Animal Encounters: Kontakt, Interaktion und Relationalität [1. Aufl. 2019] 978-3-476-04938-4, 978-3-476-04939-1

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages I-XI
Introduction—Animal Encounters: Contact, Interaction and Relationality (Alexandra Böhm, Jessica Ullrich)....Pages 1-21
Front Matter ....Pages 21-21
Animal Encounters: A Genre of Contact (Helen F. Wilson)....Pages 25-41
Framed Encounters, Disruptive Encounters: Encountering Animals Within and Beyond Human-Animal Cultures (Martin Huth)....Pages 43-55
Philosophical Animal Encounters with Cynical Affinities: Variants in Diogenes and Schopenhauer (with Remarks on Montaigne, Derrida, Blumenberg) (D. S. Mayfield)....Pages 57-73
Front Matter ....Pages 71-71
Entangled Empathy: Politics and Practice (Lori Gruen)....Pages 77-83
“Wie in Verzweiflung stürzten Beide aufeinander los!” Büchner’s Lenz is Encountering a Cat (Roland Borgards)....Pages 85-99
Empathic Animal Encounters: Thomas Mann’s Herr und Hund and the ‘Animal Turn’ around 1900 (Alexandra Böhm)....Pages 101-119
The Animal’s Eye (Olivier Richon)....Pages 121-131
Two Diverging Cosmologies from the Tiny to the Huge: Liang Shaoji and Hubert Duprat’s Artistic Collaborations with Silkworms and Caddisflies (Concepción Cortés Zulueta)....Pages 133-145
Front Matter ....Pages 147-147
Actors or Agents? Defining the Concept of Relational Agency in (Historical) Wildlife Encounters (Mieke Roscher)....Pages 149-170
First Encounters: Domestication as Steps of Becoming (Kristin Armstrong Oma)....Pages 171-185
Untying the Knots: Relational Art and Interspecific Encounter (Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir, Mark Wilson)....Pages 187-205
Begegnungen mit Kunst und Schmetterlingen: The Lover von Kristina Buch (Nike Dreyer)....Pages 207-222
Front Matter ....Pages 223-223
Sensing Slaughter: Exploring the Sounds and Smells of Nonhuman Literary Encounters (Sune Borkfelt)....Pages 225-240
Mensch-Tier-Begegnungen in Kurt Vonneguts Roman Slaughterhouse-Five (Giulia Ferro Milone)....Pages 241-255
Kontaktzone Zoo: Die kommunikative Aneignung von Zootieren (Pamela Steen)....Pages 257-275
Die Schaulust am lebenden Tier: Der Blick auf ausgestellte Tiere von den barocken Menagerien bis zur zeitgenössischen Kunst (Bettina Paust)....Pages 277-293
Human-Elephant Encounters in Music (Martin Ullrich)....Pages 295-302
Front Matter ....Pages 303-303
Über Jäger und Jagdhunde: Literarische und bildkünstlerische Verhandlungen einer Mensch-Tier-Begegnung (Claudia Lillge)....Pages 305-321
Personalerweiterung: Gefüge von Menschen, Phantomen und Hunden in der Blindenführhundausbildung nach Jakob von Uexküll und Emanuel Sarris (Katja Kynast)....Pages 323-341
Wolle, Wert, Würde. Mensch-Tier-Begegnungen bei der Schafzucht im Spanien des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Teresa Hiergeist)....Pages 343-356
Berührung als die Grundoperation des In-Gebrauch-Nehmens der Tiere: Theorie und Praxis der reiterlichen Arbeit (Marcello Pocai)....Pages 357-368
Encounters with The Visitor Centre: Art and Interspecies Relationships (Nicola Grobler)....Pages 369-388
Front Matter ....Pages 389-389
Music for Animals (Marek Brandt)....Pages 391-394
Heading South into Town (Catherine Clover)....Pages 395-396
Flying Thoughts (Hugo Fortes)....Pages 397-402
Free to Be Dog Haven (René J. Marquez)....Pages 403-408

Citation preview

C U LT U R A L A N I M A L S T U D I E S

Alexandra Böhm / Jessica Ullrich (Hg.)

Animal Encounters

Kontakt, Interaktion und Relationalität

BAN D 4

Cultural Animal Studies Band 4 Reihe herausgegeben von Roland Borgards, Frankfurt, Deutschland Wissenschaftlicher Beirat Michaela Fenske, Würzburg, Deutschland Sabine Nessel, Berlin, Deutschland Stefan Rieger, Bochum, Deutschland Mieke Roscher, Kassel, Deutschland Jessica Ullrich, Nürnberg, Deutschland Martin Ullrich, Nürnberg, Deutschland Markus Wild, Basel, Schweiz

Tiere erfreuen sich derzeit eines bemerkenswerten gesellschaftlichen wie wissenschaftlichen Interesses. Diese akute Relevanz der Tiere korrespondiert mit einer neuen Sensibilität für Fragen eines verantwortlichen und nachhaltigen Umgangs mit der Natur. Als zuständig für diesen Themenbereich galten traditionell die Naturwissenschaften. Doch im Zeitalter des Anthropozäns verlieren solche Zuständigkeiten ihre Plausibilität: Tiere werden, wie z. B. auch das Klima oder der Meeresspiegel, zum validen Gegenstand kulturwissenschaftlicher Untersuchungen. So hat sich unter dem Label der Cultural Animal Studies eine Forschungshaltung entwickelt, in der die Frage nach den Tieren auf drei Ebenen fruchtbar gemacht wird. Erstens geht es um eine Pluralisierung dessen, was zu unterschiedlichen Zeiten und in unterschiedlichen Kulturen als Tier beschrieben wird. Zweitens werden insbesondere die Künste (Literatur, Film, Theater, Bildende Kunst, Musik) daraufhin untersucht, mit welch formativer Kraft sie das Mensch-Tier-Verhältnis mitgestalten und wie Tiere ihrerseits als Koproduzenten kultureller Artefakte verstanden werden können. Und drittens arbeiten diese Forschungen daran, die Anschlussstellen zwischen einer neuen kulturwissenschaftlichen Tiertheorie auf der einen Seite und einer sich derzeit entfaltenden, naturwissenschaftlichen New Ethology zu erkunden. Die Reihe Cultural Animal Studies versammelt Monographien und Tagungs­ bände, die sich aus kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive mit der Geschichte, der Theorie und der Kunst der Tiere auseinandersetzen. Die Reihe richtet sich an das gesamte interdisziplinäre Spektrum der Cultural Animal Studies, von den Literatur-, Geschichts-, Bild-, Film-, Medien- und Musikwissenschaften bis zu Tierphilosophie, Tiertheorie, Biotheorie, Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Ethnographie. Weitere Bände in der Reihe http://www.springer.com/series/16328

Alexandra Böhm · Jessica Ullrich (Hrsg.)

Animal Encounters Kontakt, Interaktion und Relationalität

Hrsg. Alexandra Böhm Erlangen, Deutschland

Jessica Ullrich Nürnberg, Deutschland

ISSN 2662-1835 ISSN 2662-1843  (electronic) Cultural Animal Studies ISBN 978-3-476-04938-4 ISBN 978-3-476-04939-1  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1 Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. J.B. Metzler © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung, die nicht ausdrücklich vom Urheberrechtsgesetz zugelassen ist, bedarf der vorherigen Zustimmung des Verlags. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Bearbeitungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Die Wiedergabe von allgemein beschreibenden Bezeichnungen, Marken, Unternehmensnamen etc. in diesem Werk bedeutet nicht, dass diese frei durch jedermann benutzt werden dürfen. Die Berechtigung zur Benutzung unterliegt, auch ohne gesonderten Hinweis hierzu, den Regeln des Markenrechts. Die Rechte des jeweiligen Zeicheninhabers sind zu beachten. Der Verlag, die Autoren und die Herausgeber gehen davon aus, dass die Angaben und Informationen in diesem Werk zum Zeitpunkt der Veröffentlichung vollständig und korrekt sind. Weder der Verlag, noch die Autoren oder die Herausgeber übernehmen, ausdrücklich oder implizit, Gewähr für den Inhalt des Werkes, etwaige Fehler oder Äußerungen. Der Verlag bleibt im Hinblick auf geografische Zuordnungen und Gebietsbezeichnungen in veröffentlichten Karten und Institutionsadressen neutral. Einbandgestaltung: Finken & Bumiller, Stuttgart (Foto: Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir & Mark Wilson: „Vanishing Point: Where Species Meet“, 2011, 3-Kanal HD-Video, 18 min.) J.B. Metzler ist ein Imprint der eingetragenen Gesellschaft Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE und ist ein Teil von Springer Nature. Die Anschrift der Gesellschaft ist: Heidelberger Platz 3, 14197 Berlin, Germany

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1 Introduction—Animal Encounters: Contact, Interaction and Relationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Alexandra Böhm and Jessica Ullrich I

Theories of Encounter

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Animal Encounters: A Genre of Contact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Helen F. Wilson

3 Framed Encounters, Disruptive Encounters: Encountering Animals Within and Beyond Human-Animal Cultures . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Martin Huth 4 Philosophical Animal Encounters with Cynical Affinities: Variants in Diogenes and Schopenhauer (with Remarks on Montaigne, Derrida, Blumenberg). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 D. S. Mayfield II Modes of Encounter—Empathy, Anthropomorphism, Gaze, Collaboration 5

Entangled Empathy: Politics and Practice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Lori Gruen

6 “Wie in Verzweiflung stürzten Beide aufeinander los!” Büchner’s Lenz is Encountering a Cat. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Roland Borgards 7 Empathic Animal Encounters: Thomas Mann’s Herr und Hund and the ‘Animal Turn’ around 1900 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Alexandra Böhm 8

The Animal’s Eye . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Olivier Richon

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VI

Inhaltsverzeichnis

9 Two Diverging Cosmologies from the Tiny to the Huge: Liang Shaoji and Hubert Duprat’s Artistic Collaborations with Silkworms and Caddisflies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Concepción Cortés Zulueta III Contact, Interaction, and Relationality 10 Actors or Agents? Defining the Concept of Relational Agency in (Historical) Wildlife Encounters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Mieke Roscher 11 First Encounters: Domestication as Steps of Becoming. . . . . . . . . . .. 171 Kristin Armstrong Oma 12 Untying the Knots: Relational Art and Interspecific Encounter . . . . 187 Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson 13 Begegnungen mit Kunst und Schmetterlingen: The Lover von Kristina Buch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Nike Dreyer IV Places of Human-Animal Encounters: Slaughterhouse, Zoo, and the Circus 14 Sensing Slaughter: Exploring the Sounds and Smells of Nonhuman Literary Encounters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Sune Borkfelt 15 Mensch-Tier-Begegnungen in Kurt Vonneguts Roman Slaughterhouse-Five . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Giulia Ferro Milone 16 Kontaktzone Zoo: Die kommunikative Aneignung von Zootieren. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 Pamela Steen 17 Die Schaulust am lebenden Tier: Der Blick auf ausgestellte Tiere von den barocken Menagerien bis zur zeitgenössischen Kunst. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 Bettina Paust 18 Human-Elephant Encounters in Music. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295 Martin Ullrich V Practices of Human-Animal Encounters 19 Über Jäger und Jagdhunde: Literarische und bildkünstlerische Verhandlungen einer Mensch-Tier-Begegnung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 Claudia Lillge

Inhaltsverzeichnis

VII

20 Personalerweiterung: Gefüge von Menschen, Phantomen und Hunden in der Blindenführhundausbildung nach Jakob von Uexküll und Emanuel Sarris. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 Katja Kynast 21 Wolle, Wert, Würde. Mensch-Tier-Begegnungen bei der Schafzucht im Spanien des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts. . . . . . . . . . . . . 343 Teresa Hiergeist 22  Berührung als die Grundoperation des In-GebrauchNehmens der Tiere: Theorie und Praxis der reiterlichen Arbeit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357 Marcello Pocai 23 Encounters with The Visitor Centre: Art and Interspecies Relationships. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369 Nicola Grobler VI Artistic Human-Animal Encounters 24 Music for Animals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391 Marek Brandt 25 Heading South into Town. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395 Catherine Clover 26 Flying Thoughts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397 Hugo Fortes 27 Free to Be Dog Haven. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403 René J. Marquez

Herausgeber- und Autorenverzeichnis

Über die Herausgeberinnen Alexandra Böhm ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Institut für Germanistik der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg und Lehrbeauftragte an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. Ihre Arbeitsschwerpunkte sind die Cultural and Literary Animal Studies, Literatur und Empathie, Ecocriticism sowie Literatur, Wissen und Ästhetik des langen 19. Jahrhunderts. Jessica Ullrich ist Kunstwissenschaftlerin mit dem Schwerpunkt Animal Studies, Posthumanismus und Materialforschung. Sie lehrt als Honorarprofessorin an der Kunstakademie Münster.

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren Kristin Armstrong Oma  is associate professor of archaeology at the Museum of Archaeology, University of Stavanger. Her research is focused on human-animal interactions and relationships in prehistory and early history, combining archaeology and the interdisciplinary field Human-Animal Studies. Roland Borgards  ist Professor für Neuere Deutsche Literaturgeschichte am Institut für Deutsche Literatur und ihre Didaktik der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte sind die Cultural and Literary Animal Studies, Georg Büchner und die Zeit der Romantik. Sune Borkfelt  is a lecturer in English at Aarhus University, Denmark, with a focus on literary animal studies. Marek Brandt  ist Fotograf, Medien- und Soundkünstler aus Leipzig, ein Schwerpunkt seiner Arbeiten liegt im Bereich Animal Music. Dr Catherine Clover  is an independent artist. Her work uses sound and listening to explore an expanded approach to language within and across species.

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Herausgeber- und Autorenverzeichnis

Concepción Cortés Zulueta  is a Juan de la Cierva Post-Doc Fellow at the Art History Department, Universidad de Málaga, Spain, with a focus on the presence and agency of non-human animals in contemporary art and visual culture. Nike Dreyer  ist Produktionsmanagerin der Atelier Rist GmbH und promovierte an der Universität Konstanz über lebendige Tiere in der zeitgenössischen Kunst. Giulia Ferro Milone ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin an der Universität von ­Verona (Italien) mit Schwerpunkt Neuere Deutsche Literatur und Gender- und Queer Studies. Hugo Fortes  ist Künstler und Professor an der Universität von São Paulo, Brasilien, mit Schwerpunkt Kunst und Natur. Nicola Grobler  is a lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Pretoria with a focus on sculpture, participatory art and human-animal studies. Lori Gruen  is the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University where she coordinates Wesleyan Animal Studies. Her work focuses on empathy, relationships with animals, social and political philosophy and feminist ethics. Teresa Hiergeist  ist Privatdozentin an der Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg mit Schwerpunkt auf dem spanischen Siglo de Oro. Martin Huth  ist Senior Post Doc am Messerli Forschungsinstitut der Veterinärmedizinischen Universität Wien, der Universität Wien und der Medizinischen Universität Wien. Darüber hinaus ist er Lehrbeauftragter des Instituts für Philosophie an der Universität Wien. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte sind Phänomenologie, Ethik, Politische Theorie, Medizinethik, Disability Studies, Ethik der Mensch-Tier-Beziehung sowie Veterinärmedizinische Ethik. Katja Kynast  arbeitet an einer Dissertation zu Bildern der Umweltforschung. Claudia Lillge ist Privatdozentin und Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin an der ­Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main mit Schwerpunkten im Bereich ‚Welt(en) komparatistik der Tiere‘: Großwildjagd und Wildlife Design, Globalisierung und Artenschutz, das Meer als Natur- und Kulturraum. René J. Marquez  is Professor of Art & Design at the University of Delaware, ­teaching painting, drawing, and issues in contemporary art. D. S. Mayfield (PhD 2014 at FU Berlin) is currently writing his habilitation (second book), focusing on Early Modern rhetoric and drama (Rojas, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Shakespeare). Bettina Paust  ist Leiterin des Kulturbüros der Stadt Wuppertal, nachdem sie bis 2018 das Museum Schloss Moyland geleitet hat. Daneben ist sie Lehrbeauftragte der Heinrich-Heine Universität und der Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Marcello Pocai, M. A. Germanistik und Philosophie, arbeitet als unabhängiger Wissenschaftler und Pferdeausbilder.

Herausgeber- und Autorenverzeichnis

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Olivier Richon  is Professor of Photography at the Royal College of Art, London. His publications include Real Allegories, Steidl 2006; Punks, Gost Books 2013; Walker Evans: Kitchen Corner, Afterall Books 2019 Mieke Roscher ist Juniorprofessorin für Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte und die ­Geschichte von Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen an der Universität Kassel. Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir  (PhD) – artist – is Professor and MA programme director at the Iceland Academy of the Arts. Pamela Steen ist Juniorprofessorin an der Universität Koblenz-Landau (in Koblenz) und forscht derzeit im Bereich der Tierlinguistik, d. h. zur posthumanistischen Hinwendung linguistischer Fragestellungen zum (kommunikativen) Mensch-Tier-Verhältnis. Martin Ullrich ist Professor für Interdisziplinäre Musikforschung mit Schwerpunkt Human-Animal Studies an der Hochschule für Musik Nürnberg. Helen F. Wilson  is an Associate Professor at Durham University. She is a social and cultural geographer with research interests in the geographies of encounter and the lived dimensions of embodied difference. She is co-editor of Encountering the City (2016, Routledge) and her forthcoming book Robin will be published by Reaktion (Animal Series). Mark Wilson  (PhD) – artist – is Professor in Fine Art and Course leader in MA Contemporary Fine Art at the University of Cumbria, Institute of the Arts, UK.

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Introduction—Animal Encounters: Contact, Interaction and Relationality Alexandra Böhm and Jessica Ullrich

1 Etymology and Argument The term ‘encounter’ is multifaceted. Its primary meaning as the OED describes it is “[a] meeting face to face” that happens mostly “undesignedly or casually” (215). Deriving from the Old French encontre or the late Latin incontrāre, there is however also a confrontational quality inherent in the word. It is also “a meeting (of adversaries or opposing forces) in conflict; hence, a battle, skirmish, duel, etc.” (215). The contrary aspects of presence, the accidental and unintentional, then, characterize encounters as well as violence, difference and rejection. Based on the definition of the term and its etymology, many questions and issues arise with regard to human-animal encounters. How do human and ­non-human animals interact? Where do encounters take place? How are those encounters represented in literature and the arts, and performed in socio-cultural practices? The present volume concentrates on these topics by focusing on the concept of ‘encounter’. Issues, problems and questions of contact and interaction between human and non-human animals that are addressed in philosophy, literature, the fine arts and socio-cultural practices are discussed systematically and in a historically comprehensive manner in the contributions of this volume within a cultural studies perspective. The volume argues that the concept of ‘encounter’ has its place as a distinct and meaningful category next to theories of agency that recently have dominated the field of Human Animal Studies.

A. Böhm (*)  Erlangen, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] J. Ullrich  Nuremberg, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_1

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A. Böhm and J. Ullrich

With the essays of this volume, we present an overview of the manifold and heterogeneous forms of human-animal encounters in various fields such as literature, the arts, nature habitats, everyday culture, politics and sports. The interdisciplinary collection further clarifies the concept of encounter from a broad spectrum of methodical approaches that come from such diverse disciplines as cultural, literary and art studies, archaeology, linguistics, philosophy, geography or history. Despite the variety of subjects and methods, the idea of relationality, i.e. the mutual dependency and coming into existence in human-animal encounters, governs most articles. A guiding thesis of the volume is that the question of what constitutes human-animal encounters comes to the fore in the conceptual network of notions as contact, interaction, co-constitution and relationality. The i­ndividual contributions that deal with this notion close an academic gap and encourage further research in this area. The collected essays cover a variety of contact zones, in which human and nonhuman animals interact such as the home and the ‘wilderness’, urban spaces, zoos, slaughterhouses, hunting as well as the museum and taxidermy. Their analyses engage with the specific socio-cultural practices that are involved in human-animal encounters. The contributions further show what kind of narratives are generated to tell about these encounters, which challenges have to be met when encountering the other and which kind of knowledge is produced and conveyed by narratives of interspecies encounters. If we want to situate the interest in human-animal encounters in a more comprehensive picture, we need to take into account developments in cultural theory that argue for a decentering of human agency in various interactions among living entities and between living and non-living entities. Scholars like Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway or Jane Bennett have furthered a way of thinking that attempts to assume a non-anthropocentrical perspective by emphasizing networks, relations and entanglements. Such a notion for instance thwarts conceptions of the anthropocene that regard humans as the most important ecological power that interferes with and permanently alters the planet’s cycles by the acceleration of consumption and scientific knowledge since the second half of the 20th century (Bonneuil and Fressoz; Hamilton; Moore). Their theory is a critique of a human exceptionalism that puts humans in the centre of all being and becoming (Haraway, Chthulucene). The interest is directed towards the interaction and co-constitution of all living and non-living entities, whereby conceptions like nature and culture are no longer perceived as dichotomies, but rather as “naturecultures” (Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto 1–5). In this regard, responsibility for the non-human other is not only based on a commonly shared planet but also on relational ontology of a mutual becoming in actual encounters: “To be one is always to become with many”, as Haraway puts it in her seminal study When Species Meet (4). A first comprehensive outline of the literary and artistic dealings with such encounters is a desideratum we hope to meet with this volume. Isolated contributions in literary studies and art studies that have focused on specific aspects of human-animal encounters (Woodward; McHugh; Snæbjörnsdóttir; Pick; Jevbratt; Herman; Baker; Moe; Böhm; Ullrich; Chaudhuri) are complemented and put into

1  Introduction—Animal Encounters

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a larger systematical and theoretical frame of the (im)possibilities of human-animal encounters. So one decided purpose of the volume is to extend the research on encounters with a human-animal-studies point of view and to give an overview of the challenges and difficulties of human-animal encounters, their specific aesthetics and rhetorics as well as their potential to challenge the human-animal divide. Research about encounters has so far concentrated on postcolonial, social, intercultural, migrational and interreligious contacts, animals, however, were hardly taken into account, except for the field of animal geographies (Wilson 454; Bull and Holmberg; Gillespie and Collard; MacGregor). There are several geographical and zoological publications that pay attention to human-animal encounters in thematically and spatially strictly defined areas. Those are, for example, private dog-keeping, primatological field work, the hunting of foxes or urban animals in Chicago, contacts with animals in Medieval Britain or human-animal encounters in experimental lab sciences, but they hardly capture any aesthetic or artistic dimension (Shapiro; Smuts; Marvin; van Horn and Aftandilian; Crane; Sharp; Cockram and Wells). The importance of encounters as sites where identities are constituted and negotiated in a relational process has in fact been taken into account in Human Animal Studies research (Tyler and Rossini; van Horn and Aftandilian). However, almost no comprehensive and systematic attention has been paid to literary and artistic representations of animal encounters, their preconditions and chances of failure. Especially for literary studies, it applies that there is ample material in history and the present, which has not been analysed with a focus on encounter and its theory. Before the animal turn in the Cultural and Literary Animal Studies, representations of animals and their encounters with humans appeared at best in the context of research on motifs in literature but were not studied with regard to their specific poetics, their function and meaning for a situated history of the relational interaction and co-constitution of human and non-human animals. The articles in this volume examine which practices and techniques advance encounters and what effect they consequently have on the engaging parties. They also ask for the reasons that motivate the encounter and show causes for successful or failed co-constitution. The desire for interspecies c­ ontact quite often is confronted with seemingly irreducible power structures between human and nonhuman animals. However, literary texts can show alternative perspectives on cultural discourse formations. The transgressive and relational nature of encounters has the potential to fundamentally problematize and put into question the human-animal divide. A quite similar situation prevails in art studies, where a special focus is on the analysis of representations of animals and their iconological, symbolic and stylistic interpretation. Though there has been a change over the last years due to the influence of Human-Animal Studies, recent research concentrates on the description of abstract or historical relationships between human and non-human animals. Actual encounters between animals and humans in the context of art works, no matter if they are represented or performative, are hardly given any attention. Yet, especially in contemporary art interspecies encounters, contacts and interactions play a major role and require methodologically adequate studying.

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2 Relationality, Contact, Interaction It is one of the main convictions of Human-Animal Studies that the conceptualization of the human and the animal necessarily depend on each other. Already in the 1940s, T.W. Adorno formulated this relational idea in his philosophical fragment “Human and Animal”, and Giorgio Agamben has taken up this notion in his influential study The Open. Man and Animal (2002). Even the natural sciences have confirmed the relational character of human-animal communities: for instance new theories of domestication assume that dogs and humans co-evolved together. Both species can only be understood in their dependency on one another and through a relational historiography (McHugh, Dog). Rather than describing the relation between different entities (such as humans equal animals plus x; e.g. humans laugh, animals don’t), relationality is a meta-concept that refers to the nature of the relationship in its inter-dependency. Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, developed in the 1990s, also proved to be extremely influential for Human-Animal Studies with regard to Latour’s view of societies as relational networks. Latour’s ANT is important for the analysis of human animal encounters as it stresses that human and non-human animals are permanently situated in relation to one another. The essays in this collection demonstrate that if this relationality to the other is not only comprehended as an abstract relationship, but rather analyzed in its concrete cultural and social manifestations, the term ‘encounter’ becomes crucial. In the modern world, in which, as John Berger famously observed, ‘real’ animals increasingly disappear from our view, encountering the non-human other is not granted. Encounters require contact zones where humans and animals can meet. Safari and wildlife parks, as well as zoological gardens answer to this demand. Encounters with other animals are desired, sought after and abound with expectations about the other. The notion of an encounter between humans and animals that creates a contact zone of becoming-with is also crucial to Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘companion species’ (Haraway, When Species Meet). Mary Louise Pratt developed the concept of the contact zone in her study Imperial Eyes from 1992. “By using the term ‘contact’”, Pratt aims “to foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination”. She points out that the specific perspective of ‘contact’ “emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other” (7). Haraway transfers the concept of encounters between colonizers and colonized, who often act in radically asymmetrical power relations, to human-animal encounters and envisions positive contact zones. In her influential text When Species Meet she describes those encounters in the contact zone as “world-making entanglements” (4) and “co-constitutive naturalcultural dancing” (27). The metaphor of the dance unites vividly the aspects of the volatile event, the interaction of both parties in the encounters, as well as the suspension of clear dichotomies such as subject and object, or actor and patient. The concept of interaction stresses the

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notion that human and nonhuman animals are actively engaged in the encounter, and that agency is attributed to both of them. Current theories of agency open up the possibility of understanding the concept of encounter as a form of interaction that puts into question binary hierarchies of human and non-human animals (Radner; Kirksey). The processual, interactive event of the encounter transforms humans as well as animals and thereby forms something new, which needs to be contoured and described without anthropocentric presumptions (Mitchell; Wolch; Philo and Wilbert). The Belgian philosopher and psychologist Vinciane Despret also conceives the encounter of humans and animals as transformative for both species ­involved. She analyzes the anthropo-zoo-genetic practice in animal experiments as well as in the mundane life of humans who live with animals. Despret holds that the exchange between human and non-human animals is constitutive for the e­ ncounter and makes them enter a ‘becoming-with’, engendering new identities. For D ­ espret this involvement of creatures is a form of agency, which for her is always already interagency or shared agency, creating a fully functioning agent only in their togetherness. The theories and figures of thought on relationality, contact and interaction that Lori Gruen, Vinciane Despret, Donna Haraway, and representatives of the actornetwork-theory or New Materialism (Bennett) develop are a productive background for the consideration of human animal encounters in literature and the arts and their interference with socio-cultural practices and knowledge, as well as their ethical and historical dimensions.

3 Modes of Encounter “How can the encounter with the animal force us to think differently about the world and the place of humans and animals in it?”, Rohan Todd and Maria Hynes ask in an article on industrial animal violence (730–731). They understand encounters as a radical event that is closely associated with the idea of an opening, a rupture in thought, or a zone of transformation (730). A genuine encounter with the animal provokes, according to them, a transformation in thinking. One precondition for the encounter to become a transformative event has been seen in an empathic mode with which the other is approached. Recently there have been a number of studies that focus especially on the importance of empathy for an ethical relationship towards animals (Aaltola, Animal Suffering; Varieties of Empathy; Gruen, “Attending to Nature”; Entangled Empathy; Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice; Bekoff, The Animals’ Agenda). The American Animal Studies scholar Lori Gruen explores empathy as a mode of encounter in her study Entangled Empathy, where she argues for an alternative ethics of human-animal-relations that concentrates on the needs of individual animals and their entanglement with human lives. Gruen describes her concept as a form of attentiveness to other creatures that considers the individual experiences and emotions of the non-human other. One important aspect in her theory like in Todd and Hynes’ is that both

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partners are transformed in the encounter (Gruen, “Attending to Nature”; Entangled Empathy; Donovan). What do those transformations look like in literary and artistic works as well as in socio-cultural practices? Which aesthetic or narratological means are used, and are there specific genres in which they become thematical? An encounter, in its emphatic sense, requires for instance an openness for the other, a special attunement (Heidegger) as well as the ability to respond (Derrida). In his seminal text L’animal que donc je suis (à suivre), Jacques Derrida emphasized the exchange of disruptive gazes between humans and animals and pointed to the animal’s ability to respond to human approaches. Derrida refers to an episode in the children’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where “Alice wanted to give the hedgehog a blow with the head of the flamingo she held under her arm, and ‘it would twist itself round and look up in her face’, until she burst out laughing” (Derrida 377). The flamingo’s sudden address of the child disrupts its normal classification as an object. Inherent to encounters is this moment of suddenness and surprise (MerleauPonty 185–186) that expresses discontinuity and incommensurability (Bohrer 7). As a result, established categories and boundaries are called into question and transgressed by the ruptures the encounter with the ‘Other’ provokes. As an epiphanic face-to-face meeting, encounters also have political and ethical dimensions (Levinas 150). Empathy is closely connected to further modes with which the other is encountered like respect, attentiveness, care, love or respons(e)-ibility. Encounters however can also be shaped by fear, anxiety as well as by appropriation and domination. This violent and unsettling aspect of encounters is part of the etymology as shown above, meaning to confront someone, fight or reject. Especially at such places of encounter as the zoo or the slaughterhouse appropriation, exclusion, confrontation and domination are the prevailing modes of interaction. The figure of the gaze and the device of anthropomorphization are ambivalent means of encounter, which are for instance at work in zoo encounters (Steen, Richon, Paust this volume). Whilst a common definition of encounter is a face-to-face meeting, which therefore implies the concrete and actual as well as the situated spatial and temporal proximity of both parties, there are also disruptive encounters with animals that work through traces of the other—as for example in sound or smell (Borkfelt this volume). Such encounters with animal sounds, smells and traces can be described as metonymic: the human and the non-human animal do not have to be physically and simultaneously present. This is also an important aspect of mediated representations of encounters in literature and the arts, which needs to be kept in mind. In a Heideggerian tradition it has been argued that within Western rationality any form of representation is necessarily anthropocentric. This anthropocentrism is the basis for a conception of human agency that denies agency to the non-­ human, non-rational other. Insofar as animal agency does not become visible and is not recognized in visual or literary representations it is a potential violation of the other that reinforces the anthropological difference and the hierarchical power relations towards animals that are embedded in our language, semiotics and thinking. For example, the agency of nonhuman animals is obscured when they remain

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the object of mediated encounters with human beings who are often the ones who initiate and seek the encounter with the animals, as e.g. in the zoo, nature preserves or husbandry. How can the structural conditions of our thinking be disclosed, criticized, and with regard to non-hierarchical encounters with the other, be overcome and transformed? One of the central issues of the volume is in how far meaningful encounters with animals can disrupt an instrumentalizing, objectifying and anthropocentric conception and representation of the other. In the context of encounters, this disruption might consist of decentering gaze constellations, or arise through the confrontation with a non-compliant and surprising behaviour or activity of the animal counterpart. There are representations of animal encounters in the visual arts and in literary texts as the contributions in this volume show that insist on the agency of other animals by respecting their intrinsic value; they do not just use and exploit them for their own ends, for example as an unususal subject matter. One way of emphasizing the agency of non-human animals is showing their resistance to collaborate in works of art by not letting themselves be depicted (Snabjornsdottir and Wilson this volume). This aspect underlines the issue of the (im)possibility of encounters, and raises questions of whether encounters between humans and animals should always be voluntary, where both the animal and the human can escape the encounter at any point. This is an especially important issue in the ongoing debate about the value of zoos, national parks or any kind of animal enclosures. In this context, failed encounters or encounters that did not take place also become meaningful and may acquire epistemological merit and artistic worth.

4 Structuring the Field The 26 contributions of the present volume give a broad overview over the different fields of research on animal encounters. We arranged them in six sections that structure the various aspects of encounters. Each of them highlights key terms that relate to the concept of ‘encounter’ from different disciplinary perspectives. The first section deals with fundamental theoretical questions concerning the nature of encounters. The following part emphasizes modes of encounter like ­empathy, anthropomorphism, gaze and collaboration from the perspective of philosophy, literature and the arts. The contributions from the science of history and arts studies of the subsequent section deal with central terms that are adjacent to the concept of encounter like contact, interaction, and relationality. Part 4 addresses the issue of places where humans and animals meet, as in the slaughterhouse, the zoo, and the circus from the point of view of such different disciplines as literary and art studies, linguistics and musicology. The last section of the scholarly contributions analyzes socio-cultural practices of human-animal encounters such as in hunting, horse-riding, guide dogs or sheep husbandry. Finally, the volume is completed by four different artistic conceptions of human-animal encounters.

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Theories of Encounter The first section, “Theories of Encounter”, assembles three texts from the perspective of cultural geography and philosophy, which deal with issues, characteristics and difficulties of human animal encounters that are more general and give a comprehensive introduction into the topic. The volume starts with Helen Wilson’s densely argued theoretical account of the concept of encounters, which she seeks to elaborate as a genre of contact from the perspective of geography. As such, Wilson argues, it has important implications for Human-Animal Studies. As an event of relation, encounters are associated with difference and borders. Consequently, narratives of encounter are often about the alterity of the animal other, which denotes power relations, species hierarchies, and violence. However, as Wilson maintains, if we understand the encounter as event, attention should also be paid to the fluid character of momentary productions of difference. It implies the disruption and destabilizing of boundaries and lines of distinction during human-animal contacts, which is described as experience of shock, surprise, and rupture. Wilson shows that while the violation of boundaries can lead to trauma and the attempt to reinstate borders, there is also the potential of encounters as a site of emergent politics, pedagogy, and transformation. Encounters can produce difference in thought and lead to ethical reconsiderations, but as the article shows, on the reverse is a growing ‘industry’ that sells thrilling or entertaining encounters as for example in zoos, safaris, wildlife parks or habitat dioramas in museums. With these instances, the author elaborates on the problems and paradoxes that occur when encounters are staged or organized. Wilson finally notes an important aspect one has to keep in mind when talking about human-animal encounters: it is mostly humans who seek out the encounter with the animal; an invasive action that has to be kept in mind as such. The philosophical approach by Martin Huth undertakes a phenomenological reading of animal encounters. Huth emphasizes that the concept of humananimal cultures is central for apprehending human animal relations. This is to say that human and non-human animals always already are situated in an interspecies togetherness. Contrary to theories of a sharp species division as in classical anthropocentric and in newer alterity-centered positions, Huth argues that there is an entanglement and communication, albeit tacit, between humans and other animals, based on their intercorporeality and interanimality. Within human-animal cultures, he distinguishes between two different forms of encounters: framed and disruptive encounters. Framed encounters, which seem to represent the majority of humananimal interactions, reproduce typical definitions where the animal fits in ordinary classifications such as the perception of a cow as an efficient provider for milk or meat. On the other hand, disruptive encounters upset ordinary convictions and reveal the singularity of the animal. In this context, Huth especially stresses the importance of the gaze of the non-human other, which, he claims, is resistant to objectification and classification and can ultimately lead to a change in individual and collective habits.

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In his contribution, D. S. Mayfield traces the work of teriophilic philosophers like Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Derrida and Blumenberg back to the philosophy of the cynic Diogenes. Mayfield shows the importance of actual and immediate interspecies encounters in the Cynic’s philosophy, which stresses the similarities between humans and animals, thereby putting into question the human-animal divide. As characteristic for discourses with cynical affinities, of which the philosophers he discusses in his essay are representative, the author sees a provocative and performative rhetoric and a mundane, animal-related approach. Intended is a change of perspective of humans’ common notions of animals that has led to their misrecognition. Mayfield gives specific attention to Schopenhauer’s work that is renowned in Animal Studies for its philosophy of compassion that includes animals in its ethical considerations. The will to live and procreate is the same in all living beings, which leads to an ethical turn that recognizes animal suffering. Mayfield closes his readings with Blumenberg’s interpretation of a novel by Evelyn Waugh and the ultimate encounter with death. Interspecies difference as well as the postulate of radical alterity of the animal is resolved in the face of the shared corporeality of human and non-human animals. Despite their heterogeneous approaches from a phenomenological (Huth) and Cynical (Mayfield) discourse, both philosophical accounts of human-animal encounters share an emphasis on the common corporeality of humans and other animals that enables interspecies interaction. Encounters with animals, and this is also true for Wilson’s inquiry, can be seen as an opportunity to challenge cultural definitions of animals and change the perspective from which animals are treated as the (inferior) other. Modes of Encounters: Empathy, Anthropomorphism, Gaze, Collaboration The second section of this book deals with different modes of encounter. In her essay, philosopher Lori Gruen deals with violent human-animal and humanhuman encounters. She expands her concept of entangled empathy to discuss urgent questions about politics and practice. Drawing from recent examples of animal killings as well as human killings, she develops her ideas on disposability and killability. She takes a close look at the public protests that were caused by the spectacular shooting of the lion Cecil or the gorilla Harambe and the critique of those protests by protagonists of the Black Lives Matter Movement who were concerned about the fact that the killing of animals caused more outrage than police violence against African-Americans. Gruen argues that acts of violence against animals as well as certain groups of humans follow and reinforce the same logic. The ideology of disposability that puts some individuals “into a category that makes their lives not matter” authorizes and justifies the killing of those lives, no matter which species they belong to. Without dismissing the importance of justice in addressing the exclusion of animals and some humans in the social world, Gruen argues that a focus on justice alone is not enough. Justice, which she characterizes as disembodied, has to be complemented by theories and practices of

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empathy, care, and love, which focus on flourishment. Once we have recognized that we are always inevitably in relationships with other animals or other humans, she calls for us to take the next step and engage in emotional and cognitive processes that include empathy and contextual observations in order to alter the prevalent structure of power that makes some lives killable. Roland Borgards’ contribution on Georg Büchner’s novella Lenz analyzes a specific encounter of the protagonist with a cat. Borgards argues that traditional interpretations of the scene perform a ‘disappearing cat trick’ as they are commonly based on assumptions of anthropological difference, underlying processes of anthropomorphizing and anthropocentric suppositions. With his close reading that focuses on the actors, the actions and the communication of the scene, he attempts to let the cat reappear. The cat is no longer a figure or metaphor for the human, i.e. the madness of Lenz, but rather emphasizes the material-semiotic aspect of the event. As such, the encounter implies communication and resonance whereby a common material and semiotic space is created. In the following, the paper undertakes a rethinking of anthropological difference, anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism from the point of view of what Borgards calls ‘New Ethology’. With regard to human-animal encounters, Borgards draws several conclusions that enable a more complex and reflected understanding of animals in literary texts. What complicates the reading of the text even further is, as Borgards demonstrates, the historical situatedness of Büchner’s novella, which he finally focuses in his thick description. Büchner not only was a poet, but also a student of natural history. The paper compares Büchner’s realistic description of the human-cat encounter with contemporary scientific portrayals such as from Buffon’s Natural History. Borgards manages to show how Büchner’s account is a striking inversion of Buffon’s narrative, which, as he claims, has its most stunning aspect in the fact, that not only Lenz is encountering the cat, but also the cat is encountering Lenz, and both recognize themselves in the encounter as others. Alexandra Böhm’s article on empathic animal encounters argues that around 1900 an ‘animal turn’ takes place. The take on the animal fundamentally changes at the beginning of the 20th century as the essays by Hermann Bahr from 1909 and Oskar Walzel from 1918 demonstrate. As the paper shows, in literature nonhuman animals achieve their own rights, they no longer function as substitutes for humans as was the custom in fables. Most notably the animal’s perspective comes to the fore. The writers of animal narratives focus on the point of view of the animal; their aim is to see the world from the animal’s perspective. It becomes apparent, that the challenge of the anthropocentric worldview that is implied, traces back to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. The following analysis concentrates on Thomas Mann’s animal story Herr und Hund (engl. Bashan and I) and situates it within this ‘animal turn’. Whereas Mann’s text has been repeatedly criticized for enacting an authoritarian relationship between master and subservient dog, Böhm’s interpretation shows through recourse on contemporary zoological knowledge, that the empathic encounters between human and nonhuman animals deconstruct the supposed figure of auctoritas. Instead, the text implements through narrative strategies concepts of ‘becoming with’ (Haraway), coconstitution, and animal agency in the relation between ‘the master’ and his dog.

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Artist Olivier Richon in his densely argued and associative essay does not so much focus on his own photographic oeuvre but rather reflects on questions of visual representation and imitation as possible forms of encountering animal others. He references a whole array of philosophical and artistic ruminations on the topic taking John Berger’s seminal essay Why Look at Animals as the starting point for his associative meditation on the gaze of animals. The fact that captive animals avoid the human gaze could be understood as a failed or incomplete encounter. Carrying on from Arthur Danto’s essay on the pictorial competence of animals and surrealist ideas about vision, Richon reflects on the monkey as a symbol for mimesis or as an allegorical alter ego of the artist involved in the task of imitation and on the question if animals can be artists pointing to mimesis and imitation as other forms of encountering animals. Foregrounding the idea of thinking through one’s senses rather than language, Richon argues that the animal can never be reduced to a sign because of his or her radical otherness. Concepción Cortés Zulueta focuses on two distinct entomological encounters in art. In her contribution she compares the work of Chinese artist Liang Shaoji and French sculptor Hubert Duprat who both almost exclusively work with larvae: Shaoji with cocoons woven by silkworms and Duprat with the cases of caddisflies. And both regard their practice as artistic collaborations with insects, a notion that is discussed and challenged by Cortés Zulueta when she reflects the distributed agency, the nature-culture distinction and mutual influences and feedback exchanges in these works. In her analysis, she takes into account the biographies of the artists, their personal experiences, cultural backgrounds, and self-statements as well as the artistic outcomes, thus combining aesthetics of production and reception with a contextual art historical reading. She shows how the artists came to see the world through the perspective of their chosen insect species and built their own artistic cosmologies accordingly. Her text demonstrates that these creative insect-human encounters might imply a form of becoming-larvae of the human artists as well as a becoming-artist of the larvae. However, general ethical questions about the appropriation of animals as co-producers of artworks remain. Agency, Interaction and Relationality The next section of the book deals with the notions of agency, interaction and relationality. The following five articles shed light on the interrelations that constitute human-animal encounters in different contexts. They explore the relational agency of bison, sheep, seal, polar bears, hunting dogs, butterflies, and elephants in the context of (pre)history, art, and music. Mieke Roscher understands her article as “a call for an expanded social history”. She focusses on human-bison encounters drawing from environmental history and historical geography. Taking the semiotics, the politics and the perception of European bison in the Białowieża National Park and the American bison in Yellowstone National Park as her examples she discusses how agency is produced through encounter and relation of specific animals in specific histories. By focussing on relational agency which is characterized by the co-constitutionality of interacting subjects as well as on relational locality where relationships are shaped by

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the environment and overlapping living spaces, Roscher shows that agency challenges the dichotomy of action and reaction which usually puts only the human partner in a human-animal encounter in the active position. Also, she expands the concept of relationality that has been mostly discussed for domesticated animals to so called ‘wild’ animals—a category that can also only be understood in relational terms in a historical and spatial/situational perspective, as she argues. Environmental archaeologist Kirstin Armstrong Oma challenges the anthropocentric presupposition that only humans took an active role in domestication processes and calls for an archaeology that takes animal agency into account. In her article Armstrong Oma studies animal husbandry and co-habitation strategies from a time-depth perspective using the example of first encounters between humans and sheep respectively cows in the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age at the seashore in Norway. For her analysis of the manifold prehistoric interspecies engagements and entanglements, she takes a close look at the physical manifestations of these encounters like animal bones or architectural structures of joint living spaces. While she agrees that domestication changed human perception of animals as well as material cultures irrevocably, she deconstructs the belief that domestication was based on a one-sided exploitation. Rather she argues that domestication brought a change in human-animal relations from a mode of domination into a complex reciprocal relation of nurterance and care as well as interspecies dependence without fixed hierarchies of power. In their article Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson give a broad overview over their animal related artworks from their early practice to very recent projects that have encounters with plants as their subject matter. Most projects are realized in lens-based media but resist the traditional use of visual representation. In some of them the artists try to get into contact with wild, living or liminal animals, for example seal or seagulls, in a non-hierarchical way and on the animal’s own terms. Others, like the artist’s research nanoq: flat and bluesome try to reconstruct the individuality of long dead animals, in this case polar bears, in order to untie them from a generic and reductive representation. In their project (a)fly, which shows photographs of the dwellings of pets, they not only combine the iconography of hunting with the tradition of the interior and thus with two categories of animals—wild and domesticated—but also with two types of encounter: a violent one and a caring one. En passant, they also address how cities regulate and control pet keeping. All of their works operate with some kind of uncertainty regarding the involved animals and as a result open up new ways of thinking about human-animal encounters. Insofar they suggest new ways of responding towards animal others and therefore imply new encounters between art and its audience. The (failed) encounter with butterflies in the context of an artwork is the topic of Nike Dreyer’s close reading of the installation The Lover by German artist Kristina Buch, which was exhibited at documenta 13. The outdoor installation consisted of a raised bed with flowers and other plants and was supposed to be the habitat for several butterfly species that Buch bred herself in her studio. Dreyer delivers a precise description of the production and the aesthetics of the work as well as of the alleged intentions of the artist. The main focus of her text, how-

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ever, are questions of the animal as material versus animal agency, as well as the role of empathy and an ethics of care in the reception of Buch’s work. She parallels the enacted possibility of butterflies leaving the provided framework and thus withdrawing from the curiosity of visitors with a dissolution of boundaries in art reception. Dreyer shows that unlike in artworks by other artists that also involve butterflies, the spectacular encounter that Buch’s installation promises is never realized. In this way The Lover can be seen as an enactment of the impossibility of human-animal encounters with butterflies that underlines the fleeting character of encounters and also raises questions about power hierarchies and agency. Places of Human-Animal Encounters: Slaughterhouse, Zoo, and the Circus The essays in this section analyze encounters in specific spaces and places of human-animal encounters such as the slaughterhouse, the zoo and the circus. In his article, Sune Borkfelt deals with literary and cultural documents of slaughterhouses. Instead of focusing on the dominant visual portrayal, the text is dealing with sound and especially with the smell of animals that are used in the food production. In this sense, Borkfelt examines what we would like to describe as metonymic encounters: with smell and sound there are only traces of the animal, in which people are involuntarily immersed, while often no direct encounter takes place. Both fictional and argumentative texts use the evocative and emotional potential of horrid sounds and nauseating smells, which indicate a corporeal proximity of animals in distress. In 19th century literature, as Borkfelt shows, the aural and olfactory evocation of the cattle market and the slaughterhouse and their implications about health, hygiene and morals are used in the heated debate about the location of these places in the city. In the further course of literature as slaughterhouses became more shielded, texts rather criticize the distance between the consumer and the slaughter of animals. The smells and sounds of the slaughterhouse are strong reminders of the life and emotion of those who are killed, and as Borkfelt emphasizes, of the fact, that humans are animals, too. Another paper dealing with encounters in the slaughterhouse is by Giulia Ferro Milone, who analyzes Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse 5. The novel, a recollection of the bombing of Dresden during the Second World War by an American soldier, is situated in the abandoned slaughterhouse of the German city. Milone pays special attention to the manifold animals of the text, which she understands as actors who cooperate and interact with humans. She understands the slaughterhouse as a contact zone and, in Foucault’s terms, a heterotopia where (animal) victims and (human) perpetrators get into close contact, human and animal positions exchanged. Radical changes of perspective between humans and animals, Milone claims, are characteristic for Vonnegut’s novel and allow for empathic processes. The destruction of culturally established patterns of perception enable an awareness of the corporeality and mortality of both, human and non-human animals, whose suffering from the war and from general violence is comparable to those of humans. The following two papers deal with another classic space of human-animal encounters: the zoo and its possibilities of interspecies contact, which John Berger

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famously denied in his seminal text Why Look at Animals. Pamela Steen looks into encounters at the zoo from a linguist perspective. The article enquires typical forms and functions of human discourse about animals in the zoo, which, according to her, constitute an own genre of dialogue. Steen reconstructs the process of communicative appropriation of the animals. She differentiates between different types of communication: a receptive and an instrumental perspective, a situative re-perspectivation and a situative re-re-perspectivation. From her analysis of these different types of zoo dialogues, which mainly reduce the richness of the symptoms of the non-human other to precoded typifications, Steen argues that meaningful human animal encounters in the sense of a genuine “Wir-Beziehung” that recognizes the animal as a counterpart in a shared experience are impossible in the zoo. Museum’s curator and art historian Bettina Paust recapitulates the history of the display of animals from baroque menageries in the 17th century to Hagenbeckian zoological gardens and Joseph Beuys’ iconic performance I like America and America likes me (which is regarded as the pioneering work in artistic humananimal encounters and has been the reference point for future generations of artists) through to the latest contemporary art exhibitions to find out why humans like to look at animals. She shows continuities of those historically distant phenomena like for example the specific kind of architectural framing of exotic animals that initially organized the gaze in baroque menageries, and which still serves as model for the display modes in galleries today. However, she also points to shifts in the perception and meaning of the displayed animals as well as in the motivations for staging visual encounters with animals in exhibition contexts. While the exhibited animals had formerly been status symbols, entertaining spectacles, or objects of a scientific urge for knowledge, they later became living readymades, figures of institutional critique, symbols for pristine nature or figures of transgression in the art context. Paust not only traces the change of meaning of the human notion of curiosity towards the animal but also discusses the challenges museums meet when curating exhibitions with living animals. Finally, she questions the principal legitimacy of displaying living animals in art museums or galleries. The musicologist Martin Ullrich looks at encounters between elephants and humans with a focus on music. Ullrich asks what happens when elephants listen to music and when they have to perform to this music. For this, he gives a short account of human-elephant interactions in antiquity. He shows that elephants were regarded as wild, threatening animals, and as such needed to be subjugated. In Roman arenas, elephants were killed for pleasure. This socio-cultural practice is, according to the scholar Jo-Ann Shelton interconnected to the deriding amusement produced in the arenas by elephants dancing to human music. There is however an ambiguity, Ullrich claims, at the bottom of this proceeding, which is true for the exhibition of elephants to music in the Roman arena as well as in menageries and circuses of the 19th century. The musical experience gives the elephants individuality and raises them to the cultural status of being a concert audience. This, he claims can be seen, for example in the 1798 musical performance for the elephants

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Marguerite and Hanz in the Jardin des plantes in Paris, which—contrary to speciesist assumptions—demonstrated that aesthetic experiences are not restricted to humans. Practices of Human-Animal Encounters The following section “Practices of Encounter” discusses and historicizes sociocultural practices of human-animal encounters, as well as the actual application of methods of such encounters. The contributions in this part of the volume show hunting dogs, guide dogs, horses, sheep and other small animals in their social entanglements with humans. As a result, many of them appear as social beings in dynamic relationships with specific humans. Their material bodies become important as agents in their own right: animals and humans transform their worlds by ‘doing culture’ together. With the focus on the hunter, the hunting dog, and their representations in literature and the arts Claudia Lillge examines a classical practice of interaction between human and non-human animal. She argues that the hunting dog is an ‘invention’ of the human to compensate the deficiencies of the hunter. As such it is located between humans and animal realms. The dogs’ oscillating position at the human animal boundary is negotiated in texts like James Thomson’s poem The Seasons from 1730 that stages the dog as a reified tool of the human. In this function the dog is excluded from the community of other animals as in Felix Salten’s children’s classic Bambi from 1924. Another aspect of this relationship is, according to Lillge, the anthropocentric anthropomorphizing of the hunting dog as men’s most loyal friend, which neglects the animal’s agency as in Marie Ebner-Eschenbach’s novella Krambambuli. In William Faulkner’s short novel The Bear, the hunting dog transcends both the attributions of the human and the animal, and acquires instead a mythopoetic potency. Lillge’s final example of human animal assemblages changes the media of representation from literature to photography. She discusses the interventionist project of the artist and animal advocate Martin Usborne who portrays still lives of hunting dogs that are disposed of after the hunting season and restores them with grace in his specific aesthetics. Usborne’s work is as highly charged—though expression of a different cultural discursive formation—with animal ethics as hunting critical representations of the 18th century. Katja Kynast looks at the various human-animal-machine encounters in training methods for guide dogs, which were developed by Emanuel Sarris and Jakob von Uexküll at the Hamburg Institute for Environmental Research. Kynast recapitulates the arguments and divergency of competing schools and trainers and thus of different approaches to human-dog encounters. For example Uexküll und Sarris criticized other training methods that did not educate dogs but rather drilled them with the consequence that the trained dogs did not really understand their tasks but simply performed conditioned exercises. The strategy of Uexküll and Sarris on the other hand aimed at keeping the human at distance to the dog by replacing him with devices and gadgets because they considered him or her as an obstacle in the dog’s learning process. Kynast reads the encounter of humans, dogs and the tech-

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nical equipment as assemblages and social fabric. She not only shows the presence and dominance of the involved humans but also that the critique of anthropocentric learning processes as Uexküll’s and Sarris’ not necessarily aligns with a new attentiveness to the involved dogs. Still, Kynast suggests that the history of human-animal encounters can be read as the history of co-constituting assistances. Teresa Hiergeist concentrates in her paper on farm animals in the 16th and 17th century in Spain. She focuses on sheep as most important livestock that ensured the survival of the Spanish rural population in times of scarcity. Methodically, she postulates four different modes of encounter: definition, status, contact, and perspective, which, according to Hiergeist, can each stress either the proximity or the distance between human and non-human animals. Into this pattern, which allows for complex constellations, Hiergeist classifies the discourse about sheep as it manifests itself in agronomic treatises, natural histories and literature. There are two main contexts of the discourse on sheep that she examines: first, the evaluation of the sheep with regard to their usage, and second, practical instructions for the treatment of the sheep. This includes for example advice on the right time for killing the sheep. In conclusion, Hiergeist claims that the overall tendency of interspecies encounters during the siglo de oro is a functionalizing one, especially in the agronomic treatises. However, gradual differences can be noticed, specifically in natural history, where gratitude, dependency, and interaction are emphasized. Marcello Pocai analyses the notion of touch in encounters with horses in working relationships, or more specifically in equestrian respectively riding practices. He understands touch as a spatial, directed and psychosocial category and as a fundamental operation of getting into contact. Pocai argues that the humanhorse encounter is inevitably linked to violence and is usually not designed to be reciprocal. Even when dealing with domesticated animals, rituals of domestications like capturing, tying up, or the tightening of space are continually repeated. However, the different modes of touch, like a tactile or manual touch but also the touch by tools, gestures or gazes, imply a mutual influence of humans and horses. Horses can sense human intentions and react by altering their distance towards the human. Pocai demonstrates his own equestrian practice to encounter horses on their own grounds, understanding them as socially competent animals who express their needs by movement. Drawing on phenomenology as well as on findings by ethologists, he calls for an attunement to the spatial behaviour of horses, like their rhythms and their energies, and to their related psychological disposition, in order to achieve more enlightened, fairer working alliances with equids. South African artist and art educator Nicola Grobler introduces her custommade backpack with different art objects as a mobile visitor center with which to interrogate, challenge and alter humans’ perception of urban animals. It is used by Grobler as a flexible communication device during public interventions and workshops in Tswaing Meteorite Crater reserve in Soshanguve. In her text, she analyses the encounters between this mobile hub, human participants, and non-human animals. The object comfortable distance for example, a tape-measure scaled in spider legs, makes participants aware of the small size and vulnerability of spiders and encourages them to reconsider their uneasiness about these animals. Concepts

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of multispecies assemblage, interagency, interrelationality, and entangled empathy form the theoretical grounding of her artistic experiments. Grobler understands her device as an agential relational art object that can be used to reimage interspecies relationships as non-hierarchical entanglements. Engaging with her work and talking about their experience, participants might realize themselves as co-existing subjects in a multispecies world. With her art practice, Grobler wants to present an alternative, more empathic and caring model of encountering non-charismatic smaller animals like spiders, reptiles, birds, or insects, to challenge conventional anthropocentric perceptions of human-animal relationships. Artistic Human-Animal Encounters The final section “Artistic Human-Animal Encounters” of this volume presents four different perspectives on the subject. With a selection of images from animal related projects, the artists Marek Brandt (Germany), Catherine Clover (Australia), Hugo Fortes (Brazil) and René Marquez (USA) visualize the broad range of possible creative approaches to other animals. Some of them work with animals, others work for animals or about animals but all of them get their inspiration out of real-life encounters with individuals of different species. Or as is the case with Marek Brandt’s artwork, out of attempted encounters with wild animals. Brandt makes Music for Animals and addresses fish, ants, dust mites, monkeys, crows and many other creatures. For example, his composition for wildcats in Saarbrücken, Germany in 2014, consisted of electronical music, nature sounds of trees, leaves, and grass as well as of field recordings that Brandt had collected in the course of two months before the concert took place. Additionally, a saxophone player improvised in the natural habitat of the wildcats. The animal audience Brandt addressed stayed invisible for the duration of the concert. It is not possible to know if the animals responded in any way to the music that was especially produced for them. The project is a creative attempt to get into contact with other animals’ minds and other animals’ perceptions without taking their collaboration for granted. The possibility of a response is not shut off but it is also not required. Catherine Clover, who also uses sound material, approaches other animals differently. In this volume, we are showing one of her scores that is supposed to be read to a human audience. The text is a compilation of the sounds different bird species make in the typical transcription developed for ornithological fieldwork. While the written words do not make any sense to a human reader, they sound birdlike when voiced aloud. The person who improvises the score—and who becomes a little birdlike in this performance—is not supposed to show virtuosity or accuracy but is asked to listen closely to his or her own voicing and thereby to imagine the auditory worlds of other species. The piece is not only mocking the human obsession with categorizing and making birdlife accessible in verbal form but it also trains the imagination and the capacity for empathy with animal others. Just like Clover, Hugo Fortes is also interested in the encounter of humans and birds. In his installations, videos, photos, and objects Fortes engages with birds and the notion of flight. The theoretical grounding of his artistic works can be found in the reflections on birds as creatures of naturecultures by the Brazilian

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philosopher Vilém Flusser. While birds have traditionally been seen as symbols for freedom and as links between humanity and the divine, according to Flusser, they are now objects of scientific investigations in techno-scientific societies where the formerly sublime ability of flying is ascribed to airplanes and spaceships. Fortes’ representations focus on the human desire to fly and on our co-habitation with urban birds in order to ask if it is possible to come to a closer understanding of birds by artistic means. René Marquez gets into intimate contact with animals in a practical sense. He has founded a small sanctuary for dogs who did not meet the expectations of their human owners and who are considered for example untrainable or aggressive and therefore disposable. He lives with those dogs, trains them, lets them ‘be dog’ and rehabilitates them. Following Joseph Beuys’ expanded art concept that considers social practice as art, Marquez understands his co-habitation project Free to Be Dog Haven as a collaborative artistic practice. His project is not only a performative work in progress but it is also an installation piece, ethological fieldwork and scholarly study on the notion of ‘pet’-keeping as a hierarchical form of a humananimal encounter. Free to Be Dog Haven is an ever-evolving space of encounter defined by the inter-subjectivity of members of two different species. Maybe, so his artwork implies, the canine inhabitants are not suitable as pets in asymmetrical power relations but they anyhow seem to be suitable as art collaborators, companions and co-habitants. The present volume presents the results of the international, interdisciplinary conference “Animal Encounters. Human-Animal-Contacts in Art, Literature and Science”, which took place from 25th–27th November 2016 at the FriedrichAle­xander-University Nuremberg-Erlangen. In total, more than 80 scientists and artists from more than 15 countries participated in the conference. The essays compiled here reflect a cross-section of the presentations given and presented projects. We thank all delegates and supporters of the conference as well as all contributors to this volume along with the artists who provided illustrations. We also like to express our thanks to Cornelia Götschel, Imelda Stier, Stefan Steiner and Mark Schönleben for their energetic support in the organization and execution of the conference. We are also indebted to Hartmut Kiewert, Sebastian Honert and Claudia Schorcht and their staff from the “Lesecafé Anständig Essen” in Erlangen. Without the generous financial support of the conference by the German Research Foundation (DFG) this volume would not have been possible. We owe them our special thanks. We are also much obliged to our conference host, the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, in particular Antje Kley and Christine Lubkoll, and the cooperation partners Minding Animals International Incorporated, in particular Rod Bennison, and the University of Music Nuremberg, in particular Martin Ullrich.

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We also thank Ute Hechtfischer and Metzler publishing house for their professional support of the publication as well as the editor of the book series “Cultural Animal Studies” Roland Borgards. Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson have kindly provided the illustration for the book cover. We thank Miriam Rückelt for her patient and meticulous proofreading and Michaela Castellanos for the English editing of the introduction. Finally yet importantly, we are sincerely grateful to the Luise Prell Foundation at Erlangen University for their financial support of the publication.

References Aaltola, Elisa. Animal Suffering: Philosophy and Culture. Palgrave, 2012. Aaltola, Elisa. Varieties of Empathy: Moral Psychology and Animal Ethics. Rowman, 2018. Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. “Mensch und Tier.” Dialektik der Aufklärung, Suhrkamp, 1986, pp. 219–227. Agamben, Giorgio. Das Offene: Der Mensch und das Tier. Suhrkamp, 2003. Baker, Steve. Artist Animal. U of Minnesota P, 2013. Bekoff, Marc. The Animals’ Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age. Beacon Press, 2017. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010. Berger, John. Why Look at Animals? 1980. Penguin, 2011. Böhm, Alexandra. “Metamorphische Begegnungen zwischen Mensch und Tier: Donna Haraways When Species Meet und Marian Engels Bear.” Tierstudien: Metamorphosen, ed. by Jessica Ullrich and Antonia Ulrich, no. 04, 2013, pp. 100–114. Bohrer, Karl-Heinz. Plötzlichkeit. Suhrkamp, 1981. Bonneuil, Christoph, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, eds. The Shock of the Anthropocene: Earth, History, and Us. Verso, 2016. Bull Jacob, and Tora Holmberg. Animal Places: Lively Cartography of Human-Animal Relations. Multispecies Encounters, 2017. Chaudhuri, Una. “Animal Rites: Performing beyond the Human.” Critical Theory and Performance, ed. by Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach, U of Michigan P, 2007, pp. 506–520. Cockram, Sarah, and Andrew Wells, eds. Interspecies Interactions: Animals and Humans between the Middle Ages and Modernity. Routledge, 2017. Crane, Susan. Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain. Middle Ages, 2012. Despret, Vinciane. Hans, le cheval qui savait compter. Empecheurs Penser en Rond, 2004. Despret, Vinciane. Penser comme un rat. Sciences en questions, 2009. Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Trans. by David Wills. Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, 2002, pp. 369–418. Donovan, Josephine. “Attention to Suffering: Sympathy as a Basis for Ethical Treatment of Animals.” The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader, ed. by Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams, Columbia UP, 2007, pp. 174–197. “Encounter.” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989. Gillespie, Kathryn, and Rosemary-Claire Collard. Critical Animal Geographies: Politics, Intersections and Hierarchies in a Multispecies World. Multispecies Encounters, 2017.

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Gruen, Lori. “Attending to Nature: Empathetic Engagement with the More than Human World.” Ethics and the Environment, no. 14, 2009, pp. 23–38. Gruen, Lori. Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals. Lantern Books, 2015. Hamilton, Clive. Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene. Polity, 2017. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Others. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Haraway, Donna. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Combined Academic Publ., 2007. Herman, David, ed. Creatural Fictions: Human-Animal Relationships in Twentieth- and Twentyfirst-century Literature. Basingstoke, 2016. Jevbratt, Lisa. “Interspezies-Kollaboration: Kunstmachen mit nicht-menschlichen Tieren.” Tierstudien: Animalität und Ästhetik, ed. by Jessica Ullrich, no. 01, 2012, pp. 105–121. Kirksey, Eben, ed. The Multispecies Salon. Duke UP, 2014. Latour, Bruno. “On Actor-Network Theory: A few Clarifications.” Soziale Welt, vol. 47, no. 4, 1996, pp. 369–382. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Duquesne UP, 1998. MacGregor, Arthur: Animal Encounters: Human and Animal Interaction in Britain from the Norman Conquest to World War One. Reaktion Books, 2012. Marvin, Garry. “Animal Encounters: Challenge and Contest in English Foxhunting.” Ludicia: Annali di Storia e Civilita del Gioco, Fondazione Benetton, no. 9, 2003, pp. 140–151. McHugh, Susan. Dog, Reaktion Books, 2004. McHugh, Susan. “Literary Animal Agents.” PMLA, vol. 124, no. 2, 2009, pp. 487–495. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Die Prosa der Welt, ed. by Claude Lefort, trans. by Regula Giuliani, Fink, 1984. Moe, Aaron. Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry. Lexington Books, 2014. Mitchell, Robert W., ed. Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals. Suny Press, 1996. Moore, Jason W. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. PM Press, 2016. Nussbaum, Martha. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Harvard UP, 2006. OED. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford UP, 2018. Pick, Anat. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. Columbia UP, 2011. Philo, Chris, and Chris Wilbert, eds. Animal spaces: Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations. Psychology, 2000. Pratt, Mary Louise: Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, 1992. Radner, Daisie M. “Heterophenomenology: Learning About the Birds and the Bees.” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 8, no. 91, 1994, pp. 389–403. Shapiro, Kenneth. “Understanding dogs through kinaesthetic empathy, social construction and history.” Anthrozoos, vol. 3, no. 3, 1990, pp. 184–195. Sharp, Lesley A. Animal Ethos: The Morality of Human-Animal Encounters in Experimental Lab Science. U of California P, 2018. Smuts, Barbara. “Encounters with Animal Minds.” Journal of Consciousness, vol. 8, no. 5–7, 2001, pp. 87–113. Snæbjörnsdóttir, Bryndís. Spaces of Encounter. Universität Gothenburg, 2009. Todd, Rohan, and Maria Hynes. “Encountering the Animal: Temple Grandin, slaughterhouses and the possibilities of a differential ontology.” The Sociological Review, vol. 65, no. 4, 2017, pp. 729–744. Tyler, Tom, and Manuela Rossini eds. Animal Encounters. Brill, 2009.

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Ullrich, Jessica. Who Cares for Animals? Interspezies-Fürsorge in der zeitgenössischen Kunst, figurationen: Animal Traces/Tierspuren/Traces Animales, ed. by Manuela Rossini, no. 15, 2014, pp. 78–97. van Horn, Gavin, and Dave Aftandilian, eds. City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness Hardcover. Chicago UP, 2015. Wilson, Helen. “On Geography and Encounter.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 41, 2017, pp. 451–471. Wolch, Jennifer, and Jody Emel, eds. Animal Geographies: Places, Politics and Identity at the Nature-Culture Borderland. Verso, 1998. Woodward, Wendy. “‘Dog[s] of the Heart’: Encounters between Humans and Other Animals in the Poetry of Ruth Miller.” English Academy Review, vol. 18, 2001, pp. 73–86.

I  Theories of Encounter

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Animal Encounters: A Genre of Contact Helen F. Wilson

1 Introduction We stopped, turned the car round, went cautiously back up the road in first gear. There, a good 6 feet or more tall at the withers and nonchalantly chomping on foliage, was a fullygrown cow moose. The species is famously timid […] so we were surprised at how little she seemed to care about our presence. We edged the car forward until she was barely 3 or 4 feet from the headlights, turned off the engine and watched. (Jackson 8)

This was Kevin Jackson’s first encounter with a moose. He depicts it as a moment of enchantment, unlike any other, in which he was unexpectedly “enraptured” by her ears: “large, delicate, constantly in nervous motion as she picked up on the many noises of the night-time forest” (8). Within twenty minutes she had gone. For Jackson, this encounter was an unforeseen ‘epiphany’, which now serves as his introduction to the Reaktion volume Moose. But what does it mean to encounter an animal? Human-animal relations have been described in a multitude of ways—entanglements, knots, minglings, and crossings (Collard, “Cougar-human Entanglements”; Haraway, When Species Meet; Hovorka, “Transpecies Urban Theory”; Probyn; Yusoff)—but an encounter is a particular event of relation. It shocks and ruptures. It opens up a space for ethical potential and radical sociality (Lapworth). As Lauren Berlant (Desire/Love 66) succinctly puts it: we are “impacted by and different within events of encounter”. We see this in Jackson’s opening narrative in which he describes an encounter with a moose as an unexpected moment that had an affect on him. It was a moment that he had not been fully prepared to engage but was somehow worthy of note. This chapter asks what it means to understand ‘encounter’ as a very particular form of

H. F. Wilson (*)  Durham, England, UK E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_2

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relational event. Whilst it is regularly summoned within animal studies, it is rarely acknowledged as a specific genre of contact.1 Yet as a concept and mode of relation, I suggest that it has a number of important implications for animal studies and how questions of difference, power, and transformation are approached. As a geographer, I have long been interested in the idea of ‘encounter’. Whilst it has been used in a variety of ways, it has a strong connection to colonial forms. The ‘age of Empire’ was replete with narratives of encounter (Pratt 7; Carter; Stoler). Often deployed as an ‘analytical device’, ‘encounter’ has frequently been used as a way of depicting the dramatic convergence of different geographical imaginations at a time of exploration, exploitation, boundary-making, cultural imperialism and the emergence of classificatory regimes (Kim; Smith). If we trace the etymology of encounter, we see a form of meeting that arises from the Latin incontrāre, meaning against, contrary, or opposed to (OED). The primary definition of an encounter is a face-to-face meeting between adversaries or opposing forces, thus making it a meeting ‘in conflict; hence, a battle, skirmish, duel etc.’ (OED). I particularly like Elspeth Probyn’s (50) account of encountering as being “the push and pull of intimacy and distance”, which captures both the drawing together of the happening, and the oppositional logics that simultaneously characterise it. If ‘encounter’ is a historically coded event of relation then careful attention to the forms of power and inequality that shape its taking-place is warranted. Whilst ‘encounter’ has emerged as a key concept in geography to think through all manner of issues (Wilson, “Geography and Encounter”), the use of encounter is particularly prevalent in the sub-field of animal geographies. Given the historical framing of encounter, in terms of conflict and opposition, I suggest that its widespread use is carefully scrutinised to ask what it says about the status of the animal as ‘other’, and the nature of human-animal relations more broadly. In this conceptual engagement, I begin with the ‘border imaginaries’ that are common to narratives of encounter as a way of reflecting on the status of animal ‘others’. In so doing, I argue that whilst an attention to encounter hones in on species hierarchies and the workings of conceptual, spatial, and regulatory boundaries, a focus on encounter also sharpens our attention to their simultaneous undoing. I follow this by describing what the momentary confusion, transgression, and permeability of boundaries does in order to underline why human-animal encounters have been framed as sites of transformative potential. The chapter then moves to consider the significance placed upon encounters as events of relation that have the capacity to rupture, disturb, and thus open up bodies and thought to new ways of being. In particular, I address the different ways in which encounters have been sought out, focusing on their use in pedagogical prac-

1I

use genre here to denote a form of contact that involves an identifiable set of characteristics, partly inspired by Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (5) in which she outlines an interest in “genres of the emerging event”—“the situation, the episode, the interruption, the aside, the conversation, the travelogue, and the happening”.

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tice and conservation. I outline some of the paradoxes of encounter, namely the tension that exists between their unpredictability on the one hand, and the desire to manage or manipulate them on the other. Finally, I finish with a cautionary note and an account of power, privilege, and violence, as a means of returning to the unequal power relations that are inherent to moments of encounter.

2 Border Imaginaries and Species Difference Encounters are regularly read through Manichean grammars of difference that perpetuate ‘border imaginaries’. These imaginaries assume a lack of commonality, absolute opposition and, as such, crystalise symbolic logics of ‘us versus them’ (Rovisco 1015). This can be seen in the spatial concepts that are regularly used in descriptions of encounter, including ‘frontier’, ‘borderland’, and ‘boundary’ (Power; Wolch and Emel; Yeo and Neo). As Tracy Neal Leavelle argues, much of the ‘explanatory power’ of these spatial concepts “comes from the strong link between colonialism and geography” (915). If we start with these logics of opposition and absolute otherness, it is perhaps of little surprise that narratives of encounter are most present in work concerned with the cultural and political dimensions of human-animal conflicts (Pooley et al.). Studies of conflict are full of narratives of chance, strange, disturbing, fraught, and violent encounters. We might consider studies that concern: cougar-human entanglements on Vancouver Island (Collard, “Cougar-human Entanglements”); shark catch and kill policies in Australia (Gibbs and Warren); the ‘verminisation’ of rats in urban areas (Holmberg); the growing presence of Macaques in Singapore’s borderlands (Yeo and Neo); the rise of feral cats (van Patter and Hovorka); the sharing of home spaces with possums (Power); and the challenges of coexisting with coyotes (Blue and Alexander). These are just some of the many and varied examples available, and whilst each of these unique accounts of human-animal conflict must be placed in their specific cultural, political, and ecological contexts, they all offer accounts of non-human animals that are in some way rendered ‘out of place’ and thus a problem (Nagy and Johnson II; McKiernan and Instone). This might be a threat to life through predation or the spread of disease, a threat to property or capital, or simply a threat to human comfort, however defined. In these cases, the story of encounter is often one of animal alterity, which also reflects a tendency for cities in particular to be seen as the “exclusive domain of humans” and their domesticated pets (Wolch 726; Philo). Yet, whilst examples of human-animal conflicts perpetuate the animals’ position as the ‘ultimate other’ (Bull) and are often about differences that are defined prior to the encounter—human/animal, society/nature, urban/rural, domestic/wild (Castree)—a focus on the event of encounter demands that we are simultaneously attentive to the ephemeral and unpredictable ways in which differences are negotiated in the moment (Keul). As Chris Gibson has argued, an attention to encounters offers a better grasp of the contradictions, entanglements, and momentary articulations and extensions of power that undermine essentialist thought. Thus, encounters also

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open up a space for the examination of animal subjectivity (Bear; White). Whilst encounters are often characterised by the coming together of two opposing forces that are already named as such (Pratt; Sundberg, “Conservation Encounters”), encounters also make difference (Ahmed). As Haraway argues, “species of all kinds, living and not, are consequent on a subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters” (When Species Meet 4, my emphasis). This argument—that “worldmaking” happens in encounter (Rose)—recognises that beings are formed in relation. To suggest that a focus on encounter allows us to appreciate the emergence and fluidity of difference is not to suggest that structural conditions and categories of difference aren’t important. A focus on animal encounters demands that we are simultaneously sensitive to what categories do. For instance, the examples of human-animal conflicts outlined above demonstrate how species hierarchies, imperial discourses, and societal attitudes, shape the taking-place of encounters (Ginn). Encounters with rats in the city are shaped by modernist discourses of cleanliness (Atkins; Biehler); encounters with penguins in Sydney are shaped by the privileging of urban property rights (van Dooren); and human-possum encounters are influenced by understandings of what constitutes the domestic. We might also consider other classifications and values that are attributed to different animals. This might concern how delineations of domestic, stray, and feral, come to matter (Fredriksen; van Patter and Hovorka), and an insistence that all boundaries and delineations are recognised as being culturally specific and historically coded (Hovorka, “Animal Geographies”; Srinivasan). In noting how boundaries and lines of distinction are important to encounter, we might also turn to the experiences of shock, surprise, and rupture that so often accompany accounts of human-animal contact. These experiences are evidence of a moment in which something is destabilised or unexpectedly broken open; a moment in which borders are shifted, exposed, crossed, made, unmade, and undermined (Wilson, “Geography and Encounter”). Encounters are, after all, an event of relation. Whilst many examples of human-animal encounters are about the breach of spatial and regulatory boundaries—home spaces, urban borderlands, safe swim zones and so on—encounters also disturb conceptual and bodily boundaries as well. As Emma Power demonstrates, encounters between humans and animals can not only ‘rupture’ the physical borders that materially distinguish home spaces from the outside, but also challenge and sometimes undermine conceptual and symbolic borders so as to fundamentally shake up taken-for-granted human/ nature distinctions (Bull; Castree). Encounters then, do not simply take place at the border but are rather central to their making and unmaking (Sundberg, “Diabolic Caminos”). How these moments of rupture and unmaking are experienced is important. For instance, Jane Bennett argues that to experience a moment in which categorical boundaries are confused is to experience enchantment. To be enchanted is to have opened oneself up to “the surprise of other selves and bodies” and in so doing to experience a “radical permeability” (Bennett 131). Such an opening up to the surprise of other bodies can be seen in Jackson’s account of his chance moose

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encounter by the side of the road. Yet, whilst Bennett’s account might be taken as a rather positive reading of the permeability of selves, the feeling of enchantment also contains an element of the “uncanny”; the “feeling of being disrupted or torn out of one’s default sensory-psychic-intellectual-disposition” (5). As Claire Jean Kim notes, such rupturing or failure of boundaries is often attended by “indeterminancy, contestation, and anxiety” (31). On this basis the “immediacy of the encounter” might be refused or avoided in order to preserve “the stability of categories” (Todd and Hynes 7). Take, for example, Jennifer Carter and Jane Palmer’s account of the ‘morally loaded’ term of transgression in the context of human-dingo encounters in Australia, where dingos variously appear as a problem (Rose). As they argue, human-dingo encounters that are experienced as a form of transgression—as a breach or a violation—reveal “principles of human exceptionalism” and asymmetries of power. The threat of transgression through encounters is the threat to a topology that privileges the human (Carter and Palmer 216). What is clear from these very different examples is that whilst moments of encounter are sometimes read as instances of failed mastery or trauma that ignite the need to reinstate control of the boundary and the power of privilege (Kim), the rupturing of borders inherent to encounter also opens up a site of potential. This site, as I will outline in the next section, can be a site of emergent politics, pedagogy, and transformation.

3 The Potentials of Encounter If it is to be conceived as an opening, a zone of transformation or rupture of thought, then call upon the world of encounters… (Todd and Hynes 2)

The implicit understanding that encounters are relational events that disturb us— that rupture, surprise and shock—is central to their positioning as a site of transformation (Ahmed; Lapworth; Wilson, “Paradox of Encounter”). Whilst there are many ways to understand the transformative potentials of encounter, we might begin with how the encounter is experienced (Todd and Hynes). The conviction that “worlds are sensed, not just seen” (Greenhough 43) has not only brought encounters into view, but has given the ‘event of encounter’ primacy. Narratives of human-animal encounters attend to affects and emotions, visceral forces, and bodily apprehensions. Consider, for instance, the ‘crawling skin’ of some humanrat encounters (Smith and Davidson), or the raised hairs on the back of the neck that accompany the feeling of being stalked (Collard, “Cougar-human Entanglements”). The moose encounter at the start of this chapter registered as an event that was, in some way, worthy of note. It was an event that enacted a shift in sensory perception. Such shifts might be experienced as a charge that lingers, a violent rupturing, or no more than a “barely recognized fluctuation” (Anderson 9; Stewart). To draw on Kathleen Stewart (39), it might be said that however the encounter strikes us “its significance jumps”.

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Take Jacques Derrida’s (2008) encounter with his cat. Face-to-face, naked, and momentarily caught in the gaze of the animal that follows him to the bathroom, he is unsettled and ashamed. What, Derrida asks, does the animal see and why does he feel shame? This encounter between Derrida and his cat was not just an event of species difference but also an event of “difference in thought” (Todd and Hynes 2; Instone and Taylor). As Rohan Todd and Maria Hynes argue, encounters ‘seize thought’ and if we are to take encounters with animals seriously we have to pay attention to a “more sensate and differential ontology” and its non-representational forms (3; Deleuze). To prioritise such an ontology is to keep hold of the “radically ungrounding effects” of encounter so as to allow encounters to challenge our most familiar ways of knowing (Todd and Hynes 733). Whilst the force of encounters might instigate a desire to incorporate them into an order of meaning, to take them seriously is to refuse such a desire. By way of an example, Todd and Hynes use the slaughterhouse as a ‘scene’ of encounter to ask how encounters with animals (and animal violence in particular) might ‘force’ us to think differently. Noting the limitations of welfare models, which necessitate that judgements are made about how animals and humans are both “alike and different” (6), they foreground the encounter as an event that “unravels that unity of the faculties presumed by common sense” (7). Such an unravelling is the result of apprehending a force of sensate experience that demands attention but evades recognition. As they argue, ignoring the force of encounter and its radical unsettling is precisely what allows animal violence to continue: If we approach the issue of animal violence by refusing the immediacy of the encounter, covering over its force and pushing recognition back into the picture, we turn away from the difference that the encounter ushers into experience. The confrontation with an instance of animal violence is merely a rehashing of that which is appealingly familiar. (7)

The idea that the transformative potential of encounter might be realized only when the force and discomforting affects of human-animal encounters is taken seriously is seen elsewhere (McKiernan and Instone). For instance, Jennifer Carter and Jane Palmer argue that accepting and negotiating the ‘trickiness’ of dingoes in human-dingo encounters is crucial to allowing one’s knowledge to be put at risk, thus leaving room for more responsive ethical repositionings and a whole new way of thinking about transgression that might release dingoes from transgression discourses altogether. The above examples concern instances where encounters have acquired significance as events of difference in thought, but there are, of course, many other ways of thinking about transformative encounters. For example, human-animal encounters have been valued for their therapeutic qualities, including their potential to impact on human physiological states, loneliness, or morale (Gorman). A growing scholarship on the economies of encounter have asked what makes encounters amenable to commodification (Barua, “Lively Commodities”; Collard, “Putting Animals Back Together”; Haraway, When Species Meet), and here we see a concern for the selling of encounters that awe, thrill, or entertain, such as the pursuit

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of charismatic species whose appearance or proximity trigger a variety of affective responses (Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene). Whilst these affecting encounters and transformations in feeling may lead to a shift in thought that reworks species relations, they are not necessarily embraced with that intention and are frequently “mobilised for the process of accumulation” (730). An attention to the transformative capacity of encounters does not assume that transformation is realised or even necessarily good. This is clear in Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the contact zone, which was attentive to the transformative potential of colonial encounters without losing sight of the risk, coercion, violence and inequality that were central to their taking place (Wilson, “Contact Zones”). She argued that whilst characterised by “exhilarating moments of wonder and revelation, mutual understanding and new wisdom”, contact zones were also shaped by “rage, incomprehension and pain” (39). As is quite evident from the examples drawn on thus far, encounters can intensify fear, disgust, awkwardness, and inequality (Lorimer, “Auks and Awkwardness”; Smith and Davidson) and in so doing create new boundaries and power inequalities, or simply reify existing ones. Furthermore, an enchanted, awe-inspiring encounter for one might be a horrifying experience for another, and whilst encounters involve the coming together of two subjects or more, only one of these subjects might experience this coming together as a moment of encounter in the first place. Having placed emphasis on the transformative potentials of encounter I want to turn to instances where encounters have been deliberately staged in an effort to produce named outcomes. Whilst it has long been held that immersion and encounter are key to environmental education and learning (Bauch and Scott; Gannon), I focus in particular on instances where animals have been rendered encounterable in the name of education, beginning with the American Museum of Natural History and its habitat dioramas.

4 The Pedagogical Encounter Museums have a mandate to preserve, to educate, and to exhibit. Within the spaces of the museum, difference is fixed and put on display so as to facilitate encounters with cultures, species, artefacts, and objects (Boast; Tolia-Kelly). Take the habitat dioramas that were popularised in the US during the first half of the twentieth century (Rader and Cain). In the American Museum of Natural History, New York, the dioramas feature taxidermy specimens set in what look like their natural habitats, which have been created through the combination of a curved background painting and the meticulous recreation of three-dimensional elements such as indigenous flowers, trees, and geological features. Across a variety of halls, species of all kinds are arranged according to their geographical regions, with a separate hall for ocean life. Canadian Musk Ox stand on snow-covered slopes; wolves give chase to unknown prey; Moose combat on an Alaskan peat bog; a giant polar bear feasts on a seal; and a herd of gemsbok look directly out at their audience. All of them are “locked”, as Stephen Christopher Quinn describes it, “in an instant of time for

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our close examination and study” (8). These habitat dioramas have long been positioned as “tools for science education”, which are intended to create “awareness of finite and fragile ecosystems” and “a concern for nature and its wise stewardship” (Quinn 10). As Quinn suggests: For most of us, these encounters with the distant untouched lands and exotic animals depicted in the dioramas will be the closest we ever come to actually experiencing wild places and animals in nature. Yet these exhibits provide us with such an accurate illusion and powerful and compelling experience that they shape our understanding and appreciation of the real natural world. (10)

In this account, we can see an investment in the ‘powerful’ potential of encounter and the invocation of a pure, pristine nature that is somehow ‘untouched’. Encounters with the dioramas are intended to be affecting. They are designed to compel and entice viewing publics who are offered the “experience of organic perfection” (Haraway, “Teddy Bear” 34). Indeed, their popularity in the twentieth century was credited with overhauling the appeal and fortunes of natural history museums more broadly, seeing them move from a situation whereby they passively showed off their collections to one where they actively educated the public (Rader and Cain 52). Habitat dioramas were thus intended to transport people and move them; to engender an appreciation for the value of nature, and perhaps “rouse public interest in conservation” as a result (55). Yet as Divya Tolia-Kelly reminds us, museums act as sites where “the pain of epistemic violence is materialised” (899). In museums, artefacts and living cultures are petrified. Museums might be considered “mausoleums” for the visitor’s eye (896), which are sanctioned by the pursuit of knowledge and economies of affect. The American Museum of Natural History is not only an encounter with ‘specimens’, but an encounter with the continuation of imperial taxonomies and species hierarchies. That humans have stewardship over nature is never drawn into question but rather affirmed, thus supporting the continuation of anthropocentric narratives (see also Gannon on environmental education). Historical accounts of the museum’s dioramas are accompanied by tales of exploration, masculine conquest, dangerous encounter, and triumphant struggles in ‘distant’ lands (Quinn), which were funded by wealthy donors and sportsman (Haraway, “Teddy Bear”; Rader and Cain). The story of the dioramas is necessarily a story of hunting and death (or ‘collecting’, more euphemistically) and is thus deeply entangled with imperial enterprise—what Donna Haraway described as “the commerce of power and knowledge in white and male supremacist monopoly capitalism” (“Teddy Bear” 21; Smith). At points, Quinn’s account of the dioramas at the American Natural History Museum reveals moments of doubt. This includes stories of expedition leads who questioned their right to take the life of another and documented concerns from scientists that, at times, the aesthetics of the dioramas might distract from their pedagogical purpose. Indeed, as dioramas were popularised in museums across the US it was largely assumed that visitors could be trusted to “perceive the scientific and

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social lessons embedded in the new exhibits” despite the less-than-explicit nature of such messages (Rader and Cain 63). Despite these questions about violence and purpose, within the spaces of the museum the violence of encounter is largely left intact and hidden from view. Whilst natural history museums offer a very particular example of ‘staged’ encounter between humans and non-human animals, there are many commonalities with other instances where animals are rendered encounterable for pedagogical purposes. To paraphrase Jamie Lorimer, the “selling” of encounters has fast become the “orthodoxy” in twenty-first century conservation (Wildlife in the Anthropocene 143; Braverman, Wild Life; Yusoff). Zoos, safaris, eco-tourism, and wildlife documentaries have all responded to the desire for affective and haptic encounter with ‘alterity’ and become central to conservation where the value of encounter is partly attributable to their status as living beings (Barua, “Nonhuman Labour”). The general understanding that people need to see what is at risk in order to open up new forms of ethical consideration and thus ensure the survival of species (Yusoff 580) means that zoos are entirely reliant on encounters (Braverman, Zooland). They are dependent on staging intimacy between humans and nonhuman animals to encourage visitors—even discipline them—to care. Individual, charismatic—or ‘flagship’—animals become ‘ambassadors’ for their species or, as Berger described it, “living monument[s] to their own disappearance” (Berger 36; Braverman, Zooland; Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene). By ‘exhibiting’ species in immersive environments that are designed to evoke wildness, the zoo might be likened to a living museum. The emphasis placed on saving species through the enabling of encounter has not only led to a reliance on encounter, but also the production of a well-documented hierarchy of species value. “Flagship species” and those with “nonhuman charisma” or “exotic” appeal have been privileged over others (Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene). This raises the question: if species survival is dependent on ‘encounter value’ (Barua, “Lively Commodities”), then what are the implications for those without aesthetic charisma (Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene)? If the basic tenet of conservation practice is making “biotic subjects” sensible (Yusoff 578), then what about the non-relational, and subjects that refuse to be made sensible, or are not easily rendered encounterable (Bear; Johnson; Probyn). There are also a number of paradoxes to consider when approaching forms of organised or staged encounter. Encounters with the so-called ‘wild’—both charismatic and otherwise—are made possible by systems of careful, but obscured, management and governance—animal transfers, breeding programs and genetic testing, immersion design, species (re)classifications, identification technologies, legal frameworks, disease control, feeding regimes, glass panels, holding areas, and so on (Braverman, Zooland). Furthermore, animals are often only rendered valuable once they have met a variety of human expectations. Whilst zoos privilege visually appealing bodies that can be seen face-to-face and heard in close proximity, animal smells are much less desirable and often the target of design and regulation. As is also clear in the exotic pet trade, animals are not only severed from their ecological relations but are required to function as individuals, while

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docility, visual attractiveness and ability to interact with humans are central to their encounter value (Collard and Dempsey 2687). In the case of zoos, this has led some scholars to argue that the animals on display are “humanised animals” because they comply with human ideals (Braverman, Zooland 37). As such, enclosures impede their autonomy—their capacity for movement, play, and social and familial association (Collard et al.). Even those animals that might be considered ‘wild’, such as those encountered through forms of ecotourism, are likely to have had their ethologies altered by practices such as baiting, which have been used to maximise the likelihood of encounter for paying tourists (Barua, “Lively Commodities”). What is paradoxical in these examples of encounter is that what drives the desire for encounter is the supposed ‘wildness’ of the animals: their alterity. Yet the demand for encounter, and the subsequent process of rendering animals encounterable, undermines the very ‘wildness’ that drives the demand in the first place (Collard, “Putting Animals Back Together”). If zoo animals are neither wild nor tame, then they might be considered incapable of “fully embodying their species” and certainly lack the skills necessary to survive outside of human captivity (Braverman, Zooland 58). Indeed, as Braverman (75) suggests, it might be the case that the very act of seeing zoo animals already challenges their wildness. This brings me to another paradox of staged encounter. As I have argued, encounters are about ruptures and shock. If unpredictability and surprise are central to encounter then it would follow that the organisation of encounter in the pursuit of named outcomes is an impossibility (Wilson, “Paradox of Encounter”). Sharon Todd discusses this very conundrum when reflecting on the endeavours of social justice education to ‘stage’ encounters with otherness as a strategy for developing moral responsiveness. She asks “if such education is based on disrupting convention, and if that disruption emerges out of unpredictable forms of communication, then how is it possible to ‘teach’ it?” (49). If encounters with animals are staged with intention and purpose, the demand made of such encounters “ironically becomes a demand for that which cannot be demanded” (49). Whilst Todd’s question does not have an easy answer, and nor is a response necessarily expected, such a reflection on the paradoxes of staged encounter is a valuable reminder that the outcomes of encounter cannot be readily engineered. Todd’s questioning is thus about keeping open a space for emergent pedagogies. As Susanne Gannon recently noted when reflecting on child-animal encounters in a wetlands project, whilst they laid important groundwork it was not the planned activities that became central to the children’s learning, but the “unpredictable and unplanned encounters” that punctuated the wetlands trips. As she argued, unplanned encounters “generated affective force and mobilised learning in ways that could not have been predicted” (97). In outlining three unanticipated encounters—with a heat distressed swamp hen, a dead eel and duck, and a trapped turtle—Gannon noted the surprising responses they elicited, which included the mobilisation of friends, letter writing to authorities, and a bird rescue in a cardboard box. Each of these encounters became pivotal to student learning and their understanding of how they were implicated in the lagoon. Arguing for pedagogical

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spaces to be opened up so as to allow for “‘emergent pedagogies’ that are open to the flows and intensities of encounters” (96), is not about asking for encounters to be staged, engineered, or sought out, but simply about giving them room to happen.

5 Encounter, Risk, and Power As is evident, encounters are fraught with power inequalities, some of which have violent implications, while all encounters are defined by risk and uncertainty. As such, when staging encounters or seeking them out it is paramount to consider the violences that are not only necessitated by such organisation but are further legitimated in the process. The power asymmetries of encounters should always be kept in sight. And here I share the concern of postcolonial scholars that we resist the assumption that broader configurations of power are necessarily reworked through encounters—even when exchange, transformation, and learning occur (Ahmed; Pratt; Sundberg, “Conservation Encounters”). Work focused on the transformative capacity of human-animal encounters still has a tendency to privilege the implications for humans (Lloro-Bidart). For instance, if we take the example of therapeutic encounters, the tendency to frame encounters in relation to human needs and desires results in “a somewhat imperialist attitude” that sees health benefits as “just another resource to be harvested” from animals (Gorman 321). This, as Richard Gorman argues, is made further apparent through the practice of assessing animal suitability for encountering humans, whilst no such checks occur to assess the suitability of humans for encountering animals, relegating animals “to a state of utility rather than as co-beneficiaries of the positive effects” (321). Like the animals in the zoo, or the exotic pets described by Rosemary Collard, animals enlisted in therapeutic spaces are also ‘modified’ to ensure their ‘suitable’ encounterability (“Putting Animals Back Together”). In such accounts, the experiences of nonhuman animals and a “multispecies community of knowers” are overlooked (Lloro-Bidart 112). It is critical that we keep in mind who seeks out encounters in the first place. Collard’s reminder that the pursuit of encounters is often a distinctly human pursuit and one that generates “invasive actions” (“Cougar-human Entanglements” 25) is an important one, especially when for many animals face-to-face encounters are fraught with danger. This is a significant point. For instance, if we look at Jane Bennett’s (2001) work on enchantment, she outlines an ethical approach to the world that encourages an embrace of surprise and the seeking out of enchanted encounters. Yet whilst an embrace of surprise and radical openness might make a shift in attitudes possible, there is a lack of reflection on what the embrace of otherness through encounter does to the ‘other’, or what risks might be involved. In short, to be in a position where one can choose to seek out encounters for the purpose of enchantment is to occupy a space of privilege and this privilege must not slip from view.

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Perhaps what is important here is that we hone in on ideas of risk (Wilson, “Paradox of Encounter”), which run through much of the scholarship on the transformative potentials of encounter. For instance, Lesley Instone and Affrica Taylor (146) suggest that we need to do more to “cultivate risky attachments as a mode of attending”, which, to borrow Isabelle Stengers (Zournazi), is about letting our thinking push us past the safety of what we take for granted so as to purposefully jeopardise our sense of control. By putting ideas at risk, we open up the potential to think differently about the other forms of life that we encounter (Johnson). The risk embraced here is an ontological one—about ways of thinking about being. Yet, multiple forms of risk shape encounters. Whilst, for humans, an encounter might pose an ontological risk, and a risk to our sense of control, the same encounter might pose a physical, life-threatening risk for non-human animals. Of course, for humans, cultivating risky attachments isn’t just about ontological risk, as Franklin Ginn, Uli Beisel and Maan Barua note. Making oneself vulnerable in encounters might also be about risking a bite, a sting, visceral insecurity, or even death. Attending to the fluid ways in which ideas of ‘risk’ surface in encounters is thus important to questioning what extensions of power such risk-taking might enact and with what consequences, noting that not all risks are equal (Wilson, “Paradox of Encounter”).

6 Animal Encounters? In tracing how the notion of encounter appears in animal studies I have underlined what a closer scrutiny of encounter can do to how we think about questions of power, difference, and transformation. As I have argued, encounters are particular genres of contact that are historically coded and characterised by opposition, conflict, and surprise. In examining how encounters have been deployed and discussed, whether intentionally as a site of analysis or unintentionally as a way of naming a particular moment of contact, I have underlined the commonalities and shared language—rupture, shock, becoming—that hold a wide range of work together. This, I suggest, demonstrates that encounters are not only laden with value but worthy of conceptual interrogation. In beginning with the border imaginaries and oppositional logics that define encounters as relational events, I suggest that an attention to encounters enables a dual focus on the naming of (species) difference and the momentary ways in which difference is formed in, and through, encounters. As such, encounters demand and open up a space for critical scrutiny of how human and animal subjectivities are formed, remade, and given meaning, whilst also foregrounding questions of power and risk. In reflecting on forms of sense-making we see an emphasis not only on how animals are encountered through the senses: for example, how possums are encountered through smells percolating through the walls (Power), garden slugs through sticky touch (Ginn), or white ibis through nasal honks (McKiernan and Instone), but also how encounters are experienced as a

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shift in perception or a sensed fluctuation that opens up an opportunity for attuning to differential ontologies. However, whilst many of the examples gathered here place emphasis on the role that encounters might play in challenging normative thought and unsettling boundaries, much of the work on animal encounters is still about human-animal encounters, which tend to privilege the experience and viewpoint of the human (Gorman). The very act of naming an ‘encounter’ is already a moment in which human meaning has been attributed to an event of relation. As is evident from the examples covered in this chapter, even in instances where a concern for the animal is prioritised, encounters continue to be shaped by imperialist attitudes that fundamentally fail to challenge species hierarchy or fully acknowledge positionality. Indeed, as Timothy Hodgetts and Jamie Lorimer have argued more broadly, much animal geography fails to be an “animals’ geography” capable of centering nonhuman experiences. This inability to decentre the human in human-animal encounters may well be a reflection on methodological limitations. Much of the work on human-animal encounters is reliant on participant observation of human-animal interactions, auto-ethnographies that privilege the researcher, interviews with humans, and discourse analysis of human representations (Hodgetts and Lorimer 287). But there are a variety of opportunities for expanding the methodological tools drawn upon (Barua and Sinha; Bear et al.; Hodgetts and Lorimer; Lorimer et al.; White). In highlighting the tendency to privilege the human, I want to finish with the violence of encounter. If encounters are to be a privileged site of ethical, political, and pedagogical potential, I suggest that we need to critically assess what risks are being ‘embraced’ and who it is that is embracing them. Rosemary Collard’s (“Cougar-human Entanglements”) reminder of the need to recognise the invasive actions that are often legitimised in the pursuit of encounter is an important one, particularly in those instances where encounters with animals are deliberately sought out. As such, I would add that questioning the necessity of encounter for enacting ruptures in thought and fashioning new forms of ethical reflection, isn’t just important for those animals that remain absent or are perhaps less desirable, easily encounterable, or difficult to make sensible (Yusoff). Rather, it is also important for those species that are easily encountered, but would benefit from being left alone. Whilst there is plenty of work that questions how and in what ways encounters become significant to the forging of new ethical and political ways of relating, there is a need to question the necessity of encounter in the first place (Collard et al.; Yusoff). What alternatives might there be for ethical, pedagogical, and political projects? As part of a concern for ‘animal encounter’, we might ask: what would it mean to retreat from the world of encounters? Acknowledgements  Many thanks are due to Alexandra Böhm and Jessica Ullrich for their careful editorial work, and to Jonathan Darling for his comments on previous versions.

