t be hijacking this space seems a bit humorous several cat posts later. Perhaps I should change my nom de plume (nom de keyboard?) to “Derrida’s Cat,” since Haraway’s presentation of the thinker’s dilemma has moved me so much. However, with a drawerful of notes and a stack of books and articles, my original MA thesis remains unwritten, still waiting for a better time. At the same time, though, animals are thought.

What is interspecies companionship and, delving further, what does failure in fulfilling the obligations of companionship consist in?

Haraway starts with the failure of perception, drawing attention to Derrida’s revelation of seeing his cat in her separateness and individuality, recognizing her intense presence. I’m not sure that sight as a sense is the source of failure, but it’s the model sense for explanations, so let’s stay within its realm. Stripped to simplicity, this is a problem of a commonly accepted blind spot blotting out animals as animals. What kind of presence do you experience when you look at or touch your pets? Do you ever wonder what the animal is thinking — stopping there, at that sense of wonder, at the question mark, not pushing toward an answer — what the animal feels?

I see two paths, intersecting at many points. Two paths that give different meaning to separation. One uses separation as a device creating distance to enable sight and an understanding of difference. The other separates the human from the world so that thinking becomes frozen within an exclusive human space, with metaphors of otherness created in the realm of human-only interaction. The first path leads us to seeing space through the animal presence, reflecting upon ourselves through it, retaining distance. Whereas the other entails the danger of smothering the animal in thought by translating its presence into comparisons and parallels that cannot do it justice.

Over at Wohnen in Wien, I commented on Jessica Valenti’s idea of treating pets as “starter babies.” In my momentary old-saying elephantine clumsiness, I’m afraid it came out as a criticism of Denise’s interest in the idea and I didn’t mean it that way. (Apologies again, Denise.) I understand the idea’s appeal. I don’t think that people who have pets are driven by ulterior motives. However, I believe they can be very, very wrong in their thinking about animals.

Here’s where I start waving. Frantically.

The catchiness of the term “starter baby” makes me cringe. Is this a new take on euphemism, where the animal is the unspoken, the abject, too “impure” to be noted in language? Or is this meant to uphold Paul Shepard’s tenet that pets serve as stand-ins for teddy bears? I should hope there is more to pet-keeping than human narcissism.

Wouldn’t it be too easy if one experience could serve as practice ground for another? Yet life doesn’t have a pause button, there is no draft phase. Everything is for real and really present. It’s happening. Parallels and simplifications help us organize our thinking about experiences and phenomena but they do not change the reality of the said experiences and phenomena.

Your dog is not a baby surrogate. It’s a dog. Please take your catchy blindfold off and see it as who it is. Taking care of animals does teach us responsibility; this is hardly a new discovery. Recasting it in the frame of parenthood training ground makes it sound like a revelation, whereas it really is a reduction. It takes our attention away from the question of animal rights, animal consciousness, and the conditions of human-animal co-existence and companionship.

Loving animals, feeding them, dealing with their feces is not in any way comparable to rearing a child. It won’t take the shock and difficulty away from parenthood. There are no stand-ins for experiences. Especially experiences as complex as both the relationship between parent and child and that between human and animal.

Coming back to Derrida’s cat: discovering the animal’s intense presence is a revelatory moment in Derrida’s essay, in his experience, and in Haraway’s framing of the story. Something Joyce would call an epiphany. Seeing the animal means mapping space differently. The intersection of the human and the animal gaze is an invitation to seeing oneself through the idea of an unfamiliar animal consciousness. The human’s inner otherness responds to the otherness embodied in the animal. Is this the entry to a new realm of perception?

Whatever it means in individual experience, it’s a gift, an impulse to thought. In order to approach the question of interspecies companionship (not yet define it), one must allow the animal to enter the eye. Derrida’s failure to build upon the encounter lay, according to Haraway, in his immediate turn towards translating it into purely human metaphors and parallels. The animal doesn’t exist there.

The first obligation of companionship is seeing the companion. Would the second be avoiding allegorizing and comparing?

Let’s start with seeing. Let the dog be a dog, not a “starter human.” It’s not a stub, it’s a fully-fledged being. PLEASE LOOK AT THE DOG AND SEE A DOG. This is how your story of companionship begins.

Jacques Derrida has a cat. It made my day.

