What Animals Teach Us about Politics

Abstract

Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us About Politics, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014, 137pp; paperback, £14.99Most philosophers don't like animals. This truism is all the more evident if one looks at the manner in which animals have appeared in the history of philosophical anthropology. Traditionally and in separatist mode, these appearances have most often been to inflate the human at the animal's expense. The human is defined in wide-ranging ways, with some depictions simply opposing properties attributed to 'animals' (man as the non-animal, the immaterial, the preternatural, and so forth), while others offer continuist images of humans as sentient animals, conscious animals, rational animals, linguistic animals, political animals, temporal animals... Hence, Aristotle describes humans as exclusively political, Descartes as exclusively conscious, Kant as exclusively rational, Heidegger as exclusively temporal, Davidson as exclusively linguistic, and so on. This positive account consequently provides us with another list of attributes for the animal: the non-political, the non-conscious, the non-rational, the non-temporal, the non-linguistic, etc. And alongside these prosaic descriptions one can line-up all the more fanciful ones - of the human as the animal who has the right to make promises (Nietzsche), or who is what it is not and is not what it is (Sartre), or even who goes to the movies (Agamben).The more recent 'animal turn' in philosophy and critical theory, therefore, would presumably temper this form of animal abuse, given its tendency now to inflate, or restore, some value to the animal. And yet this shift in position is arguably no less a form of abuse, at least conceptually. Deleuze's 'becoming-animal', Agamben's 'bare life', or Derrida's 'animal that therefore I am', can be seen to transform the animal into one more normative and metaphysical idea (albeit now to its advantage rather than its detriment). Philosophy continues to mediate the animal for its own purpose by seeing it as only one instance of aporetic differance (Derrida), proliferated becoming (Deleuze), or bare life (Agamben). Yet any reduction of the animal to that of a proxy for differance, rhizomatics, bare life, or whatever else arguably gains its force by disregarding other aspects of the animal that are placed in the background, namely those that do not fit (or resist) the philosopher and his/her favoured philosophemes. Where Derrida focuses on the suffering and death of the animal, Deleuze concentrates on (its) life. Hence, despite even Badiou's depiction of Deleuze as a philosopher of 'the Animal' (opposed to his own of 'Number'), the fact remains that Deleuze also abuses animals, in his own way.There are kinds of animal that Deleuze (even when working with Guattari) prefers over others in his notion of all-encompassing molecular becoming: domesticated (pitied) and individuated (molarised) animals are unhealthy, reactive, and sad - this being the motive behind the infamous proclamation that 'anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool'. Likewise, state animals (the lions, horses, and unicorns of empires, myths, and religions) are to be disavowed. It is the 'demonic' or pack animal that is the Deleuzian favourite, the philosopher's pet. So, qua animal becomings (rather than the becoming-animal of humans), the true animal is always a multiplicity (as in a wolf pack) and a process (every such pack is a wolfing). Indeed, it is pack animals, animals as assemblages of other, smaller (molecular) animals, that precisely marks out Deleuze's preferential treatment. Wolves, cockroaches and rats are the stars of his menagerie (especially rats).So how does Brian Massumi's new collection of essays - What Animals Teach Us About Politics - fare on the animal front? Its first key concept, the 'supernormal', is Deleuzian in complexion (like all Massumi's work), though its origins are in zoology. And what animals teach us is how to be supernormal, that is, how to manifest a kind of instinctive behaviour that, far from being one-tracked and mechanical, as per its comprehension in the popular understanding of biology, actually generates creative responses in relation to a complex environment. …