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Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Columbia UP, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. by David Wills, ed. by Marie-Louise Mallet, Fordham UP, 2008. Fredriksen, Aurora. “Of Wildcats and Wild Cats: Troubling Species-based Conservation in the Anthropocene.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 34, no. 4, 2016, pp. 689–705. Gannon, Susanne. “Saving Squawk? Animal and Human Entanglement at the Edge of the Lagoon.” Environmental Education Research, vol. 23, no. 1, 2017, pp. 91–110. Gibbs, Leah, and Andrew Warren. “Killing Sharks: Cultures and Politics of Encounter and the Sea.” Australian Geographer, vol. 45, no. 2, 2014, pp. 101–107. Gibson, Chris. “Geographies of Tourism: (Un)ethical Encounters.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 34, no. 4, 2010, pp. 521–527. Ginn, Franklin. “Sticky Lives: Slugs, Detachment and More‐than‐human Ethics in the Garden.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 39, no. 4, 2014, pp. 532–544. Ginn, Franklin, Uli Beisel, and Maan Barua. “Flourishing with Awkward Creatures: Togetherness, Vulnerability, Killing.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 4, no. 1, 2014, pp. 113–123. Gorman, Richard. “Therapeutic Landscapes and Non-human Animals: The Roles and Contested Positions of Animals within Care Farming Assemblages.” Social & Cultural Geography, vol. 18, no. 3, 2017, pp. 315–335. Greenhough, Beth. “Vitalist Geographies: Life and the More-than-human.” Taking Place: Nonrepresentational Theories and Geography, ed. by Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison, Ashgate, 2010, pp. 37–54. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936.” Social Text, vol. 11, 1984, pp. 20–64. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. When Species Meet. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Hodgetts, Timothy, and Jamie Lorimer. “Methodologies for Animals’ Geographies: Cultures, Communication and Genomics.” Cultural Geographies, vol. 22, no. 2, 2015, pp. 285–295. Holmberg, Tora. Urban animals: Crowding in Zoocities. Routledge, 2015. Hovorka, Alice J. “Animal geographies I: Globalizing and Decolonizing.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 41, no. 3, 2017, pp. 382–394. Hovorka, Alice J. “Transspecies Urban Theory: Chickens in an African City.” Encountering the city: Urban encounters from Accra to New York, ed. by Jonathan Darling and Helen F. Wilson, Routledge, 2016, pp. 63–78. Instone, Lesley, and Affrica Taylor. “Thinking About Inheritance through the Figure of the Anthropocene, from the Antipodes and in the Presence of Others.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 7, no. 1, 2015, pp. 133–150. Jackson, Kevin. Moose. Reaktion Books, 2009. Johnson, Elizabeth R. “Of Lobsters, Laboratories, and War: Animal Studies and the Temporality of More-than-human Encounters.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 33, no. 2, 2015, pp. 296–313. Keul, Adam. “Embodied Encounters between Humans and Gators.” Social & Cultural Geography, vol. 14, no. 8, 2013, pp. 930–953. Kim, Claire Jean. Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age. Cambridge UP, 2015. Lapworth, Andrew. “Habit, Art, and the Plasticity of the Subject: The Ontogenetic Shock of the Bioart Encounter.” Cultural Geographies, vol. 22, no. 1, 2015, pp. 85–102. Leavelle, Tracy Neal. “Geographies of Encounter: Religion and Contested Spaces in Colonial North America.” American Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 4, 2004, pp. 913–943. Lloro-Bidart, Teresa. “A Feminist Posthumanist Political Ecology of Education for Theorizing Human-animal Relations/Relationships.” Environmental Education Research, vol. 23, no. 1, 2017, pp. 111–130. Lorimer, Jamie. “On Auks and Awkwardness.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 4, no. 1, 2014, pp. 195–205.

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Lorimer, Jamie. Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature. U of Minnesota P, 2015. Lorimer, Jamie, Tim Hodgetts, and Maan Barua. “Animals’ Atmospheres.” Progress in Human Geography, 2 Oct. 2017. SAGE journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517731254. McKiernan, Shaun, and Lesley Instone. “From Pest to Partner: Rethinking the Australian White Ibis in the More-than-human City.” Cultural Geographies, vol. 23, no. 3, 2016, pp. 475–494. Nagy, Kelsi, and Phillip David Johnson II. Trash Animals: How We Live with Nature’s Filthy, Feral, Invasive, and Unwanted Species. U of Minnesota P, 2013. OED. “Encounter.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford UP, 2018. Philo, Chris. “Animals, Geography, and the City: Notes on Inclusions and Exclusions.” Environment and planning D: Society and space, vol. 13, no. 6, 1995, pp. 655–681. Pooley, S., et al. “An Interdisciplinary Review of Current and Future Approaches to Improving Human‐predator Relations.” Conservation Biology, vol. 31, no. 3, 2017, pp. 513–523. Power, Emma R. “Border-processes and Homemaking: Encounters with Possums in Suburban Australian Homes.” Cultural Geographies, vol. 16, no. 1, 2009, pp. 29–54. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, 1992. Probyn, Elspeth. Eating the Ocean. Duke UP, 2016. Quinn, Stephen Christopher. Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History. Abrams, 2007. Rader, Karen A., and Victoria E. Cain. Life on Display: Revolutionizing US Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century. U of Chicago P, 2014. Rose, Deborah Bird. Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. U of Virginia P, 2011. Rovisco, Maria. “Reframing Europe and the Global: Conceptualizing the Border in Cultural Encounters.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 28, no. 6, 2010, pp. 1015–1030. Smith, Justin E. Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy. Princeton UP, 2015. Smith, Mick, and Joyce Davidson. “‘It Makes My Skin Crawl…’: The Embodiment of Disgust in Phobias of Nature.” Body & Society, vol. 12, no. 1, 2006, pp. 43–67. Srinivasan, Krithika. “The Biopolitics of Animal Being and Welfare: Dog Control and Care in the UK and India.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 38, no. 1, 2013, pp. 106–119. Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Duke UP, 2007. Stoler, Ann Laura, ed. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Duke UP, 2006. Sundberg, Juanita. “Conservation Encounters: Transculturation in the ‘Contact Zones’ of Empire.” Cultural Geographies, vol. 13, no. 2, 2006, pp. 239–265. Sundberg, Juanita. “Diabolic Caminos in the Desert and Cat Fights on the Rio: A Posthumanist Political Ecology of Boundary Enforcement in the United States-Mexico Borderlands.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 101, no. 2, 2011, pp. 318–336. Todd, Rohan, and Maria Hynes. “Encountering the Animal: Temple Grandin, Slaughterhouses and the Possibilities of a Differential Ontology.” The Sociological Review, vol. 65, no. 4, 2017, pp. 729–744. Todd, Sharon. Learning from the Other: Levinas, Psychoanalysis, and Ethical Possibilities in Education, State U of New York P, 2003. Tolia-Kelly, Divya P. “Feeling and Being at the (Postcolonial) Museum: Presencing the Affective Politics of ‘Race’ and Culture.” Sociology, vol. 50, no. 5, 2016, pp. 896–912. Van Dooren, Thom. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. Columbia UP, 2014. Van Patter, Lauren E., and Alice J. Hovorka. “‘Of Place’ or ‘of People’: Exploring the Animal Spaces and Beastly Places of Feral Cats in Southern Ontario.” Social & Cultural Geography, vol. 19, no. 2, 2018, pp. 275–295. White, Kara. “And Say the Cat Responded? Getting Closer to the Feline Gaze.” Society & Animals, vol. 21, no. 1, 2013, pp. 93–104.

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Wilson, Helen F. “On Geography and Encounter: Bodies, Borders, and Difference.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 41, no. 4, 2017, pp. 451–471. Wilson, Helen F. “On the Paradox of ‘Organised’ Encounter.” Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 38, no. 6, 2017, pp. 606–620. Wolch, Jennifer. “Anima Urbis.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 26, no. 6, 2002, pp. 721– 742. Wolch, Jennifer R., and Jody Emel, eds. Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-culture Borderlands. Verso, 1998. Yeo, Jun-Han, and Harvey Neo. “Monkey Business: Human–animal Conflicts in Urban Singapore.” Social & Cultural Geography, vol. 11, no. 7, 2010, pp. 681–699. Yusoff, Kathryn. “Insensible Worlds: Postrelational Ethics, Indeterminacy and the (K)nots of Relating.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 31, no. 2, 2013, pp. 208– 226. Zournazi, Mary. “A ‘Cosmo-politics’ – Risk, Hope, Change: A Conversation with Isabelle Stengers.” Hope: New Philosophies for Change, by Zournazi, Routledge, 2003, pp. 244–273.

Further Reading Darling, Jonathan, and Helen F. Wilson, eds. Encountering the City: Urban Encounters from Accra to New York. Routledge, 2016. Dewsbury, John-David. “Performativity and the Event: Enacting a Philosophy of Difference.” Environment and planning D: Society and Space, vol. 18, no. 4, 2000, pp. 473–496. Gillespie, Kathryn. “Witnessing Animal Others: Bearing Witness, Grief, and the Political Function of Emotion.” Hypatia, vol. 31, no. 3, 2016, pp. 572–588. Gillespie, Kathryn, and Rosemary-Claire Collard. Critical Animal Geographies: Politics, Intersections and Hierarchies in a Multispecies World. Routledge, 2015. Hinchliffe, Steve, and Sarah Whatmore. “Living Cities: Towards a Politics of Conviviality.” Science as Culture, vol. 15, no. 2, 2006, pp. 123–138. Karlsson, Fredrik. “Care Ethics and the Moving Animal: The Roles of Love and Sympathy in Encountering the Animal Being.” Animal Movements – Moving Animals: Essays on Direction, Velocity and Agency in Humanimal Encounters, ed. by Jacob Bull, Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, 2011, pp. 269–283. Mason, Victoria, and Paul R. Hope. “Echoes in the Dark: Technological Encounters with Bats.” Journal of Rural Studies, vol. 33, 2014, pp. 107–118. Pachirat, Timothy. Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight. Yale UP, 2011. Wilson, Helen F., and Jonathan Darling. “The Possibilities of Encounter.” Encountering the City: Urban Encounters from Accra to New York, ed. by Darling and Wilson, Routledge, 2016, pp. 1–24. Wilson, Helen F. “Contact Zones: Multispecies Scholarship through Imperial Eyes” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2019, pp. 1–20. Wolfe, Cary. Animal rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. U of Chicago P, 2003.

3

Framed Encounters, Disruptive Encounters: Encountering Animals Within and Beyond Human-Animal Cultures Martin Huth

1 Introduction The aim of this paper is a thorough analysis of encounters with animals from a phenomenological point of view. Human encounters with animals can be classified in terms of their status as examples of customary human-animal cultures1 (framed encounters) or in terms of their power to disrupt these human-animal cultures (disruptive encounters). Either they fulfill ordinary expectations and, thus, confirm and maintain how one perceives and conceives the animal in question (as companion, livestock animal, object of study, etc.) or the encounter is an event that disrupts one’s ordinary construal of this being and opens the gateway for questioning habitual expectations. The concept of human-animal cultures denotes the different types of interspecies relations that are generally manifest in the lifeworld. They constitute the norm of human-animal relationships in various social contexts. In the following, I will argue that one can detect an interspecies togetherness in any given context of human-animal interactions, in the sense of interconnection, or “intersubjectivity” that underpins shared meaning, shared intentions, and shared actions with animals.

1The concept of human-animal cultures will be explained in detail in Chap. 2 of this paper. Ex ante, it is important to note that these human-animal cultures represent common grounds for shared ‘cultural’ practices, mutual communication, and the joint constitution of situations that are all—contrary to traditional conceptions of culture as exclusively human—possible on an interspecies level.

M. Huth (*)  Vienna, Austria E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_3

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Classical philosophical accounts usually address the animal question as a question of difference. They rely implicitly or explicitly on the metaphysical differentia specifica between the mere living being (the zoon) and the rational/communicative (zoon logon echon) or the social or political (zoon politikon) being (Aristotle, Politics 1253a1–11).2 Against this background of a sharp contrast between the human and the mere animal (as a being lacking fundamental human capacities such as reason, language, culture, sociality etc.), animals are not construed as partners in mutual understanding or as beings with interests, fears, or concerns similar to those of humans (Agamben; Derrida).3 Hence, meaningful communication with animals and human-animal interconnections are basically denied in these accounts, and exceptions to the rule, like e.g. Michel de Mon­ taigne come across as anthropomorphists or eccentrics. Montaigne famously surmised that it is absolutely not clear who is spending time with whom when he plays with his cat (or vice versa) (505) implying that a mutual relationship on an equal basis is possible. Newer approaches in animal philosophy frequently emphasize a gap between “us” and “them”, however in terms of alterity. Authors like Jacques Derrida, Matthew Calarco, and Marc Coeckelbergh focus on a fundamental difference between my (human) perspective and the animal’s perspective to describe humananimal encounters—and their ethical significance. Although I will draw on some of their reflections in the section “Disruptive Encounters” of this paper, at this stage of my explanations I would like to point out that alterity-centered positions usually neglect or underestimate human togetherness and familiarity with animals. In contrast to many “classical” approaches to animals that might be considered anthropocentric, as well as in contrast to alterity-centered approaches, I would like to propose that the animal question can be framed through the lens of a fundamental human-animal togetherness (which manifests itself in variegated contexts). This line of thinking presupposes an underlying entanglement between humans and animals, in which one is always already immersed (Huth, “Interanimality” 162–163). This interconnection can be described through the concept of humananimal cultures that establish general structures and topoi of human-animal relations. Drawing mainly on Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the further reflections attempt to capture what (in general) is already given in our experience, in the how we experience it (Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen 92–93), when considering human-animal encounters. As in Husserl’s most prominent work The

2For

a more thorough analysis of the actuality of this differentia specifica even in recent thought see Huth (“Zwischen Mensch und Tier”). 3Giorgio Agamben famously developed the concept of the “anthropological machine”: Theoretical considerations as well as relevant practices constitute an ongoing process of inclusion and exclusion that separates humans from animals along the line of alleged cognitive capacities (37).

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Crisis of the European Sciences and the Transcendental Phenomenology, philosophical investigations start out with the lifeworld and the various contexts in which animals play different roles in our experiences (Husserl, Krisis 198).

2 Human Animal Cultures In the following, I will undertake a short phenomenological inquiry into the nature of human-animal relations as they appear and manifest themselves in our lifeworld as a prerequisite or background for any encounter with animals. The key concept to capture the structures of relations between humans and animals is human-animal cultures. This concept undermines the presumed dichotomy between nature and culture (Agamben 37; Merleau-Ponty, Signs, Nature) apparent, for instance, in the differentia specifica between humans (as cultural beings) and animals (as natural beings). Developing the concept of ‘human-animal cultures’ is meant to show that common grounds for shared ‘cultural’ practices, mutual communication, and the joint constitution of situations are all possible on an interspecies level. However, in the course of this paper it will become apparent that such cultures are predetermined and sometimes limited by particular human significations (as with Husserl’s concept of the ‘anthropological world’ below). Since animals are often conceived of as either nice, friendly, or cute in the lifeworld, or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, as disgusting or dangerous, human-animal interactions are always framed by relevant dispositives and practices (Huth, “Interanimality” 166). The commonly shared significance of animals is influential on the level of concrete encounters and determines the scope of affective responses, possible actions with or towards animals or the notion of the individual or populations. The most important premise for the upcoming reflections is the always-already presupposed interconnection with animals (Husserl, Phänomenologie 625) even if it is very subtle or implicit. This interconnection can be described through concepts of intercorporeality (Merleau-Ponty, Signs 168) and of interanimality (Merleau-Ponty, Nature 189). Drawing from Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but also from Tim Ingold and Bruno Latour, I proceed from the assumption of a pre-existing acquaintance with animals that forms and evolves from childhood on. This acquaintance is seriously underestimated within classical philosophical frameworks. As Ingold puts it, we are living in a “meshwork” (70) with animals that is potentially beneath or prior to one’s explicit intentions, volitions, and also notions of animals. Hence, one may learn what an animal is and how one should treat her in two significant ways: 1. First, one may gain an understanding of animals by being responsive to their behavior and by interacting with them. As Ingold puts it, “skilled practice involves developmentally embodied responsiveness [my emphasis, M.H.]” (65). A “skilled practice” (that is also “embodied” like the responsiveness) lends itself to analogy with Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the ‘habitual body’ (in contrast to

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the ‘actual body’, Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology 82).4 The concept of the body in phenomenology is, since Husserl as the founding father of phenomenology, not meant as the mere body, a mere physiological object, the mere res extensa described by Descartes. Rather, it is the lived body, in Husserl’s terminology the Leib, in Merleau-Ponty´s diction the corps propre that includes or better underlies the ‘mere’ body and the psyche. It is not the body that I have; it is the body that I am. This lived body is the vehicle of one’s being in the world (82) as habits of acting and perceiving are literally embodied (Zahavi and Gallagher 81). On the level of what Merleau-Ponty—drawing from Husserl5—calls “operative intentionality” (Phenomenology 441), one has a tacit knowledge of dealing with animals beneath (or prior to) explicit intentions and conscious decisions. One directly perceives, but then also conceives of things, situations and living beings according to an operative intentionality that traces back to an “in-between” (Fuchs and de Jaegher 465), an intercorporeality with animals, that predetermines one’s ordinary behavior towards animals. Hence, one’s knowledge of animals originates in an always already existent being-with animals. Craig Holdrege clarifies this idea of an embodied knowledge further: “This knowing is not intellectual; it is a kind of felt-knowing based on the direct interactions we have with animals.” (qtd. in Acampora 35). One could also refer to Michael Polanyi’s concept of ‘tacit knowledge’. In the case of companion animals, it hardly needs stating that we communicate corporeally with them more or less reciprocally on a regular basis. We ask and urge them to do this or that, and we reply to their corporeal requests regularly by gestures, postures, gazes, and actions (Därmann 309). A mutual understanding, a responsiveness between human and nonhuman bodies is part of our everyday repertoire. Ralph Acampora even claims that we can presume a “symphysis” (Acampora 23) with or between “fellow inhabitants-of-the-world” (87). This becomes particularly apparent in contexts like animal assisted therapy or the use of guide dogs for blind people. These animals are not only trained in very sophisticated ways. They are also basically capable of responding to finely detailed bodily signals in ways that we consider as adequate and helpful. Latour’s concept of the actant (75) shows, among other issues, that intercorporeality and interactions are also possible with animals that are not particularly labeled as ‘companions’ or animals that are not generally viewed as ‘close’ to humans (mammals, animals which are placed higher on the so-called scala naturae). Even in contexts where animals are considered to be objectified, like e.g. in livestock husbandry or laboratory experimentation, a tacit familiarity with animals

4This

distinction of layers of the body has a structuralist basis. Like in Ferdinand de Saussure’s conception of language along the lines of the distinction between langue (as system or structure of a language) and parole (as event of speaking actualizing and potentially modifying the langue), we find a habitual body as the basic (and tacit) corpus of a behavioral repertoire and an actual body as the actualization of this corpus. 5Husserl famously coined the concept of fungierende Intentionalität in his Ideen II.

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and their needs and behavior is imperative. As Kristian Köchy points out, drawing on Ernst Mach, even the scientist relies on intuitions and a pre-scientific familiarity with the ‘object’ of her research (127). The choice of a certain species for the conduct of a certain experiment and the ensuing treatment of an animal in the laboratory setting is dependent on an already active attunement to animals. Moreover, the keeping conditions, the very way in which experiments are conducted, and even the instruments and facilities used are responsive to animals and their behaviors and needs (100). Finally (and crucially), the entire research situation— the conduct of the experiment itself—is co-determined by responses that are given by the alleged ‘object of study’, making her resistant to radical objectification, making her appear as actant. The concept of an ‘actant’ inserts a third in between the dichotomy between actor (person) and thing (Latour 75). Hence, one can conclude from this that some sensitivity, some tacit knowledge or know-how concerning animals is a necessary condition of even the seemingly most distanced way of treating or using animals. Second, besides our being-with and being responsive to animals, we also learn how to construe and deal with animals by observing and living with other humans. One may perceive what kind of treatment of animals is construed as ordinary treatment and adopt behavior relative to that example. Such a learning process shows that human significations of animals are basically always co-determined by what Husserl calls the “anthropological world” (Phänomenologie 617). A human point of view is the basis for a perception of animals that is imbued with different human significances—linked to commensurate behavior. Consequently, one develops different kinds of familiarity with and behaviors towards different kinds of animals. These habits can be very obvious and conscious (e.g. precaution in dealing with big dogs leads to avoidance behavior), but they might also be tacit and unconscious. We learn in a very subtle way what an animal is, how one (as Heidegger would put it) deals with and how one talks about different particular animals. However, we perceive, conceive of and treat animals in variegated ways. Virtually everyone is aware of the fact that people treat biological equals very unequally—and sometimes even members of the same species. Consider a rabbit which is perceived and conceived of (not to mention treated) extremely differently in different contexts; depending on whether s/he is used in the lab (undergoing a painful research procedure), or served as food, or petted as family member and being fed by the children in the living room, before they put her/him back in her cage (Grimm and Huth 80). That constitutes a multitude of relations in terms of different categories of animals. Edmund Husserl has already indicated that animals cannot be separated from their significations within the lifeworld (Phänomenologie 625). People do not encounter animals in a vacuum, but rather in a “furnished world” (Ingold 79) in which animals appear as humans’ best friends, pests, precious beings, valuable properties, disgusting beasts etc., triggering different kinds of affects and behaviors towards them (also on the level of

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operative intentionality).6 There is—although we have seen the tacit responsiveness to animals even in supposedly “objectifying” contexts—an important difference between the notions of animals as companion animals, as livestock, as pests, as dangerous, wild and exotic or as nasty mosquitoes. It is vital to acknowledge that any kind of human-animal relation is framed by significations that stem from the mentioned “anthropological world”. These significations are manifest and materialized in practices that determine animals according to their relevance and proximity for humans. Therefore, we have to consider an inevitable anthroporelational, and a particular socio-cultural perspectivity that determines structural (and habitually embodied) human-animal cultures as well as every actual encounter with animals. Our direct perception of a particular animal and the entailed being affected by this individual is pre-determined by the structure of significantly different human-animal cultures. Consequently, the theory of human-animal cultures, which arise from a mutuality and reciprocity in human-animal interactions, has to be modified and complexified. Acampora’s concept of the symphysis is, however, ultimately onesided and undifferentiated in certain respects. While the structure of a tacit responsiveness to animals’ suchness has the power to subvert the common sense that ‘this is just an animal’, the way one frames animals in the anthropological world, in turn, affects one’s empathy with animals and our responsiveness to them.

3 Framed Encounters—Everything as Usual Encounters with animals can be seen as singular reiterations and manifestations of human-animal cultures.7 Merleau-Ponty has analyzed human perception as exceeding the empiricist scope of collecting data (and connecting and arranging them in general concepts) (Phenomenology 3–12). According to him, perceptions rather consist of socially determined habits that provide one with gestalts that immediately bear meaning. There is no animal per se in one’s perceptions since at the rudimentary level of seeing (or touching, smelling, hearing) the being in question is framed and, thus, charged with significations. As in phenomenology, the appearance of something (or someone) as something (or someone) is the most basic, yet also the most crucial structure of experience, significance is not added to a given, naked object or even to naked data. Hence, a whole system of significations seems to determine human perceptions and notions of animals. Each encounter with an animal is organized and predetermined by frames that constitute this being, e.g. as an animal inspiring awe or as particularly symbolically charged (a lion, an eagle), as a dog that represents a “man’s best friend”, as a dangerous

6Gallagher

coins the term of a “smart perception” that refers to a rich horizon of knowledge that frames direct perception (535). 7The conception ‘reiteration’ of social frames and structures is also crucial in Judith Butler (3, 91).

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or disgusting snake, as a cow qua production unit, as a nasty mosquito, or as a mere mouse among thousand others in a laboratory.8 Against the background of a habitual (and operative, hence, preconscious) horizon of expectations, an animal appears as an example of a certain category and does not appear especially noticeable unless the encounter is significantly breaking the relevant frame. This also entails common horizons of expectations regarding the proper treatment of animals. While it is usually seen as a matter of course that one owes respect to a dog and should not treat her arbitrarily, it seems far less clear what the permissible treatment of a mouse should look like. However, this system is open for and has been the target of diverse criticism. These gestalts have been analyzed by animal ethicist Bernard Rollin in his work on the possibility of gestalt shifts. Similarly, US-American psychologist Melanie Joy famously analyzed carnism as ideology that determines one’s perceptions of, and the associated capacity to be affected by animals (12–13). While veganism and vegetarianism might easily be identified as ‘ideologies’ because they seem abnormal, extraordinary, or supererogatory in Western society as our lifeworld, a ‘usual’ construal of animals as family members or as livestock qua provider of milk or meat or as objects of study etc. is hardly noticeable because of its pervasiveness. Yet, the usual construal turns out to be active, particularly at the level of operative intentionality and affectability. The associations called to mind by the sight of tethered cattle or tethered cats and dogs are likely to differ significantly. Perceptions and associations vary under varied socio-cultural conditions. It appears to be a matter of course that a Hindu would perceive and react differently to beef than a Christian might (14). Any time one encounters an animal representing a certain species, population, or category, frames of perception and recognition are reproduced, and they determine one’s reaction to that specimen. Yet, it does not seem unproblematic to refer to the differential recognition of animals as vulnerable beings with a “good of their own” or as usable objects as “ideology”. In Francis Bacon’s famous analysis of ideology from his Novum Organum Scientiarum “idols” are false interpretations that have to be corrected by insights gained from structured experiments or, more generally, by strictly scientific insights (8–9). The Christian and the Hindu might be seen as locked up in prejudices that are unjustifiable and pre-scientific in the worst of senses. They are mere prejudices. By contrast, phenomenologists frequently point out that there are necessary prejudices (most prominently in Gadamer 275–278) and that there is a necessary perspectivity of our notions. As corporeal beings people have to rely on unquestioned habits, routines, and opinions to be able to conduct their being in the world; otherwise they would stumble from one encapsulated, unfamiliar situation

8Particularly the recognition of subjectivity and vulnerability in animals is often implied in these categories. While the dog is seen as an “experiencing subject of a life” (as Tom Regan puts it in his groundwork of animal rights, 264) on a regular basis, even mammals like mice are often at the margins of such a recognition. I will come back to that example in the upcoming section.

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to the next. Moreover, one has to acknowledge that one is not capable of adopting a view from nowhere or a standpoint of the universe. In direct perception as well as in theoretical construal (e.g. of animals), people rely on a certain, socio-culturally imbued perspective that makes it possible to grasp something as something. To put it pointedly: People live in and by means of significations that inevitably form the constitutive background of perceptions and notions. Hence, they are neither fully accessible nor at one’s disposition. Nonetheless, it remains vital to emphasize that the prevailing conditions of perceiving, interacting with, and conceiving of animals are not necessarily strictly determinant conditions. One might easily apprehend that the system of frames that organizes human-animal encounters is not entirely consistent. In the case of livestock husbandry, neither animal owners nor the public would conceive of cattle or pigs merely as production units devoid of subjectivity or sentience. Although these animals appear much less as partners in mutual communication or as “experiencing subjects of a life” (Regan 264) than dogs or cats, they are not considered mere machines or mere objects which are not vulnerable. This even applies to slaughterhouse workers who for the most part seek to avoid emotional involvement with the animals they encounter in their work (Sebastian 105). There are evidently potentially ambiguous, sometimes also overlapping and interfering frames that predetermine animal encounters. It is also conceivable that a singular encounter with an animal does not bluntly fulfill expectations, but instead disrupts the underlying frames.

4 Disruptive Encounters—Nothing as Usual How can an animal look you in the face? That will be one of our concerns. (Derrida 377)

Why is the animal’s gaze a (if not the) concern when Derrida writes The Animal that Therefore I am? I suppose it is more or less the same concern that is at stake here; namely, how is it possible that an encounter with an animal can be excessive in terms of exceeding the frames in which one perceives, thinks and lives? A most telling example for that type of phenomenon (or hyper-phenomenon, see below) can be found in Theodor W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia in a passage where the author is actually concerned with the preconditions for dehumanization and genocide: The ceaselessly recurrent expression that savages, blacks, Japanese resemble animals, or something like apes, already contains the key to the pogrom. The possibility of this latter is contained in the moment that a mortally wounded animal looks at a human being in the eye. The defiance with which they push away this gaze – “it’s after all only an animal” – is repeated irresistibly in atrocities to human beings, in which the perpetrators must constantly reconfirm this is “only an animal”, because they never entirely believed it even with animals. (105)

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The focus on humans is crisscrossed by a concern for animals that express their subjectivity, vulnerability and mortality through their eyes or gaze. Being struck and affected by the human or the nonhuman Other happens notably through the gaze—it forms the center of an encounter that possibly exceeds the usual attributes ascribed to that Other (as mere animal, mere production unit—or in case of humans: mere savage, black, Japanese etc.). Particularly in the phenomenological discourse, the gaze serves as a most telling instance of an experience that is not exhaustible and cannot be captured by description or definition. To take up Merleau-Ponty’s dialectics of the habitual and the actual body again: The actual situation provides an experience that is in a significant tension with the habitual body and the horizon of expectations (and of prefigured understanding through usual categories like livestock, pest, etc.). Hence, it constitutes a “hyper-phenomenon” (Waldenfels 9) that surpasses the scope of ordinary frames and categories and is, therefore, difficult or in case impossible to apprehend. In the phenomenological discourse, this hyper-phenomenon has been analyzed most prominently in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in a passage describing seeing oneself seen by the Other as the event that questions the self as an autonomous self (257). While the Other is revealed as an experiencing subject that inevitably transcends my notion (and any attribution of characteristics and capabilities) of that person, I in turn find myself possibly objectified. In Sartre, this ultimately constitutes an experience of shame. Derrida then implicitly transfers Sartre’s description to human-animal encounters. Evidently, Derrida struggles with words as he tries to paint a picture of the event of encountering an animal that exceeds the scope of normal attributes: “[S]eeing oneself seen naked under a gaze that is vacant to the extent of being bottomless, at the same time innocent and cruel perhaps, perhaps sensitive and impassive, good and bad, uninterpretable, unreadable, undecidable, abyssal and secret.” (381). However, what is the reason for that struggle, can one discover phenomenologically the reason for the incomprehensibility of the animal gaze and other manifestations of frontal encounters that exceed the all too usual frame, “this is (just) an animal”, Adorno refers to? Why do I lose ground when I see not only an animal inspiring awe or a dog as ‘human’s best friend’ seeing myself, but also potentially a cow qua production unit, or a ‘mere’ mouse among a thousand others in the laboratory? Why can beings that fit categories like ‘mere animals’, ‘production units’, or ‘objects of study’ ever disrupt fundamental frames of experience? Derrida tries to give an answer to that question when focusing on the singularity of the encountered individual that exceeds any kind of categorization and conceptualization: Nothing can ever take away from me the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized. And a mortal existence, for from the moment that it has a name, its name survives it. It signs its potential disappearance. Mine also, and this disappearance, from that moment to this, fort / da, is announced each time that, naked or not, one of us leaves the room. (379)

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Derrida’s concern is the dialectics of naming and mastering ‘the animal’ on the one hand, and the animal’s resistance to human domination by means of her otherness as well as her vulnerability and mortality on the other hand.9 Any kind of objectification meets its limits in the experience of the fragility of lived bodies that are more and different than merely damageable. To apply Judith Butler’s reflections and terminology to the question of animal encounters, “there is a remainder of ‘life’ (…) that limns and haunts” (7) the general (normative) frames that organize one’s encounters with animals. This obviously also applies to the oppression that is implicitly active in the domination or the disregard of (some) animals. Derrida focuses on the degradation of animals due to their animality in general (hence, as supposedly less than human) as well as due to the particular degradation of livestock (394). This particular context shows the power of framing animals as mere production units, as beings with numbers (instead of names), as mere bodies instead of subjects. This tempts Derrida to postulate a link between industrial farming and genocides.10 Unsurprisingly, (wo)men of letters also refer to that hyper-phenomenon that exceeds usual structures of experience and explanation. Of the numerous literary treatments of the ex-cessive phenomenon of the animal gaze (Tolstoy; Musil; Huth, “Erfahrung” 295–296) I would like to cite Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude here. The following sentence from that short novel has clear philosophical implications regarding the topos of the animal gaze: “[A]nd all at once I started trembling, because in that mouse’s eyes I saw something more than the starry firmament above me or the moral law within me.” (Hrabal 51). Once more, the gaze exceeds the normality of an animal’s classification. Usually, a mouse constitutes a kind of liminal animal: occasionally a pet, but also frequently an object of study, sometimes vermin, but not a noble animal inspiring awe. It is merely a mouse. Hrabal’s dialectical punch line is that exactly this presumably prosaic existence opens—through her gaze—the experience of an excess beyond typical categorizations and considerations. The passage I quoted refers to the passage in Critique of Practical Reason where Immanuel Kant brings the moral law (the Categorical Imperative) in an analogy with the starry firmament in terms of a sublime appearance (289). In Hrabal’s text, the mouse does not represent a mere mouse, but an Other (in an emphatic sense of the word) who exceeds both moral law and the starry firmament. In line with Derrida’s thinking, the nonhuman Other opens through her gaze an experience that is resistant to objectification, categorization, even to practical reason and its abstract moral considerations.

9Recent

investigations in the phenomenon of vulnerability indicate that particularly the fragility of bodily existence provides a power of resistance against different kinds of problematic classification or oppression (Butler, Frames of War). 10I refrain from delving into the debate, whether it is permissible to directly compare animal exploitation to human genocides. However, within Western normative infrastructures the comparison always has a provocative element since the concept of genocide usually designates the attempted eradication of a certain human population.

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It seems that default frames and classifications of animals are made particularly explicit through the contradictory or disruptive event of facing an animal. The category ‘mere mouse’ becomes visible when it is countered, because usually this category is embodied in our everyday behavior and experience; it is unobtrusive. The same applies for the abstract categorization ‘just an animal’ as seen in Derrida’s remarks above. Disruptive encounters reveal the nature and the limits of current notions of animals. For that reason, encounters of the disruptive sort can also be regarded as productive experiences that enable change through a heightened or even new awareness of what is already going on in shared operative intentionality: they might provoke a reconsideration of common convictions about and conceptions of animals and ultimately a change in individual or even collective habits. Then, paradoxically, their singularity might turn them into a pars pro toto. Finally, disruptive encounters could also be a constant thorn in the side of protagonists that carry out socially approved treatments of animals. Consider veterinarians who perform euthanasia on a regular basis. It might seem like a matter of course that euthanasia against the convictions of the designated veterinarian presents a moral and psychological problem for that individual (Hartnack et al.). If the animal is to be euthanized for solely financial reasons or because the owner wants to save time and energy, common convictions would be in line with the reluctant veterinarian. However, there is the empirical evidence that euthanasia remains a problematic issue for veterinarians even in cases that seem to be ‘uncontroversial’ and throughout a longer career (over the course of which one might be expected to get used to euthanizing animals). Despite a broadly accepted justification, or a conviction that veterinarians should kill in some cases to fulfill a moral duty (Grimm and Huth 96–98), mixed feelings and discomfort with euthanasia persist (Hartnack et al. 5).

5 Conclusion A synopsis of the reflections that have been presented over the course of this paper has to consider four crucial cornerstones of the phenomenological description and interpretation of animal encounters: First, people live in a continual, although often concealed and implicit togetherness with animals. One can detect a corporeal resonance or co-responsiveness between humans and animals because mutual communication with animals forms a part of the human experience, sometimes even in a very sophisticated manner; we perform shared actions and refer to shared significations. Using MerleauPonty’s concepts of intercorporeality and interanimality as the basis for an analysis of such habitual human-animal interactions prompted me to filter this usual experience through the concept of human-animal cultures. That concept particularly subverts the persistent assumption of a sharp division between humans and animals along the lines of what is considered human culture, as opposed to nature, exemplified by the metaphysical differentia specifica between mere biological beings and rational/social beings.

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Second, human-animal cultures are framed and co-determined by the particular human perspective in which human significations play a fundamental role. Referring to Husserl’s concept of the ‘anthropological world’, human-animal cultures have been described as accessible only from a human point of view. Third, animal encounters can reproduce the structure of human-animal cultures (against the background of their anthroporelational significance) as typical examples. If one meets an animal that appears inconspicuous according to ordinary classifications (as a companion, as an adequate object of study, as an efficient milk or meat provider) one can apprehend this experience as a framed encounter. Fourth, typical classifications can be disrupted by encounters with animals that reveal the singularity of the individual. As Sartre, Adorno, and Derrida have pointed out variously, yet in an analogous manner, facing the gaze of the Other is a prototypical event that makes this singularity perceptible. By virtue of this experience, ordinary classifications of animals might become visible, open to critique, and finally, a change of perspectives can be sparked off.

References Acampora, Ralph. Corporeal Compassion: Animal Ethics and Philosophy of Body. U of Pittsburgh P, 2006. Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Trans. by E. F. N. Jephcott, Verso, 2005. Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford UP, 2003. Aristotle. Politics. Trans. by William D. Ross, Oxford UP, 2009. Bacon, Francis. Novum Organum Scentiarum. Jazzybee, 2015. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Live Griveable? Verso, 2009. Calarco, Matthew. “Faced by Animals.” Radicalizing Levinas, ed. by Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco, SUNY, 2010, pp. 113–133. Calarco, Matthew. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. Columbia UP, 2008. Coeckelbergh, Marc, and David Gunkel. “Facing Animals: A Relational, Other-Oriented Approach to Moral Standing.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, vol. 27, no. 5, 2014, pp. 715–733. Därmann, Iris. “Von Tieren und Menschen: Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida und die zoologische Frage.” Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie, vol. 5, 2011, pp. 303–325. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. by David Willis, ed. by Marie-Louise Mallet, Fordham UP, 2010. Fuchs, Thomas, and Hanne de Jaegher. “Enactive Intersubjectivity: Participatory Sense-making and Mutual Incorporation.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 8, 2009, pp. 465–486. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, Continuum, 2004. Gallagher, Shaun. “Direct perception in the intersubjective context.” Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 17, no. 2, 2008, pp. 535–543. Grimm, Herwig, and Martin Huth. “The ‘Significance of Killing’ versus ‘the Death of an Animal’.” The End of Animal Life: A Start for an Ethical Debate, ed. by Franck L. B. Meijboom and Elsbeth N. Stassen, Wageningen Academic Publishers, 2016, pp. 79–192.

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Hartnack, Sonja, et al. “Attitudes of Austrian Veterinarians towards Euthanasia in Small Animal Practice: Impacts of Age and Gender on Views of Euthanasia.” BMC Veterinary Research, vol. 12, no. 26, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12917-016-0649-0. Accessed 27 July 2017. Hrabal, Bohumil. Too Loud a Solitude. Abacus, 1998. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge. Springer, 1950. Husserl, Edmund. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Springer, 1988. Husserl, Edmund. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlaß: Vol. 3: 1929–1935. Kluwer, 1973. Huth, Martin. “Die Erfahrung vom sterbenden Tier: Phänomenologische Perspektiven auf das Töten von Tieren.” Opfer – Beute – Hauptgericht: Tiertötungen im interdisziplinären Diskurs, ed. by Alex Joachimides et al., transcript, 2016, pp. 291–306. Huth, Martin. “Interanimality and Animal Encounters: The Phenomenology of Human-Animal Relations.” Phainomena, vol. 98–99, 2016, pp. 155–178. Huth, Martin. “Zwischen Mensch und Tier?! Die Phänomenologie des Menschseins versus die metaphysische Bestimmung des Menschen.” Überwundene Metaphysik? Beiträge zur Konstellation von Phänomenologie und Metaphysikkritik, ed. by Murat Ates et al., Alber, 2016, pp. 246–262. Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Routledge, 2011. Joy, Melanie. Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism. Conari P, 2011. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. Suhrkamp, 1974. Köchy, Kristian. Biophilosophie zur Einführung. Junius, 2008. Latour, Bruno. The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Harvard UP, 2004. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France. Northwestern UP, 2003. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge, 1962. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signs. Northwestern UP, 1964. Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays. Penguin Classics, 1993. Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. U of California P, 2004. Rollin, Bernard. The Frankenstein Syndrome: Ethical and Social Issues in the Genetic Engineering of Animals. Cambridge UP, 2008. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Philosophical Library, 1965. Sebastian, Marcel. “Tierliebe im Schlachthof? Das Interesse am Wohlergehen der Tiere als Verarbeitungsstrategie von Gewalt im Schlachthof.” Tierstudien, vol. 3, 2013, pp. 102–113. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Hyperphänomene: Modi hyperbolischer Erfahrung. Suhrkamp, 2012. Zahavi, Dan, and Shaun Gallagher. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. Routledge, 2008.

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Philosophical Animal Encounters with Cynical Affinities: Variants in Diogenes and Schopenhauer (with Remarks on Montaigne, Derrida, Blumenberg) D. S. Mayfield

1 Astounded Encounters: Montaigne and Derrida in the Face of Philosophy some interactions between humans and animals can do more than one thing simultaneously[.] (Cuneo 5)

Philosophy is thought to have commenced with detached wonderment—Animal Studies with an immediate encounter.1 Montaigne combines both astonishment and interspecies meetings when accentuating that he “observe[s] [‘remarque’] with […] amazement [‘admiration’] the behavior […] of the dogs that blind men use both in the fields and in town” (Essays 340, II.12; Essais II. 196, II.xii).2 Likewise, everyone will be familiar with the more proximate encounter—as mediated by Montaigne’s animated description: “When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?” (Essays 331, II.12; Essais II. 179, II.xii); in the 1595 edition, he renders the respective interspecies reciprocities in particularly palpable terms, seeing that they “entertain each other with

1See Plato (54–55, 155D); Aristotle: “It is through wonder [‘tò thaumázein’] that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering [‘thaumásantes’] in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too” (12–13, I.ii.9, 982b; cf. 14–15, I.ii.15, 983a). 2Thereto, see Mayfield (“Talking Canines” 24n.–25n.).

D. S. Mayfield (*)  Berlin, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_4

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reciprocal [‘réciproques’] monkey tricks” (Essays 331n., II.12; Essais II. 706n.).3 In engaging and communicating with another animate being encountered, Montaigne’s approach is emphatic of similarities and mutuality: “We must notice the parity there is between us. We have some […] understanding of their meaning; so do they of ours, in about the same degree” (Essays 331, II.12; 335).4 Tying in with Montaigne’s focus on animals (375, 375n.), while not following his inclusive tendency highlighting likeness, Derrida outperforms the scene vividly expressed by the Early Modern precursor of present-day Animal Studies— most concisely in the line “Yet I have been wanting to bring myself back to my nudity before the cat” (390). With tacit allegiance (and patent affinity) to cynical tactics, this deliberately scandalizing declaration of independence from professional philosophy encapsulates—precisely by recourse to a vividmost interspecies encounter—the groundswell of Derrida’s lecture, and overall écriture: a willful (“I”, “wanting”, “myself”, “my”) antinomianism (“Yet”); a predilection for returns (“to bring myself back to”), specifically to ostensively unmediated nature (“my nudity”, “the cat”); and an assertion of alterity-emphatic, while other-related, forms of ‘vis-à-vis’ (‘me “before” an, respectively the, alter’).5 Taking for granted this other’s very alterity—“If I say ‘it is a real cat’ […], it is in order to mark its unsubstitutable singularity” (378)—is vital to Derrida’s approaching animals at the notional level, with the latter having been induced by a face-to-face encounter: I see it [the ‘cat’] as this irreplaceable living being […]. Nothing can ever take away from me the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized. (378–379)6

3He

adds: “If I have my time to begin or to refuse, so has she hers” (Essays 331n., II.12; cf. Essais II. 706n.). 4Cf. Essays 344; “this equality and correspondence”, 354; Montaigne signals seeing similarities as a choice of perspective, when stating that “there is more difference between a given man and a given man than between a given animal and a given man” (Essays 342, II.12). On Montaigne and animals, see Fudge (Brutal 78; 96; 117–122; “Home” 42–45); Enenkel and Smith (11–12; with further references). Shapiro and Copeland note that “[w]e all have some knowledge of the life of a nonhuman animal and […] some ability to empathize with the world-as-experienced by that animal” (345); cf. Boehrer (3). 5Derrida’s purpose is “to destabilize a whole tradition, to deprive it of its fundamental argument” (407n.). 6He insists on the alter’s immediate factuality—“that is truly a little cat, this cat I am talking about” (375)—while alluding to the possibility of his actually citing the phrase “really a little cat” (376); hence: “the cat said to be real” (378); see Fudge (“Home” 45; 46). Derrida seems frank as to whose role in the Tradition’s economy of positions he is reallocating (cf. “this deranged theatrics of the wholly other that they call animal, for example, a cat”, 380; “I hear the cat or God ask itself, ask me”, 387). Generally, see Blumenberg on “the age-old theological statement [that] God is the downright Other” (Literatur 79; trans. dsm).

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Antistrophic to the Cartesian method of circular self-identification, it is Derrida’s ‘other’ that certifies the ‘self’; but while the path (immediacy vs. indirection) differs in these two thinkers, the goal is ultimately the same in Derrida (circuitously) and Descartes (directly): verification of self.7 On this point, the former’s lecture closes on a parrhesiastic note.8 Derrida’s essay ends with a string of queries; already before, he had taken on a sort of neo-Skeptical persona, when stating that ‘he finds himself’ “in the process of searching” (383). It is particularly this zetetico-heuristic approach that links Derrida’s endeavor to his Early Modern precursors: Descartes, who claimed to be starting from scratch, and (to his mind) found a firm footing; Montaigne, who persisted in observing, describing.9 Inductively, the latter proceeds from a specific case—the tangible or textual encounter—to a more universal plane; in an animal-related context, he notes the movement from “particular actions” to “what everyone has seen and what everyone knows” (Essays 342, II.12); and that “there is material […] to find facts”, for the person willing to “stud[y] closely what we see ordinarily of the animals that live among us” (Essays 342–343, II.12). It is a comparably heuristic approach to animal encounters that initiates Diogenical Cynicism, and that subtends any discourse with such affinities.

2 Diogenes: Encounter-Induced Animal Heuristics with Respect to Interspecies Parity Whereas Montaigne emphatically mentions Diogenes in the animal-related section of the Apologie de Raimond Sebond (Essais II. 178–230, II.xii; here 192; Essays 330–358, II.12; here 338), Derrida foregoes a direct reference, also where mention of cynicism would seem requisite (discourse) historically, de re, as well as for his own claim (“I plan to speak endlessly of nudity and of the nude in philosophy”, 369; cf. Fudge, “Home” 46); his remark as to “a properly transgressal if not transgressive experience of limitrophy” (397) would arguably entail an express engagement with cynical discourses, seeing that such is precisely their groundswell in a diachronic perspective.10

7Cf.

Mayfield (“Talking Canines” 3n.; 5–8). the following phrases as indicators: “in the first place, me”; “animal narcissism”; “this cat […] my primary mirror” (418). Cf. Fudge, ‘tracing’ in Derrida “an admission of the centrality of animals to the assertion of human status” (“Home” 51). “In a world without animals, humans […] would lose themselves” (Brutal 36). Cuneo notes “how central the study of animals is to our continuing endeavors to understand ourselves and our interconnected world” (4). Cf. Bühler, in epistemological terms (20); similarly in Aquinas (as per Agamben 22). 9On the Early Modern reception of Ancient Skepticism, see Fudge (Brutal 5; 116–122; 145). 8See

10Derrida’s

dichotomizing ‘animal discourses’ into ‘philosophical’ or ‘poetic’ (382–383; 377) may seem overly unambiguous.

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Ancient Cynicism, deriving its designation from the Greek word for ‘dog’ (‘kýon’), is likely the most prominent philosophical ‘interest group’ bearing an animal name in its very label.11 The extant philosophico-literary tradition shows the arch-Cynic in several encounters with various animals. In his bearing, ‘Diogenes the Dog’ also willfully highlights the first part in the collocation ‘animal rationale’—presenting himself as the hound encountered by other human beings. His interspecies and ostensive interhuman meetings both lay bare the ethico-heuristic potentials inhering in approaching other animate beings—tentatively approximating their behavior, decidedly accentuating ties and affinities, rather than divisive differences.12 In the face of the philosophical tradition of his (and any) day, Diogenical anecdotes present his observing, adapting to, and identifying with, a range of (often canine) behaviors and traits. Both in his own heuristic approach to nature, and in the discoveries he facilitates for others by way of staged encounters, this animal philosopher par excellence explores and exposes—in an astounding, provocative manner—mankind’s habitual, often thoughtless approach to, and (tacit) conception of, other animate beings. The bewilderment the Cynic causes leads to a change of perspective on the part of those for whom he performs the encounter with himself as an animal. His ‘recourse to canine nature’ aims at a maximum of vivid effect. Diogenes—seen by his contemporaries as behaving like a hound—stages quasiinterspecies meetings with others: the astonished discovery (heúresis) thus takes place—expressly, inadvertently—in the respective alter, who has come across this self-styled dog. Everyone knows the textual encounter setting Diogenes in a position facilitating a heuristic observation of his adopted canine stance by a most prominent other: When he was sunning himself […], Alexander came and stood over him and said, ‘Ask of me any boon you like’. To which he replied, ‘Stand out of my light’ [‘ἀποσκότησόν μου’, ‘unshadow me’]. (D. Laertius 40–41, VI.38)

The effectuality of ‘the Dog’s’ attitude is exemplified in that the ruler “is reported to have said, ‘Had I not been Alexander, I should have liked to be Diogenes’” (35, VI.32). The Cynic’s perspective—having initially related to, and adopted, canine conduct as a result of his own heuristic observations—is here taken by the emperor, who, in turn, identifies with Diogenes. In this literary encounter, a marveling Alexander discovers ‘the Dog’s’ natural freedom, self-sufficiency, simplicity of living. Citing Theophrastus as a source, D. Laertius’ anecdotal account of ‘ho kýon’ commences with a salient animal encounter characteristic for this therio-minded philosopher—latently formative for any cynical discourse:

11For

the seminal study on cynicism, see Niehues-Pröbsting (passim; here spec. 210–211). to alterity in Descartes (“difference in kind”) and Darwin (“difference in degree”), see Boehrer (16)—also on “Aristotle’s notion of the interspecies continuum” (17).

12As

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Through watching a mouse running about […], not looking for a place to lie down in, not afraid of the dark, not seeking any of the things which are considered to be dainties, he discovered [‘ἐξεῦρε’] the means of adapting himself to circumstances. (24–25, VI.22)13

This narrative is vital—with respect to interspecies encounters, and as to describing the basis of cynical discourses. Defying an entire tradition already in his day, and retaining his antinomian force en route, this wayward philosopher not only mindfully perceives a minute being—otherwise hardly noticed at all (or only in its diminishing effects with disrespect to pantries), and certainly not by ‘philosophers’ soi-disant; he also considers the conduct of this animal as of so great a significance, that, following his heuristic observation, he changes the course of his own life accordingly. Diogenes attends to another animate being: as opposed to the prevalent alternative, he notices as germane the murine performance encountered—as pertinent to both of their natural, environment-related ways of life. That a philosopher deems meaningful the mouse’s conduct merits attention per se; and one may not disregard what ‘the Dog’ does not do in that meeting. This quiet little narrative marks nothing less than a revolutionizing move in the history of Western philosophy; it is no accident that it features significantly in Nietzsche.14 The Cynic is the philosopher of encounters par excellence; he both seeks and provokes them. Naturally, his meetings include animals. As a self-styled dog, he also stages encounters with human beings, confronting them with their normali­zed, typically unmindful behavior towards other living beings. The Cynic’s iden­tifying with animals via factual or potential ties and similarities marks an initial, most decisive assault on that alleged ‘human-animal divide’—which his bearing indeed undermines at every turn.15 In his attempts at (hypothetically, actively) approximating animals and their performance—demonstrating a factual affinity, not a merely definitional disparity—‘Diogenes the Dog’ emphatically relates to animals. The Cynic’s literary persona often takes such identification to extremes from the viewpoint of the prev­ alent nómos—by focusing solely on life’s physico-material factuality, affirming

13The

Cynic extends his heuristics to all animate beings: “observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away the cup […] with the words, ‘A child has beaten me in plainness of living’. He also threw away his bowl when […] he saw a child who had broken his plate taking up his lentils with the hollow part of a morsel of bread” (D. Laertius 30, VI.37). 14See his stress on heuristics: “Ich denke an die erste Nacht des Diogenes: alle antike Philosophie war auf Simplicität des Lebens gerichtet […]. In diesem Betracht haben die wenig philosophischen Vegetarianer mehr für die Menschen geleistet als alle neueren Philosophien; und so lange die Philosophen nicht den Muth gewinnen, eine ganz veränderte Lebensordnung zu suchen und durch ihr Beispiel aufzuzeigen, ist es nichts mit ihnen” (Nachgelassene Fragmente 1969–1874 752, 31[10]; cf. 739, 30[18]). 15As to the so-called “human-animal divide” (Boehrer 3; Raber 30; 45), see Derrida’s referring to “the question called that of the animal and of the limit between the animal and the human” (408; 399). Agamben asserts: “the border between human and animal” is “not just one question among many” (21; 22, 24, 36; passim).

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it in every respect, hence scandalizing a given normativity. His mindful meetings with, and various heuristic recourses to, animal nature conduce to a vivid impression (evidentia)—appresented as palpable also by the respective recipient of the textual version faced. In effect, the Diogenical praxis of staging heuristic encounters raises awareness, freeing latent capacities, inducing a change of mind in the reader or spectator. Hence the Cynic humorously feeds his conduct (based on heuristically observing other beings) back to the animals—even while provocatively conversing with them in terms of human value judgments thereby subverted: “When mice crept on to the table he addressed them thus, ‘See now even Diogenes keeps parasites’” (41, VI.40). Beneath their willfully glaring exterior, such anecdotes demonstrate an appreciable tendency toward reciprocity and parity on the part of the Dog. Diachronically, discourses with cynical affinities share a down-to-earth, thisworldly, animal-related approach—with Montaigne and Derrida being significant representatives in the present respect (the former expressly, the latter by implication). Cynicism has recourse to nature, heuristically approximating human beings and animals with a view to mutual affinities, destabilizing the divisive disparity of definitional dichotomies, subverting any views asserting an utter severance between animate beings. By recourse to evident interspecies similarities, cynical discourses gainsay a supposedly special status of man, lower the conventionally presupposed bar, undermine any merely conceptual differences typically at the root of normative assumptions.16 With provocative intent, verbally acute, performatively striking measures are taken to confront culturally fortified definitions, to scandalize hardened convictions, and treat solidified mindsets to a change of perspective.17

3 Schopenhauer: Philosophical Encounters with Respect to Animals Den Verstand der […] Thiere wird Keiner, dem es nicht selbst daran gebricht, in Zweifel ziehn. (Schopenhauer, “Wurzel” 85, IV, §21)18

Contrary to the confrontational artfulness of the above motto, Schopenhauer is widely seen as a so-called ‘pessimist’. Yet already Nietzsche, his avid reader, noted the inadequacy of this label (“P e s s i m i s t […] er war es nicht”), while immediately adducing a more adequate assessment: Schopenhauer’s “wrath was, entirely as with the Ancient Cynics, his refreshment, his recreation, his

16Cf.

Niehues-Pröbsting (320); Mayfield (Artful 194; 198; 297–298; 390–399; 410; 417; 437). radical affirmation of this body, self, life, and of this world is the cynic’s attitude tying together self-sufficiency and adaptation” (Mayfield, Artful 54; 13); cynicism ever “attacks […] the prevalent nómos” (Artful 12). 18“No one will call into question the Understanding of the […] animals, unless himself devoid [there]of” (“Wurzel” 85, IV, §21; trans. dsm; cf. 86). 17“The

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recompense, his remedy […], his b l i s s [‘Glück’, ‘good fortune’]” (Gut und Böse 349–350, III.7; trans. dsm).19 Likewise, Blumenberg remarks: There is something askew, in seeing the misanthrope in Schopenhauer. Rather[,] he seems similar to that arch-Cynic, who[,] with lantern in daylight[,] wished to see [‘nachsehen’, ‘look into’, ‘find out’], whether instances of this [human] species did [in fact] exist at all. (Sorge 184; trans. dsm)20

The above is of special relevance here, since Blumenberg ties this view of Schopenhauer qua cynic to a most somatic interspecies anecdote, staging the philosopher’s publicly encountering canine conduct: “Given a certain naughtiness on the part of his poodle widely known throughout the town[,] Schopenhauer admonished him [with the words:] You human!” (Sorge 184; trans. dsm).21 The tone is humorous, of course; at once, the anecdote reveals this philosopher’s general readiness not only to observe (see the root of ‘theoría’), but also to engage with animal behavior. Rather than spirit away the concrete encounter inducing a more theoretical (metaphysical, moral) reflection, Schopenhauer expressly retains the (visuo-)vividness (Anschaulichkeit) of actual interspecies experiences as an integral part of his philosophy—which accentuates the protection of, care for, and parity with, other animals. Epistemology One may follow Schopenhauer in proceeding from a specific animal encounter to more universal views concerning the interrelationship of animate beings in the context of his ethics. Contrary to a widespread prejudice, taking a more general, philosophical perspective does not obliterate (let alone invalidate) the inducing, particular event. In the ensuing, the theorist relates the arch-philosophical experience of surprise and amazement to a vivid activity on the part of his poodle causing his astonishment—with the latter mirroring the dog’s own act of wondering: Recently[,] I had [ordered] large curtains[,] reaching down to the floor[, to be] applied to the windows in my bedroom, of the sort that part in the middle, when one pulls on a cord: now[,] when I first performed this, upon getting out of bed in the morning, I noticed, to my surprise [‘Ueberraschung’, ‘astonishment’], that my very astute [‘klug’, ‘intelligent’] poodle was standing there all in awe [‘ganz verwundert’, ‘wondering’], and was looking around, upward and sideways, for the cause of the phenomenon, hence searching for the change, of which he a priori knew that it must have [had] occurred before: the same also happened again the following morning. (“Wurzel” 85–86, IV, §21; trans. dsm)

19See

Schopenhauer (PP II. 69, III, §50); Mayfield (Artful 90n.; 436n.). “He lit a lamp in broad daylight and said, as he went about, ‘I am looking for a man’” (D. Laertius 43, VI.41; see Mayfield, Artful 31; 48; 233n.; 342; 393; 426–427; 439–442). 21Cf. “Wundern darf es mich nicht, daß manche die Hunde verläumden: / Denn es beschämet zu oft leider den Menschen der Hund” (PP II. 567, “Einige Verse”)—this aphorism closes his published works. 20Cf.

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From this concrete encounter—the poodle wondering about the movement of the drapes, the philosopher amazed at the poodle’s astonishment, the reader appresenting the mediated scene—Schopenhauer derives a more general statement with respect to animals, severally repeated throughout his œuvre. Before adducing the latter, the aspect of mediatedness with regard to interspecies encounters must be addressed: the above narrative represents and induces an apparently immediate experience, written after the fact with a view to a recipient. The same process also takes place on another plane: for the philosopher, himself a reader, also vicariously encounters the virtual traces of such and similar meetings written by others, wherefore Schopenhauer’s respective recipient faces—comes across textually, appresents intra-visually—a severally mediated scene in the ensuing: we are surprised [‘überrascht’, ‘amazed’] at the sagacity of that elephant, who, after having already traversed many bridges on his voyage through Europe, once preferred not to set foot on [a particular] one[—]even while seeing[, the same] as before[,] the remainder of the train of human beings and horses passing over [this bridge—]since[,] to him[,] it seems [‘scheint’] too flimsily built for his [own] weight[.] (WWV I. 56, I, §6; trans. dsm)22

Implying a universality, the latter shifts to the present tense. Here, as in other passages, Schopenhauer expressly relates wonder to the “Verstand” of animals, stressing that the “monkey, elephant, dog astonish us with their Understanding” (“Wurzel” 86, IV, §21; trans. dsm; cf. WWV I. 56, I, §6). At first, such arch-philosophical amazement gives itself to perceiving the animal’s alterity—hence: “What an unfathomable mystery […] in every animal!” (WWV II. 561, IV.41; trans. dsm). Yet Schopenhauer does not remain with the initial experience of apparent otherness; in the sentence following the one just quoted, he urges the reader to return to her respective lifeworld—to a tangible, immediate materiality—calling for an active, visual encounter: “Seht das nächste, seht euern Hund an”, “Regard [sc. turn your face to] what is closest to you, perceive your dog[!]” (WWV II. 561, IV.41; trans. dsm). Very subtly, the philosopher uses Scriptural gestures (“Seht”: the Latin ‘ecce’) and vocabulary (“nächste”, see Mt. 19.19, 22.39; Mk. 12.31–33; Lk. 10.27) in a refunctionalized, ultimately antinomian manner—precisely to give animals their right as ‘neighbors’, proximate beings; given the latent presence of the Scriptural intertexts as signaled by the aforesaid watchwords, the philosopher’s above injunction intimates: ‘love any Being near you, love animals like humans and your self’. Encountering alterity astonishedly—the experience of an ‘other (than expected)’— leads to a decided emphasis on affinities: there is “incomparably more of the congeneric between animal and human, in terms of the psyche the same as somatically” (“Grundprobleme” 598, §19.7; trans. dsm). In line with the above, the philosopher dependably upholds “that all animals have Understanding […]. – The Understanding

22Cf.

“Ein ganz junger Hund springt nicht vom Tisch herab, weil er die Wirkung anticipirt” (“Wurzel” 85, IV, §21; see WWV I. 56, I, §6).

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is the same in all animals and all human beings […]: cognition of causality” (WWV I. 53, I, §6; trans. dsm; cf. 212–213, II, §27; “Wurzel” 85, IV, §21). Like the aforesaid interspecies meetings, this philosophical statement with a universal compass refers to the epistemic plane—as does an affine narrative, textually reflecting another encounter in its describing his dog’s ‘surprised leaping up with a start’ “after having inadvertently seen the sun for the first time” (“Natur” 258; trans. dsm). Schopenhauer’s œuvre is permeated by such vivid, appresentable accounts; his philosophical observations are ever induced by, and simultaneously tie in with, the tangible. Metaphysics More vital than epistemic aspects is the foundation: Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, his ethical intent with respect to decidedly including animals. It is in this elementalmost regard that he formulates the basis of similarity, the vital ‘identity’—hence ethical equality—of all beings: “the essential and the principal [is] the same in the animal and in the human being […] the Will” (“Grundprobleme” 598, §19.7; trans. dsm; cf. PP II. 497–498, XXVI, §305), wherefore “both will” (here in the verbal sense; WWV I. 73, I, §8; trans. dsm).23 From this all-encompassing perspective, Schopenhauer articulates the philosophical quintessence of encountering animals. The ensuing passage—iterating the shift from an initial experience of alterity (epistemically, signaled by the state of surprise) to an elemental interspecies parity (in metaphysical, hence ethical terms)—is key to understanding Schopenhauer’s universal emphasis, and philosophical animal encounters as inductively proceeding from an immediate, mutual meeting to a more general, ultimately comprehensive, theoretico-ethical plane: For as wondrously [‘wundersam’] diverse the countless kinds of animals may in fact be, [and] as unfamiliar our encounter [‘uns (…) entgegentritt’] with a new, never before seen [outward] form on their part; even so we know the innermost of their Being in advance, with certainty, [always taking this] as well-known, indeed as intimately familiar to us. For we know that the animal wills, even what [the animal] wills, that is, existence, well-being, life and procreation: and[,] by taking for granted[,] with utmost certainty[, an] identity with us in this respect, we also see no inappropriateness in referring to all of the [animal’s] affections of the Will, which we know from ourselves, without changing [the terms], and [so we] speak, without hesitation, of [the animal’s] lust, loathing, dread, wrath, hatred, love, joy, grief, yearning etc. […] All actions and gestures on the part of animals, which articulate movements of the Will, we understand immediately from our own Being; [it is] for this reason [that] we sympathize with them, to such an extent, in such manifold ways. (WWV II. 235–236, II.19; trans. dsm)

As in Montaigne—stating that “animals are born, beget, feed, act, move, live, and die in a manner so close to our own” (Essays 345, II.12)—ties and similarities,

23Cf.

“Selbst im kleinsten Insekt ist der Wille vollkommen und ganz vorhanden: es will was es will, so entschieden und vollkommen wie der Mensch” (WWV II. 239, II.19; cf. 559, IV.41; PP II. 331, XV, §177; 497–498, XXVI, §305).

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interspecies parity, are accentuated.24 Schopenhauer adds metaphysical inferences, universalizing a factual encounter—whether immediate to his experience, then recollected, and written with a view to a recipient’s (lively) appresentation; or mediated via another’s narrative of interspecies experiences. Stressing the import of an initial vividness, he renders explicit this experiential, heuristic approach in the ensuing: At the sight of any young animal, one is to learn[,] above all[,] to perceive the unaging existence of the species […]. I know very well that, were I to assure someone that the [very] cat, frolicking in the courtyard right now [while writing this], is still the same as [the one] performing the selfsame leaping and pussyfooting there [in that very place] three hundred years ago, he would deem me mad: but I also know that it is even more demented to believe that the present cat were thoroughly and fundamentally a completely other [cat], than that [cat] three hundred years ago. (WWV II. 559, IV.41; trans. dsm)

In Animal Studies, the presence of the paradigm’s Early Modern pioneer will be felt, and cause a look ahead, to its 20th century architect.25 As holds good with respect to the import of Diogenes and cynical discourses, Schopenhauer’s place in this theriophilic ‘genealogy’ is to be maintained. The above is a spirited plaidoyer for perceiving and articulating the undying ‘catness’—then reiterated for the lion, and the very dog in one’s presence— hence for any animal’s ultimate immortality by virtue of the Will immanent in all (WWV II. 560–561, IV.41). Proceeding inductively, Schopenhauer extends an immediate, visual, actual encounter—given in the medium of (written) language, preserved for the reader’s potential appresentation—to the universal plane, emphasizing the fundamental philosophical relevance latent in its literalness and specificity.26 Aesthetics The aspect of mediacy may be briefly exemplified by recourse to Schopenhauer’s therio-related aesthetics. Referring to “animal painting” and “sculpture” (WWV I.

24Cf. “we see something in this action […] because it resembles our own” (Montaigne, Essays 343, II.12). 25“Montaigne’s […] Apology for Raymond Sebond […] [is] one of the greatest pre- or anti-Cartesian texts on the animal” (Derrida 375). Derrida’s “essay […] is arguably the single most important event in the brief history of animal studies” (Wolfe 570; cf. Bühler-Dietrich and Weingarten 8). 26Schopenhauer’s approach shows how interspecies encounters, and universal reflections as to their metaphysical nature, are ever interrelated. The perceived immediacy of the literal does not prevent the potential presence of other (textual, notional) planes; nor vice versa, for an appresenting recipient gives a mediated scene vivid immediacy. Contrast Derrida (374); and Fudge, stating that “meditation begins with the animal and then turns to a wider spiritual truth that the material being sets off in the mind of the meditator. […] The dog as dog has disappeared from the meditation” (Brutal 105–106). Later, she revises her stance: “the real and the conceptual are not […] wholly separate spheres” (“Humans” 188). See Borgards: “die Tiere der Literatur […] stehen mit den Tieren der Welt in einem vielfältigen und wechselseitigen Austausch” (229; cf. 228).

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293, III, §44; trans. dsm), he stresses that such ‘mediated’ meetings (“durch […] Vermittelung”) may ‘also be had immediately’ (“auch unmittelbar”)—with the decisive qualification of seeing animals “in their free, natural and comfortable state” (WWV I. 294, III, §44; trans. dsm).27 Such proximate (and mediate) encounters conduce to perceiving “the manifold degrees and ways of the Will’s manifestation [of itself], which, one and the same in all Beings, always wills the selfsame” (WWV I. 294, III, §44; trans. dsm). Induced by meeting animals, such a metaphysical recognition leads to an ethical turn, articulated by recourse to “the grand word” of Sanskrit ken, “‘Tat twam asi’” (“that is: ‘this living being are you’”; WWV I. 295, III, §44; trans. dsm). When citing this once more, Schopenhauer adduces the tenet sustaining his philosophy: the “Will to life, which […] lives in everything […] extends to the animals and to nature in its entirety” (WWV I. 480–481, IV, §66; trans. dsm; cf. 483).28 Ethics Given the Will’s selfsameness in all—perceived immediately, aesthetically— Schopenhauer states the ethical consequence: animal and human suffering does not differ; neither may be spirited away.29 This metaphysically grounded emphasis on an inhering identicalness is developed in the ensuing—with a tone of cultural criticism related to discourses with cynical affinities: in this Occident, […] [man] no longer knows his brothers, but believes that animals are something fundamentally other than he[;] and, to fortify himself in this madness, [he] calls them beasts, assigns opprobrious names to each of their vital activities he shares[,] and labels them as being without rights, by violently rendering himself obdurate against the manifest identity of the Being within him and them. (“Wurzel” 106–107, V, §26; trans. dsm; cf. “Grundprobleme” 596–597, §19.7)30

The above reference to ‘the West’, its generic inhabitants, and their customarily indelicate handling of animals is specified in terms of the dogmata Schopenhauer

27An

emphatic notion of liberty may seem to provide the decisive nexus between an (aesthetically) mediated and a natural approach to encountering animals: in the former case, contemplation entails and effects freedom in the human recipient; in the latter, Schopenhauer’s enumeratively precise qualification (as quoted above) indicates the exceptional significance he gives to the wellbeing of animals. 28He had cited it as “Tatoumes, richtiger tat twam asi […]: ‘dies bist du’”, giving its source: “Oupnek’hat, vol. I, p. 60f.” (WWV I. 460, IV, §63; 460n.; trans. dsm); see Mayfield (“Talking Canines” 2; 2n.; 6n.). 29His core tenet: ‘all life is suffering’ (cf. WWV I. 405, IV, §56; 141, I, §16; 265, III, §38; 411, IV, §57; 469, IV, §65; 488, IV, §68; passim); as to Diogenes (WWV II. 671, IV, §46). On Bentham’s “‘Can they suffer?’”, see Derrida (396; 395). 30Schopenhauer censures any (linguistic) construal of ‘radical alterity’ (cf. “Grundprobleme” 596–597, §19.7; PP II. 329, XV, §177).

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takes issue with in the following, where he first claims for his own ethics “that it also safeguards the animals”—as opposed to the other European moral systems [where animals are] so irresponsibly uncared for. The animals’ alleged lack of rights, the madness [of believing] that our actions against them are without moral significance, or, as they say in the language of that morality, that there are no duties re animals, is a downright outrageous crudeness and barbarism on the part of the Occident […]. In philosophy[,] this is due to presuming[,] in spite of all evidence[,] the total alterity between a human being and an animal, which [presumption,] as is wellknown[,] was most decidedly asserted by Cartesius, as a necessary consequence of his errors. (“Grundprobleme” 596, §19.7; trans. dsm)

Discourse historically, Descartes’ stance is but a byproduct of a Judeo-Christian morality; treating the former to the silence his absolutism deserves, Schopenhauer assails the latter at its (literal, Scriptural) root and crux: [The b]asic error of Christianity is that[,] against nature[,] it severed man from the world of animals, to which[,] however[,] he essentially belongs[;] and [that it] thus wants to let only him [sc. Man] be of worth exclusively, downright taking animals to be things […]. Now[,] the aforesaid basic error is indeed a corollary of the Creation from [N]othing, according to which the Creator, chapter[s] 1 and 9 [in] Genesis, consigns to man all the animals, entirely as things and without any recommendation for good treatment whatsoever, that he [sc. Man] may rule over them [sc. Animals], meaning, [that man may] do with them as he please[ — ]whereas indeed even a vendor of dogs will, when parting from his whelp, usually add [such a recommendation]; moreover, in the second chapter, He [sc. God] also appoints him [sc. Man] the first professor of zoology, by means of the commission to give them [sc. animals] names, which they must henceforth bear; which is simply yet another symbol of their entire dependency on him [sc. Man], i.e. of their lack of rights. (PP II. 328–329, XV, §177; trans. dsm)31

An artfully articulated attack on the Judeo-Christian base in terms of its negative effects on animals: the Deity is treated to more contempt than even a peddler of dogs. In its 19th century context, Schopenhauer’s declaration of independence from the prevalent morality must have seemed cynical outright. The ‘return to nature’ is likewise in line with the tendencies of discourses with cynical affinities from Diogenes to Nietzsche.32 Referring contemptuously to “that installation scene in the garden of paradise” (PP II. 330, XV, §177; trans. dsm), Schopenhauer reviews the above—“These are the results of the first chapter of Genesis”—and offers the alternative reliably asserted throughout his œuvre:

31As

to Genesis, cf. Derrida (375–376; 380–386; 390; 392; 398–400; passim). Nietzsche’s affirmation of animality, see Mayfield (Artful 362–367; 371; 382–383; 391– 399; 402; 406n.; 410; 439; 442–443).

32On

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By contrast[,] the Mahavakya (the great word) obtains with the Hinduists and Buddhists[:] ‘Tat twam asi’ (This is you), which is always to be spoken with respect to any animal, so as to preserve the consciousness of the identity of the inner Being in [the animal] and us, as a guideline for our actions. – Get lost with your consummatemost morality [sc. Christian, Kantian]. (PP II. 331, XV, §177; trans. dsm)

This climactic invective is paradigmatically cynical, considering the setting in (and against) which Schopenhauer is writing. Should the artful immorality of such no longer be plain to a 21st century recipient, the cause will likely be the antiphilosopher that outperformed even these considerable footprints. The specific variant of a Christian morality attacked is Kant’s ethics. Citing his argument—“‘The cruel treatment of animals is against man’s duty toward himself; since it blunts compassion with their suffering in man, thereby enfeebling a natural disposition most serviceable to morality in relation to other men’”— Schopenhauer first rearticulates it thus: “So [it is] merely with a view to exercise [that] one is to have compassion with animals, and they are quasi the pathological phantom for practicing compassion with humans”; and then fulminates: I find […] such sentences outrageous and repulsive. At the same time[,] this also goes to show once more how consummately this philosophical morality, which […] is only a theological one in disguise, is dependent on the Biblical one. For since […] Christian morality does not take animals into consideration […] they are immediately [taken to be] fair game [‘vogelfrei’, ‘without rights’] in philosophical morality also, [they] are mere ‘things’, mere means to arbitrary ends […] – Fie! (“Grundprobleme” 518, “Grundlage der Moral”, §8; trans. dsm; cf. 597, §19.7)33

A cynical groundswell, discursively and elocutionally: this statement assails a given morality with arguments ad naturam; and does so in a refined manner. The affective slant adds a forceful color. To précis: a particular interspecies experience—of epistemic import, in a mediated form, with respect to a metaphysical basis—sustains a decidedly ethical agenda. The respective encounter is a lifeworldly stimulus in Schopenhauer’s heuristic approach: his inductive inquiry begins with the immediate (meeting), proceeding to epistemic, metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical reflections. The latter—ever emphatic of a considerate, reciprocal approach to any Being—remain linked to the initial, immediate, vivid encounters in the lifeworld.

4 Ultimate Encounters: Approaching the Bottom Line with Blumenberg It is only with the skandalon that the issue attains to its urgency[.] (Blumenberg, Literatur 140; trans. dsm)

33See

Fudge on “Thomism” (Brutal 138). (Quasi) Kantian mindsets persist (cf. Benz-Schwarzburg 248).

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The philosopher writes the above with respect to Evelyn Waugh—whose écriture he sees as having affinities to “cynicism” (Literatur 135; 140; trans. dsm), while granting him “the emergency law […] of rendering his presence known by means of insufferability” (Literatur 141; trans. dsm).34 Set in the perma-euphoric vicinity of the West’s para-factual industry of insubstantiality, Waugh’s caustic novel The Loved One concerns a blasé English would-be poet, working at an animal crematory, who becomes enamored with a normalized American cosmetico-mortician, performing at the high-end human burial ground nearby. Though both lovers, as per their setting, fashion and sell sentiment, the departed animals in the lad’s care rarely receive ‘special treatment’— which embodies the necro-beautician’s unique selling point; in Blumenberg’s words: One eliminates death from view in the most artful manner. One spares no expense for the illusion that it is always only the others that die. One cultivates the feeling of survival even with a view to domestic animals […]. In that their demise is both [and likewise] an aesthetico-emotionally insufferable and eliminable phenomenon, human beings and animals are ultimately on a par. Humans die, animals die – it all depends on shielding [one’s own] survival from the resultant emotional distress. This ‘Gleichschaltung’ of the human and the animal – apparently the most difficult, [is] evidently the most facile […]. The death of human beings and animals [is] equaliz[ed] as an aesthetic faux pas, which may be corrected discreetly[.] (Literatur 139–140; trans. dsm)

Published in 1948, Blumenberg reviewed Waugh’s novel in 1953. Initially, he focuses on the survivor’s vicarious life in the face of beautified death and the renovated departed. As per its ending, his attention shifts to the material interchangeability—hence parity—of human and animal remains alike; the young American “ultimately disappears into the incinerator of the cats and dogs – so slight, so insubstantial [literally: weightless] is the difference between the lapdog and the beloved, so unreal the substance of the human” (Literatur 140; trans. dsm). Encountering an other’s death is the final heuristics, the bottom line, the condition of necessity for the parity effectually obtaining: encountering a being’s corporeality—ultimately, the dead body—is the inexorable leveler of any interspecies difference construed by “that vain animal / Who is so proud of being rational” (Rochester 94, v. 6–7).35 The end being the same for all—“Know that death is common; all that live must die” (Waugh 45)—any claim of ‘radical alterity’ is bound to founder at that final encounter. Waugh’s cynicism may seem insufferable to some sentiments. Descriptively, it lays bare the effectuality of cynical discourses, ever artfully outperforming by far

34Waugh’s

heroine uses “cynical”, “irreverent”, “unethical” to describe her lover (82; 101). Blumenberg’s emphasis on the “biological authenticity” of “death” (Literatur 139; trans. dsm). Wolfe (re Bentham, Derrida) notes “the embodied finitude that we share with nonhuman animals” (570; 571). Cf. Raber’s stress on “interanimality, the shared experience of bodily existence” (28; 30).

35See

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what is felt to be tolerable at any given time—by a decided, parrhesiastic recourse to nature in all respects, to the body in its very materiality. With incisive intensity, it permits a recipient “to sense the questionable [and considerable], which lies in the extreme intensification of the matter” at hand (Blumenberg, Literatur 140; trans. dsm). The present essay has focused on philosophical animal encounters, proceeding from a particular, (im)mediate meeting to a more comprehensive, ultimately ethical plane. In addition to Montaigne and Derrida, it calls attention to the therioscholarly import of discourses with cynical affinities, especially to the animal philosophers Diogenes and Schopenhauer—for whom interspecies encounters are foundational. As in the Ancient initiator, and shown for Blumenberg’s reading of Waugh, cynicism ever flouts a perceived species-related ‘divide’—deemed immovable by a given norm trying to demarcate itself.36 The animal rationale is another animate being in the cynic’s view, and human dignity but a word. Discourses with cynical affinities feature a groundswell aiming at bringing all beings on a par; their respective semiotic measures are incisive—verbally, performatively. While the cynic’s artfulness cannot be ignored, the animated approximation of all beings has a tendency to achieve interspecies parity in effect: the focus is ever on affinities, an elemental likeness. The same as the import and impact of the Diogenical, Schopenhauer’s place in a conceivable ‘genealogy’ of theriophilic philosophers (which would also include Derrida and Blumenberg) must be accentuated. Like Montaigne, he starts from a particular encounter, and moves to a more universal plane, from a specific similarity to a general parity—while also not stopping short of metaphysical respects. Grounded in the Will’s selfsameness in all beings—perceived in vivo and aesthetically—Schopenhauer expressly proceeds from the plane of proximity, an actual interspecies encounter, to its ethical significance. On said groundwork, the philosopher (in this like Montaigne) calls for acting on the immediately observable, the evident parity—asserting a considerate relation with respect to animals.

References Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. by Kevin Attell, Stanford UP, 2004. Aristotle. Metaphysics: Books 1–9. Ed. and trans. by Hugh Tredennick, Harvard UP, 1933. Benz-Schwarzburg, Judith. “Moralfähigkeit.” Lexikon der Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen, ed. by Arianna Ferrari and Klaus Petrus, transcript, 2015, pp. 246–248. Blumenberg, Hans. Schriften zur Literatur: 1945–1958, ed. by Alexander Schmitz and Bernd Stiegler, Suhrkamp, 2017. Blumenberg, Hans. Die Sorge geht über den Fluß. Suhrkamp, 1987.

36See

Raber: “Humans are remarkably consistent in insisting on or reverting to difference, even when those humans call themselves ‘animals’ and agitate for a post-human world” (30).

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Boehrer, Bruce Thomas. Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature. U of Pennsylvania P, 2010. Borgards, Roland. “Literatur.” Lexikon der Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen, ed. by Arianna Ferrari and Klaus Petrus, transcript, 2015, pp. 225–229. Bühler-Dietrich, Annette, and Michael Weingarten. “Topos Tier – Einleitung.” Topos Tier: Neue Gestaltungen des Tier-Mensch-Verhältnisses, ed. by Bühler-Dietrich and Weingarten, transcript, 2016, pp. 7–18. Bühler, Benjamin. “Experimentalobjekte: Tiere als Figuren anthropologischen Wissens.” Topos Tier: Neue Gestaltungen des Tier-Mensch-Verhältnisses, ed. by Annette Bühler-Dietrich and Michael Weingarten, transcript, 2016, pp. 19–39. Cuneo, Pia F. “Introduction.” Animals and Early Modern Identity, ed. by Cuneo, Ashgate, 2014, pp. 1–15. Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Trans. by David Willis. Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 2, 2002, pp. 369–418. D. Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers II. Ed. and trans. by Robert D. Hicks, Harvard UP, 2005. Enenkel, Karl A. E., and Paul J. Smith. “Introduction.” Early Modern Zoology: The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. by Enenkel and Smith, Brill, 2007, pp. 1–12. Fudge, Erica. Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. Cornell UP, 2006. Fudge, Erica. “‘The dog is himself’: Humans, Animals, and Self-Control in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.” How To Do Things with Shakespeare: New Approaches, New Essays, ed. by Laurie Maguire, Blackwell, 2008, pp. 185–209. Fudge, Erica. “The Dog, the Home and the Human, and the Ancestry of Derrida’s Cat.” Derridanimals, special issue of Oxford Literary Review, vol. 29, 2007, pp. 37–54. Mayfield, DS. “‘Against the Dog only a dog’: Talking Canines Civilizing Cynicism in Cervantes’ ‘coloquio de los perros’ (With Tentative Remarks on the Discourse and Method of Animal Studies).” Animal Narratology, special issue of Humanities, vol. 6, no. 2, art. 28, June 2017, pp. 1–39. MDPI, www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/6/2/28/pdf. Mayfield, DS. Artful Immorality – Variants of Cynicism: Machiavelli, Gracián, Diderot, Nietzsche. De Gruyter, 2015. Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Trans. by Donald M. Frame, Stanford UP, 1989. Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de. Essais II., ed. by Emmanuel Naya, Delphine Reguig, and Alexandre Tarrête, Gallimard, 2009. Niehues-Pröbsting, Heinrich. Der Kynismus des Diogenes und der Begriff des Zynismus. 2nd ed., Suhrkamp, 1988. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Zur Genealogie der Moral. 1967, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Kritische Studienausgabe [KSA], vol. 5, 2nd ed., dtv/de Gruyter, 1999. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Nachgelassene Fragmente 1869–1874, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Kritische Studienausgabe [KSA], vol. 7, 2nd ed., dtv/de Gruyter, 1999. Plato. “Theaetetus.” Theaetetus. Sophist, ed. and trans. by Harold North Fowler, Harvard UP, 2006, pp. 1–257. Raber, Karen. Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture: Haney Foundation Series. U of Pennsylvania P, 2013. Rochester, Earl of (John Wilmot). The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. by David M. Vieth, Yale UP, 2002. Schopenhauer, Arthur. “Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik.” Kleinere Schriften, ed. by Ludger Lütkehaus, Haffmans, 1988, pp. 323–632. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Parerga und Paralipomena II [PP II], ed. by Ludger Lütkehaus, Haffmans, 1988.

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Schopenhauer, Arthur. “Ueber den Willen in der Natur.” Kleinere Schriften, ed. by Ludger Lütkehaus, Haffmans, 1988, pp. 169–321. Schopenhauer, Arthur. “Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde.” Kleinere Schriften, ed. by Ludger Lütkehaus, Haffmans, 1988, pp. 7–168. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I [WWV I], ed. by Ludger Lütkehaus, Haffmans, 1988. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II [WWV II], ed. by Ludger Lütkehaus, Haffmans, 1988. Shapiro, Kenneth, and Marion W. Copeland. “Toward a Critical Theory of Animal Issues in Fiction.” Society & Animals, vol 13, no. 4, 2005, pp. 343–346. Waugh, Evelyn. The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy. 1948. Penguin, 1951. Wolfe, Cary. “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities.” PMLA, vol. 124, no. 2, Mar. 2009, pp. 564–575.

II  Modes of Encounter—Empathy,

Anthropomorphism, Gaze, Collaboration

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Entangled Empathy: Politics and Practice Lori Gruen

In this chapter, I am interested in focusing on questions about politics and practice in relation to entangled empathy (Gruen, Entangled Empathy). It may seem that concern for non-human animals and the non-human world in general is a somewhat extravagant idea given the amount of racial violence and xenophobia, as well as gender discrimination of various sorts that continues to be revealed at increasing rates across the globe. Yet it seems to me that thinking carefully about questions of the non-human can be illuminating in addressing other problems. In this chapter I will suggest that there are deep connections between conceptualizing non-human animals and certain human animals as disposable and that addressing this aspect of human relationships with other humans and non-humans can help us in further developing entangled empathy. It does seem that when we are faced with so much horror against black bodies, against immigrants and refugees, that it is a bit odd to be thinking about (a), animals and (b) empathy. What we should be thinking about is human beings and justice. Traditionally, when we think about justice we tend to focus on the ways in which justice claims help people recognize that there are certain individuals who are due certain kinds of regard. They are due this regard in virtue of the fact that there is nothing morally distinctive that would justify denying it. For example, because somebody is shorter, and somebody is taller, we don’t think the shorter person doesn’t deserve the same amount of due regard as the taller person. What we might think, rather, is that if shorter people are being denied access due to height limitations, we should make adjustments to accommodate them. Just because you are short, you should not be precluded from being in certain common spaces, and just because you are tall you should not be precluded from being in

L. Gruen (*)  Middletown, USA E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_5

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certain kind of common spaces. That is what most philosophers think about when we think about justice. Justice demands equal access to certain kinds of goods in our societies, and one of those goods may be access to common spaces, but there are certainly other goods. Demands for justice are important in addressing certain kinds of exclusions that are prevalent in our social world. The Black Lives Matter Movement here in the United States reminds us that we still have a long way to go to achieve anything resembling justice for black people. Given that, it may seem far-fetched to argue for justice for non-humans. Even many black scholars think that the question of justice for black people is rather far-fetched in the current configuration of the world given the way it necessitates anti-black racism (Coates; Taylor). I find these concerns about justice and its limits quite important. I also see the importance of thinking about black lives, distinctively from say refugees, distinctively from non-human animals. I am not suggesting that these things can even usefully be compared to one another, and in fact, it is quite dangerous to think of them as being comparable. Thinking about non-human animals and thinking about the colonized other are evocative to think together. And thinking about justice does not have to be distinct from thinking about empathy or care. These things have to be thought about together too, even when they are not being compared or subsumed by the other. We don’t need to think of things in binary, either-or terms, but can rather think of the ways in which putting things in conjunction can help us to think better about both. Let us think back to that highly popularized case of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe (Loveridge). There was a wealthy white dentist who felt entitled to shoot and kill this enculturated, endangered lion. Walter Palmer was the person who did this killing. He has a history of illegal poaching He lured Cecil out from his protected area that was actually a protected sanctuary area, with the corpse of another animal. He shot Cecil with a crossbow, but that didn’t kill Cecil the lion. So then Palmer and his highly paid local collaborators ended up tracking the lion, shooting him again ultimately killing him and then skinning him. It was then that they recognized that there was a tracker on Cecil. They did, nonetheless behead him. The dentist tried to take Cecil’s head home as a trophy, presumably to mount on his wall. But somehow, news of Palmer’s deeds travelled quickly and there were huge protests. It was so intense that Palmer had to shut down his dentist office in Minnesota. What is going on here? Part of what is happening in this concern for this lion on another continent, is a recognition that when you allow for the paid slaughter of endangered animals you are permitting and endorsing a premature death. You are perpetuating the idea that some lives are disposable, in this case, for a price. The idea that we can use and dispose of other animals as we please is part of what many of those who were protesting wanted to bring to our attention and challenge. All this attention to this act of spectacular killing also led to a different kind of protest. A type of protest that involved worries about the ways in which certain black people, Trayvon Martin and Samuel DuBose who were both shot—Samuel

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DuBose was shot by a campus police officer in Cincinnati; Trayvon Martin was shot by George Zimmerman, a private citizen, are also viewed as disposable. These are just two of the many black people whose deaths have come to public attention, two of a long list of black men and women who are being killed by police and their surrogates in the United States. In light of these deaths, the response to the protesters outside of Palmer’s office suggested that white people care more about wild animals than black lives. Roxane Gay, for example, joked in the New York Times that maybe if she wore a lion suit, then people would pay more attention to her if she was murdered. I think that this awkward attempt at humor was actually a little bit disappointing, and something worth reflecting on. That some people are concerned about a lion need not mean that they are not also very concerned about the ways in which police and their surrogates are killing others with no justification. I want to suggest that these are not really either/or discussions, and that comes into focus when we explore the ideologies of disposability, and killability, and begin to see that these acts of violence authorize and reinforce the ideology that there are some people and some other animals who are killable, and who are disposable. Drawing attention to the named individuals is one vivid way to unmask this ideology: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Cecil the lion, Sandra Bland, Samuel DuBose, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Marius the giraffe, Philandro Castile. Naming the person or the animal helps draw attention to them as individuals, their connections to a larger community, to their interests, and to a future that they no longer have. As important as naming can be, it is also important that we not forget that more often than not, disposability and killability are operating most insidiously on those whose names we do not know and may never know. The millions of men, women, and children who are incarcerated, millions of immigrants who are being ripped from their families and deported, and billions of animals who are kept on factory farms and laboratories who don’t have names we know. The ideology is also reinforced by those seeking to maintain it by covertly (or occasionally overtly) pitting subjugated groups against one another, often by creating conflicts that appear as zero sum situations. We cannot care about lions and black women, so a black woman may get more respect dressing as a lion. We are treating prisoners better than ‘pound dogs’. People care more about a gorilla shot in a zoo than they do about black men shot in the streets. Who these ‘we’ are, I am not sure, but I do know that those of us reflecting on these issues, can care about the ways in which multiple beings become disposable, the way that classes of humans and all sorts of other animals get put into a category that makes their lives not matter. And that the mechanisms that allow disposability in one domain, can reinforce it in another. This is not to diminish the specific claims that black people or animals might make, but rather to recognize that there is a process of killability and disposability that works by putting certain individuals in the category of less than human. This is a way of justifying all sorts of violence against many different kinds of people as well as other animals. Often after looking closely at this ideology, it may seem that we should demand justice as a way to remedy the problems it causes. I think justice claims can work,

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sometimes, but I also have some worries about them. I do not want to do away with justice claims, rather I think that justice does not give us the whole picture. Often when we think about justice, we are doing it in a way that is much too abstract. It’s disembodied and formal. For example, everyone is, or should be, equal before the law. That sounds like a good principle of justice, but in practice it often means that many people are not able to get the kind of justice they deserve either because they speak another language or have reasons to be wary of putting themselves in the purview of the law. Too often justice requires one to articulate the wrongs done in ways that cause additional harms. In other words, justice requires a sort of assimilation to a particular set of rational political norms usually very specific to the culture in which those seeking remedy are already fundamentally excluded. One is then faced with a difficult choice—either leave behind the kinds of things that matter to you and come to the proper “side” or forego the opportunity to be considered a subject of justice. Of course, this is not even yet possible for other animals who cannot participate in considerations of justice as they are still viewed as ‘things’ under the law. For these reasons, I think it makes sense to expand justice, not to replace it, to include care, concern, and what bell hooks calls love. bell hooks suggests that the greatest movement for social justice in the United States, was the Civil Rights movement, and it was rooted in a love ethic. Love is a combination of care, knowledge, respect, commitment, trust and openness (Hooks). Love is not an alternative to justice and it is not a feature of justice, it is, or can be, a way of achieving justice. Entangled empathy, like love in hooks’ sense, is a process that also leans toward justice. One of the central features of entangled empathy is a recognition that we are already in ethical, and sometimes unethical, relationships with others. Making these relationships ethical as opposed to unethical requires work to try to understand the other. That work is not just about feeling with, or caring for the other. It is hard work that involves a lot of mistakes that require correction, an openness to being corrected, and a willingness to engage with others respectfully even if we have only partial understanding. It involves cognitive processes as well as emotional processes, that is, there are feelings, there are reasons, and there is a desire to get a handle on the perspective of the other. Entangled empathy involves a recognition of the work it takes to make our relationships, however far or near they might be, better. Contrary to popular understandings of empathy, entangled empathy is more than putting your self in the shoes of another or to feel what they are feeling. That might play some role in the process of entangled empathy, but there is more to it. Some people have thought that empathy is a type of psychological inference in which your perceptions, memories, knowledge, and reasoning combine to yield insights into the thoughts and feelings of another. To some extent that is what I have in mind. But it is not just a psychological inference. It requires a lot of work, and it also has a motivational component. When I think of attending to the relationships that we are already in, I don’t mean just our close, intimate relationships. It might be a relationship that you have with a friend, but it might also be a relationship you have that is quite distant. It

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might be the person who is actually working in a factory on another continent producing the clothes that you purchase. It could be the people who are picking your food. It could be the workers who are engaged in all sorts of labor to make your daily life work. It could be the animals who are killed in the process of getting any number of products to your table. The idea of entangled empathy is that we fundamentally pay attention to the particularity of these relationships. But the relationships themselves can be very different. Entangled empathy requires a certain amount of perspective taking. In this sense, it is more akin to some of the other ways of understanding empathy. Perspective taking means trying to get outside of your own sensibility even though of course we are limited, in some ways, by our own perspectives on the world. But taking a step back and trying to see whether or not an alternative perspective is something that we can make sense of can be enhanced by contextual observations. One way to do that is, as Bryan Stevenson has suggested, by getting closer to problems, gaining proximity to people and environments that are quite different from one’s typical milieu. Contextual observations are also extremely important in the case of empathizing with other animals. With some animals, dangerous wild animals, for example, it is not going to be possible or wise to get close to those individuals. But there are usually trained ethologists and zoologists who study these individuals. We can learn about these animals from those who know them best. Judging who is in the best position to speak of the perspectives of other animals is a challenging problem, but our empathetic skills can help us there as well. There is one other feature of empathy that is quite distinct from other versions of empathy, and that is that it is focused on flourishing. What that means is that we are not merely trying to understand the other, trying to get their perspective, trying to see how they have gotten into the situation they are in, what their interests, needs, desires, or problems might be, but we are actually interested in trying to see if there is something we can do to promote their flourishing. Empathy can certainly help diagnose problems. Many scientists use empathy to do that. But they may not do anything about what they learn. They may think, ‘yes, I’ve determined that this river is contaminated with mercury. Now we know’. But they may not get involved in bringing the results to the people and animals that might suffer from the fact that there is mercury in the river. Entangled empathy helps us figure out problems but also motivates us to do something so that we are able to promote flourishing when that is possible. The process of entangled empathy then involves emotion, imagination, cognition, justice and care. And while it focuses on flourishing there is also room in the process for emotions like outrage and indignance and anger and shame. When we recognize that other human beings and other animals are not flourishing, when we recognize that other animals and other human beings are thought to be disposable and killable. When we really understand how that manifests in their relationships with each other and with their families, and how we might be participating in that horrible state that is diminishing them, perhaps even leading to the idea, and furthering the idea, that they are disposable, all sorts of distressing mental states may

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follow. We should be enraged, we should be angry, and we should perhaps feel a fair amount of shame. Here is an example. Remember Marius, the two-year-old giraffe in the Copenhagen Zoo? Marius was shot in the head in February of 2014 when the zoo decided that they did not want Marius (Gruen, “Disposable Captives”). The zoo then performed a public autopsy of Marius’ body, with families, including children, watching. They then fed Marius’ body parts to the lions that were also held captive at the zoo. The feeding of Marius to the lions was also done in view of zoo goers. Part of the reason that this was happening was because Marius’ genes were already overrepresented in the giraffe population in the European zoos. Though sanctuaries offered to take Marius, the zoo thought that would be wasteful. A bit more privately then the public dismemberment of Marius, the same zoo killed the lions that ate Marius’ body about a month later, to make room for a more genetically worthy group of lions. Genetic desirability is still a strong justification for killing at various zoos in Europe. Sacrificing the lives of the animals in the name of conserving a diverse gene pool, what some have called, zoothanasia (Bekoff), is not uncommon at these zoos. It is usually done in less violent ways than shooting an animal in the head. But nevertheless, it is a quite common practice. The animals are, in this case, clearly seen as disposable. They are reduced to specimens. They are not commodities in the traditional sense of things that are traded on markets, although they are traded in other ways. They’re traded from one zoo to another as breeding stock. This type of disposability helps to create and has continued to reinforce the afterlives of scientific racism, of eugenic ideologies, and the intensified exploitation of many things that are deemed other. Zoo captives are disposable specimens par excellence. Perhaps interesting ones, perhaps handsome ones, perhaps beautiful ones, perhaps entertaining ones, but they are disposable all the same. I want to suggest that when we see that there is a reinforcing logic of disposability that is operating, it is not just domination, although it is definitely also domination. It is not just injustice, although it is definitely also injustice. But there is a deeper logic, I think, that goes on here that authorizes a type of ontological violence and killing. I think with the gorilla Harambe who was shot and killed at the Cincinatti Zoo, we see this in particularly astute ways (Kim). Like the case of Cecil the lion with which I began, in the case of Harambe, there was also public protest. Harambe was killed, in Cincinnati, the same US town where Samuel DuBose was also killed. They were killed by two different people, of course, but people who had been granted by the state the authority to kill these individuals. Again, in the Harambe case, people wondered why everybody cares so much about a Gorilla when black men and women are being killed in the street. One reporter for example, said, I’m all for the humane treatment of animals. Still, not til I saw how insanely fixated the media and public seemed to be by the story of Harambe did I even care why or how the gorilla was killed. Why are people so outraged? Why don’t black lives matter, or refugee lives matter, or the lives of low paid workers, drone attack victims, imprisoned migrants, death row exonerees, and other humans matter as much as the gorilla and the zoo. (Kolhatkar)

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Again, this is part of that zero-sum thinking that occludes the ideology that some beings are disposable, and that violence against them helps to maintain a particular social order. The disposability of those deemed unworthy remains outside of discussions about justice. As soon as we get involved in zero-sum debates, about human lives versus non-human lives, we’re in a very real sense reinforcing an ideology that wants those on the margins to be fighting each other. We’re not supposed to be thinking about fundamentally altering our social relationships and structures of power so that there is no possibility of making lives disposable at all. Rather we participate in pitting various justice claims against one another. This is an old, divide and conquer tactic. I think rather than participating in this tactic, we need an ethic that brings us together, to try to think ethically, politically, and practically about the importance of relationality. That is what entangled empathy is designed to help us do. To recognize that we’re in all kinds of relationships, personal, professional, political, economic, social and we are not just in these relationships, but we are actually constituted by them. When we recognize that we are constituted by these relationships, that some of these relationships are bad, then my hope is that we are going to be moved to change these relationships. And this will motivate a type of reflection to make these relationships better, to try to promote more of a sense of mutual common flourishing, so that we can begin to undo the ideology that any one is disposable.