One morning, Monsieur D. discovered that his feline companion was looking back at him…

He understood that actual animals look back at actual human beings; he wrote at length about a cat, his small female cat, in a particular bathroom on a real morning actually looking at him. “The cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the room as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse myths and religions, literatures and fables” (374). Further, Derrida knew he was in the presence of someone, not a machine reacting. [...] He came right to the edge of respect, of the move to respecere, but he was sidetracked by his textual canon of Western philosophy and literature and by his own linked worries about being naked in front of his cat. He knew there is no nudity among animals, that the worry was his, even as he understood the fantastic lure of imagining he could write naked words. [...] But with his cat, Derrida failed a simple obligation of companion species; he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him at looking back at him that morning. [...] Incurious, he missed a possible invitation to other-worlding.

(Haraway 19, 20; emphasis mine)

Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet arrived in the mail yesterday. I started reading it right away, like those distracted people who grab at books and life greedily and without a concept. (I am one of them.) I’m amazed and curious how she develops her idea of interspecies companionship, how different it is from Shepard’s.

Talking about companionship, or rather “bonding,” or not even that, since it could be merely a catchy theme… I saw SAD on several blogs recently. January appears to be a breaking point. Either that or it’s everyone’s New Year’s resolution to talk about their emotions.

Pets are out there too. I find the idea of pets as “starter babies” uncanny and… well… somehow disrespectful of animals as who they are. Reductive and blind to the otherness and the specific character of human-animal interaction. Denise wrote about it (commenting on Jessica Valenti’s article), I replied. I couldn’t disagree with Valenti more; I get the points, but I don’t accept them.

Time’s dust is slowly accumulating between me and my essay on Elizabeth Bishop’s conception of poetry as a glass eye gifted with sight. I decided to close the process of revision and consider the essay done, though I still can’t read it without thinking that it could be improved in many ways. Today, I would also add other questions to my original inquiry. But that could be a separate essay, couldn’t it? The question of creative and created sight remains open.

Because the most interesting points about sight were made by Bishop, not by me, I hesitate to paste here any excerpts from my paper. One possible point of departure for more questioning would be this paragraph, which brings together many of the ideas that interested me then: Probing the limitations of perception is one of Bishop’s idées fixes. Regardless of whether we are dealing with objectivized narration or an emotionally-colored description, the problem of the sense and aim of observation inevitably returns. The knowledge gained through watching the world closely is always questionable, being a combination of what one sees and what one only desires to see. By recreating visual experience through linguistic means, the poem becomes, out of necessity, also a tale of the act of perception. References to other senses not only emphasize certain characteristics of the object but, above all, expose the limitations of sight, its dependence on memory and imagination. Naturalness and artificiality are therefore present in observation from the very beginning.

I’m glad I used “objectivized” and not “objective,” which settles the Krapp argument tentatively in favor of me being the same person now and then. Sight as Bishop constructed it in her poetry was never “pure,” innocent, or unquestionable. Not all-embracing, not all-knowing. Tricky.

About sight in poetry, she wrote:

Off and on I have written out a poem called “Grandmother’s Glass Eye” which should be about the problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of a poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye.

(Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box 212).

Although this applies to representation of sight, I think it could be extended first to extraliterary representation and then to conceptualizing sight as such. Not that this hasn’t been done, because it has — if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t even be asking about this, because the notion of disembodied objectivity still has rather strong appeal.

I’m thinking of Bishop’s modesty as pitted against the Objectivity of scientific representation. Remember what she did in Georgaphy III? The series of questions that opens that volume creates a skeptical lens through which to view space, distances, places, and phenomena from the poems. Sight according to Bishop is a modest sense. So modest that in “Poem” Bishop cuts it off from visionary pretences–

Our visions coincided—“visions” is
too serious a word—our looks, two looks

Is modest sight too dubious for science? Is vision the locus of objectivity? How can objectivity be questioned?

I could probably turn now towards modest sight as a david to scientific vision’s goliath in Bishop’s poetry, but in this sketchy post I’ll go in the other direction.

Whether scientists like it or not (and I know a few who don’t, because they will insist that linguistic is not a “real” science), language plays with them and their findings. The “objectivity” that is touted as the ultimate truth of inquiry and representation is language pulling their strings (and having its strings pulled to some extent). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after a bath in champagne. The legacy of sentimental novels, newspaper articles, and political propaganda entering “serious” research (not like the wishy-washy humanities) all the time, quietly, unnoticed. Sic!

Apologies for enjoying the irony so much (with probably more than a hint of a humanities “complex”). Being in language is inescapable as is being in culture, politics, society. An objectivity which claims that this is possible has ulterior motives. It’s an enticing objectivity, with pretentions of godhood, one floating above the mundane in an impossible trick of its vision.

Whatever I could say has already been said in a more cogent and convincing way by Donna Haraway, so I will let the quotes from “Situated Knowledges” do my work for me.

I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribed all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. [...]

The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit [...]. [...]Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. [...]