References Bekoff, Mark. “‘Zoothanasia’ Is Not Euthanasia: Words Matter.” Psychology Today, 9 Aug. 2012, http://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/201208/zoothanasia-is-not-euthanasia-words-matter. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. One World, 2017. Gay, Roxane. “Of Lions and Men: Mourning Samuel DuBois and Cecil the Lion.” New York Times, 31 July 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/01/opinion/of-lions-and-men-mourning-samuel-dubose-and-cecil-the-lion.html. Gruen, Lori. “Disposable Captives.” OUPblog, 10 Apr. 2014, http://blog.oup.com/2014/04/disposable-captives-zoo-animals-philosophy/. Gruen, Lori. Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals. Lantern Books, 2015. Hooks, Bell. All about Love: New Visions. Harper Perennial, 2001. Kim, Claire Jean. “Murder and Mattering in Harambe’s House.” Politics and Animals, vol. 3, 2017, pp. 1–15. Kolhatkar, Sonali. “Racism Fueled Outrage Over Cincinnati Gorilla Killing.” Truthdig, 2 June 2016, http://www.truthdig.com/articles/racism-fueled-outrage-over-cincinnati-gorilla-killing/. Loveridge, Andrew. Lion Hearted: The Life and Death of Cecil and the Future of Africa’s Iconic Cats. Simon and Schuster, 2018. Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy. Spiegel and Grau, 2014. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Haymarket, 2016.

6

“Wie in Verzweiflung stürzten Beide aufeinander los!” Büchner’s Lenz is Encountering a Cat Roland Borgards

There is a cat-sentence in Georg Büchner’s unfinished novella on the late 18th-century poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, first published in 1839. In the following I will focus on this single sentence. Here it is, first quoted in German: Einst saß er neben Oberlin, die Katze lag gegenüber auf einem Stuhl, plötzlich wurden seine Augen starr, er hielt sie unverrückt auf das Thier gerichtet, dann glitt er langsam den Stuhl herunter, die Katze ebenfalls, sie war wie bezaubert von seinem Blick, sie gerieth in ungeheure Angst, sie sträubte sich scheu, Lenz mit den nämlichen Tönen, mit fürchterlich entstelltem Gesicht, wie in Verzweiflung stürzten Beide auf einander los, da endlich erhob sich Madame Oberlin, um sie zu trennen. (Büchner, Lenz 46–47)

In his novella Büchner presents the poet Lenz as threatened by mental disorder. To find rest and peace of mind, Lenz has come to the vicar Oberlin who is living in a solitary valley in the French Vosges, the “Steintal”. First, his stay with Oberlin seems to help Lenz. But after some weeks his condition gets worse again. It is in this final phase of his stay, a phase characterised by strong attacks of madness, when Lenz encounters the cat. I quote the respective sentence again, now in English, with the preceding and the following sentences: When he was alone or reading, things got even worse, at times all his mental activity would fix upon a single idea, if he thought about another person, or vividly pictured them, it was as if he became that person, he grew completely confused, and yet at the same time he felt the constant urge to deliberately manipulate everything around him in his mind; nature, other people, Oberlin alone excepted, everything as in a dream, cold; he amused himself by standing houses on their roofs, dressing and undressing people, coming up with the most outlandish pranks. At times he felt an irresistible urge to carry the thing out, and then he made horrid faces. Once he was sitting next to Oberlin, the cat lying across

R. Borgards (*)  Frankfurt am Main, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_6

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R. Borgards from them on a chair, suddenly his eyes locked into a stare, he fixed them upon the animal, then he slowly edged out of his chair, as did the cat, bewitched by his gaze, horribly frightened, bristling with fear, Lenz hissing back at it, his face horribly contorted, the two going at each other as if in desperation, Madame Oberlin finally getting up to pull them apart. Which again caused him to feel deeply ashamed. The incidents during the night reached a horrific pitch. (Büchner, Lenz, trans. 69)

In the following, I will begin by shortly reviewing traditional readings of this scene, showing that they perform a ‘disappearing cat trick’. Then I will give a close reading, answering with a ‘reappearing cat trick’. On this basis I will give two animal readings of the scene, the first using the perspective of New Ethology and interspecies communication, the second situating cat behaviour in the history of zoology of the early 19th century.

1 Traditional Readings: Disappearing Cat Trick Traditional interpretations of animals in literary texts often rely on a presupposed anthropological difference, stemming from ontological anthropocentrism and leading to naïve anthropomorphism. In Western culture, ‘anthropological difference’ is the clear and exclusive distinction between ‘human’ and ‘animal’. The usual suspects are well known: “Speech, reason, experience of death, mourning, culture, institution, politics, technique, clothing, lying, feigned feint, effacement of the trace, gift, laughter, tears, respect, etc.” (Derrida, Beast 1:130) This notion follows a simple logic of addition or subtraction (Wild, Anthropologische Differenz 3). Either: human equals animal plus x (language, reason, culture, etc.). Or: animal equals human minus x (language, reason, culture, etc.). Human  = animal + x Animal  = human  − x

Taking this equation as a starting point for an interpretation of Lenz’s cat-encounter, one can easily determine its meaning. Lenz is mad. Madness is absence of reason. Therefore, Lenz isn’t just human, he is human minus reason, an equation which leads to identifying Lenz with animality:

Lenz   = human − x animal  = human − x Lenz   = animal 

Most interpretations of Lenz’s cat-encounter use this equation: The fact that Lenz communicates with the cat, is a sign of his loss of reason—it is a metaphor for his madness (Kaminski 57).1 Insofar the cat is a powerful image. But it is only

1Kaminski:

“Bezeichnender Weise erscheint in diesem Zustand fortgeschrittenen ‘Wahnsinn[s]’ […] ‘unverrückte’ Kommunikation nur noch auf der Ebene des Animalischen möglich.”

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an image. This is the common “disappearing animal trick” (McHugh 24) of traditional literary studies: “Reading animals as metaphors, always as figures of and for the human, is a process that likewise ends with the human alone on the stage. Now you see the animal in the text, now you don’t.” (24) Generalising this observation we can already keep in mind to aspects of the conventional understanding of human-animal encounters: 1. Human-animal encounters are sometimes conceived as a form of animalisation of a human being. 2. The concept of de-humanisation presupposes the existence of a strict anthropological difference, since you have to be something other than an animal before you can be animalised. The concept of anthropological difference stems from the idea of anthropocentrism. In Western culture, anthropocentrism is the assumption that the world is entirely orientated towards the human. The world is made for mankind, and therefore mankind has the right to use it for its own ends. There are several versions of this anthropocentric view, the most popular of them is supported by Christian religion and by global capitalism. If you think that the world is made for and given to humans, you initiate a logic of exclusion: Not everyone and not everything is allowed to join the centre. Only humans belong to this sphere. And if you put humans at the centre, you also have to distinguish humans from the rest of the world. As a consequence anthropocentrism leads to the presumption of an anthropological difference. The majority of the existing interpretations of Lenz’s cat-encounter is structured by an implicit anthropocentrism. They seem to have strong evidence for this: The protagonist is a human being who is dealing with his mental disorders. You can recognise this even in the narrative form of the novella, which is strongly focalised through Lenz. That means: The novel doesn’t show a world with Lenz as one of its inhabitants, rather it shows the world as it is perceived by Lenz. So when we read of this world, actually we read of Lenz’s world, in particular of his mental state. Accordingly, research has identified the description of nature in the novella as ‘Seelenlandschaften’ (Schmidt; Michels), landscapes of the soul. From this perspective, the cat is just a part of Lenz’s inner landscape. And again the animal disappears and the human remains alone on the stage: Now you see the cat in the text, now you don’t. Concerning the traditional interpretations of human-animal encounters, we can now put two more aspects on the list: 3. Human-animal encounters are sometimes conceived as de-centration of a human being. 4. The concept of de-centration is based on anthropocentrism, since you have to be in the centre before you can be decentred. Anthropocentrism and the presumption of anthropological difference lead to anthropomorphism. In Western culture, ‘anthropomorphism’ is a mechanism by

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which humans give human shape to non-human entities. Walt Disney’s Micky Mouse is obviously a way of anthropomorphising mice. And if you talk about falling in love and say “Birds do it, bees do it/Even educated fleas do it” (Cole Porter: Let’s Do It), then there seems to be a certain anthropomorphism in this phrasing. In the act of anthropomorphisation humans and animals are drawn into a binary relation of activity and passivity, with humans who anthropomorphise standing on one side, and animals becoming anthropomorphised located on the other side. Traditional interpretations of Lenz’s cat-encounter anthropomorphise in a certain way if they understand the cat as a kind of screen on which Lenz (the character) or Büchner (the author) project purely human concerns, especially the main concern of the novella: human fear. From this perspective, talking of the cat’s fear (“sie gerieth in ungeheure Angst”) is just like talking of fleas falling in love: animal behaviour is given human shape. Again the conventional interpretation has made the cat disappear. Accordingly in generalising our interpretation of Büchner, we can add two last aspects to the list: 5. Human-animal encounters sometimes give human shape to animal behaviour. 6. This anthropomorphism adds something to the animal; it is something that is done by the human with and to the animal.

2 Close Reading: Reappearing Cat Trick The traditional readings of the cat-encounter aren’t wrong. But they aren’t sufficient either. They make the cat disappear. If you look at Western Culture, you can easily generalise this statement: The traditional interpretations of human-animal encounters aren’t wrong. But they aren’t sufficient either. They make the animals disappear. So let us bring the animals back on stage, the cat back into the text. I will do so by pointing out three dimensions of the sentence in question: the actors, the actions and the communication. First: Who are the actors? We have four of them: Lenz, the cat, Oberlin and Madame Oberlin. The sentence presents these four actors as two couples. One couple is associated with the name “Oberlin” and serves as a frame for the scene, with “Oberlin” being the fifth word from the beginning and the fifth word from the end of the sentence. The second couple is less coherent. There is a last name (“Lenz”) as well as two generic names (“Katze”, “Thier”). And in contrast to the first couple, the second one is also represented by personal pronouns (“er”, “sie”), introducing a gender difference. And while the two parts of the first couple stand completely apart from each other, the two parts of the second couple are strongly interwoven, culminating in the fact that there is one word for both (“Beide”) and even a common personal pronoun (“sie”).

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On counting how often the actors are mentioned, we can see that the cat outnumbers the other actors (the cat is mentioned six, Lenz only four times). It is a cat sentence. And if we look at the sequence of ‘Lenz-cat-both’ we can see that it starts with an alternating movement between Lenz and the cat (er, Katze, er, Tier, er, Katze, sie, sie, sie, Lenz), before both are being merged into one (Beide, sie/ plural). The cat-sentence thus not only shows a poet encountering a cat but also a poet and a cat entering into a common existence, albeit an existence of shared desperation. Second: What are the actions? If we concentrate on body-position and bodymovement, the sentence starts with Lenz sitting and the cat lying on separate chairs, followed by first Lenz, then the cat sliding down onto the floor; it culminates in both moving towards and reaching out for each other. The separation of Lenz and the cat is only announced by the mentioning of Madam Oberlin intervening, it is not carried out. Obviously, the way the sentence organises the actions points in a similar direction as the way the sentence organises the actors. The actions show an intensifying dynamic: sitting, sliding, going at each other. They show a mirroring movement: sitting and lying across from each other, slipping from the chairs, going at each other. And they show a convergence of the verbs: first sitting versus lying, followed by an edging down initiated by Lenz and mimicked by the cat, and finally a simultaneous going at each other. Just as the actors, the actions show an impressive symmetry. Third: What is the communication? If we take the two major channels of communication, the vocal and the visual, we have to look at sounds and body language (Tab. 1). Tab. 1  The pattern of the communication between Lenz and the cat

Lenz

Katze/Cat

Saß sitting

Lag gegenüber lying across

Augen wurden starr eyes locked into a stare Unverrückt auf das Tier gerichtet fixed them upon the animal Glitt langsam den Stuhl herunter slowly edged out of his chair

Die Katze ebenfalls as did the cat Sträubte sich bristling

Mit den nämlichen Tönen hissing back Mit fürchterlich entstelltem Gesicht his face horribly contorted Stürzten Beide auf einander los the two going at each other       

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The communication between Lenz and the cat is structured like a dialogue, like an exchange of phrases: Lenz: sits Cat: lies Lenz: gazes, slides Cat: slides, bristles Lenz: hisses, contorts his face Both: go at each other

The dialogue is partly explicit (as dramatised above), and partly implicit: It is not said that the cat gazes back at Lenz, but we have to interfere that he or she does so. The same is true for the sounds: We are only told about the sounds of Lenz, but as they are referred to as “nämliche Töne” (“sounds alike”), we have to assume that the cat is making sounds too (even if they are not specified). Also the cat’s bristling hints at an implicit resonance in Lenz. We have to assume this resonance if we take into account the elliptical structure of the sentence: the missing verb of the Lenz-sentence has to be filled with the verb of the preceding cat-sentence, as the English translation has already acknowledged: “Lenz hissing back at it”. Finally, we have to concede that the contorted face may be attributed to both Lenz and the cat: “mit fürchterlich entstelltem Gesicht”. Not (as in Richard Sieburth’s translation): “his face horribly contorted”. We can now fill in the gaps: Lenz: sits Cat: lies Lenz: gazes Cat: gazes Lenz: slides Cat: slides, bristles, hisses Lenz: bristles, hisses Both: contort their faces, go at each other

In the description of this communication, Büchner distinguishes carefully between the sign and its meaning, between the visible surface and the assumed inner states, or in linguistic terms: between signifier and signified. On the one hand, there are the signs of the body: gliding, gazing, bristling, hissing. On the other hand, there are the feelings of the actors. There are three inner states of the cat: “bewitched” (“bezaubert”), “frightened” (“ungeheure Angst”), and “shy” (“scheu”). And there is one inner state attributed to both Lenz and the cat: “desperation” (“Verzweiflung”). Two of the inner states are given as a matter of fact: fear and shyness. The two other inner states are given with reservation, retained by the formula “as if”: “wie bezaubert”, “wie in Verzweiflung”. The narrator does not know if the cat is really bewitched and if both of them really are in desperation. It seems so but there is no certainty. That is what communication is about—it is about the exchange of signs that we have to interpret, but without gaining final certainty about our interpretation. A close reading of the sentence, as proposed above, performs a reappearing cat trick. The animal is back on stage. In addition, the close reading reveals two

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major aspects of human-animal encounters. First, every encounter implies acts of communication: an encounter is a material-semiotic action. And second, in this encounter you can find an element of resonance, of empathy. Encounter is not only a question of decoding signs and of reacting to actions; it is also a question of creating a common space, and what is more: a common material and semiotic space.

3 Animal Reading I: New Ethology and Interspecies Communication With the cat back on stage, it is worth rethinking the presuppositions that were linked to the disappearing animal trick: anthropological difference, anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. We could rethink these presuppositions from different points of view, e.g. with the arguments of deconstruction (Derrida, Animal; Beast 1; Beast 2; Wolfe), of ‘animal philosophy’ (Wild: Tierphilosophie; Wild: Reich der wilden Tiere; Steiner, Anthropocentrism), of ethnology (Descola; de Castro), of ‘New Materialism’ (Latour; Haraway) or with a certain kind of zoological research on animal behaviour which I would like to call “New Ethology” (with proponents like Marc Bekoff, Frans de Waal, Onur Güntürkün, Martin Heisenberg, Kurt Kotrschal, Volker Sommer, Andrew Whiten, and many more). In the following I will focus on this last option: New Ethology. What do I mean by New Ethology? In the last 20 years, ethology has foregrounded a new starting point in comparing the abilities of non-human animals with those of humans. Until the 1990s the burden of proof mostly lay with those who considered animals gifted with human-like abilities. If an ethologist supposed that nonhuman animals had theory of mind or some kind of culture, that there were morality or personality in animals, that they could love and lie, and that they knew they would die, then the ethologist had to prove it. And proof was found, and evidence was given (Bekoff; Sommer; Glasgow; Whiten et al.). Today, the tables have turned. The burden of proof seems to lie with those who deny that there are animals with human-like abilities: if you are still thinking that animals other than humans do not have a theory of mind or some kind of culture, that there is no morality and personality in animals, that they can’t love and lie, and that they don’t know they will die, then you have to prove that. Looking at animal abilities, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (de Waal, Are We Smart Enough 18). Concerning the question of anthropological difference, New Ethology doesn’t look for the one thing which sets humans apart from all other living beings. Nevertheless, New Ethology keeps looking for differences—yet this time, it is differences in a decisive plural. So New Ethology turns away from the idea of a distinct anthropological difference and opens the view for a multiplicity of behavioural differences between all kinds of animals—including the differences between humans and other animals. Without the presupposition of an anthropological difference the old equations (human = animal + x, i.e., for instance, reason; animal = human – x, i.e., for instance, reason) lose their basis. The same applies to the equation of animality and madness, as used in many interpretations of Lenz’s cat-encounter

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(Lenz = human – x = animal). If there is no anthropological difference, there is no need to understand Lenz’s cat encounter as a regressive ‘reverting back’ to animality. The mutual understanding between Lenz and the cat is not triggered by Lenz’s madness, but by the simple fact, that species can meet—except that Büchner wouldn’t talk of species, but of creatures (Borgards). So the cat-encounter is not a sign of madness, but a performance of creatures meeting each other. For our topic of human-animal encounters, we can now start a new list, keeping two first aspects in mind: 1. Human-animal encounters are better conceived as encounters between two animal species. 2. But in this species-species encounter there are differences between the encountering parties (and additional differences between the encountering individuals). Concerning the question of anthropocentrism, New Ethology offers two distinct possibilities to rethink the position of humans in the animal world. On the one hand, there is the logic of extension, using the grammatical structure of ‘not-onlybut-also’-phrases: not only humans develop cultural eating habits, but also chimpanzees, our close relatives. Not only humans use proper names, but also dolphins, with their human-like brainpower. In this argument, the group of smart animals is extended beyond humans, including previously excluded life forms. This is what Gary Francione calls the “similar-minds theory” (140). Here, physiological closeness to humans remains an essential criterion. Anthropos is still the centre of the world. On the other hand, there is the logic of similarity, using the grammatical structure of ‘just like’-phrases: Although they do not have a neocortex, crows can cheat and even cheat cheating (Güntürkün et al.)—just like humans and some other non-human animals. Fruit flies know the depressive force of frustration, in spite of their extremely small brain (Heisenberg)—just like humans. In this argument, animals are reorganised insofar as they are sorted across the animal kingdom in relation to specific features of their behaviour. Physiological closeness to humans is no longer the most important criterion. Anthropos is not the centre of the world. Obviously there is a certain anthropocentrism in Büchner’s novella which is strongly focalised through its protagonist Lenz. We read of a world seen by a human. But this anthropocentrism is limited in two ways. First, the cat scene is characterised not by a stable focalisation through Lenz but by a shifting focalisation between Lenz and the cat. At least in this scene we read of a world seen by a human and a feline character. And second, focalising is a matter of perspective, not a matter of fact: even if we read of a world seen by Lenz, we don’t read of a world which is in itself organised around Lenz as its ontological centre. Therefore, it seems to be useful to distinguish between two kinds of anthropocentrism. On the one hand, there is an “ontological anthropocentrism” (Thompson 79): the world is arranged around humankind. Lori Gruen finds this attitude an “arrogant anthropocentrism” (24), Gary Steiner talks of a “normative anthropocentrism” (Anthropozentrismus 30; Anthropocentrism), Kári Driscoll uses the term “metaphysical

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anthropocentrism” (2). On the other hand, there is an “epistemic anthropocentrism” (Steiner, Anthropozentrismus 29), “conceptual anthropocentrism” (Thompson 88), “weak anthropocentrism” (Hargrove 191), or “inevitable anthropocentrism” (Gruen 24; Tyler, Ciferae 12): As humans, we can see the world only from our human perspective. Büchner emphasises this kind of epistemological limitation by his “as-if”phrasings: “as if bewitched”, “as if in desperation”. We can see the movements of a cat. But if we try to understand them, we can only use our own categories. When naming the inner states of a cat, we can’t avoid using human terms. So we have two further points for our new list. 3. Human-animal encounters may indeed initiate an ontological de-centration of humans. 4. Nevertheless, in every human-animal encounter an inevitable epistemological anthropocentrism persists. In ethology, epistemological anthropocentrism is mostly discussed under the label of anthropomorphism. Relying on ‘Morgan’s Canon’ (Morgan), traditional ethology sought to avoid any kind of anthropomorphism. To project human categories onto animal behaviour seemed to be a methodological mistake (Tinbergen). If you claim a cat is bewitched, you say nothing about the cat but only about yourself. New ethology, by contrast, insists on the fact that there is no alternative to anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism even appears to be an “unavoidable consequence of the functional organisation of the human brain” (Urquiza-Haas and Kotrschal 171). The methodological choice is not between avoiding or not avoiding anthropomorphism, but between reflecting or not reflecting anthropomorphism, a point C. Lloyd Morgan himself insisted on, drawing an analogy between Non-Europeans, children and animals: As Europeans, “the only mind with which we can claim any first-hand acquaintance is the civilised mind, that of which we are conscious within ourselves. In the terms of this mind, that of the aboriginal Australian or Red Indian has to be interpreted.” (Morgan 42) Accordingly, as adults “we have to interpret in terms of the adult-mind the child mind” (43). And in the same sense “we must use the human mind as a key by which to read the brute mind” (55). Today, renouncing anthropomorphism no longer leads to a so-called purified science, but seems to be a kind of uncontrolled “anthropodenial” (de Waal, “Anthropomorphism”). Accordingly, we not only have to distinguish between ontological and epistemological anthropocentrism, but also between naïve anthropomorphism on the one hand, and a “heuristic anthropomorphism” (de Waal, Ape and the Sushi Master 74), “reflected anthropomorphism” (Wild, “Anthropomorphismus” 27), “applied” anthropomorphism (Lockwood 186), “self-consciously constructive anthropomorphism” (Tyler, Ciferae 20), or “critical anthropomorphism” (Burton and Brady 97–99) on the other hand. New Ethology uses reflected anthropomorphism as a reliable scientific tool (Daston and Mitman; Höller). For interpretations of Lenz’s cat-encounter the question therefore wouldn’t be if the cat-sentence does or does not anthropomorphise, but if it reflects its own

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anthropomorphism or not. This reflection can be found in the way the phrase itself inserts two intradiegetic observers, Oberlin and Madame Oberlin. These characters frame the encounter between Lenz and the cat. As a consequence, the reader of the sentence is encouraged to an emphatic identification with the human-animal encounter as well as to a reflexive observation of this very encounter. We are drawn in—“the two going at each other” –, and we are drawn out: “Madame Oberlin finally getting up to pull them apart”. So even if the sentence states, that there are human-like feelings in the cat, it nevertheless reminds us, that this relies on an attribution: “as if in desperation”. Formulated as the last two points on our new list: 5. Descriptions of human-animal encounters indeed give a human shape to animal behaviour. 6. But this shaping isn’t necessarily naïve, it can also be performed in a reflected manner. It is important to mark that rethinking the three traditional concepts of humananimal relations—anthropological difference, anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism—by means of New Ethology obviously does not lead to a simple rejection of these concepts, but to a helpful differentiation. The concept of anthropological difference is replaced by the search of species differences; the assumption of an ontological anthropocentrism is replaced by an acknowledgement of an epistemological anthropocentrism; and the fallacy of naïve anthropomorphism is replaced by the tool of reflected anthropomorphism. This is exactly what cultural animal studies can learn from New Ethology: avoid anthropological difference, but search for species differences! Avoid ontological anthropocentrism, but accept epistemological anthropocentrism! And avoid naïve anthropomorphism, but use reflected anthropomorphism! For the cat-scene in question this means: We can’t presuppose an anthropological difference between Lenz and the cat, but we can search for specific species differences. We shouldn’t presuppose that the cat is simply an element of a world made for Lenz, but we should take into consideration, that we read of a world mostly perceived by Lenz and always written by Büchner. And we mustn’t presuppose that the cat’s feeling comes down to fear in the human sense, but we have to use our concept of human fear, if we want to understand the cat’s feeling. In the case of the cat’s fear in Büchner’s novella, we have to take into account two further complications: first, an aesthetic difference, introduced by the fact that we don’t witness a real encounter, but read the literary representation of an encounter; and, second, a historical difference, introduced by the fact that this literary representation dates back nearly 200 years, long before New Ethology, even before the inception of evolutionary theory. In the following I will concentrate on this second complication.

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4 Animal Reading II: Cat Behaviour and the History of Zoology My close reading of the cat sentence has shown how precise and rich Büchner describes the cat’s behaviour and her entanglement with Lenz sitting, gazing, gliding, hissing and attacking. This precision is part of Büchner’s historically unprecedented realism. This realism in turn is part of Büchner’s scientifically trained observation of the empirical world: while writing his novella, Büchner was a student of natural history in Strasbourg, and at this time just switching from a major in medicine to a major in zoology. In his two papers on comparative zoology— one dealing with the nervous system of the barbel, a species of fish, the other with the biotheoretical subject of typology and morphology—he stresses the importance of empirical observation. As zoologist, Büchner only published research on physiology and anatomy, not on ethology. So his preferred object of observation seems to have been the dead animal body. But as a poet, Büchner gives us an observation of a living animal: a cat lying, gazing, gliding, bristling, hissing and attacking. To appreciate this observation, it is helpful to compare it to other contemporary scientific descriptions of cat-human encounters. In Büchner’s time, the physiological descriptions of cats are mostly accompanied by moral judgements, with a mainstream disapproval of cats as malicious, deceitful, treacherous and aggressive. One of the rare cases in which this moral judgement is combined with a description of a human-cat encounter you can find in Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon’s famous Natural History, which was still read in Büchner’s period: They [cats, RB] easily assume the habits of society, but never acquire its manners; for they have only the appearance of attachment or friendship. This disingenuity of character is betrayed by the obliquity of their movements, and the duplicity of their eyes. They never look their best benefactor in the face; but, either from distrust or falseness, they approach him by windings. (Buffon 209)

All elements of Buffon’s human-cat encounter can also be found in Büchner, but in a strangely inverted form: both, Buffon and Büchner, state a social dimension of human-cat relations. But while Buffon accuses cats to perform social customs (“habits of society”) without true social ethos (“manners”), Büchner establishes the social situation, the common oikos, as a matter of fact: “the cat lying across from them on a chair”. Both, Buffon and Büchner, focus on a cat-human interaction. But while in Buffon the interaction is initiated by the cat, in Büchner it is the human being initiating the interaction. Both, Buffon and Büchner, describe body-movements. But while Buffon evaluates the cat’s movements as suspicious (“obliquity”), Büchner describes the movements without any judgement. Both, Buffon and Büchner, are interested in the exchange of gazes. But while Buffon talks of a cat looking at humans with a gaze remaining ambiguous and evasive, Büchner talks of a human looking at a cat with a gaze firmly fixed on the animal.

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And both, Buffon and Büchner, conclude with the encounter of cat and human. But while Buffon talks of detours, Büchner presents a direct confrontation. Two elements of Büchner’s inversion of Buffon’s cat-talk deserve closer attention: the aggression at the end, and the gaze in the middle of the sentence. To ascribe aggression to cats is very common in scientific publications of Büchner’s period. Lorenz Oken, director of the University of Zurich and Büchner’s only employer, for example, writes: “The cat comes when called, but only to be fed and flattered. She or he expresses her or his satisfaction by rubbing against you and purring; but before you know it, she strikes at you and runs away” (1582).2 It would be easy to provide plenty of similar descriptions. They all agree in one point: it is always the cat that starts the aggression; and it seems mostly to be without any comprehensible reason. So for contemporary zoology, the aggression of a cat is not the effect of a specific situation but an integral part of the cat’s character. Obviously, Büchner turns this around by 180 degree. It’s not the cat that starts to act aggressively. And what is more: aggression is not something one party imposes on another party, but a consequence of entering mutual communication. Talking about the gaze of the cat is very uncommon in scientific publications of Büchner’s period. At least there are some observations that cats normally avoid direct eye contact. But this eye behaviour is always understood as a sign of deceitfulness: “They [cats, RB] are flattering but deceitful, they only seem to be affectionate, but they are the greatest egotists and never look directly in our face like the honest dog.” (Weber 249)3 Again, Büchner turns this around 180 degree. In the beginning the cat is not the one who gazes but object of a gaze. And when the cat begins to look at Lenz, her gaze is not evasive; she locks eyes with Lenz who initiated the eye contact: There are two creatures staring straight at each other. It is what could be called an “interspecies staring-contest”. Today we know that staring is part of cats’ body communication; it signals a threat or a challenge, mostly performed by a high-ranking cat offending a lowranking cat. The only piece of evidence I found so far for a corresponding understanding of the cat’s gaze in the early 19th century doesn’t refer to house cats but to cats of prey. If a human being is threatened by a black panther, a lion or a tiger, he can stare them down. This at least is what zoologists of the early 19th century state: “just look firmly into her [the cat’s, RB] face and slowly withdraw, so that it remains fearful and refrains from attacking.” (André 98)4 We can find a similar perspective in Friedrich Voigt’s Lehrbuch der Zoologie from 1832:

2My

translation (“Sie kommt zwar auf den Ruf, aber nur um gefüttert und geschmeichelt zu werden, wobey sie ihre Zufriedenheit durch Anstreichen und Schnurren an den Tag legt; aber ehe man sich versieht, die Tatze gibt und davon läuft.”) 3My translation (“Sie sind schmeichlerisch aber falsch, scheinen nur anhänglich, sind aber die größten Egoisten und sehen nie so gerade ins Gesicht wie der ehrliche Hund.”) 4My translation: “doch darf man ihr nur herzhaft ins Gesicht sehn und sich allmählig rücklings entfernen, so bleiben sie in Furcht und scheuen den Angriff.”

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Therefore, a very reliable life-saving measure is a rigid motionless position, as well as a staring gaze; as lion, tiger and panther thereby get confused; and even though they want to prowl around people, if you follow them with your gaze, they will definitely retreat. (266)5

In early 19th century zoology, it was thus acknowledged that humans can stare down even cats of prey. Now we can measure what it means if a normal cat enters a stare contest with a human. And we can see that not only Lenz is acting in an unexpected manner; the cat too shows a strange behaviour. In the light of zoological knowledge in Büchner’s period, it is even the cat who is the true hero of this specific human-animal encounter. Comparing Büchner with Buffon we can see that Büchner’s description of the poet-cat encounter decreases the use of moral judgements and increases the intensity of empirical observation. If we now take into account ethological explanations of cats’ staring behaviour, we can push our animal reading of Büchner’s scene one last step further: in this scene Lenz not only recognises himself in the cat, but the cat also recognises herself in Lenz. So finally, we can translate the scene into meaning without making the animal disappear. It’s a scene of mutual anagnorisis, a term that in literary theory designates the moment in a play when a character recognises someone and therefore discovers his or her own identity. And the same is true for Lenz and the cat: They identify themselves by recognising themselves in the encounter. And that also means: they identify themselves as others. So the most spectacular moment in Büchner’s novella is not when Lenz is encountering a cat, but when the cat is encountering Lenz. And if this cat could talk, she or he—as living in the Vosges, and thereby in France—would probably articulate her impression of the encounter with a strange but beautiful wording: “Je est un autre.”—That’s what the cat probably would say, in a clear and pronounced voice: “I is another”.

References André, Christian Carl, ed. Der Zoologe oder Compendiöse Bibliothek des Wissenswürdigsten aus der Thiergeschichte und allgemeinen Naturkunde: Heft II–III, Eisenach/Halle, 1795. Bekoff, Marc, ed. Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004. 3 vols. Borgards, Roland. “Performing Species: Menschenpolitik und Tiertheorie im ‘Woyzeck’ (H1,1; H1,2).” Georg Büchner Jahrbuch (2013–2015), vol. 13, De Gruyter, 2016, pp. 257–274. Büchner, Georg. Lenz, ed. by Burghard Dedner, Marburger Ausgabe, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001. Büchner, Georg. Lenz. Trans. by Richard Sieburth, Archipelago Books, 2004. Buffon, Count de. The Natural History of Quadrupeds. Vol. 1, Edinburgh, 1830.

5My translation: “Darum ist ein entschiedenes, ganz ausgemachtes Rettungsmittel vor ihnen, steifes, unbewegliches Stillstehen, auch wohl starres Anblicken; denn der Löwe wie der Tiger und Panther werden dadurch irre, und wenn letztere auch den Menschen umschleichen wollen, so muß ihnen nur stets der Blick folgen, dann ziehen sie sich unfehlbar zurück.”

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Burton, Simon, and Emily Brady. “What Is It Like to Be a Bird? Epistemic Humility and Human-Animal Relations.” Animal Ethics in the Age of Humans: Blurring Boundaries in Human-animal Relationships, ed. by Bernice Bovenkerk and Josef Keulartz, Springer, 2016, pp. 89–101. Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de. “Some Reflections on the Notion of Species.” Bio/Zoo, special issue of emisférica, vol. 10, no. 1, Winter 2013, www.hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-101/viveiros-de-castro. Daston, Lorraine, and Gregg Mitman. “Introduction.” Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, ed. by Daston and Mitman, Columbia UP, 2005, pp. 1–14. De Waal, Frans. “Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial.” Philosophical Topics, vol. 27, Fall 1999, pp. 255–280. De Waal, Frans. The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist. Basic Books, 2001. De Waal, Frans. Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? Granta Books, 2016. Derrida, Jaques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Trans. by David Willis. Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 2, 2002, pp. 369–418. Derrida, Jaques. The Beast and the Sovereign. Vol. 1, ed. by Michel Lisse et al., trans. by Geoffrey Bennington, U of Chicago P, 2009. Derrida, Jaques. The Beast and the Sovereign. Vol. 2, ed. by Michel Lisse et al., trans. by Geoffrey Bennington, U of Chicago P, 2011. Descola, Philippe. The Ecology of Others, trans. by Geneviève Godbout and Benjamin P. Luley, Prickly Paradigm P, 2013. Driscoll, Kári. “An Unheard, Inhuman Music: Narrative Voice and the Question of the Animal in Kafka’s ‘Josephine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk’.” Humanities, vol. 6, no. 2, 3 May 2017, pp. 1–26. MDPI, http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/6/2/26. Francione, Gary L. Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation. Columbia UP, 2008. Glasgow, Rupert. The Minimal Self. Würzburg UP, 2017. Gruen, Lori. Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relations with Animals. Lantern Books, 2015. Güntürkün, Onur, et al. “Cognition without Cortex.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 20, no. 4, Apr. 2016, pp. 291–303. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Hargrove, Eugene C. “Weak Anthropocentric Value.” The Intrinsic Value of Nature, special issue of The Monist, vol. 75, no. 2, Apr. 1992, pp. 183–207. Heisenberg, Martin. “Outcome learning, outcome expectations, and intentionality in Drosophila.” Learning Memory, vol. 22, 2015, pp. 294–298. Höller, Thomas. “Das Tier in Uns—Das Wir im Tier: Verwendungsarten des Anthropomorphismus.” Das Tier in unserer Kultur: Begegnungen, Beziehungen, Probleme, ed. by Hans Werner Ingensiep, Oldib, 2015, pp. 9–34. Kaminski, Nicola. “Herzbruder? ‘Lenzens Verrückung’ über die Jahrhundertschwelle.” Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert, vol. 28, no. 1, 2004, pp. 46–64. Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Harvard UP, 2004. Lockwood, Randall. “Anthropomorphism is Not a Four-Letter Word.” Perceptions of Animals in American Culture, ed. by Robert J. Hoage, Smithsonian Institution P, 1989, pp. 41–56. McHugh, Susan. “Animal Farm’s Lessons for Literary (and) Animal Studies.” Humanimalia: A journal of human/animal interface studies, vol. 1, no. 1, Sep. 2009. DePauw, www.depauw. edu/humanimalia/issue01/pdfs/Susan%20McHugh.pdf/. Michels, Gerd. “Landschaft in Georg Büchners ‘Lenz’.” Textanalyse und Textverstehen. Quelle & Meyer, 1981, pp. 12–33. Morgan, Lloyd C. “Other Minds than Ours.” An Introduction to Comparative Psychology, by Morgan, Walter Scott Publishing, 1903, pp. 36–59.

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Oken, Lorenz. Allgemeine Naturgeschichte für alle Stände: Vol. VII/3: Säugethiere 2. Stuttgart, 1838. Schmidt, Harald. Melancholie und Landschaft: Die psychotische und ästhetische Struktur der Naturschilderungen in Georg Büchners ‘Lenz’. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1994. Sommer, Volker. “Kultur in der Natur: Wie Tiere Traditionen pflegen.” Das Plateau, vol. 102, Aug. 2007, pp. 5–26. Steiner, Gary. Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in Western Philosophy. U of Pittsburgh P, 2005. Steiner, Gary, “Anthropozentrismus”. Lexikon der Mensch-Tier-Beziehung, ed. by Arianna Ferrari and Klaus Petrus, transcript, 2015, pp. 28–31. Thompson, Allen. “Anthropocentrism: Humanity as Peril and Promise.” The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics, ed. by Stephen M. Gardiner and Thompson, Oxford UP 2017, pp. 77–90. Tinbergen, Niko. “On Aims and Methods of Ethology.” Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, vol. 20, 1963, pp. 410–433. Tyler, Tom. Ciferae: A Bestiary in Five Fingers. U of Minnesota P, 2012. Urquiza-Haas, Esmeralda G. M., and Kurt Kotrschal. “The Mind behind Anthropomorphic Thinking: Attribution of Mental States to Other Species.” Animal Behaviour, vol. 109, Nov. 2015, pp. 167–176. Voigt, Friedrich Siegmund. Lehrbuch der Zoologie. Vol I, Stuttgart, 1834. Weber, Carl Julius. Dymocritos oder hinterlassene Papiere eines lachenden Philosophen. Vol. VI, Stuttgart, 1836. Whiten, Andrew, et al. “Cultures in chimpanzees.” Nature, vol. 399, 10 June 1999, pp. 682–685. Wild, Markus. Die anthropologische Differenz: Der Geist der Tiere in der frühen Neuzeit bei Montaigne, Descartes und Hume. De Gruyter, 2006. Wild, Markus. “Anthropomorphismus.” Lexikon der Mensch-Tier-Beziehung, ed. by Arianna Ferrari and Klaus Petrus, transcript, 2015, pp. 26–28. Wild, Markus. “Im Reich der wilden Tiere: Ergänzungen, Repliken, Revisionen zur Tierphilosophie.” Erwägen, Wissen, Ethik, vol. 23, no. 1, 2012, pp. 108–131. Wild, Markus. Tierphilosophie zur Einführung. Junius, 2010. Wolfe, Cary. “Animal Studies: Disciplinarity, and the (Post)Humanities.” What Is Posthumanism?, by Wolfe, U of Minnesota P, 2010, pp. 99–126.

7

Empathic Animal Encounters: Thomas Mann’s Herr und Hund and the ‘Animal Turn’ around 1900 Alexandra Böhm

In a special issue on “Man and Animal” of the Süddeutsche Monatshefte, a critic wrote in 1927 that the animal story, which had been rather neglected in Germanspeaking poetry, lately turned into the favourite genre of his countrymen. In his article on “The Animal in Poetry”, he takes stock of this new fashion and critically comments on the literary industry that has successfully managed by then to appropriate the animal. Henceforth, he assumes, not only butchers would gut the animal but also the German-speaking writers (Hofmiller 898). On account of this, it is mandatory to focus only on animal narratives that are of “true value” (898).1 This article will argue that around 1900 an ‘animal turn’ took place to which the new paradigm of empathy and the category of encounter are essential. The first part will look at statements concerning this shift by contemporary critics and writers and establishes their central arguments. The subsequent analysis concentrates on Thomas Mann’s animal narrative Herr und Hund (engl. Bashan and I), which

1“Denn während bis vor kurzer Zeit die Tiergeschichte nur als Außenseiter mitlief, ist sie neuerdings Favorit geworden. Unsere Literaturindustrie hat sich mit Erfolg auch des Tieres bemächtigt. Es ist ein gangbarer Artikel und im Begriff große Mode zu werden. […] Das Tier wird nicht nur vom Metzger ab-[,] sondern auch vom Literaten ausgeschlachtet. […] Umso nötiger ist es, nur von Tiergeschichten zu sprechen, die wirklich von Wert sind” (898).

A. Böhm (*)  Erlangen, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_7

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appeared in 1919, and asks in how far the story relates to this turn in its representation of empathic encounters between man and dog.2

1 Empathy and Encounters around 1900 Around 1900 a fundamental shift occurred in the narrative representation of animals. The Austrian literary historian Oskar Walzel commented on this transformation in his review “New Animal Poetry” which appeared in the Journal for Bibliophiles in 1918.3 There, Walzel opposes two different modes of presenting animals: Since some time, a considerable shift can be observed in animal poetry. The ancient custom of the fable has been to talk of the animal and to mean the human […]. Recently, the animal has been poetically captured for its own sake. It shall no longer be just a comfortable means to sensualize the human in an abbreviated form. It wants to find its own right. It wants its own sorrows and delights to find expression. (53)4

Walzel is referring to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and his theory of the fable from the end of the 18th century. For Lessing, Walzel claims, the animal worked as a mask for the human. Classical fable animals such as the wolf and the lamb represented certain fixed traits that the poets used as metaphors to characterize humans. What Walzel describes is reminiscent of what Susan McHugh identifies as the “disappearing animal trick” (24). “Reading animals as metaphors, always as figures of and for the human, is a process that […] ends with the human alone on the stage” (24). In contrast to this practice, Walzel situates the newer animal poets who do not perceive the animal as mirror reflecting man, but rather want to illuminate the animal’s soul and see it as an end in itself.5 Walzel writes, “the most notable characteristic of our newest poets is their zealous endeavour to feel themselves into the animal and to learn about the workings of their souls” (53).6

2It

would be instructive to compare the reasons, mechanisms and arguments of the ‘animal turn’ around 1900, for which I argue in this paper, with the ‘animal turn’, which has been taking place over the past decade or so in Germany. This would however be beyond the scope of this article. 3The translations in the following are my own, unless otherwise indicated. 4“In der Dichtung vom Tiere läßt sich seit einiger Zeit eine nicht unbeträchtliche Verschiebung beobachten. Uralte Gewohnheit der Fabel ist, vom Tiere zu reden und den Menschen zu meinen. […] In neuerer Zeit wird das Tier um seiner selbst willen dichterisch erfaßt. Es soll nicht länger nur als bequemes Mittel dienen, in abgekürzter Form den Menschen zu versinnlichen. Es will sein eigenes Recht finden.” Cf. Kári Driscoll, who writes about Walzel’s review in the context of zoopoetics around 1900 (212–218). 5Cf. “Seine [Carl Ewald’s] Märchen tragen den wesentlichen Zug neuerer Tierdichtung: sie wollen dem Tier in die Seele blicken, nicht dem Menschen im Bilde des Tiers einen Spiegel vorhalten.” (54) 6“Besonders bezeichnendes Merkmal unserer Neuesten ist das eifrige Streben, sich ins Tier einzufühlen und seine Seelenvorgänge ihm abzulauschen.”

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Einfühlung (feeling into) was a key term in the philosophical and aesthetic debate around 1900. It became popular in Germany at the end of the 19th century in the works of Robert Vischer and especially Theodor Lipps (1851–1914), who wrote several books and articles on Einfühlung.7 The American psychologist Edward B. Titchener (1867–1927), who also drew from the works of Lipps, translated the German term Einfühlung with the neologism ‘empathy’ in 1909. Instead of restricting the concept to the analysis of the aesthetic experience, Lipps redefined Einfühlung “as the primary epistemic means for our perception of other persons as minded creatures” (Stueber). Einfühlung thus deals with the problem of having knowledge of other minds. Whereas for Lipps this is an interpersonal issue, Walzel transfers the debate to the human-animal relation. For him the main concern of the modern animal poets is to understand the nonhuman animals. There are of course obstacles to looking into the soul of the animal. Walzel comments that the only way the poets can deduce the workings of the animal soul is by inferring it from their knowledge of the human soul. For him, this is the only instance, “where the human being is the centre of reference” (53).8 The anthropomorphic projection of “human wanting, feeling and thinking” (53) is practice not only with the poets but also with the natural historian. Their aim is to take the point of view of the animal, to see the world from their perspective. In Hermann Löns’ animal narrative Mümmelmann from 1909, Walzel claims that “the hare is most notably a hare, not because it ‘hobbles’ […] or ‘perks up his ears’”, but because “the whole action is taken from the perspective of the hare” (54).9 Instead of assuming a distanced, anthropocentric stance as, according to Walzel, is characteristic for the fable, the new animal poets “sensualize the animal for its own sake, based on the knowledge of its biological specifics” (56).10 The change Walzel describes in the representation of animals is based on the decentering of the human and a concomitant interest in the animal’s perspective, which the poets attempt to understand empathically. But to what fundamental shift in the cultural knowledge does the new animal poetry respond?

7E.g.

Ästhetische Einfühlung (‘Aesthetic Empathy’) in 1900, Einfühlung, innere Nachahmung und Organempfindung (‘Empathy, Inner Imitation and the Sensation of the Organs’) in 1903, and Einfühlung und ästhetischer Genuß (‘Empathy and Aesthetic Pleasure’) in 1906. Simultaneously with his work on Einfühlung, Lipps dealt with David Hume’s philosophy and his concept of ‘sympathy’, which he developed at the end of the 18th century. In 1904 and 1906, Lipps published a German translation of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (Ein Traktat über die menschliche Natur). 8“Wenn irgendwo, so ist in diesem Fall der Mensch das Maß der Dinge.” 9“Er ist vor allem Hase, nicht nur weil er ‘hoppelt’ […] oder ‘die Löffel spitzt’. Vielmehr ist der ganze Vorgang vom Standpunkt des Hasen genommen.” 10“[…] Versinnlichung des Tiers um seiner selbst willen, gestützt auf unsere Kenntnis der biologischen Eigenheiten des Tiers.”

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The cultural and scientific background of the new animal poetry is the subject of a review by the Austrian writer and critic Hermann Bahr, which appeared in the journal Neue Rundschau in 1909. Bahr describes a new relationship between humans and nature that he traces back to Charles Darwin’s work On the Origin of Species from 1859. Whereas Darwin’s theory of evolution was officially critiqued for denying God’s existence, Bahr writes, people were de facto even more outraged at his dethronement of the human (276–277). In 1917, Sigmund Freud famously described the disempowerment of human beings by Darwin’s theory of evolution as “biological insult to people’s narcissism” (8).11 Before Freud, Bahr had already commented on this challenge to the anthropocentric worldview in his review of the latest books of nature. Human’s age-old traditional self-image that God was above him, but nature subordinate, suddenly crumbled: “the human too had become an animal” (277). Until then, nature had been an object, to which humans stood opposed. In humans’ anthropocentric view, they were nature’s spectators and masters, “in front of whom and for whom the great theater of the world takes place” (277). With Darwin’s theory of evolution however, “human beings were torn into nature, into its very midst; they had nothing left to themselves, and the animals, the flowers, the stones were now to be their brothers and sisters” (277).12 Humans were no longer alone on the stage. Their idea of exceptionalism that was based on the differentia specifica, i.e. the distinguishing mark between humans and animals, was put into question. Human beings were bereft of their singularity but also of their solitude amongst nature (277). Natural history, Bahr writes, has turned into family history (280). Traditional natural history was marked by distance to the objects it represented. Even in Alfred Brehm’s wonderful portrayal of nature, Bahr claims, “the animals stand as in a menagerie, a remote world, displayed for observation, behind bars” (280).13 The “new thought”, on the contrary, leads to proximity, close contact, and encounter between human and nonhuman animal: “all boundaries dissolved, he [man] really was to be the

11Freud

describes the consequences of Darwin’s theory of evolution as the second insult for humanity: “Dies ist aber die zweite, die biologische Kränkung des menschlichen Narzißmus” (8). He further elaborates in Eine Schwierigkeit der Psychoanalyse: “Der Mensch warf sich im Laufe seiner Kulturentwicklung zum Herrn über seine tierischen Mitgeschöpfe auf. Aber mit dieser Vorherrschaft nicht zufrieden, begann er eine Kluft zwischen ihr und sein Wesen zu legen. Er sprach ihnen die Vernunft ab und legte sich eine unsterbliche Seele bei, berief sich auf eine hohe göttliche Abkunft, die das Band der Gemeinschaft mit der Tierwelt zu zerreißen gestattete. […] Wir wissen es alle, daß die Forschung Ch. Darwins, seiner Mitarbeiter und Vorgänger, vor wenig mehr als einem halben Jahrhundert dieser Überhebung des Menschen ein Ende bereitet hat. Der Mensch ist nichts anderes und nichts Besseres als die Tiere, er ist selbst aus der Tierreihe hervorgegangen, einigen Arten näher, anderen ferner verwandt.” (7–8) 12“Der Mensch, bisher der Natur gegenüber, als ihr Zuschauer und ihr Herr, vor dem und für den das ganze Spiel der Welt geschieht, sah sich nun plötzlich in die Natur gerissen, mitten in sie hinein; er hatte gar nichts mehr für sich allein und die Tiere, die Blumen, die Steine sollten nun seine Brüder und Schwestern sein.” 13“Auch Brehm hat die Natur geschildert und es war wunderschön, aber die Tiere standen dort wie in einer Menagerie, eine fremde Welt, zum Anschauen ausgestellt, hinter dem Gitter.”

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same as his brothers and sisters in the woods, the fields and the sea, drawn into their dance.” (277)14 The metaphor of the dance in which humans now participate, stresses the interactive quality of the new relationship. Humans are no longer passive observers but co-agents. Hence, the “meaning of the time” (280) is an immersion in nature, which the American poetry of Walt Whitman expresses.15 According to Bahr, “humans must return to nature, in order to find themselves” (280).16 In the encounter with nature, people are to recognize themselves. Bahr describes this encounter as interpersonal instead of a relation between subject and object. Now, humans really “want to be acquainted with earth and her animals and her flowers”, not just as something known with the intellect, but with the heart. Bahr intends this approach as an epiphanic moment of recognition, where human beings get to know themselves in the face of the other: “the heart that hopes to find and contemplate itself in the other” (279).17 Ursula Renner convincingly argues that Bahr’s notion of encountering the nonhuman other connects with contemporary theories of Einfühlung (363). Humans’ new mythology (280) that results from the imperative ‘Know thyself’—“Lo, this is you, look at yourself here, there you come from, there you belong, recognize yourself here” (280)18—paradoxically relates to the latest technical inventions of the century like the modern transport system with its automobiles and electric tramways, which allowed the townsfolk to get into direct contact with nature (282). Even above these new technical facilities, Bahr ranks the revolution in optic media, i.e. moment photography, which enables an intimate, albeit mediated encounter with the other animal. Bahr emphasizes that photography allows a “completely new way of seeing the animal, that is, as an individual”, whose “face addresses us” (282).19 What both authors, Bahr and Walzel describe as the zeitgeist is a new form of empathy that occurs in actual encounters with nonhuman animals that are no longer stock characters of moral tales or dead objects of knowledge. During the 19th century, empathy with animals was closely associated with compassion or pity as reflected in widespread socio-cultural practices such as the formation of Animal Protection Movements, or the influential philosophical work of Arthur Schopenhauer and Jeremy Bentham (Roscher; Kean). At the beginning of the 20th century,

14“[…]

[A]lle Schranken fielen, er sollte wirklich dasselbe sein wie die Brüder und Schwestern im Wald und auf der Flur und im Meer, in ihren Tanz gezogen.” (277) 15“Sinn der Zeit”. 16“In die Natur müssen wir zurück, um uns zu finden.” 17“Und da will er jetzt […] auch seine Erde und ihre Tiere und ihre Blumen […] auch wirklich kennen lernen, näher und anders als einst, nicht als etwas Wissenswertes für den Verstand bloß und mit den Augen und mit den Ohren, sondern wie der Mensch Menschen kennen lernen will: mit dem Herzen, das im anderen sich selbst wiederzufinden und anzuschauen hofft.” 18“Das bist ja du, hier sieh dich selbst, da kommst du her, da gehörst du hin, erkenne dich hier!” 19“[…] eine ganz neue Art, das Tier zu sehen: als ein Individuum nämlich. […] sein Antlitz spricht uns an […].”

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empathy with regard to animals developed the primary meaning of “Einfühlung”, an empathic understanding of the specific being of the nonhuman animal. For this, the encounter with the other is central: For Walzel and Bahr it is partly an emotional (Einfühlung) partly a cognitive act that is based on the (visual) knowledge of the animal’s individuality, habits and soul (new natural history, poetry, moment photography). The American writer Ernest Thompson Seton, who is one of the pioneers of the modern animal narrative, states in his “Preface” to Wild Animals I Have Known from 1898 that the “real personality of the individual and his view of life” (7) are the subject of his animal stories. Seton’s intention is to show that “we and the beasts are kin” (7), implicitly alluding to Darwin’s theory of evolution. His stories about wild animals reflect Darwin’s assumption in The Descent of Man that “the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind” (Darwin 101). Like Darwin, Seton postulates a continuous scale between human and nonhuman animals, wherefrom he deduces an ethical consideration of the other animals. “Man has nothing that the animals have not at least a vestige of, the animals have nothing that man does not in some degree share.// Since, then, the animals are creatures with wants and feelings differing in degree only from our own, they surely have their rights.” (11–12) Seton’s claim that his “stories are true” (7) is typical for the new, realistic animal stories in Germany, Europe, and America. The attempt to portray animals no longer as stock characters as in fable or satire, but as true individuals with their own emotions and perspective, is however a challenge to narrative representation. For William Nelles, Jack London’s empathetic account of animal life in White Fang from 1906 shows the “thorough attempt […] to reproduce something like the texture or content or shape of nonhuman thought” as his narrative restricts itself to “the animal’s natural and/or conventional sphere of interest and reference” (192). Walzel also mentions the problem of an adequate representation of the animal’s consciousness when he discusses the Swedish author Aage Madelung’s story “The Sterlet”, which is told from the point of view of the fish. Madelung tries to express the sterlet’s specific experience, especially as it differs from the human. Walzel writes: “Still, also the layman perceives the obstructions which come up at every turn in a representation that like Madelung’s shows the peculiar inner experience of a fish, which wholly contradicts our own while at the same time it cannot dispense with the human imagination.” (56)20 Each attempt at representing the specific other consciousness of nonhuman animals faces this paradox of an ineluctable epistemic anthropocentrism, which means that the depiction of the other animal’s existence is inevi­ tably grounded in human language and restricted by human’s limited ­perceptive

20“Dagegen

erkennt auch der Laie, welche Hemmungen sich überhaupt auf Schritt und Tritt in einer Darstellung aufdrängen, die gleich der Novelle Madelungs das besondere, ganz unserm Fühlen widersprechende innere Erleben eines Fischs kennzeichnet und dennoch nicht der Vorstellungswelt des Menschen entraten kann.”

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faculties. Marco Caracciolo points to this “ineliminable anthropocentrism of human representations of animal experience” and asks whether “literary narrative can expose such anthropocentrism in striking ways” (485). In the following, this article will focus on one animal narrative in particular, Thomas Mann’s semi-fictional text Herr und Hund—translated into English as Bashan and I.21 I will explore how the narrative concentrates on empathic encounters between the narrator Mann and his dog, a companion animal that contemporary zoology praises for his steadfast loyalty to man. Although the text does not feature a speaking dog, nor assumes the dog’s perspective, I argue that it partakes in the ‘animal turn’ around 1900. While several critics have criticized Bashan and I for its stark anthropocentrism, I propose that the text as Caracciolo demands, exposes and deconstructs this mindset by the encounters between the dog and his master and its narrative technique.

2 Empathic Encounters in Thomas Mann’s Herr und Hund Thomas Mann wrote the semi-fictional narrative of his dog at the end of the First World War. It tells the story of Bashan, a German pointer—a so called ‘Hühnerhund’—and his relationship with the homodiegetic human narrator. The meticulously descriptive and rather plotless text consists mainly of factual elements. Some critics even maintain that each part of the text existed in the exact same way in real life (Goebel 323). The text stages the undisguised author Mann—however without explicitly mentioning his name—together with his dog Bashan. The narrative portrays their extensive walks through the Isar wetlands near Munich where Mann’s family moved in 1914. The reception of Bashan and I, the subtitle of which identifies it as an idyll, was mixed from the beginning. Although Mann was an eminent author of the first half of the 20th century, his animal biography did not attract much attention. Next to positive reviews that especially praised the description of the dog, the text met with perplexity and even bewilderment by his contemporaries. For example in 1919, shortly after the publication of Bashan and I, an anonymous reviewer polemically queried whether the poet is untouched by the grim misery of the ­German people in the face of the recently lost war. He asked how Thomas Mann could now have the solemn and undisturbed time for writing idylls (Vaget 209).22 Still in 2012, the German scholar Alexander Honold maintained that the animal story was no more than a finger-exercise between the fiasco of the Reflections of an Unpolitical Man from 1918 and the resumption of work on the Magic Mountain (50–51). The interpretive helplessness was partly due to the missing symbolic

21Mann’s

own translation of the title in his Preface to Stories of Three Decades is “A Man and His Dog” (115). The dog’s name in the original German text is Bauschan. 22Anonymous review in Fränkischer Kurier, 22nd November 1919, cited after Vaget.

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meaning critics were usually looking for in Mann’s texts. In Bashan and I, the reader was confronted with just a dog, and over and above that, it was the undisguised pointer of Thomas Mann as the author himself emphasized in the Preface to the story. Accordingly, this line of interpretation follows Mann’s own evaluation of the text. After finishing his animal biography, Mann himself played down the importance of the idyll. “It is”, he reflected in his diary from 1918, “an emotional, idyllic-human reaction to this time, an expression of a soft mood, of a need for love, tenderness, benignity, also for quiescence and meaningfulness, which were caused by its sufferings and concussions” (Vaget 207).23 It is exactly the literalness of Mann’s dog that predestines him for an analysis from a Literary Animal Studies perspective. Bashan is not so much a semiotic dog as a diegetic one, i.e., he is not only a signifying medium, but a seizable element of the narrated world (Borgards 226). His character and perspective are taken seriously. Indeed, as Karla Armbruster maintains, especially stories “inspired by animals who were part of a writer’s life” convey “at least a trace of the ‘perspective of the dog’” (28). Bashan’s extradiegetic quality and Mann’s minute and lengthy descriptions of the dog’s appearance, habits and behavior made a symbolic interpretation difficult, and led some critics to see no more in them than the portrayal of a ‘tyke’ (Schiffer 281). The text consists of five parts. The first three chapters, “Bashan Puts in His Appearance”, “How we acquired Bashan” and “A Few Items Regarding Bashan’s Character and Manner of Life”, follow the conventions of biographical writing.24 In a highly detailed description, the reader is made familiar with Bashan’s home in the family household of the narrator, as well as with his ancestry, former home, habits, character and physiognomy. The narrative shows Bashan as a singular animal, not a type. His deviations from the ideal breed of a pointer make him even more attractive and lovable to the narrator and endow him with what the narrator calls a “Persönlichkeitswert” (528), i.e., the merit of a distinct personality. The titles, though, of Chaps. 4 and 5, “The Hunting Grounds” and “The Chase”, which together constitute almost two-thirds of the text, indicate a shift—away from the description and emphasis of the individual biographical subject towards an account of its interrelatedness, of the interrelatedness and co-constitution of human and animal life, and of both with nature. In the following analysis of Mann’s animal narrative, I will focus on three different aspects. First, I will look in some detail at the exposition of Bashan and I that denominates central features of the relationship between human and nonhuman animal. Second, I argue for the co-constitution of ‘master’ and dog in their encounters, which deconstructs the contemporaneous

23“Es

[Gesang vom Kindchen] ist, wie auch Herr und Hund, dem es sich anschließt, eine seelische, idyllisch-menschliche Reaktion auf die Zeit, ein Ausdruck einer durch Leiden und Erschütterungen erzeugten weichen Stimmung, des Bedürfnisses nach Liebe, Zärtlichkeit, Güte, auch nach Ruhe und Sinnigkeit […].” Diary Entry from 27th October 1918, cited after Vaget. 24All English quotes from Mann’s text follow the translation by Herman George Scheffauer.

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zoological knowledge. And third, I will relate the narrator’s attempt at an empathic understanding of his dog to the new discipline of Animal Psychology, which is part of the ‘animal turn’ around 1900. Response Rituals—the Text’s Exposition The first chapter of the text, ‘He turns around the corner’, starts in medias res with a typical episode of the narrator and his dog’s shared life. The scene is presented in an ekphrastic manner that describes the image of a locus amoenus. Two central topics that are crucial to the whole course of the text unfold in the opening chapter. This is first Bashan’s physical appearance and his belonging to the breed of pointers, and second, the mundane rituals of contact between the narrator and his dog, such as their acts of welcome and communication and their extended walks in the Isar wetlands where Bashan likes to run and chase small animals. There are many illustrations of address and response, of their “dance of welcome” (14; “Begrüßungstanz”, 527) between the master and his dog that focus on an extra-linguistic language, which includes sensual touch or sound as for example the melody of the voice or a whistle. One such instance of interspecies communication where the narrator and Bashan respond to each other in an encounter creating a sense of an unpredictable kind of ‘we’, is reminiscent of Donna Haraway’s “subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters” (When Species Meet, 4–5). Haraway repeatedly refers to the act of encountering as dance. She stresses that “all the actors become who they are in the dance of relating”, where they “are redone through the patterns they enact” (25). The passage in Bashan and I, where the dog responds to the narrator’s rather obscure and logically unordered babbling, reads as follows: He stands and stares, listening to the tone of my voice. He finds that this tone is full of accents which decidedly approve of his existence, something which I am at pains to emphasize in my speech. And suddenly, with an upward lunge of the head and a swift opening of his jaws, he makes a snap towards my face, as though he intended to bite off my nose, a bit of pantomime that is obviously meant to be an answer to my remarks and which invariably throws me backward in a sudden recoil, laughing—as Bashan well knows. He intends this to be a kind of air-kiss, half tenderness, half mischievousness—a manoeuvre which has been peculiar to him from puppyhood on—I had never observed it in the case of any of his predecessors. Moreover, he at once begs pardon for the liberty he has taken by waggings, short abrupt bows and an embarrassed air. And then we pass out of the garden-gate into the open. (20)25

25“Er

steht und schaut, er lauscht auf den Tonfall meiner Stimme, durchdringt sie mit den Akzenten einer entschiedenen Billigung seiner Existenz, die ich meiner Ansprache stark aufsetze. Und plötzlich vollführt er, den Kopf vorstoßend und die Lippen rasch öffnend und schließend, einen Schnapper hinauf gegen mein Gesicht, als wollte er mir die Nase abbeißen, eine Pantomime, die offenbar als Antwort auf mein Zureden gemeint ist und mich regelmäßig lachend zurückprallen läßt, was Bauschan auch im voraus weiß. Es ist eine Art Luftkuß, halb Zärtlichkeit, halb Neckerei, ein Manöver, das ihm von klein auf eigentümlich war, während ich es sonst bei keinem seiner Vorgänger beobachtete. Übrigens entschuldigt er sich sogleich durch Wedeln, kurze Verbeugungen und eine verlegen-heitere Miene für die Freiheit, die er sich nahm. Und dann treten wir durch die Gartenpforte ins Freie.” (529)

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This act of communication, which is representative of the encounters between the narrator and his dog in Thomas Mann’s text, is most adequately described as an empathic entanglement (Gruen). In particular, the semantics and syntax of the first sentence realize this interpenetration. It is represented by the interfusion of their respective voices, marked in the German original by the word ‘durchdringen’, the alternating use of the possessive pronouns ‘meiner’ and ‘seiner’, belonging to sentence parts which are intricately interwoven, corresponding to the change of subject. The rest of the passage is also characterized by a forward and backward movement indicated by the use of directional verbs and adverbs, as well as by the change of subject and object positions. Bashan is shown as being able to act playfully, and what is more, he is aware of it at the same time (“was Bauschan auch im voraus weiß”). The relationship is not only marked by love (“Luftkuß”), but also by “courteous regard” and mutual respect (“entschuldigt er sich sogleich durch Wedeln, kurze Verbeugungen […] für die Freiheit, die er sich nahm”). The German word “Freiheit” (‘freedom’) semantically and phonetically resonates to the final word of the quoted passage, “ins Freie” (“into the open”). The separate agents of man and dog finally merge into a before unmentioned “we” (“wir”). Together they step into the open that is associated with the freedom and unpredictability of a ‘becoming with’ (Haraway, When Species Meet 4). Next to such detailed descriptions of the acts of welcome and communication between the master and his dog are the narrator’s comments on Bashan’s physical appearance and breed.26 “He is a short-haired setter—if you will not take this designation too sternly and strictly, but with a grain of salt. For Bashan cannot really claim to be a setter such as are described in books—a setter in accordance with the most meticulous laws and decrees.” (15) Bashan does not conform to the ideal of a German pointer—unrelenting breeders would find fault with his size, his crooked forelegs, and the dewlap under his neck; they would also criticize as unacceptable his random colouring. What happens here is that Bashan is shown as an individual, a singular animal not flattened into an exemplary representative of his species (Orlik 112). His deviations from the ideal imbue him with the merit of personality against a rigidly schematizing classification. For the narrator, the dog is even more attractive and lovable because of his variations that turn him from a type into a singular animal that possesses individuality, not just concerning his physical appearance but also his character as the second aspect will show. Master and Dog or, “If I have a dog, my dog has a human” In Western cultural history, the dog has served, according to the German scholar Gerhard Neumann, as a guarantor of men’s identity (108). In the steadfast loyalty of his dog, man finds himself recognized despite external changes—most

26“Es

ist ein kurzhaariger deutscher Hühnerhund,—wenn man diese Bezeichnung nicht allzu streng und strikt nehmen, sondern sie mit einem Körnchen Salz verstehen will; denn ein Hühnerhund wie er im Buche steht und nach der peinlichsten Observanz ist Bauschan wohl eigentlich nicht.” (527–528)

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famously described in Homer’s Odyssey, where the dog identifies his master and dies.27 Since then, the loyalty and devotion of the dog as man’s favourite companion animal have frequently been conjured in history. “The dog may be said to be the only animal whose fidelity is unshaken; who always knows his master, and the friends of the family; who distinguishes a stranger as soon as he arrives”, GeorgesLouis Leclerc de Buffon writes about the dog’s character in his influential Natural History of the 18th century (8). Around 1900, Alfred Brehm’s popular Thierleben (Animal Life), may still count as the general zoological reference work, which conveys the prevalent cultural knowledge of dogs, their characters and relation to humans. There, Brehm claims that the most excellent trait of dogs is the steadfast fidelity and devotion to their master, as well as total obedience and submissiveness. The dog’s loyalty to humans, the text goes on, makes him man’s most indispensable companion. The animal belongs to his master completely and even sacrifices its life for the sake of him. From this special relationship between man and dog, Brehm explicitly excludes women (584–585). However, Bashan is not only a companion dog, but also a pointer—a classical hunting dog. The narrator of Mann’s text repeatedly mentions Bashan’s ancestry as hunter (“Jägerblut”), and that his dog is always keen on going to their hunting grounds. Hunting, and the question, who is the rightful hunter—the dog or the master, thereby reversing the positions of the ‘actor’—is a central theme of Mann’s animal narrative. A contemporary encyclopedia, the widely read Brockhaus Konversationslexikon, gives under the entry ‘pointer’ a catalogue of features the hunting dog should possess. The main requirements of the “Hühnerhund” or, in English, pointer, are to scent the game, especially quails, snipes pheasants, ducks and hares. Hunting dogs shall cautiously approach the game, continuously pointing towards it with their nose for the huntsman. They must not chase the uninjured hare, or the winged game. They shall obey their master at each time, and enter into every place that the huntsman allocates as, for example, they shall not shy the water. Though this behaviour is natural to the pointer, the encyclopedia advises the huntsman that the best results are achieved through a violent breaking in of the dog where he is taught obedience by pungency and severe punishment (“Hühnerhund, Vorstehhund, Stellhund” 408). It has often been commented on in Thomas Mann criticism that the narrator of Bashan and I is portrayed as a controlling, patriarchal and self-willed subject who uses the dog’s subserviency as guarantor of his self. One passage in particular shows Bashan as the exemplary companion, demonstrating unwavering loyalty and devotion for his master: We have to deal here with a remote and long-derived patriarchal instinct of the dog which determines him—at least so far as the more manly, open-air loving breeds are ­concerned—to regard and honour the man, the head of the house and the family, as the

27For

this scene of recognition, see also Claudia Lillge’s article in this volume.

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master, the protector of the home, the lord, and to find the goal and meaning of his existence in a peculiar relationship of loyal vassal-friendship, and in the maintenance of a far greater spirit of independence towards the other members of the family. (53–54)28

The emphasis here lies on the special relationship between man and dog, which Brehm mentions in his Animal Life and Mann’s text evokes in such passages. Further remarks by the narrator that Bashan has no autonomous life of his own (“von einem selbständigen Leben Bauschans, das er ohne mich während dieser Stunden führte, kann nicht gesprochen werden”, 543) and that his life only then begins, when he, the master, is leaving the house (“Sein Leben beginnt, wenn ich ausgehe”, 543) explicitly express an anthropocentric perspective. It is in this context, that the German title of the narrative, Herr und Hund, has been interpreted as emphasizing the “figure of auctoritas”, which expresses an “hierarchic-antipodic relationship”, which, according to Mann scholar Alexander Honold, is constitutive for the whole narrative: “Through the dog and his description, the master reformulates his sovereignty” (42). In her animal reading of the text, Julia Bodenburg also affirms that Mann’s narrative of man and dog stabilizes the patriarchal order without question (293), and Elizabeth Boa claims that Bashan “confirms the pater familias in his patriarchal role and enables the sedentary writer to explore manly pursuits” (175). This article however argues that whilst the narrator’s comments invoke the contemporary zoological knowledge, the encounters between ‘dog’ and ‘master’ as well as the text’s narrative strategies deconstruct these conventional paradigms. A closer look at the representation of the narrator as hunter and Bashan as hunting dog shows a deconstructive tendency concerning the character of both, human and nonhuman animal, as well as their relationship. Bashan is introduced as a typical hunting dog and the narrator emphasizes that he rightfully belongs to the breed of pointers. “Yes, there can be no doubt of it—the hunter and the tracker dominate prodigiously in Bashan’s education.” (19)29 However, when comparing the “Hühnerhund” definition of the Brockhaus encyclopedia with the narrator’s dog, it turns out that Bashan is rather the caricature than the embodiment of a pointer. Instead of scenting quails, woodcocks, pheasants, ducks or hares and cautiously approaching them, staying put at some distance, waiting the hunter, Bashan is passionately chasing the game in full flight (533).

28“Es

handelt sich da um einen von weither überkommenen patriarchalischen Instinkt des Hundes, der ihn, wenigstens in seinen mannhafteren, die freie Luft liebenden Arten, bestimmt im Manne, im Haus- und Familienoberhaupt, unbedingt den Herrn, den Schützer des Herdes, den Gebieter zu erblicken und zu verehren, in einem besonderen Verhältnis ergebener Knechtsfreundschaft zu ihm seine Lebenswürde zu finden und gegen die übrigen Hausgenossen eine viel größere Unabhängigkeit zu bewahren.” (541) 29“[…] ja, der Jäger und Vorsteher waltet eben doch mächtig vor in Bauschans Bildung, er ist ein rechtlicher Hühnerhund, wenn man mich fragt […].” (529)

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The master’s character, on the other hand, turns out to be rather different from a typical huntsman. While Bashan is chasing after game, the narrator mostly assumes the position of a passive, innocent bystander. According to him, they are chasing for the sake of itself and not for the prey (584). Bashan is, in this context, not a means to the end of his master’s hunting but rather acquires his own agency so that the narrator referring to them both as huntsman and hound wonders whether they should in fact be called the hunter and his master, thereby stressing the active role of the animal (607). His fear of water, which he avoids at all times, adds to Bashan’s undisciplined behaviour as pointer. Indeed, the narrator mentions that Bashan steadfastly resists the procedure of breaking in, even if he was threatened of being beaten to death. In contrast to the narrator’s more passionate youth with his former dog Percy, the master now refrains from trying it as he has long since forfeited to demand performances which are contradictory to the dog’s nature and whose claim could lead to a rencounter (553). The frequent references to his former dog Percy divide the text into past and present, which coincide with different cultural practices. Bashan, belonging to the present, acquires an agency of his own; the relationship between the narrator and the dog is deconstructing the master/servant relation that contemporary zoological works articulate and which the narrator’s comments like the one quoted above mirror. With Donna Haraway one could say that the text enacts that “[p]ossession—property—is about reciprocity and rights of access. If I have a dog, my dog has a human” (Companion Species Manifesto, 53–54). Rather than being an autonomous self, the narrator appears as fundamentally relational, constituted by the empathic encounters with his nonhuman companion. Through narrative strategies, such as the continuous entanglement of the human and the animal, for instance by ascribing human qualities to the animals and animal traits to the human protagonists, the text enhances the permeability of the gap between the species. Two lovers, for instance, watch Bashan and the narrator from their nest, “mit kecken und scheuen Tieraugen” (567)—with “wide, shy, yet insolent eyes, they regard us from their bower” (116).30 In Chap. 5, there is an intense focus on the relationship between Bashan and the narrator owing to the dog’s two weeks stay in the hospital, due to so-called ‘occult’ bleedings from his nose or muzzle. The narrator confesses that he might secretly have wished for Bashan’s absence, in order to achieve an inner autonomy through the disentanglement from the dog. He soon discovers, though, that his boredom and lack of physical exercise make his condition increasingly similar to Bashan’s in his cage at the clinic: It was not to be denied—since Bashan’s internment I was enjoying a definite feeling of independence such as I had not known for a long time. […] This was a comfortable condition of things, quieting and full of the charm of novelty. But as the accustomed incentive was lacking, I almost ceased to go walking at all. My health suffered in consequence, and

30The

English translation here misses the animal allusion of “Tieraugen” in Mann’s narrative.

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whilst my condition grew to be remarkably like that of Bashan in his cage, I indulged in the moral reflection that the fetters of sympathy would have been more conducive to my own comfort than the egoistic freedom for which I had panted. (188–189)31

The narrator realizes that his identity is relational, that it comes into being with Bashan and not in isolation from him. In this reading, the title Herr und Hund becomes ambivalent and exemplifies the movement of the text from an autonomous to a relational conception of the subject, which leads to a dialogic rather than a subjecting relationship. The co-constitutive aspect of the self in the narrative is not limited, though, to the relation between human and nonhuman animal. It also extends to the natural world. The landscape descriptions of Bashan and I, most notably in Chap. 4, have frequently been referred to by critics as outstanding, especially in Thomas Mann’s oeuvre. The author gathered the thorough botanical knowledge from his neighbour Karl Gruber, who qualified as a professor for zoology in 1912, and was also active in the field of animal psychology. During the first half of July 1918, Mann and Gruber went on walks together through the Herzogpark in Munich, where the zoologist specified the botanical details of their immediate environment to the renowned writer (Gruber 124). The detailed, almost botanic description of the flora and fauna of the hunting grounds in Chap. 4 shows a heightened attentiveness to the nonhuman environment, which is, as the text explicates, deeply entangled with human efforts of cultivation. The narrator calls it a “Zaubergarten” (565), an enchanted garden, “neither forest nor park” (113) by which he feels fantastically touched (566). For the narrator the landscape is his “park” and “solitude”: “My thoughts and my dreams are mingled and intergrown with its scenes, like the leaves of its creepers with the stems of its trees.” (156)32 Bashan and the narrator are in a contact zone, where the boundaries of the self dissolve, a self that is not self-contained, static, self-determined and hence superior, but relational, procedural and equal. The narrator’s extensive remarks on the water in the area and his meanderings on the subject emphasize the aspect of interrelationality. “The attraction which water exercises upon the normal man is natural and mystically sympathetic. Man is a child of water. Our bodies are ninetenths water, and during a stage of our pre-natal development, we even have

31“Wirklich

genoß ich einer gewissen und lange nicht mehr erprobten inneren Unabhängigkeit seit Bauschans Internierung. […] Das war bequem, beruhigend und hatte den Reiz der Neuheit. Da aber der gewohnte Ansporn fehlte, so ging ich beinahe nicht mehr spazieren. Meine Gesundheit litt; und während mein Zustand demjenigen Bauschans in seinem Käfig nachgerade auffallend ähnlich wurde, stellte ich die sittliche Betrachtung an, daß die Fessel des Mitgefühles meinem eigenen Wohlsein zuträglicher gewesen war als die egoistische Freiheit, nach der mich gelüstet hatte.” (598) 32“Sie [die Landschaft] ist mein Park und meine Einsamkeit; meine Gedanken und Träume sind mit ihren Bildern vermischt und verwachsen, wie das Laub ihrer Schlingpflanzen mit dem ihrer Bäume.” (582)

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gills.” (136)33 The narrator even goes so far as to claim that the merging of the self in the universal is only possible for him in contemplation of the water (“die rechte Hinlösung des eigenen beschränkten Seins in das allgemeine [ist] mir nur in dieser Anschauung gewährt”, 575). Nature in “The Hunting Grounds” is not pristine nature untouched by man. The wilderness “is criss-crossed by paths” which were there “through the agency of use” (115). Next to these are streets which a society that tried to cultivate the area had built ten or fifteen years ago. The streets bear deeply cultural names such as “Adalbert-Stifter-Straße” (568) or “Shakespeare-Straße” (569), but are by now overgrown, their signboards decaying. “There can be no doubt—these park-like streets with the poetic names are running wild—the jungle is once more devouring them.” (124) Nature and culture are insolubly entangled as “naturecultures” (Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto 3) in the liminal sphere of the hunting grounds. The third and last aspect of the analysis will deal with the aspect of empathic understanding between human and nonhuman animal in Mann’s animal narrative. Empathic Understanding In 1920 one critic maintains that Mann’s “idyll is animal psychology in its best sense”. His discussion of the problem of the animal soul, he goes on, was ingenious as he portrays the dog as dog and not as a human in disguise. Mann, Carl Müller-Rastatt argues, makes no assumptions and only shows what the senses can perceive.34 Part of the ‘animal turn’ around 1900 was an intense debate in the field of animal psychology about the animals’ soul, i.e. their intellectual abilities and emotions. Most famously the controversial experiments by the mathematician Karl von Osten with his horse ‘Clever Hans’ in Berlin in 1904 were to prove, as Karl Krall, who took on the legacy of von Osten after his death in 1909, claims in his treatise Denkende Tiere (Thinking Animals) from 1912, “that the animals feel, want and think like us” (244).35 Mann’s neighbour Karl Gruber, who instructed him on botanical details for Bashan and I, was substantially involved in this debate on animal psychology. In Krall’s journal Tierseele (Animal Soul), which appeared between 1913 and 1914, Gruber published an article on “The Crisis in Animal Psychology”. The founder of the Society for Animal Psychology in Munich

33“Die

Anziehungskraft, die das Wasser auf den Menschen übt, ist natürlich und sympathetischer Art. Der Mensch ist ein Kind des Wassers, zu neun Zehnteln besteht unser Leib daraus, und in einem bestimmten Stadium unserer Entwicklung vor der Geburt besitzen wir Kiemen.” (575) 34“Das Tierseelenproblem [ist] eines der allergrößten, rätselvollsten Probleme […]. Die Art, in der Mann es behandelt, ist schlechtweg genial. […] Er nimmt den Hund als Hund und nicht als verkleideten Menschen. Seine Idylle ist Tierpsychologie im besten Sinne. Sie hält sich völlig freie von Hypothesen, sie schildert nur […] was unseren Sinnen erkennbar ist.” (Carl MüllerRastatt, Hamburger Correspondent, 22nd May 1920; cited after Vaget 207). 35“[…] daß die Tiere gleich uns fühlen, wollen und denken […].” See Baranzke for a comprehensive account of the ‘Clever Hans’ experiments and their contemporary discussions.

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argued that the two dominating trends in animal psychology, the physiological approach, which Jakob von Uexküll stood for among others, and the philosophical line of argument, as represented by Wilhelm Wundt, were being turned over by the results of the experiments of Karl von Osten and Karl Krall. As if by a magic spell, Gruber goes on, a way opened to the psyche of the animal through a language that humans also understand (244). Even though animals do not have sufficient organs for speech, they can now communicate with humans via a language of signs, as von Osten’s experiments showed, because they possess the indispensable prerequisite, that is, ideas (244). For Gruber, ‘understanding’ is the most important aspect for attempting to build a bridge between the soul of human and nonhuman animals. Understanding, he stresses, needs patience, love and an essential empathy for the animal’s individuality (“Verständnis der Eigenart des Tieres”, 249). Empathic understanding and communication between human and nonhuman animals also lie at the heart of Mann’s animal narrative. Bashan and I abounds with references to the attempt to understand the nonhuman other. Communication happens in Bashan and I in empathic encounters. The narrator’s attempt to adopt the perspective of the dog by imaginative empathy informs the entire text. Communication and understanding happen in empathic encounters, when man and dog merge into “unpredictable kinds of ‘we’” (Haraway, When Species Meet 5). The narrator’s extreme attentiveness to Bashan seems to make interspecies communication possible. The narrator describes one such instance where he and Bashan communicate with each other. In one of their typical games, the narrator repeatedly addresses Bashan by his name “in different tones and in different degrees of emphasis”, thereby fueling the dog’s sense of self. This leads to “a kind of drunkenness of identity” (97; “eine Art von Identitätsrausch”, 560), an ecstasy to which Bashan responds with loud, jubilant barks towards heaven. The narrator most prominently assumes the perspective of his dog during their walks in the hunting grounds. It is through Bashan’s perspective that the narrator perceives the environment. His imaginative empathy even turns involuntarily into emotional contagion, when Bashan becomes so agitated hunting that the narrator starts feeling the same way as his dog. He shares the dog’s excitement when chasing after a mouse (172), a duck (230), or a hare (209). The narrator’s empathy however not only extends to his dog, but especially with regard to the hare, he also adopts the perspective of the chased animal. In a sudden, epiphanic moment, when the narrator unexpectedly encounters the hare, he feels the interconnectedness of all being through the contact with the hare’s “secret throbbing heart of the landscape” (218; “das innere schlagende Herz der Landschaft”, 606). Another strategy in the process of empathic understanding is the anthropomorphization of Bashan’s character and experiences. Anthropomorphisms have been repeatedly criticized for being of a problematic nature, as they are in danger of being rather a projection of the human’s own feelings and thoughts than an appreciation of the nonhuman other’s. Mann’s text responds to this risk by using the figure of hyperbole. Some of the anthropomorphisms that the narrator uses to

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describe Bashan’s looks, feelings and experiences are so hyperbolic that the text achieves an ironic quality, which simultaneously exposes and relativizes the inherent anthropocentrism of the representation. The narrator stresses that despite all his efforts at an empathic understanding of Bashan, there will always be an inevitable distance to ‘the soul’ of his dog: “A wondrous soul! So friendly and intimate and yet so alien in certain traits, so alien that our language is incapable of doing justice to this canine logic.” (83)36 Through the alternation of proximity and distance the text enacts what for Donna Haraway is the key to human-animal encounters—the “recognition that one cannot know the other or the self, but must ask in respect for all of time who and what are emerging in relationship (Companion Species Manifesto 50).

3 Conclusion Mann’s Bashan and I can thus be situated in the ‘animal turn’ that critics like Oskar Walzel and Hermann Bahr observed in the first two decades of the 20th century and writers like Ernest Thompson Seton described as main concern of their animal stories. The new way of seeing the animal as individual, with an own perspective, agency and consciousness is not limited to literature but widespread amongst the cultural and scientific discourses of the time.37 The ‘animal turn’ in literature participates in the latest physiological and psychological insight into and knowledge of the animal as the empathic encounters in Mann’s animal narrative show with regard to the aspect of understanding the nonhuman other. Empathic encounters in Bashan and I are attempts of emotional understanding that oscillate between anthropomorphic appropriations and respect for the irredeemable alterity of the animal. Bashan and I thereby maintains what Lori Gruen considers as essential for empathic encounters between human and nonhuman animals: a clear sense of one’s self while nonetheless acknowledging the entanglement with others (Gruen 60).

36“Wunderliche

Seele! So nah befreundet und doch so fremd, so abweichend in gewissen Punkten, daß unser Wort sich als unfähig erweist, ihrer Logik gerecht zu werden.” (554) 37Kári Driscoll, who also documents this shift in the representation of animals around 1900, sees the reason for it in the so-called Sprachkrise, the crisis of language. The animal acts as “a way out of the ‘prison-house of language’ and into the ‘Open’” (221). Though the observation that the animal serves as an antidote to the crisis of language and hence the anthropocentric ego, is an important aspect for authors like Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and also Thomas Mann, it cannot account for the simultaneous ‘animal turn’ around 1900 in several other disciplines such as natural history or animal psychology. It fails to factor in the new paradigm of empathic understanding as a “non-inferential and non-theoretical method of grasping the content of other minds” (Stueber) and the interest in perspective that became dominant at the beginning of the 20th century.

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Bashan’s ‘disentanglement’ and hence his agency in Mann’s story probably shows itself best in the episode where the dog and his master come across a ‘real’ huntsman during one of their walks. The man who hunts with a gun is obviously a poacher and kills the animals for food in the meagre times of the war. The man with the impressive pose fascinates Bashan the hunting dog and in the following he acts contrary to the traditional image of the dog as loyal and subservient companion to man. He stays on and the master returns home on his own, visibly annoyed. When animals no longer function as set metaphors or fulfill the roles humans ascribed to them but acquire agency, encountering them becomes unpredictable, surprising, or even shocking.

References Armbruster, Karla. “What Do We Want from Talking Animals? Reflections on Literary Representations of Animal Voices and Minds.” Speaking For Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing, ed. by Margo De Mello, Routledge, 2013, pp. 17–33. Bahr, Hermann. “Bücher der Natur.” Die neue Rundschau, vol. 20, 1909, pp. 276–283. Baranzke, Heike. “Nur kluge Hänschen kommen in den Himmel: Der tierpsychologische Streit um ein rechnendes Pferd zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts.” Die Seele der Tiere, ed. by Friedrich Niewöhner and Jean-Loup Seban, Harrassowitz, 2001, pp. 333–379. Boa, Elizabeth. “Walking the Dog: Paths and Thickets in Thomas Mann’s Herr und Hund.” Publications of the English Goethe Society, vol. 80, no. 2–3, 2011, pp. 166–179. Bodenburg, Julia. “Auf den Hund gekommen: Tier-Mensch-Allianzen in Donna Haraways ‘Companion Species Manifesto’ und Thomas Manns Erzählung ‘Herr und Hund’.” Ich, das Tier: Tiere als Persönlichkeiten in der Kulturgeschichte, ed. by Jessica Ullrich, Friedrich Weltzien, and Heike Fuhlbrügge, Reimer, 2008, pp. 282–293. Borgards, Roland. “Tiere und Literatur.” Tiere: Kulturwissenschaftliches Handbuch, ed. by Borgards, Metzler, 2016, pp. 225–244. Brehm, Alfred. Brehms Thierleben: Allgemeine Kunde des Thierreichs: Große Ausgabe. Vol. 1, 2nd, expanded, ed., Leipzig, 1876. Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de. Natural History, General and Particular. Vol. 4, trans. by William Smellie, illustr. with above 260 Copper-Plates, and Occasional Notes and Observations by the Translator, Edinburgh, 1780. Caracciolo, Marco. “‘Three Smells Exist in This World’: Literary Fiction and Animal Phenomenology in Italo Svevo’s ‘Argo and His Master’.” Animals in Modern Fiction, special issue of Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 60, no. 3, 2014, pp. 485–505. Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, And Selection in Relation To Sex. Vol. 1, New York, 1872. Driscoll, Kári. “The Sticky Temptation of Poetry.” Journal for Literary Theory, vol. 9, no. 2, 2015, pp. 212–229. Freud, Sigmund. “Eine Schwierigkeit der Psychoanalyse.” Gesammelte Werke: Chronologisch geordnet, vol. 12, Fischer, 1999, pp. 3–12. Goebel, Eckart. “Tierische Transzendenz: ‘Herr und Hund’.” Apokrypher Avantgardismus: Thomas Mann und die klassische Moderne, ed. by Stefan Börnchen and Claudia Liebrand, Fink, 2008, pp. 307–327. Gruber, Karl. “Die Krisis in der Tierpsychologie.” Tierseele: Zeitschrift für vergleichende Seelenkunde, ed. by Karl Krall, Verlag Emil Eisele, 1913, pp. 243–249. Gruber, Ulrich. “‘Okkulte Erlebnisse’: Der Arzt, Zoologe, Skipionier und Bergsteiger sowie Parapsychologe Professor Dr. Karl Gruber als Nachbar Thomas Manns.” Thomas Mann in München IV: Vortragsreihe Sommer 2006, ed. by Dirk Heißerer, peniope, 2008, pp. 111–153.

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Gruen, Lori. Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals. Lantern Books, 2015. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm, 2003. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Hofmiller, Josef. “Das Tier in der Dichtung.” Süddeutsche Monatshefte, vol. 25, no. 12, 1928, pp. 895–898. Honold, Alexander. “Vorkriegs-Nachlese mit Herr und Hund: Eine Dekonstruktion.” Deconstructing Thomas Mann, ed. by Honold and Niels Werber, Winter, 2012, pp. 43–63. „Hühnerhund, Vorstehhund, Stellhund.“ Brockhaus Konversationslexikon, 14th ed., 1894–1896. Kean, Linda. Animal Rights: Political and Social Change Since 1800. Reaktion Books, 1998. Krall, Karl. Denkende Tiere: Beiträge zur Tierseelenkunde auf Grund eigener Versuche. F. Engelmann, 1912. Mann, Thomas. Bashan and I. Trans. by Herman George Scheffauer, Henry Holt and Company, 1923. Mann, Thomas. “Herr und Hund: Ein Idyll.” Gesammelte Werke in dreizehn Bänden, vol. VIII, Fischer, 1974, pp. 526–617. Mann, Thomas. “Preface [To ‘Stories of Three Decades’].” Gesammelte Werke in dreizehn Bänden, vol. XIII, Fischer, 1974, pp. 111–116. McHugh, Susan. “Animal Farm’s Lessons for Literary (and) Animal Studies.” Humanimalia, vol. 1, no. 1, 2009, pp. 24–39. Nelles, William. “Beyond the Bird’s Eye: Animal Focalization.” Narrative, vol. 9, 2001, pp. 188– 194. Orlik, Franz. Das Sein im Text: Analysen zu Thomas Manns Wirklichkeitsverständnissen und ihrem Wandel. Königshausen und Neumann, 1997. Renner, Ursula. “‘Jetzt aber war der Mensch auch ein Tier geworden’—Verwandlungsgeschichten um 1900.” Hofmannsthal Jahrbuch: Zur europäischen Moderne, vol. 19, 2011, pp. 357–399. Roscher, Mieke. Ein Königreich für Tiere: Die Geschichte der britischen Tierrechtsbewegung. Tectum, 2009. Schiffer, Eva. “Irritierende Repräsentanz: Noch eine Bestandsaufnahme zu Thomas Manns 100. Geburtstag.” Rezeption der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur im Ausland, ed. by Dietrich Papenfuß and Jürgen Söring, Kohlhammer, 1976, pp. 275–285. Seton, Ernest Thompson. Wild Animals I Have Known. McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1983. Stueber, Karsten. “Empathy.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2018, plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/empathy/. Vaget, Hans Rudolf. Thomas Mann-Kommentar zu sämtlichen Erzählungen. Winkler, 1984. Walzel, Oskar. “Neue Dichtung vom Tiere.” Zeitschrift für Bücherfreunde, vol. 10, no. 1, 1918, pp. 53–58.

8

The Animal’s Eye Olivier Richon

Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. (Berger 8)

John Berger ends up his evocative, although sanctimonious essay, Why Look at Animals, with the animal’s refusal to return our gaze. Animals do not look at us any longer, they look sideways. Yet isn’t avoiding our gaze a way of acknowledging it? We can assume that animals in captivity know they are being looked at and perhaps this is what their avoidance of our gaze indicates. In the short story The Mappined Life by Saki, Mrs Gurtleberry comments about the artificial mountains of the London Zoological Gardens to her niece. The Mappin Terraces she says, “give one the illusion of seeing the animals in their natural surroundings. I wonder how much the illusion is passed on to the animals”. These new enclosures “look so spacious and natural, but I suppose a good deal of what seems natural to us would be meaningless to a wild animal”. The adolescent girl responds to her unforgivingly: “This is where our superior powers of self-deception come in, said the niece; we are able to live our unreal stupid little lives on our particular Mappin Terrace, and persuade ourselves that we are really untrammelled men and women leading a reasonable existence in a reasonable sphere”. Here the encounter with the animal in captivity is an encounter with oneself as a human animal captured by the conventions of social life: “We are just so many animals stuck down on a Mappin Terrace, with this difference in our disfavour, that the animals are there to be looked at, while nobody wants to look at us. As a matter of

O. Richon (*)  Royal College of Art, London, UK E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_8

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fact, there would be nothing to look at”. The absence of a gaze towards us is what troubles the niece most. We are worse off than animals in captivity, there is no gaze we can address as nobody returns ours. In Saki’s story, the animal, even in captivity, is existentially preferable to the human. Is it because as speaking beings, we are second rate compared to the otherness of non-speaking animals? Do we fail to fascinate non-human animals? For Berger, animals in a zoo are “the living monument to their own disappearance”. For Saki, visiting a zoo we are likely to become the living monument to our own disappearance. If animals do not look at us, what if they look at pictures? In Animals as Art Historians, the philosopher Arthur A. Danto has suggested that when it comes down to art and vision, animals may do a better job than us, assuming we understand what they see. Is it because nature does not care about culture and history and thus is less likely to be prejudiced with regard to vision? Is the animal’s gaze innocent? Does an animal recognize visual signs as referring to objects in the world? Danto’s view is that animals are good observers and have no problems with natural or continuous signs, details and differences between some types of images. Apparently, sheep, pigeons and apes are good at this in various degrees. They perceive an image but obviously show no interest in its connotations. A study of pigeons’ response to art (Watanabe) demonstrated their ability to distinguish between different artists. They were shown a range of paintings including Claude Monet’s Pears and Grapes, Paul Cézanne’s Still Life with Onions and Eugène Delacroix’s Still Life With a Lobster. Would this talent for observation turn some animals into critics, theorists, and even artists? Danto comments upon a large monochrome painting by Mark Tansy, made in 1981 when postmodernism was rife. It represents, in the genre of illustrative realism, a cow in an art gallery looking at a painting entitled The Young Bull, made in 1647 by Paulus Potter (Fig. 1). The painting is unveiled in front of the cow, a theatrical gesture that places her and us as viewers of a spectacle about picturing. On the gallery wall is also represented Monet’s Grain stacks (1890). Danto wonders what the world of this cow might be. Does the cow only see pigments, tones and colours, is her eye innocent of reference and representation or does the cow recognise a bull? If the cow only sees pigments, shapes and tones, her eye, unconcerned with the question of meaning, is akin to what John Ruskin called the innocent eye: “a certain childish perception of those flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify, as a blind man might see them if suddenly gifted with sight.” This zero degree of perception recalls Erwin Panofsky’s distinction between form and meaning: When an acquaintance greets me on the street by removing his hat, what I see from a formal point of view is nothing but the change of certain details within a configuration forming part of the general pattern of colour, lines and volumes, which constitutes my world of vision. When I identify, as I automatically do, this configuration as an object (gentleman), and the change of detail as an event (hat-lifting), I have already overstepped the limits of purely formal perception and entered the first sphere of subject matter or meaning. (26)

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Fig. 1  Mark Tansey. The Innocent Eye Test, 1981. (The Metropolitan Museum, New York)

Is this purely formal point of view primary, does it come before the recognition of objects? Seeking a vision stripped from meaning recalls the famous making strange or ostrananie (Shklovsky) of Russian formalist criticism, when art and literature seek to restore a fresh perception that has been occluded by the routine of everyday life. Is perception of the overlooked restored, though? Was it always already there waiting to be perceived in its literalness, or is it an aesthetic attitude working against blindness of our everyday life, where habits prevent us from seeing? Is the cow a formalist and therefore unconcerned by what the picture represents or does the cow recognises the young bull? Is the eye of the cow innocent of representation or knowing? If the cow recognises the picture of the bull for what it represents, does it mean that she has internalised a monocular perspective that, from the Renaissance onwards, as some claim, has been the dominant system of representation, with its optical codes still at work structurally within photography? This seems obviously absurd, yet if the cow recognises the bull, what becomes absurd is the assumption that seeing necessarily requires a code to turn shapes into identifiable objects and that a code presupposes learning how to see. If the cow responds, Danto argues, it is not because the cow is acquainted with a pictorial language. The cow is not endowed with a grammatical competence, but she may have pictorial competence, inasmuch as she may associate a visible form with a corresponding object. If a cow can see an image, it does not see the image as art, as the world of the cow is not located in culture and history but in a grazing field. Is the eye innocent or corrupted by resemblance? Ruskin’s idea of an innocent eye, demands that one would respond to pictures as if they were things made of

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“flat stains of colour”. This purely perceptive world, outside of culture and history, indicates a highly cultured and historical view of art in which the eye is trained to transcend the vulgarity of subject matter. Matter is presumably what matters to the cow. If a cow can see a bull in the picture, it means the innocent eye does not come first but last, in an effort to resist the illusionism of resemblance. The eye is knowing from the beginning. It cannot help but recognise things. Tansey’s innocent eye test is a test with art history. Danto is carried away by Tansey’s visual wit, and tries to outwit him with his comments. He asks: can the cow be turned on by the picture of the bull. If a classical image of a bull turns on a cow, is this attributable to natural or biological vision? Is Paulus Potter’s bull the equivalent of an erotic centrefold for cows, and is Danto’s analysis a stunt from a cow boy approach to art theory? I now wish to turn from Tansey’s painting of Potter’s bull to the actual painting he is referring to. The bull is the title of the painting, its main subject, but not the only subject. There are many animals, and a farmer, all looking towards the beholder, except for a sheep on the left which is looking sideways. There are also flies, a bird, a frog and other animals grazing at a distance. But it is the bull’s left eye that holds my attention. The eye is the orifice that looks at me and through which a picture is formed (Fig. 2). We can place Paulus Potter’s Bull in the context of theories of vision. It is contemporary with René Descartes’ Optics (1637). Descartes is interested in light, “the noblest and most comprehensive of the senses”. He wants to demonstrate how

Fig. 2  Paulus Potter. The Young Bull, 1647. (Mauritshuis, The Hague)

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light rays “enter into the eye”. The dark chamber is his model for vision, a room kept in complete darkness except for a hole, and in front of the hole a lens. There is a white sheet stretched behind this and placed at such a distance that an image is formed upon it: “the chamber represents the eye, the hole the pupil; the lens, the crystalline humour […] and the sheet the internal membrane which is composed of the optic nerve endings.” The room is like the eye, and yet the comparison between eye and room is not enough. Descartes wants the analogy to be more convincing. But you may become more certain of this if, by taking the eye of a newly dead person (or failing that the eye of an ox or some other large animal) you carefully cut away the three surrounding membranes at the back so as to expose a large part of the humour without spilling any. Then cover the hole with some white body thin enough to let light pass through (e.g. a piece of paper or an egg shell) and put this eye in the hole of a specially made shutter so that its front faces a place where there are various objects lit up by the sun, and its back faces the inside of the room where you are standing. (115)

The camera obscura, that represents the eye, now has an eye for a lens. It has an animal eye and an eggshell. The shell is the remains of another animal’s matter, upon which is formed an image of the objects outside, lit up by the sun: “as you look at the white body, you will see there, not perhaps without wonder or pleasure, a picture representing all the objects outside”. Wonder and pleasure are the responses to this image that appears, mediated through an animal substance and projected upon an eggshell; the egg has a shell that contains embryo and food. The demonstration is complete: “Now when you have seen this picture in the eye of a dead animal, and considered its causes, you cannot doubt that a quite similar picture is formed in the eye of a living person […]. The images of objects are not only formed in this way at the back of the eye but also pass beyond into the brain.” Descartes is precise, he does not say that we see these retinal images, but that these images are passed on into the brain. He does not necessarily propose a perspectivist notion of knowledge and perception. I can see a retinal image as it is staged in the experiment, but I will never be able to see my own retinal image. For Descartes, it is the soul that sees, not the eye. Vision is demonstrated with a dead eye, and the dead inform the living about the wonder and pleasure of images in perspective, images made from light rays. The spectacle of representation takes place in a dark room and is mediated through a large animal’s eye, a bull, an ox or a cow. It is a beautiful, even convulsive encounter between objects placed in the sun, a dead eye and an eggshell, on a dissection table of sorts. Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot have been busy dissolving Cartesian optics. The famous introduction scene of Bunuel and Dali’s film Un Chien Andalou, gets straight into the subject, with its close-up of an animal’s eye cut by a razor blade. The eye empties itself from its viscous substance. Like Descartes, Georges Bataille puts eye and egg together but for very different ends. The identity of both is dissolved in bodily fluids. The eggshell is broken, the eye becomes an egg, the egg is an eye that looks at me but does not see me.

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Fig. 3  Hampton Manor, 1941. (Abadie 129)

It is perhaps Dali (Fig. 3) who has engaged consistently with the problem of perspective and vision. In one of his earlier texts on photography, in his short manifesto, Photography, Pure Creation of the Mind (1927), Dali describes the photograph of the eye of an animal: “In a wide and limpid eye of a cow, we see a minuscule post-machinist landscape, deformed in the spherical sense, exact to the very details of the sky where minuscule and luminous clouds are floating by.” The photograph shows a landscape reflected in the eye of the cow. The eye of the animal is not here a lens that serves as a model for vision. Here the eye is a mirror like surface that produces a virtual image. It deforms and reduces. It creates a miniature landscape with minuscule and luminous clouds. This photograph, a pure invention of the mind, here shows the mutual dependency between the eye of the cow and the eye of the camera. We cannot help thinking of a miniature Dutch landscape. Paulus Potter and his cows and bull are not far, and Jan Vermeer is very near. Dali on photography again: “With all the temptations of light, Van der Meer, a new Saint Antony, conserves the object intact with an inspiration that was wholly photographic.” (my translation from French). Vermeer is a constant obsession in Dali’s iconography, and in particular The Lacemaker, an intimate painting with details that recall the clarity of camera obscura images. Dali made a film, that remained unfinished, The Prodigious Adventure of the Lacemaker and the Rhinoceros. A photograph shows the painter sitting against the edge of a wheelbarrow, ready to paint the encounter between animal and painting (Fig. 4). A huge reproduction of The Lacemaker, held by

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Fig. 4  Vincennes Zoo, 1955. (Dali, Retrospective 355)

ropes, is presented to François, the rhinoceros of the zoo of Vincennes. The creature is moving towards the cave-like arch of its enclosure that resembles the socket of a monocular eye. Here an animal, the reproduction of a Vermeer painting and a painter are in a zoo. The zoo becomes a studio, and similarly, the painter becomes part of the zoo as an exhibit: someone to be looked at. Dali paints from observation, but what he observes is invisible. His painting, also a creation of the mind, ends up depicting a logarithmic spiral of horns. It is not clear whether François, the rhinoceros, engages with the painting or not. Is this meeting likely to be as beautiful as the fortuitous encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table (an expression that the surrealists borrowed from Lautreamont). The dissection table is the zoo enclosure. And isn’t the sewing machine the mechanical incarnation of the lacemaker, as mechanical as a camera, and the rhinoceros’s horn the equivalent of the famous umbrella? What will come out of this fortuitous encounter? Will the dissection table be a deathbed smeared with blood? Look at the red blood thread of her lacemaking kit … will the horn metamorphose itself into a lacemaker’s needle? What is the relation between objects, these object-beings as Dali would call them? The lacemaker and the rhinoceros are joined for a battle, and the lacemaker is likely to win. The rhinoceros will lose a horn that turns into a logarithmic spiral of Dali’s desire. John Berger remarks that in the social space of the zoo, animals look sideways. Yet a sideway glance, in another situation, may indicate the tacit acknowledgement of the presence of another, and a peaceful non-confrontation. Some apes are particular sensitive to the gaze of another ape, or any other human or non-human

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Fig. 5  Olivier Richon. Portrait of a Monkey, C type print, 2009. (Copyright Olivier Richon)

animal. A return of the gaze would be the sign of an aggressive confrontation. Here not looking, or looking sideways, is a sign of a polite acknowledgement. Monkeys have a very specific place within the iconography of art history. In the Western Renaissance tradition, it is a living allegory of imitation. Mimesis is the art of the copy, a copy that fixes the original in a cataleptic pose that announces photography as an art of stopping time (Fig. 5). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the question of allegory resurfaces in contemporary art, and in particular within photographic practices of quotation and appropriation. Craig Owens’ essay ‘The Allegorical Impulse’ (1980) was informed by the work of Walter Benjamin on the work of mourning as a cultural form. An allegory is not simply an abstract meaning or a coded and conventional cultural sign. Allegory is rather a sensual material form that produces meanings that are incomplete. Here the sign resembles a ruin, a collection of fragments. An allegory consists of signs and objects that think, and that allow thought to wander. It involves thinking through seeing. It is a visual montage, where image and language inform one another. Saki, in The Remoulding of Groby Lington, offers his take on mimesis and an allegory of sorts. Groby Lington is a man who enjoys the company of his books and of his parrot, much more than life in society. And yet one day he finds in his nephew’s sketch book, a caricature that compares him to his parrot. They were “bearing a likeness to one another that the artist had done the utmost to accentuate”. Isn’t the parrot in this context, an allegory of bourgeois life, a parrot like existence of codes and conventions filled with empty parrot talk? The situation changes when the man is given a monkey who gets into a fight with the parrot. The bird “squawked out ‘rats to you sir!’ and the blessed monkey made one spring at him, got him by the neck and whirled him round like a rattle”. Just as Groby Lington gradually fell into a parrotlike existence, he now begins a monkeylike

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existence, mimicking the ape’s actions and temper. With Saki, the animal always has the last word or the last action. However, when it comes to picture making and picture seeing, animals have another, non-mimetic perspective. In the late 1950s, research undertaken in London Zoo by Desmond Morris had chimpanzees, capuchins and gorillas undertaking mark making in a free form style that was prevalent at the time in the art world. Morris is convincing in establishing stylistic patterns that demonstrate their gradual mastery of mark making on a sheet of paper. The culmination of the experiment is perhaps the acquisition of the skill to draw a circle, something that Congo, a particularly gifted chimpanzee, was capable of (Fig. 6). Achieving a circle indicates intent, agency and control and recalls the calligraphy of the Zen sign for emptiness. Unlike other experiments with animals, predicated upon the giving of food as reward and index of communication, Morris was keen to emphasise that the drawings or paintings made by apes were a form of enjoyment, not dissimilar to the muscular enjoyment in gymnastics. Morris notes how the apes were often absorbed in their tasks, what he calls “self-rewarding activities”, “actions which, unlike animal behavior, are performed for their own sake rather than to attain some basic biological goal” (144).

Fig. 6  Advance stage of differentiation: Congo’s circle. (Morris 136, fig. 48)

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Other tests, that included a reward in terms of food exchanged against drawings, only produced hasty sketches that had none of the aesthetic qualities of the works made with calm concentration. For Morris, only the ape in captivity, housed and fed, is likely to become an artist. The artist-ape is an animal that does not use its instinct for the acquisition of food. Having a full stomach is here the precondition for art making, just as it also is a precondition for aesthetic contemplation, according to Immanuel Kant: “People with a healthy appetite relish everything so long as it is something they can eat. Such delight, consequently, gives no indication of taste having anything to say in the choice. Only when men have all they want can we tell who among the crowd has taste or not” (49). Morris is keen to e­ mphasize a shared aesthetic pleasure between human and ape when it comes to picture making. Congo had his paintings shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1957 (Fig. 7). The success of the exhibition overshadowed the research value of the experiments: “the serious purpose of the investigation was almost obliterated by the joyous reactions of the popular press” (Morris 27). Desmond Morris was also a surrealist painter and therefore well acquainted with non-mimetic art practices. It is worth noting that in the experiments, the supply of materials, such as paper, pencil, brushes and paint, already constitutes the premises for making art. They are not neutral or innocent, they are signifiers of art. If apes can be called expressive artists, it is in part because expression was at the time a privileged signifier of art practice. And yet the similarity between ape art and human art is not so much at the level of expression but at the level of the signifiers and apparatus made available to them. The animal studio at the zoo is a kind of art school that provides the materials for making art: “The stage is set, as it were, for rhythmic, spatially organized responses which, if given the appropriate equipment, will lead naturally to the first pictures” (Morris 145). However,

Fig. 7  Congo choosing a colour. (Morris 49, plate 17)

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as Morris remarked, apes never draw from their own initiative but respond when prompted to do so in the context of the experiment. Berger, Saki, Danto and Morris offer a bestiary of words and images on encounters between humans and animals. It is a critical dictionary of sorts, where the gaze and actions of animals question us and our assumptions about them. And yet the animal remains an insistent allegory in as much as allegory can never be fully explained. It leaves instead an aporia, a puzzlement that holds meaning at bay.

References Abadie, Daniel. La vie de Salvador Dali. Centre Georges Pompidou, 1980. Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals.” About Looking, by Berger, Pantheon Books, 1980, pp. 1–26. Dali, Salvador. Oui: Vol 1. La révolution paranoïaque-critique. Denoël Gonthier, 1971. Dali, Salvador. Retrospective 1920–1980. Centre Pompidou, 1979. Danto, Arthur C. “Animals as Art Historians: Reflections on the Innocent Eye.” Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-historical Perspective, U of California P, 1992, pp. 15–31. Descartes, René. “Optics: Discourse 5.” Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, Cambridge UP, 1988, pp. 63–64. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. Trans. by James Creed Meredith, Clarendon P, 1957. Morris, Desmond. The Biology of Art: A Study of the Picture-making Behaviour of the Great Apes and its Relationship to Human Art. Methuen, 1962. Owens, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism.” October, vol. 12, 1980, pp. 67–86. Panofski, Erwin. “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art.” Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers In and On Art History, Doubleday, 1995, pp. 26–54. Ruskin, John. The Elements of Drawing. 1857. The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 15, London, Allen, 1904. Saki. The Short Stories of Saki. The Bodley Head, 1930. Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique.” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. and trans. by L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reis, U of Nebraska P, 1965, pp. 3–24. Watanabe, Shigeru, Junko Sakamoto, and Masumi Wakita. “Pigeon’s discrimination of paintings by Monet and Picasso.” Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, vol. 63, no. 2, 1995, pp. 165–174.

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Two Diverging Cosmologies from the Tiny to the Huge: Liang Shaoji and Hubert Duprat’s Artistic Collaborations with Silkworms and Caddisflies Concepción Cortés Zulueta

As an art historian with some background in biology, most of my research has been focused on the presence and agency of non-human animals in contemporary art from the 1960s to the 21st century (Cortés Zulueta, Fundamentos biológicos). One of the first things that comes to my mind when thinking about human-­ animal encounters (this particular kind of animal-animal encounters) is how these exchanges differ depending on cultural and biographical dimensions. Therefore, I am going to compare two artistic human-animal encounters which, in many ways, have traits in common regarding their approaches towards non-human animals, but diverge in many other features. The two artists whose work I am addressing here are Liang Shaoji,1 and Hubert Duprat.2 Both artists have worked extensively with insect larvae, each of them with a distinct species or set of species: Liang with silkworms, the caterpillars of the domestic silkmoth (Bombyx mori) and a species which belongs to the order Lepidoptera, and Duprat with some species of caddisflies, part of the order Trichoptera. The adults of Lepidoptera and Trichoptera are both terrestrial and look similar, as the two orders are closely related and comprise the superorder Amphiesmenoptera (Holzenthal et al.; “Lepidoptera”). Both larvae spin silk from modified salivary glands, though the Trichoptera larvae are aquatic. In fact, the two artists seem to have been attracted to these specific species by something crafted by the insects, something which they perceived as created by the larvae

1For 2For

Liang’s biography, see: Brouwer, “Liang Shaoji Talk”; Gladston. Duprat’s biography, see: Duprat and Besson, Hubert Duprat Theatrum.

C. Cortés Zulueta (*)  Malaga, Spain © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_9

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with their silk: either the cocoons woven by the silkworms or the cases the caddisflies build using gravel, shells or plant matter. Duprat was born in the village of Nérac, in the South of France, in 1957 and Liang in the city of Shanghai in Eastern China in 1945. So, added to the cultural and geographical particularities, there is also a rural-urban contrast regarding the backgrounds of the artists which reflects in the onset and development of their entomological-oriented careers. For instance, around the time of their respective births, Shanghai had a population of several millions while Nérac’s only amounted to a few thousands. Accordingly, the ways in which Duprat and Liang experienced their encounters with either caddisflies or silkworms were, of course, different; but nonetheless those encounters have certain elements in common. First of all, as has been already pointed out, they are insect-human encounters. A kind of encounter that doesn’t seem to get as much attention as encounters involving bigger and more charismatic animals. Especially if the former is not ephemeral and is portrayed in a positive light instead of focusing on describing unpleasant clashes with stinging wasps or biting bed bugs.3 As well, despite the age difference, both Duprat and Liang started working as artists with their insect species in the 1980s. And they continue to do so nowadays, fostering a lifelong experience with the species of their choice. Hence, they have opted for living with and around insects, either caddisflies or silkworms. In consequence, they share a biographical, vital, and entomological connection with these tiny creatures, a dilated human-animal encounter with a beginning but without a clear-cut end encompassing the life cycles of multiple individuals. For this reason, I don’t agree with Tom Tyler when he circumscribes an encounter as something enclosed in bodies and definite in space and time, as “a meeting between discrete parties, which ceases at the moment they combine or separate” (3). And I believe that the peculiarities present in Liang’s and Duprat’s entomological encounters resist those attempts of demarcation, blurring some boundaries instead. As a result of their decades-long approaches, the entomological encounters favoured by the two artists have had two distinct moments or stages which can be put in parallel. First an early, introductory phase, quite long and somewhat dormant, followed by a properly artistic exploration. For instance, Duprat happened to discover the strange and varied cases built by the caddisfly larvae while he roamed through the country, probably as a child, in the streams surrounding his home village. In Duprat’s words: I spent my boyhood and teenage years in the countryside, where I hobnobbed with hunters and fishermen. Very early on, I had a keen interest in archaeology and the natural sciences. I made early observations in aquaria, where I installed water scorpions, waterstriders, newts, tadpoles, pond skaters, planorbid snails and, right at the outset, caddis worms—Trichoptera. (Duprat and Besson, “The Wonderful Caddis Worm”)

3For

instance, insects are underrepresented in Tyler and Rossini; Smith and Mitchell.

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But not everyone in France or in Nérac knows about the existence of caddisflies, despite them being common in many rivers. Duprat found and brought them into his house, making these wild species temporarily domestic and part of his childhood games, of his infant leisure. In contrast, Liang couldn’t escape knowing about silkworms or their cocoons, silk and its animal producers being such a huge issue in China, either historically, socially or economically. He must have learned about them when he was very young, he might not even have remembered a time when he didn’t know what a silkworm was. As the Cultural Revolution disrupted his artistic education, Liang started working in a linen factory: I was assigned to the largest linen-making plant. There I used linen and cotton to make carpets, fabrics, lampshades, shoes, as well as tapestry […] Later I became the director of the Institute of Arts and Crafts in Taizhou. The scope of research of the Institute ranged from embroidery, to sculpture, to toys. As the director of the Institute in Taizhou, I could choose what to study and to focus on, and I could go on experimenting with fibers, which I liked so much. (Brouwer, “Liang Shaoji Talk”)

In 1985 Liang enrolled at the Varbanov Institute of Tapestry in Hangzhou (Zhejiang province) where, encouraged by Marin Varbanov (O’Dea), he experimented with textile installations. He lived in Hangzhou for a few years, a city that was considered as the historic centre of silk production. So Liang’s link with silk, and silkworms, was originally associated with crafts and the textile industry, and focused on fabrics and fibres. After this initial stage these entomological encounters with either caddisflies or silkworms entered into a second stage that metamorphosed these personal experiences into fully artistic ones. Interestingly enough, in both cases this transformation had something to do with glow, with the reflection of light: with the glow of gold in Duprat’s case and with the glow of silk in Liang’s. Duprat decided he was going to provide scales of gold and other precious materials to the caddisfly larvae when he heard there was gold in some of the rivers of his native region (Duprat and Besson, Hubert Duprat Theatrum 7–8). He thought it was, in fact, possible that the larvae had occasionally used the gold they could find in the riverbed instead of the gravel, the vegetal matter or the shells. So why not reproducing and reinforcing the process on a large and artistic scale?: I knew that caddis larvae were able to make tubes using the materials around them and I had learned from my friends that gold could be found in rivers. This made me wonder whether caddis larvae would be able to use gold to make their cases. So I decided to place the larvae in a sort of laboratory, in which they have no choice but to construct their cases out of gold because I deprived them of all other materials. (“Artist Hubert Duprat discussing his work”)4

4Transcription of the English subtitles, which capture the essence of what Duprat says, but do not translate his exact words.

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In the beginning of his practice, Duprat was unsure about his aims. So he ended up patenting the jewelled cases of the Trichoptera as if they were the invention of a fashionable and heterodox jeweller.5 After that he explains that he had problems to exhibit them as art, as they were considered too precious as artworks. Finally, in 1984 Duprat was invited by Louis Bec to present the precious cases in Le Vivant et l’Artificiel (Duprat and Besson, Hubert Duprat Theatrum 7–8). This exhibition was part of that year’s Avignon Festival, and it combined artistic and scientific projects that blurred the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the living and the inert (Faivre d’Arcier). The caddisflies’ cases fitted in this context, as they had been manufactured, but not by a human being. Liang was already working as an artist when he made an installation with raw silk and empty cocoons on it as part of the pivotal exhibition China/Avant Garde of 1989 (Noth et al.). Until that moment he had been interested in and had experimented with textiles, and had tried to overcome the barrier between art and crafts, claiming that there wasn’t a difference between the two. Indeed, the barrier between art and crafts was the first one he both denied and fought against. Then, he continued questioning several others and among them was a very core one: the barrier separating art and life. Silk was helpful from the start in this sense, “because under a certain light silk still seems to move, to be alive” (Brouwer, Cloud). However, the fabric wasn’t alive, it only appeared to be alive. Therefore, Liang took his ideas a step further: In 1988 I created the large installation titled ‘Yi’ Series-‘Magic Cube’ (materials: silk, dry cocoons, metal, rice paper), which was accepted for the 1989 ‘China Modern Art Exhibition’ at China Fine Arts Museum. Later this piece went to the Hangzhou Guomei Auditorium. I was setting up the installation right after a rainstorm, and a beam of light came shining through a window onto the silk fabric. I was entranced at the sight of cocoons dangling against a translucent, lit-up background, so I thought: ‘Why don’t I do a piece with raw silk from living worms?’ (Tong, “Liang Shaoji and His ‘Tao’ of Silkworms” 20)6

The light passing through the silky installation made it glow, as if it had suddenly come to life. That and the empty cocoons made Liang wonder if it wouldn’t be possible to work with life in a real and direct sense, not just in a metaphorical one: with living cocoons and with silk made by living worms instead of the common (and dead) textile. He discovered that “the egg-shaped cocoon of a silkworm is in fact fabric, and full of ideas about life” (Liang 41). Even though a cocoon is not an egg, both its egg-shape and its role in metaphorically giving birth to a moth turn it into a suitable foundation for Liang’s artistic cosmology. In fact, cosmic eggs are common among creation myths (Stookey 33–37). Like Duprat, Liang questioned the natural-artificial distinction, and subsequently the two artists acknowledged the agency of the insects to some extent.

5The

patent is reproduced in Duprat and Besson, Hubert Duprat Theatrum 9. 1989 ‘China Modern Art Exhibition’ at China Fine Arts Museum is, in fact, China/Avant Garde exhibition.

6The

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Thus, they approached their relationships with them as collaborations. As a result, Duprat and the caddisfly larvae made jewelled cases with gold, pearls and precious stones, and Liang presented different objects and materials to the silkworms for the insects to wrap them in silk, among other projects. This way, the two artists were highlighting that animals as tiny and as allegedly as irrelevant as these insects were producing things, contributing to a work of art. Of course, both types of collaborations can be seen as human impositions, even as an exploitation of the animal co-worker, or considered as Uninvited Collaborations with Animals—the title with which Nina Katchadourian labelled her own artistic interactions with spiders, among other creatures. But despite these impositions and asymmetries, which they recognise in different ways, Liang and Duprat seem to stress that they are working together with the insects, making something valuable and with a symbiotic component which would not exist without the cooperation of both insects and humans. Over time, I understood that both Liang and Duprat had begun to see the world surrounding them through the prism of their chosen species, and to reconstruct it from the tiny—the insects themselves—to the huge—the whole planet, even the universe.7 They did so inspired by two different worldviews, rooted in their respective contexts: cultural, geographical, and personal. Thus, they created and recreated two diverging cosmologies which shaped their two distinct aesthetics. An initial glare or glow was what triggered their artistic projects, but then they followed different paths. I perceive their practices as lead by different images or patterns, even metaphors, which might partially explain their choices regarding their insect collaborators and the materials employed, either caddisflies and gold, or silkworms and silk. In Duprat’s case, that aesthetic image would be a mosaic, similar to the patched surface of the Trichoptera’s cases, jewelled or not: a compilation of definite items with a comparable size, each with an assigned location in a general scheme of things. Liang’s image, in comparison, would be a cloud, nebulous and intangible, smooth and lacking a definite shape; whitish, but with many other hues, and recalling in several ways the qualities of silk. Or even getting confused with silk, as Liang once explored by using silk-stained mirrors which also reflected the passing clouds: clouds as silk, silk as clouds (Brouwer, Cloud). Along with the mosaic image, Duprat is captivated by cabinets of curiosities. Christian Besson observed that his work seemed “to be fueled by an insatiable curiosity about science”, and that the world the artist had created around him recalled “a kind of cabinet de curiosités, such as existed during the Renaissance, a Wunderkammer—a room of wonders—as the German term so nicely puts it”. Duprat replied to Besson that “[t]he collectors who created those Wunderkammern were driven by a feeling that I myself experience about art” (Duprat and Besson,

7For another artistic approach from the tiny to the huge, and a comparison between Liang Shaoji’s silkworm artworks, and Yanagi Yukinori’s collaborations with ants, see Cortés Zulueta, “Two artists, two ecologies”.

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“The Wonderful Caddis Worm”). These cabinets have been described as spaces housing an encyclopedic, descriptive, taxonomic and visual knowledge, as the place where natural history can be located (Pimentel). This all-encompassing drive to gather knowledge, and certain kinds of natural objects, matchs Duprat’s artistic practices. On the one hand, he has made many delicate assemblages with minerals, stones, red coral, bone, and other materials favoured in the antique cabinets of wonder; like tree branches covered with small polished tiles of bone (À la fois, la racine et le fruit, 1997–1998), or pyrite crystals arranged in a cylindrical shape (Cristaux de pyrite, 2007–2008). Even when he uses less precious materials, as different sections of PVC tubing, he composes them in order to generate mesmerising tessellated patterns (“Artist Hubert Duprat discussing his work”). Besides, the jewelled cases of the caddis larvae act like the tangible and conceptual core of Duprat’s artworks and collections, and their mixed nature condenses the main features of the archetypal cabinet objects: opulence (the gold and precious stones), rarity, strangeness (close to teratology), fine workmanship (although non-human), maybe even certain magical properties or aura (the glow) added to the way they illustrate ambiguity and metamorphosis, and question certain categories (Daston and Park 273). On the other hand, Duprat soon started collecting every item, illustration or information he could gather about the caddisflies, and organised it all in the form of an archive where every single piece of knowledge had its place, just like the tesserae of the Trichoptera’s golden cases. In his quest, Duprat has traveled to libraries, archives and museums—mostly around Europe –, or he has made books and other objects travel towards him. In this way, Duprat has created a library he named The last library (La dernière bibliotèque) (Chardon; Duprat), which he exhibited and is constantly enlarged through those trips, just like the cabinets through exploration expeditions and the European expansion. As has been often remarked, in the cabinets of curiosities the objects were inextricable from the stories, names or tags they were granted, from the textual knowledge which both explained their relevance and the way they were classified or sorted. And Duprat has found his own path to go from objects to words using the mosaic image provided by the caddisflies as a structure he somewhat replicates. It is as if he is building an archive around himself, bit by bit, just like the larvae make their tubular dwellings. Duprat, then, seems to look back with a certain nostalgia towards the cabinets of curiosities, and to the material and mythical founding’s of modern science and the outline of Western civilisation. As well, Liang also turns to the past. Not just a few centuries, but a couple of millennia towards the roots of Chinese culture. Above all, to schools of thought like Taoism or Zen Buddhism, and figures like Zhuangzi or Laozi, whose ideas he combined with those of other Western philosophers like Martin Heidegger or Friedrich Nietzsche. For Liang, “[t]he philosophy of Lao-Tzu and Chuang-Tzu [sic] provides wisdom of human existence, or aesthetic of existence, by focusing on how an individual faces life” (Tong, “The Way to Truth” 111). If Duprat was replicating a very specialised cabinet of curiosities and collecting knowledge in the form of objects and texts, Liang turned to

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philosophy and meditation in order to generate knowledge. In a way, Liang wasn’t collecting artworks, or objects, but speculative propositions (or meditations) in an open-ended series he called Nature Series, consisting of a numbered succession of works brought about by his coexistence with the silkworms. As explained by Brouwer: Most of these works are entitled Nature Series, followed by a number and a date. Each Nature Series may start with one initial work and continue to multiply over a number of years, ultimately comprising several works made at different dates. (Cloud)

If in the world outlined by Duprat each item had its definite borders and was clearly distinguished from the other items placed next to it, the universe claimed by Liang was as fluid and continuous as the silk secreted by his worms. In fact, the worms almost erased the borders, the distinctions, softening the shapes and the edges of things, attaching them to movement and life (live silk, live worms, live thoughts) and not to dead and motionless texts like, in a way, Duprat did in his archive. Despite their small size, Liang argued that the silkworms, their “breeding, reeling and weaving”, were responsible for shaping “China’s character, philosophy, aesthetics and history” and he seems to imply that silkworms had also shaped global culture, through the Silk Roads (Liang 42). After all, silkworms had lived with humans along millennia, and if humans had moulded the life cycle and bodies of silkworms, why not the other way around, through observation and coevolution? When Donna Haraway writes that “[c]o-constitutive companion species and coevolution are the rule, not the exception”, this can be applied to humans and silkworms too (Haraway 220). In this sense, Liang pointed to traditional sayings that set the sacrificed and laborious existence of silkworms as an example, or their entangled and skeined silk cocoons as a metaphor of a cluster of embroiled thoughts inside which one could get lost or immersed (Liang 44). Liang wished to turn the “great inventiveness of ancient China into a modern artistic creation, to create a kind of unique artistic language, and then build a new ‘Silk Road’” (Liang 42). In this manner, Liang tries to emphasise the connections and dependencies between humans and other animals, above their differences. For instance, he challenges the animal/human dichotomy referring to “a passage by Zhuangzi called ‘On the Equality of All Things’, in which he argues that nature, animals and people are all the same” (Gladston). Thus, all living beings deserve the same respect: The Chinese Taoist philosopher Zhuang Zi once expressed the idea that “everything needs to be treated equally”. We shall not think human beings are superior to other living creatures. When I see a silkworm, I treat it like a baby. Therefore, to me, to care about them is like caring about life and human beings. Deep in our hearts, we shall not think ourselves superior to any other species in any way and shall respect all other creatures and take care of them. (Brouwer, “Liang Shaoji Talk”)

As mentioned, Liang defied other dichotomies as well, like art/crafts but also nature/culture or art/science; and most importantly, art and life. As I have noted

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before, this position of lifting or undermining these conceptual barriers is congruous with the cloud image that Liang favours, and with the role and aesthetics of the silk threads which the worms extruded. When he first became interested in silkworms, he developed a method to encourage them to cover scraps of metal and fragments of wire with their silk, to make those materials more amiable. Liang associated metal with China’s industrialisation, with hardness, cruelty and violence, and he was trying to soothe those attributes: “When warm, delicate silk threads are wrapped around cold metal, it affects you” (Brouwer, Cloud). Then, he left behind big cities (Shanghai, Hangzhou) and installed his studio in a sacred mountain, adopting a more ethereal position: I moved my studio to Tiantai, a sacred place for Buddhism and Taoism. The clouds and the atmosphere gave me “a sense of cloud”, like life, vastness, transcendence and detachment. I came to realize that Zen means to think in peace, “a natural state”, or “the surroundings changing with the state of the mind”. (Tong, “The Way to Truth” 111)

The silky mantle covering the objects, and metamorphosing them into artworks, also made them more difficult to distinguish, to sort and classify, disguising their shapes and limits and forcing us to look at them through the filter of silk, of the organic, erasing distance and anchoring them to life. Liang is inviting us to look through a Chinese wooden window whose lattice has been occupied by silkworm cocoons, and its pattern dissolved by the silk threads (Window/Nature Series No.159, 2011). Ultimately, instead of focusing on the objects, Liang seems to shift our attention towards the meditations and emotions that emerge from and around them. In contrast with this, and although he partially questions them, Duprat relies more on divisions and classifications. In Duprat’s cosmology each item stands by itself, instead of getting enmeshed with others or with the background. This aligns with his main inspiration, cabinets of curiosities, and with the image and the aesthetic of the mosaic, which the Trichoptera larvae also contribute to build and design. In fact, both Duprat and Liang need and use silk, through either caddisflies or silkworms, as both of these species extrude silk in order to build either their cases or cocoons. But for Liang silk is the main material, focus and image of his work, while for Duprat silk is just the glue that holds together the gold scales and the diverse definite items of his mosaic forms. In a way, through his artworks and the library he is compiling, Duprat evokes a compartmentalised universe ruled by an orderly system, a classificatory diagram with its branches and hierarchies. A system that resembles taxonomy and Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae; a system he uses to codify and regulate the larvae themselves: The larvae I use belong to the families Limnephilidae, Leptoceridae, Sericostomatidae and Odontoceridae, with a preference for the Limnephilid genera Potamophylax and Allogamus. I collect the larvae from January to April, in low- and medium-altitude mountain areas, and keep them in an aquarium where the water is oxygenated, circulated and kept at 40% [sic] C. (Duprat and Besson, “The Wonderful Caddis Worm”)

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A system, an operative methodology that he also apparently employs to sort the different kinds of objects (books, journals, illustrations) and information he gathers in his Trichoptera’s library: The oldest reference I managed to find to an experiment with the caddis worm is in the writings of François-Jules Pictet, an entomologist from Geneva […] Jean-Henri Fabre, one of the founding fathers of ethology, describes his observations on and experiments with the species Limnephilus flavicornis. […] The first reference to an aesthetically unusual result occurred in 1923, with Canon C.-H. de Labonnefon. (Duprat and Besson, “The Wonderful Caddis Worm”)

Duprat declares he is collaborating with the larvae, and I think he is doing so to a certain extent. In fact, there are options in this sense, as the Trichoptera larvae have a certain flexibility in order to build their cases, which is what makes the jewelled ones possible in the first place (Gould and Gould 35–40).8 However, in line with the hierarchies and classifications I have mentioned, Duprat sees and describes himself as the architect supervising the work of his industrious artisans, turning to the literary topic of the laborious insect (hardworking ants, dedicated bees, artistic caddisflies) we can trace back to entomological treatises such as Jean Henri Fabre’s Souvenirs entomologiques (1879–1907), or more recent books, like Karl von Frisch’s Animal Architecture (1974). As Duprat states: “The work is a collaborative effort between me and the caddis larvae. I create the conditions ­necessary for the caddis to display their talents. I create situations. I’m a bit like an architect who has builders carry out his work.” (“Artist Hubert Duprat discussing his work”) Somehow, Duprat takes the place of the god of the cosmology he is recreating, while Liang talks about himself as if he was just another silkworm, consecrating his life to a certain end. Duprat tends to keep a certain distance from the insects, while Liang immerses himself in the life, world, and universe surrounding him. Accordingly, he tells the story of how one night he woke up to discover himself wrapped in silk threads, like his worms, like if he was inside the rough sketch of his own cocoon: I’ve even turned my bedroom into a temporary silkworm room and slept on a mat on the floor. Once, when I woke up in the middle of the night, I discovered that the fine silk quietly spat by a silkworm had already linked my shoulder, neck and head. The creased shape of a cocoon suddenly made me consider that tired out from too much work, wasn’t I just like a silkworm? (Liang 43–44)

Liang, then, tries to abolish distances and to bring everything back to life by touching it with the silk thread. While Duprat, on the contrary, cherishes distance as something useful and valuable for gathering critical or artistic knowledge. This also explains why Duprat seems fully aware of the impositions on the ­caddisfly

8Gould and Gould focus on the nets made by some species of caddisfly. But the flexibility they describe concerning repairs seems to apply to how Duprat’s caddisflies mend their cases, which is an ability that the artist uses to create more varied results.

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larvae when he makes them do what he wants. In comparison, when Liang explains how he gets silkworms to do certain things, he either seems more ambiguous, or tries to compensate the alleged impositions without fully and clearly acknowledging them. For instance, by taking himself the compromised position in which he had put the silkworms in before during a performance, in which he walked on the same kind of metal shavings that he provided to the silkworms, getting badly hurt in the process (Nature Series No. 25, 1999) (Brouwer, Cloud). Therefore, both Liang and Duprat consider that they are collaborating or working together with either silkworms or caddisflies, that they are creating artworks together. The extended nature of these creative human-insect encounters puts into play the artists’ diverging backgrounds and ideas. The latter progress and grow in contact with the lives and capacities of the insects, with the images and possibilities that these tiny creatures open. Consequently, instead of mechanical interactions, after which its components remain unchanged, these prolonged encounters shape its participants, that become enmeshed in order to create new meanings and metaphors. Another issue that can be confronted in the projects of these two artists with either caddisflies or silkworms is related to the binomial universality-specificity. Both artists depart from the tiny in order to reach the huge (Cortés Zulueta, “Two artists, two ecologies”), but along their journey they approach the life of the insects in different ways. Duprat focuses on the specific. He has selected a section of the life cycle of the caddisflies: The aquatic larvae phase when they build their protective cases. And in this particular artistic project—his main one, although he has others—he is only interested in Trichoptera, and only gathers publications and illustrations that refer to them, scoping every library in his search for more items. Just like European explorers combed the world looking for strange animals, plants and minerals to bring to their queens and kings. The difference is that these explorers looked for variety and classified it, while Duprat’s compilation activities are extremely specific and only address caddisflies and their cases, just the variety of images and sources concerning them. Meanwhile, Liang considers the entirety of the silkworms’ life cycle: from worm to cocoon/pupae, to butterfly. Unlike what happens in the silk industry, through him silkworms are able to complete their life cycles instead of dying while pupating. He lives with them, listens to them and directs the attention of the viewers towards them, towards their lives, trying to arise their empathy not only towards them, but to any other being surrounding them. Thus, Liang has exhibited a roll of painting stained by all the steps in the silkworms’ life cycle, by the remains and traces they leave behind (Broken Landscape/Nature Series No. 148) (Tong, “Liang Shaoji and His ‘Tao’ of Silkworms” 24). Or he has created an installation that amplified the sounds of these insects, nibbling mulberry leaves or fluttering their wings (Listen to the silkworm/Nature Series No. 98, 2006). On the whole, he is interested in how silkworms illuminate Chinese and the world cultures, history and nature, and our relationships with the planet. And he explores all these connections and confusions between nature and culture, art and life, and how they shape and influence each other. Accordingly, he also complains about the

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specificity of modern science, about how it tends to miss the big picture, and he points out how isolating things in order to study them ends up setting all these barriers that enclose, and limit, concepts and realities: [D]espite the triumph of science and reasoning, logics and criticism, which has greatly boosted the social progress, modern science is not omnipotent, so with [sic, probably for “as”] human understanding of the world grows, people feel they are ignorant. By contrast, Eastern philosophy understands the relationship between the sky, the earth and human being from a macro perspective in the framework of dialectics. (Tong, “The Way to Truth” 111)

In Liang’s artistic project, I find compelling the way he stressed connections instead of shapes and divisions, how he tried to overcome all those conceptual barriers. And, besides, what Liang declared sounded familiar, converging with recent scientific developments; because taxonomies are being constantly re-thought, and units like the species concept have been thoroughly discussed and questioned, and addressed as more fluid and permeable divisions (De Queiroz 879–882). However, both approaches, Liang’s or Duprat’s, can be seen as complementary. It is as if Liang pointed the path to follow, with the help of the silkworms and their cocoons as well as inspired by Chinese tradition, when underscoring how everything, every concept, gets confused and mingled with its opposite and with what lies next to it, making everything part of its silky cloud. In contrast, Duprat’s works create a dialogue with the place where we come from concerning systematic knowledge. Liang’s position is complemented and enriched by Duprat’s and his divisions and separations of the mosaic cases of the Trichoptera larvae. Liang, as he has explained and acknowledged, would have never become the artist he is now if he had not learned, through his philosophical readings and early travels to France, Germany, or Russia about the Western, individual, linear, progressing, concept of the artist, and combined it with his own background and explorations of traditional Chinese culture (Brouwer, “Liang Shaoji Talk”; Gladston). That is, Liang initiated his practice over the barriers and divisions he is trying to lift, and he found theoretical support for this in Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings, which he characterises as “powerful” and a “hammer” that can be used to break with the constraints and softness of the Chinese tradition (Gladston). Meanwhile, Duprat looks back with nostalgia towards the foundations of science, and its classifications. Perhaps, missing those divisions, since everything is becoming more hybrid and mixed, and thus more difficult to separate. But his mosaic image also reminds us that we should not forget or underestimate these concepts, barriers, and divisions as they are still extant, influencing how we approach, experience and encounter other animals; even in Liang’s case. In this essay, I have sketched the main nodes of the comparison between these two human-insect encounters with either caddisflies or silkworms. I have tried to outline the main features of these two artistic cosmologies, and how Liang and Duprat have grounded them in their respective biographical and cultural contexts. Both artists came into contact with those specific species in different ways, and from then on they developed lifelong encounters with successive generations of

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these insects. They turn to these small creatures and approach them as fundamental elements, as living seeds of their artistic cosmologies, which attempt to encircle everything, from the tiny to the huge; including art, life and science. Therefore, Duprat and Liang also share an all-encompassing ambition which is worth exploring and that might be related to the small size and short life span of the insects, which makes them more manageable and apt to generate and discuss entire worldviews (Cortés Zulueta, “Pequeñas hormigas mundanas”). However, the two artists approach these interactions as collaborations and certainly, what they produce, what they create, wouldn’t be possible without the contributions of either caddisflies or silkworms, a fact that both of them acknowledge. Accordingly, the coexistence with these multiple insects allowed these humans to find in them two peculiar patterns that lead, encourage and condense their artistic and vital practices: the mosaic image in Duprat’s case and the cloud image in Liang’s. A divided mosaic like the patched surface of the caddis larvae’s cases, and a continuous and intangible cloud, smooth and lacking a definite shape like the objects covered by the silkworms’ threads. In this sense, it is difficult to establish what came first, and to which extent: the concerns of the artists or the aesthetics provided by the insects? In any case, it would be interesting to think deeper about the mutual influence and feedback in exchanges like these ones, especially about the contrasts between these two entomological encounters, these two core metaphors and the distinct cosmologies they have made possible.

References “Artist Hubert Duprat discussing his work.” YouTube, uploaded by NorfolkCountyCouncil, 10 Mar. 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=e78hni1LoSo. Brouwer, Marianne. Cloud: Liang Shaoji. ShanghArt, 2007. Brouwer, Marianne. “Liang Shaoji Talk with Marianne Brouwer.” ShanghART, 2009, www. shanghartgallery.com/galleryarchive/text.htm?textId=1824. Accessed 30 July 2017. Chardon, Elisabeth. “Hubert Duprat et le grand livre des trichoptères.” Le Temps, 6 Aug. 2012, www.letemps.ch/societe/2012/08/06/hubert-duprat-grand-livre-trichopteres. Accessed 30 July 2017. Cortés Zulueta, Concepción. Fundamentos biológicos de la creación: Animales en el arte y arte animal. Dissertation, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2016. UAM_Biblioteca, repositorio. uam.es/handle/10486/672482. Cortés Zulueta, Concepción. “Pequeñas Hormigas Mundanas, Enormes Insectos Utópicos: Las Obras Mirmecológicas de Yukinori Yanagi.” REGAC – Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo, no. 2016.1, 2016, pp. 277–315. Cortés Zulueta, Concepción. “Two artists, two ecologies, and a shared empathy towards nonhuman animals’ agencies: Yanagi Yukinori and Liang Shaoji.” Journal of Contemporary ­Chinese Art, vol. 3, no. 3, 2016, pp. 377–387. Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. Zone Books, 1998. De Queiroz, Kevin. “Species concepts and species delimitation.” Systematic biology, vol. 56, no. 6, 2007, pp. 879–886. Duprat, Hubert. Miroir Du Trichoptère / The Caddisfly’s Mirror. Website, trichoptere.hubertduprat.com. Accessed 30 July 2017.

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Duprat, Hubert, and Christian Besson. Hubert Duprat Theatrum: Guide Imaginaire Des Collections. Réunion des musées nationaux, 2002. Duprat, Hubert, and Christian Besson. “The Wonderful Caddis Worm: Sculptural Work in Collaboration with Trichoptera.” Trans. by Simon Pleasance. Leonardo, vol. 31, no. 3, 1998, pp. 173–177, www.leonardo.info/isast/articles/duprat/duprat.html. Accessed 30 July 2017. Fabre, Jean-Henri. Souvenirs entomologiques: Études sur l’instinct et les mœurs des insectes. Paris, 1879. Faivre d’Arcier, Bernard. “Le vivant et l’artificiel.” IHEST, 15 May 2009, www.ihest.fr/les-formations/le-cycle-national/cycles-nationaux-precedents/cycle-national-2008–2009/productions/le-vivant-et-l-artificiel. Accessed 30 July 2017. Frisch, Karl von, and Otto von Frisch. Animal Architecture. Harcourt, 1974. Gladston, Paul. “A Conversation with Liang Shaoji and Response to a Conversation with Paul Gladston.” ShanghART, 2012, www.shanghartgallery.com/galleryarchive/texts/id/4007. Accessed 30 July 2017. Gould, James L., and Carol Grant Gould. “Building with silk.” Animal Architects: Building and the Evolution of Intelligence, by Gould and Gould, Basic Books, 2007, pp. 19–56. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Holzenthal, Ralph W., et al. “Trichoptera: Caddisflies.” Tree of Life Web Project, tolweb.org/ Trichoptera. Accessed 30 July 2017. Katchadourian, Nina. “Uninvited Collaborations—The Mended Spiderweb Series.” Nina Katchadourian’s Official Web Site, www.ninakatchadourian.com/uninvitedcollaborations/spiderwebs.php. Accessed 30 July 2017. “Lepidoptera: Moths and Butterflies.” Tree of Life Web Project, tolweb.org/Lepidoptera. Accessed 30 July 2017. Liang Shaoji. “About the ‘Nature Series’—Notes on Creative Work.” Chinese Artists, Texts and Interviews: Chinese Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA) 1998–2002, ed. by Ai Weiwei, Timezone 8, 2004, pp. 41–46. Noth, Jochen, Wolfger Pöhlmann, and Kai Reschke. China Avant-Garde: Counter-Currents in Art and Culture. Oxford UP, 1994. O’Dea, Madeleine. “Perpetual Motion: The Life and Art of Maryn Varbanov.” 艺术界 LEAP, 1 Aug. 2010, www.leapleapleap.com/2010/08/maryn-varbanov/. Accessed 30 July 2017. Pimentel, Juan. “La Naturaleza Representada: El Gabinete de Maravillas de Franco Dávila.” Testigos Del Mundo: Ciencia, Literatura Y Viajes En La Ilustración, by Pimentel, Marcial Pons, 2003, pp. 147–151. Smith, Julie A., and Robert W. Mitchell, eds. Experiencing Animal Minds: An Anthology of Animal-Human Encounters. Columbia UP, 2012. Stookey, Lorena Laura. Thematic guide to world mythology. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004. Tong Juanjuan. “Liang Shaoji and His ‘Tao’ of Silkworms.” Preguntas Al Cielo—Questioning Heaven. Gao Magee Gallery, 2012, pp. 18–25. Tong Juanjuan. “The Way to Truth: Interview with Liang Shaoji.” Preguntas Al Cielo—Questioning Heaven. Gao Magee Gallery, 2012, pp. 106–113. Tyler, Tom. “Introduction: The Case of the Camel.” Animal Encounters, ed. by Tyler and Manuela Rossini, Brill, 2009a. Tyler, Tom, and Manuela Rossini, eds. Animal Encounters. Brill, 2009b.

III  Contact, Interaction, and

Relationality

Actors or Agents? Defining the Concept of Relational Agency in (Historical) Wildlife Encounters

10

Mieke Roscher

1 Introduction When in May 2016 park rangers in Yellowstone National Park were confronted with a bison calf worried visitors had picked up and put in the trunk of their car, they could hardly believe their eyes. Did the visitors not know that calves would customarily be left by their mothers in a safe space? Did they not know that they had endangered the calf by having taken it away from the herd? Sure enough, the calf was indeed euthanized because it was “habituated to humans” (Rogers) and therefore, rejected by both the mother and the herd. However, as the perceived closeness of ‘wild’ animals in national parks as well as of those infiltrating our cities changes relationships, where in the mind-set of many they become quasi domesticated, the categorization of ‘wild’ becomes fluid and fuzzy. Taking the bison calf alludes to these fuzzy boundaries. The shadowy impression of ‘wild’ thus affects both perception as well as treatment of those animals. Touching upon issues of the history of the body, environmental history and historical geography, this paper will focus on theoretically framing encounters as a prerequisite of interactions between animals and humans in the ‘wild’ as ‘relational agency’. Relational agency, as I define it, is characterized by the co-constitutionality of the interacting partners inside and outside of close social circles. Why is this of interest? As animal historians, we routinely look for signs of animal agency in our sources. Putting relational agency in a historical perspective enables us, as will be argued, to alleviate classical dichotomies between action and reaction and to frame animals as active partners in the making of specific histories. With reference to Donna Haraway I assert that relation is “the smallest possible

M. Roscher (*)  Kassel, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_10

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unit of analysis” (Haraway 20) and that this is especially true for animal histories. While this concept has so far been reserved for domesticated animals, this paper will argue for an extension of the concept to include certain kinds of spatially defined conservation projects, as they clearly also put into question the boundaries drawn between nature and culture. This is particularly interesting in the case of the settlement and resettlement of animals. Defining these places of encounter as ‘more-than-human-places’,1 the object of investigation becomes enmeshed in these specific spaces. The overlapping of living spaces can thus be regarded as ‘relational locality’. The theoretical frameworks of both relational agency and relational locality will be put to the test by following the tracks of specific encounters of human and wild animals in specific localities at specific times: The European bison in the Białowieża National Park and the American bison in Yellowstone from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. By historicizing face-to-face encounters, it will be shown that the question of whether these wild animals are actors or agents can only be answered situationally and is thus in need of historical contextualization.

2 Relational Agency The concept of animal agency is one of the central motifs human-animal studies scholars across all disciplines are currently engaging with.2 For historians especially, the question of what constitutes a historical actor is an ongoing one and the arrival of novel (potential) actors mostly reads as a signal for the democratization of the discipline. Following labour and gender historians on the one hand and social theorists on the other, those involved in animal history have come to some conclusions of what animal agency could look like and how to detect it in sources available to us. Hilda Kean has argued that the interlacing of source material needs a conceptual expansion, including “materials for creating the past outside books, particularly traces from the physical landscape. Such traces could include the gradients modified or not by the labour of horses, the rat runs under floor boards, the tracks in the wood taken by foxes, the marks on trees scratched by cats” (Kean 64). And although we still have some lack of clear cut methodology in applying frameworks of animal agency to our sources, there seems to be widespread consensus that we must do away with a reading that favours pure representationalism (64),3 that is, an understanding of animals as mere mirrors of human action, and instead treat our sources in the same manner we would with past humans lives. “This is what historians do: we find material, often created in different times, with

1The

concept of more-than-human-places has been made fruitful by an animal-centred cultural geography. 2For example Weil; McHugh; Shaw, “The torturer’s horse”; Nance; Lulka. 3See also Roscher.

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which to imagine a past and bring it alive in the present” (63). This, however, does not mean, and Kean is quite clear about this, that we need to imagine ourselves as animals. What is required, however, is to picture historical relationships between humans and animals by embedding them in specific, historically distinct contexts. Many discussions based on a social theory of animal agency follow, in one way or another, Bruno Latour’s use of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and, hence, also his notorious distinction between actors and actants. Defining only humans as actors shows a tendency to recreate binaries by effectively differentiating between wilful action and involuntary reaction within a given network. Yet, as I want to show, these binary oppositions are all too rigid especially when regarding ‘wild’ and ‘wildlife’ as social structures that are defined by multi-relations. Therefore, I agree with Jamie Lorimer’s—and others’4—reading and application of ANT as implicitly relational while drawing “attention to the importance of ‘affect’ and of the corporeal in understanding social and human/nonhuman interaction” (Lorimer, “Nonhuman Charisma” 193). Lately, the predominant approaches within the wider discussion on animal agency mainly endorse distributive agency theories. These are being popularized by proponents of what can be summed up rather broadly as ‘new materialism’ (Cudworth). While as a cultural historian, I find it helpful to think that ‘matter matters’, I do think that sometimes a clearer and historically more precise differentiation is needed. Accordingly, political scientists Erika Cudworth and Stephen Hobdon make a valid critique, when they point out that in new materialist thinking and ANT “all agency is understood as of the same quality” (137). This means that the focus of new materialism is on an inherent capacity of humans, animals and things to act and not on acting itself. For me as a historian this is, however, of little help. The fixed allocation of specific agential capacities makes me uneasy as it does not reflect the structures of historical opportunity. Moreover, the ignorance of historically specific power relations does not fit together easily with disentangling the past via the help of the theories proposed here. Cudworth and Hobdon agree when they write that there is a need for “distinction between different kinds of beings and objects in the world in order to recognise, for example that distinction such as those between humans and all other ‘animals’ are forged through and continue to carry, relations of inequality and domination” (137). To keep static assumptions about agency at bay, we might therefore need to turn to environmental history for inspiration. In her 2005 remarks on “The Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency?”, Linda Nash called for the close observance of the presumed partnership between humans and their environment and for construing agency as the result of “a conversation with a larger world, both animate and inanimate” (69). Citing anthropologist Tim Ingold and his model of “organism-in-its-environment”, she parts from ideas of the “self-contained

4See

for example Hurn; Maurstad; Wilkie.

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individual” and endorses a view in which the environment constantly shapes (human) intentions and therefore also actions. This variability of influence is also stressed by Vinciane Despret when she asserts, building upon the work of Gilles Deleuze, that an agencement is a rapport of forces that makes some beings capable of making other beings capable, in a plurivocal manner, in such a way that the agencement resists being dismembered, resists clear-cut distribution. What constitutes the agent and the patient is distributed and redistributed incessantly. (38)

Sociologists Nicki Charles and Bob Carter also insist on the entanglement of relations as a prerequisite for agency. In this entanglement, the collective actors or face-to-face-encounters are always “historically contingent and variable” (Carter and Charles 329). By differentiating between actors and action, they open up new potential for framing ‘wild’ animal agency, displaying the possibilities for acting next to the course of action. As Christopher Watts writes, it is “the linkages, rather than the nodes, the actions rather than the substances” (1) that are the focus of the relational approach. The “reticular arrangements” (3) are thus at the centre of attention. ‘Reticular’ in this sense means looking at human-human, humananimal and animal-animal relationships. These relationships manifest themselves foremost through bodily encounters that include a variety of entangled relations with all species that are, rather oversimplified, defined as ‘wild’ animals. Therefore, the body needs to be central to historical analysis, as it is the material basis for the encounter. Applying a ‘relational agency’ approach means then to follow up on different encounters and to contextualize them with view of their potential influences and outcomes, in short, to observe under which circumstances agency is produced through the encounter and the relation.

3 Charisma and Agency While the concept of relational agency is potentially applicable to all wild animals, it is specifically the charismatic ones who are the subject of discussion here, as they are more likely to make it into the historical record. This again shows that not all animals will have the same effects on humans and are consequently not all endowed with the same ‘type’ of relational agency. On the contrary, there are fine distinctions depending on species membership, cultural perception and possible encounters. In particular, the effect on humans depends on the ‘charisma’ of the perceived animals. Jamie Lorimer has helpfully divided the notion of nonhuman charisma into three categories. Animals can either boast “ecological”, “aesthetic”, or “corporeal” charisma (Lorimer, “Nonhuman Charisma” 911–932). While it is the aim of Lorimer’s paper to show how the charisma of different animals is responsible for their consideration in biodiversity conservation, his typology is

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even more enticing on a larger level. The ecological charisma is determined by space-time considerations such as the sharing of the same element (land) or migratory patterns, making it thereby applicable to a historical analysis that focuses on longue durée-perspectives. Of the other two types Lorimer says: The first type of affective charisma relates to the aesthetic properties of an organism’s appearance and behaviour when encountered visually by an observer either in the flesh or as a textual inscription. The second type of charisma is interrelated and refers to the affections and emotions triggered in practical, corporeal interactions with an organism in the field. (“Nonhuman Charisma” 918)

Visual and bodily appearances are central to the ‘type’ of relation and therefore also to the ‘type’ of agency. The “empathy-factor” determines the closeness between humans and diverse groups of animals and desires to see, feel, and photograph, in short, the desire to interact with these animals. Watts also suggests that it is “empathy” rather than “exceptionalism” (9) which makes us focus on relations to some animals but not to others. Roughly on the same page, yet with slightly different vocabulary Cudworth and Hobdon speak of “affective agency” when they try to pinpoint the relational aspect of generating agency. In their framework, the societal impacts and the changing character of relations affected are at the centre of attention: “We need a situated and differentiated notion of agency that understands the ability of creatures and things to ‘make a difference in the world’ as a question of situated relations rather than intrinsic capacity alone” (Cudworth and Hobdon 138). However, these “intersections of particular relationships” (Watts 13) are historically specific and must therefore concern historians. At the same time there might be drawbacks to basing the following analyses on empirical examples of those “flagship species” (Lorimer, “Nonhuman Charisma” 923) that are part of the “charismatic mega-fauna” (Lunney). In this vein, Vinciane Despret would be right to accuse me of neglecting those animals who “have been poorly articulated” (37), since I concentrate on the bison, admittedly a “charismatic animal”. Nevertheless, this is a purposeful choice for what this paper wants to achieve, namely to build an initial framework for a historical construction of relational agency and test the empirical validity of the approach with well-researched examples. It, therefore, may shed light on some agents without paying tribute to the many other “secret agents” (37), as Despret calls them, lurking in the dark.

4 Wild Animal Agency Typically, one encounters acts of animal agency in relations to pets, domesticated or working animals, those, in short, who live in close social relation with humans. Historians have specifically addressed the self-will of the animals observed in these encounters. Whether it is the acts of rebellion Jason Hribal and Eric Baratay

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have focused on5 or the taking of indigenous land Virginia DeJohn Anderson describes in her history of animals in colonial North America,6 these animals lived at least once in a social relationship with humans, even if not by their own free will. Such a history has also been written about elephants as working animals.7 For these socio-domestic animals there appears to be a plethora of sources to make use of. However, what I am concerned with here are animals who, at least at first glance, do not serve such socially entangled functions in interspecies relations, apart from being the target of hunting for either meat or sport or, as will be seen, constituting cultural symbols. There is an abundance of sources to be found on domesticates. The same, however, cannot be said about so-called ‘wild’ animals who, as a result, have been rather neglected by animal historians. In spite of this, the willingness to treat wild animals as more than “passive entities” (Martin 454) has lately led to attempts to create a counterbalance by focusing on those animals who prey on humans or are an effective danger to their livelihoods. Leaving aside for now how this leads to a of a new binary (dangerous vs. peaceful), these narratives have come to show that telling those tales helps to avoid putting animals “into a single ahistorical category” and instead conceptualizing them as “agentsin-the-world” (454). This seems to be a fruitful new engagement. Nonetheless, referring to these dangerous encounters brings to mind the many tales of the man-eaters in colonial contexts, so it becomes obvious that we need to be more precise in the analytical framing of specific situations.8 Agency was attributed to these animals on purpose, either to legitimize hunting them down or as an excuse to control and dominate the humans populating the same landscape. As a consequence, just putting the label agency on the animal is not helpful. Otherwise as animal historians, we’ll find ourselves in a situation where “agency is the ability to have an effect”, and will therefore “arrive at the banal conclusion that everything affects everything else in some way or another”, as Carter and Charles so poignantly put it (328). Consequently, the historian has to start by defining what, in specific historical circumstances, characterizes wild animals and what does not. This goes hand in hand with outlining what is particular about so-called domesticated animals. When trying to answer these questions from a historical point of view, what is ‘wild’ and what is domesticated becomes even more complicated than the binary opposition suggests (Shaw, “A Way” 5). For example, as Kari Weil reminds us, the opposition of domesticated (or civilized) and ‘wild’ (or savage), “carries a host of gendered, raced and otherwise hierarchically organized associations” (5). Indeed, in modern Western societies ‘wild’ is most likely no longer equated with savagery but with authenticity. Authenticity is established by the act of seeing, smelling,

5See

Hribal; Baratay.

6See Anderson. 7See 8See

Lorimer, “Elephants”. on this topic Walker.

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photographing and even touching wild animals. It is also produced through the animals’ specific bodily expressions. As urban wildlife entering the cities is defined as a “lesser part of nature” (Woolfson; Buller 238), however, the binary thinking needs to be questioned on yet another level. Jamie Lorimer for example, following Donna Haraway, denotes elephants in Sri Lanka as companion species, as they are “too social and sagacious to be objects; too strange to be human; too captive to be wild, but too wild to be domesticated” (Lorimer, “Elephants” 495). This “figures a growing menagerie of companion species that far exceed the unworldly identities of resource, wilderness and subhuman” (495). Again, this holds true for historic situations as well. As Kerry Harris and Yannis Hamilakis discovered in their own work on prehistoric Crete, “the term ‘wild’ as a blanket description for ‘non-domestic’ animals homogenizes the widely varying characteristics of different species and prevents the detailed exploration of species-to-species interaction” (98). Hence, we always need to consider cultural, social and political implications in determining what is considered ‘wild’ at a specific point in time and, more importantly, who is considering animals as ‘wild’. Boiled down, we need to reflect the social and cultural background of the human part in the relationship and we need to look at it from a genealogical perspective. “Whatever we do”, David Gary Shaw points out in his introduction of a special issue of History & Theory dedicated to the concept of animal agency, “we need to retain the sense of distinctiveness and difference that actually confronting an animal makes immediately clear” (“A Way” 6). Moreover, when looking at animal related discourses historically we need to scrutinize the construction of ‘wild’ or of ‘domesticated’ via the relationship to humans. Is wildlife itself, as Sarah Whatmore and Lorraine Thorne have argued, already a “relational achievement” (444), only explicable through relation? Are they then more than “symbolical and material units in some human currency?” (444) Today, these discourses mainly contain the question of what follows legally from status as either ‘wild’ or ‘domesticated’ given to the animal.9 Historically, these questions appear much more diverse. When at the turn of the twentieth century, which saw the creation of natural preserves and parks, the assumption was that “wilderness was out there”, as Simon Schama analysed in his seminal work on landscape and memory, the creation of wilderness followed idealized patterns of pureness (Schama 7).10 When John Berger famously declared that with the 20th century animals have disappeared from our closest circle only to be replaced by artificial animals as pets or zoo animals (Berger), the binary construction reappears, but with a slight twist. Instead of “wild” and “domesticated”, we are

9For

a recent discussion see Wandesforde-Smith. Cronon has shown that wilderness in itself is a deeply problematic term for historians (see Cronon) as well as by the responses to his article. 10William

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confronted with questions of authenticity, where the real animal creating real relations with humans has disappeared into a figurative ‘out there’. Hence, the “tangled and multi-faceted interactions” (Harris and Hamilakis 108) with non-domesticates should be looked upon from varied perspectives, including all possible encounters, taking into account the “currency of various human desires, whose value rises with distance” (Whatmore 451). While some encounters lead to interactions that are then traceable, others might not leave any traces in sources at all. Following this perspective, interaction can be understood as a “class of events which occurs during co-presence and by virtue of co-presence” (Best 1). If we substitute co-presence with encounter, one might argue that it is the classes of events constituting the interaction that are in need of historic contextualization depending also on the human relation to specific animals. One might therefore need to be more meticulous when establishing ‘wild’ animals as a specific cultural animal type. More challenging even, depending on the cultural background of both the chronicler as well as the observed, one might be faced with a variety of cultural animal types. Cultural animal types, such as pets, zoo animals or laboratory animals, specifically define the relation between human and (certain) animals as historically and culturally specific. In National Parks, which are at the centre of concern here, relation is mainly produced via the management of a particular species, be it the encouraging of reproduction or the killing of ‘surplus’ animals. By focusing on the “topologies of wildlife”, as suggested by Whatmore and Thorne, where there are multi-faceted relations with animals that are not domesticated but are managed, I hope to show that by concentration on these different aspects of relations, historians are able to flatten out the binary divide between domesticates and wild animals.

5 Relational Locality When defining what is wild and what is not, one is immediately struck by the sense of place immanent in this question. Turning to animal geographers Chris Wilbert and Chris Philo, who famously stated that animals “destabilise, transgress or even resist our human orderings, including spatial ones”, I am following their line of thought by also defining localities as relational (5). As Whatmore and Thorne have furthermore indicated, “the enduring coincidence between the species and spaces of wildlife as the antipodes of human society meant that, to ask what is ‘wild’, is, simultaneously, a question of its whereabouts” (437). The empirical data generally show distinct interactions with animals in explicit localities. These localities are time-specific and must therefore be regarded as historic phenomena in themselves. In other words, by placing animals in a setting, which is deemed ‘wild’, they become ‘wild’. Authentication is the result of the creation of both place and body. This production of a specific meaning is thereby also in accordance with concepts of praxeology argued for by the new cultural history (Steinbrecher and Krüger).

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Space and place are relational categories and in turn effect our relations with animals. In this reading it is also the landscape, the topography of wilderness that possesses agency (Philo and Wilbert 13). What we have here, as Lorimer points out, is a “relational ontology that is bounded and can account for geographically and temporally constrained yet consistent emergent properties in a socionatural assemblage” (Lorimer, “Nonhuman Charisma” 914). To illustrate the meaning of relational localities, Charles and Carter use the example of a polar bear when differentiating between acting and action: Being a polar bear in a zoo involves a different set of agential conditions from being a polar bear in the Arctic; the social relations into which the polar bear is incorporated are different in the two situations and they condition the bear’s possibilities for action. In both situations, the possibilities for action are conditioned by incorporation into human social relations. Agency is thus always Agency in relation to other Agents and to what those other Agents want to do. (330)11

This agency is therefore the result of the particular setting. From this presumption, Henry Buller deduces that “wilderness” is primarily a spatial category, “that encompasses normative orderings in which animals are both materially and semiotically ‘placed’” (234). These normative orderings also state that so-called ‘nature’ is to be pristine, untouched and pure in order to be ‘wild’ and that thus National Parks display just glimpses of this ‘nature’: The idea of a “confined nature” has been their trademark (Gissibl et al., “Introduction” 2). Alongside this concept of purity, there is another aspect worth contemplating: the assumption that wilderness is also without history. Despite this assumption, as Whatmore and Thorne point out, wild animals “have been, and continue to be, routinely imagined and organized within multiple social orderings in different times and places” (437). In National Parks they might be “civilized, territorialized and categorized” (Gissibl et al., “Introduction” 2) all of which puts them in different relationships to human actors. Historically placed, National Parks emerged exactly at a time when “wild nature could no longer be conceptualized as an unlimited mental and practical resource beyond, but became a finite resource within the boundaries drawn by civilization” (Gissibl et al., “Introduction” 2).12 It is this cultural, spatial and temporal sense of the environment, of the landscape, that we need to consider when investigating wild animals and their agency historically. As Shaw informs us: “Our sense that environment always impinges on and affects human life through an ecological web provides a very broad conceptual and geographical framework in which to closely link animals as historical players” (Shaw, “A Way” 7). Thus, a relational account of the place as historically contingent is imperative for framing human-animal encounters in the ‘wild’.

11For

another example of defining animal agency using the polar bear as an example see Flack. by the authors.

12Highlights

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6 Entering the Forest of Białowieża: The European Bison and Cross-Political Relations Placing relational agency historically is in need of solid contextualization with regard to both place and time. After all, it is the specific relationships that are the focus of this approach. For the forest of Białowieża this story begins where it should end: With the killing of the last ‘wild’ European bison in the Caucasus in 1927. Six years earlier, the last bison had been killed in the forest of Białowieża, which is at the centre of the story here. The numbers there had dropped dramatically during World War I with German soldiers killing over 600 individuals. Of course, there is a history preceding these killings, which Simon Schama has recounted in much detail in the context of the bison being formative for the creation of the landscape around Białowieża, their “ancestral habitat” (37). The bison figured as the “miraculous relic of a presocial, even prehistoric past” in early modern Polish mythology, an allegory to outlaws and partisans prominent in resistant literature for centuries to come (41). They were declared to be ‘royal beast’ and it was the prerogative of the king and the nobility to hunt them. In addition, because the place they inhabited was laden with mythology, their numbers remained stable until the late eighteenth century with its bellicose partition of Poland by Russia, Austria and Prussia and the following turmoil of the Napoleonic wars. When Białowieża became Russian in 1813, modernization crept over the borders of the forests, greatly reducing the space for the free roaming bison. In World War I, the advancing German troops caused an extension of the deforestation and saw the bison as “standing meat” (Schama 65). In a typically apologetic tone, biologist Theodor Ahrens reported in 1921: “In fact all or nearly all the remaining wisents have been shot by the inhabitants and the retiring German soldiers, among whom discipline had been undermined by the revolution.” Before that, he was quick to argue, the well-ordered German army had treated the animals carefully. “But, if we sum up, we must nevertheless conclude that the extinction of the species is imminent” (Ahrens). While re-introduction started as soon as 1929 in confined places, with bison being brought to Białowieża from zoos in Germany and Sweden and the forest itself becoming a National Park in 1932 for the purpose of creating “laboratories of wild nature and evolution” (Bobiec 34), as its founder, botanist Władysław Szafer remarked, the mythical body of the bison soon changed. The bison was to become the emblem of Teutonic strength and with the invasion of the German Wehrmacht in Poland it would soon be Germanized. Moreover, while the re-breeding attempts of bison in the German Reich by Hermann Göring and his accomplice, the infamous Berlin zoo director Lutz Heck, were met with apprehension by the bison, the occupation of Białowieża in 1941 gave them access to the remaining re-wilded animals. Unlike re-breeding attempts of the long gone aurochs (Driessen and Lorimer), there seemed to be still enough genetic material to successfully repopulate the Germanized Eastern parts of Europe with the wild herbivores. Expanding the realm of the National Park by violently cleansing it of its human inhabitants through mass-killings and forceful evictions (Gautschi

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211–217), Göring thus created a pseudo-Germanic mythical territory. The European bison could be “re-classified as zoologically Aryan” (Schama 72), resulting also in “mental and practical reclamation of the East as ‘actual frontier’ and Lebensraum of the German people.” (Gissibl et al., “A Bavarian Serengeti” 102–119) By conceptualizing the animals as ‘wild’, the landscape could also be considered ‘wild’; empty and ready for the taking. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the bison of Białowieża once again were subject of political decision-making processes, when the forest was divided up between Poland and Belarus. With Soviet control in Belarus, hunting the animals was turned into a past time for diplomatic trophy hunters until in 1991 the area was declared protected. At the same time, however, restoration of the herds began again in the 1950s. From 1951 on in the Polish part of Białowieża, some of the bison which had until then been kept in a small fenced reserve were released ‘into the wild’—with disastrous effects. In winter, they would come to nearby villages in search of hay, they would mingle with common bovines, often injuring their human herders, or would make their way to the USSR, needing to be recaptured or just dying of poor health (Ścibor 299). Only after more animals were released by the end of the decade did the situation change and the animals stayed put. Since 1981, a border fence has separated the Polish and the Belarusian herds. The national regimes also created different management strategies, which in turn affect the “type of interaction” between bison and humans (Agrawal). Today, about 800 individuals are counted in the forest. As a recent survey of National Parks worldwide explained, Białowieża now offers “guided walks, bilingual booklets, foot and horseback trails, boat tours, natural history museums, guesthouses, and camping” (Schwartz), and advertises that “while walking through the tourist trails one has a chance to come across these glorious animals” (“Rules and fees in BNP”), with bison being the “public symbols of naturalness for the BPF area” (Bobiec 34). With this historical background in mind, how exactly can we fathom the relational agency between humans and the European bison of Białowieża in the last century, especially with the spatiality of the encounter in mind? For a start, we can look for easily optainable narratives. The spatial relational dimension presented in this account of the Białowieża bison is maybe particularly accessible in the portrayal of the German occupation, where the linking of “zoology and landscape planning” turned “geopolitics into a more-than-human affair” (Driessen and Lorimer 148). Indeed, when looking at specific human-animal relationship it is precisely the environment that shapes the encounter and thus the potential for agency. To this day, the boundaries of the area, most significantly represented by the border between Poland and Belarus are immanent in forming the possibilities of interagency between humans and bison. Therefore, layers of temporality and spatiality are just as entangled as the human-animal interaction. This is stressed by the fact that recent attempts in re-wilding (nearly) extinct species embrace timeframed benchmarks for their re-introduction goals, with “pre-European levels… pre-agricultural revolution levels; or… pre-human levels” and “pre-modern human colonist levels” being just some examples (Hayward 766). One of the indicators

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of which time frame is appropriate for the historical analysis is the level of coevolution between humans and the targeted species, showing again that relational approaches are to be considered. This highlights that what we have here is a “mediated landscape that can never be ‘wilderness’ alone” (Blavascunas 119). As argued above, the spatial relational dimension is also culturally distinct and we should therefore, and maybe in a second step, define the categorizations (‘wild’, ‘dangerous’, ‘primeval’ etc.) and thus the semiotics of European bison as relational. Because these terminologies rely on specific interactions and encounters with the animal (or the lack thereof), and on the cultural animal type ascribed to the animals, the status of the individual animal is created through description. These descriptions again are not to be read simply as representations void of purpose and emerging without the bodily encounter with the animals. On the contrary, their shifting meaning also tells us something about the change in lived relationships. When Polish partisans regarded the bison as symbols of resistance, they did so because it embodied both strength and the ability to survive the adverse realm of Białowieża. This respect for the animal has since not stopped, but it was more the surviving of adversaries from outside the forest that was the cause for adoration. As Eunice Blavascunas writes: “Its restitution from near extinction after World War I created a reverential status for the relict ungulate and its ‘original forest dwelling’” (Blavascunas 118) It is hard not to see the connection with the history of the Polish nation. The bison are of “de facto importance” to the region (Notzke 391). Their characterization as a “refugee animal”, defined “as those that can no longer access optimal habitat” (Kerley) underlines these projections. Another angle from which to look at the agency of the animal is a temporal approach by considering the specific use of the wisent now and then. The fact that the human stakeholders in the park, from hunters to refugees, from locals and foresters to tourists and wildlife biologists, have different interests and perceptions of the animals shapes relations to the animals as such or to specific individuals and in turn determines their repertoire of action. As shown above, until the late nineteenth century, the animals were seen as royal animals and therefore targets of the royal hunt. The relation was thus structured around being ‘hunter’ or being ‘prey’ with all the possible outcomes, including the death of the hunters. The re-breeding and re-wilding attempts also portray a variety of relational activities, including noncompliance. Finally, impacts on the life of the wisent can also be understood in relational terms. As a recent study on the bison suggests, the changing environmental use of the area results in a “deterioration of the physical condition” and “may be connected to such environmental and populational factors as: winter supplementary feeding, winter aggregations, and a decline in immunity related to inbreeding” (Wołk 405). Undeniably, the process of feeding the animal as a specific form of encounter which affects both their movement within the park as well as their social structure (Mysterud et al. 79), also hints at the transformation of interagency with humans and at the volatile character of the term ‘wild’. By looking at these different aspects of relations, be they spatial, temporal, or cultural we are able to get a much more refined picture of the wisent’s potential to historical agency.

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7 The Last Remnants of the Great Plains: Following the Bison into Yellowstone National Park One of the most significant relational aspects detailed above is the construction of the ‘wild’. The debate about what constitutes ‘wilderness’ was perhaps discussed nowhere more fervently than during the foundation of Yellowstone National Park in the northwest corner of what was to become the state of Wyoming. When Yellowstone was founded in 1872, with its stunning views defined by the Rocky Mountains, the High Plains and geothermic activities, it was the first National Park in the U.S. and became a model for national parks worldwide.13 Bison, or buffalo,14 had been part of the fauna that was native to Yellowstone when it was still under tribal control, yet the area was just one place among many populated by the biggest mammal on the continent. Between 25 and 30 million bison were said to have once roamed the Plains before European colonialization (Isenberg, Destruction). As a primary resource of the frontier economy in an age “when an instrumental economic mentality encouraged the unthinking depletion of resources” (Isenberg, “Toward a Policy” 227), the bison fell victim to the European settlers and frontier pioneers for several reasons, presenting a variety of relational agencies to choose from. The marketability of the animals rose when the tanning of the hides was perfected and guns outmatched any forms of resistance. Once the professional fur trade discovered the bison as a target, it took only thirteen years between 1871 and 1883 to almost eradicate the species. The laws passed by several states to protect the animals were either ignored or came too late to secure the survival of the herds (Dolph and Dolph). With regard to the intra-human level as well, the hunting of the bison became a milestone in American history. When the numbers of the bison became too scarce for the nomadic Indians to hunt, the tribes were effectively pressured to enter the “reservation system” (Isenberg, “Toward a Policy” 228). General Philip Sheridan, a high ranking Civil War hero who was formative in developing “scorchedearth” techniques, strongly encouraged hunters to destroy the bison, as they, so he declared, have done “more to settle the vexing Indian question than the entire regular Army has done in the last thirty years” (Dolph and Dolph 15). Killing the bison did not, however, just destroy the food supply but it also endangered the cultural survival of the Plains Indians. When Michigan congressman Omar Conger stated in 1874 that conserving the bison would be “utterly useless” and that the buffalo could not stop the “march of civilisation” (Isenberg, “Toward a Policy” 228), he evoked a clear binary between ‘wild’ and ‘civilization’. This distinction came with an eliminatory undertone that was directed at all that was declared ‘wild’, including the Native American tribes. The talk of a ‘manifest destiny’ of the Euro-Americans finding a new providence in the West was a combination of

13In

this text I capitalize National Park when referring to specific National Parks. correct term would be bison. The settlers however referred to the large beasts as bison and buffalo interchangeably, and the name buffalo, though scientifically inaccurate, stuck. 14The

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capitalist and Puritan thought, characterizing American politics during the nineteenth century. The Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano agreed: “So long as the Indian can hope to subsist by hunting buffalo, so long will he resist all efforts to put him forward in the work of civilization” (Dolph and Dolph 16). Andrew Isenberg has specified this position as paradigmatic of the nineteenth-century American mind-set, where ideas of nature as orderly and friendly and Indians as noble savages were replaced by an attitude dominated by their ‘othering’. This was a view of nature (and Indians as part of this nature) as hostile and destructive. It was accompanied by striving for undeterred economic growth and a belief that the extermination of the Indian tribes was a part of the struggle for the survival of the fittest (Isenberg, “Toward a Policy” 231–234). Therefore, the extinction of bison and of Indian tribes were two sides of the same coin in the popular and political sentiment. The destruction of the bison herds was seen as a “means of pacification”. Controlling the buffalo meant “controlling the Indians” (236). As a result, a bison census in 1889 surveyed by William T. Hornaday, chief taxidermist of the Smithsonian, showed that only 285 “wild” buffalos still lived on US territory. The relational agency of the bison at that time was mainly, just as that of the Native American tribes, determined by the perception of them as an obstacle for opening up the West for economic exploitation. Concurrently, first efforts to preserve the bison were put on the table. They were however not presented by lawmakers but rather by scientists working for the Smithsonian or the New York Zoological Society. Private owners, farmers and some tribes also began cultivating herds in captivity. There was some effort to cross breed buffalos with cattle, to produce beefalo, also called cattalo, in order to sell hides, but these attempts, although initially successful, did not live up to the expectations of the breeders as the offspring turned out to be sterile. With the foundation of the American Bison Society in 1905, the attempts to cultivate the bison as a useful commodity were taken to a new level. Hornaday, who presided over the Society, gave examples for the manufacturing of wool as well as their usage as draft animals (American Bison Society 6). However, the main purpose of the society was educational: to foster publicity about the plight of the bison. It did help their cause that prominent figures such as President Theodore Roosevelt supported the proliferation of the ‘wilderness’ as intrinsically American. Hornaday even applied the ‘wild vs. civilized’ distinction in reference to the men responsible for the mass killing. In his seminal work The Extermination of the American Bison he commented that the “white men who engaged in the systematic slaughter of the bison were savages just as much as the […] Indians” (Hornaday 487). Concurrently, Theo B. Comstock wrote in the American Naturalist in 1874, that these animals were to become extinct “directly or indirectly at the hand of the civilized man”. Hence, Isenberg has termed these early preservationists as anti-modernist because of their inherent critique of civilization as such (“Return” 180). Indeed, they wanted to preserve a frontier wilderness, which would resist the ever advancing cultivation of the West symbolized most fervently by the encroaching railway. The relations thus shifted and so did the perception of the bison. The bison was no longer seen as the emblem of a world to be subjugated, but of the disastrous

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results of civilization taken to the extreme. In this vein, the relation to the bison shifted, leaving room for changes in possible encounters. Such was the case with the Yellowstone herd of ‘wild’ bison, where the species was an integral part of the environment “since prehistoric times” (State of Montana et al. 10). However, Yellowstone had been far from a safe haven in earlier years, although the foundation of the National Park system was built on the promise of the “protection of its fish and game”. When the park was established in 1872, several hundred individuals still roamed its perimeters. But due mainly to poaching and lack of law enforcement their numbers steadily declined until in 1902 only 22 individuals were said to have survived the mass slaughter of the 19th century by hiding out in the Pelican Valley. Yellowstone was also not a safe haven for the native tribes, but instead became the prototype of how to eradicate any hint of native usage in the building of the National Park System (Kantor; Spence). As early park managers called them “pests”, the “civilization of nature mandated the removal of so-called primitive peoples”, as Karen Jones points out (39). It is telling that the park was under Army rule from 1886 onwards, mainly to fence off the native tribes. In 1917 the National Park Service, one year after its inauguration, took over control. Also in 1902, new measures were taken to ensure the continued existence of bison in the park, such as the introduction of a captive herd of 21 “tame” animals (Dolph and Dolph 18). The reason for introducing the captive herd into Yellowstone, as Mary Ann Franke suggests, however “had more to do with gratifying park visitors than with preserving the species” (4). Indeed, as John Pilcher, the acting Superintendent of the park proposed: If we succeed in raising a new herd of buffalo under fence they will become very tame, and when the herd is sufficiently increased in numbers we can gradually turn them loose in the park and they will become so accustomed to seeing people about them that they will not be frightened out of the country or driven into the high mountains by the appearance of the summer tourist. (Franke 5)

This was even more encouraged by Horace Albright, who took over office as Superintendent in 1919 and who not only encouraged the feeding of bears, but organised bison stampede with either “real western cowboys” or “Crow from the nearby reservation dressed in their regalia and war paint” (Franke 9).15 As preservationists before him, his was the idea that the herds would serve “as places of historical and moral education for Euro-Americans nostalgic for an imagined, pristine Western frontier” (Isenberg, “Return” 18), but that they would at the same time also incorporate the idea of subjugating this wilderness. Indians, for example, had no place in this idealized version of American nature. The land was on the

15The

Crow Nation, called the Apsáalooke in their own Siouan language, are a tribe, who in historical times lived in the Yellowstone River valley.

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contrary regarded as “unpeopled”, “untrammelled by man” and indeed “primeval” (Kantor 44). With the introduction of new animals, all bison were henceforth declared to be government-owned and were managed as livestock, which included them being sent to zoos or meat packers until the 1960s, when a policy of natural regulation was adopted by the park. The Yellowstone National Park Master Plan of 1974 declared “ongoing and future wildlife management actions will be directed toward reducing or eliminating disruptive human influences, relying, whenever possible, upon natural controls to regulate animal numbers” (U.S. Ntl. Park Service). The differentiation between livestock and wild animals was not only semantics (Burton), it also brought a variety of cultural, but more importantly, legal attributions with it. From the beginning of the century onwards, it meant effectively that there were two herds in the park, one coming from the ‘tame’ stock and being fenced in, one from the ‘wild’ and more or less roaming freely. Treating the animals as either ‘wild’ or tame is of course mainly a relational ascription, as they were both being controlled by the park service, only to a different extent. However, the attribution was important for their status and accordingly the relational agency of the animals. Declaring that their ancestors were the “last truly wild herd in North America” (Schullery 40) therefore helped to create an authenticity, which could not so easily be accredited to other herds. Consequently, many naturalists feared the degeneration of the species and its de-masculinization, if it were to be tamed (Isenberg, “Return” 182–183). This, again, was not always the case. Until the early 1930s, the same naturalists did not care too much for the ‘wild’ bison, but instead the tame herd was actively managed and increased in size. In the 1910s and 1920s, the ‘wild’ and the ‘tame’ herd began to intermingle, so that from the 1930s onwards the herds were then mainly referred to by their primary range in the winter months (Franke 7). In 1923, the herds grew beyond what seemed necessary to convey the image of wilderness. Accordingly, a Federal Act gave the Secretary of the Interior the power “to sell or otherwise dispose of the surplus buffalo of the Yellowstone National Park herd” (Disposition of Surplus). The herd in Yellowstone clearly provided different human groups with different cultural symbols and therefore the relational agency of the animals is to be looked at from these different perspectives. For many Native American tribes, “the Yellowstone bison population […] contains the direct descendants of progenitors who brought native peoples onto this earth” (Plumb 27) In this way, the fate of the bison was discursively inextricably linked to the survival of the tribes, today, however, primarily on a cultural and not on an economic level. From a settler-colonist perspective, the bison in Yellowstone symbolically stand for “the Old West and our wilderness experience” (Keiter 1). They remain, just as the wolf, a symbol of control in the frontier society. As such, as Zachary Lancaster writes, [t]ime changes, but the basic conflict of interest remains the same: cattle ranchers want the land use rights to graze cattle, and conservationists want bison to solely occupy the same land. The conflict between bison and livestock represents the broader conflict in the West when wildlife, people and livestock all share the same land. (423)

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However, these notions seem to run conflict with a recent description of Yellowstone issued in National Geographic: Yellowstone is a wild place, constrained imperfectly within human-imposed limits. It’s a wild place that we have embraced, surrounded, riddled with roads and hotels and souvenir shops, but not tamed, not conquered—a place we treasure because it still represents wildness. (Quammen)

In this reading, the ‘wild’ seems to still be able to overcome ‘civilization’. In truth, it is just one cultural notion of ‘wild’ that competes with others. As Karen Jones writes, the whole idea of national parks in the US was “irrevocably connected with processes of westward expansion” and at the same time with the establishment of a “cult of wilderness” (Jones 33). Perhaps Yellowstone was able to market this cult in a more skilful manner than other places. There have been other controversies affecting the relational agencies of the bison. Since the early 1920s, great controversy arose about the species as transmitters of Brucellosis. Bison that left the park were in danger of being shot and indeed, in the 1990s more than 400 were killed annually. This was the result of a legislation passed in Montana, which declared the bison “emigrating” out of Yellowstone huntable. Apparently, as late as 1990, the opinion was that “the bison movement to ‘bison vacant’ lands outside the park will probably continue” especially in places “where they are in conflict with other management strategies on both private and public lands” (State of Montana et al. 13). As a result, the agencies governing the Park as well as the surrounding land came to the conclusion that it was necessary that one should do the utmost to “maintain a self-sustaining population of bison” in the Park, as well as to “ensure opportunities to view the free-ranging bison”, while reducing the potential conflicts both with regard to the transmission of diseases as well as property damage (13). At the same time, it was agreed that at least when it came to the Northern herd, which was “not easily deterred by normal fence wire” (18), that those trespassing on private land could and should be “reduced”. In the winter of 1996–1997, more than 1000 bison were killed because they tried to leave the park (Franke 12). Although widely unpopular among the national press, Native tribes and animal welfare organizations, the state of Montana maintained its right to kill the animals, once they left the security of the park, and all court cases maintained this right.16 Once more, it was the ‘wild’ bison that were seen as the problem, not the buffalos bred for meat by the same ranchers who were most vigorously lamenting the killing. From a relational perspective, this shows how ‘wild’ itself again becomes a contestable notion (Burton 24). As demonstrated, maybe even more so than in the case of Białowieża, the American bison at Yellowstone was embedded in multi-relational networks that determined their possibilities to act or to be acted upon, depending largely on the

16For

an overview over these cases, see Burton 25.

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historical circumstances. For conservationists and the National Park Service, the buffalo became the flag-ship species for the successful prevention of extinction, “the bison is notably emblazoned on the fabric of NPS employee uniforms and insignia” (Plumb 22) and is also displayed on the Wyoming flag. The significance becomes even more apparent when considering the spatial approach. The frontier mythology, real or imagined, was based on the encounter, the contact and combat with and finally the subjugation of the ‘wild’ for which the bison was more than just a symbol. It was the meat that kept the frontiersmen alive, it was the fur that helped them to build an economic empire, it was the use of the ‘buffalo traces’ that helped settlers find accessible water sources and it was the means by which to regulate and to control the Indian population. How the bison acted in this spatial arrangement has been the centre of some debate, especially when it comes to historically reconstructing migration routes and “predictability” where the local conditions have not been adequately recorded (Bamforth 2). As Douglas Bamforth had noted already in 1987, we need to carefully and historically distinctively record the spatial conditions in which the animals were able to follow patterns of choice, if we do not want to fall victim to “misinterpretations of cultural-ecological relationships” (13).

8 Conclusion To this day, the spatial relations are fundamental in determining just how interspecies relationships work: “While the bison are protected inside the park, and regarded as noble symbols of American heritage, agencies associated with the state of Montana consider them mobile vectors of disease. […] In crossing the line, bison discard their identity as noble symbols of American heritage and become characterized instead as dangerous, disease-ridden pests”, as Jean Lavigne points out (285). This is interesting insofar as the distinction of the bison here does not operate simply along the ‘wild-tame’ line, but on a different cultural level associated with the bison’s particular use of space. Historically and as result of these spatial dimensions, we have different relational agencies inherent within the bison-human relation, such as mythological figure, provider of food, transmitter of diseases each coming with particular spatial allotments. Just as with the European bison, how these dominant relations are defined at any one time has solid spatial implications. It furthermore shows a historic specificity, which affected the range of possible intersections. In addition, as might have become apparent by now, the relational agencies following these attributions do differ from those applied to the wisents in Białowieża. They were never ‘royal beasts’ and hence never bestowed with any kind of exclusivity which gave them some room to manoeuvre. On the contrary, as with all eliminatory projects, the potential for agency, let alone resistance, becomes marginal. However, it is striking that the Native Americans’ regard for the bison and the tribes’ insistence on a shared fate invokes quite similar relations as the reverence provided by Polish partisans. Both groups co-inhabited “landscapes of power” (Jones 39). This power was both stabilized and eroded

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through the presence, encounter and interaction with the animals. There were however also stark differences. The lived relationship with their specific species of bison also affected the relational agency of the animals. As the empirical examples disclose, the notion of ‘wild’ constitutes a wide array of meanings and is indeed time specific. Big charismatic animals, one might argue, are not the problem in the constitution of agency. They are not only a not easily overlooked metabolic entity, but also a force to reckon with. After all, one reason for the mass killings in the Prairies was the bison’s repeated destruction of newly built train tracks. And while there is of course a problem with focusing on these charismatic animals, I want this paper to be understood as an attempt to open up discussions on expanding concepts of relations not only to the closest social circles, but to relations constituted through encounters of all kind: rewilding, managing, feeding, killing etc. As ‘co-participants’ in ‘colonizing’ the respective regions in natural parks, the animals became involved in political struggles that were not of their own making but in which they still took an active role. This is of course even more true for their ignorance of human made borders, fences and partition lines. Again, the crossing of those lines did not have the same impact on all people at all times and therefore human reaction to all kinds of bison activity will differ. So instead of suggesting that we take all activity of the bison as equally important and then once more fall into the trap of assuming that all agency is of the same quality, it will be necessary to take into account all possible relations with all possible partners. This would call for an expanded social history. Instead of looking for potential actors structuring our histories, we should for a start look at the possible relations that are produced through the encounter of humans and ‘wild’ animals. This will always mean to categorize ‘wild’ as a specific form of relation producing a specific cultural animal type that clearly cuts across any nature/culture divide and which needs to be carefully disentangled. Only then will it be possible to write about animals in a way that does not repeat static projections on their potential of agency (or their lack thereof). At that point, the question of whether they are actors or agents would become obsolete.

References Agrawal, Arun. “Adaptive Management in Transboundary Protected Areas: The Bialowieza National Park and Biosphere Reserve as a Case Study.” Environmental Conservation, vol. 27, no. 4, 2000, pp. 326–333. Ahrens, Theodor. “The Present Status of the European Bison or Wisent.” Journal of Mammalogy, vol. 2, no. 2, 1921, pp. 58–62. Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. Oxford UP, 2004. The American Bison Society. Annual Report of the American Bison Society, 1905–1907. The Society, 1908. Bamforth, Douglas B. “Historical Documents and Bison Ecology on the Great Plains.” The Plains Anthropologist, vol. 32, no. 115, 1987, pp. 1–16. Baratay, Éric. Point de vue animal: Une autre version de l’histoire. Seuil, 2012. Berger, John. Why Look at Animals? Penguin, 2009.

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First Encounters: Domestication as Steps of Becoming

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Kristin Armstrong Oma

1 Domestication Complexities When non-human animals like dogs, cows, pigs, sheep, horses and hens emerged as domesticated species, a landslide of civilizational development happened. Both intangible relationalities and material cultures changed irrevocably. Why and how the domestication event(s) happened is as yet unaccounted for and can merely be theorised about. However, the normative narrative outlines the process as one of human mastery over animals (Clutton-Brock; Ingold; Russell). We tend to look at farm life today and make tacit assumptions that, although technology and architecture have changed, the particular constellation of humans and domestic animals, and the way they are situated towards each other, is a given. I have previously argued that resulting from the domestication process, a shift in perception happened in humans, from a domination mode of being to an ethics of care (Armstrong Oma, “Making Space”). Anthropologist Tim Ingold has reversely argued that the shift went the other way, from a relationship of trust between hunter and prey to domination over domestic animals. Ingold and others that hold this view envision domestic animals as livestock, a resource to be harvested by humans. Although this may be the desired outcome of living with domestic animals, it omits the everyday practice of encountering living animals. Ingold’s approach was first critiqued by John Knight (Armstrong Oma, “Between Trust”). Knight’s critique can be summarised as follows: “we should be wary of collapsing the two separate dimensions of the human relationship to domestic animals – outcome and process. The preoccupation with the outcome of the

K. A. Oma (*)  Bryne, Norway E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_11

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relationship (e.g. slaughter for meat) is apt to conceal the protracted relationship of nurturance and care that precedes it” (Knight 5). These two schools of thoughts come to their understanding of the domestication process from very different conceptions of the nature of animals as well as human-animal relationships. But ultimately, maybe positioning oneself in one camp or the other is obsolete—deep interspecies entanglements resulted from the domestication process, and these entanglements unfolded through time and at different locations to become many things depending on their historical situation, both trust and domination, dominated-by, dominated-with, trustful resistance and trusting cooperations. In her book When Species Meet, Donna Haraway suggests that humans and animals are mess-mates, as in messy mates, sitting at the table together and sharing existence in several ways, often in ways that defy categorisation (17). Who is who of the dominator and the dominated might not always be so clear-cut. Therefore, I argue that animal husbandry needs to be studied from a wide range of temporal and geographical situations to explore the full potential of the diversity of living with domestic animals in sustainable ways. These situations reflect a plethora of human-animal encounters and co-habitation strategies. The first encounters between humans and their potential animal co-domesticates would be markedly different, and take place in very different physical frameworks compared to encounters between established farmers and domestic animals, with their architectural structuring. This is a means to challenge and, if necessary, reconsider the epistemological frameworks that underpin studies of animal husbandry in current society. In this contribution I explore the ontological rationale of the enlightenment paradigm underlying the study of animal husbandry in archaeology, and investigate the implications of tacit assumptions and their effect upon the general understanding of animal husbandry from a time-depth perspective. The way scholars conceptualise animal husbandry in past societies can form a political rationale for current husbandry practices. From an animal welfare perspective it is therefore important to critically investigate not only current practices but also the narratives that often are, unreflectively, used to form normative understandings of the ontological status of the participants in animal husbandry practices (Armstrong Oma, “Past and Present”). By adding time depth to narratives of animal husbandry practices, these narratives can form a rationale of legitimisation, ‘it was ever thus’. But was it? By reviewing recent analyses that reveal some of the story of the domestication of sheep, I consider domestication as steps in a process of becoming, rather than as a single event. I will further draw upon two situations from the late Neolithic and the early Bronze Age (c. 2300–1500 BCE) in Norway. The later Bronze Age farm is a site of daily encounters between different kinds of household members: the human farmers and the domestic animals. Creating a physical framework for these encounters encompasses a shift from a way of constructing houses that were for human habitation only, to the construction of houses believed to house humans and domestic animals (Armstrong Oma, Sheep people). Creating joint living spaces inside the house has implications for several aspects of animal husbandry

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practices and ramifications for human-domestic animal relationships, ranging from health and zoonotic diseases to architecture, socio-economic strategies, trade, identity, and so on. But prior to this, there were a number of encounters that, although not first encounters geographically speaking, were perceived as such by the people who lived and experienced them. In the late Neolithic, first encounters presumably happened at the seashore.

2 The Beginnings of Domestication Sheep are believed to have been the first husbandry species to become domesticated (Ryder). It is commonly assumed that domestic sheep (Ovis aries) developed from the Asian Mouflon sheep (Ovis orientalis), and that the European Mouflon sheep are the feral offspring of an early wave of domesticated sheep that came out of the Fertile Crescent (Zeder, “Domestication and Early Agriculture”). Sheep were domesticated in the so-called Fertile Crescent in the Middle East some 11.000 years ago according to Zeder et al. (“Documenting Domestication”) and Colledge et al., and 9–10.000 years, according to Juliet Clutton-Brock. The disparity in dating is due to new scientific methods that have dated early domestication events based on evidence for herd management and crop cultivation that predate the morphological changes traditionally used as evidence for domestication by at least 1000 years (Zeder, “Domestication and Early Agriculture”). Recent genetic studies into mitochondrial DNA (Hiendleder et al.; Meadows et al.) and endogenous retroviruses as genetic markers (Chessa et al.) have demonstrated that there were several domestication events and that “sheep were recruited from wild populations multiple times” (Meadows et al. 1371). This means that ‘first encounters’ between humans and sheep happened several times. Also, studies of retroviruses have separated waves of sheep migrations into Europe, identifying “breeds previously recognized as ‘primitive’, such as Orkney, Soay and the Nordic short-tailed sheep now confined to the periphery of NW Europe” as relics of a first migration, whereas a later migratory episode involved sheep with improved production traits (i.e. better wool quality), which formed the basis for present-day breeds (Chessa et al. 533). Although these studies reveal some clues as to how the domestication process took place, they say nothing of the cause. The reasons underlying domestication are complex, and the characteristics and needs of both humans and sheep must be considered. Fundamentally, sheep were originally socially well adapted to live with humans, with certain innate characteristics that were important fundamentals in human-sheep relationality: lack of aggression, manageable size, and a social nature (Budiansky 78–80). On top of this, successful breeding was facilitated by early sexual maturity and a high reproduction rate. It is assumed that initially, humans kept sheep for meat and skin—although it is important to acknowledge that the reasons underlying the initiation of the domestication process are unknown and reasons beyond ‘meat on the hoof’ could have been equally important. What has become evident is that sheep is one of the most successful species

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on the planet considering genetic development, diversity of breeds and geographical distribution. Starting from a small ecological niche in Anatolia, they have ‘conquered’ the world. Following the initial domestication events, and the subsequent waves of migrations of domestic animals into Europe, sheep have cohabited with humans for millennia in Northern Europe. According to archaeological evidence, sheep were first introduced to Europe during the Neolithic, c. 4000 BCE (Marciniak, Placing Animals).

3 Early Evidence of Sheep in Norway In Norway, early indications of husbandry practices are reflected in pollen from Plantago lanceolata and other plants that indicate pastures, the earliest ones are dated to around 4000 BCE (Myhre and Øye 27–31, with references). Caves and rock shelters provide good contexts for the preservation of bones, whereas settlements with two-aisled houses, when they start appearing in the late Neolithic, have very poor bone preservation due to the acidity of the soil. Therefore, based upon bones from rock shelters we can infer that sheep were present in Western Norway from the late Neolithic. Further, rock shelters, some of them far inland and high in the mountains, suggest the practice of transhumance from the Neolithic onwards (Prescott, “Aspects of Early Pastoralism”). The earliest sheep remains from Western Norway are from the late Neolithic, dated to about 2500 BCE. They were discovered in the rock shelter known as Skipshelleren (Hufthammer; Prescott, “Was There Really”). Other early finds come from similar contexts, such as the rock shelter Skrivarhellaren (Prescott, Kulturhistoriske Undersøkelser). In Rogaland, sheep bones were found in the rock shelter Stangelandshelleren, and a cattle bone from the same context was dated to 3340–2890 BCE (Høgestøl and Prøsch-Danielsen 23)—although it is unknown if the sheep bones are from the same time. There are hundreds of years between these separate finds, and similar to the discussion of the domestication of sheep, the archaeology of early husbandry in Norway demonstrates how a settled life with domesticated animals was not an event that occurred once and was then thereafter a set way of living. Quite the opposite—this was a process of separate encounters, trying to establish sustainable human-domestic animal relationships, succeeding for a while, failing, and then for other groups of the population to try again, and in other ways. Thus, already in the late Neolithic sheep were one amongst other domesticated species that cohabited with humans on settlements and formed herds that roamed the land, both in the coastal regions where farms have been located and the mountainous inland regions where faunal remains in rock shelters attest to their presence. Farming settlements, in which human-domestic animal encounters had become solidified, do not appear until the late Neolithic, with the two-aisled longhouses. There is no evidence to suggest that domestic animals lived inside the earliest farmhouses from around 2200 BCE. Loosely herded flocks that served as ‘meat on the hoof’, in addition to hide for various purposes, is

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the most likely explanation of how sheep and other domesticates entered a social contract with the Neolithic people. However, we must bear in mind that the people and their flocks lived in tangled and complex relationships. Like Arkadiusz Marciniak points out, “Neolithic farmers could certainly not be viewed as ‘dummy’ economic people” (Placing Animals 9), which means that they were not just governed by considerations of cost-benefit maximisation but also by social and cultural considerations for the animals as kin.