A tribute to this technology of direct, devouring, generative, and unrestricted vision, whose technological mediations are simultaneously celebrated and presented as utterly transparent, the volume celebrating the 100th anniversary of the National Geographic society closes its survey of the magazine’s quest literature, effected through its amazing photography, with two juxtaposed chapters. The first is on “Space,” introduced by the epigraph, “The choice is the universe–or nothing” (Bryan, 1987, p. 352). Indeed. This chapter recounts the exploits the exploits of the race and displays the colour-enhanced “snapshots” of the outer planets reassembled from digitalized signals transmitted across vast space to let the viewer “experience” the moment of discovery in immediate vision of the “object.” These fabulous objects come to us simulataneously as indubitable recordings of what is simply there and as heroic feats of techno-scientific production. The next chapter is the twin of outer space: “Inner Space,” introduced by the epigraph, “The stuff of stars has come alive” (Bryan, 1987, p. 454). Here, the reader is brought to the realm of the infinitesimal, objectified by means of radiation outside the wavelengths that “normally” are perceived by hominid primates, i.e., the beams of lasers and scanning electron microscopes, whose signals are processed into the wonderful full-colour snapshots of defending T cells and invading viruses.

But of course that view of infinite vision is an illusion, a god-trick. I would like to suggest how our insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision (though not necessarily organic embodiment and including technological mediation), and not giving in to the tempting myths of vision as a route to disembodiment and second-birthing, allows us to construct a usable, but not an innocent objectivity.

(Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of the Partial Perspective.”The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. 86-87)

(The title is absolutely borrowed. I am intrigued by how powerfully this combination of beauty and emotion with dismemberment works. If you’re curious about the source, read Linda Gregg’s poem, completely unrelated to this discussion. If not, pass on to my rambling below.)

The conceptual marriage of beauty and suffering comes across as a Gordian knot. I say “comes across,” not “is,” because I don’t believe this link is necessary for our thinking about either concept. Yet together they come to produce a new quality, a kind of beauty martyrdom.

Many concepts are inverted along the path to salvation through beauty. (Something called “beauty” being conceived of as, paradoxically, both essential and produced, its production and attainment of a “natural-looking” ideal desired without questioning.) Most importantly, pain becomes anaesthetized in the beauty discourse. It becomes something purely imagined and exaggerated. In beauty martyrdom, pain doesn’t exist. It’s swallowed before the mind could let it come into being.

The mind. Smoothly inserted into the body, which is — what? An object? Property? Easily remodeled clay? Whatever it is, it is clearly divisible from whatever the mind is in this narrative. If beauty is married to suffering, then the mind is forever divorced from the body. In my rushed and perhaps somewhat inconclusive comment to Wildly Parenthetical’s post “The appropriation and normalisation of the body,” (which is a response to [What in the hell...] do things do things look like if we start with the body?, so I recommend reading both) I wrote: The discourse of beauty production further removes the body from the mind, depersonalizing it even further, it seems to me. The body ready for a “cosmetic surgeon’s” scalpel, with lines drawn on it is already dismembered, ready for another level of butchering. The justification for the practice erases identity from the body. The woman (it is usually the woman) is made to believe that the “imperfect” body is abstracted from her self and that the mind (as a fully separated entity) should have all possible creativity in determining the shape of its flesh encasement.

For a far more cogent and comprehensive argument, I suggest looking up Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth.

What I would like to focus on is the question of dismemberment.

It strikes me that this kind of dismemberment seems to have a completely different cognitive impact than the dismemberment of animals as described by Paul Shepard:

Breaking up the world in thought, attending to its diversity and discontinuity, discriminating differences in order to think–all this clearly threatens its continuity and wholeness. Learning the morphology of bodies has been likened to a kind of dissection. The butchering analogy extends as well to the naming of the internal part of the body. Oddly enough, it is the insides of animals that work against the tendency of the world to fragment. (The Others 47)

We need to cut up the world in order to make sense of it and animals are our primary models, argues Shepard. But “butchering” has two different meanings for him depending on the context. When the process of dismemberment is removed from our eyes and made the business of institutions that deliver to us ready products:

Butchery makes new categories by abstracting “meat” from the whole animal, creating a perceptual gap between the food and the thing eaten. (The Others 34)

I wouldn’t want to insist on direct parallels between the animal world with human participation and the human society which sees itself as abstracted from the broader natural context. But I’m tempted to ask if there is any human-to-human equivalent to creative cognitive butchery when the beauty industry so neatly fits the second description?

To what extent can we relate dismemberment to control or creation? Where is the point when these ideas become perverted? When and how did the marriage of beauty to suffering take place?