4 Encountering Cows in the Late Neolithic—on the Seashore of Slettabø In the following, I will zoom in on an archaeological site to outline how domestication events could tangibly take place at sites of encounters. In 1968, the settlement site of Slettabø, a stone’s throw from the sea in southwestern Norway, was excavated (Skjølsvold). The site has a long habitation span ranging from the late Mesolithic, i.e. the hunter-gatherer phase of the Stone Age, to the early Iron Age (Glørstad). I will focus on how this site can contribute to an understanding of first encounters between humans and domestic animals. This site is not, however, the first ever encounter between humans and domestic animals in this region—that moment cannot be pinpointed in time, and we can assume that ‘first encounters’ have happened again and again, at the level of the individual humans and animals. The Slettabø site consists of separate settlement phases, identified by separate layers with soil rich in organic material and finds. The layers have been covered by sand. Layer II, dated to the middle to late Neolithic (c. 2900–2200 BCE), has received much attention because it represents the only known so-called Bellbeaker site in Norway (Glørstad; Prescott and Glørstad; Skjølsvold). This phase, dated to c. 2300/2200 BCE is consistent with the C-14 dating of cattle bones that were found on site, which indicates that cattle were introduced at this time. Before I proceed with describing the site, I will briefly give a background to the Bellbeaker culture, which is still one of the most enigmatic cultural complexes in European prehistory. Around 2500 BCE, a new culture, recognised mainly by their pottery, the Bellbeakers, and archer equipment such as wrist guards and flint arrowheads, made with pressure-flake technology, are found from Spain and Portugal in the south and all along the Atlantic façade, via France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, England and Ireland, with one outlier in Norway—namely Slettabø (Prescott and Glørstad). Lately, new analyses based on a range of skeletons demonstrate how these objects belonged to a genetically separate people that settled in new territories (Olalde et al.). No such analyses are possible for southwestern Norway, since remains from humans are not found. Animal remains have not been analysed with regard to mobility patterns. The Slettabø site where sherds of Bellbeakers were retrieved is situated by what was a little sheltered cove at the time of the Neolithic settlement, and would probably have been a good harbour for rowing boats (Prescott and Glørstad 78; Skjølsvold 19). The hinterland is a mix of rocky outcrops and plains of sandy, rich soil

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that is easy to farm. The region is one of the earliest agricultural regions in Norway. The time-depth of the settlement, dated to 2900 BCE to 900 BCE (Skjølsvold 175–182), indicates that it was an advantageous location both from the perspective of a hunter-gatherer way of life, as well as for traders and farmers. This site, where the sea meets land, seems to have been chosen mainly for its strategic advantage in the Neolithic, judging by the presence of ‘foreign’ pottery of both Pitted Ware and Bellbeaker styles. Intriguing in this regard, and my main focus here, are the cattle bones found on site, that are chronologically consistent with the Bellbeakers and subsequently with the Bellbeaker expansion along the Atlantic. Layer II, the second phase of the settlement, according to the stratigraphic layers and the distribution of finds and C14 dates, belongs to the Neolithic culture with its scattered attempts at animal husbandry, as described above. Seven fragments of cattle teeth are found in a cluster in this layer (Skjølsvold 68–69). They probably belong to one incident, all belonging to the same animal and placed there together. The local soil does not conserve bones well, so presumably there have been more bones (68, 189). Finds of cattle bones point to a presence of living cows at the site. Nonetheless, these bones do not necessarily indicate a large flock but a small number of individuals. Considering the nature of the site, and the presence of Bellbeakers, I postulate that this site is a place of first encounters. The little cove could have been a place where boats docked and brought people, animals and objects that were foreign to the shore. This is an important aspect of domestication—the spread of animal husbandry was not a wave that evenly spread out on a map, but a series of first encounters between humans and domestic animals. We can only speculate: What happened at such a first meeting? And what happened thereafter? Did the cows conquer new land and become part of the lifeworld of the region? Obviously, the presence of bones attests to killing, and presumably consumption. Based on the bones, we cannot know what happened here. The excavator speculates that the people who occupied the site were hunter-gatherers with cattle herding as a sideline, or that they have traded the cows with other herders, or even that they were cattle thieves (Skjølsvold 189–190). But Arne Skjølsvold ruled out that the local population were farmers, based on the lack of other evidence, such as grain, although he suggests that they could have been herders. There is so far no indication of grazing in the region, although the surrounding areas would be well suited for it. The context of the teeth is also worth considering; they were found in a cluster. This probably means that they represent one event, rather than an accumulation over time. The fact that teeth are found could be due to taphonomy (i.e. processes that happened to the bones post deposition) since teeth generally are preserved better than other bones, but in this context, I find it more likely that they were intentionally placed in a pile. Such an act could signify the commemoration of a specific event, something out of the ordinary. Therefore, I suggest that the cattle teeth represent encounters with herding cultures and subsequently with cows.

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A physical manifestation of this encounter has come down through millennia and gives us a rare glimpse into what a magnanimous event it must have been to encounter creatures belonging to a species so foreign, so radically outlandish, as cows must have appeared to these people by the seashore. These people were basically hunters, as the other animal bones and the hunting tools attest to. But the osteological analysis of the bones shows that the cattle that the locals were introduced to, were domestic animals. The meeting with domestic animals presented to them both the idea and the tangible reality of a proximity between themselves and this kind of animal that might have been, to them, unprecedented. The encounter must have been laced with vulnerability and risk—from an experience of animals as hovering from a long range, to being close enough to touch. Thus, the cows take on an importance similar to that which is proposed for the Bellbeakers themselves—these pots were considered to be outlandish objects, maybe used for alcohol consumption. In a Norwegian context, the coming of people bearing Bellbeakers was probably a catalyst for new lifeways, which led to wide-ranging changes, from a mobile hunter-gatherer society to settled, agrarian societies (Prescott and Glørstad). I argue that the meeting with cows was just as pivotal as the meeting with the Bellbeakers, since this ‘first encounter’ was needed to develop the husbandry practices that followed in the ensuing centuries. This site serves as an example of the many first encounters between humans and domestic animals which must have been crucial both for taming and domesticating animals, and later for the spread of herding and farming as a lifestyle. In the following, I will time walk to the Early Bronze Age in the same region in order to explore human-domestic animal encounters in agricultural settlements.

5 Facilitating Deep Time Encounters: The Three-Aisled Longhouse Not long after the encounter with cows at Slettabø, people in this region converted from hunting and gathering to a mainly agro-pastoral way of life, represented by finds of large farmhouses, so-called two-aisled longhouses, and widespread evidence of both cultivation of grains and grazing (Høgestøl and Prøsch-Danielsen; Prescott and Glørstad). The houses are interpreted as dwellings for several families, and there are no indications of animals living inside. They are a stable form of building and embody a particular way of life that stays mostly unchanged from the Late Neolithic (c. 2200 BCE) to the Early Bronze Age (c. 1500 BCE). According to the archaeological evidence, animals did not live inside these houses, based upon the lack of internal divisions, which signifies that the whole house was used for human habitation (Ethelberg et al.; Tesch, Houses, Farmsteads). The two-aisled longhouse was a stable way of building dwellings and subsequently structuring lives, for hundreds of years. However, after c. 700 years, a very specific development in architecture happened in Northern Europe, from the Netherlands, to Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway—the transition from two-aisled to three-aisled longhouses. Three-aisled longhouses are rectangular

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structures with two length-wise lines of posts inside the house that held up the roof, thereby separating the internal space into three long aisles. Compared to the two-aisled houses, with one central, internal row of roof-bearing postholes, these houses were more segregated and the internal space was less open. Traces of byres and internal divisions appear ca. 1500 BCE (Fokkens 36). These houses were probably designed to stall animals indoors (Ethelberg et al. 203), which is the main reason that the transfer from the two-aisled to the three-aisled longhouse is associated with moving domestic animals into the house. Several archaeologists (Årlin; Armstrong Oma, “Between Trust”; Human-Animal Relationships; “LargeScale”; “Making Space”; “Past and Present”; Lagerås and Regnell; Rasmussen and Adamsen 138; Rasmussen 281; Tesch, “House, Farm” 290) believe this transition is connected to a shift which implies making room for animals indoors, whereas others dismiss this assumption based on the ambiguity of evidence (Carlie; Petersson). Several three-aisled houses have internal structures either in one end of the house, or in the middle, that utilise the roof-bearing posts to create a byre with stalls for animals, presumably cattle, along the walls. This novel architectonic solution signifies a momentous shift in the perception of animals. Some archaeologists (Årlin; Armstrong Oma, “Between Trust”; Human-Animal Relationships; “Large-Scale”; “Making Space”; “Past and Present”; Rasmussen) have suggested that the change happened due to a change in the perception of domestic animals, leading to their becoming household members and being embedded in the lifespace of humans. Consequently, a human-animal relationship developed in which greater physical proximity created a new way of living where everyday encounters would lead to humans and domestic animals knowing each other as individuals. This is aptly demonstrated by the remains of a house that burnt down some centuries later in Nørre Tranders on Jutland, in which the bones of animals were unearthed in situ in the part of a longhouse interpreted as the byre (Nielsen). This house was dated to the Pre-Roman Iron Age, and is one of several from this period around the Limfjord area on Jutland that were burnt down, either by accident or by arson, where the human and animal remains were found exactly where they died (Kveiborg). What do these houses tell us about human-animal relationships? Obviously, this kind of setup facilitated husbandry practices and easy access to the domestic animals, such as milking, plucking wool, collecting dung, etc. The changes are probably to some degree contingent upon what is known as the secondary products revolution (Sherratt), in which domestic animals were no longer ‘meat on the hoof’, but became producers of valuable products (Årlin). Recently, analyses of pottery with milk protein from earlier times have led to a questioning of this term and the time-scale of its introduction (Greenfield; Marciniak, “Secondary Products”). Nonetheless, the three-aisled longhouses undoubtedly facilitated this production process for humans and animals both in an expedient manner. But, beyond the functionality of agrarian lifeways, I propose that the architectonic solution that these houses offered provided a physical layout and structure for repeated, solidified human-animal encounters.

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6 Domestication and Human-Animal Relations: Changes in Terms of Engagement I have presented three examples of the steps of becoming that domestic-animals and domestic-humans have negotiated together: • the lengthy and complex process of sheep domestication; • a singular site where first human-cow encounters possibly happened; • and the deep-time encounters orchestrated by the architecture of the threeaisled longhouses. These three examples demonstrate how human-animal relationships developed along different trajectories, where the level of engagement to some extent depended upon physical proximity and actual encounters. However, this is not in line with mainstream archaeological thinking around domestication. Archaeology has traditionally played a role in trying to explain domestication processes of plants and animals by way of environmental archaeology. This strand of archaeology has epistemologically been informed by a fundamentally Cartesian, i.e. humanist and enlightenment paradigm, that has presupposed that humans have conquered animals, plants and landscapes and subjected them to the human will, as though they are passive, even inanimate, matter (Johannsen). The agency of plants and animals has rarely been considered. This perspective has led other disciplines to mistrust the ability of archaeology to respond to questions of domestication and, fundamentally, to questions of which factors pushed the development. For example, anthropologist Natasha Fijn questions the theoretical tenets upon which archaeology is based, when she says: Animal domestication is often investigated in the realm of archaeology, especially zooarchaeology, in an attempt to establish the origin of domestication in animals. This line of questioning could be flawed from the outset in that the aim is to seek a point where humanity transcended nature and was set along the path towards culture and civilisation. Anthropological thinking is moving towards the idea that humanity has never been separated from nature […]. (22)

How can archaeology counter this critique? One solution is to fundamentally reconsider the domestication process and early agrarian commitments in the way I have attempted here and investigate the process as steps of ever-changing humananimal engagements that created historically unique interspecies relationships. The examples I have given allow us to glimpse some such unique relationships. The agency of plants (Morehart and Morell-Hart; Van der Veen) and animals (Brittain and Overton) has only recently come under scrutiny, and informs my way of thinking. I suggest that archaeology needs to deal with the domestication of animals, both in the past and in recent times, from a perspective of reciprocity,

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commitment and co-authored life-ways (Armstrong Oma, “Making Space”). Archaeology needs to shed its fixation with an anthropocentric point of view. Such a starting point presupposes that humans have been doing unto other nonhuman animals rather than having been done to, it assumes a hierarchy of beings, of species, with us humans at the top of the food chain. It considers the development of life on earth as a constant struggle for human survival, and that finally, with the advent of domestication, establishing human supremacy was achieved to our satisfaction. As Natasha Fijn (22) suggests, it hints at an understanding of the development of life on earth as a one-directional road, for human benefit only as well as the need for human survival leading to a mindless exploitation of other beings. And maybe in our globalised world, this is to a large extent true—but certainly not so in the period of domestication. My project aims at deconstructing this narrative of one-sided exploitation and bring into it a play of many kinds of beings and many forms of inter-species engagements (Armstrong Oma, “Past and Present”). In this regard, I am inspired by the fieldwork conducted by Fijn and her work on Mongolian herders, in which she developed a conceptualisation of human-animal relations that she refers to as “co-domestic”, defined thus: “the social adaptation of animals in association with human beings by means of mutual cross-species interaction and social engagement” (Fijn 19, original emphasis). What does this entail from the point of view of domestication? I argue that from the point of view of the prehistoric domestication process, “co-domestic” embodies a specific ethics of care (Puig de la Bellacasa) in which humans responded to the needs of animals and instead of taking and/or using animals by killing them, there was a sense of, and possibly a need to, give back to the animals. Ethics of care is here understood as the applied practice of caring relations rather than a set of moral standards, or virtues (Held). It implies giving care to those who are perceived to need it and expands the original concept, used in nursing, to go beyond human-only interactions. This term is associated with duty of care and is normally used in social sciences and particularly in medicine and nursing (Latimer). But it is also a much wider term and has frequently made its way into discussions of animal ethics (Donovan and Adams; Puig de la Bellacasa). In UK legislation, duty of care is implemented in the Animal Welfare Act (UK Government). In a broader sense, it is based on the five freedoms (freedom from hunger or thirst, from discomfort, from pain, to express normal behaviour, from fear and distress) and denotes the duty of behaving in such a way to others as to not do them harm, but to protect them—and it is in this sense that I extend this notion to animals in the past, although I recognise, like pointed out by María Puig de la Bellacasa, that not only humans give care, and that human and nonhuman relations of care cannot really be disentangled. Considering human-animal relations from a domestication perspective, I understand an ethics of care as reciprocal actions—giving back, in which humans felt obliged to observe, assess and take appropriate action to ensure the wellbeing of animals in their care. Giving back could initially manifest in practices such as

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clearing areas for grazing and guarding water supplies, so that the animals were protected. And later, in more complex and entangled relationships, in building shelters, aiding during giving birth, providing food by collecting grass, leaves, bark, and ultimately more complex strategies that involved storage, such as haymaking. From the animals’ perspective, what better partners in domestication could they have than these humans who clear and guard pastures, build shelters, bring water and food, and so on. Introducing an ethics of care into the domestication discourse discloses an attitude in which the relationship between humans and domestic animals could be seen as asymmetrical. However, this does not necessarily imply fixed hierarchies of power, or that animals are mindless creatures, Cartesian automata, or slaves devoid of agency, dominated by humans. I acknowledge that animals have the capacity for agency, in line with the growing interdisciplinary recognition that animals possess characteristics such as intelligence, emotion and awareness that vary from humans by degree rather than kind (Argent; Bekoff; Birke et al.; Johannsen; McFarland and Hediger). As in the humanities at large, human agency has been granted supremacy in archaeology. Ontologically, the nature of being is the nature of human being; the nature of action is of human action (Johannsen 305). But animals are more than cultural abstractions: what is lacking in the humanities are considerations of the animals as themselves. Animals are alive, active participants in their worlds, and the spaces where those worlds intersect and enmesh with humans are often messy and difficult to divide into clean compartments. In addition to how humans “use” them, other animals often take part in subjectified relationships with humans that impact both species at various levels of scale. I will briefly illustrate the implications of this by paraphrasing John Law and Annemarie Mol’s (58) exploration of the agency of a Cumbrian sheep situated in in a particular historical setting, in 2001 in England during the middle of the foot-and-mouth epidemic. Starting from material semiotics, they claim that entities give each other being, that they enact each other. Agency is thus “ubiquitous, endlessly extended through webs of materialised relations.” (58). This means that “an actor does not act alone. It acts in relation to other actors, linked up with them. This means that it is also always being acted upon. To act is not to master, for the results of what is being done are often unexpected.” (57). This perspective eludes the distinction between mastery and being-mastered. Anna Tsing debunks the notion of human mastery over other species as a fantasy of human exceptionalism: “[S]cience has inherited stories about human mastery from the great monotheistic religions. These stories fuel assumptions about human autonomy, and they direct questions to the human control of nature, on the one hand, or human impact on nature, on the other, rather than to species interdependence.” (144). Instead, she posits, “What if we imagined a human nature that shifted historically together with varied webs of interspecies dependence?” (144). Within domestication, webs of interspecies dependence is key: relations are managed by both humans and animals, with their specific requirements to thrive and form a healthy flock, and by the animals’ ability, by their agency, to choose

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whether to cooperate or resist. Successful human-domestic animal relationships, then, depend upon acknowledging that animals’ needs must be met in order for them to thrive. The examples I have discussed above demonstrate how attempts at introducing animals did not always succeed. In the case of the domestication of sheep, there were successes and failures. For example, little is known about the initial domestication of sheep, but archaeological and genetic evidence demonstrate how sheep at some points in time and space successfully moved into other parts of the world and thrived, and at other points went feral, and established themselves beyond human societies. Encounters, like the one that can be glimpsed by way of the archaeological site at the shore of south-western Norway in the Neolithic, were not necessarily by themselves sufficient to immediately set history upon a new course, although they were required to instigate the process of creating codomestic households. It takes some hundred years from the first encounter at Slettabø to settled farming societies with cows and humans in the region. Why is this? Several issues hang in the balance, there might be factors beyond human control, such as a mismatch of environmental conditions and the biological requirements of specific species and failed adaptation to new kinds of ecological niches. But mainly, the success would depend on the manner of encounters: how sites of encounters would solidify to become meeting points (Armstrong Oma, Human-Animal Relationships 163–164) that created sufficient proximity, trust, and knowledge to be able to function within a duty of care framework, sufficient room to roam, willingness to both assess needs of the animals and a willingness to engage at the necessary level. Identifying needs becomes an important aspect of this line of conjecture. In order to successfully carry out a duty of care, the need for care, and its specific ramifications, must be known. These needs are what the domestic animals bring into the social contract (Armstrong Oma, “Between Trust”), and give animals stakeholder status (Armstrong Oma, “Past and Present”). Humans must cater to these needs, otherwise they will not be able to live in a successful agrarian commitment. Thus, in order to achieve a functioning household economy based upon husbandry, the needs of the animals are the main priority. The animals respond to the duty of care that humans bring to the table, as well as bringing their own. Consequently, by way of their needs, animals co-shape not only the social contract but also the spatial arrangements, daily and yearly cycles, engagement with the wider environment and so on, that shape the lives of all stakeholders in agrarian commitments. By this engagement, the process of mutual becoming unfolds. I suggest that we understand this age we live in as having been co-authored by humans and animals and it is the deep interspecies entanglements that are a defining trait rather than a speciesist understanding of humans as the sole doers and agents. Encounters with animals mattered in the deep past. The exceptionalism of both human and non-human animals in the case studies discussed above resides in their willingness to make space for other beings to flourish on their own terms.

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Untying the Knots: Relational Art and Interspecific Encounter

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Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson

In this essay, we will present some of the ways in which the relationships between humans and others are conceptually and strategically re-framed in our work and for what purpose/s. In addition, we will demonstrate how in our projects, mechanisms of ‘encounter’ between humans and the non-humans are established, mobilised and considered in their effects. We will look at how this approach has developed from our early practice—our first experiments with and more specifically, in opposition to animal representation, from our subversion of the taxidermic specimens in the installation, nanoq: flat out and bluesome (2001–2006) through the domestic habitats we examined in (a)fly (2006), to the later, structured meetings of between you and me, Three Attempts (2009) and Vanishing Point (2011) and the more recent frozen condor bodies in the photographic and video works entitled: You Must Carry Me Now (2014). We will demonstrate how in one of our most recent projects, Beyond Plant Blindness (2017), ideas of interspecific encounter, involved shifts in scale and strategic slowing down of thought in order to sense ontological ‘difference’. In all this, for us there is a driving imperative to unlock new ways of thinking and offer unfamiliar and often necessarily odd approaches in order to unravel established behavioural and perceptual knots and to create a freer and more productive flow of, (for instance), intelligent and sensitive environmental responses. In this respect, at this time, we believe that the answers to our challenging interspecific and environmental circumstances are unlikely to be found in any one established strand of thought, or one field, one philosophy, or one logic—much

B. Snæbjörnsdóttir (*) · M. Wilson  Brampton, UK E-Mail: [email protected] M. Wilson E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_12

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more likely, they are discoverable by means of some process of interpolation between disparate disciplines and fields. In order for this to be accomplished, mobilised and sustained we should, by suspending disbelief in any one system, put trust in a new kind of compound ‘intersense’, constituted interstitially and responsively, to kindle sites of productive unfamiliarity, uncertainty and not-knowing by which we may newly observe the world. For us, in pursuing this idea in our work, not only have we necessarily adopted and mobilised the experiences and knowledge of multiple others, professionals and amateurs alike, but we have found it strategically imperative to append and qualify—to resist and in some cases, surrender entirely—the significant centrality of visual representation.

1 nanoq: flat out and bluesome (2001–2006) It is important to note that back in 2000 to 2001 at the start of our collaboration, we made no conscious decision to start working with human and animal relations. Appropriately perhaps we sort of ‘stumbled’ into this rich seam of enquiry when working on the project nanoq: flat out and bluesome (Fig. 1). The initial prompt for this project was in fact another entirely, which was triggered by Snæbjörnsdóttir’s inquiry regarding a polar bear specimen belonging to the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow. She was part of a group of Glasgow-based artists making an exhibition (1999– 2000) for the Centre for Contemporary Arts in the City. Characteristically she had

Fig. 1  Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson. nanoq: flat out and bluesome, installation incorporating ten taxidermic polar bears, 2004. (Spike Island, Bristol, UK; © Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson)

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been working for some time in response to Northern landscapes, questioning the meaning of ‘white’ as a popular signifier of emptiness, or nothingness. She constructed environments in which female names of different cultures were systematically joined together to open up ‘new’ meanings in hybrid languages within these bodies of text. It was thus logical for her to consider her own surname, Snæbjörnsdóttir, which translates as daughter of [a] snow-bear or polar bear—snæ (snow) björn (bear) dóttir (daughter). The fact that a polar bear’s fur is not white, but transparent and each hair is hollow and grows from the bear’s paradoxically black skin added further to the fascination. Permission was requested from Kelvingrove Museum to photograph the two polar bears in their zoology collection. On first contact it was reported to us that the polar bears had recently been removed from display in the Museum, a consequence of a recent policy to present only those animals in their collection, indigenous to Scotland. Still they offered us the chance to photograph them where they were kept in storage, which at that time was in the basement of the Transport Museum. On arrival, we were considerably surprised and moved by the sight of hundreds of animal bodies gathered from all over the world and stuffed in whatever poses were befitting a historically ‘colonial’, imaginative impulse. Coming from Iceland (which has only a very small zoology collection comprising mostly local birds, a few sheep and fish on display in Reykjavik), Snæbjörnsdóttir found it an extraordinary and overwhelming experience. Furthermore, in order to access the polar bears, many of the other animal specimens had to be moved aside—some she had only ever seen in pictures or on television. This abundance of apparently discarded animal bodies, prompted a variety of emotions in touching their different skins and fur. In short it was clear that these skins had once been animals, each with its own individual life—taken by humans solely in order to act as representative of a species in accordance with human significations of conquest and classification. In a new taxonomic significance—here they were—apparently deemed and doomed as an embarrassment, even in their representations of British colonial excess. We wondered about other polar bears housed in collections up and down the country. Were they equally troublesome in respect of post-colonial sensibility? And so, our project nanoq: flat and bluesome (2001–2006) was born and a 5-year period began in which we set out to locate, photograph and gather the historical provenances for each of the UK specimens we found. In our project, we sought to research and return the individuality of each polar bear to the idea of its former living self. We did this both in the photographic work—for which a constituent of each image is the respective provenance, as a text—and in the installation, we made for Spike Island in Bristol, in which we gathered and presented 10 stuffed polar bears together in the same space. (In our installation, although these histories were available elsewhere within the exhibition, all this and any other information normally associated with the museum presentation of taxidermy, was actually removed from the specimens themselves, forcing the public to engage with the specific material individuality of each respective mount). Their poses had of course been imagined and crafted at different times over the previous 200 years,

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with varying degrees of expertise and as such, they depicted less reliably the anatomy of bears and more, our human desires, ignorance and colonial hubris. Despite that, we found that as the general public encountered and engaged with what was on display they were able to arrive at certain conclusions or projections concerning former, individual polar bear lives—for example, whether each had lived last in the wild or in captivity, by the sharpness or bluntness of the claws. So, as artists, the focus on individuality—and the anomalous—became key in our minds, not only to the development of this project but notionally as a mechanism, in almost all our subsequent work, by which to engage the imagination of audience. This was for us, the beginning of an art practice within a field that has kept us intensely occupied to this day. Throughout this time, we have both individually written doctoral theses on particular aspects of our research and practice. In Snæbjornsdóttir’s thesis, entitled Spaces of Encounter: Art and Revision in Human— Animal Relations (2009), the human and animal encounter in our work was deconstructed in relation to lens-based media. In Wilson’s thesis, Beyond Control: Towards an Ecology of Uncertainty (2012), in the specific context of our practice, he examined the mechanics and intricacies of the relational, the virtues of art’s capacity to dismantle cultural faculties and the merits of engaging and prompting the engagement of audiences with the consequentially unfamiliar and its productive, conceptual potential. Of particular significance to us were the capacities, shortcomings and effects of ‘glass’ in the processes both of representation and presentation—whether in the form of lenses, TV screens or as used for instance, in zoo enclosures—as membranes that divide and create distance from the subject of the non-human. It was thus increasingly important to consider carefully the position of the camera (both conceptually and physically) in any artwork featuring human and animal encounters and to identify possibilities when exhibiting through photography or installation, to reappraise and reconfigure the apparent situation, to shift its parameters and to perform a deconstructive re-evaluation of any presentation that pretends to ‘capture’ the animal. This we would come to do across a number of projects by ‘untying’ or ‘unhitching’ individual animal beings again from their generic and plurally reductive representations.

2 (a)Fly: Between Nature and Culture (2006) An example of this strategy can be seen in our project (a)fly (Fig. 2) in which we photographed the animal dwellings of pets within the homes of their human cohabitants. So let’s look at some of the spaces of encounter as they were mobilised in this project. On the 13th November, 2005 we rendezvoused with four ptarmigan hunters in a disused quarry on the outskirts of the city of Reykjavík. The quarry is used on a fairly regular basis by local hunters for target practice. We wished to undertake a survey, designed to enable us to identify urban homes where humans

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Fig. 2  Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson. (a)fly, shooter and shot map (photograph, 85 × 100  cm and map, 70 × 90  cm), 2006. (National Museum of Iceland, Reykjavík; © Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson)

cohabit with animals. In addition to the four hunters, we had brought along four large-scale, mounted maps of the central area of Reykjavík 101, which were sufficiently detailed to show the specific footprints of individual dwellings and residential blocks. For pragmatic reasons, we chose a quarry as the site at which to conduct a performative shooting because (like most quarries), it is away from the city and so our activity would be relatively discreet and unnoticed—but in so doing we were mindful also of a number of other associations of the term ‘quarry’, not least as the object of a hunt. Symbolically, we were interested in its functions typically described as an open excavation from which material is extracted by blasting and a rich source of something. Another pertinent and typical definition of ‘quarry’ is an animal or bird that is hunted by something or somebody—and somebody or something that is chased or hunted by another. Finally, the transitive use of the verb, denotes the ‘act of extraction’ and (of particular note in this case) the obtaining of something, such as facts or information, by searching laboriously and carefully. Once more, it will be seen that there is an emphasis here for us on process and methodology and how these aspects of our practice are deployed and managed in specific accordance and resonance with the objectives of each project. A prevailing structure, conceptually, and often practically, is that of the search, where our investigative work and that of our collaborators and/or participants in the projects often from within other disciplinary fields, is made visible, as a constituent of the artwork itself. The weapon used for ptarmigan hunting, in common with game shooting in the UK, is the shotgun (also known as scattergun). Following the trajectory of pellets from a discharged cartridge, this part of the work imagines a passage through several different kinds of space—in the first instance, following the real journey down the 60 cm barrel of the gun and from there, a further 50 m across the open space of the quarry to the symbolic space of the map. At this interface, the metal pellets punched holes through (and in some cases, remained embedded) in the map,

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thereby identifying specific houses or apartment blocks. Ultimately, through this and subsequent enquiries, we were able to identify the presence of specific animal occupancy within homes in Reykjavík 101, at some 30 km distance from the quarry. By further extrapolation, by means of the camera, we extended the symbolic journey of the initial shots into the very real, domestic sites of human/nonhuman animal cohabitation. This set of maps, was the document of an event and became a tool for our subsequent inquiry—as both, it constituted one of the exhibits in the art work. In the four photographic portraits we made, each hunter stands, legs apart and braced to absorb the recoil from the gun at his shoulder. At this time of year, from 15 October to 15 December using this type of gun and shot, the Icelandic hunter would be focusing his attention on the ptarmigan, the mountain bird whose plumage turns to white in winter. The bird is used for the traditional Icelandic Christmas meal. As he shoots, we ‘shot’ the shooter and so an image of the act was recorded on film. This suite of photographs constituted the second part of the artwork and was exhibited together with the maps, in the National Museum of Iceland. The number of households hit was 273. Of these, 161 were special flats for the elderly where pets are not allowed. The survey therefore comprised 112 households. 91 households responded to a follow--‐up call. Of these, 25 had pets. 16 households had cats. 9 households had dogs. 2 households had birds and 1, a snake (a forbidden animal). (Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson, (A)fly 77)

When at a later time, we entered into the respective homes, on our request we were shown to the specific places where the animal chooses to reside or rest—the place where he or she sleeps and wakes up, to look out on the world about. Here in front of this place, we set up the camera for another shoot; this time, the place made intimate by the implicit, recent presence of the animal. We were interested in the question embedded in the images, that in the absence of the animal, what was it—there on the film, on the photograph? A photograph can never contain the present; it always records the past but presents itself to us as the basis of some imagined future. Thus, according to Roland Barthes, it has the ability to blur the boundaries between life and death (96). When looking at the often rather forlorn images of the dwellings, one senses the departure, or loss of a subject. The given name of the respective animal incorporated below the photographic element, adds to this sense of loss in a way that invokes what we might understand as a ‘haunting’ presence. It is an unbalancing experience when we suddenly find ourselves in the presence of something which prompts us to think beyond our terms of reference—even more so, when the mechanism for this seems to be constituted by the utterly familiar. This unsettling is not about what we see, but stems instead from the absence of what we expect to see. In compositional and affective terms this might be what we once referred to as a centre of interest, or as Barthes put it, the ‘punctum’ or point.

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(40). In this context, into every disconcerting or disquieting gap we try instinctively to pour some sort of light or knowledge. The audience might escape the constraints of his/her own learned response by asking, if the animal is absent, as is the human, then whose home is this? We saw the process and the exhibited work as an instrument whereby momentarily we might visualise our own ‘othering’ in the world of the animal. But another way of looking at these images is to approach them as we might a forensic investigation. The photograph directs our attention in seeming to give importance to a context rather than a specific subject—is this not how we imagine a crime or investigation scene after some fateful event has taken place? If it is the scene of a crime, there is certainly no sign of any violence. Nothing is disturbed, overturned or in disarray. On the contrary the scene is more or less ordered and things seem in their place. When we encounter the scene of a police investigation, typically characterized by exclusion tapes and notices we are still compelled to look. Fleetingly, surreptitiously as we pass, we search for clues to tell us who, what and how? Furtively, in turn we survey these interiors and here too we are made aware of our voyeuristic transgression when moving through the closets, the bedrooms, the cupboards, ledges and lounges of these essentially private spaces. What clues are there to be found here? What signs? What are the residual and tell-tale traces left by animals and humans? By some means, the apparent removal of an identifiable subject leaves us in a quandary and since we cannot help but acknowledge that all occupancy is implicit only, there is a balancing effect where all possible presences, human and animal— existing as they do in the imagination of the viewer—are of equal value. As to the investigation and our forensic enquiry—are both parties, in their equality, therefore under threat? Is their relationship what we thought it was? How does this relationship reflect our diminished sense of a meaningful interface with the wider environment? How is the animal itself complicit in this? What has domesticity done here? What effect does symbiosis have on the respective agents and their position in the world? And is there the possibility still, that the animal, even the domestic, detached animal, despite all its derisive negation by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (265), can after all serve in some way to reconnect us to our own lost ‘animality’ and so beyond, to the idea and practice of ‘cohabitation’ in a global, non-domesticated sense? The project interrogates our disparate approaches to animal others—down the barrel of a gun we acknowledge the distance that is a part of our conception of wildness—without that sense of distance, could there be so strong a desire to narrow the gap between ourselves and them, through hunting, through field study, eco-tourism and the absorption of the unfamiliarity of its nature—or indeed through its eradication and taming through agriculture? If by looking at these habitat photographs and observing the approach, which is the approach of each respective animal through the environment, to the bed or to the nest or den within our homes and we are moved to imagine our animal selves, without being sure necessarily, what animal—if by doing this, instead of furniture,

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clothes and window sills, we are able to see simply the likely places we might clean ourselves, scratch, curl up in or perch upon, then some slight transformation or shift has taken place and we may be reminded that our civilizing ways are really froth on a turbulence almost impossible to see from here. Nevertheless, that ‘turmoil’ or unrest is present and altogether suddenly darker, more chthonian and ultimately and pressingly, just below the skin.

3 Performative Encounters (2009–2011) In our multi-media installation, between you and me (2009), one of the key components, Three Attempts is a performance-video work showing a live encounter between a human being and a colony of seals in an estuary on the north coast of Iceland (Fig. 3). Our intention for the piece was to engineer an encounter between seals and humans in a situation where having presented ourselves, it was then entirely the seals’ choice as to whether the ‘meeting’ actually took place. Seals are thought of as curious animals and according to local folklore are attracted to the colour orange and this influenced the choice of the performer’s outfit. A camera was set up behind the figure as she knelt down on the shore looking out to sea, emulating as much as possible the body contours of a seal. For a long time (as is playfully reflected in the title of this work Three Attempts) nothing happened. The tide was coming in and in the film one can see the seals popping into the sea from the bank on the far side of the estuary; but still they kept their distance. The performer whistled various tunes but stayed mostly still—finally the

Fig. 3  Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson. Three Attempts, still from single channel video work, from the installation between you and me, 2009. (© Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson)

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seals started to come closer and to bob up in the sea in front of the performer—one after another. When this work was shown in association with the Minding Animals #1 Conference in Newcastle, Australia (2009) there were some who supposed we had tapped into some kind of ‘magic’ or shamanistic method to call the seals out of the sea. Needless to say, this was not the case. What was ultimately clear to us, was the unequal respective positions of those involved in the work—that is the non-human animal and the human. It was us who decided and contrived to set up and record this and to turn this ‘interaction’ into a work of art. In that respect, the seal had no choice in being thus instrumentalised and once again, the distinction between an event and its recording, indicates an ethical threshold and some of the dilemmas of representation. For Vanishing Point: Where Species Meet (2011), a work commissioned for Pandemonium, the 2011 Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, we tried to test further this interspecific encounter work. In a site-specific response, we decided to invite seagulls for dinner (Fig. 4). The area where the work was to take place is notorious for seagulls ‘pestering’ al fresco diners at local restaurants. We designed a table and installed it close to the edge on the flat roof of the Biennial building, Roda Sten. The long table meant there was space at each end, allowing seagulls to partake either separately or ‘with’ a seated human performer. Local fishermen we consulted gave us advice regarding the seagulls’ favourite foods, some pieces of which were then placed in the specially hollowedout bowl at one end of the table. The performer, using a stove and utensils, fried the same food at the opposite end. In the weeks preceding the performance, because seagulls had not previously frequented that location, some food had regularly been put out there, as a familiarising strategy.

Fig. 4  Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson. Vanishing Point, still from three-channel video work, commissioned for Pandemonium, 2011. (Gothenburg International Biennial of Contemporary Art; © Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson)

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By cooking on site, we hoped that the smell might attract the seabirds. What is important to note is that it was never the objective of this work to sensationalise an encounter between human and non-human animals. To counteract any such notion, we placed the cameras carefully in positions that, should a close encounter occur in which the animal made contact with the performer, this would not itself become the subject of the documentation. On the day of the performance and the filming, the weather was spectacularly clear and sunny. To our surprise the seagulls were reluctant fully to accept or indulge our invitation. We had had previous experience of them catching food in the air so we threw some out over the table into the bowl but even when they came in a flock, there was no intrusion—whilst the human diner sat at one end, they kept their distance, at and around the other. We can speculate over the reasons why it is that when we want quietly to eat, the seagulls are unafraid to drop down at our tables and steal food from our plates, before our eyes—but when invited, and a situation is created for them by which they might freely eat, the desire for such proximity is reduced. In this light, we, or others might one day conduct other, extended analyses, wherein issues of unfamiliarity, shyness, politeness, suspicion, respect, fear, mischief (and the lack of sandwiches) might be explored… Nevertheless, recordings of human and animal encounters on social media offer an abundance of sensational imagery in which animals are active participants in human-made realities. Contemporary natural history documentaries for the BBC not only show us intimate images of animal lives (and deaths) in close-up, but in these productions, a special epilogue is added—another layer of ‘transparency’ incorporating the exposition of human endurance and tenacity (the camera crew in pursuit of the elusive animal) in order to draw us into an interspecific worlding, highlighting the intersection of behaviours, animalities and temporalities at variance. What is it then, that we as artists do when staging human and animal encounters in which the conventional role of the camera as an interspecific medium is challenged? Is it indeed possible to displace the notion of hunting, so embedded in the practice and terminology of photography (to capture, to shoot, to take)—and consequently in the resulting image—as trophy?

4 Ecologies of Being and Meaning In the chapter, Place and World: The Photographs of Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson as Environmental Photography written by Fröydi Laszlo for You Must Carry Me Now: The Cultural Lives of Endangered Species (2015) she says: The time of the historical, when the human would bend towards nature and read its secrets, is over. Instead, we must acknowledge that our image culture has come to dominate our idea of the real, and that where traditionally the image was likened to a mirror of what exists, the technical image is now a projection onto the world. It will make no difference if this projection is made by photons on a light sensitive surface or constructed by a computer programme like Photoshop or CAD. The indexical relation of an ‘outside’ existence, to its visual reproduction is destabilised. Instead of the finger pointing from reality towards us through our use of media we point, through our image culture, towards the

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outside. We can no longer read or make sense of our world without these projections; they are our real source of meaning. (140–141)

In essence, with specific reference to ‘image’ this reprises once again, our obfuscating dependency on simulacra—and so, the paradoxical question for many artists remains—as proponents and general purveyors of image, how can this dependency be deconstructed and reassembled—and our images aligned to more revolutionary and disruptive effect? One of the methods that has been important in our work ever since the nanoq project has been to deploy ways of destabilising the dominance and credibility of generic representation and so to connect directly with the individuality of particular animal beings. This strategy, we believe, carries with it the possibility of opening up an empathetic space within the human imagination, by which we seek to make our artwork have the greatest possible meaning and affect. Practically, on more than one occasion we have done this by combining texts with photography or video, in works that relate a particular history to the subject of an image or to otherwise extend, inflect or confound the meaning of that image. (The image and the de-stabiliser, or troubler of image) In You Must Carry Me Now, both a photographic and a video work including images of 14 frozen condor bodies, carefully laid out on black cloth, the photographs are juxtaposed with written texts that describe aspects of their individual lives and behaviours as revisited in the recollections of their human stewards (Fig. 5). When alive, these condors had been part of a conservation project in and around the Grand Canyon, Arizona. Initially, back in 1987, all 22 remaining

Fig. 5  Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson. Condor #248, still from single channel video work You Must Carry Me Now, 2014. (Collection ASU Museum and Art Gallery, Tempe, Phoenix; © Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson)

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condors had been removed from the wild as part of a capture-and-release programme in order to save them from otherwise certain extinction. During captivity, the programme bred the birds through incubation and after 5 years began releasing them back into the wild at Vermillion Cliffs in the Grand Canyon. By the 31st of December 2014 the population had grown to 421 living Californian condors, this number comprising 193 in captivity and 228 out in the wild. Each and every bird carries a pair of number tags, each the size of a hand, on their wings and a GPS transponder in order for the programme to monitor their movements. The contradictory aspect of this rescue/conservation mission is that despite all this investment, effort and care, the birds are still under the same threat from humans as led to their initial endangerment—that as scavengers, they will naturally feed from easy, but fatal pickings, from the discarded gut piles of carcasses left by hunters using lead bullets. As a consequence of this they fall victim to lead-poisoning and if not recalled to the field lab on a regular basis and treated, these birds will die of crop stasis and so, starvation. Cary Wolfe in Condors at the End of the World writes about this work, that these bodies before us are part of an archive, one enmeshed in a complex landscape of legal, political, and scientific forms of knowledge and force, what […] Derrida calls those “stabilizing apparatuses” that simulate the sure and steady existence of a world in the face of the complexities we have just outlined. […] As Derrida points out, “there are no archives without political power” (Krell 2013), and, indeed, these Condor bodies are in fact evidence of a potentially very charged political type, autopsied to reveal (more often than not) poisoning by a hunter’s lead bullet. The archive is thus, as Derrida puts it, a kind of mise en scene of:two principles in one: the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence—physical, historical, or ontological principle—but also the principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given. (164–165)

It is in examples like this response and analysis that we acknowledge art’s significant place in the extension and development of new thinking as part of a shared and developing interdisciplinary discourse around for instance, the environment and a post-humanist approach. Together we seek to carve out and occupy a space of contemplation and action with our enquiry and research methods. Such methods exist within what we identify as an infinite number of possibilities, each kindled by discrete encounters in which ‘otherings’ are manifest in human and non-human species, systems, events and phenomena. In one of our publications entitled Uncertainty in the City, related to an art project with the same name, Rikke Hansen, whilst considering the project in the light of Nicolas Bourriaud’s 1998 signature work, alongside writings from other commentators (including Kester and Morton), points to the participatory nature of the project as constituting a correspondence with the themes of Relational Aesthetics, but also suggests the departure that Uncertainty provides by “facilitating a radical openness” in its utilisation of “more-than-human hospitality” (112–113) In making further reference to Jacques Derrida she references the effect of the work, in rendering us “‘naked’, stripped of our usual contours of identity”. But, by dwelling on complexity, uncertainty and irresolution within the work, in fact we feel more correspondence with Claire Bishop’s proposed relational antagonism

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(52–79), itself put forward as a critique of Relational Aesthetics on the basis of the lack of specific critique attributed to or embedded in the work of some of Bourriaud’s key artist-exemplars. Disruption-towards-reconsideration as a principle, is paramount here as a useful objective of art. Two further points are significant in Hansen’s essay. One is the insight that like nanoq, the project seeks to privilege the individual encounter and indeed, individual being, as an antidote to cultural and generic presumptions. The other is the intrinsic ‘ecological’ nature of the work. She quotes Timothy Morton: [Ecological thinking] isn’t just to do with the sciences of ecology. Ecological thinking is to do with art, philosophy, literature, music and culture […]. Ecology includes all the ways we imagine how to live together. Ecology is profoundly about coexistence. Existence is always coexistence. No man is an island. Human beings need each other as much as they need an environment. Human beings are each others’ environment. Thinking ecologically isn’t simply about nonhuman things. Ecology has to do with you and me. (Hansen 115–116)

Put differently and even more inclusively, the ‘model’ for an alternative form of relational aesthetics offered by our project Uncertainty in the City is profoundly ecological because it investigates the complex and a-rational interconnectedness of living organisms, entities and systems, whether human-to-human or human-to-animal, human-to-plant, plant-to-mineral, animal-to-plant-to-weather system, and so on. In our most recently completed project, Beyond Plant Blindness (2017), possibly our most challenging to date, this collaborative project has seen us functioning as artists within a research context involving botanists and plant ‘collecting’ (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6  Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson. Searching for Stipa, archival photograph (dimensions 1.5 × 14 m), from the project Beyond Plant Blindness, 2017. (Installation in Stolpboden building, Botaniska, Gothenburg, Sweden; © Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson)

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Deceptively simple at first glance, the project, which was funded by the Swedish Science Council is predicated on the idea that as humans in a western, agrarian, capitalist and ultimately highly anthropocentric society, we (dis)regard plants with such passivity that we can be said to be ‘blind’ to their world, their ontologies and their behaviours. Instead, they customarily provide simply a backdrop to human (and animal) subjects. This issue of perceptual exclusion is taxing, often because of the reasons it occurs in the first place and for this we can point once again to our historic and incremental withdrawal from the land and the replacement of a subsistence engagement—and this is absolutely linked to ideas of migration and serial ‘encounters’ with phenomena in the land—by an agrarian relationship where demarcation, delimitation, selection, separation and exclusion are the watchwords for a way of life which is both desirous of control but ultimately, in turn just as controlling of our behaviour and experience. In the project’s initial proposal to the Research Council, the small Beyond Plant Blindness team, of which we were members, wrote: Contemporary humans have become an urban species. Living in megalopolitan cities reduces intimate contact with the natural world, thus placing greater emphasis on ‘presented nature’ settings, such as zoos, botanic gardens and natural history museums. However, previous research has demonstrated that ‘plant blindness’ inhibits human perceptions of plants. In view of increasing species’ extinction, the world can no longer afford our citizens to see ‘nothing’ when they look at plants – the basis of most life on earth. The team will examine the hypothesis and sensoric experiences in ‘presented nature environments’ to investigate whether through the functions of art, a shift in perception might enable a move from ‘plant blindness’ towards the perceptual centrality of plants in an imagined sustainable world. (Nyberg et al.)

The fact that technology allows us now to observe the social behaviour of plants, their observed activities and choice-making gives us real insight into their very different temporality and ontologies. We are customarily drawn to notice mammals because of their similarities to us—in the context of similarity, apparent differences are made distinct and to matter. In plant life, much activity is either hidden (going on below the surface of the earth) or happens so slowly as to be imperceptible to us. The life cycle of plants involving germination, growth, reproduction, death and enriching decay occurs variously over weeks, months and millennia but the changes involved are invariably too slow for the human eye to notice. Perhaps more than anything it is these real but discrete invisibilities that are most constitutive of our general blindness towards plants. Again, what we as humans ‘see’ or indeed are able to ‘see’ can be but a disembodied fraction of what plants ‘are’ and ‘do’. When we gather plants together in a botanical garden (for the living) or herbarium (for the dead) we make distinctions to which we may be customarily blind, more evident by singling species out, by re-presenting those, which neither belong here, nor indeed belong together. The decontextualizing and concomitant exoticising of plants in this way parallels just what we do and have done with insects and fauna in natural history collections and zoos. Such collections privilege the spectacle of things but give us very little insight

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into how things behave and relate—and nothing at all of the ‘work’ they do, out in the world. It denotes and services our tendency to see objects rather than relationships. The presentation of components of the ‘natural’ world within synthetic settings such as zoos and gardens must therefore culturally be in some ways contributory to our incremental tendency to overlook and our fatal failure to see ‘them’— these obfuscating mechanisms, intended once as a means by which to lend focus and offer synthetic order have over time displaced the original complexities of site, local conditions and interspecific symbiosis and relations. Their presented surrogates and simulacra, have served to create distance between the objects of our study and the awareness of our environmental and interspecific ontological entanglements. In this light, it might appear to be utterly paradoxical, if not perverse, that intermittently over two years, we worked on the site of Botaniska (the Botanical Gardens in Göteborg) on our part in the Beyond Plant Blindness project. But in many ways, over and above the logistical and political expedience of this requirement, it made the same kind of sense, as was mobilised in our work in (a)fly (2006) to be working at the problematic cultural site—at which plants from all over the world are relocated—and imagining, from there, back into the world. It also makes sense that in our work on this project we were interested, no less than in previous human-animal inquiries we had conducted, in the idea of encounter—no less, because we could see that the challenge of doing so with plants mirrored absolutely but even more challengingly, the case of our interactions with mammals or birds, molluscs or insects. When we speak of encounters we must also and always consider the encounter between our production and its audience. The use of non-art spaces in which to exhibit is appealing in that the strategy spreads the effects of art democratically beyond art audiences and environments and this dispersal aligns ideologically with our wider, ecological approach—the processes, media and mechanisms we use have the capacity to draw in unexpected audiences and, in the case of Botaniska, to hijack the attention of some who otherwise had no intention of viewing art at all. For Beyond Plant Blindness the work we showed between April and September was placed in three sites across the Gardens—one in the gallery near the visitors’ entrance, one at Stolpboden, an ancient wooden store house in the centre of the Gardens, near the restaurant and the third, closely related work, in the building known as the Rain House overlooking the Rock Garden. We focused on the recent and historical relocation of specific plants within the Garden—how and from where they had been collected and on the difference and behaviour in their domestic setting. Amongst a selection with which we worked, made up of specimens chosen by the horticultural curator Henrik Zetterlund, one plant in particular Stipa pennata, a steppe grass was particularly useful to us as an example by which we could explore tensions existing between a variety of human interests and factions. We focused on the specific nature and behaviour of the plant and particularly on its propagation habits. The feathered Stipa pennata awn carries its seed, first on the wind and then into the ground. Once dispersed by wind, with increased humidity during the night, the

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twisted awn becomes erect and in the process, pushes the pointed grain into the soil. During the day, the humidity reduces but the stiff, backward-pointing hairs at the base of the spikelet lock into the soil, preventing the grain from reversing. Through alternating phases of day and night time humidity, the awn’s pumping movements drill the spikelet as much as an inch into the soil. Compelling though this narrative might be, it speaks of a temporality beyond our patience and capacity easily to register, without resorting to the aid of technologies which in turn assert, exoticise and distort rather than allow us to extrapolate imaginatively for ourselves. Our strategy was to slow things down by other means and so on the two sites where Stipa featured, respectively, we mobilised the effects of scale and transit. By piecing together a total of thirty electron microscope scans we generated a one-hundred times enlargement of the seed awn, thus taking it to a size of 14 m × 1.5 m—considerably larger than human scale. This scroll was presented horizontally to fill the interior space of the old wooden Stolpboden building, confronting the audience on entry, but too close to and too large to be accommodated in one view. The level of detail of this image in relation to the eye was overwhelming and so, primed with the story of its dynamic and tenacious environmental behaviour, the viewer could move slowly to the left and to the right and back, to begin to absorb something of its world and nature. In the Rain House our emphasis was on the history and the single, unique natural habitat of the plant in Sweden. The wild site, in Västra Götaland, is a patch of less than 200 m2 in total and yet there is evidence of this predominately Eurasian Steppe grass having grown consistently at and around this site since the Bronze Age. Its status is now close to extinction in Sweden and though various (contested) conservation measures have been taken, its fate there is under review. From inside the Rain House, the visitor was able to overlook the growing Stipa pennata (or European Feathergrass) in the conspicuously managed Rock Garden section of Botaniska, through window/screens carrying large scale images of the single, diminutive, wild site of this extreme (Swedish) rarity. The difference between these two environments is striking, the wild site being a clamour of colour from a riot of competitive plant life. Fenced off now from surrounding livestock, it is believed that Stipa’s survival chances are more in jeopardy than ever, because with no seasonal clearing of spaces by hooves or by spades, the relatively weak plant is compromised by the elaborate process and needs of its natural dissemination. In the final work (shown in the gallery) we placed in close proximity, a photographic image of one seed respectively from a selection of 14 plants, a text extract from the interview with Zetterlund in which he describes the (usually geographically remote) site and conditions of its collection and historical introduction to Botaniska—and a seedling in its pre- and early stages of growth, taken from the very same collection shown in the photographic image. As with the Stipa, these seed images were captured in the electron microscopic scanner—multiplying their size considerably through a high-resolution scan thereby transforming the seed from being a minute speck to the size of a pumpkin.

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In the process of its production, we replaced the grayscale mode with colour, as close a match to the original seed as could be discerned by the human eye, using a standard microscope. In the installation we relied on a method of art making we have used before and which relates to what has been referred to art-historically, as ‘three registers of representation’. This method is often associated with the conceptual work of Joseph Kosuth, especially his One and Three Chairs (1965). Mary Kelly in her Post Partum Document (1973–1979) later challenged this modernist conception of what she referred to as an ‘objective’ legacy. It is however within Kelly’s definition that we see resonance with our own work in that she emphasizes the production of meaning as residing in the medium, in the contexts in which the art is produced and from which it is reviewed, and finally, in the significance she placed on sexuality as an asset of artistic authors and audience alike. Replacing (or perhaps conjoining) the sexuality factor with that of non-human animal relations allowed the construction of our seed installation a conceptual framework within which these plants justifiably assumed and demonstrated multiple traits and resonances of the conditional, of the transitory and of our specific and personal intersections—in this case, of course, within the garden site of Botaniska. In conclusion therefore, by the deployment of these sometimes various, sometimes closely related methods it should be clear that art may be an instrument by which we bring focus to and privilege relationships, from any of which it is possible to extend our understanding. If we seek to distinguish and separate per se for instance, encounters between species on the one hand and encounters between art and its audiences—ecologically speaking, we miss a trick. The opportunities with which we are presented when we think about encounters between humans and other species and indeed of any interspecific meetings and interactions—deserve close consideration, for instance of the processes and natures of diverse perceptual capacities and behaviour. Encounters for the artist and for all, concern thresholds where something new, unique and extraordinary becomes possible or evident. To think usefully about encounters in the first instance, is to recognise their potentiality not only for ourselves but for the relational encounter itself. Secondly, we should fight in order to presume nothing. Then, from a position of uncertainty, we should watch for what might happen next—to arrest the torrent of assumed knowledge—to slow down thought…

References Exhibitions Snæbjörnsdóttir, Bryndís, and Mark Wilson. (A)fly. National Museum of Iceland, Reykjavík, 2006. Etc. Snæbjörnsdóttir, Bryndís, and Mark Wilson. Between You and Me. Installation including video works The Naming of Things and Three Attempts, Kalmar Konstmuseet, Sweden, 2009. Etc. Snæbjörnsdóttir, Bryndís, and Mark Wilson. Beyond Plant Blindness. Installation in three locations in the Botanical Garden in Gothenburg, Sweden, 2017.

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Snæbjörnsdóttir, Bryndís, and Mark Wilson. If I Ruled the World. Living Art Museum, Reykjavík, 1999, and CCA, Glasgow, 2000. Snæbjörnsdóttir, Bryndís, and Mark Wilson. nanoq: flat out and bluesome. Installation incorporating ten taxidermic polar bears, Spike Island, Bristol, 2004. Snæbjörnsdóttir, Bryndís, and Mark Wilson. nanoq: flat out and bluesome. Photographic Installations and events, Multiple venues in UK and Europe, 2004–2010, and USA, 2014–2016. Snæbjörnsdóttir, Bryndís, and Mark Wilson. Pandemonium. Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, 2011.

Artworks Kelly, Mary. Post-Partum Document. Installation in six parts, mixed media, Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1973–1979. Kosuth, Joseph. One and Three Chairs. Installation, mixed media, MoMA, New York, Manhattan, 1965. Snæbjörnsdóttir, Bryndís, and Mark Wilson. The Naming of Things. Single channel video projection, 2009. Snæbjörnsdóttir, Bryndís, and Mark Wilson. Three Attempts. Single channel video work, 2009. Snæbjörnsdóttir, Bryndís, and Mark Wilson. Vanishing Point: Where Species Meet. Three-channel video projection, 2011. Snæbjörnsdóttir, Bryndís, and Mark Wilson. You Must Carry Me Now. Photographic and video work, 2014.

Conferences Minding Animals #I: The 2009 International Academic and Community Conference on Animals and Society, 12–19 July 2009, Newcastle, NSW, Australia.

Artist Publications Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Hill and Wang, 1981. Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October, vol. 110, Fall 2004, pp. 51–79. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Les Presses du Réel, 1998. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, BecomingImperceptible…” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Deleuze and Guattari, trans. by Brian Massumi, U of Minnesota P, 1987, pp. 232–309. Hansen, Rikke. “Animal Dialogues: Uncertainty, Hospitality and More-Than-Human Encounters.” Uncertainty in the City, ed. by Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson, The Green Box, 2011, pp. 110–120. Krell, David Farrell. Derrida and Our Animal Others: Derrida’s Final Seminar, “The Beast and the Sovereign”, Indiana UP, 2013. Laszlo, Fröydi. “Place and World: The Photographs of Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson as Environmental Photography.” You Must Carry Me Now: The Cultural Lives of Endangered Species, ed. by Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson, ASU Museum P, 2015, pp. 133–146. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Harvard UP, 2010. Nyberg, Eva, Sanders, Dawn, Snæbjörnsdóttir, Bryndís, and Wilson, Mark. Beyond Plant Blindness. Research team proposal in application to the Swedish Research Council, 2014.

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Snæbjörnsdóttir, Bryndís. Spaces of Encounter: Art and Revision in Human – Animal Relations. PhD Thesis, University of Gothenburg, 2009. Snæbjörnsdóttir, Bryndís, and Mark Wilson. (A)fly: (Between Nature and Culture). National Museum of Iceland, 2006. Snæbjörnsdóttir, Bryndís, and Mark Wilson. Uncertainty in the City. The Green Box, 2011. Snæbjörnsdóttir, Bryndís, and Mark Wilson. You Must Carry Me Now: The Cultural Lives of Endangered Species. ASU Museum P, 2015. Wilson, Mark. Beyond Control: Towards an Ecology of Uncertainty. PhD Thesis, University of Lancaster, 2012. Wolfe, Cary. “Condors at the End of the World.” You Must Carry Me Now: The Cultural Lives of Endangered Species, ed. by Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson, ASU Museum P, 2015, pp. 151–166.

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson are a collaborative art partnership. Their interdisciplinary art practice is research-based and socially-engaged, exploring issues of history, culture and environment in relation to both humans and non-human species. Working very often in close consultation with experts and amateurs in the field, they use their work to test cultural constructs and tropes, and human behaviour in respect of ecologies, extinction, conservation and the environment. Underpinning much of what they do are issues of psychological and physical displacement or realignment in respect of land and environment and the effect of these positions on cultural perspectives.

Begegnungen mit Kunst und Schmetterlingen: The Lover von Kristina Buch

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Nike Dreyer

Die Arbeit The Lover von Kristina Buch stellte das Herzstück der documenta 13 im Jahr 2012 dar: Die Installation war mitten auf dem zentralen Friedrichsplatz ausgestellt.1 Auf einer ca. 100 m² großen Fläche hatte die Künstlerin ein Hochbeet auf einem Gerüst installiert, in dem sie jeden Tag Schmetterlinge aussetzte (Meister 37). 3000 Tagfalter 40 unterschiedlicher lokaler Spezies zog sie dafür im Verlauf der Ausstellung in einer Wohnung in Kassel auf. Die Schmetterlinge waren nach dem Aussetzen in der Kunstinstallation frei, konnten in dem Garten verweilen oder sich – auch getrieben durch den Wind – auf dem umliegenden Gelände verteilen. Die Möglichkeit einer Begegnung zwischen den Schmetterlingen und den Betrachter/innen war konstitutiv für dieses Werk und erlaubt einerseits Überlegungen aus kunstwissenschaftlicher Perspektive, angestoßen durch den ambiguen Status lebendiger, tierlicher Akteure. Andererseits stößt The Lover aber auch grundsätzliche Gedanken hinsichtlich Charakteristika einer Begegnung und der Bedeutung der Empathie für diese Begegnungen an. Der folgende Text verfolgt daher eine doppelte Lesart des Kunstwerks: sowohl auf die künstlerische Novität der Installation als auch die Besonderheiten der Begegnung, die in ihr ausbuchstabiert werden. Die lebendigen Tiere in The Lover waren nicht nur, so die These, künstlerisches Material, sondern im ästhetischen Rahmen dieses Kunstwerkes Protagonisten,

1Dieser Platz – eine große, freie Fläche vor dem Fridericianum – liegt genau zwischen der documenta-Halle, der St. Elisabeth Kirche und dem Naturhistorischen Museum in Kassel und ist damit ein zentraler Platz jeder documenta.

N. Dreyer (*)  Zürich, Schweiz © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_13

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die mit ihrem Verhalten und in ihrer ungewissen An- bzw. Abwesenheit innerhalb der Installation aufseiten der Betrachter/innen zu einer Irritation über ihren Status führten. Dass sich die Tiere frei bewegen und das Material somit die Kunst verlassen konnte und andere Schmetterlinge aus Kassel in die Installation hineinfliegen konnten, demonstriert den oszillierenden Status der Schmetterlinge zwischen objektivierbarem Kunstmaterial und selbstständigem Akteur. The Lover demonstrierte durch diesen Materialeinsatz die viel proklamierte Entgrenzung der Kunsterfahrung. Das zentrale Moment dieser produktiven Verwirrung waren die lebendigen Tiere und die damit einhergehende Möglichkeit von Begegnungen. Zwar schaffte das Arrangement des Kunstwerkes die Möglichkeit, dass sich Menschen und Schmetterlinge begegnen konnten, allerdings erwies sich dieser Rahmen auch als hinderlich. Denn die Tiere waren durch die besondere Gestaltung des Gartens, fast nicht zu sehen und eine Begegnung dadurch erschwert. Begegnungsmöglichkeiten, wie The Lover sie für Schmetterlinge und Menschen eröffnete, stehen sowohl innerhalb der Geschichte der Kunst als auch der Entomologie in einem Gegensatz zu bisherigen Dispositiven, in denen Menschen Schmetterlinge nur betrachten – und ihnen nicht in einer komplexen Situation begegnen können.

1 Der Einsatz von Schmetterlingen im zeitgenössischen Kontext Buchs Vorgehen erweist sich sowohl vor der Folie des kunstwissenschaftlichen als auch des naturwissenschaftlichen Umgangs mit Schmetterlingen als Novität. Dies lässt sich an ihrem Vorgehen und in Abgrenzung zu den im Folgenden kursorisch vorgestellten Praktiken verdeutlichen. Die Künstlerin hatte die Bedürfnisse und Lebensbedingungen der Schmetterlinge vor Ausstellungsbeginn eingehend recherchiert und den Garten, in den sie jeden Morgen neue Schmetterlinge bei Sonnenaufgang und vor dem Eintreffen der Besucher/innen entließ, in Anlehnung an ihre Recherchen entsprechend konzipiert: Er bestand aus 3000 Pflanzen 180 verschiedener lokaler Sorten, die nicht nur eine farbenfrohe Blütenpracht zeigten, sondern von spezifischem Nutzen für die Schmetterlinge waren. Sie dienten als Eiablageplatz, Futter für die Raupen oder als Spender von Nahrung und Schutz für die Schmetterlinge. Damit stellte Buch „ideale, jedoch offensichtlich hypernatürliche Nahrungsbedingungen für [die] heimische[n] Tagfalter her“ (Meister 37) und zeigte den Bedürfnissen der Tiere gegenüber Aufmerksamkeit. Auf diese Weise entgrenzte sie einerseits das Verhältnis zwischen Betrachter/innen und Kunstwerk, verteilten sich doch die Schmetterlinge und mit ihnen das künstlerische Material über die gesamte Stadtfläche und über die Dauer der Documenta hinaus. Und sie hinterfragte andererseits auch die Produktionsbedingungen von Kunst, verstand sie die Schmetterlinge als Co-Produzenten des Kunstwerkes und schrieb damit tierlichen Akteuren ästhetische Wirkmacht zu. Buch gab aktiv ihre künstlerische Hoheitsmacht und Kontrolle über das Werk anteilhaft ab. Die aus diesem Vorgehen resultierende Involvierung der lebendigen Tiere steht traditionellen Formen der (erzwungenen) Begegnung zwischen Menschen und

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Tieren in Kunstwerken entgegen und nimmt auch für das Verständnis der Kunst und ihrer Materialien eine grundlegende Verschiebung vor. Kunst wird einerseits durch die Aktivitäten des tierlichen Materials selbst kreiert, etwa durch das Verhalten der Schmetterlinge, und andererseits dem Zufall überlassen und für Konsequenzen von äußerem, zufälligen Einwirken durchlässig. Das spezifische Kunstverständnis und die unterschiedlichen Modi der Begegnung, die sich in diesem Umgang und dem Einsatz der lebendigen Schmetterlinge ausdrücken, lassen sich in Abgrenzung zu anderen zeitgenössischen Arbeiten demonstrieren. Damien Hirst nutzte die Tiere ab 1991, als er die Puppen von Schmetterlingen auf Leinwände klebte und dann wartete, bis sie – gewissermaßen aus dem Bild heraus – schlüpften (Science Ltd). 2012 stellte er in einer Retrospektive in der Tate Modern seine Arbeit In and Out of Love aus, in der er lebendige Schmetterlinge in einem Ausstellungsraum fliegen ließ, wenngleich in den 23 Wochen der Ausstellung etwa 9000 Schmetterlinge starben (Nikkah). Zudem nutzte er seit den 1990er Jahren die Flügel tropischer Schmetterlinge für seine Kaleidoscope Paintings, in denen er die filigranen, farblich oszillierenden Flughäute in Mustern zu kaleidoskopisch-symmetrischen Formen zusammensetzte. Die Bilder nutzen die irisierenden Farben der Schmetterlinge: Die symmetrische Anordnung der delikaten Flügel in weitläufigen bildlichen Arrangements steht dabei im Kontrast zu dem Wissen um die makabre Herstellungsweise dieser visuellen Opulenz, namentlich das Zerpflücken von Schmetterlingen.2 Auf die filigranen Strukturen der Flügel nahm auch Marta de Menezes mit ihrem Projekt Nature? Bezug, in dem sie mithilfe eines Biologen die Flügel von Schmetterlingen im Puppenstadium manipulierte. Durch den Eingriff wiesen die Schmetterlinge als ausgewachsene Vollinsekten unterschiedlich gemusterte Flügel auf.3 De Menezes’ ästhetische Praxis sorgt einerseits für eine detailliertere Betrachtung der Schmetterlinge durch den Vergleich der unterschiedlichen Flügel, andererseits ist die Arbeit aber auch eine Demonstration der technischen Möglichkeiten und die Dehnung ethischer Grenzen, wenn die Künstlerin einer Vivisek-

2Dass Hirst im Jahr 2003 der größte Importeur von Schmetterlingen in Großbritannien war, verdeutlicht den Einfluss seiner Arbeit zumindest in zahlenmäßiger Hinsicht. Für den riesenhaften Verbrauch von Schmetterlingen für die Kunst lässt sich in Anbetracht dieser Massenlogik eine ähnliche Beobachtung wie schon für den Einsatz von lebendigen Tieren für Experimente machen, namentlich die Feststellung einer Verbrauchsorientierung, in der das Ziel – hier wissenschaftliche Erkenntnis, dort ästhetische Innovation – jeglichen Verbrauch von lebendiger Materie zu rechtfertigen scheint und darüber hinaus auch zu einem Demonstrationsmittel von Wissen und Macht genutzt wird. Es ist außerdem bekannt, dass er seine Schmetterlinge nur von nachhaltig wirtschaftenden Schmetterlingsfarmen bezieht (Aloi, Animal Studies 20). 3Hierzu nutzt sie die noch in den Kokons reifenden Puppen und verändert die Flügel mittels einer heißen Nadel, ein Vorgehen, das sie von Experimenten aus der Entwicklungsbiologie übernommen hat. Wenn die Schmetterlinge letztlich schlüpfen, weisen die Flügel unterschiedliche Muster auf. Sie nutzt hierfür zwei afrikanische Schmetterlingsspezies, die sehr distinkte Augen und Färbungen auf ihren Flügeln aufweisen und denen sie durch die heiße Nadel neue Muster hinzufügt (Stracey 498).

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tion gleich4 „life-sculpting“ mit lebendigen Tieren betreibt und ihnen im Zuge der Kunstproduktion Schmerzen bereitet (Stracey 498). Und auch die Arbeit are you really sure that a floor can’t also be a ceiling? (2010) des Kunstkollektivs Bik van der Pol demonstrierte einen Einsatz lebendiger Schmetterlinge als künstlerisches Material. In einer Nachbildung des Farnsworth Hauses (1951) von Mies van der Rohe installierte das Künstler-Duo Schmetterlinge und tropische Pflanzen (Db). Besucher/innen konnten das Haus in kleinen Gruppen und unter Aufsicht betreten. Die Arbeit stellte miniaturhaft die Fragilität eines Ökosystems aus, in dem die Anwesenheit der Besucher/innen in dem Haus den Einfluss der Menschen auf ihre Umwelt verdeutlichte. Die Schmetterlinge symbolisierten, weil sie auf Klimaänderungen sehr sensibel reagieren, in dieser künstlerischen Miniaturwelt ein ökologisches Frühwarnsystem, konnten das Haus aber nicht verlassen.5 In all diesen Werken sind die Schmetterlinge Objekte, die aufgrund ihrer Farbund Formvariation der genussvollen Betrachtung oder dem Symbolismus dienen, etwa als Zeichen wissenschaftlicher Entwicklungen oder des Klimawandels. Zentral für all diese Arbeiten jedoch ist, dass die Schmetterlinge eine ihrer wichtigsten Fähigkeiten, nämlich ihre Fähigkeit zu fliegen, durch die räumliche Begrenzung nicht oder nur stark beschränkt nutzen können – wenn sie den Zeitraum der Kunstinstallationen überhaupt überleben.6

4Auch

wenn de Menezes betont, dass diese Intervention die Schmetterlinge nicht verletzt, haben Entomologen Kritik aufgrund der Tatsache geäußert, dass bereits Puppen als empfindsame Wesen betrachtet werden können und die Flügel von Schmetterlingen Blutbahnen und Atmungsbahnen beinhalten, also komplexe und schmerzempfindliche Bereiche seien (Aloi, Art 79).

5Zahlen

über den Verbrauch von Schmetterlingen in dieser Ausstellung wurden nicht veröffentlicht, es ist aber davon auszugehen, dass ihr Überleben durch die Überwachung im Vergleich zu In and Out of Love wahrscheinlicher war. Ein paradigmatisches Beispiel des Klimaeinflusses auf Schmetterlinge war etwa 2012 beobachtbar, als die Monarchfalter ihre jährlichen Wanderungen unerwartet abänderten und tausenderweise starben. Dies nutzte etwa Barbara Kingsolver als literarische Vorlage für ihr Buch, das eine Milieustudie mit einem umweltaktivistischen Anliegen verbindet (2012). 6Schmetterlinge, kann man mit Blick auf die naturwissenschaftlichen wie auch kunstwissenschaftlichen Einsatzfelder festhalten, sind Generatoren von menschlicher Erkenntnis. Ihr Verbrauch in großen Mengen für die Kunst ist dabei kein Ausnahmefall, wie ein Blick auf naturwissenschaftliche Sammlungen zeigt. In der Staatssammlung in München lagern etwa 10 Mio. Schmetterlinge. An der Schnittstelle zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft lässt sich die ästhetische Praxis der Künstlerin Maria Sibylla Merian beschreiben, die die Entwicklungen der modernen Entomologie durch ihre künstlerische Forschung und ihre Zeichnungen um 1700 vorantrieb, etwa durch ihr Buch Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, in dem sie ihre Erkenntnisse über den Lebenszyklus von Insekten in Suriname 1705 veröffentlichte. Ihr Erkenntnisgewinn durch Schmetterlinge war einerseits ästhetisch motiviert, prägte aber andererseits auch die wissenschaftliche Kategorisierung der Tiere und demonstriert den wichtigen Status von Schmetterlingen für beide Bereiche (Merian et al.).

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2 Begegnungen oder die Beachtung von Bedürfnissen im Umgang miteinander In Buchs Arbeit ist die Begegnung mit einer Spielart der Installationskunst möglich, die mit Traditionen der Kunst bricht, indem sie Begegnungen mit Schmetterlingen ermöglicht, aber nicht erzwingt. Bevor auf die besondere Beschaffenheit dieser Begegnungsmöglichkeit zwischen Tieren und Menschen einzugehen ist, wird in einem ersten Schritt die materialästhetische Dimension der Arbeit herauspräpariert. Buchs Arbeit unterscheidet sich sowohl durch ihren Aufbau und als auch durch die Flugmöglichkeiten der Schmetterlinge von diesen zeitgenössischen Arbeiten, die lebendige Schmetterlinge verwenden. Ihr geht es vielmehr um die Betonung der Bedürfnisse der Schmetterlinge, deren Flug- und Nahrungsvorlieben sie berücksichtigt und deren ungewisses Verhalten sie zu einem zentralen Teil der Arbeit erklärt. Dies betonte auch der erhöhte Aufbau des Gartens, der einer Bühne gleich den Rahmen für eine Begegnung vorgab, den Menschen den Zutritt zum Kern des Gartens allerdings verweigerte. Der Garten war außerdem mit einer Reihe von Disteln und Brennnesseln gerahmt, die nicht nur den Zugang, sondern auch den Einblick erschwerten. Die Schmetterlinge waren dadurch die entrückten Protagonisten des Werkes: auf Augenhöhe mit den Betrachter/innen und doch den Blicken durch dichten, stacheligen Randbewuchs entzogen. Während diese Barriere aus stacheligen Pflanzen die Besucher auf Distanz hielt, waren die Schmetterlinge frei beweglich, kein Netz und kein Glas hielt sie davon zurück den Garten zu verlassen und davonzufliegen, nur der Wind trieb sie. Für Menschen und Tiere galten ganz andere Grenzen und Bedingungen. Und nicht nur das: Die stacheligen Büsche und die unaufgeregte Begrenzung des Gartens auf dem weitläufigen Platz machten The Lover als Kunstwerk nicht eindeutig erkennbar. Besucher brauchten entweder eine Vorinformation über den Status des Gartens, eine ausgeprägte Neugierde oder gleich beides, um die Chance zu haben einen Schmetterling in diesem Garten zu sehen. Aufgrund der spezifischen Struktur oblag es den Schmetterlingen und dem Einfluss des Windes, ob und wie Menschen und Schmetterlinge sich im Kontext der Installation begegneten und inwiefern menschlichen Betrachter/innen die Begegnung mit einem Schmetterling überhaupt möglich wurde. Dieser Aufbau steht im Kontrast zu den eingangs eingeführten anderen künstlerischen Einsätzen von Schmetterlingen, die etwa an Wissenschaftspraktiken Anleihen nehmen und die Schmetterlinge zu verschiedenen Graden in ihrer Freiheit und Flugfähigkeit beschränken.

3 Künstlerische Materialexperimente mit Schmetterlingen, dem Wind und der Hoffnung Dass die Beobachtung der Schmetterlinge und eine Begegnung mit ihnen nur eine Möglichkeit war, aber keine Selbstverständlichkeit, lässt auf einen ungewöhnlichen Materialbegriff der Künstlerin schließen, der sich auch in den anderen verwendeten Materialien erkennen lässt und der auf Materialentwicklungen der

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modernen Kunst rekurriert. Buch gab bei der Werkbeschreibung als Material der Arbeit neben der Erde,7 den Pflanzen und den Schmetterlingen auch „die Möglichkeit der Freiheit“ sowie den Wind an. Mit dem Wind, einer Bewegung der Luft, knüpft sie an künstlerische Traditionen an (Nova), die sich der Luft als „physische[m] Material einer künstlerischen Arbeit“ (Wagner 251) bedienten: Duchamp hatte 1919 Air de Paris in einer Glasphiole ausgestellt und Piero Manzoni erklärte mit Corpo d‘aria 1959 seine eigene Atemluft zum Kunstwerk – und nahm damit das Motiv des schöpferischen Atems auf, wie es bereits seit der Antike bekannt ist (Wagner 251–252). Luft ist ein Anti-Material, wenn man Monika Wagners Eigenschaftenbeschreibungen dieses Elements folgt. Dem Licht und der Luft „fehlt, was Materialien der Bildkünste auszeichnet: Sie haben keine haptischen Qualitäten, sie sind flüchtig, tendieren zur Expansion und lassen sich daher nicht formen“ (250); dass Luft unsichtbar ist und erst durch die Anreicherung mit anderen Partikeln wie Wasser oder Staub sichtbar wird, schließt diese Reihe der Unmöglichkeiten für ein Kunstmaterial ab. Dies macht sie visuell zwar schlecht erfassbar, konzeptuell machen diese Materialeigenschaften die Luft jedoch zu einem Platzhalter für andere Formen der Welterfahrung, namentlich durch sinnliche Eindrücke, die Erfassung der Welt durch Imagination oder auch den Einfluss einer unkontrollierbaren Kraft in Form des Windes auf Kunst und Leben.8 Buch bewegt sich mit dieser spezifischen Materialwahl in einer Tradition der modernen Kunst, der sie mit dem Einsatz der lebendigen Schmetterlinge eine neue Wendung gibt. Denn viele der von ihr aufgezählten Materialien sind eher Anti- oder Nicht-Materialien, wie etwa – wie gerade erläutert – der Wind. Buch zählt auch „eine Ungewissheit und Hoffnung“ oder „ein Abgrund des weiten Offenen“ als Materialien von The Lover. Aufgrund der Abstraktion dieser Materialaufzählung müssen viele Bestandteile eher als eine Beschreibung der Möglichkeiten von Kunst selbst und dieses spezifischen Kunstwerks verstanden werden und nicht als eine konkrete Beschreibung. Dies jedoch hat weitreichende Konsequenzen für die Definition von Kunst. Die Betrachter/innen müssen bei The Lover nicht nur akzeptieren, dass der Wind und damit der Zufall die Schmetterlinge vom Garten hinfort wehen könnte, auch Buch selbst gibt dadurch einen signifikanten Teil der Kontrolle über ihr Werk ab und lässt die Materialien die letztendliche Form des Werkes teilweise selbst bestimmen. Die Fähigkeiten und Eigenheiten der Schmetterlinge und nicht nur ihre schönen Farben, machen die Tiere zu den Protagonisten des Werkes und das Material damit zum zentralen Formgeber des Werkes: Dass sie fliegen können,

7Die

komplette Materialliste lautet wie folgt: „‚Der Liebende‘, Gerüststrukturen, Erde, Pflanzen, Tagfalter, ein Ritual entsteht, ohne dass es geplant ist. Der Wind, die Möglichkeit zur Freiheit. Eine Ungewissheit und Hoffnung, ein Abgrund des weiten Offenen. Das Ephemere und das vermeintlich Vergebliche, ein Anfang, aber kein Ende.“ Übersetzung aus dem Englischen von Helga Meister (37). 8Insbesondere mit der Sinnlichkeit des Windes operierte auch eine andere Arbeit der documenta 13. Für sein Werk I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorize (The Invisible Pull) leerte Ryan Gander die Ausstellungsräume im Erdgeschoss des Fridericianums völlig. Ein Luftzug, der durch die leeren Räume wehte, war das Kunstwerk, das man spüren musste, um es zu erfahren (Weiss 74).

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dass sie eigene Vorlieben für gewisse Pflanzen haben, dass sie sich vom Wind treiben lassen, ist dabei ebenso wichtiger Bestandteil des Werkes wie die Aspekte, die Buch selbst entschieden hatte, wie den Umriss des Gartens oder die Positionierung und Auswahl der Pflanzen.9 Die Künstlerin teilt sich ihren kreativen Einfluss auf das Werk mit anderen und nimmt damit von der vermeintlichen Arbeitsweise eines singulär agierenden, alles abwägenden und entscheidenden Künstler-Genies Abstand. Bei dieser kontrollierenden Arbeitsweise erscheint – man denke an die eingangs eingeführten anderen Beispiele – das Feststecken, Einsperren oder Festkleben der Schmetterlinge für eine bessere Betrachtung und Kontrolle des Werkes die Norm. Buchs Ausstellungsweise konträr gegenüber steht die Ausstellung toter Schmetterlinge, wie sie nicht nur etwa in Hirsts Werk präsent ist, sondern wie sie auch in vielen naturkundlichen Museen praktiziert wird: Dafür werden tote Schmetterlinge mit langen Nadeln durchstochen in Vitrinen ausgestellt, um eine bessere Vergleichbarkeit der Individuen und Arten zu gewährleisten. Die knapp 10 Mio. ausgestellten Tiere allein in der Staatssammlung München etwa verschieben die zahlenmäßigen Dimensionen beim Einsatz der Schmetterlinge für die Kunst und verdeutlichen den traditionellen und historischen Umgang mit Schmetterlingen, an den selbst Damien Hirst mit knapp 2700 toten Schmetterlinge pro Kaleidoscope Painting kaum heranreicht (Science Ltd). Gerade in diesem Kontext erscheint Buchs Werk und ihre Einbindung der Schmetterlinge umso ungewöhnlicher, obgleich auch sie die Technik des Durchstechens an anderer Stelle aufnahm wie noch zu zeigen sein wird.10 Durch den Einsatz der Schmetterlinge ergibt sich nicht nur eine Abgrenzung zu anderen Werken mit Schmetterlingen, sondern auch zu konkreten Werken am Ort des Friedrichsplatzes selbst: Dass die frei fliegenden Schmetterlinge sich der Kontrolle von Künstlerin und auch Betrachter/innen entziehen, korrespondiert wiederum mit einem anderen berühmten Werk der documenta, das 30 Jahre zuvor auf diesem Platz begann und sich ebenfalls auf die Stadt Kassel verteilt hat. Im Rahmen der documenta 7 im Jahr 1982 hatte Joseph Beuys’ Werk 7000 Eichen dort seinen Ausgangspunkt genommen. Sind der Ort und der Anlass der Ausstellung der gleiche, so könnten die Kunstwerke aufgrund des gewählten Materials unterschiedlicher kaum sein.11 Wie auch die Schmetterlinge sich über die

9Wobei natürlich die Pflanzen ebenso wie die Tiere nicht gänzlich der Kontrolle der Künstlerin unterstehen. Auf die Wuchsrichtung der Pflanzen etwa hat die Künstlerin nur bedingt Einfluss. 10Fraglich ist allerdings, wie viele Betrachter/innen die Schmetterlinge tatsächlich gesehen haben. Die Möglichkeit, dass Buch niemals Schmetterlinge ausgesetzt hat, sondern nur eine Geschichte von einer Schmetterlingsaufzucht erzählt hat, wird an dieser Stelle nicht weiterverfolgt werden, wäre aber in Anbetracht der Bedeutung von Fiktionalität in ihrem Werk für eine weitere wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit Buchs Oeuvre von Interesse. 11Beuys hatte 7000 Basaltsäulen keilförmig vor dem Friedericianum auf dem Friedrichsplatz aufschichten lassen. Bis zur darauffolgenden documenta 8 im Jahr 1987 sollten alle Steinsäulen in der Stadt verteilt werden. Dies geschah, indem jede Säule innerhalb des folgenden fünf Jahre einer frisch gepflanzten Eiche in Kassel beigegeben und neben ihr vertikal aufgerichtet wurde.

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Stadt verteilten, so verließen auch die Basaltsäulen der Beuys’schen Aktion ihren Ausgangspunkt12 und stehen noch heute neben den ihnen zugewiesenen Eichenbäumen, als künstlerisches Material dadurch klar erkenntlich. Beuys macht den Basalt trotz seiner monolithischen Qualitäten zu einer transitorischen Materie, weshalb Wagner die 7000 Eichen im Anschluss an Johannes Stüttgen eine „Zeitskulptur“ nennt (183). Während durch die künstlerisch genutzten Prozesse des „Umgruppieren[s], Displazieren[s] und Relocieren[s]“ (184) der schwere, leblose Basalt, der „‚ewige‘ Stein“, über die Stadt verteilt und jeder Stein mit einem Baum zusammengestellt wird, verteilen sich die Schmetterlinge gänzlich anders über die Stadt. Sie sind nicht auf eine monumentale Ewigkeit hin angelegt, wie sie die Dauerhaftigkeit eines Steines suggeriert, sondern ihre Anwesenheit im städtischen Raum ist vielmehr als eine konzeptuelle Ewigkeit zu imaginieren: Auch in Zukunft und solange noch Schmetterlinge in Kassel anzutreffen sein werden, könnten die Nachkommen dieser Kunst-Schmetterlinge im städtischen Raum und darüber hinaus leben. Menschen, die um die besondere Beschaffenheit des damaligen Kunstwerkes wüssten, könnten dann, so die Pointe, immer wieder mit der Frage konfrontiert werden, ob sie einem Schmetterling begegnet sind oder dem immer noch agierenden Teil eines Kunstwerkes, das einmal existiert hat. Dass diese ‚Ewigkeit‘ des Kunstwerkes und die örtliche Verankerung, die geographisch über die Zeit entgrenzt ist, bei Buch ganz anders funktioniert als bei Beuys, auch wenn sich das Material bei beiden Werken über die Stadt verteilt, führt auch zu einem anderen Verhältnis zwischen Werk und Betrachter/ innen. Erdrücken die 7000 Basaltskulpturen durch ihre massive Präsenz die Besucher geradezu und drängen sich ihnen förmlich auf, so ist der Garten mit den Schmetterlingen fast nicht zu entdecken. Muss für den Abtransport der Steine jedes Mal ein neuer Baum gekauft und gepflanzt werden, so entscheiden die Schmetterlinge selbst und ohne menschlichen Einfluss, nur getrieben durch den Wind, wann sie den Weg in die Welt außerhalb der Installation antreten. Indem das künstlerische Material selbst teilweise über sein Ziel entscheidet, verweist es über das Werk hinaus auf den Raum, in dem es sich bewegt. Und dies ändert auch den Status der Kunst: Sie wird bei Buch als etwas Organisches verstanden, das sich in den Kreislauf der Dinge einfügt. Auch The Lover ist eine „Zeitskulptur“, die sich jedoch in jedem Schmetterling in Kassel und darüber hinaus re-aktualisiert, viel fragiler und kleiner als die Basaltsäulen neben den Eichen, aber womöglich noch

Die Säulen waren für je 500 DM käuflich zu erwerben. Für eine Beschreibung der Aktion und eine Analyse aus materialästhetischer Perspektive (Wagner 179). 12Basalt ist aufgrund seiner spröden Struktur fast nicht zu bearbeiten und fand daher anders als beispielsweise Marmor kaum Einsatz als künstlerisches Material für die Herstellung von Skulpturen. Beuys’ Nutzung des Basalts als künstlerisches Material kann daher als äußerst ungewöhnliche Wahl verstanden werden, die nicht nur dessen materielle Eigenschaften, sondern auch seine verschiedenen historischen und symbolischen Ebenen miteinbezieht und sie für sein Kunstverständnis fruchtbar machte (Wagner 180).

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dauerhafter, allein durch die Kraft von Imagination und Erkenntnis der Bedeutung der Schmetterlinge als ursprüngliche Bestandteile eines Kunstwerkes. Doch Buch nahm die bisher übliche Ausstellungsweise von Schmetterlingen und die Fixierung von Material auf eine unerwartete Weise in ihrem Werk wieder auf. Sie stellte die abgelegten Chrysalis der geschlüpften Puppen aus. Täglich fügte sie die Hüllen der frisch geschlüpften Schmetterlinge in einer Vitrine in der Eingangshalle der documenta der Reihe der vorherigen hinzu. Fixiert mit feinen Nadeln blieb dadurch ein „sculptural detritus“ (Walleston) der Metamorphose und anschließenden Häutung der Schmetterlinge übrig, denen die Besucher nicht beiwohnen konnten, da sie in der Wohnung der Künstlerin stattgefunden hatten. Somit war das Einzige, was die Besucher mit Sicherheit zu sehen bekamen, die leblose Hülle der Schmetterlinge anstelle der Tiere selbst. Mit dieser Form der Ausstellung ließ Buch den Hüllen eine erhöhte Aufmerksamkeit zukommen, was zwar Besucher/innen enttäuschen konnte, die Schmetterlinge erwartet hatten, den Blick jedoch auf die Schönheit dieser biologischen Abfälle lenkte. Die Hüllen erhielten ihren Namen – Chrysalis – vom griechischen Wort für Gold (chrysós, χρυσός), da manche von Natur aus teilweise oder auch komplett goldfarben glänzen. Sie erscheinen aufgrund dieser äußeren Beschaffenheit wie aus Gold gemacht und damit wie Miniaturskulpturen.13 Dass Buch diesen Hüllen einen so prominenten Platz einräumte, lässt sich auch mit der mythologisch-theologischen Bedeutung der Schmetterlinge in Verbindung bringen, waren sie doch in der Antike das Symbol der Wiedergeburt und im Christentum für die Auferstehung Christi, weil das lange Ruhen der Tiere und ihre Metamorphose von einer Raupe in ein fliegendes Vollinsekt metaphorisch verstanden wurde (Lins 9). Obgleich die Hüllen ihren ganz eigenen ästhetischen Wert mit sich brachten, funktionierten sie im Rahmen des Erwartbaren wie eine Leerstelle, weil Buch eben nicht die Schmetterlinge selbst ausgestellt hatte, sondern die Überreste, den Detritus, und damit die Betrachter/innen in ihren Erwartungen einer klassischen Ausstellungsszene von Schmetterlingen enttäuschte. Dass auch dieses Spiel mit den Erwartungen und Hoffnungen als Teil des Kunstwerkes betrachtet werden kann, machte nicht zuletzt die Materialliste deutlich, in der schließlich auch „Ungewissheit und Hoffnung“ angegeben waren, die sich ebenso auf die An- bzw. Abwesenheit der Schmetterlinge im Garten selbst beziehen lässt. Buchs Verständnis von Kunst verdeutlicht sich mit anderen Worten nicht nur an dem Einsatz der Tiere, sondern auch an den weiteren Materialien, die sie einsetzte. Die letzte Komponente der Arbeit, „das Ephemere und Vergebliche, ein Anfang aber kein Ende“, findet sich auch in weiteren Werken, bei denen Buch die Kontrolle über deren letztendliche Form abgegeben hat, etwa in later, Goliath. And then started humming. (2013–2017) und „One of the things that baffles me about you is that you

13Eine

Vitrine mit den Hüllen sowie eine Fotoserie der Installation kauften später das Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf durch die Sparkassenstiftung. Sie sind auch die einzigen materiellen Artefakte der Installation, die übrigblieben – sieht man von den ausgesetzten, aber nicht mehr identifizierbaren Schmetterlingen einmal ab (Meister 38).

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remain unmurdered.“ (2012–2016).14 Für Goliath werden in verschiedenen internationalen Galerien moderner Kunst zwei Bilder von Buch ausgestellt, die andere kunsthistorisch wichtige Werke imitieren. Erst die Werkbeschreibung verrät, dass die Werke von Buch stammen – und aus Zucker bestehen. Die Werkbeschreibung erklärt außerdem, dass die Werke „geleckt werden können, bis sie verschwunden sind“ (Schlüter). Auch dieses Werk nimmt verschiedene Aspekte von The Lover auf, auch wenn keine Tiere zum Einsatz kommen: Ihm liegt eine für den klassischen Kunstkontext atypische Materialwahl zugrunde – der Zucker – und es wird durch die Anweisungen an die Betrachter/innen zu einer interaktiven und letztendlich flüchtigen Arbeit. Nicht nur müssen die Betrachter/innen für die optimale ästhetische Erfahrung des Werkes selbst einen ungewöhnlichen Schritt tun – und die Arbeit ablecken –, sondern auch die Kontrolle über ein Kunstwerk übernehmen, das sonst unberührbar ist. Buch zitiert nicht nur ironisch zwei wichtige Größen der Kunstgeschichte, sondern dekonstruiert ihre Wichtigkeit durch den profanen Akt des Ableckens, indem sie die Kontrolle über den Zustand und den Verbleib der Werke ausschließlich in die Hände oder besser die Zungen der Betrachter/innen gibt. Wie es um die Werke nun tatsächlich steht, ist aktuell nicht klar: Beide Zuckerbilder werden nicht öffentlich beworben und auch die Museen, in denen sie ausgestellt werden und wurden, sind vorher nicht bekannt.15 Nur die Betrachter/innen, die die Anweisungen lesen, verstehen und nach ihnen handeln, werden das Zucker-Werk

14Das

Kunstwerk endet in der Tat mit einem Punkt. In dieser Konzeptarbeit imitieren zwei Bilder jeweils ein Bild von Kasimir Malewitsch (das schwarze Quadrat) und von Barnett Newman (eine grau-rosafarbene Replik). Beide Künstler vereint, dass sie sich „auf abstrakte Weise mit Ikonenmalerei“ beschäftigten. Die Parallelisierung zwischen dem Küssen von Ikonenbildern und dem Küssen bzw. Ablecken der Bilder liefert eine zusätzliche Bedeutungsebene zwischen religiösen und säkularen Kunstwerken sowie der Frage nach dem Umgang und der Bewertung von Sichtbarem als Repräsentant für einen unsichtbaren Wert (Meister 40–41). 15Die letzte Ausstellung, die bekanntermaßen Goliath zeigte, fand im MALBA in Buenos Aires statt. Dort hing nur noch das Titelschild der Arbeit zwischen den anderen Werken südamerikanischer Künstler/innen. Die Arbeit schien „in den südamerikanischen anthropo-theophagischen Bauch verschwunden zu sein, als sei die Arbeit wie ein heiliger Feind schlussendlich absorbiert worden, um das Fremde in radikal neue Formen des Eigenen zu anabolisieren“. Es ist noch nicht einmal sicher, dass die Werke überhaupt existieren. Die von ihnen veröffentlichten Fotos könnten ebenso gut inszeniert worden sein. Goliath war ihre Abschlussarbeit an der Kunstakademie Düsseldorf 2013, jedoch legte sie nicht die Bilder selbst, sondern lediglich drei journalistische Publikationen als Arbeit vor. Buchs Spiel mit Fiktion ist auch an einem anderen Werk gut erkennbar, Some at times cast light (Manche werfen, gießen, betonieren, verteilen manchmal Licht). Hierfür ließ sie 2015 „einen Platz durch Ratsbeschluss nach einer fiktiven Frau Grete-Penelope Mars benennen“ und installierte ein Straßenschild und eine Bronzebüste zur Erinnerung dieser fiktionalen Persönlichkeit. Auch Tiere kamen in diesem Werk vor: So setzte Buch Glühwürmchen aus, die zu für einen kurzen Zeitraum (d. h. Ende Juni, Anfang Juli) im Jahr leuchten. Neben feministischen Lesarten dieses Werkes – so der Geschichtlichkeit und Realität vom Bild der Frau in der Gesellschaft – sind auch Tiere, aber eben auch das Vermengen von Fiktion und Realität in Bezug auf das Bild der Frau, Interpretationsansätze bzw. Mittel von Buchs künstlerischer Arbeit (Meister 42).

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von Buch tatsächlich erkennen und ablecken. Allen anderen bleibt diese ästhetische und kulinarische Erfahrung verwehrt und lässt sie eine Fälschung für ein Original halten. Was Kristina Buch über The Lover sagt, trifft auch auf diese Arbeit zu: „Der Arbeit wohnt die Tatsache inne, dass man sie nicht wirklich kontrollieren oder in Grenzen halten kann. Man kann sie nicht besitzen. Sie ist von Natur aus grenzenlos und flüchtig.“16

4 Das Konzept der „Lebensgeste“ im Kontext einer direkten Begegnung Auch wenn der Aspekt der Grenzen- und Kontrolllosigkeit sich ebenfalls auf The Lover übertragen lässt, stellt sich durch das Verhältnis zwischen Tagfaltern und Betrachter/innen auch eine andere Beziehung zum Werk dar. Es ist nicht nur das Ephemere, das Buch selbst zum Teil des Kunstwerkes proklamiert, sondern auch das Warten und Ausharren der Betrachter/innen wird, vorstellbar als eine endlose Dauerschleife, selbst zum Material der Arbeit, oder wie es in der Materialliste heißt, „Ungewissheit und Hoffnung“. Dies heißt im Umkehrschluss auch, dass nicht die tatsächliche Beobachtung der Schmetterlinge – wie in all den anderen vorgestellten Arbeiten –, sondern der Prozess der Annäherung, Geduld und auch der Fürsorge als zentrales Kernstücke der Arbeit betrachtet werden müssen, dem damit eine reflektierte Begegnung zugrunde liegt. Deswegen ist es der Künstlerin ein Anliegen, dass bei der Dokumentation der Arbeit auch mindestens so viele Bilder von der Aufzucht der Schmetterlinge und der Arbeit mit den Pflanzen gezeigt werden, wie von dem Werk selbst und dadurch kommt die letzte zentrale Materialbeschreibung ins Spiel. Es heißt: „ein Ritual entsteht, ohne dass es geplant ist“. Es ist der Umgang mit den Schmetterlingen und die Fürsorge, sowie das allmorgendliche Aussetzen in eine mögliche Freiheit, die Buch als Teil der Arbeit betrachtet und die in einem Spannungsverhältnis zu den Rückzugsmöglichkeiten der Schmetterlinge stehen. Denn während die Aufzucht und das Verhältnis zwischen Künstlerin und Schmetterlingen zwar dokumentarisch deutlich dargestellt werden, hatten die Betrachter/innen nur durch einen zufällig glücklichen Moment die Möglichkeit, überhaupt einem Schmetterling zu begegnen. Sind die Schmetterlinge in der medialen Präsentation des Werkes sehr präsent, war ihre Anwesenheit im Werk selbst eher ein kleines Wunder, obgleich sich auch Schmetterlinge, die Buch nicht aufgezogen hatte, von selbst in der Installation niederließen. Das Konzept der Fürsorge kann auf zweierlei Arten verankert werden und wirft ein Licht auf das spezielle Konzept einer Begegnung, mit dem Buch für die Installation operiert und das sie mit dem Begriff der „Lebensgeste“ zu fassen versucht. Einerseits, ausgehend vom Titel The Lover und der mythologischen Bedeutung der Schmetterlinge lässt sich die Begegnung durch eine Theorie von Liebe, präziser sogar einer christlich konnotierten Liebe, fassen. Diese Annahme speist sich 16„Inherent

in the work is the fact that you cannot really contain or control it. You can’t own it. By nature it’s boundless and ephemeral.“ (Ricciardi), Übersetzung N.D.

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aus der besonderen, bereits eingangs erwähnten Bedeutung von Schmetterlingen als Metapher für die Auferstehung im Christentum.17 Diese Denkweise theoretisiert die Begegnung mit einem Schmetterling als einen magischen Moment der Erkenntnis, in der die Besonderheit des Gegenübers erkannt wird. Andererseits lässt sich das Werk im Rückgriff auf die konkrete Fürsorge der Tiere in einer Ethics of Care verorten. Hier ist die Begegnung nicht einfach nur ein besonderer Moment ästhetischer oder emotionaler Überraschung oder Neuheit, sondern fordert die Begegnenden auf, sich im Rahmen ihrer Möglichkeiten Gedanken über den jeweils Anderen zu machen, dem begegnet wird und dem gegenüber ein gewisses Verhalten angemessen ist, das selbst reflektiert, gesteuert und auch verändert werden kann. Liest man den Titel der Installation als Referenz auf generelle Eigenschaften von Liebenden, kann das Werk auch mit dem großen Lehrbuch der Liebeskünste, namentlich Ovids Ars Amatoria, in Verbindung gebracht werden. Buch lässt offen, ob sie den Titel in Anlehnung an Ovids Werk gewählt hat, wie in manchen Beschreibungen der Arbeit berichtet wurde („To German Artist Kristina Buch goes“). In dem 2000 Jahre alten Werk beschreibt Ovid grundlegende Beziehungsfähigkeiten für Frauen und Männer. Liebe wird nicht nur zu einem praktisch zu erreichenden Ziel, für das man nur gewisse Spielregeln zu beachten hat, sondern auch zu einer grundlegend transformativen Kraft. Dem Moment der Begegnung mit den Schmetterlingen liegt, das verdeutlichen die unterschiedlichen Interpretationsansätze, auch die Möglichkeit von Reflexion über das eigene Verhalten, der Bedürfnisse der Tiere oder der persönlichen Faszination für die eigene Umwelt, die Kunst oder andere Tiere inne. Dass diese Interaktion mit den Schmetterlingen sich auch auf ihr Verständnis von Kunst niederschlägt, mag in Anbetracht von Buchs steter Arbeit für die Schmetterlinge nicht überraschen. Buch nennt denn auch dieses spezifische Format nicht einfach Installation oder Performance, sondern eine „Lebensgeste“: Erst in der Aktivität und der Begegnung mit dem Lebendigen findet Buchs Kunstwerk zu seiner Form. Tiere, aber auch der Wind übernehmen in ihren Werken einen aktiven Part, denn, so Buch, sie „haben einen eigenen Willen und sind somit Gestenschreiber“. Dem neuen Begriff liegt nicht nur Lebendigkeit, sondern auch Buchs Fürsorge für die Tiere und ihre Feststellung, dass die Tiere einen eigenen Willen hätten, zugrunde. Der Terminus der Lebensgeste bzw. der „life gesture“ verdeutlicht den Einfluss und Austausch zwischen Künstlerin und Tieren sowie dem weiteren Material: „Ich setze Parameter und zwischen diesen Parametern kann das Leben spielen und sich auf unerwartete Weise entfalten.“18 In dieser Selbstbeschreibung tritt der Aspekt der Offenheit in Abgrenzung zu einem als kontrolliert und abgeschlossen wahrgenommenen Kunstwerk wieder hervor. Ihr geht es gerade darum, dass Kunst als dynamische und offene Geste funktioniert und

17Religiöse

Bezüge in Buchs Arbeit liegen auch deswegen nahe, weil die Künstlerin vor ihrem Kunststudium Biologie und evangelische Theologie studiert hatte (Kunsthalle Bremerhaven). 18Originalzitat: „I set parameters and between those parameters life can play and unfold itself in unexpected ways.“ (Buch)

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dies markiert der Einsatz der Tiere und die Möglichkeit zur Begegnung zwischen Betrachter/innen und Schmetterlingen. Trotz dieses offenen Spiels ist das Werk gleichzeitig klar strukturiert, wie die Ritualisierung der Aufzucht und des Aussetzens zeigt. Im Kontext einer Ethics of Care lässt sich das Werk außerdem als eine Darstellung der Fürsorge und der Verbundenheit deuten, wenn Buch etwa gezielt regionale Schmetterlinge für ihre Installation auswählt, sie aufzieht und in einen speziell arrangierten Garten entlässt – in den sehr frühen Morgen- und Abendstunden und abseits der Blicke der Betrachter/innen. Mit diesem Ausstellen ihrer Pflege der Schmetterlinge verweist Buch auch auf die Besonderheit der Schmetterlinge und auf die Notwendigkeit ihrer Pflege zur Kreation eines Kunstwerkes. Sie übersieht nicht die speziellen Bedürfnisse der Schmetterlinge. Nicht einfach ein moralisch-abstrakter Überbau begleitete diese Installation, sondern Buchs tägliche Präsenz im Garten, ihre tägliche Pflege der Puppen in der Wohnung und somit ihre konkrete und von Moment zu Moment ausgeübte Fürsorge für die Tiere. Buchs Werk zielt nicht auf eine rein emotionale Reaktion der Betrachter/innen aus, die sich nun empathisch den Schmetterlingen zuwenden würden, sondern zielt wahrscheinlich auch auf eine rationale Betrachtung der Zusammenhänge ab, wie sie beispielsweise Lori Gruen in ihrer Theorie und dem gleichnamigen Buch Entangled Empathy beschreibt. Hierfür definiert Gruen Empathie wie folgt: Entangled Empathy is a type of caring perception focused on attending to another’s experience of wellbeing. An experiential process involving a blend of emotion and cognition in which we recognize we are in relationships with others and are called upon to be responsive and responsible in these relationships by attending to other’s needs, interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes and sensitivities. (3)

Gerade die Vermengung von emotionalen und kognitiven Aspekten macht aus Gruens Annäherung ein Instrument, um sich Buchs Arbeit zuzuwenden. Empathie zu empfinden heißt in diesem Zusammenhang nichts anderes, als sich so gut wie möglich vorzustellen, wie die Welt aus der Perspektive eines völlig anders gearteten Lebewesens sein könnte, „wie sie scheint, sich anfühlt, riecht und aussieht aus der jeweiligen situierten Position.“19 Buch übt die grundlegenden Aspekte einer Entangled Empathy aus, wenn sie die Schmetterlinge aufzieht, ihre Bedürfnisse kennt und versucht einen Garten zu bauen, der ideal auf die Bedürfnisse der Tiere abgestimmt ist. Die Schmetterlinge, die sie als Material einsetzt, werden nicht verletzt oder getötet, um aus ihrer Arbeit ein kontrollierbares und letzten Endes auch verkäufliches Werk zu machen. Vielmehr ist sie sich des doppelten Status der Schmetterlinge bewusst: Einerseits als wirkungsmächtiges (und schönes) Material, mit dem die Grenzen der Kunst einmal mehr erweitert werden können und andererseits als schutzbedürftige Wesen. Im Moment der reflektierten Begegnung erreicht diese Dopplung ihren direktesten Effekt, wenn sowohl 19„What

we need to do when we are trying to empathize with very different others is to understand as best we can what the world seems, feels, smells, and looks like from their situated position.“ (Gruen 66), Übersetzung N.D.

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die Wirkungsmacht der Schmetterlinge als auch das besondere Arrangement des Kunstgartens mit seinen Hindernissen offenbar werden. Dabei ist dieser Vorgang der Pflege durch Buch keine selbstlose Aktivität, sondern auch charakterisiert durch Eigennutz. Buch setzte die verschiedenen Tagesfalter gerade aufgrund der positiven Konnotation ein, die diese Tiere kulturell mit sich tragen und nicht, weil sie bei den Betrachter/innen ein empathisches Verständnis für die Tiere hervorrufen wollte. In der Rolle der Matriarchin wählte sie auch das Umfeld der Tiere aus, in denen diese ausgesetzt wurden (Walleston). War dieses Verhältnis auch nicht ebenbürtig, handelte Buch rechtlich gesehen doch korrekt und auch im Sinne der Entangled Empathy: Sie holte für die Aufzucht und Freilassung der Schmetterlinge eine Erlaubnis des Umweltministeriums des Landes20 ein und nutzte nur heimische Spezies, die natürlicherweise in der Gegend um Kassel vorkommen.21 Sie beschaffte Pflanzen, die ihnen ein Überleben erleichtern würden. Und letztlich verschaffte sie den Tieren auch einen Rückzugsraum vor Menschen, nämlich in ihrer eigenen für Menschen nicht zugänglichen Installation. Obgleich Buch im Umgang mit den Schmetterlingen fürsorglich und auch empathisch handelte, ist nicht zu vergessen, dass die Künstlerin aus diesem Materialeinsatz einen Vorteil zog, der die Schmetterlinge zu ungefragten, wenn auch pfleglich behandelten Akteuren machte. Buch nähert sich dem tierlichen Material in ihren Arbeiten zwar mit einem ethischen Ansatz, sie verfolgt aber keine aktivistischen Ziele. Vielmehr erprobt sie verschiedene Einsatz- und Wirkungsformen des tierlichen Materials.22 Für ihren künstlerischen Ausdruck ist es gerade die Unkontrollierbarkeit des kreatürlichen Verhaltens, das sie als kreative Kraft nutzt und damit das jeweilige Tier/Pflanze zu einem Co-Autor macht, wie es auch in anderen ihrer Arbeiten deutlich wird.23 Nicht nur zu der Entgrenzung der Kunst unter den Vorzeichen der Empathie lassen sich Erkenntnisse treffen, in Buchs Werk und der Materialaufzählung zeichnen sich auch Charakteristika der Begegnung ab. Beginnend mit dem Aufbau und der Begrenzung der Installation erweisen sich aufseiten der Betrachter/ innen die Fähigkeit abwarten zu können und Geduld zu haben als zentrale Voraussetzungen für eine Begegnung. Auch das Respektieren der Grenzen, einerseits die der Schmetterlinge, für die eine Berührung womöglich schmerzhaft oder unerwünscht ist und andererseits der Grenzen der Kunst – der Garten kann nur

20Die

korrekte Bezeichnung lautet: „Hessisches Bundesministerium für Umwelt, Klimaschutz, Landwirtschaft und Verbraucherschutz“. 21Sie achtete auch auf die natürliche Schlupfzeit der Tiere und versetzte die ungeschlüpften Puppen im Kühlschrank in eine längere Winterruhe, bis der Kalender die ideale Jahreszeit anzeigte. 22Dies zeigt sich unter anderem auch daran, dass auch Kristina Buch Tiere für ihre Arbeiten tötet, wie etwa bei ihrer Arbeit Sole Marie Sits (2013), in der sie einen Fisch in einer Ausstellung tötete und dann filetierte. 23Etwa in ihrer Lebensgeste mit einem Hasen unter dem Titel Two Monks and a Rabbit or A Cosmic Hunger Based on and Dedicated to a Carrot (2013) oder auch ihre expansive Video und Textarbeit „One of the things that baffles me about you is that you remain unmurdered.“ (2013).

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mit den Blicken, nicht aber mit dem Körper, betreten werden – ist für eine mögliche Begegnung zentral. Selbst der Umgang mit einer möglichen Enttäuschung der eigenen Erwartung ist wichtig, wenn etwa trotz geduldigem Ausharren keinem Schmetterling begegnet wurde. Hoffnung, Vorfreude oder auch Neugierde auf eine mögliche Begegnung mit einem Schmetterling konnten für Betrachter/innen eine Motivation sein, sich der Kunstinstallation länger auszusetzen als einem Hochbeet ohne künstlerischem Konzept. Diese konzeptuelle Kraft und auch die Intensität der Begegnung nährte sich in The Lover aus der Fürsorge und Empathie, die Buch den Schmetterlingen entgegengebracht hatte und die auch die Betrachter/innen in der Begegnung mit Tieren wie Kunst üben konnten. Ob und was diese Begegnung bei Tieren wie Menschen ausgelöst haben mag, bleibt ungewiss. Doch selbst über den Zeitraum der Installation hinaus kann die Präsenz der Schmetterlinge in Kassel nicht nur ein Nachdenken über die Beziehungen zwischen Menschen und Tieren anregen, sondern auch über das Verhältnis der Betrachter/innen zur Kunst (Abb. 1–4).

Abb. 1–4  Kristina Buch. The Lover, 2012. In Auftrag gegeben und produziert Documenta 13. Gerüststrukturen, Erde, Pflanzen, Tagfalter, ein Ritual entsteht, ohne dass es geplant ist, der Wind, die Möglichkeit zur Freiheit, eine Ungewissheit und Hoffnung, ein Abgrund des weiten Offenen, das Ephemere und das vermeintlich Vergebliche, ein Anfang, aber kein Ende. (Bilder oben und unten links von Kristina Buch, Bild unten recht von Rosa Maria Rühling. Copyright ProLitteris und Kristina Buch, © 2019, ProLitteris, Zurich)

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Literatur Aloi, Giovanni. Animal Studies and Art: Elephants in the Room, hg. v. Giovanni Aloi. Sonderheft Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, Mar. 2015. Aloi, Giovanni. Art & Animals. Tauris, 2011. Buch, Kristina. „Details zur Arbeit The Lover.“ Email empfangen v. Nike Dreyer, 20. Nov. 2016. Db, Nicoletta. „Bik van der Pol: Butterfly House at Macro.“ Designboom, 7. Dez. 2010, www. designboom.com/art/bik-van-der-pol-butterfly-house-at-macro/. Gruen, Lori. Entangled Empathy: An alternative Ethic for our Relationships with Animals. Lantern Books, 2015. Kingsolver, Barbara. Flight Behaviour: A Novel. Faber and Faber, 2012. Kunsthalle Bremerhaven, Hg. Execution Semantics: For a necessary criminal. Sonderheft zum Ausstellungskatalog, 2016. Lins, Heinz Maria. Tiere in der Mythologie und ihre religiöse Symbolkraft. Fischer, 1990. Meister, Helga. Neue Düsseldorfer Kunstszene in 70 Portraits. Wienand, 2017. Merian, Maria Sibylla, u. a. Insects & Flowers: The Art of Maria Sibylla Merian. J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008. Nikkhah, Roya. „Damien Hirst Condemned for Killing 9,000 Butterflies in Tate Show.“ The Telegraph, 14. Okt. 2012, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/9606498/Damien-Hirst-condemned-for-killing-9000-butterflies-in-Tate-show.html. Nova, Alessandro. Wind und Wetter: Die Ikonologie der Atmosphäre. Marsilio, 2009. Ricciardi, Nicola. „Iconoclash by tongue.“ Mousse Magazine, 6. Juli 2016, www.moussemagazine.it/iconoclash-by-tongue/. Schlüter, Ralf. „Zuckerschock für Museumsbesucher.“ Art Magazin, 5. Juli 2013, www.art-magazin.de/szene/7732-rtkl-kristina-buch-zuckerbilder-zuckerschock-fuer-museumsbesucher. Science Ltd. „In and Out of Love – Damien Hirst.” Damien Hirst, www.damienhirst.com/exhibitions/solo/1991/in-out-love. Science Ltd. „Kaleidoscope Paintings.“ Damien Hirst, www.damienhirst.com/texts1/series/kaleidoscope. Stracey, Frances. „Bio-Art: The Ethics Behind the Aesthetics.“ Nature, 10. Juli 2009. „To German Artist Kristina Buch goes.“ Trieste Contemporanea, www.triestecontemporanea.it/ attivita.php?id_attivita=99&l=e&id_m=3&id_sm=. Wagner, Monika. Das Material der Kunst: Eine andere Geschichte der Moderne. Beck, 2001. Walleston, Aimee. „Kristina Buch‘s Constant Garden.“ Art in America, 26. Juni 2012, www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/kristina-buch-documenta-13/. Weiss, Judith Elisabeth. „‚Mord‘ an der Kunst: Zur Verweigerungslogik in der Kunst der Gegenwart.“ Ästhetische Praxis, hg. v. Michael Kauppert und Heidrun Eberl, Springer, 2016, S. 55–82.

IV  Places of Human-Animal Encounters:

Slaughterhouse, Zoo, and the Circus

Sensing Slaughter: Exploring the Sounds and Smells of Nonhuman Literary Encounters

14

Sune Borkfelt

Few phenomena are as distant and concealed from us, and yet as intimately and directly connected to actions carried out by most people in their daily lives, as is the abattoir and what happens inside it. We know it is there, yet it is most often located outside of both the physical and cognitive spaces in which we carry on with our lives. It is outside our towns and outside our minds, our common discourse. If we choose to see them as such, meat products may serve as a reminder of the abattoir’s existence, but in actuality these are most often served up in ways designed to disguise their origins. Thus, we might say that the encounter with the animal in the slaughterhouse is one that rarely, if ever, happens for most people, although this is the achievement of, historically speaking, relatively recent changes to the societies and cities most of us live in. And yet, such encounters may happen in cultural representations, not least in literature, where we may not only experience slaughter, but remain in the experience, immersed as we are in narrative and plot. Indeed, by engaging with the slaughterhouse, contemporary literary narratives can arguably help lift concealment, challenge invisibility, and add ‘knowledge’ in the form of descriptions and narratives that prompt us to imagine the hidden space of slaughter. In this way, literary space can challenge the conventions of our social space and suggest the need for a reappraisal of the ‘others’ we slaughter and eat. Experience of slaughterhouses is intimately connected to sense impressions and the meanings attached to these. We meet the slaughterhouse through sights, sounds, and smells, and different meanings and interpretations are attached to the

S. Borkfelt (*)  Aarhus C, Denmark E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_14

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experiences of the world through the different senses.1 For instance, vision has, in the words of Janice Carlisle, historically been “almost inevitably intellectualized”, while less value has been attached to the other senses (3); smell, by contrast, has typically been considered the lowest, least reliable, and most animal of senses, more likely to promote base emotional responses than intellectual reflection (Porteous 357). In a number of ways, the sense of sight is thus the one most often considered across most academic disciplines and indeed more widely in Western culture and society (Coates 636), for which there may be good reasons. According to environmental geographer J. Douglas Porteous, “[u]p to 90 per cent of our perceptual intake is visual” (356), and scientific data and evidence are thus also often perceived visually. Moreover, while the etymology of ‘aesthetics’ suggests a more general connection to sensory perception, vision is arguably also the sense most closely connected to ideas of the aesthetic; in other words, we often tend to think of beauty (or ugliness) as something visual, which provides one way in which sight is connected to that which moves us, the emotionally stirring. Exploring literary depiction, experience, and perception through a focus on the sense of sight can therefore allow for reflections not just on the intellectualization of that which is depicted, but also on its ties to emotion. Moreover, it is indeed easy to think of the obscurity of the modern abattoir as mainly visual: invisibility, obstructions of lines of sight by windowless walls, through placement away from view, through delivery of animals for slaughter in early mornings when few eyes are open. Even the kinds of laws that in some places today seek to prevent footage from inside slaughterhouses and factory farms from reaching the public have a clearly visual focus (Editorial Board; Potter). There is, in such measures, distinct effort to make sure that we do not, in the words of Tristan Egolf’s novel Lord of the Barnyard, stare our meals “square in the eye before plowing in” (133). Yet, rather than adding to the focus on sight, my aim here is to begin to explore how the equally important, if less obvious, aural and olfactory sense impressions work in our literary encounters with the animals our society slaughters for food. In doing so, I hope to close in on, and begin to answer, the question of what reading through sound and smell can add to our understanding of texts and of the animals we encounter therein. With the possible exception of music, academic attention to sound is largely a relatively recent phenomenon. As researchers note, historians have tended to prioritize the visual over other senses (Coates 636; Chiang 409), including the aural, and much the same can be said of literary studies. Yet, as the cries of both humans and nonhumans attest to, sounds are closely tied to emotional expressions, and descriptions of them can be highly evocative. Moreover, distinguishing sounds from one another has historically been a way of telling the human from

1While

taste and touch can occasionally be relevant as well, they are more closely connected to our experiences with the products of the slaughterhouse than with experiencing the slaughterhouse itself.

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the animal; those sounds that could be categorized as language were a mark of humanity, while other sounds failing to meet such criteria could signify animal inferiority (Borkfelt 112; Esmail 102–132). Descriptions of the soundscape of any given setting can provide us with much information; certain sounds—or the absence thereof—can for instance easily help us in telling an urban from a rural setting (Schafer 43; Connor 19–20), while opinions on what constitutes ‘noise’ can reveal cultural, as well as subjective, attitudes and habits (Coates 641; Schwartz 20–21). In various ways, then, culture and nature have often been separated along a dichotomization of sound, and its place in literary depictions can thus be highly telling, not least where animal sounds are concerned. As I will also expand on below, more than any other sense, smell has often been considered primitive, animalistic, and basic compared to other senses (Carlisle 4; Corbin 7; Jenner 337, 343; Porteous 356–357). Moreover, scholars comment on the particularly subjective nature of smell (Chiang 405), which may be another reason why it is often absent from cultural analysis, although if only 20% of the existing “odorous compounds” are considered pleasant, as research suggests (Porteous 358), it would seem to conversely suggest a significant degree of olfactory consensus. One reason why smell is often considered more subjective than other senses is perhaps the way in which it is perceived as tied to emotion rather than rationality or as “primarily very basic, emotional, arousing […] unlike vision or sound, which tend to involve cognition” (Porteous 357). Yet it may be that exactly this very basic nature of smell makes it a greatly evocative tool for writers of fiction. Since they are closely connected to both memory and emotion (Booth 3; Chiang 405–406; Porteous 359), odours may unleash responses in readers more easily or just differently. They can, for instance, make for a suggestive way of introducing and describing a site or place in a narrative, because smell often reaches us upon approach, perhaps before we catch sight of its source. As Porteous contends, “[n]o war novel is complete without reference to the sweet stench of bloated human remains” (361). Similarly, it may be argued that no depiction of a slaughterhouse is complete without reference to the odours of faeces, blood, and offal one finds on a kill floor. Indeed, since smell in itself is, in Porteous’ words, “immediately evocative, emotional and meaningful” (360), a focus on the “potential of olfactory narration” (Booth 3)—alongside other senses—could possibly provide readers with an immersion that helps slaughterhouse narratives take on those qualities as well.

1 Removing the Animal As various scholars have pointed out, most of us today live lives in which we only rarely, if ever, encounter the animals that are the sources of meat products, or, indeed, very many other kinds of nonhuman animals (apart from companion animals), and this is largely the result of developments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (John Berger; Bulliet; O’Sullivan 1–4). As John Berger— although more concerned with the psychological and symbolic than with physical

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distance—argues, the last couple of centuries have seen a “cultural marginalization of animals,” which has profoundly changed the ways in which we view and relate to (or don’t view or relate to) other animals in general and domestic animals in particular (25). Historian Richard W. Bulliet has dubbed this new condition ‘postdomesticity’ because most people do not have regular contact with domestic animals other than companion animals. Bulliet argues that “postdomestic people live far away, both physically and psychologically, from the animals that produce the food, fiber, and hides they depend on, and they never witness the births, sexual congress, and slaughter of these animals” (3). Animal products are still consumed, indeed in stupefying quantities. We just do not see where they come from, since, Bulliet contends, postdomestic urbanites “experience feelings of guilt, shame, and disgust when they think (as seldom as possible) about the industrial processes by which domestic animals are rendered into products and about how those products come to market” (3). Expressions of horror and disgust at animal slaughter are not unique to postdomesticity, but they did take on new forms and gain new momentum during the nineteenth century, when seeing both the lives and deaths of domestic animals was still a common feature of urban life. Indeed, many city dwellers found the sights, sounds, and smells of these domestic animals to be an affront to modern city life, and the keeping, driving, selling, and slaughter of animals inside city boundaries were the sources of a number of problems. An illustrative example of this is found in the debates surrounding the cattle market at Smithfield in London, where the number of animals bought and sold increased in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Bull 5). The market, with its many slaughterhouses and other related businesses in the vicinity, was a source of heated debate during the first half of the nineteenth century; its possible removal was the subject of select parliamentary committees in 1828, 1847, 1849, and 1851, while the market was expanded in 1835–1838 and again in 1846 in the attempt to accommodate growing numbers of animals (MacLachlan 231–233). One gets a sense of the challenges urban cattle markets posed for city dwellers in Charles Dickens’s description of Smithfield Market in Oliver Twist (1838): It was market-morning. The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire; and a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemd to rest upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above. All the pens in the centre of the large area: and as many temporary pens as could be crowded into the vacant space: were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen, three or four deep. Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled in together in a mass; the whistling of drovers, the barking of dogs, the bellowing and plunging of oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs; the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every public-house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping, and yelling; the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses. (146–147)

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Dickens’s description mirrors many of the issues raised in public debates about Smithfield at the time, in which he also played an active part himself. He also made references to the market in a number of other texts, perhaps most notably when Pip calls it a “shameful place, being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam,” in Great Expectations (1860–1861) (165; Gay 88). As the “fat and blood” in Pip’s description hints at, a significant part of the filthiness of Smithfield was due to the many private slaughterhouses found close to the market, and this was a common argument invoked by those who sought its removal from the city centre. As in Dickens’s lines in Oliver Twist, this was seen as closely connected to the pollution of London’s air, and the smells from “the reeking bodies of cattle” and other animals, both living and dead, were connected to health issues through miasmic theories popular at the time (Winter 125). The image of “filth and mire” and of foul smells “mingling with the fog” would therefore easily have evoked the feeling of market mornings at Smithfield for many Victorian Londoners. In what follows, I use the example of Smithfield Market—and the debates and fiction about it—to further explore the sounds and smells of literary animals and slaughter.

2 Silencing Animals “Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, noise frequently resides in the ear of the listener,” environmental historian Peter A. Coates reminds us (641). Indeed, what we define as noise is of course sound that is found disturbing or disruptive to our purposes or comfort, to a greater or lesser degree. Some noise may seem entirely purposeless; the noise of an industrial machine, for example, can disturb and is purposeless, since it is a by-product of the machine trying to fulfil its purpose, not an end in itself. Other noise is more complex. With noise coming from the voices of other humans, or with music, we may recognize that there is a purpose to the noise. Music, for example, is not noise if I am playing it for my own enjoyment, but I may think of it as noise if it comes from my neighbour’s house and disturbs me in writing this chapter. Yet, of course, it is then not noise from my neighbour’s perspective. As individuals and as societies, we construct and expect certain soundscapes to form the auditory background of our existence. As Steven Connor tells us, “[a] soundscape is … a kind of precomposition, a score rather than a performance” and is formed not just by the sounds themselves, but by the relation of the sounds as well, whether this relation is formed by us through our listening or exists regardless of our listening, as when sounds are “produced in interchange” (17, 18). While in some cases they may seem like a part of the background hum of noises, animal sounds’ expressiveness and directionality mean that they belong in the category of the purposeful. In other words, if we find them noisy it is because we experience a clash of purposes; when we consider them to be noise, the sounds of animals are heard as contaminating the soundscape that we desire or expect.

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Unlike many sounds that are connected in our soundscapes only through our listening, animal sounds have the added complexity of having a relation regardless of our listening to them. They are produced with a purpose, as expressions of the animals’ situations in life, and are thus typically meant for other ears. As Connor points out, “[l]istening to animal sounds is […] in a replete sense, an ‘overhearing’ […] in that in it I lend an ear to other listenings” (18). When animals cry out and break the background hum that otherwise forms our soundscape, they therefore remind us of their individuality in the form of voices and ears. Moreover, animal sounds become a potent reminder that animals have agency, and therefore of the fact that they are living beings. As the sociologist Mick Smith reminds us, this raises questions “about the voice as an expression of self-identity” and therefore of the ethics of failing to truly listen (and respond) when we overhear others in their time of distress (49). Indeed, the denial of meaning to the voices of other species has historically been one of the ways in which a human/animal binary has been defined by distinguishing animal sounds from human language. Accordingly, “to hear their voice as a form of self-expression, as a language that might speak to us, that might alter our sensibilities, would be to jeopardise our special status, our separateness” (Smith 49). An imposing voice from a suffering nonhuman animal in our soundscape is therefore potentially not just a threat to our comfort, but to our human identity as well. The effects of animal sounds, when heard, will stand out even more to us in urban environments. As Connor writes, you hear few animal sounds in the city, since animals have increasingly been removed from urban areas, but when animals then are heard, they may have a more profound effect on our listening (19). Today, as Connor concludes, “the construction of soundscape is part of the huge effort of rethinking relations between the human and the natural that must characterize our future,” but this has in fact long been the case (22). As the construction of city soundscapes has happened gradually, the removal of most animals has played its part in creating what we today consider normal for urban soundscapes. In early modern Europe, for instance, “slaughterhouses were typically in the middle of towns, so the terror of pigs and calves scenting blood echoed through the nearby streets” (Garrioch 7). As more aspects of life in towns and cities became regulated to a greater extent, controlling sound also increasingly became the object of ordinances and campaigns (Attali 123; Schafer 65–67). In his book on the history of noise, Hillel Schwartz attempts to explain why Victorian efforts to limit street musicians had such backing, when there were so many other horrific sounds in English cities at the time, including “thousands of cattle, sheep, and pigs driven in the early morning through city streets, bleating and squealing down ramps into abattoirs whose walls scarcely damped the sounds of slaughter” (238). As he notes, such sounds “should have been psychoacoustically as penetrating as” any street music (238). Yet, arguably, Victorians did protest against the sounds of animals driven to market and slaughter, they merely did so as part of broader campaigns and debates attempting to renegotiate the places of animals and slaughter in cities that were increasingly sites of planning and control. As one commentator remonstrated, “the

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repose of the whole neighbourhood is disturbed by the noise of suffering cattle and sheep” since Monday was market day and animals therefore had to be driven through the city to Smithfield Market on Sundays (Bull 25). Indeed, enduring the soundscape of Smithfield may have been a challenge for those visiting. James Grant seems to have thought so when he wrote of the market in his Lights and Shadows of London Life (1842) that “the lowing of oxen; the roaring of bulls; the squeaking of pigs; and the bleating of sheep”, mixed with the shouts and oaths of drovers, meant that “one’s auricular organs have, I may safely say, to undergo a much more severe trial in Smithfield market, than they would in almost any other spot” in the world (Vol. 2, 179–180). Moreover, as Chris Otter notes, argumentative texts of the period often give the impression that “sounds of dying animals were particularly emotive” (46). It is no wonder, then, that writers of both fiction and argumentative texts utilized the evocative qualities of the city’s animal sounds. Although people could surely feel a great range of emotions when seeing suffering animals, it was through sound that the animals could be said to be expressing their own anguish and pain. An example of this is found in Richard Horne’s short story “The CattleRoad to Ruin,” which appeared in 1850, at the height of the debate on Smithfield. The text follows what is at the beginning a “good-natured, healthy, honest-faced ox,” as well as a sheep, from meadow to market, and on to slaughter, and is written from the animals’ perspectives with bouts of anthropomorphic phrasing that clearly connect animal sound with animal feelings. The ox “bellows aloud his pain and indignation” when cramped into a rail wagon with other oxen, who collectively “uplift their great voices in anger and distress” (326). Horne’s text thus exemplifies how animals’ voices and our ideas of their feelings go together, and how we perceive the sounds of animals as laden with purpose and meaning, and hence arguably view other animals as having individuality and a sense of self. Their emotive qualities make the sounds a vehicle for implicit comparison between human and nonhuman experience, and between human and nonhuman life and identity. Horne even makes this rather explicit when he writes of a sheep being driven by dogs that “no word of man, or bleat of sheep, can convey any adequate impression of the fright it causes her” (328). As animal sounds are voices, objections to bad treatment, and thus signs of agency, their absence or suppression becomes equally disturbing, signifying the muted, subdued animal spirit. Eventually worn down, Horne’s oxen in this way are silenced: “There are no more loud lowings and bellowings; they utter nothing but gasps and groans” (326). In this way, the diminution of sound from loud, purposeful vocalizations into groans becomes a sign of agency being taken away or given up in despair, which conversely emphasizes the importance of sound as a signifier of life and passion, whether human or nonhuman. Dickens, similarly, used the evocativeness of the animal sounds of Smithfield in the short story “The Heart of Mid-London” as well as in Oliver Twist, and the list of animal sounds in the latter was mirrored in the writings of reformers (146; Dickens and Wills 122; Bull 25). In this way, animals’ voices haunted texts on the subject, as they haunted Londoners, who found them to be signs of animal cruelty

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and distress, implying only too well the kinship of human and nonhuman feeling. As one public health chemist later commented on the sounds of city slaughterhouses, “the squeals, or almost human shrieks” of pigs were “peculiarly distressing, and from the high pitch of the sounds, […] heard a long distance” (qtd. in Otter 46). Removing the sounds of distressed animals could, in turn, prevent the human distress that might result from bearing witness to animals’ all too recognizable feelings as they endured suffering and went to their deaths, and using the sounds in literature was, for the same reasons, likely to be evocative and emotionally stirring. Making the animal sounds of cattle markets and slaughterhouses unheard in the urban landscape is, effectively, a muting of animal voices, made possible through city planning, architecture, and a politics of sound as well as sight. Its effect is the creation of an urban soundscape without the voices of the condemned. When slaughterhouses and cattle markets were removed from cities, the animal voices expelled in the process were the voices of those animals who arguably had the most reason to cry out—those slaughtered and exploited—and as both fictional and argumentative uses of them show, they had great emotive potential. Silencing animal ‘noise’ is therefore more than the creation or alteration of a soundscape and more than the removal of the mere sound itself; it is an effort at extinguishing the discomfort caused by the specific noise in question, which, in the case of the sounds produced by the animals sent to slaughter, often includes moral discomfort or ethical doubts about the processes that bring about our meat.

3 The Smell of Slaughter Introducing his study of industrialized animal slaughter, political scientist Timothy Pachirat touches upon the paradox of consumers relying on animal consumption while being shielded from animal production. Upon exiting the interstate on his way into Omaha, Nebraska, he observes, [a] roadside sign, erected by the city, reads, ‘To Report Manure Spills or Odor, Call 444– 4919.’ An empty assertion of bureaucratic power over the unruliness of smell, it is one among numerous symptoms of the ongoing conflict between the messiness of mass killing and a society’s–our society’s–demand for a cheap, steady supply of physically and morally sterile meat fabricated under socially invisible conditions. Shit and smell: anomalous dangers to be reported to the authorities in an era in which meat comes into our homes antiseptically packaged in cellophane wrappings. To enable us to eat meat without the killers or the killing, without even–insofar as the smell, the manure, and the other components of organic life are concerned–the animals themselves: this is the logic that maps contemporary industrialized slaughterhouses. (Pachirat 3, italics original)

While describing the norm of cutting up, disguising, and packaging meat products in ways that allow us to forget their connection to living animals and their slaughter, Pachirat highlights smell as the sensory impression that is perhaps most likely to break through the veil surrounding meat production and remind us of where the

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food really comes from. Whereas both sights and sounds are usually more easily contained, smells are often unruly and penetrating. Indeed, smells have historically often been a chief complaint against, and a reason for relocation of, the business of slaughter as well as other animal-related businesses (Brown 203; Clemen 120; Jones 78, 96; Pacyga 22, 58–60, 167). Thus, ordinances and regulations have often specifically mentioned unpleasant odours connected to slaughter businesses, as in the 1912 regulations from Des Moines, Iowa, which stated that no “slaughterhouse offal of any sort or untanned hides shall be transported through the city, except in tightly covered vessels or wagons which preclude the escape of noxious odors” (“Des Moines” 767). Likewise, a 1915 ordinance from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, ordered “owners, agents, or occupants” of slaughterhouses “to distribute twice each week a quantity of lime sufficient to prevent any offensive odor about their premises” during the summer months (“Carlisle” 963). Similarly, the smells of animal businesses were often mentioned as an unpleasant feature of British cities in the Victorian Period (Wohl 80–81, 83, 88–89). Different animal smells were prolific in nineteenth-century cities—from the dung of horses in city streets to cowsheds, dairies, and piggeries—and depictions of smell could thus be used to recall the experience of animal markets from readers’ memories and to set a certain kind of scene. The satirical magazine Punch, for instance, used references to smell as the opening of pieces meant to evoke the public’s experiences of the “flagrant – by no means fragrant – nuisance” of Smithfield Market in the 1840s and 1850s (“Smithfield Market Prize Show”). As the magazine punningly reported when Parliament voted against closing the market in 1849: “the ‘Noes have it’ … and … the Nose will be likely to have it for some time to come” (“The Noes Have It”). But even worse than the smells of markets was the stench emanating from urban slaughterhouses, also because blood and offal often drained straight into sewers, rivers, and streets (Wohl 84). Because slaughterhouses were found in populated areas, this often meant that people lived in such smells; one Southampton doctor visiting a patient living near an open cesspool by a pig-slaughterhouse felt that the “smell was so pestiferous that he (not being stink-seasoned) could not remain five minutes without fainting” (qtd. in Wohl 83). Such sentiments were mirrored in fiction. Eliza Meteyard depicted a surgeon who “in no charnel-house, no fever-hospital, no den inhabited by les chiffonniers of Paris, or the beggars of Westminster Almonry, had” ever “come upon a stench more foul” than that of a Smithfield butcher calling at his doorstep (Silverpen 520). Similarly, when he later visits the butcher’s home, he experiences how, at the opening of a door, “in reeked the swelter and stench of the slaughter-house, thus merely divided from the human dwelling by a thin partition” (525). The descriptions of slaughterhouse smells by Meteyard and others reflected a number of contemporary concerns and ideas found in debates on city slaughterhouses. Just as sound and sight could make living close to slaughterhouses problematic by providing disturbances and constant reminders of a violent and unsanitary business, so could smell. Like the abattoir debates in general, the issue of smell also invited comparisons with French cities, where abattoirs had been moved to the outskirts earlier

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in the century. Whereas writers often remarked on the stench of London slaughter­ houses, smells in relation to French abattoirs were most remarkable for their absence. While the engineer Richard B. Grantham thus complained about the smell of blood thrown on dung heaps from Smithfield slaughterhouses and found the slaughterhouses around Newgate to be “abounding with the most offensive smells” in his Treatise on Public Slaughter-houses, the “absence of all bad smells” in an abattoir in Blois was the only reference to odour in the eleven French abattoirs he reported on (78, 82, 58). Other reformers and writers similarly emphasized the stench of London’s slaughterhouses and the way odours made their way into people’s homes, while descriptions of Paris abattoirs rarely alluded to smell at all (Cook 50; Byng 17–18; Dunhill 20, 22, 40). While such descriptions undoubtedly attest to actual differences in the conditions under which animal slaughter took place in Paris and London at the time, the role of smell in such texts can also be read as a sign of the proximity of slaughterhouses in Londoners’ lives—a proxi­ mity, which would have played a role in the way fiction about such places was read. While smell can sometimes travel over a great distance, it also suggests proximity to its source, especially when encountered in literature. In this way, smell clearly implies something spatial, even if the experience of smell is, as Porteous reminds us, “non-continuous, fragmentary in space and episodic in time” (359). This relationship between smell and its source is important to our gradual experience of places. Whereas we may not be able to see what is around the corner of a street, upon approach we may smell it, making our first impression and conceptualization of a place likely to be olfactory. By introducing readers to “a thick steam, per­ petually rising from the reeking bodies of cattle, and mingling with the fog” in the first lines of describing Smithfield in Oliver Twist, Dickens exploits this olfactory aspect of encountering the market and its animals (146). Introducing smell early on mimics the real sensory impression of entering a live animal market, thus tying the scene more closely to the actual experience of many Victorian city dwellers. Meanwhile, Richard Horne, in “The Cattle-Road to Ruin,” describes the likely less known location of a knacker’s yard, where old horses and diseased cattle are slaughtered, in olfactory detail and makes use of the fact that first impressions often come through smell: But even before the eye,– usually the first and quickest organ in action,– has time to glance round, the sense of smell is not only assailed, but taken by storm, with a most horrible, warm, moist, effluvium, so offensive, and at the same time so peculiar and potent, that it requires no small resolution in any one, not accustomed to it, to remain a minute within its precincts. (327)

While Horne’s story is full of detailed visual descriptions and makes ample use of aural impressions as well, odours play only a small part in the text. Thus, when the above passage does occur, it is all the more notable. The opening reference to the eye being superseded by the nose not only signifies a temporary shift in the sensory focus of the text, but can also be read as a reference to the knacker’s

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yard being perhaps more out of sight, or less willingly seen, than regular slaughterhouses. Yet odour betrays its location, and the generally dramatic and emotive language of the text takes on an extra dimension in the introduction of a place meant to strengthen the author’s arguments against city slaughterhouses. In narrative terms, the scene in the knacker’s yard sticks out. While readers are meant to think that the ox whose journey the story details will be slaughtered in the yard, the scene proves unimportant to the fate of the characters and instead mainly allows the author to describe an unsavoury slaughtering environment in great detail. The argumentative importance of the scene is tied to its initial invocation of smells, as odours are more closely connected to emotional responses than visual impression is (Porteous 357, 359, 375). By appealing to readers’ imagination of smell, the story thus heightens the tension before the pivotal scene of death that comes soon after. This is crucial; while actual olfactory experience is perhaps not directly transferable to literary experience of smell, texts in general and fiction in particular do ask us to imagine their environments by invoking our own feelings and memories, which suggests that the use of smell in literary works may draw on its real-life ability to “stimulate emotional and motivational arousal” (359). What the scene from the knacker’s yard in Horne’s story, along with other texts on slaughterhouses or animal markets of the period, also reminds us is that smells can overwhelm, due to the way they act as a tell-tale sign of corporeal proximity. As Porteous argues, whereas views can be distant or arguably even distancing through the framing and intellectual response they often invite, odours “penetrate the body and permeate the immediate environment” (359). Thrust into smell, then, we may react very strongly and our reactions may be seen as involuntary and even sickening, as when the “smell of the meat, the pungent odour of the offal” overwhelms Émile Zola’s protagonist Florent and contributes to his nausea at the meat market in The Belly of Paris (1873) (30). By contrast, other characters would be expected to react differently to the same smells, because a process of habituation occurs as “the perceived intensity of smell declines rapidly after one has been exposed to it for some time” (Porteous 358).2 Whether this is a sign that perception of smell is essentially subjective or that it is cultural, it therefore makes sense that characters living near slaughterhouses and animal markets in Victorian stories, such as those by Meteyard and Horne, hardly even notice the strong smells that surround them. Moreover, the odorous immersion of such characters can in itself be read as a sign of their low status, since, as Janice Carlisle reminds us, smell is often conceptually connected to something “inveterately low: corporeal, animalistic, primitive, and therefore degraded,” and Victorian discourse provides “numerous examples of groups marked as less than human by their supposedly distinctive scents” (4). Characters who are visitors to these ‘animal’ locations, on the other

2Contemporary controversies over the smells of slaughterhouses also often involve disagreements about how much a given location actually smells, in which newcomers often find smells more pungent and offensive (News Staff; Andrew-Gee; Bruggers).

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hand, will often experience and describe the presence of odours as striking, thus effectively emphasizing a contrast between the neighbourhoods they come from and the lower, dirtier, more animal neighbourhoods, as well as between the different classes of people belonging to these different parts of the Victorian city. Odour, both in literature and life, works differently than other sense impressions and is distinguished especially from the visual through a number of specific characteristics. As Porteous claims, “use of odour in literature emphasizes that while one may stand outside a visual landscape and judge it artistically, as one does a painting, one is immersed in smellscape; it is immediately evocative, emotional and meaningful” (360, italics original). In this way, smell can enhance readers’ experience of immersion and of proximity to the unpleasantness of slaughter, in Victorian as well as contemporary literature. In reality, smell is often the reminder of the slaughterhouse that is most difficult to contain, and therefore the sense through which many people otherwise isolated from slaughter most easily encounter it. After all, even a butcher’s shop has a particular sweet smell, which reminds us that the products found there belong to a particular category of groceries, apart from those of plant origin. Moreover, because smell is “commonly […] recognized as intimately bound up with taste” (Jenner 350), and is also a warning device against poison and contamination (Porteous 356), it conspicuously suggests a possible paradox in modern meat eating: How can we physically put meat into our stomachs, when we have trouble stomaching the odours of its production? Yet it tends to be the placement of production, rather than the nature of it, which draws criticism when modern-day slaughterhouse smells become a topic of discussion (Andrew-Gee; Joseph Berger). Since in reading we do not become immersed in the physical smell as much as olfactory imagination, the idea of smell, literary depictions do not in the same way invite (nor allow for) the solution of moving the place of slaughter elsewhere. Instead, representations of smells connected to slaughter and animals invite us to encounter the sources of those odours rather than simply seek their removal.

4 Reading Slaughter Through the Senses As accessibility to slaughter and the locations of slaughterhouses have changed over time, so have depictions of them. The portrayals of cattle markets and slaughterhouses by Dickens and his contemporaries, for instance, rely on and reflect that such scenes were a recognizable part of city life at the time. Many readers of the period, whether in London or elsewhere, would have known the sights, sounds, and smells connected with animals destined for slaughter and meat consumption. Rather than being more or less foreign to urbanites, as is often the case today, the descriptions of cattle markets and slaughterhouses would thus have been largely a matter of amplifying common urban experience, at least in Britain. Moreover, depictions such as that of Smithfield in Oliver Twist contain reminders of many common arguments against the market and its location in the city centre,

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which would have also been transferable to the debates in other places at the time. As such, Dickens’s treatment of the market in the novel did not need to contain much detail of the sights to be seen there to have a profound effect. Instead, it consists mainly of a number of lists of verbs, adjectives, and nouns—sounds, actions, characteristics, and types of people—without narratively detailing any of the actions, sufferings, or attitudes of the people and animals that make up the scene. Nonetheless, it has an evocative quality to it, even as it leaves readers to fill in more details and supply emotional content from their own experience or from what was said and written in contemporary debates. Authors of the period simply did not need to put much energy into convincing readers that slaughter was happening or describe normal slaughtering processes in great detail—this was largely well known and accepted. Rather, they needed to impress on readers why having these things happen in the city turned what was often simply considered necessary evils into dangers to both the health and the morals of people, and here sounds and smells had important roles to play. As historian Christopher Otter notes, there was a “historical drift […] toward deodorized space and hidden horror” in the Victorian period (64), and depictions therefore incorporated both what Diana Donald has called the “painful proximity” of “sites of cruelty” and the wishes for reform present at the time (516). The place of the slaughterhouse in society was changing, however, and representations have changed along with it. Hence, later literary depictions of violence to animals in connection with slaughter differ from those in older texts in a number of ways. As access to slaughterhouses has gradually become for the few and readers’ everyday lives have thus become more shielded from the experiences of slaughter, slaughterhouse fictions have undergone a development in which what is more or less explicitly challenged, subverted, drawn upon, or simply exhibited for effect, has increasingly become the distance, rather than the proximity, between the reader/consumer and the slaughter of other animals. Evocative as they are, however, impressions of sound and smell often continue to be at the centre of the literary slaughterhouse encounter. It is to significant effect that “the ear was assailed by a most terrifying shriek” from the first pig to be hoisted onto the disassembly line in the slaughterhouse scenes in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), only to be followed by more and louder shrieks (44), or that the cows bellow and sheep bleat at the slaughterhouse in Gertrude Colmore’s The Angel and the Outcast (1907) (163–164). It enlivens our encounter with the animals slaughtered when “steel [meets] screaming flesh” as the pigs squeal and the cows moo and snort their way through slaughter in Beat Sterchi’s The Cow (1983, trans. 1988) (342, 288, 321, 328). And it is a testament to the haunting nature of sounds of suffering that the protagonist in Tristan Egolf’s Lord of the Barnyard (1998) has to endure “the screaming of shackled birds” in his head as he lies awake at night after his first day working at a “poultry plant” (135). As signifiers of life, passion, and emotion, such literary animal sounds demonstrate the ominousness of how agency is subdued when someone is “mooing for the last time, still full of warmth, life and blood” (Sterchi 102).

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Smell also remains a tool for authors to evoke the reality of slaughter. Just as one of the main characters in The Angel and the Outcast remarks of slaughterhouse work that it “stinks orful” (Colmore 104), so it is “the pervasive smell of blood” that is among the protagonist’s first impressions of the slaughterhouse in The Cow (Sterchi 312). Similarly, Tristan Egolf’s protagonist must suffer “the overwhelming stench of bloodshed” and “the stench of scorched quills” in his daily turkey slaughtering routine (131, 137). Indeed, in narrative as in real life, smell continues to overwhelm and to be that which may most easily creep “out of the slaughterhalls” or announce the slaughter industry at a distance (Sterchi 202– 203; Olsen 67–68; Sinclair 32). For the study of the sensory animal encounter in literature, slaughterhouse fictions certainly provide ample, if at times horrifying or depressing, material. Indeed, literary depictions of such sense impressions are potent reminders of the (f)act of killing and of the nonhuman lives taken to satisfy desires for meat. Moreover, our (literary and real) use of, and reliance on, these senses that have historically been considered less rational, and thus more primitive, may also serve as continual reminders that we—like those slaughtered—are animals too.

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Porteous, Douglas J. “Smellscape.” Progress in Physical Geography, vol. 9, no. 3, 1985, pp. 356–378. Potter, Will. “Exposing Animal Cruelty is Not a Crime.” CNN, 26 June 2014, edition.cnn. com/2014/06/26/opinion/potter-ag-gag-laws-animals/index.html. Accessed 7 July 2017. Schafer, R. Murray. The Tuning of the World. Knopf, 1977. Schwartz, Hillel. Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond. Zone Books, 2011. Silverpen. “The Market-Old and New.” Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, vol. 5, no. 30, 1847, pp. 519–528. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Penguin, 1985. Smith, Mick. “The ‘Ethical’ Space of the Abattoir: On the (in)Human(E) Slaughter of Other Animals.” Human Ecology Review, vol. 9, no. 2, 2002, pp. 49–58. “Smithfield Market Prize Show.” Punch, or the London Charivari, 1847, p. 177. Sterchi, Beat. The Cow. Trans. by Michael Hofmann, Faber and Faber, 1988. “The Noes Have It.” Punch, or the London Charivari, 1849, p. 51. Winter, James. London’s Teeming Streets 1830–1914. Routledge, 1993. Wohl, Anthony S. Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain. Harvard UP, 1983. Zola, Émile. The Belly of Paris. 1873. Trans. by Brian Nelson, Oxford UP, 2007.

Mensch-Tier-Begegnungen in Kurt Vonneguts Roman Slaughterhouse-Five

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Giulia Ferro Milone

Car il n’est pas dict que l’essence des choses se raporte à l’homme seul. (Michel de Montaignea)

Kurt Vonneguts Roman Slaughterhouse-Five erschien 1969 in den Vereinigten Staaten, in einer Zeit, als ein generelles Protestklima gegen den Vietnam-Krieg im ganzen Land herrschte. Der Roman hatte sofort eine weltweite Resonanz und wurde bald zur Ikone der Antikriegsbewegung. Seit Jahrzehnten gehört er zum Kanon amerikanischer Literatur. Es ist viel diskutiert worden, in welche liter­ arische Gattung der Roman einzuordnen sei: Er wurde als historische Metafik­ tion,1 pazifistischer Roman,2 psychologische Auslotung des Protagonisten und seiner subjektiven Empfindungen bei der raum-zeitlichen Dimension3 oder

aMontaigne,

Michel de. „Apologie de Raimond Sebond.“ Zit. in Segarra 120.

1Den

historischen und soziokulturellen Impakt von Slaughterhouse-Five hat Vonnegut-Experte Jerome Klinkowitz in seinem Essay The Vonnegut Effect umfassend erörtert. Zum historischen Kontext des Romans vgl. auch den Beitrag von McArdle. 2Zu Vonneguts Pazifismus vgl. Gros-Louis. 3Eine Reihe von wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten hat sich mit dem Problem Raum-Zeit im Roman befasst, vgl. dazu die Beiträge von Coleman, Harris und Hölbling.

G. Ferro Milone (*)  Verona, Italien E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_15

241

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als ironisch-satirischer Text betrachtet.4 Im Allgemeinen kann der Text als ein Beispiel postmoderner Schreibweise angesehen werden, da er bedeutende Merkmale postmoderner Literatur aufweist.5 Der Hauptgegenstand des Romans ist die Rekonstruktion der Luftangriffe auf Dresden, genauer der Feuersturm, der in der Nacht zwischen dem 13. und dem 14. Februar 1945 große Teile der Innenstadt und der industriellen und militärischen Infrastruktur der Stadt zerstörte und tausende Menschen tötete. Unverkennbar ist auch, dass autobiographische Elemente den Text charakterisieren: Zum Beispiel war Vonnegut tatsächlich als amerikanischer Kriegsgefangener und Augenzeuge während der Luftangriffe in Dresden, die er genauso überlebte wie der autobiographisch-geprägte Erzähler des Romans und der fiktive Protagonist der Geschichte Billy Pilgrim.6 Trotz der vielen relevanten faktualen Bestandteile des Buches werden die Leser/innen gleich am Anfang des ersten Kapitels auf den fiktionalen Charakter des Textes aufmerksam gemacht, wenn der Erzähler schreibt: „All this happened, more or less“ (1),7 wobei der Ausdruck „more or less“ dezidiert auf den erfundenen Charakter des Buches verweist.8 Billy Pilgrims Zeitreisen, seine Entführung durch außerirdische Wesen auf einen Planeten namens Tralfamadore, sein Zur-Schau-Gestellt-Werden in einem hiesigen Tiergarten und die von den Tralfamadorianern entwickelten Theorien über Zeit und Tod verweisen auf den Science-Fiction-Charakter des Romans, so dass er als Pastiche und als Mischung aus heterogenen narrativen Materialien bezeichnet werden darf, die in keine kodifizierte Literaturform integrierbar sind: Es handelt sich um eine Erzählung – wie Ann Rigney zutreffend bemerkt hat – „hors catégorie“ (12). Bei der nunmehr extrem reichhaltigen literaturwissenschaftlichen Forschung über Slaughterhouse-Five besteht eine Lücke hinsichtlich der vielen Tierfiguren, die den Text bevölkern. Das ist zunächst einmal bemerkenswert, denn schon die bloße Anzahl der im Roman erwähnten Tierarten setzt in Erstaunen: In den einfallsreichen rhetorischen Figuren des Textes werden Eulen, Bienen und ein

4Dem

Thema vom Humor in Vonneguts Werken hat die Zeitschrift Studies in American Humor 2012 eine Sonderausgabe („Kurt Vonnegut and Humor“) gewidmet; zum Roman Slaughter­houseFive vgl. insbesondere die Beiträge von Gallagher und Kunze; zum Thema Humor vgl. auch Brown; Merrill und Scholl.

5Zu

Vonneguts Roman als Beispiel postmoderner Literatur vgl. Jweid, Termizi und Majeed; Chellamuthu. 6Biographische Züge sind schon im paratextuellen Einschub enthalten, der Titel und Untertitel begleitet. Im Paratext werden die Leser/innen über die deutsche Herkunft des Autors – Vonnegut ist ein Deutschamerikaner der vierten Generation –, seine Anwesenheit in Dresden als amerikanischer Kriegsgefangener und Augenzeuge während des dramatischen Luftangriffes auf die Stadt und über das Gesamtkonzept des Romans unterrichtet. 7Aus dieser Ausgabe wird im Lauftext zitiert: Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five. 8Zu

der besonderen Mischung von Science-Fiction, Erinnerung und Zeugenschaft, zu Vonneguts Zuverlässigkeit als Erzähler und Zeuge der Ereignisse im Jahr 1945 und zur Rolle der Literatur, verstanden als Ort und Mittel historischer Erkenntnis, vgl. Rigney.

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Flamingo erwähnt und in der Handlung kommen nicht nur die traditionellen Gefährten der Menschen (Hunde und Pferde) vor, sondern auch Singvögel, Ratten, Bakterien, Flöhe, Läuse, geschlachtetes Vieh und wilde Tiere – die Giraffen, die dem Protagonisten im Traum erscheinen. Die These des vorliegenden Beitrags lautet: In Slaughterhouse-Five sind Tierdarstellungen zu finden, die die anthropozentrische Perspektive hinterfragen; d. h., in Vonneguts Roman erscheinen Tiere nicht als allegorische, anthropomorphe Wesen, die auf eine Moral zur Erbauung der Leser/innen verweisen; ganz im Gegenteil treten sie als Individuen in der Handlung auf, etwa im Fall der Singvögel, die in gegenseitiger Vernetzung mit der Erzählinstanz stehen und deren rätselhaftes Zwitschern bei der Konstitution des Textes selbst mitwirkt. Um es mit Donna Haraway zu formulieren, erscheinen die Mensch-Tier-Begegnungen im Roman als ein „become with“ (When Species Meet 4),9 d. h. als Begegnungen, wobei menschliche und nicht-menschliche Individuen interagieren und in Kooperation stehen. Mit den Menschen haben die im Roman vorkommenden Tiere außerdem Leiden und erlebte Gewalt gemeinsam: Hunde und Pferde, aber auch Vögel, Bakterien und Insekten, kommen in den Kriegslandschaften vor, wo sie ihre individuelle Rolle an der Seite der Menschen spielen. Mit Bezug auf die aktuelle literaturwissenschaftliche Tierforschung10 können die im Text erscheinenden Tierfiguren in dreierlei Hinsicht gelesen werden. Erstens: Sie sind nicht nur Gegenstand und Mittel der literarischen Rede (Borgards, „Literatur“ 226), sondern sind auch als „Akteure“ zu verstehen (228), die mit dem Erzählprozess interagieren und an der Gestaltung des Textes mitwirken – dies bezieht sich auf die Rolle der Singvögel, deren Stimme an vier bedeutsamen Textstellen zu vernehmen ist. Zweitens: Das Erzählverfahren aktiviert bei den Leser/innen Einfühlungsprozesse und Empathie für das Leiden der jeweils betroffenen Tiere. Und drittens: Durch häufige Mensch-Tier-Perspektivumkehrungen und Parallelisierungen macht der Text auf das gemeinsame Schicksal von menschlichen und nicht-menschlichen Individuen aufmerksam und wird in dieser Hinsicht zur bedeutungsvollen Denunziation von Gewalt und Kriegszerstörung. Die erwähnte dreifache Tierdimension des Romans soll im Folgenden an relevanten Textstellen erläutert werden.

9„Becoming

with“ ist ein Schlüsselbegriff in Donna Haraways When Species Meet. Bis jetzt existiert keine vollständige deutsche Übersetzung ihres Essays. Eine deutsche Version der Einleitung ist in der Sammlung Texte zur Tiertheorie unter dem Titel „Einleitungen“ zu finden. Der Ausstellungskatalog Tier-Werden, Mensch-Werden (Austellung Berlin, NGBK, 9. Mai-14. Juni 2009) enthält außerdem die deutsche Übersetzung des Abschnitts „And say the philosopher responded? When animals look back“ (S. 19–27), übersetzt von Friedrich Weltzien, mit dem Titel „Und hat der Philosoph respondiert? Wenn Tiere den Blick erwidern“ (S. 65–76). 10Zum literaturwissenschaftlichen Forschungsparadigma der Literary Animal Studies und der Cultural Animal Studies, vgl. die Beiträge von Roland Borgards „Einleitung: Cultural Animal Studies“ und „Tiere und Literatur“; als Einführung in die aktuellen Hauptbegriffe der Tiertheorie vgl. Roland Borgards „Tiere und Wörter“ und Roland Borgards, Esther Köhrings und Alexander Klings „Einführung“ zum Sammelband Texte zur Tiertheorie.

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1 Singvögel Die literaturwissenschaftliche Tierforschung unterscheidet zwischen „diegetischen“ und „non-diegetischen“ bzw. „semiotischen“ Tieren, wobei erstere als Lebewesen und Handlungsträger im Handlungsablauf ihren Platz einnehmen, während letztere in Redewendungen, Namen und Tropen zu finden sind. Scharfe Unterscheidungen lassen sich allerdings – laut Roland Borgards – schwer ziehen, denn „zwischen diegetischen und semiotischen Tieren [bestehen] komplizierte Verbindungen.“ („Tiere und Literatur“ 227) In Vonneguts Roman erscheinen Tiere oft als „semiotische“ Tiere in Gleichnissen, Metaphern und Oxymora. Zunächst einmal einige Beispiele dafür. Nachdem der Protagonist die Zerstörung seines Regiments während der Ardennenoffensive überlebt hat, vergleicht ihn der Erzähler mit einem schmutzigen Flamingo: „He didn’t look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.“ (33) Kurz danach wird in derselben Episode eine auf ihn geschossene Kugel metaphorisch als eine todbringende Hornisse bezeichnet: „[T]he lethal bee buzzed past his ear.“ (33) Und als der Erzähler den Protagonisten am Kriegsende beschreibt, während er unter den Trümmern Dresdens auf einem Wagen zum ehemaligen Schlachthof Fünf fährt, verweist er auf die Größe der Kugeln der in seinem Gürtel untergebrachten Pistole als wären sie Rotkehlcheneier: „It was loaded with bullets the size of robin’s eggs.“ (195) Die zuletzt zitierte rhetorische Figur, bei der harmlose noch nicht geborene Vögel oxymorisch mit der Tötung von Menschen im Krieg assoziiert werden, erscheint als nicht besonders originell, aber sie stellt ein Beispiel für die Perspektivumkehrungen zwischen Non-Humanem und Humanem dar, die Vonneguts Poetik in Slaughterhouse-Five charakterisieren – dazu mehr im Folgenden. Als semiotische Tiere erscheinen Vögel zunächst einmal im ersten Kapitel. Der autobiographische Ich-Erzähler, der – wie oben erwähnt – Züge vom Autor selbst aufweist, verbringt die Nacht bei seinem ehemaligen Kriegskameraden O’Hare, mit dem er sich über die Dresden-Ereignisse zur Vorbereitung auf das geplante Niederschreiben seines Erinnerungsbuches unterhalten möchte. O’Hare hat ihm ein Büchlein über die Architektur des „Florenz an der Elbe“ vor seiner Zerstörung im Zweiten Weltkrieg auf den Nachttisch gelegt. Aus dem Vorwort des 1908 erschienenen Werkes erfährt der Ich-Erzähler, dass das Buch einem englischlesenden Publikum ein Bild von der Stadt aus der Vogelperspektive geben will: „It attempts to give to an English-reading public a bird’s-eye view of how Dresden came to look as it does, architecturally“ (17). Die nicht ungewohnte rhetorische Figur („a bird’s-eye view“) ist hier interessant, weil es das erste Mal ist, dass Vögel den narrativen Raum betreten, und weil sie die Haltung vorwegnimmt, die die diegetischen Vogelfiguren im Roman einnehmen. Sie kommen als tierliche Handlungsträger zum Vorschein, die aus der Distanz und doch mit teilnehmender Aufmerksamkeit das Agieren der Menschen zu beobachten und zu kommentieren scheinen. Als diegetische Tiere tauchen die Vögel mit ihrer rätselhaften Aussage „Pootee-weet?“ – Deutsch: „Ki-witt, Ki-witt?“ (Schlachthof 5 25) – an vier entscheidenden Stellen des Romans auf: Zweimal im ersten Kapitel, dann in der

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Mitte des Buches in Kap. 5 und schließlich in der allerletzten Zeile des Textes in Kap. 10. Das autobiographisch geprägte erste Kapitel gilt als eine Art Einleitung und als meta-reflexives Vorwort zum Roman, wobei der konstruierte Charakter des Erinnerungsprozesses ersichtlich wird.11 Vonnegut als Erzähler berichtet hier, wie mühsam es war, sich mit dem Niederschreiben der Kriegserinnerungen auseinanderzusetzen, denn die menschliche Sprache scheint unzulänglich zu sein, das Massaker zu schildern. Nachdem der Erzähler sich bei seinem Verleger für die chaotische und wirre Struktur des Romans entschuldig hat, muss er konstatieren, dass in den verwüsteten, stillen Kriegslandschaften nur die Stimme der Vögel zu vernehmen ist: Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like „Poo-teeweet?“ (19)

Die Aussage „Poo-tee-weet?“ – sie kommt dann ein zweites Mal am Ende des ersten Kapitels in einer Vorausblende vor, als der Erzähler, das Ende der Handlung vorwegnehmend, schreibt: „It ends like this: Poo-tee-weet?“ (22) – ist offensichtlich eine phonetische Transkription einer vokalen, bei Singvögeln vorkommenden Gesangsstruktur. In der zitierten Stelle – wie übrigens auch später im Text – bezieht sich der Erzähler auf die Artikulation der Vogelmitteilung nicht mit dem Verb „singen“, sondern mit den Verben „sagen“ bzw. „fragen“ („say“ 19; „said“ 215; „asked“ 100). Die beiden Verben verweisen auf eine Bedeutungsstruktur, und die Anknüpfung an einen Sinn wird zusätzlich durch das Fragezeichen am Ende der Aussage betont. Die Kursivschrift im Originaltext signalisiert außerdem, dass es sich entweder um ein Zitat oder um eine fremde Sprache handelt. Innerhalb der jahrhundertealten, abendländischen Kulturtradition, die bis in die aktuellen Tweets des gleichnamigen Netzwerkes hinreicht, werden Singvögel oft als mythopoetische Symbole verwendet. Die Romantik hat ihnen bekanntlich einen besonderen Wert verliehen und zwar auf doppelte Weise, wie Mario Ortiz Robles erklärt hat (88): Sie spiegeln einerseits metareflexiv die Poesie wider – und dabei wird ihr geheimnisvolles Singen zum Emblem des Dichtens schlechthin –, andererseits verweisen sie auf das Verhältnis des Menschen zu seinem natürlichen Lebensraum und auf die Möglichkeit, den Umgang mit der Umwelt auf kompatiblere Weise zu gestalten. In ihrer aufschlussreichen Lektüre von Birding Babylon, dem Tagebuch eines amerikanischen Soldaten und Vogelbeobachters während des zweiten Irak-Kriegs, macht Molly Wallace auf die Rolle von Vonneguts Vögeln in Slaughterhouse-Five aufmerksam und schreibt, dass sie „the absurdity and senselessness of war“ betonen (127) und „a kind of metaphorical barometer of environmental destruction“ darstellen (127). Diese Interpretation ist sicherlich angemessen und in Einklang

11Zu

einer sorgfältigen Analyse des ersten Kapitels, vgl. Matheson.

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mit dem Erfolg des Romans als pazifistisches Werk. Aber neben der von Wallace angedeuteten Funktion als Kommentatoren und als Messinstrumente der Katastrophe spielen Vonneguts Singvögel auch noch eine mythopoetische Rolle als Co-Initiatoren des Erinnerungs- und Schreibprozesses, die an die po(i)etische Funktion der Singvögel in der Romantik zurückdenken lässt: Sie interagieren nämlich direkt mit dem Ich-Erzähler als Überlebendem des Feuersturms und fordern ihn mit ihren Fragen zum Akt des Respons auf.12 Anders gesagt besitzt ihr mysteriöses Sagen bzw. Fragen eine illokutionäre performative Macht (Rigney 20), die zur kulturellen Operation der Erinnerungsarbeit beiträgt. Es ist dabei interessant zu bemerken, dass Vonnegut es vermeidet, die Vögel in menschlicher Sprache zu Wort kommen zu lassen und sie somit zu anthropomorphisieren. Ihre Aussage, die für Interpretationen offen bleibt, verlangt aber einen Respons und Vonnegut als Erzähler nimmt die Herausforderung an. Anders als Jacques Derrida, der trotz seines Einfühlungsvermögens seiner Katze gegenüber nicht imstande war zu respondieren („[b]ut with his cat, Derrida failed a simple obligation of companion species“, Haraway, When Species Meet 20), lässt der Erzähler seinen Respons einerseits auf der Ebene des Erzählten und andererseits auf der Ebene des Metanarrativen hören: Zum einen teilt er den Leser/innen mit, dass er seinen eigenen Kindern konkrete Verhaltens- und Lebensanweisungen gegeben hat, damit sie eine radikal pazifistische Haltung einnehmen: I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that. (19)

Zum anderen antwortet er auf die Frage der Vögel mit seinem aktiven Erzählgestus: Erst nach dem mühsamen, metareflexiven Kap. 1 beginnt die Handlung mit der effektiven Rekonstruktion der Kriegsereignisse in Kap. 2. Mit anderen Worten interagiert die Äußerung der Singvögel mit einem erzählerischen Respons-Raum, der das Buch selbst ist; erst durch die Begegnung in dieser gemeinsam gestalteten, narrativen „contact zone“ (Haraway, When Species Meet 4) entwickeln sich Erinnerungen und Geschichten als Antwort. Dabei stellen die Vögel keine bloßen Schmuck- oder Nebenfiguren dar, sondern erscheinen als „literarische Akteure“ (Borgards, „Tiere und Literatur“ 239), die die Handlungsmacht besitzen, Effekte hervorzubringen, da aus ihrem Poo-tee-weet?-Sprechakt eine wirkungsvolle Interaktion mit den Menschen – hier mit der Erzählinstanz – entsteht. Die Poo-tee-weet?-Aussage tritt dann in der Mitte der Handlung, im fünften Kapitel, wieder auf. Die Vögel sprechen hier direkt den Protagonisten Billy Pilgrim an, der sich in einer psychiatrischen Einrichtung für Kriegsveteranen hat internieren lassen mit der Hoffnung, sein Kriegstrauma überwinden zu

12Zur

Übersetzung vom Begriff „response“ (Haraway, When Species Meet 4) mit „Respons“ vgl. Borgards u. a., Texte zur Tiertheorie 295; 307; Anm. 17.

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können. Der Aufenthalt im Krankenhaus ist ein wichtiges Moment in seinem Leben, da er hier zum ersten Mal die Science-Fiction-Bücher kennenlernt, die bald seine Lieblingslektüre werden („[…] science fiction became the only sort of tales he could read.“ 101) und die psychologische Quelle für seine Raum- und Zeitreisen darstellen. Es ist ein schöner Frühlingstag und „Billy uncovered his head. The windows of the ward were open. Birds were twittering outside. ‚Pootee-weet?‘ one asked him.“ (100) Der Protagonist scheint die Frage nicht zu vernehmen – das steht im Einklang mit der Harmlosigkeit und Naivität der Billy-Pilgrim-Figur als Antiheldenfigur (Smith 57–58) –, und der Erzähler fährt ohne zu kommentieren mit der Beschreibung der Krankenstation fort: „The sun was high. There were twenty-nine other patients assigned to the ward, but they were all outdoors now, enjoying the day.“ (100) Die Aussage der Vögel kommt zum letzten Mal am Ende des Romans vor. Es ist Frühling, der Krieg ist zu Ende, die amerikanischen Gefangenen sind befreit worden und sie gehen durch die Straßen von Dresden. Stille herrscht überall, und wie im ersten Kapitel ist der einzige zu vernehmende Laut die Stimme der Vögel. Einer wendet sich wieder an den Protagonisten: „Birds were talking. One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, ‚Poo-tee-weet?‘“ (215) Auf öden Kriegslandschaften sind also wieder nur die Vögel zu hören. Ihre Frage bildet den allerletzten Satz des Romans und damit nimmt der Text auf der erzählerischen Ebene eine kreisförmige Struktur an: Ende und Anfang (vgl. die Poo-tee-weet-Aussage in Kap. 1) berühren sich; das scheint die Leser/innen darauf aufmerksam zu machen, dass der Prozess der Rekonstruktion und des Niederschreibens von Kriegserinnerungen – trotz aller Mühe – immer neu anzufangen ist. In Slaughterhouse-Five kommen sehr oft Wiederholungen vor. Sie übernehmen die Rolle, den Text leitmotivisch zu strukturieren. Ein auffallendes Beispiel ist der kurze Kommentar „So it goes“, der obsessiv jedes Mal vorkommt, wenn eine Figur stirbt. Die Aussage „Poo-tee-weet?“ kommt dagegen nur vier Mal im Text vor. In ihrem Beitrag zu Vonneguts Roman nimmt Ann Rigney auf Roland Barthes’ Essay über die Photographie Bezug und bemerkt pointiert, dass die stilistische Kargheit und Knappheit (kurze grammatikalisch einfache Sätze, parataktische Struktur) in Vonneguts Poetik wichtiger als detailreiche Schilderungen ist, und dass deshalb die anwesenden Details die Kraft des punctum in der Kunst der Photographie aufweisen: „The relative paucity of details means that those that are there have the force of a punctum, those random details in a photograph that strike the reader as incongruous and troubling.“ (18; Anm. 39) Wenn man Rigneys Hinweis aufnimmt und Barthes’ Begriff des puntcum auf Slaughterhouse-Five überträgt, dann erscheinen die vier Poo-tee-weet-Vorkommnisse als fundamentale Bestandteile, die dem ganzen Werk einen Sinn geben, denn wie das punctum auf einer Photographie besitzen sie „eine expansive Kraft“ (Barthes 55), die sich auf den ganzen Text ausdehnt; und dabei bleiben sie doch Details. Zusammenfassend sind also die Vögel in Slaughterhouse-Five keine auf Stimuli reagierenden Maschinen, sondern „meaning-making figures“ (Haraway, When Species Meet 5), deren „Sagen“ bzw. „Fragen“ eine Erwiderung seitens der Menschen verlangt. Ihre Stimmen, die den Anfang, die Mitte und das Ende

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der Geschichte markieren und abgrenzen, tragen materiell und performativ dazu bei, den narrativen Raum zu konstituieren. Vonnegut als Erzähler lässt die Frage nicht unbeantwortet, sondern er nimmt die Aufforderung an und respondiert mit dem ganzen Prozess der Erinnerung und mit der Niederschrift des Romans. Es bildet sich auf diese Weise eine „relation of response“ (Haraway, When Species Meet 310; Anm. 27) zwischen Menschen und Tieren, wobei die Vögel auf zwei unterschiedliche Weise zu handeln scheinen: Einerseits erblicken sie das Massaker von oben nach unten, aus der Vogelschau-Perspektive, andererseits interagieren sie durch ihr Fragen mit dem Erzähler und fordern ihn dazu auf, sich mit der Destruktivität menschlichen Verhaltens auseinanderzusetzen.

2 Geschlachtetes Vieh und Mensch-TierPerspektivumkehrungen Die tierliterarische Dimension des Textes kommt auch schon im Titel des Romans deutlich zum Vorschein. Im „Slaughterhouse Five“, d. h. in einem mit der Zahl Fünf gekennzeichneten Gebäude des ehemaligen städtischen Dresdner Schlachthofes hat Vonnegut den Feuersturm von Dresden erlebt und überlebt, wie auch seine beiden Alter Egos, die Erzählerfigur und der fiktive Protagonist der Geschichte. Mit dem Wort Schlachthof bezeichnet man bekanntlich eine „in einem größeren Gebäudekomplex untergebrachte Einrichtung, in der Schlachtvieh geschlachtet, zerlegt, weiterverarbeitet wird“ (Duden 1462). Der Schlachthof ist somit typischerweise eine Kontaktzone, wo der Viktimisierungsprozess und die Gewaltverhältnisse zwischen Menschen und Tieren deutlich zum Vorschein kommen und die Verteilung der Rollen zwischen Opfern und Tätern festgelegt wird. Die Rollenverteilung innerhalb eines Schlachthofes entwickelt sich normalerweise nur in eine Richtung. Vonneguts Roman bietet aber den Leser/innen hierzu eine interessante Inversion der Perspektive: Geschlachtetes Vieh und lebendige Menschen, Opfer und Täter, befinden sich Seite an Seite im Kühlraum des Dresdner Schlachthofes. Im Gebäude Fünf kommen die gefangenen Amerikaner in direkten Kontakt mit dem geschlachteten Vieh und dessen grausamem Schicksal, wie in der folgenden Textpassage ersichtlich wird: Down in the locker were a few cattle and sheep and pigs, and horses hanging from iron hooks. So it goes. The locker had empty hooks for thousands more. It was naturally cool. There was no refrigeration. There was candlelight. The locker was whitewashed and smelled of carbolic acid. There were benches along a wall. The Americans went to these, brushing away flakes of whitewash before they sat down. (165)

Das Umkippen der Perspektive Tier-Mensch scheint noch tiefer zu sein, wenn man bedenkt, dass im Dresdner Schlachthof Menschen – die amerikanischen Gefangenen unter feindlichem Luftangriff – selbst Gefahr laufen, wie Vieh getötet zu werden. Das Bild der tausenden leeren Fleischerhaken in der zitierten Passage evoziert das Bild einer Schlachtung, die nicht nur Tiere, sondern auch Menschen betreffen könnte. Aus einer früheren Textstelle hat man erfahren, dass

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der Schlachthof stillgelegt worden ist („The slaughterhouse wasn’t a busy place any more.“, 152) und dass das Gebäude jetzt als Luftschutzbunker für Kriegsgefangene fungiert. Die gewalttätige Dimension des Schlachthofes kippt also noch einmal um, indem das Gebäude als Ort der Tötung (von Vieh und möglicherweise auch von Soldaten) zum Ort des Lebens wird. Die Kälte des Raumes, das matte Licht der Kerzen, das Weiße der Wände und der Geruch nach Karbolsäure scheinen auf einen stillen Schwellenraum zu verweisen, der zwischen Leben und Tod schwebt, auf einen heterotopischen Raum (Foucault 39), wo sich Opfer und Täter annähern, wo den Tätern das Schicksal und das Leiden der Opfer nicht fremd und nicht unweit ist. Infolge seines Kriegstraumas hat Billy Pilgrim – so der Erzähler – das Zeitgefühl verloren. Während einer seiner phantastischen Zeitreisen auf den Planeten Tralfamadore erlebt er selbst eine kühne Perspektivumkehrung vom Menschen zum Tier: Er wird in einem Zoo von den außerirdischen Wesen nackt zur Schau gestellt und mit einem Filmstar gepaart: „He was taken to Tralfamadore, where he was displayed naked in a zoo […]. He was mated there with a former Earthling movie star named Montana Wildhack.“ (25) Auf ähnliche Weise wird menschliches Leben auch an anderen Textstellen in Parallele zur Existenz von Tieren gesehen, insbesondere von Insekten. Während der interplanetarischen Reise auf Tralfamadore wird die Hauptfigur von den Aliens über die wahrhafte Beschaffenheit von Raum und Zeit unterrichtet. Dabei erfährt er, dass Vergangenheit und Zukunft nicht existieren und dass es daher keine kohärente Abfolge von Ereignissen geben kann. Nur der Augenblick als zeitliche Struktur hat Konsistenz; auch das ständige, typisch irdische Fragen nach Zusammenhängen und Begründungen ist völlig sinnlos, wie ein Außerirdischer erklärt, nachdem der Protagonist sich nach dem Grund seiner Entführung erkundigt hat: ‚Why me?‘ That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? ‚Yes.‘ Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three lady-bugs embedded in it. ‚Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.‘ (76–77)

Menschlichen Individuen widerfährt hier dasselbe Schicksal wie den eingesperrten Marienkäfern. Durch das Gleichnis zwischen den in Bernstein eingeschlossenen Insekten und den Menschen, die „im Bernstein dieses Augenblicks gefangen“ sind (Schlachthof 5 84), wird ein Prozess der Einfühlung für die leidenden Kleinwesen aktiviert, der ein extrem reiches Erkenntnispotential für den Helden birgt, da er tatsächlich lernen wird, Augenblick um Augenblick zu leben. Auch später im Text werden Menschen und Insekten wieder parallelisiert. Im Krieg erleben sie nämlich ein ähnlich tödliches Schicksal wie die Menschen. Das passiert bei der Desinfizierung der Uniformen der amerikanischen Häftlinge durch Giftgas. Bei der Operation sterben Kleiderläuse, Bakterien und Flöhe zu Milliarden, wie der

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Erzähler berichtet: „The Americans’ clothes were meanwhile passing through poison gas. Body lice and bacteria and fleas were dying by the billions.“ (84) Und die Erzählerstimme fügt gleich danach den Kommentar hinzu: „So it goes.“ Das Motto, wie schon erwähnt, stellt einen obsessiven Refrain dar, der sich durch den Text wie eine insistierende Basslinie leitmotivisch hindurchzieht. Es signalisiert die Allgegenwart und Unvermeidbarkeit des Todes. Diese Erzählstrategie dient offensichtlich dazu, Einfühlungsprozesse bei den Leser/innen hervorzubringen und sie darauf aufmerksam zu machen, dass alle Wesen Vergänglichkeit und Tod gemeinsam haben. An der zitierten Textstelle gilt der extradiegetische Kommentar „So it goes“ auch den Läusen, Bakterien und Flöhen, die genauso wie die Menschen im Krieg massenweise sterben. Die Parasit-Mensch-Parallelisierung und der anschließende Kommentar rufen bei den Leser/innen ein Nachdenken über den Status des Menschen hervor, wobei die anthropozentrische Perspektive unterminiert wird. Die Parasiten erscheinen nicht nur als Objekte, sondern auch als Mittel einer nicht nur auf die Tiere bezogenen Erkenntnis über die Existenzverhältnisse aller Lebewesen.

3 Einfühlungsprozesse bei Hunden und Pferden Als die herkömmlichen Begleiter des Menschen kommen Hunde in Slaughter­ house-Five oft vor. Es wird zunächst einmal im Text der Hund im Alltag des Ich-Erzählers erwähnt: „[…] I let the dog out or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me.“ (7) Auf ähnliche Weise hatte ein Hund namens Spot auch die Hauptfigur erfreut: „There used to be a dog named Spot, but he died. So it goes. Billy had liked Spot a lot, and Spot had liked him.“ (62) Das Bellen von einem Hund zieht sich dann leitmotivisch durch den Roman hindurch: „Somewhere a big dog was barking“ (42; 48, 75, 82, 168), und dominiert die öden, winterlichen Kriegsszenarien. Als diegetische Figurenträgerin kann dann eine deutsche Schäferhündin betrachtet werden, die bei einer Säuberungsaktion von deutschen Soldaten eingesetzt wird. Ihr „bronzenes“ Bellen („[…] that dog had a voice like a big bronze gong“, 48) hatten die amerikanischen Flüchtlinge in der Distanz als bedrohlich empfunden. In Wirklichkeit zittert sie jetzt, denn nie zuvor war sie im Kriegseinsatz gewesen: The Germans and the dog were engaged in a military operation […]. The dog, who had sounded so ferocious in the winter distances, was a female German shepherd. She was shivering. Her tail was between her legs. She had been borrowed that morning from a farmer. She had never been to war before. She had no idea what game was being played. Her name was Princess. (52)

Die Konjunktion „and“ in der ersten Zeile der zitierten Textstelle verweist auf das gemeinsame Schicksal für die Soldaten und das Tier bei den Kriegsoperationen. Die Soldaten und die Hündin sind in einem militärischen Kontext an derselben Tätigkeit beteiligt, wobei menschliche und nicht-menschliche Individuen pure

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Arbeitskraft darstellen. Hier wird Empathie bei den Leser/innen dadurch aktiviert, dass die Lebensgeschichte der Schäferhündin kurz und bündig erwähnt wird: Sie wurde von einem Bauern ausgeliehen, um bei der Säuberungsaktion eingesetzt zu werden. Ihre Gefühle bei der militärischen Operation können von ihrer Körperhaltung abgelesen werden, d. h. von ihrem Schwanz, der zwischen ihre Beine geklemmt ist. Auf der Sprachebene verweist der erzählerische Duktus – insistierende Wiederholung der Pronomen „she“ und „her“, kurze Sätze, Biographie der Hündin – einerseits auf die wertvolle, individuelle Existenz des Tieres. Andererseits legt er zugleich auch den doppelten Opferstatus der Hündin – Tier und Weibchen – offen. Der Name „Princess“, der den Absatz und die Episode abschließt, gilt als ironische und groteske Signatur einer zweifachen Unterwerfung. Auch später im Text (Kap. 6) kommt ein Hund als Figurenträger vor. Wir erfahren hier, wie das Tier von einem amerikanischen Soldaten mit dem s­prechend­ en Namen Lazzaro grausam behandelt wird, bis es unter seinen Augen stirbt. Im Johannes Evangelium ist Lazarus bekanntlich der von den Toten auferweckte Freund Jesus’ (Joh. 11), aber hier kippt die heilige Gestalt in die Figur eines brutalen Tierfolterers um. Der amerikanische Soldat ist nämlich ein streit- und rachsüchtiger Mensch und wird als unfähig dargestellt, Mitleid mit anderen Lebewesen zu empfinden. Er selber war wiederum grausam behandelt worden; psychologisch gesehen kann also die am Hund begangene Tortur als die Konsequenz einer gestörten Entwicklung betrachtet werden. Lazzaro erzählt, er sei vom Hund gebissen worden und als Rache habe er ihm scharf geschliffene Metallteile in einem Fleischstück zum Fressen gegeben. Er habe dann schadenfroh beobachtet, wie das Tier unter schrecklichen Leiden gestorben sei. Hinterlist spielt auch eine große Rolle, denn zuerst nähert sich der Soldat dem Hund, als ob er sich mit ihm aussöhnen wollte. Im Dialog mit Billy Pilgrim erzählt Lazzaro: ‚… You should have seen what I did to a dog one time.‘ ‚A dog?‘ said Billy. ‚Son of a bitch bit me. So I got me some steak, and I got me the spring out of a clock. I cut that spring up in little pieces. I put points on the ends of the pieces. They were sharp as razor blades. I stuck ‘em into the steak-way inside. And I went past where they had the dog tied up. He wanted to bite me again. I said to him, ‚Come on, doggie-let’s be friends. Let’s not be enemies any more. I’m not mad.‘ He believed me.‘ (138–139)

In dieser Episode wird die Verkehrung der üblichen Verhältnisse zwischen Hund und Mensch geschildert. Die Episode erscheint als die materielle Metapher eines bis ins Extreme geführten Unterwerfungs- und Vernichtungsprozesses tierlichen Lebens seitens des Menschen. Wie Roland Borgards erklärt hat, „[entstehen] materielle Tiermetaphern dort, wo Menschen und Tiere aufeinandertreffen; sie lassen sich als Protokoll oder Skript solcher Begegnungen verstehen.“ ­(Borgards, „Battle at Kruger“ 342) Der Hund steht hier nicht als Symbol für etwas ­Anderes, sondern wird materiell und als Akteur in eine Praktik der Degradierung selbst verwickelt; die ganze Szene kann dann als Protokoll einer erniedrigenden Mensch-Tier-Interaktion gelesen werden, wobei die völlige Rechtlosigkeit und Versachlichung des Tieres zum Vorschein kommen. Die Merkmalsträger, die

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normalerweise Bedeutung für einen Hund besitzen,13 d. h. Speise und freundliches menschliches Auftreten, werden vom amerikanischen Soldaten hinterlistig verkehrt, indem er dem Hund einen tödlichen Fleischbissen zum Fressen gibt. Auf diese Weise ändert sich die Umwelt des Hundes mit all ihren Bedeutungsträgern, einschließlich der kooperativen Regeln, die das Verhältnis Hund – Mensch gestalten, gründlich. Der amerikanische Soldat schaltet die Fähigkeit des Hundes aus, zwischen Freunden und Feinden differenzieren zu können. Wie schon in der Episode der Vergasung der Parasiten während der Desinfizierung der Uniformen entwickelt sich auch hier der Einfühlungsprozess bei Leser/innen nicht durch psychologische oder moralisierende Kommentare, sondern gerade dadurch, dass der Erzähler ohne Erklärungen zu geben und ohne den Hund zu humanisieren die Episode erzählt. Eine ähnlich nüchterne Erzählweise wird auch am Ende des Buches ersichtlich. Diesmal handelt es sich um zwei Pferde-Figuren. Wie Hunde sind auch Pferde companion species von Menschen.14 Im Krieg und in der Arbeit – man denke z. B. an die Landwirtschaft und an das Bergwerk – wirken sie seit Jahrtausenden an historischen und sozialen Veränderungen mit. Im Zweiten Weltkrieg haben Pferde trotz der hochtechnologisierten Kriegsführung und der Vollmotorisierung eine viel größere Rolle gespielt, als man vermuten könnte: Sie wurden immer noch massenhaft in der Kavallerie und als Haupt-Fortbewegungsmittel der Wehrmacht eingesetzt, so dass ohne Millionen von ihnen der Krieg nicht zu führen gewesen wäre (Seewald); dabei war der Zweite Weltkrieg „das größte Pferde-Massaker der Geschichte“ („Reis und Curry“ 147).15 Die Pferde im letzten Kapitel des Romans werden als Zugkraft eingesetzt und sie erledigen ihre Aufgabe, indem sie einen Transportwagen durch die Trümmer der Stadt Dresden ziehen. Der Krieg ist zu Ende, die amerikanischen Gefangenen sind befreit worden, und der Protagonist befindet sich auf dem improvisierten Transportkarren. Ohne in das Erzählte einzugreifen, berichtet der Erzähler über den schlechten Zustand der Tiere und über die zwei Figuren, zwei deutsche Geburtshelfer/innen, einen Mann und seine Frau, die die Schmerzen der Pferde bemitleiden und sich ihrer annehmen. Billy Pilgrim schlummert auf dem Wagen; sein Schlummer wird oberflächlicher, als er plötzlich in mitleidigen Tönen Deutsch sprechen hört: Now his snoozing became shallower as be heard a man and a woman speaking German in pitying tones. The speakers were commiserating with somebody lyrically. Before Billy opened his eyes, it seemed to him that the tones might have been those used by the friends of Jesus when they took His ruined body down from His cross. So it goes.

13Zur

Kulturtheorie des Hundes, wozu seine besondere Fähigkeit gehört, Freunde und Feinde, auszudifferenzieren vgl. Borgards, „Kerberos“ 273–274. 14Der Ausdruck „companion species“ kommt in Haraways Essay When Species Meet als Grundbegriff immer wieder vor. 15Laut des deutschen Bundesarchivs befanden sich 40–80.000 Pferde pro Monat im Krankenstand und mehr als 1,5 Mio. starben im Krieg (Menzel).

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Billy opened his eyes. A middle-aged man and wife were crooning to the horses. They were noticing what the Americans had not noticed – that the horses’ mouths were bleeding, gashed by the bits, that the horses’ hooves were broken, so that every step meant agony, that the horses were insane with thirst. The Americans had treated their form of transportation as though it were no more sensitive than a six-cylinder Chevrolet. (195– 196)

Die Leser/innen werden zunächst einmal wieder mit einer Perspektivumkehrung von Opfer und Täter konfrontiert, die hier durch das Medium der Sprache erfolgt: Deutsch, d. h. die Sprache gefühlloser Nazi-Verbrecher wird zum Vehikel des Mitleids und der Teilnahme für leidende Tiere, während die Befreier und Sieger, d. h. die amerikanischen Soldaten, in die Rolle der Gefühllosen umkippen, für die die Pferde keine Lebewesen, sondern Gebrauchsobjekte darstellen. Die Verbindung zwischen dem gekreuzigten Leib Jesus’ und den verletzten Körpern der beiden Pferde setzt außerdem menschliches Leiden in eins mit tierlichem Leiden. Im Gegensatz zu der oben diskutierten, gefühllosen Figur Lazzaros sind die beiden deutschen Geburtshelfer/innen – und am Ende auch der Protagonist – bereit und fähig, sich in die Einstellung nicht-menschlicher Wesen einzufühlen und ihr Leiden zu lindern. Als auch die Hauptfigur sich des Zustandes der Tiere bewusst wird, bricht sie in Tränen aus und man erfährt später, dass die Pferde ausgespannt werden. Die beiden deutschen „Pferdebemitleider“ (Schlachthof 5 204) schelten den Protagonisten wegen des Zustands der Pferde und fordern ihn auf, aus dem Wagen herunterzusteigen und sich die Pferde anzusehen: When Billy saw the condition of his means of transportation, he burst into tears. He hadn’t cried about anything else in the war […]. The story ended this way. Billy and the doctors unharnessed the horses, but the horses wouldn’t go anywhere. Their feet hurt too much. And then Russians came on motorcycles, and they arrested everybody but the horses. (197–198)

Die beiden Figuren und schließlich auch der naive Held interagieren mit den ­Tieren, indem sie sich als fähig erweisen, Aufmerksamkeit zu zollen. Um mit Haraways Worten zu sprechen, befinden sie sich mitten in einem pulsierenden Knoten bzw. in einer „figure“ (When Species Meet 4) von Menschen, Tieren und ­Dingen (Transportwagen, Trümmer), und in diesem Knoten sind sie im Stande, am Leiden anderer Lebewesen Anteil zu nehmen; sie lassen sich von „shared mortality“ (79) berühren.16 Abschließend und zusammenfassend wird in Vonneguts Roman Slaughter­ house-Five ein Mensch-Tier-Kollektiv dargestellt, bei dem ästhetische und politische Instanzen sich im Zusammenspiel überlappen. In die mühsam rekonstruierten Kriegslandschaften und Kriegsoperationen gehören nicht nur Menschen, sondern

16Vgl. hierzu das Kapitel „Sharing Suffering“ in Haraways When Species Meet und insbesondere die Geschichte des alten Aufsehers einer wissenschaftlichen Struktur für Tierversuche in Afrika, von der am Anfang des Kapitels die Rede ist (69–70).

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auch Tiere: von den traditionellen companion species und Mitarbeiter/innen der Menschen, den Hunden und Pferden, über Vögel und geschlachtetes Vieh, bis hin zu den kleinsten Lebewesen (Läuse, Bakterien und Flöhe), die die Uniformen der Soldaten bevölkern. Den Vögeln kommt – entsprechend ihrer traditionellen po(i)etischen Rolle – die literarische Aufgabe zu, den narrativen Erinnerungsraum zusammen mit der Erzählinstanz zu konstituieren. Mit ihren wiederholten Fragen stellen sie ein wirkungsvolles ästhetisches bzw. poetisches Medium des Nachdenkens über den Krieg dar. Der Ich-Erzähler (Vonnegut als Erzähler) lässt sich von den Vögeln ansprechen und antwortet mit seinem erzählerischen Gestus, d. h. mit dem ganzen Erinnerungsbuch Slaughterhouse-Five. Rhetorische Einfühlungsstrategien (Leitmotive, Wiederholungen, kurze parataktische Sätze, Umkehrungen) und die Abwesenheit von moralisierenden Kommentaren lassen die Leser/innen erfahren, dass allen – menschlichen und nicht-menschlichen – Individuen Leiden und Sterben gemeinsam sind. Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-Five erscheint somit als ein Beispiel „politischer Literatur“, nicht nur, weil das Buch eine deklarierte Rolle als Antikriegsroman einnimmt, sondern auch weil darin Tiere nicht als emotional menschenähnliche Wesen dargestellt werden, sondern als Akteure, die mit dem Erzähler und den anderen literarischen Figuren interagieren und letzten Endes die Geschichte – verstanden in ihrer Doppelbedeutung von Erzählung und von Weltgeschichte – mitgestalten.

Literatur Barthes, Roland. Die helle Kammer. Suhrkamp, 1989. Borgards, Roland. „Battle at Kruger: Tiere, Metaphern und das Politische.“ Politische Tiere: Zoologie des Kollektiven, hg. v. Martin Doll und Oliver Kohns, Fink, 2017, S. 331–352. Borgards, Roland. „Einleitung: Cultural Animal Studies.“ Tiere: Kulturwissenschaftliches Handbuch, hg. v. Borgards, Metzler, 2015, S. 1–5. Borgards, Roland. „Kerberos: Schwellenkämpfe zwischen Animalität, Poesie und Gewalt.“ Unterwelten: Modelle und Transformationen, hg. v. Joachim Hamm und Jörg Robert, Königshausen & Neumann, 2014, S. 271–283. Borgards, Roland. „Tiere und Wörter.“ Lexikon der Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen, hg. v. Arianna Ferrari und Klaus Petrus, Transcript, 2015, S. 225–229. Borgards, Roland. „Tiere und Literatur.“ Tiere: Kulturwissenschaftliches Handbuch, hg. v. Borgards, Metzler, 2015, S. 225–244. Borgards, Roland, Alexander Kling, und Esther Köhring. „Einführung.“ Texte zur Tiertheorie, hg. v. Borgards, Köhring und Kling, Reclam, 2015, S. 7–21. Brown, Kevin. „‚A Launching Pad of Belief‘: Kurt Vonnegut and Postmodern Humor.“ Studies in American Humor, Jg. 3, Nr. 14, 2006, S. 47–54. Chellamuthu, K. „An Evaluation of Postmodernist Aesthetics in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter­ house-Five.“ TJELLS: The Journal for English Language and Literary Studies, Jg. 1, Nr. 5, 2005, www.tjells.com/article/35_CHELLAMUTHU.pdf. Coleman, Martin. „The Meaninglessness of Coming Unstuck in Time.“ Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Jg. 44, Nr. 4, 2008, S. 681–698. Duden – Deutsches Universalwörterbuch. 6. Aufl., Dudenverlag, 2006. Foucault, Michel. „Andere Räume.“ Aisthesis: Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik, hg. v. Karlheinz Barck, Reclam, 1992, S. 34–46.

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Gallagher, Rosemary. „‚All this happened, more or less‘: Making Sense of the War Experience through Humor in Slaughterhouse-Five and The Sirens of Titan.“ Studies in American Humor, Jg. 3, Nr. 26, 2012, S. 73–84. Gros-Louis, Dolores. „Slaughterhouse-Five: Pacifism vs. Passiveness.“ Ball State University Forum, Jg. 18, Nr. 2, 1977, S. 3–8. Haraway, Donna J. „Die Begegnung der Arten.“ Texte zur Tiertheorie, hg. v. Roland Borgards, Esther Köhring und Alexander Kling, Reclam, 2015, S. 290–325. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Harris, Charles B. „Time, Uncertainty, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: A Reading of Slaughterhouse-­ Five.“ The Centennial Review, Jg. 20, Nr. 3, 1976, S. 228–243. Hölbling, Walter. „‚Dystopie der Gegenwart‘: Science-Fiction und Schizophrenie in Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-Five.“ AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Nr. 2, 1977, S. 39–62. Jweid, Abdalhadi Nimer Abdalqader Abu, Arbaayah Binti Ali Termizi, und Abdulhameed A. Majeed. „Postmodern Narrative in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.“ Journal of Foreign Languages, Cultures and Civilizations, Jg. 3, Nr. 1, 2015, S. 72–78. American Research Institute for Policy Development, https://doi.org/10.15640/jflcc.v3n1a10. Klinkowitz, Jerome. The Vonnegut Effect. U of South Carolina P, 2004. Kunze, Peter C. „For the Boys: Masculinity, Gray Comedy, and the Vietman War in Slaughterhouse-Five.“ Studies in American Humor, Jg. 3, Nr. 26, 2012, S. 41–57. Matheson, T. J. „‚This Lousy Little Book‘: The Genesis and Development of Slaughterhouse-Five as revealed in Chapter One.“ Studies in the Novel, Nr. 16, 1984, S. 228–240. McArdle, Kelly A. „Poo-tee-weet? Unintelligent Things to Say About a Massacre: Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and US interventions in the post-WWII era.“ Honors Scholar Theses, Nr. 427, 2015, digitalcommons.uconn.edu/srhonors_theses/427/. Menzel, Thomas. „Pferde im Einsatz bei Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS.“ Das Bundesarchiv, www. bundesarchiv.de/DE/Content/Virtuelle-Ausstellungen/Pferde-Im-Einsatz-Bei-WehrmachtUnd-Waffen-Ss/pferde-im-einsatz-bei-wehrmacht-und-waffen-ss.html. Merrill, Robert, und Peter Scholl. „Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: The Requirements of Chaos.“ Studies in American Fiction, Jg. 6, Nr. 1, 1978, S. 65–76. „Reis und Curry.“ Der Spiegel, Jg. 38, 1976, S.  147–148, www.spiegel.de/spiegel/ print/d-41146935.html. Rigney, Ann. „All This Happened, More or Less: What a Novelist Made or the Bombing of Dresden.“ Historical Representation and Historical Truth, Themenheft Nr. 47 History and Theory, Jg. 48, Nr. 2, 2009, S. 5–24. Robles, Mario Ortiz. Literature and Animal Studies. Routledge, 2016. Seewald, Berthold. „Sie waren die wichtigsten Helfer der Wehrmacht.“ Welt: N24, 24. Nov. 2016, www.welt.de/geschichte/zweiter-weltkrieg/article159718383/Sie-waren-die-wichtigstenHelfer-der-Wehrmacht.html. Abgerufen 25. Feb. 2018. Segarra, Marta. „Hélène Cixous’s Other Animal: The Half-Sunken Dog.“ New Literary History, Nr. 37, 2006, S. 119–134. Smith, Dennis Stanton. CliffsNotes on Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Cliffs Notes, 1999. Vonnegut, Kurt. Schlachthof 5 oder Der Kinderkreuzzug. Übers. v. Kurt Wagenseil, Volk und Welt, 1976. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. Dell Publishing (Random House), 1991. Wallace, Molly. „War is for the Birds: ‚Birding Babylon‘ and the ‚Military-Industrial-Environmental Complex‘.“ Cultural Critique, Nr. 76, 2010, S. 126–147.

Kontaktzone Zoo: Die kommunikative Aneignung von Zootieren

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1 Tierlinguistische Perspektiven auf das kommunikative Mensch-Tier-Verhältnis „Nach einem anstrengenden Tag macht es sich das Nashorn gemütlich“1 – ein Tag im Zoo kann anstrengend sein, nicht nur für das Nashorn, das im Kreis gelaufen ist. Auch für die Menschen ist das Wahrnehmen und Verstehen dessen, was vor ihren Augen, ihren Ohren, ihrer Nase geschieht, ein aktiver Akt, der häu mit anderen kommunikativ geteilt und verarbeitet wird: Menschen sprechen im Zoo über die nichtmenschlichen Tiere (im Folgenden: Tiere), manchmal auch zu/mit den Tieren. Aus gesprächslinguistischer Perspektive stellt sich die Frage nach der typischen Form und Funktion dieses empraktischen, also in außersprachliche Handlungen verflochtenen Sprechens, das Ähnlichkeiten mit dem Sprechen vor dem Fernseher oder einem Bild im Museum hat. Aufgrund der situativen Determiniertheit weisen diese Gespräche eine starke lokale Sensitivität (Bergmann, „Local Sensitivity“) auf. Es gibt jedoch zur Fernseh- und Museumssituation einen entscheidenden Unterschied: Tiere sind lebendige Wesen, die die soziale Situation vor/in den Gehegen mitkonstituieren bzw. eigene Situationen gestalten, und mit denen prinzipiell eine soziale Begegnung möglich wäre. Unter dieser anerkennenden Prämisse kann das Sprechen im Zoo als eigene Gesprächsgattung kategorisiert werden, die für die Tierlinguistik relevant ist. Unter dem Begriff Tierlinguistik versammeln sich linguistische Fragestellungen, die die

1Zoobesucherin

über ein im Sand liegendes Nashorn im Leipziger Zoo, 16. Mai 2015.

P. Steen (*)  Koblenz, Deutschland E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_16

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­ erspektive der Tiere so weit wie möglich in die Untersuchung einbinden und das P kommunikative Mensch-Tier-Verhältnis dezidiert zum Thema machen. Die Liste der gesprächslinguistischen Arbeiten, die sich mit Mensch-Tier-Begegnungen befassen, ist noch relativ kurz (z. B. Hirsh-Pasek und Treiman; Burnham u. a.; Torres Cajo und Bahlo; Tannen; Bergmann, „Haustiere“; Huneke). Die Arbeiten zeigen aber, dass Kommunikationssituationen von Menschen und Tieren für die linguistische Pragmatik relevant sein können. Wenngleich es bemerkenswert ist, dass sich die Gesprächslinguistik dem Mensch-Tier-Thema nähert, so haben die Texte gemeinsam, dass sie zumeist aus einer anthropozentrischen Perspektive analysieren. Diese Perspektive ist den Analyseinteressen geschuldet, das heißt, es wird der Fokus auf die menschliche Kommunikation gelegt, in deren Verlauf sich Kontakte mit Haustieren realisieren. Zu neuen Erkenntnissen über das Verhalten von Haustieren wird die Untersuchung der Mensch-Tier-Kommunikation nur insoweit führen, als wir darin etwas über uns und unsere Kommunikationspraxis erfahren. (Bergmann, „Haustiere“ 300)

Jörg R. Bergmann macht also von vornherein erkenntniseinschränkende Bemerkungen zu Tieren. Sarah Torres Cajo und Nils Bahlo verweisen in ihrer neueren Studie zwar auf die Human-Animal-Studies, gehen aber in ihrem Aufsatz nicht näher auf deren Forschungsinteressen ein. Es stellt sich daher die grundsätzliche analytische Frage, ob die anthropozentrische Forschungsperspektive für die Gesprächslinguistik eine notwendige ist, da man mit linguistischen Methoden eben nur menschliche Gespräche untersuchen kann.2 Tiere, so ließe sich behaupten, können keine Gesprächspartner/innen und keine sozialen Akteure und Akteurinnen sein, weil sie der menschlichen Sprache nicht mächtig seien. Wenn ein Linguist die verbale Kommunikation von Menschen mit Tieren als „Quasikommunikation“, mit der eine fiktionale „Quasirealität“ (Huneke 195) hergestellt wird, bezeichnet, so geben derartige Begriffe jedoch nicht die emische Perspektive der Gesprächsakteure und -akteurinnen wieder. Diese erleben die Gesprächssituation womöglich als (anders) real, auch wenn das Tier nicht wortwörtlich zu verstehen scheint. Solche restringierenden Begriffe verraten vielmehr etwas über die forscherische Einstellung zur Mensch-Tier-Begegnung. Mit einer solchen Forschungsperspektive werden trennende Unterschiede zwischen Menschen und Tieren mitkonzipiert. Ein differenzierterer Blick ist nötig, damit die Gesprächslinguistik nicht unreflektiert die „konventionellen Objektivierungen und Distanzierungen […] methodisch und theoretisch“ (Kynast 131) wiederholt. So wird auch hier vorgeschlagen, grundsätzlich von Einzelfall zu Einzelfall zu untersuchen, wie Menschen und Tiere die Begegnung interaktiv und/oder kommunikativ ­konstruieren.

2Vgl.

hierzu die Kritik von Clinton R. Sanders und Arnold Arluke an denjenigen Soziologen, die nur versuchen, „to capture the perspectives of humans who interact with or think about animals“ (378).

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So sollte sich Tierlinguistik,3 ausgehend von erprobten linguistischen und ethnografischen Methoden (Deppermann 49–110), im Anschluss an die Human-Animal Studies bemühen, die Vielfalt der kulturellen Praktiken zu rekon­ struieren und die Organisationsformen und Kategorien einer Gemeinschaft aufzudecken (Torres Cajo und Bahlo 79). Bezogen auf den Akteurstatus von Tieren ist die Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie Bruno Latours eine unvoreingenommene Theorie, die durchaus anschlussfähig für die Gesprächslinguistik ist.4 Danach ist der Akteurstatus nicht nur sprechenden Menschen vorbehalten, sondern all denjenigen Entitäten, Aktanten, Agierenden und Interferierenden, die in der Lage sind, andere Akteure und Akteurinnen zu modifizieren (Latour, „Parlament“ 108). Ein Tier ist dann weder ein Akteur, weil Menschen bzw. Forscher/innen dies so wollen, sondern schlicht für die adäquate Interpretationssituation relevant, sobald es andere Akteure und Akteurinnen modifiziert. Tierlinguistik muss zudem als deskriptive kulturlinguistische Teildisziplin verstanden werden, die Kommunikationsakteuren und -akteurinnen nicht vorschreibt, wie diese richtig zu handeln haben. Aufgrund der Forschungsausrichtung ist jedoch die Anthropozentrik mit all ihren Implikationen deutlich zu machen; dies kann sekundär als gesellschaftliche (nicht jedoch dogmatische) Kritik aufgefasst werden, wenn die rekonstruierten Haltungen der Akteure einer utilitaristischen Anthropozentrik (Heuberger 125) entspringen. An empirischen Beispielen der menschlichen Kommunikation im Zoo wird im Folgenden demonstriert, wie eine tierlinguistisch orientierte Gesprächsanalyse beschaffen sein kann.5 Es wird rekonstruiert, wie sich menschliche Akteure und Akteurinnen in konkreten Begegnungssituationen die wahrgenommenen Tiere kommunikativ aneignen. Bei dieser kommunikativen Aneignung sind verschiedene Perspektivierungen auf die Tiere möglich, die im Einzelnen diskutiert werden. Den Analysen vorausgeschickt wird als theoretischer Ausgangspunkt eine Einordnung der Zoogespräche als kommunikative Gattung im Hinblick auf den Ort bzw. Raum Zoo, der als spezifische Mensch-Tier-Kontaktzone verschiedene Restriktionen aufweist.

3Vgl.

die Ökolinguistik (Fill, „Ökolinguistik“; „Language“) sowie die Gesprächsethologie (Sager), die menschliche Kommunikation als natur-kultur-verschränkt betrachtet und die das tierliche Verhalten definitorisch nicht ausschließt. 4Insofern sind auch ‚Dinge‘ im Museum und im Fernsehen potenzielle Akteure in einem Netzwerk. Die ANT wurde kürzlich für die Gesprächslinguistik entdeckt (vgl. Günther). Von einer dortigen Etablierung kann aber noch keine Rede sein. 5Die zugrunde liegenden Aufnahmen erfolgten zwischen 2013 und 2015 im Leipziger Zoo über eine für die Besucher sichtbare Videoaufnahme der Zootiere. Die nicht-elizitierten Gespräche sind faktisch-öffentlich und wurden durch Transkription (Konventionen: GAT II, vgl. Selting u. a.; Partitureditor EXMARaLDA) zusätzlich vom individuellen Sprecher abstrahiert und anonymisiert. Zudem wurde die Kamera abgeschaltet, wenn private Themen angesprochen wurden, die in keinem Zusammenhang mit der genuinen Zoosituation standen. Durch diese einigermaßen mühevolle Sammelarbeit ist ein 40-seitiges Transkriptkorpus entstanden.

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2 Kommunikative Aneignung und Raumkonstitution Seit dem spatial turn der Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften Ende der 1980er Jahre (Soja) werden Räume nicht mehr als physisch (vor-)gegeben verstanden, sondern als dynamisch durch verschiedene interaktive und kommunikative Praktiken hervorgebracht (Lefebvre 26). So wäre der Zoo mit Michel de Certeau (218–219) als Ort „eine momentane Konstellation von festen Punkten“, also eine architektonische Zusammensetzung von Gebäude und Wegen mit ihren Blickachsen. Der Zoo als Raum wäre die „Gesamtheit der Bewegungen […], die sich in ihm entfalten“. Aus interaktiver (Raum-)Perspektive (Goffman, „Interaktion“) ist der Zoo eine „soziale Veranstaltung“, eine „Zusammenkunft“ (376) von Personen, ein Ereignis, das zeitlich und räumlich begrenzt ist. Zudem liefert eine solche soziale Veranstaltung den strukturellen sozialen Kontext, in dem sich viele Situationen und Zusammenkünfte bilden, auflösen und umformen, in deren Verlauf sich ein Verhaltensmuster als angemessen und (häu) offiziell oder als beabsichtigt herausbildet und anerkannt wird (376–377).

Die menschlichen verbalen Verhaltensmuster im Zoo, die als angemessen und als beabsichtigt erkannt werden, können zusammenfassend als kommunikative Gattung (Luckmann, „Grundformen“; Günthner und Knoblauch) des Zoogesprächs beschrieben werden. Nach Thomas Luckmann sind Gattungen „historische und kulturell spezifische, gesellschaftlich verfestigte und formalisierte Lösungen kommunikativer Probleme“ („Grundformen“ 256). Gattungen unterscheiden sich nach dem Grad ihrer Verfestigungen; so können Zoogespräche, da sie nicht streng formal geregelt sind, auch als kommunikative Muster mit gattungsähnlichen Zügen bezeichnet werden (Günthner und Knoblauch 703). Sie können auf drei Ebenen rekonstruiert werden: der Binnenstruktur (z. B. Deixis, Aufforderungsakte, Gattungsbezeichnungen); der situativen Zwischenebene, mit der der interaktive Kontext des dialogischen Austausches gemeint ist und die „situative Relation der Handelnden im sozialräumlichen Kontext“ (705) (z. B. sequenzielle Muster des Erklärens und Belehrens); der Außenstruktur (z. B. der Zoo als gesellschaftlich legitimierter Ort der Tierschau) (704–705; Luckmann, „Grundformen“). Herausgegriffen werden nun sprachliche Perspektivierungen, mit denen Mensch-Tier-Räume im Zuge der kommunikativen Aneignung der Zootiere hergestellt werden. Das Zoogespräch ist insofern raumkonstituierend, als die räumlichen Ressourcen (die Tiere) Produkte „situierter Orientierungen und Relevanzen [sind], die von den Beteiligten Schritt für Schritt relevant gemacht werden“ (Hausendorf u. a. 15).6 In der Regel liegt den Zoo-Gesprächen eine

6Dass

die Tiere als ‚Ressource‘ des Raumes bezeichnet werden, sagt nichts über ihren Akteurstatus aus; neutral betrachtet werden auch nicht am Gespräch beteiligte Menschen als kommunikative Ressourcen bezeichnet.

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­ ollen-Dichotomisierung und -hierarchisierung zugrunde, nämlich derjenigen von R Schauenden und Angeschauten. Menschen und Tiere bilden zwar innerhalb der sozialen Veranstaltung ‚Zoo‘ eine „Zusammenkunft“, das heißt, sie sind „Individuen, die sich zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt in der gegenseitigen Anwesenheit anderer befinden“ (Goffman, „Interaktion“ 376), sie sind einander aber nicht unbedingt präsent. „Gemeinsame Präsenz“ meint, dass die Personen deutlich das Gefühl haben, dass sie einander nahe genug sind, um sich gegenseitig wahrzunehmen bei allem, was sie tun; es muss auch wahrgenommen werden, dass sie den anderen wahrnehmen, und sie müssen einander nahe genug sein, um zu fühlen, dass sie wahrgenommen werden. (375–376)

In diesem Sinne ist ‚Begegnung‘ im Zoo zumeist mit dem Begriff der Zusammenkunft gleichzusetzen, nicht aber mit dem der gemeinsamen Präsenz, der auch einen qualitativen Wert ausdrückt. Dieser Zusammenhang wird deutlicher, wenn er mit dem Konzept der Situation verbunden wird. Auch Erving Goffmans Begriff der Situation ist eng mit Präsenz verwoben. Situationen werden erst durch wechselseitige Wahrnehmung interaktiv hervorgebracht. Im Zoo sind gemeinsame soziale Situationen aus menschlichen und tierlichen Akteuren und Akteurinnen zwar nicht die Regel, aber möglich. Dann adressieren z. B. Menschen Tiere verbal; die wechselseitig aufeinander gerichteten Blicke überbrücken die Gitter, Glasscheiben, Gräben; die taktile Kommunikation im Streichelzoo konstituiert gemeinsame Präsenz. Ein Mensch kann sich jedoch nicht immer sicher sein, ob ein Tier nur in seine Richtung sieht oder ob es ihn auch wahrnimmt und ihm „Du-Evidenz“ (Geiger 297) zuschreibt. Diese Frage bleibt für jede empirische Wissenschaft je nach Situation eine Quelle der interpretativen Unsicherheit. Ob ein Mensch einem Tier Du-Evidenz zuschreibt oder nur als Objekt ansieht, kann jedoch an seinen kommunikativen Handlungen rekonstruiert werden. Zudem ist die Wahrnehmung durch die Besucher/innen kein unvorei­ ngenommener Prozess. Was wahrgenommen wird, wird in bestehende, in der Sozialisation erworbene Auslegungsschemata einer bestimmten Weltsicht ein­ geordnet, die wiederum vom jeweiligen Relevanzsystem abhängig ist. Welche Relevanzsysteme eine Gesellschaft ausformt, hängt, so Luckmann („Grenzen“ 76), von mehreren Umständen ab, z. B. von der Abhängigkeit von bestimmten Pflanzen und Tierarten, der Verteilung von Macht und Herrschaft, dem Stand der Technik. „In der Entwicklung einer Weltsicht wirken jedoch über diese ‚funktionalen Erfordernisse‘ hinaus auch Gliederungsprinzipien wie Wichtigkeit, Dringlichkeit, Vertrautheit, Über- und Unterordnung, die dem sozialen Handeln selbst entspringen, entscheidend mit.“ (76–77). Vor allem ist der Zoo ein „Raum der Repräsentation von Tieren, der die Art, wie Menschen Tiere wahrnehmen und über sie denken, mitgestaltet“ (Benz-Schwarzburg und Leitsberger 17). Es liegt dabei auf der Hand, dass Zoos das gesellschaftliche Gliederungsprinzip der Über- und Unterordnung institutionalisiert haben, wobei Andreas Stark relativiert, dass „räumliche (An)Ordnungen sowohl an der Reproduktion hegemonialer Vorstellungen beteiligt (sind) als auch an deren Infragestellung“ (55).

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Kann nun die vornehmlich visuelle und auditive Wahrnehmung der Tiere als primäre Aneignung verstanden werden, so bildet das Sprechen über das Wahrgenommene eine Form sekundärer Aneignung, die Aufschluss darüber geben kann, was möglicherweise bei der primären Aneignung geschieht. So versuchen die Zoobesucher/innen gemeinhin durch „face-to-face-Kommunikation mit anderen Rezipient/innen eine überindividuell gültige, also weiterhin viable Deutung zu stützen“ (Holly 14; Rusch). Da es sich selten um Anschlusskommunikation handelt, erhalten Menschen vielmehr Zutritt zum „Informationsreservat“ von Tieren, vor allem zu dem, „was unmittelbar an einem Individuum, an seiner Körperhülle und an seinem jeweiligen Verhalten wahrgenommen werden kann.“ (Goffman, „Öffentlicher Austausch“ 68). Zusammengefasst wird hier der Aneignungsprozess im Sinne eines weiten und zunächst neutralen Aneignungsbegriffs verstanden, der auf die rezeptorische Verarbeitung von Informationen abzielt, der aber auch alle weiteren sekundären Aktivitäten, die über den Rezeptionszeitpunkt hinausreichen (Faber 27–28), einbezieht. Kleinschrittiger lassen sich folgende Elemente des Prozesses ausmachen: Organisieren der Zoosituation (z. B. grundsätzliche Orientierung); kognitives Verstehen des Verhaltens bzw. Aussehens der Tiere und/oder deren Situation; emotionales Verarbeiten; Übertragen in die eigene Erfahrungswelt; gemeinsames Vergnügen; das perspektivierende und bewertende Interpretieren (28). Im Zentrum der folgenden Gesprächsanalysen steht nun vorrangig der letzte von Marlene Faber aufgeführte Aspekt der Perspektivierung und Bewertung des Wahrgenommenen. Merkmale der rezeptiven Perspektive In der folgenden Situation stehen drei Frauen vor dem Schimpansengehege und beobachten die Tiere durch eine Glasscheibe (s. Transkript in Tab. 1). Die Schimpansen haben grundsätzlich die Möglichkeit, auch die Menschen anzusehen, zeigen hier aber kein Interesse. So bilden Frauen und Schimpansen jeweils separierte soziale Situationen. Frau 2 tritt an die Scheibe heran und konstatiert: „da ist nicht mal action hier“ (3), womit sie ihrer Gesprächspartnerin deutlich macht, dass sie ein dynamisches Verhalten der Tiere erwartet hat und dieses jetzt nicht wahrnimmt. Die Kategorie ‚Action‘ bezieht sich auf alle anwesenden Tiere, vergemeinschaftet, anonymisiert sie und reduziert sie auf eine typisierte Handlung. Was als ‚Action‘ aufgefasst wird, ist zudem ein subjektives, graduelles Phänomen. Der Anglizismus bzw. das jugendsprachliche Lexem „Action“ ist nur partiell synonym mit „Bewegung“ oder „Dynamik“, denn es bezeichnet hier die Action der anderen und konstituiert ein rezeptives Verhältnis, das an den Film- oder Bühnenkontext erinnert, wo jemand für einen anderen etwas absichtlich zur Schau stellt. Die Bedeutung von „Action“ ist hier also eher mit ‚Performance‘ in Verbindung zu bringen. Die Negation „nicht“ gepaart mit dem Modalpartikel „mal“ indiziert emotionale Involviertheit, nämlich Enttäuschung, die über ein reines Abgleichen des Gesehenen mit dem Erwarteten hinausgeht. „Da“ und „hier“ sind lokale deiktische Adverbien, die den repräsentativen Sprechakt einklammern und das in der Ferne Beobachtete

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Tab. 1  „Action“

(da) sprachlich heranholen (hier). John Berger befindet, dass Enttäuschung eine typische Emotion im Zoo sei. Er unterstellt kindlichen Besuchern, dass diese die Zootiere häu unerwartet langweilig finden: (So häufig, wie man Tiere im Zoo schreien hört, so oft hört man Kinder laut rufen: Wo ist er? Warum bewegt er sich nicht? Ist er tot?) Und so könnte man die Frage der meisten Besucher, die sie zwar bewegt, die sie aber dennoch nicht aussprechen, vielleicht folgendermaßen formulieren: Warum sind diese Tiere so viel unbedeutender, als ich gedacht hatte? (184).

Nachdem Frau 2 feststellt, wie unbedeutend die Schimpansen (heute) sind, entdeckt Frau 3 etwas und fordert Frau 2 mit dem Imperativ „guck mal“ (4) zur visuellen Wahrnehmung eines anderen Tieres auf. Es folgt mit dem lokalen Adverb „da“ erneut eine deiktische Raumkonstitution. Mit dem Indefinitpronomen „einer“ wird das Tier verbal aus der Gruppe der Schimpansen ‚herausgegriffen‘. Das unpersönliche Pronomen reduziert das tierliche Individuum auf sein Verhalten, das auch hier nicht beschrieben, sondern nur in die relevante Kategorie ‚Action‘ eingeordnet wird. Andere Tiere erscheinen durch diese kognitive Einstellung für den Moment nicht auf dem Wahrnehmungsradar: Man sieht nur, was man sehen will. Die situative Weltsicht wird von Adhoc-Kategorien gesteuert, sodass andere, potenziell wahrnehmbare Phänomene zurückgedrängt werden. Und mit der beschreibenden Konstruktion und „fugalen“ (Schwitalla 84) Wiederaufnahme des Lexems „action“ zeigt die Sprecherin, dass sie den „bestimmten Weltausschnitt

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in der gleichen Weise“ (84) wie Frau 2 sieht: ‚Action‘ stellt mithin im Zoo eine akzeptierte Kategorie der Beobachtungsrelevanz dar. Frau 3 entdeckt dann ein Tier, das „so schön liegt“ (6). Nun bildet Ästhetik das Relevanz-Kriterium für die Aneignung. Das bewertende Adverb „schön“ bezieht sich hier dennoch auf eine performative Kategorie: Denn nicht der Affe in seinem äußeren Erscheinungsbild ist generell schön, sondern seine liegende Position als Anblick für die Frau. Frau 2 gibt mit dem lokalen Fragepronomen „wo“ (7) ihren Suchmodus zu erkennen, findet den selegierten Affen, kommentiert und bewertet dessen Verhalten mit dem Adjektiv „süß“ und der Erstaunen indizierenden Interjektion „oh“ (5). Emotionen anzeigende Ausdrücke wie affektive Adjektive („süß“, „goldig“) (Hermanns 147) oder unmittelbare affektäußernde Interjektionen des Erstaunens und der Freude sind typische Binnenstrukturelemente der Gattung Zoogespräch. Sie sagen jedoch wenig über die emotionale Tiefe oder Einlassung der menschlichen Besucher/innen aus; vielmehr ist im Allgemeinen nicht die Qualität, sondern die Quantität solcher Ausdrücke maßgeblich. Es geht nicht darum, von den Tieren in einem spirituellen Sinne einmalig verzückt zu sein: „Ein Tier zu beobachten, kann den Geist befreien und ins Hier und Jetzt bringen, […] dorthin, wo Tiere immer sind – in Hingabe an das Leben“ (Tolle und McDonnell 32), sondern darum, nach kurzer Verweildauer vom Anblick des nächsten Tiers wieder aufs Neue verzückt zu sein. Mit dem menschlichen Erstaunen wirbt der Zoo Leipzig auf einem Plakat vor Ort und im Internet. Darauf abgebildet ist ein Nashorn, zusammen mit den Aussagesätzen: „Hat zwei Hörner. Aber eigentlich sind’s Haare.“ Darunter ist der Imperativsatz „Entdecke das ‚Unglaublich‘!“ zu lesen. Die „Zoo-Voice“ ­(Patrick und Tunnicliffe 137), die sich hier im Plakatspruch ausdrückt, gibt mögliche Erfahrungen von Besucher/innen vor den Tiergehegen wieder. Sie sollen an sich selbst entdecken, wie sie „Unglaublich!“ ausrufen. Es wird also mit einer speziellen Rezeptions- und Aneignungserfahrung geworben. Diese Handlungsaufforderung ist damit ein verbalisiertes generalisiertes Auslegungsschema. Es ist aber zugleich ein medial schriftlicher, konzeptuell mündlicher Appell an die Besucher/innen, nicht nur das oberflächliche Aussehen der Tiere zu beachten („hat zwei Hörner“), sondern sich über die visuelle Aneignung des Tieres hinaus auch Wissen anzueignen, das die Perspektive auf das Tier verändert: denn „eigentlich sind’s Haare“: Man sieht nur, was man weiß. Erst über die aktivierte und erweiterte Wissensdimension – so das Plakat – kann man intensive Erfahrungen machen, die zu einem derartigen Ausruf führen und die über die dynamische und ästhetische Kategorie hinausgehen. Dennoch soll der Zoobesuch für den Menschen einen (rationalen) Nutzen haben, denn es geht ja vorrangig um ein Lernen von Sachverhalten (woraus besteht das Horn eines Nashorns?) und um ein daraus resultierendes Erstaunen, das auch ohne konkrete Begegnung oder gar Interaktion mit einem Tier möglich ist. Mit einem Erstaunen, das mit Hartmut Rosa als „Resonanzerfahrung“ zu bezeichnen wäre, in dem Sinne, dass Menschen „davon überzeugt sind, dass sie von etwas berührt werden, das (für sie) ­ schlechthin unabhängig von ihren konkreten Wünschen, Bedürfnissen und Begehrungen wichtig ist“ (456), wird hier nicht geworben.

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Zurück zum Transkript: Im Affengehege kommt es im Folgenden zu einer kurzen körperlichen Auseinandersetzung. Zwei Affen berühren sich, und der eine drängt den anderen danach im schnellen Lauf zurück. Diese soziale Situation der Schimpansen wird von Frau 3 erneut mit „fugalem Sprechen“ (Schwitalla 83) („da hast du deine action hier“ (8)) kommentiert. Die veränderte Konstruktion mit der personalen Anrede „du“, dem Besitz-Verb „haben“ sowie dem Possessivartikel „deine“ ist auffällig. Sie zieht eine direkte Verbindungslinie vom Beobachteten zur Beobachterin, Frau 2. Hier erfolgt daher nicht nur eine verbale Aneignung des Gesehenen, sondern gleichzeitig auch eine Übereignung von Frau 3 an Frau 2 als einer eigentlich für sie bestimmten Performance. Hier wird das Verhalten der Schimpansen in einem zweiten Grade objektifiziert, als es nun nicht nur Anschauungsobjekt ist, sondern man es auch ‚haben‘ kann. Es erfolgt also, ganz im Sinne Erich Fromms, „eine gewisse Verschiebung des Akzents vom Sein zum Haben“: „Eine Tätigkeit durch die Verbindung von ‚haben‘ mit einem Hauptwort auszudrücken ist jedoch ein falscher Sprachgebrauch, denn Prozesse und Tätigkeiten können nicht besessen, sondern nur erlebt werden.“ (Fromm 31–32). Dies gilt nicht nur für die eigenen Handlungen, auch die Handlungen der anderen könnten mit Verbalkonstruktionen wie ‚da streiten sich zwei‘ ausgedrückt werden. In einer solchen Konstruktion würden die Tiere als Agens der Handlung benannt; mit der Nominalkonstruktion „action“ wird deutlich, dass es den Besucherinnen nicht um die Tiere als individuelle Akteure, sondern nur um deren unterhaltsames Verhalten geht. Würde aus der Perspektive der Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie (Latour, „Parlament“ 108) argumentiert, ließe sich wohl feststellen, dass die Schimpansen dennoch mit ihrem So-Sein das Verhalten der menschlichen Akteurinnen beeinflussen, und sei es nur, dass sie ihre Aufmerksamkeit auf sie ausrichten und ihre Wahrnehmungserwartungen an ihrem Verhalten abgleichen. Die Modifikation der Besucher/innen ist dann aber womöglich eine, die über die konkrete situative Erfahrung nicht hinausführt. Instrumentelle Perspektivierung Eine besondere Art der kommunikativen Aneignung zeigt sich, wenn Besucher/ innen Tiere direkt ansprechen (s. Transkript in Tab. 2). Es sind meist Kinder, die mit Tieren, die sie niedlich finden, in unmittelbaren Kontakt treten wollen. Erwachsene sprechen die Tiere eher in einem instrumentellen Zusammenhang an, der über den reinen Kontaktwunsch hinausgeht. Ein Mann und eine Frau stehen im Elefantenhaus getrennt durch ein Eisengitter vor einem indischen Elefanten. Während das Tier Nahrung aufnimmt, versucht der Mann es zu fotografieren. Da neben ihm andere Besucher stehen, kann er sich nicht in eine adäquate Position bringen, um den Elefanten so zu fotografieren, dass d­ ieser nicht von einer breiten Eisenstange verdeckt wird. Mit einem verbalen Akt der Aufforderung, „geh doch mal ein bisschen weiter nach rechts“ (0) spricht der Mann den Elefanten an, adressiert ihn anschließend typisiert mit dem zur volkstümlichen Gattungsbezeichnung gewordenen Ausdruck „dumbo“ (2). Dieser Ausdruck verweist auf weitere, dem Sprechakt zugrundeliegende kulturelle Auslegungsschemata, die sich auf literarisches oder (Disney-)filmisches Vorwissen beziehen.

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Tab. 2  „weiter nach rechts“

Die semiotischen Tiere scheinen bei der kommunikativen Aneignung im Hintergrund auf: „Denn die sogenannten ‚realen‘ Tiere sind selbst schon Bedeutungswesen, und die sogenannten ‚fiktiven‘ oder ‚fiktionalen‘ Tiere haben ihrerseits eine ‚objektive Existenz‘“ (Borgards 240; Latour, „Existenzweisen“ 322). Zum sozialen Akteur wird das Tier für den Menschen nur qua instrumenteller, ästhetischer Bildmotiv-Perspektive. Insofern ließe sich fragen, ob hier nicht Wesen und potenzielles Abbild verschmelzen, das Tier hinter seinem Bild verschwindet: Man sieht nur, was man fotografieren kann. Roland Barthes spricht davon, dass eine Fotografie der „Tod“ (22) des Subjekts sei, indem dieses zum fotografischen Objekt wird. Und um „Leben“ (22) in ihre Bilder zu bringen, stellen Fotografen alles Mögliche an (z. B. das Objekt umplatzieren) (Barthes 22–23). Zootiere sind als Foto-Objekte unberechenbar. Sie stellen sich selten in Pose. Dass der Elefant „ein bisschen weiter nach rechts“ gehen soll und nicht etwa nach links, ist ein Hinweis auf die anthropozentrische Perspektive des beobachtenden Mannes. Rechts und links sind relationale Konzepte, weil sie abhängig von der jeweiligen Perspektive des Gegenübers in der Interaktion sind (Werlen 50–51). Der Sprecher konstruiert seinen Sprechakt aus der egozentrischen Perspektive im Gegensatz zur allozentrischen, die am anderen ausgerichtet wäre (Haun). Eine egozentrische Perspektive zeigt sich also nicht nur darin, dass das Tier etwas ‚für mich‘ machen soll, sondern kann, wie hier in dem Beispiel, auch unbewusst in sprachlichen Akten der relationalen Raumkonstruktion manifest ­werden. Die folgende Sequenz ereignet sich vor dem Erdmännchengehege, wo die Tiere über den Boden laufen; eines sitzt auf einem Hügel und hält Ausschau (s. Transkript in Tab. 3). Die Besucherin fordert das Erdmännchen dazu auf, „nach vorne“ (allozentrisch) zu gucken und adressiert und typisiert es mit der Gattungsbezeichnung „erdmännchen“ (8). Den pejorativen, distanzierenden Ausdruck „vieh“ (10), der das Zootier außerdem in die Nutztierkategorie verschiebt, verwendet sie nur zur lateralen Referenzierung, als wenn das Tier nur die direkte Ansprache verstehen könnte und deshalb Höflichkeitskonventionen im Sprechen über es nicht

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Tab. 3  „Sonnenstudio“

n­ otwendig seien. Nachdem das Tier nicht ‚guckt‘, fordert die Frau es mit „guck mal hierher“ (deiktisch-egozentrisch) erneut auf und versucht, es mit phonetischen Geräuschen („t t“, 11) auf sich aufmerksam zu machen. Trotz Zoosituation sind die Tiere nicht vor Feinden, wie z. B. Greifvögeln, geschützt. Dies hat der Begleiter bereits mit der Feststellung „der überwacht immer den himmel“ (5) thematisiert. Daraus wäre rational ableitbar, dass es für dieses Tier augenblicklich kein sinnvolles Verhalten darstellt, sein räumliches Überwachungsverhalten zugunsten eines menschlichen Bedürfnisses wie der

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p­erfekten Porträtfotografie zu unterbrechen. Die kommunikative Aneignung erfolgt hier also aufgrund eines Ignorierens der sozialen (und räumlichen) Situation des Tieres, um eine gemeinsame Situation, die aber keine echte face-to-faceBegegnung der gegenseitigen Präsenz sein soll, herzustellen. Eine empathische Perspektive auf das Tier und seine Bedürfnisse könnte sich darin ausdrücken, dass man es möglichst nicht ablenkt, während es seinen Bedürfnissen nachgeht. Dabei spielt es keine Rolle, ob es objektiv gesehen unnötig erscheint, dass das Tier das Gehege bewacht, so lange es aus der Perspektive des Tiers notwendig ist.7 Der Mensch hinter der Kamera agiert auch hier nicht gegenüber einem anderen, gleichberechtigten sozialen Akteur, sondern gleichsam in der Funktion eines ‚Jägers‘ gegenüber seiner ‚Beute‘: „Nur verfolgt der Fotograf sein Wild nicht im offenen Grasland, sondern im Dickicht der Kulturobjekte, und seine Schleichwege sind von dieser künstlichen Taiga geformt.“ (Flusser 31). Was Vilém Flusser über die Geste des Fotografierens im Allgemeinen sagt, kann für die Zoosituation beinahe wörtlich genommen werden, denn das Erdmännchen als ausgestelltes natürliches Kulturobjekt wird in der Tat nicht im offenen Grasland beobachtet, sondern am Rande der sogenannten ‚Kiwara-Savanne‘, einer eingegrenzten Rasenfläche, auf der Zebras und Giraffen leben. Das Tier schaut dann im Zuge seiner Überwachung zufällig in die Richtung der Frau, sodass diese ihr Foto machen kann, was mit „ja ich hab ihn auch (-) ganz klar“ (16) kommentiert wird. Auch hier wird durch das Besitz-Verb der doppelte Aneignungsprozess ersichtlich; zum einen wird das gelungene Foto als verbales Konstrukt in der menschlichen Gemeinschaft kommunikativ verfügbar gemacht, zum anderen wird das so eingefangene Tier in einem ganz praktischen Sinne mit nach Hause genommen. Die beschriebenen Situationen, in denen Tiere ein bestimmtes Verhalten zeigen sollen, sei es zur Unterhaltung, sei es für das perfekte Foto, verdeutlichen: Dort ist „nicht stets sinnvoll entscheidbar […], ob man von Tieren eher bildbezogen als von einem ‚lebendigen Sujet‘ oder eher bühnenbezogen als von mortifizierten ‚Protagonisten‘ sprechen sollte.“ (Janecke 148). Situative Re-Perspektivierung Eine neue Perspektive auf die Zootiere eröffnet sich, sobald Besucher/innen verbalisieren, von einem Tier angesehen zu werden (s. Transkript in Tab. 4). Im Korpus gibt es nur wenige dieser explizit verbalisierten ‚Augenblicke‘. Zunächst macht eine Frau ihr Kind mit einem Imperativ „guck mal“ (0) auf die Otter, die man durch eine Glasscheibe in einem Wasserbecken schwimmen sieht, aufmerksam. Die ineinander verschlungenen Bewegungen der Otter werden als „kaspern“ (1) interpretiert, also mit einem Ausdruck, den sie vermutlich aus der Interaktion mit dem Kind entlehnt. Die kommunikative Aneignung des Gesehenen

7Vgl.

hierzu das Konzept der „cognitive empathy“ (Gruen 48), demzufolge der Mensch grundsätzlich fähig ist, reflektierend die Perspektive des Gegenübers zu imaginieren, sodass er in die Situation bzw. in die Gemütsverfassung des Anderen versetzt wird.

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Tab. 4  „Kaspern“

wird damit für das Kind vereinfacht, da es das tierliche Verhalten mit seinem eigenen (bewerteten) Verhalten abgleichen kann. Obwohl die Otter zentral aufeinander konzentriert sind, hat der Mann den Eindruck, dass sie die Besucher/innen ansähen. Er verbalisiert und bewertet diesen Eindruck mit „ist ja schon (-) interessant wie die otter (-) ein ja so angucken nä“ (3). Die tag question „nä“ am Ende der Äußerung projiziert eine mögliche Bekräftigung der Einstellung durch die Gesprächspartnerin. Pluralbildung („die Otter“) und Indefinitpronomen („ein/en“) machen die Begegnungssituation jedoch nicht explizit an Individuen fest, sondern lassen nur eine vage Situation der Präsenz entstehen, die kommunikativ nicht weiter vertieft wird. Analog dazu konstatiert John Berger, dass dem Blick des Tieres zu begegnen, im Zoo eine Unmöglichkeit sei: Der öffentliche Zweck eines Zoos besteht darin, den Besuchern die Möglichkeit zu geben, Tiere anzusehen. Doch nirgends im Zoo kann ein Fremder dem Blick eines Tieres begegnen. Der Blick des Tieres flackert höchstens und wendet sich dann anderem zu. (188).

Wenn die Otter den Menschen hinter der Glasscheibe tatsächlich ansehen, dann so, wie es Berger beschreibt, in Form eines kurzen Aufflackerns, denn das Wasser ist trübe, es bilden sich viele Luftblasen, die Scheibe ist schmutzig, der Raum dahinter dunkel. Die Unwahrscheinlichkeit eines Blickkontaktes mit Zuschreibung einer Du-Evidenz lässt den menschlichen Wunsch danach offenbar umso deutlicher hervortreten. Es ist hier nicht das vertraute Haustier, dessen Blick man jederzeit einfangen kann, sondern des Otters, der im Jahr ca. 1,7 Mio. Menschen schemenhaft hinter der Glasscheibe wahrnimmt. Die verbalisierte Re-Perspektivierung, die die bewusste Perspektive der Tiere auf den Menschen konstatiert, ist damit Ausdruck einer Sehnsucht, in der das Zootier als Sozialpartner einer echten Begegnung konstruiert wird: Man sieht, was man sehen will. Insofern ist auch das zufällige Einfangen des Otterblicks, wenn dieser sich für einen Moment aus der eigenen sozialen Situation heraus nach draußen richtet, eine Art Trophäe, die es wert ist, sprachlich markiert zu werden.

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Situative Re-Re-Perspektivierung Kann die situative Re-Perspektivierung vielfach als Illusion bezeichnet werden, so ist die Re-Re-Perspektivierung Ausdruck einer menschlichen Imagination bzw. Fiktionalisierung. Das folgende Beispiel ist am Rande der Pinguinfreianlage situiert. Ein Mann, der mit einer weiblichen Begleitung vor Ort ist, lässt einen Pinguin ‚laut denken‘. Während das Tier in Richtung einer Gruppe anderer Pinguine läuft und sich dort mutmaßlich umsieht, denkt es: „ach ich komm jetzt mal rüber und guck mal was die hier drüben so machen (-) komische leute stehn hier rum (-) gucken alle so blöd ins gehege rein.“ Da der Besucher nicht wissen kann, was (und ob) der Pinguin denkt, liegt hier eine anthropomorphisierende „humoristische Fiktion“ (Kotthoff 187) vor. Der Sprecher tut so, als ob es sich bei dem Gesagten um eine referenzierende Tatsachenbehauptung handelt, quasi ein Dolmetschen der Gedanken des Tieres. Deborah Tannen nennt diesen kommunikativen Vorgang „ventriloquizing“ (402). Mensch und Tier verschmelzen dabei im Sinne Goffmans zu einem „Mehrfachwesen“ (Goffman, „Rahmen“ 553): Der menschliche Sprecher tritt als „Animateur“ (Goffman, „Rede-Weisen“ 59) der Rede in den Hintergrund, denn er bringt die Rede physisch und physikalisch hervor. Er ist im Akt der Übersetzung auch noch „Autor“, da er für die inhaltliche und formale Ausgestaltung der Rede zuständig ist; scheinbar, eben nur fiktionaler verantwortlicher „Urheber“ oder Auftraggeber der Rede ist der Pinguin, da es ‚seine‘ Gedanken sind, die verbalisiert werden (59). Beginnend mit der Interjektion „ach“, die kognitiv-emotional eine Aufbruchsstimmung des Pinguins organisiert, sagt er sich selbst: „ich komm jetzt mal rüber und guck mal was die hier drüben so machen“. Der Sprecher konstruiert dem Pinguin menschliche Motivationen, Gemütsverfassungen, etwa den Wunsch nach Gruppenanbindung und eine Gelassenheit, die sich in den Modalpartikeln („mal“) ausdrückt. Mit der lokalen Deixis „hier drüben“ erfolgt eine Versetzung der „Origo“ (Bühler 107) in die Perspektive des Tieres. Der menschliche Sprecher schlüpft also für den Sprechakt in die Rolle des Pinguins, die eine Raumaneignung notwendig macht, die sich auch im Bewegungsverb „gehen“ zeigt. Dabei ist die fiktionale Aussage „komische leute stehn hier rum (-) gucken alle so blöd ins gehege rein“ eine Re-Re-Perspektivierung. Konstruiert wird der Blick des Pinguins auf die Menschen, wie dieser nämlich wiederum deren Blick auf ihn konstruiert. Aus dieser doppelt gespiegelten Aneignungsperspektive wird das Unmögliche möglich: Man sieht, was man (eigentlich) nicht sehen kann: sich selbst in den Augen des Tieres. Betrachtet man den Inhalt des Gesagten genauer, so wird deutlich, dass der Sprechakt selbstreflexive Sozialkritik impliziert. Der Pinguin spiegelt das eigene Verhalten (ins Gehege ‚reingucken‘) und bewertet dieses negativ („so blöd“). Zudem sind die Leute „komisch“, also merkwürdig. Der Pinguin versteht nicht, warum sie da sind, aber dass er sich in einem „gehege“ befindet, womit wiederum das Tier die Perspektive des Menschen auf ihn versteht, nämlich als unfrei, als anders, als Tier.

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Zwar liegt auch hier ein Prozess der kommunikativen Aneignung des Tieres vor, der für die eigene Selbstreflexion fiktionalisierend und typisierend instrumentalisiert wird, jedoch führt die Typisierung zu einer generellen Perspektivenverschiebung, die sich auf alle Tiere im Zoo und ihren Präsentationsstatus übertragen lässt. Die Fiktion kritisiert damit die Zooveranstaltung im Allgemeinen, in deren Verlauf sich ein anerkanntes Verhaltensmuster herausgebildet hat (Goffman, „Interaktion“ 376–377): nämlich das Ansehen der Tiere, das aber aus Sicht der Tiere möglicherweise nicht angemessen ist.

3 Aneignung vs. Anverwandlung Für die Analyse wurden Zoogespräche ausgewählt, die unterschiedliche Perspektivierungen im Zuge der kommunikativen Aneignung von Zootieren verdeutlichen. ‚Kommunikative Aneignung‘ ist dabei zunächst ein wertneutraler Begriff, der das Verstehen des Wahrgenommenen und seine kommunikative Verarbeitung beschreibt; die Aneignung muss dabei zwangsläu anthropozentrisch sein, da der Mensch nur aus seinem Standpunkt heraus auf die Tiere blicken kann; sie muss aber nicht immer anthropomorphisierend oder utilitaristisch anthropozentrisch sein. Die Beispiele haben gezeigt, dass bei der kognitiven und emotionalen Beteiligung bestimmte Vorprägungen und Auslegungsschemata – Weltanschauungen – eine wichtige Rolle spielen. Menschliche Akteure und Akteurinnen sehen nicht unvoreingenommen auf Tiere, sondern mit dem Gesehenen werden Erwartungen abgeglichen, Intentionen verknüpft, Erfahrungen aus dem menschlichen Interaktions- und Kultur-Kontext verbunden, Wünsche manifest. Es wird die Mensch-Tier-Veranstaltung ‚Zoo‘ als Bedingung der kommunikativen Aneignung reflektiert. In allen Fällen gibt die Aneignung des Weltausschnittes ‚Tier‘ Aufschluss über die jeweiligen situativen individuellen und typischen Relevanzstrukturen. Mit Hartmut Rosa (457) ließe sich fragen, wann Aneignung in Anverwandlung übergeht. Anverwandlung, so könnte für den Zoo-Kontext definiert werden, trans­ zendiert die Auslegungsschemata, die in einer Situation notwendig gegeben s­ind. Ein anverwandelter Weltausschnitt wird nicht als vom Selbst abgetrenntes Objekt erlebt, sondern als ein Gegenüber in einer gemeinsamen Erfahrung – einer Begegnung. Dann werden Tiere nicht „in einem Modus der stummen, verdinglichenden Beziehung instrumentell bearbeite[t], behandel[t]“ (Rosa 455), sondern als Entitäten erfahren, „welche die für Resonanz konstitutive Bedingung des tendenziell Unverfügbaren, Widerständigen, Eigensinnigen, aber eben auch des ­Antwortenden“ (457) erfüllen. Anverwandlung würde bedeuten, dass die Zoobesucher/innen mit den Tieren eine „Wir-Beziehung“ (Schütz und Luckmann 106) konstituieren. Die Ausprägung einer solchen erfordert, sich Zeit zu nehmen für die Symptomfülle des Anderen (106). Stattdessen, so hat die Analyse gezeigt, werden im Allgemeinen typisierte, auf alle Zootiere anwendbare Auslegungsschemata in Anschlag gebracht: Das Da-sein und das So-sein der Tiere wird vermittels

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abgeleiteter Typifizierungen erfahren, als hätte keine individuelle Begegnung stattgefunden. Anders ausgedrückt: Die Tiere werden weniger in einer Du-Einstellung, als in einer Ihr-Einstellung erfahren. An die Stelle (un)möglicher, sich schrittweise aufbauender subjektiver Sinnzusammenhänge treten objektive Sinnzusammenhänge, weshalb der Bezugspunkt der Ihr-Einstellung anonym ist (119). Die präsentierten Tiere sind zudem den Blicken der Besucher/innen ausgesetzt, ob sie es wollen oder nicht, weshalb sich in der kommunikativen Aneignung auch eine Dimension der Machtausübung spiegelt. Die Tiere sind in diesen Situationskonstellationen immer die Machtlosen: „the powerless are at all times subject to the gaze of the powerful, subject (irrespective of their own preferences) to con­ stant scrutiny, monitoring and examination“ (Beardsworth and Bryman 88). Alan Beardsworth und Alan Bryman sprechen von einem „recreational gaze“ (89), den Zoobesucher/innen auf Tiere richten, und der, so muss hinzugefügt werden, nicht auch von Seiten der Tiere auf Besucher/innen ergeht, wenn damit impliziert ist, dass für einen solchen Blick Freiwilligkeit eine notwendige Bedingung ist, die wiederum auf einem bewussten und intendierten Aufsuchen der Begegnungssituation basiert. Wie gezeigt, gibt es Bemühungen von Seiten der ‚Zoo-Voice‘, diesen nur zur eigenen Entspannung dienenden Blick auf Tiere mit der Anreicherung von biologischem Wissen über sie zu verändern. Aber auch mit diesem Wissen bleibt die Begegnung in der „contact zone“ (Haraway, When Species Meet 205) von Zootieren typifiziert und hierarchisiert. Sie ist vor allem eine Kontaktzone zwischen Menschen, in der die Tiere in ihren Gehegen, Volieren, Aquarien scheinbar kommunikativ näher gerückt werden. Nur, wenn der Schimpanse zumindest beim nächsten Zoobesuch wiedererkannt wird als ein Individuum, das schon beim letzten Besuch „so schön dalag“, weshalb von einer langsam sich entwickelnden Du-Einstellung gesprochen werden könnte, kann er von einem bloßen typifizierten Zeitgenossen zu einem Gegenüber werden, mit dem eine andere Stufe der Erlebnistiefe erfahren wird. Für eine echte „Wir-Beziehung“ (Schütz und Luckmann 102) als Bestandteil einer Mensch-TierBegegnung, für das, was Donna Haraway mit „wir sind auf konstitutive Weise Spezies der Gefährt/innen“, „wir erfinden einander leibhaftig, wir machen einander aus“ („Manifest für Gefährten“ 8) beschreibt, braucht es jedoch mehr. Es braucht die wechselseitige Bezogenheit (auch das Tier muss den/die individuelle/n Besucher/in als ein ‚Du‘ wahrnehmen), die dem Zoo mit seinen örtlichen, räumlichen und fluiden sozialen Strukturen als Möglichkeit nicht eingeschrieben ist. Was dem Zoo als Einrichtung kaum gelingt, wurde im vorliegenden Aufsatz zumindest für die (bislang noch nicht übliche) Perspektive der Linguistik auf eine theoretische und analytische Weise versucht, nämlich, wie Roland Borgards es formuliert, sowohl Tiere als auch Menschen „in einen gemeinsamen Raum zu stellen“ (2). Zoogespräche als kommunikative Gattung führen zwar nicht zu mehr Erkenntnissen über das Verhalten von Zootieren, aber sie verraten uns etwas, über die Merkmale der menschlichen Kommunikation hinaus, über das in die kommunikativen Praktiken eingeschriebene, uns vielerorts immer noch als selbstverständlich erscheinende Mensch-Tier-Verhältnis.

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Hausendorf, Heiko, Lorenza Mondada, und Reinhold Schmitt. „Raum als interaktive Ressource: Eine Explikation.“ Raum als interaktive Ressource, hg. v. Heiko Hausendorf u. a., Narr Francke Attempto, 2015, S. 7–36. Hermanns, Fritz. „Kognition, Emotion, Intention: Dimensionen lexikalischer Semantik.“ Die Ordnung der Wörter: Kognitive und lexikalische Strukturen, hg. v. Gisela Harras, de Gruyter, 1995, S. 138–178. Heuberger, Reinhard. „Linguistik: Das Tier in der Sprache.“ Disziplinierte Tiere? Perspektiven der Human-Animal Studies für die wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen, hg. v. Reingard Spannring u. a., transcript, 2015, S. 123–135. Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy, und Rebecca Treiman. „Doggerel: Motherese in a New Context.“ Journal of Child Language, Nr. 9, 1982, S. 229–237. Holly, Werner. „Der sprechende Zuschauer.“ Der sprechende Zuschauer: Wie wir uns Fernsehen kommunikativ aneignen, hg. v. Holly u. a., Westdeutscher Verlag, 2001, S. 11–24. Huneke, Hans-Werner. Sprechen zu Tieren: Formen und Funktionen tiergerichteten Sprechens. IUDICUM, 2004. Janecke, Christian. „Tiere in Kulissen: Über das unweigerlich Bühnenhafte des Zoos.“ Zoo, Themenheft Tierstudien, Nr. 7, 2015, S. 144–157. Kotthoff, Helga. „Gemeinsame Herstellung humoristischer Fiktionen im Gespräch – eine namenlose Sprechaktivität in der spielerischen Modalität.“ SpracheSpielen, hg. v. Helga Andresen und Franz Januschek, Fillibach, 2007, S. 187–213. Kynast, Katja. „Geschichte der Haustiere.“ Tiere: Kulturwissenschaftliches Handbuch, hg. v. Roland Borgards, Metzler, 2015, S. 130–138. Latour, Bruno. Existenzweisen: Eine Anthropologie der Moderne. Suhrkamp, 2014. Latour, Bruno. Das Parlament der Dinge. Suhrkamp, 2015. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell, 1991. Luckmann, Thomas. „Grundformen der gesellschaftlichen Vermittlung des Wissens: Kommunikative Gattungen.“ Kultur und Gesellschaft, hg. v. Friedhelm Neidhardt, Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986, S. 191–211. Luckmann, Thomas. „Über die Grenzen der Sozialwelt.“ Lebenswelt und Gesellschaft, hg. v. Luckmann, Schöningh, 1980, S. 56–92. Patrick, Patricia G., und Sue Dale Tunnicliffe. Zoo Talk. Springer, 2013. Rosa, Hartmut. Resonanz: Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung. Suhrkamp, 2016. Rusch, Gebhard. „Kommunikation und Verstehen.“ Die Wirklichkeit der Medien: Eine Einführung in die Kommunikationswissenschaft, hg. v. Klaus Merten u. a., Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994, S. 60–78. Sager, Sven Frederik. Kommunikationsanalyse und Verhaltensforschung: Grundlagen einer Gesprächsethologie. Stauffenburg, 2004. Sanders, Clinton R., und Arnold Arluke. „If Lions Could Speak: Investigating the Animal-Human Relationship and the Perspectives of Nonhuman Others.“ The Sociological Quarterly, Jg. 34, Nr. 3, 1993, S. 377–390. Schütz, Alfred, und Thomas Luckmann. Strukturen der Lebenswelt. UVK, 2003. Schwitalla, Johannes. „Über einige Weisen des gemeinsamen Sprechens: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie der Beteiligungsrollen im Gespräch.“ Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, Nr. 11, 1992, S. 68–98. Selting, Margret, u. a. „Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2 (GAT 2).“ Gesprächsforschung – Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion, Nr. 10, 2009, S. 353–402, http:// www.gespraechsforschung-ozs.de/heft2009/px-gat2.pdf. Soja, Edward. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. Verso, 1989. Stark, Andreas. „Koproduktion von Raum und Speziesismus: Eine genealogische Betrachtung räumlicher (An)Ordnungen von Tiergehegen.“ Tiere und Raum, Themenheft Tierstudien, Nr. 6, 2014, S. 43–56.

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Die Schaulust am lebenden Tier: Der Blick auf ausgestellte Tiere von den barocken Menagerien bis zur zeitgenössischen Kunst

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Die Haltung und Präsentation von lebenden, vor allem wilden Tieren außerhalb ihres angestammten Habitats zum Zweck der Zurschaustellung und Betrachtung prägt die Mensch-Tier-Beziehung seit Jahrtausenden (Baratay und Hardouin-Fugier 17–42). Die Motivationen zum Blick auf reale Tiere in ihrer Lebendigkeit – in künstlichem Umfeld wie in künstlerischem Kontext – sind dabei bis heute äußerst vielfältig und können kulturell, religiös, soziologisch, naturwissenschaftlich oder psychologisch begründet sein. Die Lust, Tiere auszustellen und zu betrachten, scheint ein dem Menschen eingeschriebenes Bedürfnis zu sein, um über die Repräsentation von Tieren die eigene Selbstkonstituierung (Roscher 88) zu erfahren. Im Folgenden wird aufgezeigt, wie sich der Blick des Menschen auf ausgestellte, lebende Tiere von den barocken Menagerien bis zur zeitgenössischen Kunst in seinen Konstanten, Modifikationen sowie Wahrnehmungs- und Bedeutungsverschiebungen vollzieht. Im 17. Jahrhundert begann mit der Entstehung barocker Menagerien die systematische Sammlung und Zurschaustellung lebender, meist seltener, fremdländischer Tiere. Die Menagerie von Versailles (Abb. 1), die bereits 1664 als eine der ersten Lustbauten im Schlosspark größtenteils fertiggestellt war, markiert in ihrer radialen Anlage den architektonischen und gartenkünstlerischen Prototyp zur Haltung und Betrachtung lebender Tiere innerhalb des Französischen Gartens (Paust, Menagerie 54–80). Der Grundriss des Menageriekomplexes folgt dabei in seiner geometrischen Struktur nicht nur den formalen Gestaltungsprinzipien der zeitgenössischen Gartenkunst, sondern war insbesondere auf die Sichtbarkeit der in den Gehegen gehaltenen Tiere ausgerichtet. Den Mittelpunkt der ­Menagerie ­bildete das zweigeschossige Château de la Menagerie, das sich in einen ­oktogonalen Baukörper mit umlaufendem Hof erweiterte. Von diesem

B. Paust (*)  Wuppertal, Deutschland E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_17

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Abb. 1  André Pérelle, Menagerie von Versailles, Ansicht von Nordwesten, Kupferstich, 2. Hälfte 17. Jahrhundert

z­ entralen Mittelpavillon waren durch die Fenstertüren bzw. vom Balkon oder dem Hof aus die Tiere in ihren Gehegen übersichtlich zu betrachten. Wobei das Innere des Lusthauses mit Gemälden des französischen Tiermalers Nicaise Bernaerts von in der Menagerie gehaltenen Tieren ausgestattet war (Paust, Menagerie 59–60). Diese meist bildfüllenden Tierporträts sollten, wie es Madeleine de Scudéry 1669 in ihrer Promenade de Versailles beschreibt, einerseits auf die Betrachtung der realen Tiere einstimmen oder im Nachgang die Erinnerung an diese vertiefen (95). Ausgewählte Tiere der Menagerie erfuhren somit durch ihr gemaltes Abbild nicht nur eine Aufwertung als individuelles Tierporträt, sondern gleichfalls eine bildliche Konservierung ins Zeitlose. Wegen der besseren Sichtbarkeit der Tiere waren die einzelnen Gehege nur durch Eisengitter voneinander getrennt. Die skulpturale Ausstattung der Tierabteile zum zentralen Hof hin erfolgte durch steinerne Termen, die Episoden aus den Metamorphosen Ovids zeigten, in denen sich Menschen in Tiere verwandeln. Die Bezugnahme auf die mythologischen Verwandlungsgeschichten Ovids verknüpft die reale Mensch-Tier-Begegnung in der Menagerie mit der die Menschheitsgeschichte prägenden Mensch-Tier-Korrelationen. Für die höfische Gesellschaft unter König Ludwig XIV. gehörte der Besuch der Menagerie mit ihren meist exotischen Tieren als besondere Sehenswürdigkeit zum festen Bestandteil einer Besichtigung des Parks von Versailles. Die M ­ enagerie war Ausdruck der absolutistischen Macht und des Reichtums des Sonnenkönigs sowie seiner weitreichenden Kontakte zu ausländischen Potentaten. Als Sammlung lebender Tiere war sie erlebbares und komprimiertes Abbild des Tierreichs

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als Teil der Welt. Zugleich fungierte sie als Sinnbild für den absolutistischen Anspruch nach Verfügbarmachung und Reglementierung der Natur, wie sie dem klassischen Französischen Garten zugrunde liegt. Die Menagerie als Statussymbol diente in erster Linie der Unterhaltung des Königs und seines Hofes und wurde dementsprechend für Inszenierungen genutzt (Baratay und Hardouin-Fugier 51). Von der Neugierde und der Lust am Anblick der seltenen Tiere und dem Faszinosum, das diese auf ihre Betrachter/innen ausübten, schwärmten Zeitgenossen wie Madeleine de Scudéry (95) oder Jean de la Fontaine (15). Auch dienten die Tiere der Versailler Menagerie einer Reihe von Künstlern als lebende Modelle sowie nach ihrem Tod als praktisches Anschauungsmaterial und für anatomische Untersuchungen in der unter Ludwig XIV. gegründeten Pariser Académie des sciences (Paust, Menagerie 72–74). Die Gehege, in denen vor allem fremdländische Vogelarten und andere seltene Tiere gehalten wurden, sollten – zumindest aus zeitgenössischer Sicht und nach dem damaligen Kenntnisstand (62–66) – zum Wohl der Tiere ausgestattet gewesen sein, wobei die Sterblichkeitsrate vor allem der exotischen Tiere recht hoch war. Die Menagerie von Versailles in ihrer spezifischen Grundrissdisposition mit einem zentralen „Beobachtungsraum“ und den darum strahlenförmig angeordneten Tierhöfen spiegelte die Welt- und Staatenordnung König Ludwigs XIV. wieder, in der er selbst als Weltenherrscher im Zentrum stand (Dittrich 11). Sie war das Vorbild für zahlreiche barocke Menagerien im deutschsprachigen Raum. Dieses System der einsehbaren, durch Gitter getrennten Tiergehege bildet eine wesentliche Voraussetzung für das Modell der Zurschaustellung von Tieren in der Kunst: einerseits wird das Gehege als Ort der Präsentation von Tieren und des Betrachtet-Werdens definiert, andererseits der zentrale Mittelplatz als Ort für die Betrachter/innen konstituiert, für den die animalischen Lebend-Exponate bereitgehalten wurden. Mit den barocken Menagerien nimmt somit das Ausstellen von lebenden Tieren und deren „Rahmung“ seinen Anfang, die sich mit der Gründung von Zoologischen Gärten im 19. Jahrhundert und seit den 1960er Jahren mit dem Aufkommen von installativer und performativer Kunst in unterschiedlichsten Ausprägungen bis heute fortsetzt. Die Aufklärung bewirkte einen Wandel im Verständnis von der Verfügbarkeit der Natur im Französischen Garten und damit im Blick auf das „gesammelte Tier“ in den barocken Menagerien. Nun fokussierte sich in den Menagerien der ­Aufklärung die Wahrnehmung von Tieren auf ihre Bestimmung als Untersuchungsgegenstand zum wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisgewinn. Das berühmteste Beispiel für diesen Blickwechsel ist der Jardin des Plantes in Paris (Baratay und Hardouin-Fugier 73–78). In ihm vereinen sich zwei Tierhaltungsformen, die für die Entwicklung der Zoologischen Gärten und das Ausstellen von Tieren prägend werden sollten: Einerseits kam die Haltung von Tieren in nebeneinander aufgereihten Eisenkäfigen einer vergleichenden Betrachtung wie in einem aufgeschlagenen Biologiebuch entgegen (Meuser 53). Andererseits wirkte sich der aus England kommende neue, natürliche Gartenstil nicht nur auf die Haltung von Tieren im Landschaftsgarten aus, sondern auch auf deren Haltung in Menagerien, in denen in Abgrenzung zum absolutistischen Französischen Garten der

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Naturbegriff nun unlösbar mit dem Freiheitsgedanken der Aufklärung verbunden war (Buttlar 9). Neue Tendenzen in Gartenkunst und wissenschaftlicher Forschung sowie die Demokratisierung des Blickes auf das lebende Tier bildeten die Voraussetzung für die Entstehung der Zoologischen Gärten im 19. Jahrhundert. Als bürgerliche Gründungen dienten diese, in Fortführung der Menagerien der Barockzeit und der Aufklärung, dem Sammeln und der Präsentation lebender Tiere. Dabei hatten die Sammlungs- und Belehrungsstrategien unmittelbare Konsequenzen für die Gestaltung der Zoos und für die dortigen Haltungsbedingungen (Rieke-Müller 119). Wie Museumsexponate wurden die Tiere in menagerieartigen Reihen von Käfigen und Gehegen präsentiert, um dem/der Betrachter/in – wie bei den chronologischen, thematischen oder monologisch präsentierten Kunstwerken im Museum – ein vergleichendes Sehen zu ermöglichen. Durch die Entstehung historisierender Zoobauten und solcher, die in ihrer architektonischen Gestaltung Anklänge an die Heimatländer der Tiere evozierten (Meuser 58–59), wurde ein neuer, aufwendig gestalteter „Rahmen“ um die Tiere errichtet. Zeitgleich mit den im 19. Jahrhundert als öffentliche Bildungseinrichtung und beliebtes Freizeitvergnügen gegründeten Zoologischen Gärten, in denen im Zeitalter des Kolonialismus die Sehnsucht nach fernen Ländern durch die Präsentationen von meist exotischen Tieren, Architekturen und „Naturvölkern“ in sogenannten Völkerschauen gestillt wurde, entwickelten sich auch die ersten öffentlich zugänglichen Museen. Aus höfischen Kunst- und Wunderkammern hervorgegangen, verfolgten Museen (Heesen 48–72) und Zoologische Gärten mit ihrem Bildungs- und Forschungsauftrag sowie ihrer Erlebnisorientierung und -befriedigung für das Publikum durchaus vergleichbare Ziele. Wobei dahingestellt sei, inwiefern diese Ziele auch erfüllt werden (Goldner 440). Schließlich setzte der Tierpark Carl Hagenbeck, der 1907 in Hamburg eröffnet wurde, mit den gitterfreien Panoramagehegen neue Maßstäbe in der Zootierhaltung und -betrachtung. Die Tiere sollten in größtmöglicher Freiheit und in einer der jeweiligen Tierart angepassten Form, die sich an deren natürlicher Lebeweise orientierte, gehalten werden. Dies hatte auch einen veränderten Blick der Besucher/innen auf die Tiere im Zoo zur Folge. Denn die ausgestellten Tiere repräsentieren seit jeher nicht nur lebendige Natur, sondern auch die sich wandelnden Auffassungen von Natur in der Vorstellung des Menschen. Dabei wurde und wird den Tieren in ihrer Zurschaustellung eine Rolle zugewiesen, die die Form der Haltungssysteme bestimmt und auf die Wahrnehmung des Tieres durch den/ die Betrachter/in einwirkt (Rieke-Müller 117). So bemerkte zum Beispiel voller Begeisterung der Erfinder Thomas A. Edison 1911 bei einem Besuch des Tierparks Hagenbeck, dass sich die Tiere nun nicht mehr in einem Käfig befänden, sondern auf einer Bühne (Meuser 61). Für das neue Zookonzept war also nicht nur die Verbesserung der Tierhaltung ausschlaggebend, sondern auch die Optimierung der Besucherzufriedenheit durch eine entsprechende Inszenierung der Tierpräsentation. Denn dem Bedürfnis nach der Betrachtung lebendiger Tierexponate, dem die Menagerien und frühen Zoologischen Gärten entsprochen hatten, war inzwischen der Wunsch gefolgt, die Tier in einem möglichst typischen Ausschnitt ihres natürlichen, meist fremdländischen Lebensraumes zu betrachten. Die einst

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trennenden Gitterstäbe wichen der freien Sicht der Betrachter/innen auf die animalischen Exponate und suggerierten so die Illusion ihrer uneingeschränkten und artgerechten Haltung auf einer ihrem Habitat nachempfundenen Naturbühne (Abb. 2). Konstanten in der Zurschaustellung von Tieren in der Geschichte der Tierhaltung von den barocken Menagerien bis zu den Zoos der Gegenwart sind ihr Schauwert, die Gestaltung ihres Lebensraumes und schließlich die Gewährleistung ihres (Über-)Lebens. Drei stereotype Gehegeformen lassen sich dabei für die Präsentation von Tieren im Zoo ausmachen (Hölck 131–143). Der ‚Schaukasten‘ als einansichtiges, räumlich in die Tiefe gestaffeltes Schaubild präsentiert Tiere als ausgestellte Exponate in funktionalen Räumen, die keinerlei bzw. nur wenig Bezug zu den natürlichen Lebensräumen ihrer animalischen Bewohner haben. Durch Gitter, Zäune oder zunehmend auch durch Glasscheiben begrenzt, sind sie auf bestmögliche Einsehbarkeit durch die Betrachter/innen ausgerichtet. Zusätzliche Beleuchtung, vor allem bei Aquarien, dient nicht nur der besseren Sichtbarkeit der Tiere, sondern auch deren inszenatorischen Aufwertung, vergleichbar den auf Kunstwerke gerichteten Spots in Ausstellungsräumen. Die Schaffung von illusionistischen „Freiräumen“, wie dies in den Panoramagehegen im Tierpark Carl Hagenbeck oder in den modernen Immersionsgehegen der Fall ist, formt den Typus der ‚Bühne‘. Auf ihr agieren die Zootiere wie Schauspieler in unterschiedliche Rollen und erwecken den Eindruck von ‚lebendiger Natürlichkeit‘, wobei der Zoo als Schauveranstaltung immer auf Kosten der „tierischen Zwangsdarsteller“ funktioniert (Goldner 440). Der ‚Park‘ als dritte zoologische Haltungsform für

Abb. 2  Tierpark Carl Hagenbeck, Affenfelsen und Flamingos, um 1920 (Postkarte)

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meist wenige, leicht zu domestizierende Tiere ermöglicht den freien Auslauf auf dem Zoogelände zwischen den Besucher/innen. Diese Aufhebung der separierenden Grenzen vermittelt die Verheißung einer friedlichen Koexistenz von Mensch und Tier. Eine Untersuchung von siebzehn europäischen Zoos, die Anne Hölck unternommen hat, hat ergeben, dass die häufigste Haltungsform die des ‚Schaukastens‘ mit dem lebenden Tier als Bild ist (141). Mit Verweis auf den Zoo kommt John Berger zu der Erkenntnis, dass im Prinzip „jeder Käfig ein Rahmen um das Tier im Inneren“ ist (34). Er entwickelt diese These in seinem Essay Warum sehen wir Tiere an?, den er bezeichnenderweise an den Anfang seines Buches Das Leben der Bilder oder die Kunst des Sehens gestellt hat. In ihm widmet er sich vorrangig der Betrachtung von Kunstwerken. Der Vergleich eines Zoo-Besuches mit dem einer Kunstgalerie ist somit für ihn konsequent, denn das Verhalten der Besucher/innen ist nahezu identisch: Dort gehen sie von Käfig zu Käfig, hier von Kunstwerk zu Kunstwerk, um das Tier oder die Kunst zu betrachten. Aus der Analogie zwischen der Betrachtung eines Exponates der Kunst und der Betrachtung eines ‚gerahmten‘ Tieres wird eine Verschmelzung, wenn das Tier selbst zum Element der Kunst wird, wie dies seit dem Aufkommen der Aktions- und Installationskunst seit Anfang der 1960er Jahre der Fall ist. Die Installation Ohne Titel (Dodici Cavalli Vivi) mit zwölf Pferden von Jannis Kounellis und die Aktionen Titus/Iphigenie 1969 sowie I like America and America likes me 1974 von Joseph Beuys sind Schlüsselwerke in der Entwicklung der Kunst mit lebenden Tieren. Erstmalig verwirklichte Jannis Kounellis im Januar 1969 eine Lebend-Installation in der Galleria L’Attico in Rom (Abb. 3), die er in der Folge mehrfach an anderen Ausstellungsorten wiederholte. In einer Tiefgarage, in der normalerweise PKWs untergebracht waren, stellte Kounellis zwölf Pferde, geordnet nach Rasse, Körperbau und Farbe und mit je einem Strick an der Wand angebunden aus, zwischen denen sich die Besucher/innen bewegen und diese von der Nähe betrachten oder gar berühren konnten (Celant 198–203). Mit dieser institutionskritischen Arbeit reflektiert Kounellis vor dem Hintergrund der politischen und gesellschaftlichen Ereignisse der 1960er Jahre das tradierte System des Kunstbetriebes: Lebende Tiere werden an einem Ort zu Ausstellungsobjekten, der nicht als Präsentationsraum für Kunstwerke etabliert war. Vertraute Nutz- bzw. Haustiere wurden an einem Platz installiert, der für ihre PS-starken Nachfolger bestimmt ist. Das Konterkarieren und Hinterfragen stereotyper gesellschaftlicher Handlungs- und Wahrnehmungsmuster und das erstmalige Ausstellen lebender Tiere im Kunstkontext macht diese Arbeit zu einem wegweisenden Werk der Kunstgeschichte. Mehrmals installierte (re-enacted) Kounellis seine Arbeit in modifizierter Form, so auch 2006 anlässlich seines 70ten Geburtstages auf der Art Cologne als in den Medien viel beachtetes Highlight der Kunstmesse. Dabei erfuhr das Werk in vielfacher Hinsicht eine Bedeutungsverschiebung: Die Pferde standen in einem großen, abgetrennten Raum an einem Ort, der der Vermarktung von Kunst und der Ökonomie des Kunstbetriebes dient – auch wenn die Arbeit von Kounellis nicht käuflich zu erwerben war. Sie fügte sich nun, wie auch an den anderen Präsentationsorten auf der Biennale in Venedig

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Abb. 3  Jannis Kounellis, Ohne Titel (Dodici Cavalli Vivi), 1969. Installation mit zwölf Pferden, Galeria L’Attico, Rom, © Jannis Kounellis / VG Bild-Kunst 2019; Foto: Claudio Abate

(1976), dem MADRE in Neapel (2006) oder bei Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York (2015), den Strategien des Kunstbetriebes ein, bei gleichzeitigem Verlust seiner ursprünglichen Institutionskritik. Die öffentliche Aufmerksamkeit war dabei jedem Ausstellungsort sicher, nicht zuletzt durch öffentlich formulierte Bedenken von Tierschützern. In Köln war es nicht möglich, anders als im ursprünglichen Installationsaufbau wie in Neapel und New York, die Arbeit zu durchschreiten, sich den Pferden zu nähern oder sie womöglich zu berühren. Auch mussten nach Vorgabe des Veterinäramtes die Pferde, die für die Dauer der Kunstmesse von einem Kölner Reitverein ausgeliehen waren, nach einigen Stunden des Aufenthaltes in der ‚Kunstbox‘ ausgewechselt werden. Ein verändertes Bewusstsein im Umgang mit Tieren auch im künstlerischen Kontext erfordert heute bei der Entwicklung und Präsentation von Kunstwerken mit lebenden Tieren die frühzeitige Berücksichtigung tierschutzrelevanter Aspekte und Maßnahmen, was wiederum Auswirkungen auf die Präsentationsform der Werke haben kann. So konnten die Besucher/innen der Art Cologne die Pferde nur von einem Standpunkt aus und abgetrennt durch eine Kordel einansichtig wie ein lebendes Bild in einem Schaukasten betrachten (VernissageTV). Hier verschränken sich, wie dies John Berger beschreibt, kunstspezifische mit zoospezifischen Präsentationsformen und Sehgewohnheiten: Da wie dort werden Tiere in zugewiesenen Räumen ausgestellt bei bestmöglicher Sicherung der Tiere und Kunstwerke sowie der Besucher/innen. Diese Faktoren lenken und bestimmen die Möglichkeiten der Wahrnehmung der Tiere in ihrem jeweils künstlerischen bzw. künstlichen Habitat. So scheint es nur

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folgerichtig, dass die erste umfassende Untersuchung zum lebenden Tier in der Kunst, die Thomas Zaunschirm 2005 in zwei Bänden des Magazins KUNSTFORUM International vorlegte, den Titel Im Zoo der Kunst trägt. Im zweiten Band ist ein Archiv mit denjenigen Künstler/innen angelegt, die seit den 1960er Jahren mit lebenden Tieren gearbeitet haben („Beginn“; „KünstlerInnen“). Eine Vervollständigung und Aktualisierung dieses Archivs bis zum heutigen Tag steht noch aus. Doch sollten diese Parallelen in der Blickführung der Betrachter/innen und in den Formen der Tierpräsentation im Zoo einerseits und im Kunstraum andererseits nicht vergessen lassen, dass die Tiere in der Kunst neben ihrer leiblichen Präsenz als lebendiges Ready-Made in Installationen oder als (Mit-)Akteure konstituierende Elemente des jeweiligen Werkes sind und entsprechenden Referenzcharakter besitzen. Dies trifft in besonderem Maße auf den lebenden Kojoten in der Aktion I like America and America likes me von Joseph Beuys zu (Abb. 4). Dieser verbrachte anlässlich der Eröffnung der Galerie René Block in New York 1974 drei Tage mit einen handzahmen und leinenführigen Kojoten in dem Galerieraum, der durch einen Drahtzaun in einen Aktions- und einen Besucherbereich untertrennt war (Paust, „Coyote“ 154–169). Die Mehrzahl der Fotografien von dieser Aktion blendet jedoch den trennenden Drahtzaun aus, sodass in der bildlichen Überlieferung der Eindruck eines gitterlosen Raumes suggeriert wird. Beuys ging nicht intentionslos in die Begegnung mit dem Kojoten, sondern er brachte Aktionsobjekte, wie Triangel, Spazierstock, Filzbahnen oder Stapel des Wall

Abb. 4  Joseph Beuys, I like America and America likes me. 1974. Aktion mit einem Kojoten, René Block Gallery, New York, © Joseph Beuys / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019; Foto: Caroline Tisdall; © Caroline Tisdall, London 2019

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Street Journals für seinen im Vorfeld konzipierten Handlungsablauf mit. Seine rituell wirkenden Handlungssequenzen vollzog er gemeinsam mit dem Kojoten ca. dreißigmal während der gesamten Aktion. Diese Begegnung zwischen Mensch und Tier wurde vor allem durch den siebenunddreißig-minütigen Film von Helmut Wietz und die zahlreichen Fotografien von Caroline Tisdall ausführlich dokumentiert, die diese in einer Publikation unter dem Titel Coyote zwei Jahre später veröffentlichte. Die deutsche Übersetzung dieses Buches überarbeitete die Autorin gemeinsam mit Joseph Beuys, wodurch dieser die inhaltlichen Ebenen seiner Aktion und deren Interpretation bereits anlegte. In der visuellen Übermittlung durch die reproduzierten Bilder bestimmen die Anwesenheit des Kojoten und die sich aus seinem Verhalten ergebenden Situationen ebenso stark das Werk wie die Handlungen und der Habitus des Künstlers, der sich darin als „Priester-Schamane-Heiler“ (Wienand 65–97) inszenierte. In der Begegnung und dem angestrebten Dialog zwischen Beuys und dem Kojoten verdichtet sich der Traum von einem pseudoparadiesischen Naturzustand als Ausweg aus einer – nach Beuys – erkrankten Entwicklung der westlichen, industrialisierten Welt. Dabei nimmt der Kojote als vielschichtige Projektionsfläche eine gewichtige Rolle ein: als Träger spiritueller Kräfte, als Synonym für „wilde Natur“ und Gegenbild zum vernunftgesteuerten, seelisch verkümmerten Menschen der ökonomisierten Welt, als Symbol für die Indianer in Amerika, die diskriminiert und verfolgt wurden, oder als Referenzfigur für Grenzüberschreitungen. Erstmalig in der Geschichte der bildenden Kunst erfolgte eine Auflösung des Objektstatus des Tieres als Ready-Made und das Tier – der Kojote – tritt als handelndes Subjekt in Interaktion mit dem Künstler auf der Bühne der Kunst auf. So verschränken sich in dieser Aktion zwei Raumdispositive, die die Schaustellung des Tieres einerseits und die Freistellung von Kunst im White Cube (Kravagna 302–305) andererseits miteinander verkreuzen, wie dies Esther Köhring darlegt (84–93). Ausgehend von den ikonischen Bildern, in denen die Aktion I like America and America likes me in überlieferter Form tradiert ist, setzt sie den Aktionsraum in Analogie zu einem Bühnenraum im Theater, auf dem das Tier als Bühnen- bzw. „ausgewildertes“ Theatertier eine dem Zoo vergleichbare Zurschaustellung erfährt. Der Zuschauer im Zoo, Theater oder bei performativen Aufführungen blickt auf das Geschehen in einem definierten und gestalteten Raum, wobei ein Zurückblicken des animalischen Akteurs grundsätzlich möglich ist. John Berger spricht zwar von der Unfähigkeit zur Blickerwiderung des Tieres aufgrund seiner Zurückdrängung aus seinem natürlichen Lebensumfeld und seiner Zurschaustellung im Zoo: „Doch nirgends im Zoo kann ein Fremder dem Blick eines Tieres begegnen. […] Die Tiere blicken aus den Augenwinkeln heraus. Sie sehen blind in die Ferne. Sie suchen alles mechanisch ab. Sie sind Begegnungen gegenüber immunisiert …“. Die letzte Konsequenz ihrer Verdrängung sei die Auslöschung des Blickes zwischen Tier und Mensch, so Berger (38). Ganz anders interpretiert Caroline Tisdall das Verhalten des handzahmen Kojoten, der für die Aktion von einem Tierverleih gemietet wurde und mit einer Sondergenehmigung in das Stadtzentrum von New York transportiert werden durfte. Sie bezeichnet den an Menschen gewöhnten Kojoten, der den Namen ‚Little John‘ trägt, mit

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stark anthropomorphisierender Tendenz als einen ausgezeichneten „Showman“, dessen Routine und Timing nie witzlos gewesen seien. „Manchmal riß er die Show total an sich, hin und her streifend, ab und zu anhaltend, um den hinstarrenden Besuchern ihren Blick zurückzugeben, um dann unvermittelt diejenige gemeine Miene aufzusetzen, die seine Zuschauer wohl von ihm erwarten mochten.“ (Tisdall 7). Was in einem Tier vorgehen mag, wenn der Blick des Menschen den Blick des Tieres im Zoo oder im Kunstwerk trifft, muss der Spekulation oder zukünftiger wissenschaftlicher Forschung überlassen bleiben. Generell ist über eine visuelle Kontaktaufnahme zwischen tierischen Akteur/ innen und Zuschauer/innen hinaus auch eine körperliche Begegnung durch Berührung möglich: in Theateraufführungen (Fischer-Lichte 58–126), bei der Zoohaltungsform des ‚Parks‘ oder in Kunstwerken mit lebenden Tieren, wie z. B. bei der von Jannis Kounellis in Rom (1969), Neapel (2006) und New York (2015) oder in der Arbeit Untilled von Pierre Huyghe auf der dOCUMENTA (13). Dies ist allerdings oft nicht erwünscht oder zur Sicherheit von Mensch und Tier verboten, ebenso wie das Berühren von Kunstwerken in den Ausstellungsräumen meistens untersagt ist. In der Beuys’schen Aktion vollzieht sich eine Verschränkung von Bühne als Ort des Agierens von Künstler und Tier und dem White Cube als idealen, leeren, scheinbar neutralen Raum der Kunst, wie ihn 1976 Brian O’Doherty (Kemp 7–137) definierte. Der Galerieraum in New York thematisiert somit das Wechselspiel von Dekontextualisierung und Kontextfeedback und folglich das Schwanken des (Bühnen-)Tieres zwischen Referenz und Präsenz, da in ihm die theatralen Raumordnungen des fiktionalen/referenziellen und faktisch/materiellen zusammenfallen (Köhring 87–88). Dabei ist jedoch grundsätzlich zu bedenken, dass gerade die Analyse der Aktion I like America and America likes me – wie der meisten Aktionen und Installationen – allein anhand des überlieferten Bildmaterials erfolgt. Die Rezeption ephemerer Werke mit lebenden Tieren erfolgt in der Regel anhand reproduzierter Bilder einer Begegnung zwischen Mensch und Tier, die konstituierender Bestandteil der hier beispielhaft angeführten K ­ unstwerke ist. Dabei ist Filmmaterial, im Gegensatz zur heutigen Verfügbarkeit von bewegten Bildern im Internet, in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren noch relativ selten und im Falle von Beuys entstand ein Film als komprimierter Zusammenschnitt seiner dreitägigen Aktion. Dieser erfolgte in Absprache mit dem Künstler, ebenso wie die nachträgliche Überführung des Farbfilmes in eine Schwarzweißversion. Damit ist ein durch Beuys autorisierter und intendierter Blick auf die Aktion (vor)gegeben. Ebenso liegt durch die gemeinsame Auswahl der Fotografien von Caroline ­Tisdall für ihr Buch Coyote ein Kompendium von Bildern vor, das die Sicht auf die Aktion geprägt hat, bekräftigt durch die begleitenden Erläuterungen von Beuys und Tisdall. Die Frage, ob Fotografien, die ein Ereignis in die Zweidimensionalität eines Bildes übertragen, durch diese Form des Abstrahierens sogar eine Urheberrechtsverletzung des Kunstwerkes – der Aktion – selbst darstellen, führte im Mai 2011 am Beispiel einer anderen Aktion von Joseph Beuys zu einer höchstrichterlichen Entscheidung am Bundesgerichtshof in Karlsruhe (Paust, „Rechtsgeschichte“ 75–81).

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Grundsätzlich stellt sich somit – anders als im Zoo – in der Kunst die Frage nach den Möglichkeiten der Wahrnehmung ortsspezifischer Installationen und Aktionen in ihrer Echtzeit-Präsenz einerseits und in ihren überlieferten Bildern andererseits. Meistens operiert die Kunstgeschichte in ihren Untersuchungen mit der bildlich tradierten Version eines temporären Werkes; selten ist eine direkte Augenzeugenschaft gegeben. So müssen sich Analysen von Kunstwerken, wie hier die von Kounellis und Beuys, auf die mehr oder weniger ergiebigen bildlichen wie schriftlichen Quellen stützen. Hierbei findet jedoch die affektive Wirkung von performativer und installativer Kunst mit lebenden Tieren bisher keine Berücksichtigung. Wenn Tiere ins Spiel kommen, scheinen Emotionen und Affekte der Zuschauer/innen oder Besucher/innen – wie Faszination, Angst, Wut, Schock, Entzückung, Ärger oder Ekel usw. – jedoch vorprogrammiert zu sein. Dies ist neben dem Museum hinlänglich aus dem Zoo oder Zirkus bekannt. Auf dem Feld der zeitgenössischen Kunst ist somit eine hohe Aufmerksamkeit und Sensibilität gefordert, um aktuelle Kunstereignisse mit lebenden Tieren selbst vor Ort in ihrer Echtzeit-Präsenz zu erleben und sie in allen ihren Dimensionen zu erfahren, zu dokumentieren und zu erforschen. Die grundlegende Frage nach der Ausstellbarkeit von Tieren im White Cube des Museums wurde erneut anlässlich der Arbeit SOMA von Carsten Höller im Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – in Berlin 2010 aufgeworfen

Abb. 5  Carsten Höller: Soma, 2010. Zwölf männliche kastrierte Rentiere, Rentierurin, Fliegenpilze (gefroren und getrocknet), acht Gefrierwürfel, zwei Kühlaggregate, Schnee, zwei Hausfliegen mit unbestimmtem Geschlecht, acht Monitore, zwei Kameras, Gerüst, Zaun, Futtertröge, Rentierfutter, Tränken, Wasser, Urinschaufel, Lederhalfter, verschiedene Laborgeräte, Verbundglas, Spiegelfolie, Baufolie, Teppich, Holzspäne. Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin. Courtesy the artist; © Carsten Höller; Foto: Attilio Maranzano

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(Abb. 5). SOMA sorgte mit seinen Rentieren aus einem brandenburgischen ­Tierpark zur Weihnachtszeit für großes öffentliches Aufsehen: Die Medien titelten „Das Museum als Tierpark“ (Kuhn), „Tiere im Museum“ (Storm) oder „Rentiere blicken dich an“ (Buhr). Zeitweise bildeten sich lange Besucherschlangen vor dem Museumseingang, um das Spektakel im Museum zu erleben. Carsten Höller, Künstler und Naturwissenschaftler, schuf für drei Monate im Museum eine komplexe Installation als zweiteilige Versuchsanordnung mit lebenden Tieren (Kittelmann und Brill 36–41). Die große Mittelhalle des Museums war in zwei Versuchsterrains unterteilt, in denen je sechs Rentiere, vier Mäuse, zwölf Kanarienvögel und eine Fliege für die Laufzeit der Ausstellung lebten. Die Besucher/innen konnten links und rechts des zweigeteilten Mittelgeheges, das durch einen Metallzaun mit zusätzlichem Elektrodraht gesichert war, die Rentiere betrachten. Außerdem ermöglichte eine erhöht errichtete Tribüne dem/der Besucher/in einen umfassenden Blick auf das Kunstwerk und für 1000,- € konnte man für eine Nacht direkt in der Installation ein Bett auf einer Empore buchen. Apathisch wirkende Rentiere, so war mein Eindruck beim mehrmaligem Besuch der Ausstellung, lagen dösend im Sägemehl oder bewegten sich langsam durch den ihnen zugewiesenen Raum. Vogelgezwitscher belebte akustisch die Szenerie und vermischte sich mit dem Grundgemurmel der Besucher/innen, während ein strenger Geruch die Museumshalle erfüllte. Und über allem thronte der Mensch, entweder auf der Besuchertribüne oder des Nachts auf der Empore inmitten der Installation, umhüllt von schwarzer Bettwäsche, wenn man sich dieses Erlebnis leisten konnte. Erhoben über dem irdisch-animalischen Treiben konnten gerade finanzstarke Besucher/innen – das Bett war schnell ausgebucht – auf die Geschöpfe unter ihnen herabblicken, wie einst die höfische Gesellschaft vom Balkon des Mittelpavillons der Menagerie von Versailles auf die Tiere in ihren Höfen. Die situationsgebundene Begegnung zwischen Mensch und Tier und deren gegenseitige Wahrnehmung als Konstante von Werken der Kunst erhält in SOMA durch das Wissen um den gleichnamigen Trank nomadisierender Stämme Nordindiens eine die Betrachtung der ausgestellten Tiere erweiternde Dimension. Dieser Trank, der aus Fliegenpilzen und aus dem Urin der Rentiere nach dem Fressen von Fliegenpilzen gewonnen wird, soll bei den Konsumenten/innen eine psychedelische Wirkung erzeugen, was jedoch von der Wissenschaft weder eindeutig bewiesen noch widerlegt ist. Die eine Hälfte der ausgestellten Tiere erhielt, so Carsten Höller, Zugang zu der sagenumwobenen Substanz, ohne dass jedoch ersichtlich wurde, ob und welche Tiere den Trank zu sich nahmen. Nun schwang in der Beobachtung der Tiere in der Installation SOMA immer auch die Frage nach einer möglichen Veränderung ihres Verhaltens mit, je nachdem welcher Gruppe die animalischen Probanden zugeordnet gewesen sein mögen. Diese Perspektiven der Betrachtung – subjektiv-emotional, kunsthistorischästhetisch und wissenschaftlich-empirisch – charakterisieren das Kunstwerk und lassen es zu einer hybriden Konstellation zwischen Natur, Wissenschaft und Kunst werden, das zu einer Überprüfung bestehender Vorurteile über Kunst und Naturwissenschaften anregen sollte (Dickel 57). Eine solche Überprüfung sollte allerdings die Existenz der die Installation konstituierenden Tiere miteinbeziehen und ihren Status und ihre Funktion innerhalb des Werkes berücksichtigen. Sie ver-

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körpern in SOMA einmal mehr das Stereotyp des lebenden Tieres in der Kunst als ästhetisch und inhaltlich konnotiertes Material der Kunst und weisen zugleich durch ihre Anwesenheit auf die Instrumentalisierung des Tieres in der wissenschaftlichen Forschung. Im Jahr 1997 realisierten Carsten Höller und Rosemarie Trockel für die dOCUMENTA X in Kassel ihre speziell auf eine visuelle Tier-Begegnung ausgerichtete Arbeit Ein Haus für Schweine und Menschen. Das Gebäude war ein schlichter Betonquader, der im Inneren durch eine große Glasscheibe in zwei Raumkompartimente unterteilt war. Der eine Bereich mit einer schrägen Ebene mit Matten war den Menschen vorbehalten. Im anderen Gebäudeteil mit angrenzendem Auslauf lebte für die Zeit der dOCUMENTA X eine Schweinefamilie der Bentheimer Landrasse. Das Haus wurde auf der Basis neuester wissenschaftlicher und ökologischer Tierhaltung entwickelt und sollte den Schweinen optimale Lebensbedingungen bieten (Höller und Trockel 7–12). Wie häufig in heutigen Zoologischen Gärten konnten die Besucher/innen des hybriden Kunst-NutzRaumes durch eine Fensterscheibe in den Stall und das Gehege der Schweine blicken. Den Schweinen war es jedoch, im Gegensatz zu Präsentationsformen in Zoologischen Gärten, aufgrund der einseitigen Verspiegelung der trennenden Glasscheibe nicht möglich, die Menschen optisch wahrzunehmen. Ein möglicher Blickkontakt zwischen Mensch und Tier war damit per se ausgeschlossen. Die visuelle Begegnung war eine einseitige von Mensch zu Tier: Wie in einem Schauoder Guckkasten konnten die Besucher/innen die Schweinefamilie in ihrem optimierten Stall betrachten. Das lebende Bild war durch das Verhalten der Schweine in ständiger Bewegung und nicht durch die Anwesenheit der Besucher/innen beeinflusst. Als Gegenbild zur industriellen Massentierhaltung von Schweinen spitzt diese Arbeit durch die einseitige Blickrichtung die konstante Mensch-TierDichotomie der Menschheitsgeschichte zu: Der Blick des Tieres geht nicht einmal mehr „blind in die Ferne“, wie es John Berger beschreibt, sondern jeglicher Blickkontakt zwischen Tier und Mensch ist ausgelöscht. Tiere in ihrer Leibhaftigkeit sind schon längst in der Kunst und damit im Betriebssystem Kunst – in Museen, Galerien oder auf Messen und Biennalen – angekommen. Werke mit lebenden Tieren sichern Besucher- und ­Medieninteresse, wie die dOCUMENTA 13 im Jahr 2012 bewies, die die besucherstärkste in der Geschichte dieses Kunst-Großereignisses war. Der wesentliche k­ uratorische Leitfaden war für die Leiterin der dOCUMENTA Carolyn Christov-­Bakargievs die Anerkennung nichtmenschlicher Lebewesen in ihren Fähigkeiten zu Kommunikation, Wahrnehmung und Handlung. Der Blick des Tieres auf die Welt sollte dabei eine zentrale Rolle spielen, um – in Anlehnung an Michel Serres und Bruno Latour – den anthropozentrischen Blick, der den Menschen und seine Sicht auf die Welt in den Mittelpunkt stellt, weitestmöglich aufzulösen (Buchmann 128). Diese Intention hat am überzeugendsten der französische Künstler Pierre Huyghe mit seiner Arbeit Untilled erfüllt die zugleich das mediale Highlight der dOCUMENTA 13 war (Kasselmenta; Doctv13). Er hatte in ­ einer verlassenen Kompostierungsanlage ein umzäuntes Areal als Environment geschaffen: mit Abfall, unterschiedlichen Tieren und Pflanzen, einer liegenden Skulptur als Habitat für ein Bienenvolk und zwei Hunden der spanischen Rasse

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„Podenco“. Die weiße Hündin, die den Namen „Human“ trägt, war mit ihrem pink gefärbten Vorderbein der Star der Kunstschau und Garant für medienwirksame Bilder. Gemeinsam mit einem jungen Podenco war sie zusammen mit den Bienen der sichtbare, animalische Part des Environments. Die werkbildenden Subjekte – menschliche und nichtmenschliche Lebewesen – formten mit Pflanzen und Objekten einen vernetzten Organismus, der im Zusammenspiel aller Komponenten zur Auflösung der Kultur-Natur-Dichotomie führte, wie sie Bruno Latour in seiner „Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie“ entwickelt hat (Hantelmann 228–233). Die in die Arbeit involvierten Tiere konnten sich frei als „Aktanten“ bewegen, wobei die Hunde als Bezugsperson mit enger sozialer Bindung ihren Besitzer stets um sich hatten. Untilled von Pierre Huyghe ist ein weiterer Meilenstein in der Entwicklung des Ausstellens von lebenden Tieren in der Kunst und für den aktuellen Paradigmenwechsel in der Mensch-Tier-Beziehung: Die Tiere hatten im Rahmen der Gesamtinstallation größtmögliche Bewegungs- und Verhaltensfreiheit mit entsprechenden, vom Menschen nicht einsehbaren Rückzugsmöglichkeiten. Somit wich der Rahmen um das Tier, der bei Kounellis, Beuys, Höller und Trockel noch durch die Gehegehaltung existierte, einem nicht mehr anthropozentrischen Blick auf Wirklichkeit, indem das Tier als nichtmenschliches Individuum und agierendes Subjekt (Kurth u. a. 7–42) im Zentrum des Kunstwerks steht. Der Künstler überlässt – im Rahmen der tierschutzrechtlichen und örtlichen Gegebenheiten – den Tieren und der Natur sowie den Besucher/innen das Feld, sodass sich vielfältige Begegnungen zwischen Publikum und Tieren im direkten Gegenüber und Miteinander intentionslos entwickeln können. Kunst als Spiegelbild und Resonanzboden gesellschaftlicher Themen und Entwicklungen hat lebende Tiere seit den 1960er Jahren nicht nur in den Fokus genommen, weil dies erst durch die Entstehung neuer Kunstformen, wie Performance- und Installationskunst, möglich wurde. Vielmehr ist es die zunehmende Bewusstwerdung und vor allem Infragestellung der über Jahrtausende gelebten Hybris des Menschen in seiner Beziehung zum Tier, die den Einzug des realen Tieres in die Kunst bewirkte und aktuell verstärkt. Das lebende Tier in den Ausstellungsräumen des Museums ist immer ein ausgestelltes Lebewesen, vergleichbar den Tieren in Zoologischen Gärten. Untersuchungen sowohl für Kunstmuseen (Rauterberg) wie für Zoologische Gärten (Benz-Schwarzburg und Leitsberger 18) haben ergeben, dass dabei die Verweildauer der Besucher/innen durchaus identisch ist – sie währt jeweils nur wenige Sekunden vor Kunstobjekten oder Tiergehegen. Auch sind die Methoden der Zurschaustellung von Tieren in ihrer Grunddisposition – Schaukasten, Bühne, Park – weitgehend als Rahmen der Präsentation vergleichbar. Die Ausformungen und Gestaltungen des künstlichen bzw. künstlerischen Habitats sowie die Intentionen des Ausstellens jedoch sind äußerst unterschiedlich. Die Auswahl und damit Ausstellbarkeit der Tierarten für ein Kunstwerk jenseits inhaltlicher Konnotationen hat dabei Auswirkung auf die Aussage des Werkes: Es ist ein Unterschied, ob Rentiere, die es gewöhnt sind, betrachtet zu werden, in einem Gehege, wie in der Arbeit SOMA von Carsten Höller, zu ­Ausstellungszwecken gehalten werden (müssen), oder den Tieren als „Aktanten“

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bestmögliche Freiheit gewährt werden kann und soll wie den Hunden und Bienen in der Arbeit Untilled von Pierre Huyghe. Auf die Existenz von lebenden Tieren als Kunstwerke ist das Kunstmuseum (noch) nicht eingerichtet. Tiere stören eher die Normalität des Museums, das nach wie vor auf traditionelle – leblose – Artefakte ausgerichtet ist. Der dem Museum eingeschriebene Auftrag zum Sammeln und Bewahren würde bei Kunstwerken mit lebenden Tieren eine große Herausforderung und Ausweitung der musealen Standardaufgaben darstellen, vorausgesetzt die Kunstwerke sind nicht auf einmalige Präsentation angelegt. Bei Ohne Titel (Dodici Cavalli Vivi) von Jannis Kounellis und Untilled von Pierre Huyghe ist die Wiederholbarkeit durch Re-enactments vom Künstler vorgesehen. Auch die Frage nach dem authentischen und urheberrechtlich geschützten Werk müsste, wie auch bei anderen zeitgenössischen Kunstformen im öffentlichen Raum der Straße oder des Internets, neu definiert werden. Die „Konservierung“ von ephemeren Kunstwerken durch Formen der Dokumentation ist im Museumsalltag hingegen hinlänglich bekannt. Tiere erfordern und schaffen Bedingungen, die per se museumsfern sind: Tiere bewegen sich, machen Geräusche und Gerüche, müssen gefüttert und gepflegt werden und produzieren Exkremente. Die Haltungsvoraussetzungen gehen oft nicht konform mit den konservatorischen musealen Bedingungen. Das Ausstellen von Tieren unterliegt notwendigen tierschutzrechtlichen Auflagen, ruft jedoch häufig Tierschützer/innen auf den Plan, die beim Ausstellen von Tieren Tierschutzrechtsverletzungen vermuten. Das Tier im geschützten White Cube des Museums scheint schutzbedürftiger zu sein als im „realen“ Leben und es verbreitet durch sein Ausgestellt-Sein ein unwiderstehliches Faszinosum. Die Frage an die Institution Museum muss sein, ob und wie eine interdisziplinäre, offene und kritische Auseinandersetzung mit lebenden Tieren in Werken der Kunst möglich ist.

Literatur Baratay, Eric, und Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier. Zoo – A History of Zoological Gardens in the West. Reaktion Books, 2004. Benz-Schwarzburg, Judith, und Madelaine Leitsberger. „Zoos zwischen Artenschutz und Disneyworld.“ Zoo, Themenheft Tierstudien, Nr. 7, 2015, S. 17–30. Berger, John. „Warum sehen wir Tiere an?“ Das Leben der Bilder oder die Kunst des Sehens, hg. v. Berger, Wagenbach, 1986, S. 13–38. Beuys, Joseph, Künstler. „I like America and America likes me“. One week’s performance on the occasion of the opening of the René Block Gallery, New York, May 1974. Film von Helmut Wietz, Galerie René Block und Helmut Wietz/Common Film Produktion, 1981. Buchmann, Sabeth. „(Kunst-)Kritik in kollaborativen Zusammenhängen.“ Kunst und Wirklichkeit heute: Affirmation – Kritik – Transformation, hg. v. Lotte Everts u. a., Transcript, 2015, S. 125–141. Buhr, Elke. „Rentiere blicken dich an.“ Monopol Magazin für Kunst und Leben, 3. Nov. 2010, www.monopol-magazin.de/rentiere-blicken-dich. Buttlar, Adrian von. Der Landschaftsgarten: Gartenkunst des Klassizismus und der Romantik. DuMont, 1989.

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Celant, Germano. „Jannis Kounellis: Ohne Titel (Dodici Cavalli Vivi), Rom, 1969.“ Die Kunst der Ausstellung: Eine Dokumentation dreißig exemplarischer Kunstausstellungen dieses Jahrhunderts, hg. v. Bernd Klüser und Katharina Hegewisch, Insel, 1991, S. 198–203. Dickel, Hans. Natur in der zeitgenössischen Kunst: Konstellationen jenseits von Landschaft und Materialästhetik. Edition Metzel, 2016, S. 57. Dittrich, Lothar. „Die Geschichte der Zoologischen Gärten in Deutschland.“ Zootierhaltung: Tiere in menschlicher Obhut, hg. v. Dittrich und Gunther Nogge, Europa-Lehrmittel Nourney, 2012. Doctv13. „dOCUMENTA (13) ‚Untilled‘ von Pierre Huyghe.“ YouTube, Offener Kanal Kassel, 23. Aug. 2012, youtu.be/mEjEy3RY37o. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Ästhetik des Performativen. Suhrkamp, 2014. Fontaine, Jean de la. Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon. Edition Stéréotype d’après le procédé de Firmin Didot, 1669. Goldner, Colin. „Zoo.“ Lexikon der Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen, hg. v. Arianna Ferrari und Klaus Petrus, Transcript, 2015, S. 438–441. Hantelmann, Dorothea von. „Denken der Ankunft: Pierre Huyghes Untilled.“ Kunst und Wirklichkeit heute: Affirmation – Kritik – Transformation, hg. v. Lotte Everts u. a., Transcript, 2015, S. 223–239. Heesen, Anke te. Theorie des Museums – Zur Einführung. Junius, 2012. Hölck, Anne. „Lebende Bilder und täglich wilde Szenen: Tiere im Maßstab von Zooarchitektur.“ Zoo, Themenheft Tierstudien, Nr. 7, 2015, S. 131–143. Höller, Carsten, und Rosemarie Trockel. Ein Haus für Schweine und Menschen. König, 1997. Kasselmenta. „Windhündin Human genervt von documenta-Besucher – Karlsaue in Kassel, dOCUMENTA (13) 2012.“ YouTube, Video-Berichterstattung aus Kassel, 05. Aug. 2012, youtu.be/vZ0LR20J2MA. Kemp, Wolfgang, Hg. Brian O’Doherty: In der weißen Zelle – Inside the White Cube. Merve, 1996. Kittelmann, Udo, und Dorothée Brill, Hg. Carsten Höller: SOMA: Dokumente/Documents. Hatje Cantz, 2010. Köhring, Esther. „Habitat Bühne: Theatertheriotopologie in Joseph Beuys: I like America and America likes me (1974).“ Tier und Raum, Themenheft Tierstudien, Nr. 6, 2014, S. 84–93. Kravagna, Christian. „White Cube.“ DuMonts Begriffslexikon zur zeitgenössischen Kunst, hg. v. Hubertus Butin, DuMont, 2002, S. 302–305. Kuhn, Nicola. „Das Museum als Tierpark.“ ZEIT ONLINE, 4. Nov. 2010, https://www.zeit.de/ kultur/2010-11/tiere-hamburger-bahnhof. Kurth, Markus, u. a. „Handeln nichtmenschliche Tiere? Eine Einführung in die Forschung zu tierlicher Agency.“ Das Handeln der Tiere: Tierliche Agency im Fokus der Human-Animal Studies, hg. v. Sven Wirth u. a., Transcript, 2015, S. 7–42. Meuser, Natascha. Architektur im Zoo: Theorie und Geschichte einer Bautypologie. DOM, 2017. Paust, Bettina. „Eine Aktion und ihre fotografische Spur schreiben Rechtsgeschichte: Joseph Beuys, Manfred Tischer und eine Installation von Bachmann & Banz.“ Caroline Bachmann und Stefan Banz – Das Schweigen der Junggesellen, hg. v. Stiftung Museum Schloss Moyland, Verl. f. Moderne Kunst, 2014, S. 75–81. Paust, Bettina. Studien zur barocken Menagerie im deutschsprachigen Raum. Werner, 1996. Paust, Bettina. „Was sprachen Beuys und der Kojote? Die Aktion ‚Coyote. I like America and America likes me‘ und das lebende Tier in der zeitgenössischen Kunst.“ Mensch und Tier – Eine paradoxe Beziehung, hg. v. Stiftung Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Hatje Cantz, 2002, S. 154–169. Rauterberg, Hanno. „Und die Herzen schlagen höher.“ ZEIT ONLINE Kultur, 19. Apr. 2012, www.zeit.de/2012/17/Museumbesuch-Studie. Rieke-Müller, Annelore. „Das zahme Wildtier – Repräsentant seiner Art und besserer Mensch? Der Zoologische Garten als Lernort im 19. Jahrhundert.“ Tiere: Eine andere Anthropologie, hg. v. Hartmut Böhme u. a., Böhlau, 2014, S. 117–131.

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Human-Elephant Encounters in Music

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Martin Ullrich

Elephants and human music have been related in various cultures and various historical situations. This paper mainly tries to explore some of the connections between elephants and music in Western culture and some of the encounters between elephants and humans that have been generated or furthered by Western music. The term “encounters” has figured prominently in several publications that deal with human-animal interaction. In his introduction to Animal Encounters (Tyler and Rossini), Tom Tyler has shown that human encounters with animals historically covered a broad range from antagonistic to harmonious interactions, highlighting the possibility of agonistic encounters in a Foucauldian sense (1–2). Tyler writes, “The camel has long been portrayed as an irritable, ill-tempered creature, whose relations with others are fractious and antagonistic. Foucault highlighted the distinction, however, between antagonism and agonism …” (1). This refers to Foucault’s definition of agonism in “The Subject and Power”: At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential freedom, it would be better to speak of an “agonism”–of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle, less of a face-to-face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation. (790)

Clearly, Foucault originally aims exclusively at humans, but Tyler’s application of the concept of agonism to the relations between different species is very convincing. While in this specific case a camel (whom Tyler finds in Rudyard Kipling’s story “How the Camel Got His Hump”) is the agonistic animal, we may well transfer the agonistic stance to elephants, who historically have been even

M. Ullrich (*)  Nürnberg, Deutschland E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_18

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more resistant to all attempts of domestication than camels. So, my use of the term ‘encounters’ relates to this agonistic interpretation, but also to Barbara Smuts’ 2001 article “Encounters with Animal Minds”, where Smuts bridges scientific ethology and empathic intersubjectivity: Ample evidence exists that when people have extended opportunities to co-exist with wild animals, profound relationships based on mutual trust (as with the baboons), or at least mutual understanding (as with the chimpanzee Goblin) can develop. With such prolonged exposure, members of two different species can co-create shared conventions that help to regulate interspecies encounters (302).

These approaches to interspecies encounters lay emphasis on the reciprocal character of the interaction. Nevertheless, when it comes to the effects of music, one has to be well aware that there is a strong Western tradition of constructing the identity and subjectivity of single individuals by referring to aesthetic experiences through music and their influence on the individual’s emotions, thoughts and actions. Therefore, as a musicologist, I am going to focus on the aesthetic experience of listening to organized sound and to musical artifacts as a means of constructing identity and difference while at the same time bearing in mind the above definitions of animal encounters. When we construct ourselves as Western cultural beings, one of the building blocks is our perception of and reflection on music. I would like to discuss whether elephants as actors in human-animal cultures undergo the same (or, at least, analogous) processes. What happens when elephants listen to human music? What happens when they have to perform to this music? How is the concept of being a listening subject challenged by applying it to nonhumans? A recent example for an artwork that deals with these questions is the 2014 documentary Music for Elephants, directed by Amanda Feldon. Featured here are, among others, the British pianist Paul Barton and the Thai retired working elephant Pla-Ra. Pla-Ra was blinded by working in the timber industry, and his former owner cut off his tusks and sold them. In an interview passage at the beginning of the film, Barton describes how he would play piano for Pla-Ra, and how the 45-year-old elephant would stop eating and listen to, for example, the slow movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique. The viewer also watches Barton and Pla-Ra standing face to face to each other, with Barton playing a flute and Pla-Ra listening. Barton comments on several of these encounters: Each time I played music for Pla-Ra – I would play sometimes in the forest at night, I would play sometimes the flute, or piano – and each time, there was an identical reaction: Pla-Ra would stand for a while, and then he would curl his trunk and hold his trunk in his mouth until the piece was over. No matter how long that piece was, he would stay like that, and we could see on the video his trunk was trembling. As soon as I stopped, he would let his trunk out and reach out for the musical instrument, and you could touch his trunk, and that would be it. But the mahouts said that was the only time he did that. They had never seen him doing that before.

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There are manifold layers of implications in Feldon’s film concerning cultural human-animal relations. The documentary deals, besides many other aspects, with pleasure, guilt, exploitation and reconciliation. Here I would just like to take the described scene as a starting point for the exploration of the phenomenon of elephants as audiences and the construction of elephant subjectivities through making them listen and react to human music. While Paul Barton’s approach to making music for elephants, as it is featured in the film, has some unique aspects, it is not new in principle. On the contrary, it seems that from the moment elephants became present in Western culture, music played a role in integrating those apparently monstrous and alien creatures into the existing framework. Before we come to this specifically musical discourse, it may be worthwhile to spend a few thoughts on the general context of human-elephant interactions in Western history. If we go back as far as antiquity, we can notice that elephants as a species enter the classical world relatively late. Otto Körner in his exhaustive work on Homeric animals bluntly registers that the Homeric Greeks obviously didn’t know anything about elephants (53). The soldiers of Alexander the Great were the first Europeans to encounter the massive impact of war elephants. That lead to the rather unusual situation that Roman and Hellenistic thinkers could not build on a classical Greek discourse about elephants. So the pachyderms, in contrast to many other animal species, were constructed from scratch as cultural beings in the Hellenistic and Roman period. This situation generated an extraordinary degree of ambiguity. As Jo-Ann Shelton has demonstrated, Roman citizens have seen elephants mainly as enemies: Like other wild species, such as lions and bears, elephants were placed in arenas and killed in spectacles which demonstrated the Romans’ ability to dominate nature. In these situations, the animals were looked upon as representatives of a natural world which was wild, alien and hostile to human endeavors, and which therefore deserved to be destroyed. (“Elephants as Enemies in Ancient Rome” 5).

This status of enemies has several causes. As elephants were never fully domesticated, they always belonged to the realm of wild animals who generally were seen as adversaries to the societies of humans and domesticated animals. Furthermore, as war elephants they joined the coalitions of Rome’s most dangerous enemies (like Pyrrhus and Hannibal). Killing elephants in war or, after making them prisoners of war, in the arena was a demonstration of controlling the forces of nature and of crushing the military power of Rome’s opponents at the same time. On the other hand, Aelian in his On the Characteristics of Animals gives us the following account: 11. Touching the sagacity of Elephants I have spoken elsewhere; and further, I have spoken too of the manner of hunting them, mentioning but a few of the numerous facts recorded by others. For the present I intend to speak of their sense for music and their readiness to obey and their aptitude for learning things which are difficult even for

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­ ankind, to say nothing of so huge an animal and one hitherto so fierce to encounter. m The movements of a chorus, the steps of a dance, how to march in time, how to enjoy the sound of flutes, how to distinguish different notes, when to slacken pace as permitted or when to quicken at command—all these things the Elephant has learnt and knows how to do, and does accurately without making mistakes. Thus, while nature has created him to be the largest of animals, learning has rendered him the most gentle and docile. (101–103)

Therefore, when we compare Shelton’s and Aelian’s positions, the relationship between elephants and music in classical Rome turns out to be ambiguous. Following Jo-Ann Shelton, the subjugation to torture and killing is interconnected with the subjugation of dancing elephants to human music as a means of ridiculing them (“Dancing and Dying” 474). We have to bear in mind that many Romans not only found amusement in making animals obey, listen and perform to human utterances, but also often reacted with amusement to the killing and torturing of animals (and humans) in the arena. Let us for a moment leave the Roman circuses and arenas and think about performative situations and power relations in Western music in general. In many parts of the world music is performed as a social interaction between active participants. Only the specific European tradition has created such a clear dichotomy of musicians vs. listeners. As I have already pointed out, being part of an audience, acquiring experience and expertise as a listener in this tradition contributes to the constructed identity of a cultural being. Still, it gets even more complicated: in the Western dichotomic performer-audience model, relationships tend to be either more horizontal or more vertical. To put it simply: if the relationship between the performers and the audience is horizontal, the social practice of making music exerts no power on the participants (or at least, no obvious power). If the relationship is vertically structured, music—more precisely, the social practice of musical performance—constitutes a hierarchical relationship. It is important to understand that in several cultural contexts this hierarchy can put either the performers or the audience on top of the aesthetic and social food chain. Sometimes, as in the case of court musicians in the early modern period, the audience dominates the performers. In other historical situations, the performers dominate their audience, for example in the Romantic era of the 19th century with its virtuoso cult and its religious overtones. Returning to the special case of music for elephants, the classical sources hint at a deep interconnection between killing elephants and subjugating them to music, while at the same time the musical experience seems to be able to elevate the elephants to a higher cultural status. Perhaps this ambiguity is not so much a special case of Roman history, but a hidden leitmotif of human music education for elephants. Robert Delort in The Life and Lore of the Elephant postulates a progress from the murderous Roman arena to the menageries and circuses of the 19th century: “This affinity with people was particularly obvious on stage, where elephants struck ludicrous or clownish poses and mimicked audiences that reacted, not with primitive savagery and bloodlust, but with the benign gentleness of laughter.” (92) Actually, one can have reasonable doubt whether human audiences in the 19th century differed so much from antique Roman ones as Delort suggests.

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Nevertheless, there have been modern attempts to constitute a more horizontal relationship between human musicians and elephant audiences. In 1794, the Jardin des plantes was founded in Paris. The concept aimed at an emancipatory transformation of the former royal menageries into a republican institution. In 1798, musicians from the (also newly founded) conservatoire of Paris gave a concert for the two elephants in the Jardin des plantes, Marguerite and Hanz. While the performance aimed at testing the reactions of musically naïve recipients, it seemingly started a process of enculturation for the non-human listeners. Marguerite and Hanz are granted a rudimentary subjectivity by being elevated to the status of concert audience. Musical experience that the two elephants gained through their encounter with human music here quite obviously can be seen as a kind of acquisition of individuality. The concert is well documented by Georges Toscan’s article in the Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique (1798). Toscan sees the concert as a scientific experiment, and he favours this ethological approach over anatomical research and especially over vivisection: “[…] je crois qu’il est plus raisonnable, et sur-tout plus humain, d’etudier les ressorts et les fonctions de la vie dans la vie même, que de les aller chercher dans la mort, ou dans les convulsions d’un animal expirant” (257). The two elephants in the Jardin des plantes, who had been brought to Paris from the Netherlands and, originally called Parkie (a female) and Hans, had been renamed Marguerite and Hanz (with a ‘z’), on this occasion listened to several compositions, among them an opera extract by Gluck and a symphony by Haydn, as well as popular and revolutionary songs. The ensemble consisted of string and wind instruments, sometimes combined with singers. Following Toscan, the elephants showed differing reactions to the pieces, ranging from indifference to total excitement. The grade of emotional impact even seemed to change when a composition was transposed to another key. James H. Johnson puts the concert for the two elephants in the context of the changing attitudes of audiences from the French ancient régime to the romantic era (129–132). Johnson postulates a quest of revolutionary aesthetics for a rediscovery of the ancient powers of music that could arouse citizens to political and military action for the state. Following Johnson, this aim lead to a testing of sentient but culturally naïve elephants and their reaction to music. (Of course, we should bear in mind that the assumption of the elephants being culturally naïve is anthropocentric, as it implies the existence of human cultures but not of elephant cultures.) Jeffrey Kallberg adds the aspect of the relationship between music and sex, that in itself is a political one (132–134). Shortly after the concert, the elephants’ keeper was said to have witnessed the pair having sex for the first time. Nevertheless, his account of the act as being executed in a missionary position makes it rather improbable (again a case of anthropocentric projection). Jean-Pierre-Louis Houel in his book Histoire naturelle des deux elephants from 1803 recounts Toscan’s article from the Décade philosophique and even gives illustrations of this imagined intercourse. Interestingly, Houel puts Toscan’s documentation as a whole into the context of other species-specific traits of the elephants.

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Toscan favors the concert as an experiment of empirical aesthetics and compares it positively to the Cartesian willingness to cut dead and living animals in pieces for the sake of physiological research. If we bear in mind this ambiguous relation between ethology, physiology and vivisection, it may be legitimate to draw a historical line from the Roman discourse with its complex connection between elephants, music and killing to the complex connection between elephants, music and killing in the 19th century. While Parkie/Marguerite and Hans/ Hanz were able to live in confinement without actively being killed by humans at a certain point, for elephants in Western culture in the 19th century this seems to have been more an exception than the rule. The history of menageries, traveling shows, theaters and circuses in the 19th century is shockingly rich of elephants who were stars in their youth and early adolescence and got killed for one or the other reason later on. The 1798 concert, among other aspects, could be seen as an early challenge of speciesist assumptions that only humans react to music or can have aesthetic experiences at all. To me it seems unavoidable to associate this approach to the fact that two successors of Marguerite and Hanz, Castor and Pollux, who also lived in the Jardin des plantes, were killed and eaten by their fellow citizens during the siege of Paris at the end of 1870. Another example of a tragic career ending is the then world-famous Jumbo, sold from the United Kingdom to the United States (Oettermann 186–188). Jumbo was violently killed in a train accident (86), but at the same time inspired – misspelled as Jimbo, which sounds in French quite similar to Jumbo with an ‘u’ – Claude Debussy’s peaceful and affectionate piano piece “Jimbo’s Lullaby” from the suite Children’s Corner. There are numerous other cases of elephant biographies in the 19th and early 20th century that reach from enculturating individual elephants to accidentally or even intentionally putting them back to the status of wild and consequently unprotected beasts. Therefore, human-elephant encounters sometimes seem to have the potential of blurring the line between humans and nonhuman animals when it comes to cultural phenomena, but on the other hand easily can lead back to a regressive re-animalization of the elephants that turns them from proto-cultural beings back to savage enemies of human culture. This historical context provides the background for contemporary encounters of elephants and humans in music. Paul Barton, as a pianist making music for elephants in sanctuaries, clearly follows an emancipatory concept. He avoids playing pianos with ivory keys, sees the exploitation of elephants in the past in the ivory and wood industries as a historical guilt of humans and intends to demonstrate the elephants that humans have some good things to offer by playing the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven to them. However, there are other recent examples of presenting music to elephants that have been discussed more controversially. The Belgian zoo Pari Daiza in 2015 claimed that elephants ‘danced’ or swayed in unison to musicians performing in front of them. A video of this situation was published on the zoo’s Facebook page (“Are These Elephants Really Dancing to Classical Music?”). It is hard do decide from watching this footage whether we witness a case of entrainment to the rhythm of the

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music or just the symptoms of neurosis induced by captivity that by chance sometimes seem to synchronize with the music. This is even more problematic when it comes to the claim by violin player Eleanor Bartsch: “Me warming up for my performance of the Bach Concerto for Two Violins with the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra at the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, WI. I decided to go outside and play a bit for Kelly and Viola, 44 and 45 year-old elephants that have lived together for most of their lives. I found out that elephants REALLY like Bach…” Again, this is a case of video footage published on the internet, this time on YouTube in 2014 (Bartsch). The publication of this video triggered a harsh commentary by the animal advocacy organization PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals): “No, These Elephants Aren’t Dancing”, accompanied by videos that document the swaying of the elephants as a recurring symptom of captivity-induced mental illness (O’Connor). To sum it up, there seems to be an at least two thousand years old tradition to grant elephants the status of enculturated individuals as recipients of music. However, the elephants’ status as cultural beings with aesthetic experiences and a sense of musical reflection is not an unalienable, permanent status in these narrations. In most of the cases, humans have the power to let the narratives of harmonious or agonistic encounters unfold or to revert them to antagonistic and potentially destructive ones. As musical production is time-dependent, the benefits that elephants can gain from encountering human music are fragile and can vanish in time like a sound in the air.

References Aelian. On the Characteristics of Animals. Trans. by Alwyn Faber Scholfield, vol. 1, Heinemann, 1958. “Are These Elephants Really Dancing to Classical Music? – Video.” The Guardian, 16 June 2015, www.theguardian.com/world/video/2015/jun/16/elephants-dancing-classical-musicvideo. Barton, Paul. Interview by Amanda Feldon. 2014. Bartsch, Eleanor. “Elephants Dancing to Violin! Adorable!” YouTube, 24 Aug. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaFaelwEaL4. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018. Delort, Robert. The Life and Lore of the Elephant. Thames and Hudson, 1992. Feldon, Amanda, director/producer. Music for Elephants. Lightning International, 2014. Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 4, Summer 1982, pp. 777–795. Houel, Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent. Histoire naturelle des deux éléphans, mâle et femelle, du Muséum de Paris, venus de Hollande en France en l’an VI. Paris, 1803. Gallica, gallica.bnf. fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k135081d. Johnson, James H. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. U of California P, 1995. Kallberg, Jeffrey. “Peeping at Pachyderms: Convergences of Sex and Music in France around 1800.” Fashions and Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera, ed. by Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Hilary Poriss, Cambridge UP, 2009, pp. 132–151. Körner, Otto. Die Homerische Tierwelt. 2nd ed., Bergmann, 1930. Europeana Collections, www. europeana.eu/portal/record/9200143/BibliographicResource_2000069296879.html.

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O’Connor, Jennifer. “No, These Elephants Aren’t Dancing.” PETA, 26 Aug. 2014, www.peta.org/ blog/elephants-arent-dancing/. Oettermann, Stephan. Die Schaulust am Elefanten: Eine Elephantographia Curiosa. Syndikat, 1982. Shelton, Jo-Ann. “Dancing and Dying: The Display of Elephants in Ancient Roman Arenas.” Daimonopylai: Essays in Classics and the Classical Tradition Presented to Edmund G. Berry, ed. by Rory B. Egan and Mark A. Joyal, Center for Hellenic Civilization, 2004, pp. 363–382. Shelton, Jo-Ann. “Elephants as Enemies in Ancient Rome.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 32, 2006, pp. 3–25. Smuts, Barbara. “Encounters with Animal Minds.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 8, no. 5–6, May 2001, pp. 293–309. Toscan, Georges. “Histoire-Naturelle: Du Pouvoir de la Musique sur les Animaux, et du Concert donné aux Èlephans.” La Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique: Par une Société de républicains, Paris, 1798, pp. 257–264. Gallica, gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4239845. Tyler, Tom. “Introduction: The Case of the Camel.” Animal Encounters, ed. by Tyler and Manuela S. Rossini, Brill, 2009, pp. 1–9. Tyler, Tom, and Manuela S. Rossini, eds. Animal Encounters. Brill, 2009.

V  Practices of Human-Animal

Encounters

Über Jäger und Jagdhunde: Literarische und bildkünstlerische Verhandlungen einer Mensch-TierBegegnung

19

Claudia Lillge

Nach zehn Jahren des Kampfes um Troja, nach weiteren zehn Jahren einer durch zahlreiche Gefahren, Verlockungen, Irrwege und göttlichen Zorn erschwerten Heimfahrt erreicht Odysseus endlich die Gestade Ithakas. Doch obwohl er sich seinem Haus zunächst nur in Verkleidung nähert und sich dabei gänzlich unerkannt wähnt, wird ihm bereits im Hof ein Empfang und Willkommensgruß zuteil, für den indes weder seine Frau Penelope noch sein Sohn Telemachos verantwortlich zeichnen. Vielmehr berichtet die homerische Hexameter-Dichtung im 17. Gesang der Odyssee von einem Wesen, das in der abendländischen Literaturtradition als ein bekanntes „Symbol des Wächters und der Treue“ sowie der fragilen „Differenz von Natur und Kultur“ gilt (Borgards, „Hund“ 165). So heißt es in der klassischen Homer-Übersetzung von Johann Heinrich Voß aus dem Jahr 1781: Aber ein Hund erhob auf dem Lager sein Haupt und die Ohren, Argos, welchen vordem der leidengetrübte Odysseus Selber erzog; allein er schiffte zur heiligen Troja, Eh’ er seiner genoß. Ihn führten die Jünglinge vormals Immer auf wilde Ziegen und flüchtige Hasen und Rehe; Aber jetzt, da sein Herr entfernt war, lag er verachtet Auf dem großen Haufen vom Miste der Mäuler und Rinder […]. Hier lag Argos, der Hund, von Ungeziefer zerfressen. Dieser, da er nun endlich den nahen Odysseus erkannte, Wedelte zwar mit dem Schwanz und senkte die Ohren herunter, Aber er war zu schwach, sich seinem Herren zu nähern. Und Odysseus sah es und trocknete heimlich die Träne […]. (Homer 243)

C. Lillge (*)  Frankfurt am Main, Deutschland E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_19

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Dass antike Vasenfriese, die Malerei oder auch filmische Adaptationen der Odyssee immer wieder bildmotivisch auf eben jene Szene der Ankunft rekurrieren, verweist auf die nicht eben unwesentliche narrative Funktion, die der Begegnung von Herr und Jagdhund innerhalb des Handlungsverlaufs zukommt. Schließlich „erhebt Homer“, wie Roland Borgards überzeugend argumentiert, „den Hund zum Garanten persönlicher Identität“ („Hund“ 166). Denn allein „Argos stiftet die Einheit des ausziehenden mit dem zurückkehrenden Odysseus“, und allein er „weiß dessen eigentliches Wesen vom äußeren Anschein zu unterscheiden“ (166). Gerhard Neumann bezeichnet den homerischen Jagdhund daher als einen beispielhaften „Semiotiker menschlicher Identität“ (101). Und auch Borgards verweist darauf, dass der Hund auf paradigmatische Weise das „Modell“ eines „Blick[es]“ vorführt, „der sich von keiner Verstellung täuschen lässt“ („Hund“ 166). Zudem ist augenfällig, dass die beschriebene Szene eine bemerkenswerte Gefühlsübereinkunft zwischen Mensch und Tier ausstellt. Argos’ Willkommensgruß nämlich rührt Odysseus, und zwar so sehr, dass er – immerhin – eine Träne vergießt. Anders gewendet: Die ‚Vermenschlichung‘ der männlichen Herrscherfigur und des vermeintlich unverwundbaren Kriegshelden führt hier, und zwar über Begegnung und Blickwechsel, „ausgerechnet über das Tier“ (Schröder 136).1 Ausgehend von dieser archetypischen Szene der antiken Literatur versammelt die nachfolgende tour d’horizon Repräsentationen von Jagdhunden in Literatur, Malerei und Fotografie, die ich zu einem kulturwissenschaftlichen Tiergruppenporträt zusammenfasse. Damit ist methodisch weniger an die Inventarisierung eines in sich kohärenten Motivs gedacht, als vielmehr an die komparatistische und medienkomparatistische Differenzierung von Tierfiguren respektive die Profilierung ihrer zeit- und kulturgeschichtlichen Prägungen, die ich als Ausdruck kultureller Diskursformationen lese. Mit der nachfolgenden exemplarischen Auswahl verbindet sich keinerlei Vollständigkeitsanspruch, wohl aber das Ziel, Kernfragen, das heißt neuralgische Punkte von Mensch-Tier-Begegnungen (encounters), zu besichtigen und die ästhetischen Verhandlungsräume zu erkunden, die – und dies

1Die

künstlerische Inszenierung, mittels derer ein Mensch ‚menschlicher‘ in Begleitung eines Tieres wirkt, ist uns auch aus der Malerei – zum Beispiel durch Tizians berühmtes, 1533 entstandenes Doppelporträt Karl V. mit Ulmer Dogge bekannt. Zur Tradition des Doppelporträts und deren Weiterführung durch Tizian führt ebenfalls Schröder aus: „Der Hund, als treuer Begleiter seines Herren, ergänzt im neuen Typus des Doppelporträts die Persönlichkeit des Porträtierten. Er unterstreicht dessen Stand und Rang, er ist Statussymbol und zugleich Ausdruck einer neuen Gefühlssymbiose von Mensch und Tier. Tizian hat den Hund auf der höchsten gesellschaftlichen Ebene ins Porträt integriert und die Zuneigung des Menschen zu seinem Hund sichtbar gemacht. Tizian malt Karl V. nicht nur zu Pferd in der Pose des Feldherren mit Helm und Rüstung, als Sieger gegen die protestantischen Fürsten der Schlacht von Mühlheim, im dramatischen Licht und als Verkörperung von Adel, Macht und Herrschaft. Er malt den mächtigsten Herren des 16. Jahrhunderts auch im königlichen Gewand mit seinem Hund, einer weiß grauen Dogge. Der Herrscher legt wie beiläufig die Hand auf den zu ihm aufblickenden Hund. Der schmiegt seinen Kopf vertraulich an den Fürsten. Die Hand ist das einzig Private, das Tizian in die herrschaftliche Pose des Kaisers einfließen lässt“ (Schröder 136).

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sind zugleich die thematischen Säulen meiner Überlegungen – um Aspekte der Verdinglichung, der Anthropomorphisierung, der Mythologisierung und der Tiertötung kreisen.

1 Erste Einlassungen oder Die ‚Idee‘ des Jagdhundes Die Frage danach, was genau eigentlich ein Jagdhund ist, lässt sich auf zwei unterschiedliche Arten und Weisen beantworten. Der eine Weg führt über Hunde-Lexika oder einschlägige Bestimmungsbücher, welche die infrage kommenden ‚Gebrauchshunderassen‘ mit Blick auf ihre jagdliche Spezialisierung nach Apportierhunden (z. B. Labrador Retriever, Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever), Erdhunden (z. B. Welsh Terrier, Dackel oder Teckel), jagenden Hunden (z. B. Brandbracke, Stichelhaariger Bosnischer Laufhund), Schweißhunden (z. B. Bayrischer Gebirgsschweißhund, Alpenländische Dachsbracke), Stöberhunden (z. B. English Cocker Spaniel, Deutscher Wachtelhund) und Vorstehhunden (z. B. Weimaraner, Stabyhoun) klassifizieren. Der andere und für meine weitere Argumentation erkenntnisreichere Weg gestaltet sich zweigliedrig: Er führt, in einem ersten Schritt, über eine allgemeine Definition der Jagd, um sich dann, in einem zweiten Schritt, der ‚Idee‘ des Jagdhundes anzunähern. „Zur Jagd“, pointieren die Philosophen Jens Tuider und Ursula Wolf, „gehört nach üblicher Definition das Aufspüren, Verfolgen und Erlegen von Wild“ (33). Dabei ist die Jagd, wie Borgards weiter präzisiert, eine höchst „ambivalente Angelegenheit“ („Tiere jagen“ 7). Denn „[e]inerseits ist sie offensichtlich ein Naturphänomen: Falken jagen Amseln, Ameisenlöwen jagen Ameisen, Schimpansen jagen Stummelaffen. Andererseits gilt sie als elaborierte Kulturtechnik des Menschen, in deren Ausübung er sich von den Tieren unterscheidet“ (7). In seinen Meditationen über die Jagd aus dem Jahr 1944 lässt der spanische Philosoph José Ortega y Gasset jedoch keinerlei Zweifel daran, dass Menschen den Tieren, die sie jagen, zunächst einmal deutlich unterlegen sind. Schließlich können Tiere der Verfolgung des Jägers mit einer ganzen Reihe von „Gegenmitteln“ begegnen (107). Sie verfügen beispielsweise über die „Schnelligkeit der Beine, die die Flucht erleichtert“, den „feine[n] Geruchssinn, der [sie] […] warnt“, den „Scharfblick des Auges, das den Horizont absucht“ sowie die „Gabe, sich verborgen zu halten“ (107–108). „In Wirklichkeit“, konturiert Ortega das defizitäre Moment des Jägers in aller Prägnanz, „verfügt der Mensch, um jenem überlegenen Instinkt des Tieres, sich unsichtbar zu machen, entgegenzuwirken, über keinen entsprechenden Instinkt“, und selbst „die Vernunft […] scheitert bei der Bemühung, das argwöhnische Wild aufzubringen“ (109). Die entscheidende ‚Idee‘, die das beschriebene Ungleichgewicht der Kräfte unterlaufen und den Vorteil der Tiere aufheben sollte, fällt erst mit der Erfindung eines zwischen Menschen und Tieren agierenden ‚go-between‘ zusammen:

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Eines Tages jedoch hatte [der Mensch] […] eine geniale Eingebung; um das übervorsichtige Tier aufzuspüren, nahm er zu dem Spürinstinkt eines anderen Tieres seine Zuflucht und nahm dessen Hilfe in Anspruch. Damit tritt der Hund in die Jagd ein, und das ist der einzige, denkbare, wirkliche ‚Fortschritt‘ der Jagd; er besteht nicht in der direkten Betätigung der Vernunft, sondern vielmehr darin, dass der Mensch ihre Unzulänglichkeit anerkennt und zwischen seine Vernunft und das Tier ein anderes Tier einschaltet. Das wäre unmöglich, wenn der Hund nicht von sich aus jagte. Der Mensch hat nichts anderes getan, als dass er den instinktiven Jagdstil des Hundes verbesserte und der Zweckmäßigkeit einer Zusammenarbeit anpasste […]. Infolgedessen bezieht der Mensch in sein Jagen das Jagen des Hundes ein und führt so die Jagd zur höchsten Vervollkommnung, zur vollendeten Form: entsprechend dem, was in der Musik die Entdeckung der Polyphonie war. (109–110)

Die aus Ortegas Rhetorik deutlich zu vernehmende Euphorie, mit der der spanische Philosoph quasi ‚die Erfindung‘ des Jagdhundes würdigt, kontern Literatur und die Künste, wie die nachfolgenden Fallbeispiele vorführen, mit einer ganzen Reihe von Tierporträts, die den oszillierenden Platz von Jagdhunden ausgestalten und problematisieren. Gerade weil sich Jagdhunde charakteristischerweise auf einer ambulanten Grenze zwischen Tieren und Menschen bewegen, sind sie, wie ich behaupten möchte, in besonderer Weise dazu geeignet, ästhetische Inszenierungen und Reflexionen von Mensch-Tier-Begegnungen anzuregen.

2 Der verdinglichte Jagdhund James Thomsons erstmalig 1730 vollständig veröffentlichtes Blankvers-Gedicht The Seasons, das nicht nur in Großbritannien zu den bekanntesten Naturdichtungen des 18. Jahrhunderts zählt (Müllenbrock und Späth 150), integriert in seiner Autumn-Passage die detailreiche Darstellung einer Parforcejagd. Bei einer solchen handelt es sich um eine Jagd, bei der Jäger zu Pferd und von Hunden begleitet dem Wild bis zu dessen Ermüdung und Entkräftung nachsetzen. In Großbritannien wurde diese Form des „Hunting“ bis zu ihrem Verbot im Jahre 2005 als Sport betrieben, bei dem – wie unzählige Kupferstiche, Radierungen und Jagdgemälde künstlerisch in Szene setzen – nicht selten „hunderte berittener Jäger“, meist mit einer Vielzahl an Meutenhunden „einem einzigen Fuchs nachjag[t]en“ (Rösener 81). Thomsons Schilderung der Hetzjagd, die deskriptive mit reflexiven Passagen verknüpft, steht im Dienste einer mit moralisch-didaktischem Impetus vorgetragenen Jagdkritik, welche die Jagd nicht nur als „barbarous game of death“ ausstellt (99), sondern selbige auch als anmaßenden Zeitvertreib aristokratischer Lebensformen angreift. In Thomsons poetischer Darstellung einer sensualistisch erfassten Natur treten Jagdhunde vor allem in Formation, sprich: als Part der Meute in Erscheinung, die, ähnlich wie die vor Wildheit rasenden Hunde in Ovids Aktäon-Passage,2 als „growling pack“ charakterisiert und als „blood 2Diese

Passage im dritten Buch von Ovids Metamorphosen erzählt von dem Göttersohn und erfahrenen Jäger Aktäon, der die Jagdgöttin Diana und ihre Nymphen in einer Grotte im Wald beim Baden überrascht. Zur Strafe verwandelt ihn Diana in einen Hirschen, der von seiner eigenen Hundemeute verfolgt und zerfleischt wird (Ovid 82–84).

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happy“ attribuiert wird (99). Die Meute, die das Wild aufstöbert und sich in dieses verbeißt, wird dabei wie das Gewehr als ein Werkzeug der Jagd inszeniert, das dem Arsenal der Jagdwaffen zugerechnet werden kann. Die damit einhergehende Verdinglichung der Jagdhunde, die sie allein „auf ihr materielles Sein reduziert“ (Quadflieg 148) und auf ihren „Nutzungsaspekt“ abstellt, sprich: die Tiere als reine „Gebrauchsgegenst[ä]nd[e]“ im Dienste des jagdlichen „Wettbewerbsvorteil[s]“ klassifiziert (Strigl 100; Jaeggi und Stahl), erfährt indes vor allem durch eine poetische Kontrastrelation auf anschauliche Weise Kontur, die Thomson zwischen Meute und Wild auffaltet. Neben Rebhühnern und Hasen rückt in diesem Zusammenhang namentlich ein Hirsch in den Blick, den Thomson mit einem reichen Gefühlskostüm ausstattet. Denn der gejagte Hirsch präsentiert sich uns als ein seiner Verzweiflung erliegendes Tier, dessen emotionale Befindlichkeit mit sprachlichen Bildern – wie „sick seizes on his heart“ oder auch „the big round tears run down his dappled face“ – profiliert wird (Thomson 101). Mit dem Motiv des ‚weinenden Hirschen‘ nun greift Thomson ein nicht nur in der Literatur, sondern auch in der Kunst verbreitetes Bild auf, das bereits in die Jagdkritik der europäischen Renaissance – zu denken wäre an Michel de Montaignes Essay „De la cruauté“ („Über die Grausamkeit“, 1580), aber auch an William Shakespeares As You Like It (1600) – Eingang fand. Matt Cartmill interpretiert die kontextuelle Gebundenheit dieses Motivs wie folgt: Die schluchzenden Geschöpfe in der Kunst und Literatur des 16. Jahrhunderts sind subversive Gestalten, deren Klagen die Rechtmäßigkeit der überkommenen Hierarchien in Zweifel ziehen sollen. Einige davon […] werfen in einer mehr oder weniger symbolischen Weise Fragen nach der sozialen Gerechtigkeit auf. Aber andere, etwa die weinenden Hirsche Dürers und Shakespeares, formulieren direktere Fragen nach dem Verhältnis von Menschen und Tieren. In Montaignes einflussreichen Essais spiegeln solche Fragen eine tiefe Skepsis hinsichtlich der Überlegenheit des Menschen wider. (116)

Auch in Thomsons Gedicht schreibt sich eine „Skepsis“ ein, die „den Platz des Menschen in der Welt betrifft“ und ihn – unter „Anverwandlung des […] Humanistentopos“ der Jagdkritik (Uhlig 162) – zu einer ästhetischen Umordnung veranlasst: Während der weinende Hirsch ‚menschliche‘ Züge erhält, wird die Jagdgesellschaft, zu der Menschen und Hunde gleichermaßen zählen, als „inhuman rout“ deklassiert (Thomson 101). Jagdhunde als Werkzeuge des Menschen, so ließe sich an diesem Beispiel zuspitzen, wandern auf der von ihnen besetzten beweglichen Grenze zwischen Menschen und Tieren dabei an die Seite der Menschen und werden, im Zuge der Unterwerfung anderer Tiere, zu deren Trumpf. In der vielleicht bekanntesten literarischen Jagdkritik des 20. Jahrhunderts, Felix Saltens 1924 erschienener Erzählung Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde, wird uns die Interpretation eines Jagdhundes als menschliches Werkzeug erneut begegnen; hier allerdings mit einer bemerkenswerten Variation. Saltens Jagdhund nämlich muss sich von den Tieren des Waldes ob seiner Dienstbarkeit gegenüber dem Menschen als „Überläufer“, „Scherge“, „Verräter“ und „Abtrünniger“ beschimpfen lassen (Salten 123), sprich: er wird aus der

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­ emeinschaft der Tiere, die zugleich eine moralische Gemeinschaft ist, exkludiert. G Außer als Werkzeuge des Menschen haben Hunde – zumal in der jagdkritischen Literatur – daher offenkundig auch eine narrative Funktion als Sündenbock im Sinne René Girards zu erfüllen, denn die jagdfeindliche Gesinnung wird bei Salten innerdiegetisch – im Zuge einer durchaus bemerkenswerten Verschiebung – nur mittelbar an den Menschen, in direkter Anklage aber an den Jagdhund adressiert.

3 Der vermenschlichte Jagdhund Betrachtet man das zur Sammlung der Londoner Tate Gallery zählende Gemälde Dignity and Impudence (1839) des britischen Tiermalers Sir Edwin Landseer, so sind in der Mimik des vermeintlich ‚würdevollen‘ Bluthundes und des vermeintlich ‚frechen‘ Scotchterriers augenfällig „anthropomorph[e] Gesichtsausdrück[e]“ erkennbar (Schröder 145). (Abb. 1) In den Bildern des Animaliers Landseer avancieren Hunde, und zwar mittels eines künstlerischen Akts der Vermenschlichung, nicht nur zu beseelten Wesen, sondern regelrecht zu Charakteren, denen

Abb. 1  Sir Edwin Henry Landseer. Dignity and Impudence, Öl auf Leinwand, 1839. (Collection Tate London)

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zugleich „menschliches Verhalten“ attestiert wird (144). Landseers Gemälde können dabei als bildhaftes Zeugnis einer neuen Intimität zwischen Menschen und Tieren gelten, das heißt eines Verhältnisses, in das sich vonseiten des Menschen vermehrt Emotionen einmischen, die beispielsweise in der im 19. Jahrhundert aufflammenden Tierschutzbewegung, aber auch in einer explosionsartig expandierenden Haustierhaltung und einer damit einhergehenden Tierliebhaberei ihren Ausdruck fanden (140–146). Letztere wurde dabei nicht selten als Freundschaft zu Tieren interpretiert, wobei der anthropozentrische Freundschaftsbegriff des 19. Jahrhunderts im Hinblick auf Tiere ausgesprochen vielschichtig und ambivalent ausfiel. Dies zumindest eröffnet auch ein literarischer Text, der zweifellos als einer der bekanntesten Tiererzählungen der deutschsprachigen Literatur angesehen werden kann. „Vorliebe empfindet der Mensch für allerlei Gegenstände. Liebe, die echte, unvergängliche, die lernt er – wenn überhaupt – nur einmal kennen“ (Ebner-Eschenbach 5). Mit diesen Zeilen lässt Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach ihre 1883 erstmalig veröffentlichte Novelle Krambambuli beginnen, deren Auftakt eine Erwartungshaltung geriert, welche den Leser zunächst einmal auf eine falsche Fährte lockt. Nämlich nicht die eine „unvergängliche“ Liebe zwischen Mensch und Mensch ist hier gemeint, sondern die eines Menschen zu einem Tier, genauer: eines Jägers zu seinem Jagdhund, noch genauer: die Liebe des Revierjägers Hopp zu seinem Krambambuli. Als Hopp den Jagdhund das erste Mal sieht, ist es Liebe auf den ersten Blick. Bis ins kleinste Detail registriert der Jäger sogleich die „körperliche Wohlgestalt“ (Stutz 206), wobei die auktoriale Erzählperspektive für diese mit zahlreichen Epitheta stilistisch ausgefeilte Darstellung eigens in die – aus Sicht des Jägers gestaltete – erlebte Rede wechselt. Von dem „wundervollen Hund“ wird hier gesprochen, von „Augen“ so „groß“ und „schwarz“ und „leuchtend“, von „hoch angesetzten“, „makellosen“ Ohren, von der „feinen Witternase“ und von „der kräftigen, geschmeidigen Gestalt“ (Ebner-Eschenbach 6). Zwölf Flaschen Danziger Kirschwein, sogenannten Krambambuli, bietet Hopp dem Besitzer des Hundes, der ein ortsbekannter Lump ist und in den Handel nur allzu gerne einwilligt. Demzufolge wechselt der Hund seinen Herrn, wird nach dem eingetauschten Kirschwein, dem Krambambuli, benannt, und ersetzt dem Revierjäger binnen kürzester Zeit nahezu jede menschliche Beziehung, denn allein der Hund ist ihm, wie es heißt, „eifriger Diener“, „guter Kamerad“, vor allem aber „treuer Freund und Hüter“ (7). Auch namhafte Zoologen und Verhaltensforscher haben immer wieder die Treue des Hundes betont, sie mit menschlichen Treuebündnissen verglichen oder, wie ich behaupten möchte, schlicht verwechselt. So lesen wir beispielsweise in Alfred Brehms Illustrirten Thierleben aus dem Jahr 1864, mit dem auch Ebner-Eschenbach bestens vertraut war: Kein einziges Thier der ganzen Erde ist der vollsten und ungetheiltesten Achtung, der Freundschaft und Liebe des Menschen würdiger als der Hund. Er ist ein Theil des Menschen selbst. […] [Er] bleibt ihm ergeben bis zum Tode. Und all dies entspringt weder der Noth noch aus Furcht, sondern aus reiner Liebe und Anhänglichkeit. (313)

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Und auch Konrad Lorenz wird noch fast ein ganzes Jahrhundert später, nämlich 1949, die Treue des Hundes in ähnlicher Weise glorifizieren: Einer der wunderbarsten und rätselhaftesten Vorgänge ist die Herrenwahl eines guten Hundes. Plötzlich, oft innerhalb weniger Tage, entsteht eine Bindung, die um ein Vielfaches fester ist als alle, aber auch alle Bindungen, die zwischen uns Menschen je bestehen. Es gibt keine Treue, die nicht schon gebrochen wurde, ausgenommen die eines wirklich treuen Hundes… Rätselhaft ist der ‚Treueschwur‘, jener endgültige Anschluß des Hundes an einen Herren. (130)

Bemerkenswerterweise stört Ebner-Eschenbach jene zoologische und verhaltensbiologische Position, indem sie in ihrer Novelle mit kritisch-ironischem Blick die narrative und zugleich anthropozentrische Durchformung jenes Treuediskurses herausarbeitet: Der Oberförster des Reviers nämlich wird eines Tages ermordet aufgefunden und keinem anderen als dem Revierjäger Hopp und seinem Krambambuli ist es vorbehalten, den Mörder zu stellen. Letzterer nun ist genau jener Lump, der den Hund einst gegen den Kirschwein tauschte. Als Gewehrschüsse zwischen Hopp und dem Lumpen hin und her wechseln, da ereignet sich die für die Novelle charakteristische ‚unerhörte Begebenheit‘. Auch Krambambuli wechselt die Seiten, sprich: er verlässt Hopp und läuft zurück zu seinem ersten Herren. Die Hunde-Tragödie nimmt dadurch unvermeidlich ihren Lauf. Mit einem Schlag verliert der Hund zwei Herren. Den ersten, den Wildschützen und Mörder, durch einen tödlichen Schuss, der ihn trifft, weil der Hund ihn freudig angesprungen hat, den zweiten, den Revierjäger Hopp, durch dessen abgrundtiefe Enttäuschung angesichts dieses scheinbaren Treuebruchs. Zwischen Hopp und Krambambuli ereignet sich anschließend folgendes Gespräch: ‚Deserteur, Kalfakter, pflicht- und treuvergessene Kanaille!‘ ‚Ja, Herr, jawohl.‘ ‚Du warst meine Freude. Jetzt ist’s vorbei. Ich habe keine Freude mehr an dir.‘ ‚Begreiflich, Herr‘, und Krambambuli legte sich hin, drückte den Kopf auf die ausgestreckten Vorderpfoten und sah den Jäger an. (Ebner-Eschenbach 15)

„Worte direkter Rede“, so schreibt Elfriede Stutz zu Recht, „werden Krambambuli“ hier „in den Sinn, nicht nach Art der Tierfabel in den Mund gelegt, die ein menschlicher Interpretationsversuch“ sind (229). Dazu zählt auch die Verbalisierung der „Ergebenheitshaltung“ (Stutz 229), die der Jäger nicht etwa aus einer Prosopopöie erschließt, sondern den Blicken des Hundes sowie seinem unterwürfigen Gebaren entnimmt. Letztere hält Hopp zwar davon ab, Krambambuli zu töten, es hindert ihn aber nicht, die seiner Ansicht nach „treuvergessene Kanaille“ zu verstoßen. Kurze Zeit darauf stirbt Krambambuli. Die tragische Wendung, welche die Novelle nimmt, ist freilich nicht dem vermeintlichen Treuebruch des Jagdhundes geschuldet, sondern schlicht dem Umstand, dass der Jäger den Jagdhund als Tier, das trotz jedweder Zu- und Abrichtung über eine eigenständige Handlungsmacht (agency) verfügt, stets verkannte. Dieses Verkennen wiederum steht im Kontext einer bestimmten ‚Grenzpolitik‘, mit der Differenzen zwischen Menschen und Tieren, Eigenem und Fremden vielfach aus-

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gehandelt, jedoch keinesfalls aufgelöst werden. Der „Stachel des Fremden“ nämlich, wie es Bernhard Waldenfels im Kontext seiner auf Mensch-Tier-Begegnungen durchaus übertragbaren Phänomenologie des Fremden nennt (Waldenfels pass.), lässt sich durch eine Vermenschlichung von Tieren,3 die ein Akt der Bemächtigung ist, nur temporär, sprich: nur so lange verdrängen, bis ein Tier an seinen Akteurstatus (etwa über eine widerständige Handlung wie im Fall von Krambambuli) ‚erinnert‘. Betrachtet man Tiere im Sinne Donna Haraways als companion species, gesteht man ihnen von vornherein einen Akteurstatus zu (Haraway pass.). Die Perspektive des anthropozentrischen Anthropomorphismus hingegen, für die Revierjäger Hopp ein Beispiel gibt, ‚reinigt‘ das Tier nicht nur von allem Tierlichen,4 sondern führt zudem nicht eben selten dazu, dass sich Menschen in einem von Projektionen gesättigten Umgang mit Tieren selbst bespiegeln oder aber sich in deren Antlitz, wie in dem eingangs genannten Gemälde Landseers, suchen und auch finden.

4 Der mythische Jagdhund William Faulkners als Kurzroman, Novelle oder auch Kurzgeschichte geltender Text The Bear, der 1942 als Teil des mythopoetischen Erzählzyklus Go Down, Moses publiziert wurde, führt uns in einen ganz anderen Jagdkontext, und zwar in die von zivilisatorischem Fortschritt bedrohte amerikanische Wildnis. Die Bärenjagd, die Faulkner zum Gegenstand seiner Erzählung erhebt, wird dabei als ein ­alljährlich

3Ein

alternatives Konzept zur ‚Vermenschlichung‘ eines Jagdhundes findet sich in Marlen Haushofers Roman Die Wand (1963). Die namenlose Heldin dieses Romans lebt ebenfalls in einer ausgesprochen engen Lebensgemeinschaft mit ihrem Jagdhund Luchs sowie mit Katzen, einer Kuh und einem Stier. Im Gegensatz zu Ebner-Eschenbachs Hauptfigur führt die Lebensgemeinschaft von Haushofers Protagonistin jedoch nicht allein zu einer ‚Vermenschlichung‘ des Tieres, sondern auch zu ihrer eigenen ‚Vertierlichung‘: „In jenem Sommer vergaß ich ganz, daß Luchs ein Hund war und ich ein Mensch. Ich wußte es, aber es hatte jede trennende Bedeutung verloren“ (265). An einer anderen Stelle heißt es: „Die Schranken zwischen Tier und Mensch fallen sehr leicht. Wir sind von einer einzigen großen Familie, und wenn wir einsam und unglücklich sind, nehmen wir auch die Freundschaft unserer entfernten Vettern gern entgegen. Sie leiden wie ich, wenn ihnen ein Schmerz zugefügt wird, und wie ich brauchen sie Nahrung, Wärme und ein bißchen Zärtlichkeit“ (235). 4Vgl.

dazu die einschlägige Erörterung bei Frans de Waal, der den anthropozentrischen Anthropomorphismus wie folgt erklärt: „Die sprechenden Tiere im Fernsehen, die satirische Darstellung von Personen des öffentlichen Lebens als Tiere und die naive Zuschreibung menschlicher Eigenschaften bei Tieren haben wenig mit dem zu tun, was wir über die Tiere selbst wissen. In einer Tradition, die auf Volkserzählungen, Aesop und La Fontaine zurückgeht, dient ein Anthropomorphismus dieser Art menschlichen Zwecken: dem Spott, der Pädagogik, der moralischen Ermahnung und der Unterhaltung. Zu einem großen Teil bedient er zudem das liebevolle Klischee vom Tierreich als einem friedlichen und gemütlichen Paradies. Die Tatsache, daß Tiere sich in Wirklichkeit gegenseitig töten und verschlingen, an Hunger und Krankheit sterben oder einander gleichgültig sind, passt nicht in dieses idealisierte Bild. Der massive Versuch der Unterhaltungsindustrie, Tieren ihre häßliche Seite zu nehmen, ist treffend als ‚Bambifizierung‘ bezeichnet worden“ (74).

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wiederkehrendes Ritual und Ereignis beschrieben, zu dem sich eine Gruppe von Männern zusammenfindet, die während der Jagd mustergültig das vollzieht, was Ortega y Gasset als „Ferien vom Menschsein“ beschrieb (161). In diesen, so Ortega, folgt der Jäger dem „starken Sog“ der Vergangenheit, denn die „Vergangenheit ist ihm ein Versprechen größerer Einfachheit“, zu der man sich vor den „Kompliziertheiten der Gegenwart“ temporär quasi wie auf eine „Insel“ retten könne (166). In Faulkners Text ist der Jagdanlass, wie der Titel der Erzählung bereits verrät, ein Bär, wobei dessen Tötung zunächst nur von höchst sekundärem Interesse erscheint. Vielmehr geht es den Jägern – dies zumal aus der Sicht des jungen Protagonisten Isaac McCaslin – wesentlich darum, ein ohne jedweden Trophäenehrgeiz initiiertes Stelldichein mit dem Wildtier zu zelebrieren, sprich: um „the yearly pageant-rite of the old bear’s furious immortality“ (186). Ähnlich wie Herman Melvilles Moby Dick ist auch Faulkners Bär, dessen Singularität und Besonderheit wie Melvilles Pottwal mit einem Eigennamen, nämlich ‚Old Ben‘, hervorgehoben wird, als ein diegetisches Tier mit primär symbolischer Funktion gestaltet. Denn der „Modus seiner Beschreibung und Stilisierung läßt nicht daran zweifeln, dass Faulkner“, wie Hartmut Heuermann zu Recht bemerkt, „kein gewöhnliches Exemplar der Gattung ursus americanus im Sinne hatte, als er die Jagdgeschichte konzipierte (319). Vielmehr dient die überlebensgroße Zeichnung des Pelztieres“ bereits „von vornherein einer Evokation des Numinosen, das physisch in der gigantischen Statur, physisch in der Aura des gleichermaßen Erhabenen und Furchteinflößenden zum Ausdruck kommt“ (319) Attribute wie seine vermeintliche Überlegenheit und Unsterblichkeit verweisen uns ferner darauf, dass Old Ben „der Vertreter einer anderen Ordnung und einer anderen Zeit“ ist, der „in der Legende, die die Jäger um ihn gewoben haben […] als unzerstörbarer Zerstörer“ gilt und „dem – wie einem archaisch-heroischen Krieger – der Ruf des Unbezwingbaren vorauseilt“ (319). Dass die Jäger diesen, mit vielen Eigenschaften eines Totems ausgestatteten Bären indes dennoch eines Tages zur Stecke bringen, ist nicht unwesentlich dem Verdienst eines Jagdhundes geschuldet, der, was seine Einzigartigkeit anbelangt, es mit dem Bären durchaus aufnehmen kann. Dieser Jagdhund lässt sich, ähnlich wie die Meutenhunde bei James Thomson, zunächst einmal als Werkzeug des Menschen beschreiben, wohl aber als eines, dessen Domestizierungsgrad um ein Vielfaches geringer ausfällt. In seiner historischen Abhandlung zur Jagdkultur Nordamerikas beschreibt Michael Brander exakt eine solche Art von Jagdhund, für den im Vergleich mit seinen europäischen Ahnen in auffälliger Weise vor allem das Charakteristikum der ‚Unabhängigkeit‘ reklamiert wird: Bei den in Amerika herrschenden Verhältnissen waren eine gute Büchse und erstklassige Hunde hochgeschätzte Besitztümer. Das Ziel der Hundezucht in den Vereinigten Staaten war es, einen Hund heranzuzüchten und abzurichten, der eine hervorragende Nase und große Unabhängigkeit besaß, also fähig war, allein zu jagen, ohne sich auf die übrige Meute zu verlassen, wie es in England der Fall war. (165)

Einen solchen Hund zu finden, erweist sich auch in Faulkners Erzählung als keineswegs leichtes Unterfangen, vielmehr wird es zum retardierenden Moment der Handlung, das die Figur Sam Fathers, der in das Jägerkollektiv die meiste

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Jagd- und Naturerfahrung einbringt, wiederholt mit dem Satz unterstreicht: „We aint got the dog yet“ (192). Als der Hund schließlich gefunden ist, wird ihm eine ganz eigene Form der Abrichtung zuteil, bei der vor allem Sam Fathers Wert darauf legt, dass er nur so weit wie nötig einer Zähmung unterworfen wird, um seinen Jagdtrieb und Mut möglichst ungebrochen zu erhalten. Nach abgeschlossener Abrichtung präsentiert sich dieser Jagdhund, dem die Jäger den Namen ‚Lion‘ geben, als ein Tier, das zwar die bläuliche Stahlfarbe eines Pistolenlaufs hat, dennoch mitnichten eine Verdinglichung erfährt. In der Art wie er als „some natural force“ inszeniert wird (209), die, wie es heißt, weder Dinge noch Menschen liebt, wird dem Hund ein vergleichbarer Status wie dem Bären zugeschrieben, mit dem er schließlich in einem gewaltigen Kampf gemeinsam den Tod findet. An seinem Grab spricht General Compson für den Jagdhund eine Totenrede, die auch einem Menschen zur Ehre gereicht hätte und die ihn mittels der Performanz des Rituals in eine quasi-sakrale Ordnung implementiert. Die Jäger würdigen den Hund, weil sich in seiner Unabhängigkeit und seinem Mut Werte ausdrücken, die für ihre Gemeinschaft gelten und für diese eine stabilisierende Funktion erfüllen. Insofern gleicht der Jagdhund seinem Gegner, dem Bären, aber auch seinem Namensgeber, dem Löwen, weil er wie diese, und zwar auf Basis einer „nicht beweisfähige[n], kollektive[n] Affekt- und Glaubensstruktur“ (Heuermann 14), höchste mythische Potenz besitzt.

5 Die Tötung von Jagdhunden Medial spezifisch für die Fotografie ist, dass der Referent nicht symbolisch (wie in der Literatur), sondern zunächst und zuvorderst indexikalisch festgehalten wird. Bezogen auf den hier verhandelten Gegenstand meint dies: Während die Literatur reale Tiere notwendig immer verfehlen muss, bleiben sie als Referenten an der Fotografie, um es mit Roland Barthes zu sagen, „haften“ (14). Letzteres mag in nicht unerheblichem Maße dafür verantwortlich zeichnen, dass speziell Künstler/ innen, die ihre kreative Arbeit explizit politisch dimensionieren, das heißt in den Dienst von Tierrechten stellen, häufig im Feld der Fotografie (insbesondere im Feld der Dokumentarfotografie) operieren, um auf die unterschiedlichsten Kontexte der Ausbeutung von Tieren aufmerksam zu machen. Auch der Londoner Fotograf und Tierschutz-Aktivist Martin Usborne, dessen Fotos bereits vielfach in international renommierten Galerien und Museen ausgestellt wurden, kann der anwaltschaftlich motivierten Tierfotografie zugeordnet werden. Drei Jahre nach The Silence of Dogs in Cars (2012) holt Usborne in seinem 2015 erschienenem Fotobuch Where Hunting Dogs Rest erneut Hunde vor seine Kamera, und zwar Jagdhunde, die im Südwesten Spaniens zur Hasenhetzjagd verwendet, am Ende der Jagdsaison aber ausgesetzt oder auf brutale Art getötet werden. Um dieser weitgehend unbekannten Praktik, der jährlich viele tausende Hunde zum Opfer fallen, Sichtbarkeit zu verleihen, wählt Usborne einen künstlerischen Zugriff, der nicht nur verschiedene Bild-Traditionen zusammenführt und intermedial miteinander verknüpft, sondern sich auch daran abarbeitet, wie sich das Verhältnis von Ästhetik und Tierethik neu bestimmen lässt.

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Abb. 2  a und b Martin Usborne. Where Hunting Dogs Rest. (Kehrer, 2015)

Die Jagdhunde, die Usbornes Fotografien als Voll- oder Teilporträts präsentieren (Abb. 2a und 3a), sind von besonderer Anmutung. Auffällig ist der Mangel an Leben und Bewegung, der den meisten von ihnen eignet. Nahezu jede Fotografie eines Jagdhundes flankiert Usborne mit der Fotografie einer Landschaft oder der eines Ortes (Abb. 2b und 3b). Diese zumeist karg-rauen und unbehausten Schauplätze, die mit ihrer zum Teil erdigen, zum Teil kühlen Harmonie der Farben jeweils einem bestimmten Tierfoto zugeordnet scheinen, zeigen Schluchten, Flüsse, Stadtränder und Straßen, wo man sich der Jagdhunde üblicherweise entledigt oder aber Bäume, an denen man sie kopfüber aufhängt. Diesen Akten der Tiertötung begegnen Usbornes Fotos, indem sie die Jagdhunde nicht nur in einen künstlerischen Kontext stellen, sondern auch mit einer Bildinszenierung, der­

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Abb. 3  a und b Martin Usborne. Where Hunting Dogs Rest. (Kehrer, 2015)

es – trotz des elenden Zustandes der Tiere – gelingt, etwas von ihrer vormaligen Anmut und Graziliät zu transferieren. Dies wiederum ist nicht unerheblich einer fotografischen Darstellungsweise geschuldet, die sich in entscheidendem Maße Konventionen der Malerei bedient. Im Hinblick auf die ästhetische Gestaltung seiner Fotos suchte Usborne einen deutlichen Bezug zu jenem Maler herzustellen, der mit Südspanien in hervorragender Weise verbunden ist. So lassen sich hinsichtlich der Farbgebung der Fotos, aber auch bezogen auf den Einsatz von modellierendem Licht und Chiaroscuro-Effekten augenfällige Reminiszenzen an die Malerei Diego Velázquez’ erkennen. Zu Velázquez’ Zeiten indes genoss gerade jene Hunderasse der spanischen Galgos, die Usbornes Fotos überwiegend vorführen, noch allergrößtes Ansehen. Ihr Besitz galt in der Regel als Adelsprivileg. Insofern impliziert der

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Abb. 4  a Martin Usborne. Where Hunting Dogs Rest. (Kehrer, 2015), b Klever Schule. Stillleben mit Schnepfe und Orange, Öl auf Leinwand, 2. Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (privater Besitz).

Bezug zu Velázquez auch einen historischen Wandel, im Zuge dessen besagte Jagdhunde über die Jahrhunderte hinweg erheblich an Wertschätzung eingebüßt haben. Zu den Gesten der Malerei, die in Usbornes Fotobuch regelrecht re-inszeniert werden, gehört aber auch die Tradition des Stilllebens (Abb. 4a und b), unter dessen Genrebegriff „gemeinhin die Darstellung unbewegter, zumeist kleinerer Gegenstände, Pflanzen und regloser Lebewesen in bewusst arrangierter Anordnung“ gefasst wird (Schütz 17). Die zwei Orangen in der rechten unteren Bildhälfte des Fotos in Abb. 4a rufen einen solchen Bezugskontext ebenso auf wie der auf einem Podest und vor einem Fonds bühnengleich positionierte Hund. Freilich ist als Spielart der Stilllebenmalerei auch das sogenannte Jagdstillleben

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bekannt, das zum Beispiel tote Hasen, Rebhühner oder Fasane zeigt. In diesem aber kommen Hunde nur vergleichsweise selten vor. Sind sie jedoch anwesend, dann werden sie meist als vitale Bewacher der Jagdbeute entworfen. Usborne markiert und variiert zugleich die Tradition der Stilllebenmalerei, denn in seinen Fotografien tritt der Jagdhund in die Zone der toten Jagdbeute ein. Er ist folglich nicht mehr Agent des Todes anderer Tiere wie bei Thomson, sondern nun selbst vom Tod bedroht. Eben diesen Eindruck verstärkt die Fotografie, deren ‚mortifizierender‘ Effekt in der Fototheorie immer wieder betont wurde (Dubois 164). Alle fotografierten Jagdhunde fand Usborne in Tierauffangstationen, die den entsorgten Hunden Fürsorge geben. Das letzte Bild der Fotoreihe konfrontiert die Betrachter/innen mit dem einzigen toten Tier. Auf ihm sehen wir bezeichnenderweise keinen Hund, sondern einen Hasen. Nicht allein um eine visuelle Kritik, die sich ausschließlich gegen die gewaltvolle Tötung von Jagdhunden richtet, ist es Usborne folglich mit seinem interventionistischen Projekt zu tun, sondern allgemein um eine Problematisierung von Jagdpraktiken, insbesondere jene der Hetzjagd, die in Spanien bislang noch nicht verboten wurde.

6 Jagdhunde als Schwellentiere Kulturelle Artefakte, so kann resümierend festgehalten werden, lassen Grenzen zwischen Menschen und Tieren verschwimmen oder auch unscharf werden. Eben dadurch regen sie uns dazu an, darüber nachzudenken, was eigentlich ‚menschlich‘ und was eigentlich ‚tierlich‘ ist, und von welchem Standort aus wir unser Verhältnis zu Tieren bestimmen. Zugleich begegnen Literatur und die Künste den kulturellen Beunruhigungen, die von Tieren ausgehen, indem sie uns mit Konstruktionen des vermeintlich ‚Eigenen‘, ‚Verwandten‘, ‚Anderen‘ oder ‚Fremden‘ konfrontieren und uns auf ambivalente oder auch widersprüchliche Logiken der Konstellierung von Mensch-Tier-Interaktionen aufmerksam machen. Speziell Repräsentationen von Jagdhunden führen uns sehr weit ins Zentrum dieses Spannungsfeldes und dieser Verunsicherung. Schließlich sind Jagdhunde nicht einfach nur „Grenztiere“, wie es allgemein für Hunde gilt.5 Vielmehr eröffnen sie einen Schwellenraum, in dem nicht nur Mensch-Tier-Differenzen, sondern vor allem auch moralische und emotionale Zugehörigkeiten ausgehandelt werden, die

5Zur

Klassifizierung des Hundes als „Grenztier“ führt Borgards aus: „Der Hund ist für die moderne Zoologie zwar einerseits eindeutig ein wirkliches, natürliches Tier. Andererseits jedoch erscheint er zugleich als Ergebnis eines menschlichen Eingriffs in die Natur, als ein kulturell gestaltetes Lebewesen, als ein produziertes Tier, das aus einem züchterischen Differenzierungsprozess vom Wolf abgespalten worden ist. In keinem anderen Tier steckt so viel Arbeit wie im Hund. Für die Zoologie erwächst daraus die Konsequenz, dass der Hund zu einem Grenzphänomen zwischen natürlicher Gegebenheit und menschlicher Erfindung wird. Für die Anthropologie erwächst daraus die Konsequenz, dass der Hund zu einem Grenzphänomen zwischen dem Animalischen und dem Humanen wird“ (Borgards, „Tier“ 486).

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die Jagd als speziesistische Kulturpraktik vorführen und nicht eben selten in einer elementaren Begründungskrise zeigen. Zumal weil Jagdhunde dem Menschen nah und fern zugleich sind, kann an ihnen exemplarisch vorgeführt werden, welche Herausforderung es für Menschen fortwährend darstellt, sich gegenüber Tieren – selbst im imaginären Raum – zu positionieren. In diesem Sinne schließe ich mit den Worten Thomas Manns, der in seiner 1919 erschienenen Erzählung Herr und Hund mit Blick auf seinen Jagdhund Bauschan nicht nur die Möglichkeit, sondern auch die Grenzen der künstlerischen Reflexion im Feld von Mensch-Tier-Begegnungen eingesteht: „Wunderliche Seele! So nah befreundet und doch so fremd, so abweichend in gewissen Punkten, dass unser Wort sich als unfähig erweist, ihrer Logik gerecht zu werden“ (41).

Literatur Barthes, Roland. Die helle Kammer: Bemerkungen zur Photographie. 1980. Suhrkamp, 1989. Borgards, Roland. „Hund.“ Metzler Lexikon literarischer Symbole, hg. v. Günter Butzer und Joachim Jacob, Metzler, 2008. Borgards, Roland. „Tier.“ Phantastik: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, hg. v. Hans Richard Brittnacher und Markus May, Metzler, 2013, S. 482–487. Borgards, Roland. „Tiere jagen.“ TIERethik, Jg. 5, Nr. 7, 2013, S. 7–11. Brander, Michael. Die Jagd von der Urzeit bis heute. BLV Buchverlag, 1972. Brehm, Alfred Edmund. Illustrirtes Thierleben: Eine allgemeine Kunde des Thierreichs. Bd. 1, Hildburghausen, 1864. Cartmill, Matt. Das Bambi-Syndrom: Jagdleidenschaft und Misanthropie in der Kulturgeschichte. 1993. rororo, 1995. Dubois, Philippe. Der fotografische Akt: Versuch über ein theoretisches Dispositiv. 1942, hg. v. Herta Wolf, Philo Fine Arts, 1998. Ebner-Eschenbach, Marie von. „Krambambuli.“ Krambambuli und andere Erzählungen, Reclam, 2001, S. 5–17. Faulkner, William. „The Bear“. 1962. Go Down, Moses, Random House Vintage, 1990, S. 181–315. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Haushofer, Marlen. Die Wand. 1963. List, 2014. Heuermann, Hartmut. Mythos, Literatur, Gesellschaft: Mythokritische Analysen zur Geschichte des amerikanischen Romans. Fink, 1988. Homer. Odyssee. Standard, 1957. Jaeggi, Rahel, und Titus Stahl. „Schwerpunkt: Verdinglichung.“ Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Jg. 59, Nr. 5, 2011, S. 697–700. Lorenz, Konrad. Er redete mit dem Vieh, den Vögeln und den Fischen. 1949. DTV, 1998. Mann, Thomas. Herr und Hund: Ein Idyll. 1919. Fischer, 1989. Müllenbrock, Heinz-Joachim, und Eberhard Späth. Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts. Francke, 1977. Neumann, Gerhard. „Der Blick des Anderen: Zum Motiv des Hundes und des Affen in der Literatur.“ Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft, Nr. 40, 1996, S. 87–122. Ortega y Gasset, José. Meditationen über die Jagd. 1944. Dürckheim, 2012. Ovid. Metamorphosen. Hg. v. Gerhard Fink, Artemis und Winkler, 2001. Quadflieg, Dirk. „Verdinglichen.“ Handbuch materielle Kultur: Bedeutungen, Konzepte, Disziplinen, hg. v. Stefanie Samida u. a., Metzler, 2014, S. 148–155. Rösener, Werner. Die Geschichte der Jagd: Kultur, Gesellschaft und Jagdwesen im Wandel der Zeit. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004. Salten, Felix. Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde. Unionsverlag, 2012.

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Schröder, Klaus Albrecht. „Das Tier in der Kunst.“ Tiere: Der Mensch und seine Natur, hg. v. Konrad Paul Liessmann, Zsolnay, 2013, S. 127–152. Schütz, Karl. „Die Geschichte des Stilllebens.“ Das flämische Stillleben: 1550–1680S, hg. v. Wilfried Seipel, Luca, 2002, S. 17–31. Strigl, Daniela. „Von Krambambuli bis Bambi: Tiere als literarische Protagonisten.“ Tiere: Der Mensch und seine Natur, hg. v. Konrad Paul Liessmann, Zsolnay, 2013, S. 97–126. Stutz, Elfriede. „Studien über Herr und Hund.“ Das Tier in der Dichtung, hg. v. Ute Schwab, Winter, 1970, S. 200–238. Thomson, James. „The Seasons.“ The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence. 1730. Hg. v. James Sambrook, Oxford UP, 1972, S. 1–162. Tuider, Jens, und Ursula Wolf. „Gibt es eine ethische Rechtfertigung der Jagd?“ TIERethik, Jg. 5, Nr. 7, 2013, S. 33–46. Uhlig, Claus. „Der weinende Hirsch: As You Like It, II, 1, 21–66, und der historische Kontext.“ Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 1968, S. 21–66. Waal, Frans de. Der Affe und der Sushimeister: Das kulturelle Leben der Tiere. 2001. DTV, 2005. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Der Stachel des Fremden. Suhrkamp, 1990.

Personalerweiterung: Gefüge von Menschen, Phantomen und Hunden in der Blindenführhundausbildung nach Jakob von Uexküll und Emanuel Sarris

20

Katja Kynast

Die erste Beschreibung eines Blindenführhundes findet sich in dem vielleicht wichtigsten tierphilosophischen Text der Frühen Neuzeit – in Michel de ­Montaignes „Apologie für Raymond Sebond“ von 1580. Montaigne versammelt hier Berichte von der Sprach- und Lernfähigkeit der Tiere und argumentiert auf diese Weise gegen rigide Konstruktionen anthropologischer Differenz. Sprechende Amseln und Papageien, zählende Ochsen und Hunde, die Tricks vollführen sollen hier verdeutlichen, dass Tiere mit ganz ähnlichen Fähigkeiten ausgestattet sein können wie Menschen. All die beschriebenen, teils erstaunlichen, Leistungen werden für Montaigne nur von ganz bestimmten Tieren übertroffen, nämlich von den Hunden, „deren sich die Blinden üblicherweise in Stadt und Land bedienen.“ (203). Montaigne gibt an dieser Stelle keinen Bericht eines anderen Autors wieder (vielleicht weil keiner zuhanden war, aber dazu später), sondern beschreibt die Blindenhunde aus eigener Perspektive: Ich habe beobachtet, wie sie vor bestimmten Türen haltmachen, an denen es gewöhnlich Almosen gibt, und wie sie ihren Herrn, damit er nicht überfahren wird, vor Kutschen und Karren beiseite ziehn, obwohl der Platz zum Durchkommen für sie selber ausgereicht hätte; einen sah ich, der entlang eines Stadtgrabens einen geebneten und glatten Pfad verließ und auf einen schlechteren wechselte, um seinen Herrn vom Graben fernzuhalten. Wie hat man diesem Hund verständlich machen können, daß es seine Aufgabe sei, allein auf die Sicherheit seines Herrn bedacht zu sein und in dessen Dienst die eigene Bequemlichkeit hintanzustellen? Und wie vermochte er zu erkennen, daß jener Weg, der für ihn durchaus breit genug war, für einen Blinden es nicht sein würde? Kann man all das lernen, ohne Verstand und Denkfähigkeit zu haben? (203–204)

K. Kynast (*)  Berlin, Deutschland © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_20

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Dieser Abschnitt ist allein deswegen bemerkenswert, weil hiermit die wohl früheste schriftliche Beschreibung eines Führgespanns beziehungsweise MenschHund-Teams1 vorliegt. Für diesen Beitrag ist darüber hinaus besonders interessant, dass Montaigne hier zwar keine Ausbildungssituation beschreibt, aber dennoch das Lernen und Verständlichmachen, also eine pädagogische Beziehung, thematisiert. Dieser Beitrag folgt dieser Thematik und beschäftigt sich deshalb auch mit den von Montaigne (teils rhetorisch) formulierten Fragen. Hierfür werden im Folgenden entsprechende Settings aufgesucht, in denen Antworten darauf formuliert wurden, „wie […] man diesem Hund [hat] verständlich machen können, dass es seine Aufgabe sei“ und wie „man all das lernen [kann]“ (204). Einer ernsthaften beziehungsweise systematischen Beantwortung der Frage, wie Hunde die von Montaigne beschriebenen Fähigkeiten erlernen und welche Methoden hierfür geeignet wären, widmen sich erst über 300 Jahre später die neu gegründeten Blindenführhundschulen mit denen eine institutionelle Ausbildung der Hunde etabliert wird. Ich möchte mich hier auf eine sowohl im Hinblick auf ihre theoretischen Konzepte als auch ihre praktische Ausführung originelle Methode konzentrieren und diese kritisch diskutieren. Es handelt sich um die von dem Biologen Jakob von Uexküll und seinem Assistenten Emanuel Sarris am Hamburger Institut für Umweltforschung entwickelte Ausbildung. Uexkülls umwelttheoretische Konzepte wurden und werden in diversen Ansätzen, die sich Mensch-Tier-Relationen widmen, rezipiert, etwa von Gilles Deleuze und Félix Guattari in ihrem Entwurf einer Ethologie (Deleuze 162–163; Deleuze und Guattari 350) sowie aktuellen affekttheoretischen Anschlüssen (Angerer 36–37), in Vinciane Desprets und Stéphan Galetics Lektüren oder in Ingolds ökologischer Anthropologie (174–178).2 Ich möchte mich hier den kulturhistorischen und theoretischen Implikationen der praktischen Umsetzung der Umwelttheorie in der Blindenführhundausbildung widmen. Uexküll und Sarris reagierten mit ihrem Ausbildungsanatz auf die ihrer Meinung nach unzureichenden Methoden der ersten Blindenführhundschulen in Oldenburg (gegründet 1916) und Potsdam (gegründet 1923). Kern ihrer Kritik war, dass die Trainer/innen die Hunde nicht ausbilden, sondern abrichten und diese deshalb auch nichts lernen, sondern nur dressiert würden.3 In verschiedenen

1Blindenführhunde zählen nach § 39 Bundesbehindertengesetz zu den Assistenzhunden. Die Begriffe Assistenzhundeteam oder kurz Team werden häufig synonym zum Begriff des Gespanns verwendet. (Maßgeblich österreichische) Assistenzhundevereinigungen setzten sich seit den 1990er Jahren für den Begriff des Teams ein. Für die Hinweise danke ich Dr. Karl Weissenbacher vom Messerli-Forschungsinstitut Wien und Gloria Petrovics. 2In den letzten Jahren wurden auch die praktischen Umsetzungen der Umwelttheorie und die Blindenführhundausbildung in medien- kulturwissenschaftlichen sowie biosemiotisch orientierten Untersuchungen diskutiert (Bühler; Harrasser: Prothesen; Magnus; Rieger). 3Sie reagierten aber ebenfalls auf eine gesteigerte Nachfrage nach Blindenführhunden, die aus der großen Zahl an Kriegsblinden, die der 1. Weltkrieg hervorbrachte, resultierte. Die Ausbildung beziehungsweise der Verkauf von Blindenführhunden hatte sich zu einem lukrativen Geschäft entwickelt.

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Publikationen aus den frühen 1930er Jahren legten sie, teils sehr polemisch, ihre Kritikpunkte an den anderen Schulen dar und stellten ihre Methode und die zugrunde liegenden pädagogischen und umwelttheoretischen Ansätze vor. Ich möchte hier den spezifischen Strukturen und Möglichkeiten von Begegnung nachgehen, wie sie in der von ihnen vorgeschlagenen Formierung eines Führhundgespanns beziehungsweise den vorgeschalteten Lernprozessen zum Ausdruck kommen und die Argumente nachzeichnen, die dazu führten, dass es als notwendig erachtet wurde provisorisch, aber in einem entscheidenden Moment des Lernprozesses, Begegnungen von Menschen und Tieren zu disqualifizieren, um eine neue Relation als Mensch-Hund-Team beziehungsweise Gespann zu ermöglichen. Pointe der Uexküll-Sarris-Methode ist nämlich, dass sie Menschen als Lernhemmnis für die Hunde begreift und diese deshalb apparativ auf Distanz hält. Folgt man Uexkülls und Sarris’ Argumentationen wird deutlich, dass die herkömmliche Begegnung von Menschen und Hunden auf dem Übungsplatz im Modus der Dressur verfährt, was Erfahren und selbstständiges Lernen ausschlösse. Neben diesem pädagogischen Argument führen sie ein umwelttheoretisches ins Feld. Der hundliche Fokus auf den Menschen und ein ‚anthropozentrisches Training‘ stellen ein Problem dar, weil die Aufmerksamkeit der Hunde von der Umwelt abgezogen wird. Kern der Uexküll-Sarris-Methode ist aber gerade, dass die Hunde eine Erweiterung ihrer Umwelt um menschliche Elemente erfahren und sich selbstständig in diesen Umwelten orientieren können, ohne von Befehlen oder Signalen der Menschen abhängig zu sein. Um dies zu erreichen entwickelten sie einen apparativen Ersatz für das ‚Lernhemmnis Mensch‘, einen Ausbildungswagen, auch „Phantom“ oder „künstlicher Mensch“ genannt, vor den die Hunde gespannt wurden und so auf Elemente der menschlichen Umwelten, also zum Beispiel Hindernisse wie Gräben oder Bordsteinkanten aufmerksam werden sollten. Uexküll und Sarris argumentieren dabei in ihrer Kritik an bestimmten Formen der Dressur auch tierethisch. Man kann aber davon ausgehen, dass ihre Vorschläge zur Neugestaltung des Lernprozesses und der Neukonzipierung der hundlichen Anteile und Fähigkeiten nicht tierethisch motiviert war, denn auch ihre Methode gilt in dieser Hinsicht als sehr problematisch. Uexküll und Sarris waren vor allem an einer praktischen Anwendung umwelttheoretischer Konzepte interessiert und ihre Kritik an Konditionierung mündete, wie Karin Harrasser analysiert, „in einer systematisch auf Umwelten bezogenen Handlungstheorie und in einer Theorie der Technik, die in der Nähe derjenigen Bruno Latours anzusiedeln ist“ (Prothesen 267).4

4Nach Harrasser zwingen technische oder lebendige Erweiterungen (Prothesen) immer zu Umwegen. Mit Uexküll wären dies Umwege durch die Umwelt, Merkwelt und Wirkwelt des jeweils anderen. Auf diese Weise ergäben sich komplexe Gefüge aus Menschen, Tieren und Maschinen. Die darin auftauchenden Formen der Vermittlung ließen sich mit Latours Konzept der „Delegation“ oder „semantischen Verschiebung“ beschreiben, die für sein mediales Modell der Technik zentral sind (Prothesen 269).

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Anhand ihrer praktischen Anwendung lassen sich Umwelttheorie und ihre bis heute relevanten Konzepte exemplarisch skizzieren und problematisieren. Ich möchte den Fokus auf die Implikationen richten, die die provisorische Vermeidung des Menschen und seine Ersetzung durch den Ausbildungswagen mit sich bringen. Dies scheint mir vor allem deswegen interessant, weil sich hier Unterschiede zwischen Begegnungen, die sich agrartechnisch und kulturhistorisch als Gespann fassen ließen, und denjenigen, die eher als Teambildungsprozess zu verstehen wären, konturieren lassen. Daraus ergibt sich die Frage, inwiefern die beschriebene Problematisierung des dressierenden Menschen und Kritik an einem anthropozentrischen Lernprozess in diesem konkreten Fall auch eine neue Aufmerksamkeit auf die beteiligten Hunde beinhaltete. Inwiefern kommt es hier zu einer Neukonfigurierung der Hunde und werden diese im vorgestellten Setting in ihren (kommunikativen) Angeboten wahrgenommen? Menschen sind in diesem Setting nämlich trotz der apparativen Distanzierung als Ausbildende, Forschende und Fotografierende präsent. Diese Begegnungen sind, so möchte ich schließlich argumentieren, nur aus der Verknüpfung von tier- und humanwissenschaftlichen Disziplinen, etwa der Biologie, Psychologie und Pädagogik, zu erklären. Um diese Settings und die darin provozierten Begegnungen zu analysieren, werde ich mit einem Exkurs in die Geschichte der Blindenführhunde und ihrer Ausbildung beginnen und anschließend die modernen Ausbildungsmethoden entlang der Konstellationen von Hunden und Menschen, Hunden und ‚Phantomen‘ sowie Tier- und Humanwissenschaften diskutieren.

1 Von der Selbst- zur Fremdausbildung: Zur Geschichte der Blindenführhunde Die Beantwortung der Frage, seit wann es Blindenführhunde gibt, hängt von unserer Definition eines Blindenführhunds ab. Wenn damit von einer externen Institution, also nicht von oder mit Halter oder Halterin ausgebildete Hunde gemeint sind, lässt sich ihr Aufkommen auf das Jahr 1916 datieren als in Oldenburg die erste Blindenführhundschule gegründet wurde. Selbstverständlich gab es aber bereits lange davor blinde Hundehalter/innen; auf welche Weise hier eine Teambildung stattfand, ist jedoch kaum erforscht und aufgrund der Quellenlage auch kaum möglich. Es sind nur wenige Darstellungen überliefert, häufiger und älteren Datums als die schriftlichen sind dabei bildliche Darstellungen. Aus den Dokumenten wird meist jedoch nicht deutlich, ob oder in welchem Sinn es sich bei den Hunden um Assistenztiere handelt, das heißt weder die Ausbildung noch Arten und Weisen der gemeinsamen Fortbewegung sind dokumentiert.5

5Man

muss auch beachten, dass der Blindenführhund heute ein so bekanntes Phänomen darstellt und so retrospektiv bei Abbildung eines Blinden mit einem Hund davon ausgegangen wird, dass es sich hierbei um ein Führgespann handeln müsse. Diese Art der Zuschreibung bezieht sich

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Seit es Ausbildungsstätten gibt und Führhund-Teams sichtbarer wurden, wuchs auch das Interesse an deren Geschichte und verschiedenste Quellen wurden seither herangezogen. So wird seit dem frühen 20. Jahrhundert anhand einer Wandmalerei aus Herculaneum die Frage diskutiert, ob nicht bereits in der Antike Führgespanne bekannt waren (Stork 13–14; Calabrò 3–6). Das betreffende Gemälde zeigt einen Bettler, der in der linken Hand einen Stab hält und in der rechten Hand die Leine eines kleinen Hundes. Verschiedene Indizien, Kopfhaltung, Mimik und Gestik betreffend, wurden erörtert, um zu klären, ob der Bettler blind ist und, ob sein Hund ihm assistiert. Die Frage wurde bis heute nicht abschließend geklärt. Anhand weiterer vereinzelter bildlicher Darstellungen (schriftliche Quellen fehlen quasi völlig) aus der Antike und dem Mittelalter, sowohl im europäischen Raum als auch in Asien, wird seither versucht, das Auftauchen von Blindenführhunden zu datieren. Eine erste schriftliche Beschreibung eines Blindenführhundes findet sich in dem oben zitierten Werk Montaignes, der interessanterweise auf die Blindenhunde als in Stadt und Land bekanntes Phänomen verweist. Bemerkenswert ist diese frühneuzeitliche Beschreibung auch, weil in Kürze bis heute gültige wesentliche Aufgaben und Fähigkeiten der Hunde benannt werden. Dazu gehört, dass die Hunde Ziele aufsuchen können, die nur für den Menschen eine Bedeutung haben oder dass sie Hindernisse erkennen, die für sie gar keine darstellen. Dass sie außerdem die Breite von Wegen in Relation zur menschlichen Körpergröße einschätzen können und gegebenenfalls selbstständig Umwege finden, diese kommunizieren und dabei auch einmal Anweisungen ignorieren.6 Montaigne beschreibt auch schon die Orientierung in der städtischen Umwelt und im Straßenverkehr. Und er wirft die Frage auf, wie die Hunde dies alles lernen konnten. Berichte über Ausbildungsversuche und -methoden sind allerdings aus Montaignes Zeit oder früher nicht bekannt. Erste Texte hierzu sind aus dem 18. und 19. Jahrhundert überliefert und noch rarer gesät als Dokumente, die den Alltag ‚fertiger‘ Führgespanne wiedergeben. Als erster Bericht einer Blindenführhundausbildung gilt die Abhandlung des Wiener Arztes Joseph Beer über seinen Patienten Joseph Reisinger und dessen Hunde aus dem Jahr 1813. Nach Beer waren Führgespanne im Wiener Stadtbild bis dahin nicht bekannt und als Vorbild hätten Reisinger deshalb wohl die Blinden aus dem Hôpital des Quinze-Vingts in Paris7 gedient, von denen man hört, dass sie

nicht nur auf historische Quellen, sondern auch auf Erwartungen, die an blinden Hundehalter/ innen gestellt werden. Diese berichten häufig, dass sie sich rechtfertigen müssen, wenn sie ihre Hunde nicht als Blindenführhunde gebrauchen beziehungsweise entschieden haben, mit Hunden zusammenzuleben, die nicht ausgebildet und im Sinne der Orthopädieverordnung als Prothese anerkannt sind (siehe Tanner). 6Ein Verhalten, das heute mit dem Begriff ‚intelligenter Ungehorsam‘ gefasst wird. 7Das Krankenhaus wurde im 13. Jahrhundert gegründet und existiert auch heute noch als Spezialklinik für Augenheilkunde.

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„fast durchaus von wohlabgerichteten Hunden in dem weitläufigen Paris geleitet werden“ (36). Beer identifiziert als wichtiges Element der Ausbildung eine Art Leine, die ähnlich heutiger Führgeschirre als Kommunikationsmittel dient und übermittelt, wenn der Hund stehen geblieben ist, um beispielsweise ein Hindernis oder Ziel anzuzeigen. Er berichtet außerdem davon, wie wichtig „Liebkosungen“, „gute Nahrung“ und selten auch „Drohungen“ seien, um den Hund zu einem „unzertrennlichen Gefährten“ zu machen. (37). In dieser ersten dokumentierten Ausbildung wird deutlich körperliche und emotionale Nähe als entscheidend für den Erfolg beschrieben. Über 30 Jahre sollen Reisinger und seine Blindenhunde – erst ein Spitz, später ein Pudel – auf diese Weise gemeinsam durch Wien gelaufen sein. 1844 erscheint mit Jakob Birrer von Lutherns Erinnerungen, merkwürdigen Lebensfahrten und besonderen Ansichten ein zweiter Bericht, dieses Mal vom blinden Halter selbst. Auch dieser bezieht sich auf Quinze-Vingts. Er habe gehört, so Birrer, dass Blinde in Paris Pudel als Führer hätten, dass er das aber erstens nicht glaube und dass er zweitens auch keinen Hund zum Führer haben wolle. Probehalber begann er dennoch, einen Spitz zu dressieren (158). Auch in seinem Bericht ist die Leine als elementares Kommunikationsmittel genannt. Birrer beschreibt ebenfalls, wie wichtig es ist, möglichst gewaltfrei zu trainieren, um eine vertrauensvolle Begegnung von Hund und Herr zu ermöglichen (159) und so ein Konzept von Begegnung favorisiert, das dem heutigen der ‚sozialen Bindung‘ entspricht. Außerdem und damit zusammenhängend, ist es für Birrer unbedingt erforderlich, dass die (blinden) Halter ihre Hunde selbst ausbilden. Die Gründe hierfür liegen mutmaßlich darin, dass Birrer erkannte, dass nicht nur der jeweilige Hund ausgebildet wird, sondern sich vielmehr Hunde und ihre Halter/innen miteinander und aneinander ausbilden. Mit der systematischen Blindenführhundausbildung im 20. Jahrhundert kam es in diesem Punkt zur Zäsur. Es waren nun nicht mehr die Halter/innen, die ihre Hunde ausbildeten, sondern die Schulen, die die Hunde anschließend und nach einer Eingewöhnungsphase an die neuen Halter/innen abgaben. Es stellt sich die Frage, weshalb und in welchem historischen Kontext man nach einer womöglich Jahrtausende zurückreichenden Geschichte von Mensch-Hund-Teams im frühen 20. Jahrhundert damit begann, die Ausbildung auf diese Weise zu institutionalisieren? Also zu einem Zeitpunkt, an dem sich die Gespanne von Tieren und Menschen mit der zweiten Industriellen Revolution zunehmend auflösten? Ein wichtiger Faktor hierfür ist, dass der Erste Weltkrieg eine große Anzahl von Erblindeten durch Giftgasangriffe, aber auch durch andere Verletzungen, hervorbrachte. Mit diesen Kriegsblinden entstand gewissermaßen eine neue Klasse von Blinden. Als Versehrte und Veteranen waren sie gesellschaftlich anerkannter als sogenannte Friedensblinde und sie nutzten diese Position, um neue Formen der gesellschaftlichen Teilhabe, der Selbstorganisation und Interessenvertretung von Blinden zu entwickeln. 1916 organisierten sie sich im „Bund erblindeter Krieger“, um wirksamer ihre Rechte vertreten und für materielle Versorgung und gesellschaftliche Anerkennung kämpfen zu können. Zentral waren Forderungen

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nach Maßnahmen, die eine Erwerbstätigkeit ermöglichten. Hierzu gehörten ganz besonders die Blindenführhunde, deren Bedeutung als ‚Führer zur Arbeit‘ in den einschlägigen Publikationen intensiv diskutiert wurde.8 Die Gründung der ersten Ausbildungsstätte in Oldenburg 1916 ist als Reaktion auf diese Situation zu verstehen. Noch im selben Jahr gab die Schule den ersten Hund an einen Kriegsblinden ab.9 Aus Berichten in den einschlägigen Fachzeitschriften Der Kriegsblinde oder Der Hund wird deutlich, dass in den folgenden Jahren in Oldenburg eine enorm hohe Zahl an Blindenführhunden ausgebildet wurde.10 Die Ausbildung versprach umso mehr zu einem lukrativen Geschäftsfeld zu werden, als ab 1920 Blindenführhunde im Reichsversorgungsgesetz als Prothese anerkannt waren. Ab 1922 durften schließlich auch Friedensblinde Hunde erhalten. Mit der Eröffnung einer weiteren Schule in Potsdam im darauf folgenden Jahr war der geschäftliche Wettbewerb eröffnet und es ging darum, Alleinstellungsmerkmale geltend zu machen. So warb die Potsdamer Schule damit, ihre Hunde im Gegensatz zu den Oldenburgern zu evaluieren und sie an das Führen in modernen Großstädten, d. h. im Straßenverkehr, gewöhnt zu haben. Potsdam versprach also eine qualitativ hochwertige Ausbildung, aber auch hier wurde massenweise ausgebildet – der 1000. Blindenhund wurde 1932, also nach nicht einmal 10 Jahren, abgegeben. Als dritter Akteur trat Anfang der 1930er Jahre das Institut für Umweltforschung in Hamburg auf den Plan. Das Institut des Biologen Jakob von Uexküll hatte nicht, wie die anderen Schulen, einen Hintergrund in der Militär- oder Sanitätshundeausbildung, sondern widmete sich als Forschungsinstitut den Umwelten so verschiedener Lebewesen wie Fischen, Zecken, Krähen und mit Emanuel Sarris der Hunde. Die Ausbildung von Blindenführhunden sollte hier eine praktische Anwendung umwelttheoretischer Konzepte ermöglichen, weshalb sie sich in Theorie und Methodik sehr von den anderen Schulen unterschied.

2 Personalerweiterung: Begegnungen von Menschen, Hunden und Disziplinen am Institut für Umweltforschung Grundlage der Ausbildung bildete also Uexkülls Umwelttheorie. Mit dieser hatte er einen radikal neuen Ansatz entwickelt, die Beziehungen der Lebewesen zu ihrer Umwelt – andere Lebewesen eingeschlossen – zu denken. Kern seiner Theorie ist ein neues Konzept von Umwelt, das er ab 1909 in dezidierter Abgrenzung zum darwinistischen Milieubegriff und auch zur alltagssprachlichen als objektiv aufgefassten oder physikalisch bestimmbaren Umgebung entfaltete. Streng

8Es

wurde sogar eine Sonderbriefmarkenreihe mit diesem Titel herausgegeben. Schule ging aus dem oldenburgischen Verein für Sanitätshunde hervor. Über 6000 Hunde wurden von ihnen ausgebildet (Stork 50–51). 10Bis 1928 hatte man 5000 Hunde ausgebildet und abgegeben (Calabrò 21). 9Die

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abgegrenzt ist sein Ansatz auch von darwinistischen Vorstellungen des Milieus und damit einhergehenden Anpassungsleistungen der Tiere. Uexküll definiert Umwelt stattdessen als den Teil einer Umgebung, mit dem ein Organismus in konstitutivem Zusammenhang steht. Ausgangspunkt und Schwerpunkt seiner Forschungen sind deshalb die vielfältigen subjektiven Gefüge von Organismen und ihren Umwelten. Dieser Ansatz wurde bereits damals in den unterschiedlichsten theoretischen Ansätzen, auch diverser politischer Ausrichtung, rezipiert. Die Idee von der grundsätzlichen Umweltgebundenheit wurde unter anderem von der philosophischen Anthropologie aufgenommen (Mildenberger 87). Und Martin Heidegger setzte sich in seiner Vorlesung von 1929/30 intensiv mit Uexküll auseinander und führt ihn als einen der „hellsichtigsten Biologen von heute“ (315) ein, da dieser verstanden habe, dass nur das „Beziehungsgefüge des Tieres zu seiner Umgebung“ (382)11 Ausgangspunkt der biologischen Forschungen sein könne. Heidegger stimmt mit Uexküll überein, dass es bei der Erforschung der Fähigkeiten der Lebewesen nicht darum gehen könne, Umgebung und Lebewesen getrennt voneinander zu betrachten und gegebenenfalls Anpassungsleistungen und Auslese zu beobachten, vielmehr gehöre die Verbindung mit der Umgebung bereits zum Wesen des „Benehmens“ und des „Fähigseins“ (375).12 Organismus und Umwelt sind umwelttheoretisch als immer schon perfekt eingepasst zu verstehen. Konzepte evolutionärer Entwicklung hin zu einer besseren Fitness und auch eine implizite Hierarchisierung in niedriger und höher entwickelte Lebewesen werden somit ausgeschlossen. Inwiefern auch Insekten und nicht erst höhere Säugetiere perfekt sind, verdeutlichte Uexküll am breit rezipierten Beispiel einer Zecke in einer sommerlichen Wiese. Von allen Reizen, die diese Wiese ausüben kann, sind nach Uexküll genau drei von Bedeutung für die Zecke und bilden somit ihre Umwelt. Das erste ‚Merkmal‘, so der umwelttheoretische Begriff, ist der Geruch von Buttersäure, also Schweißgeruch, der von potenziellen Wirten ausgeht. Die Zecke antwortet auf dieses Merkmal mit einer korrespondierenden Aktion, ‚Wirkmal‘ genannt, indem sie sich von ihrem Halm abstreifen lässt, um auf den Körper des Wirts überzugehen. Nun bekommt das zweite Merkmal, die Körpertemperatur, Bedeutung und die Zecke wird eine warme Stelle aufsuchen. Drittes Merkmal der Umwelt der Zecke ist die Hautoberfläche, um eine geeignete Stelle für den Stich (gemeinhin spricht man vom Biss) aufzusuchen. Der Funktionskreis ist somit perfekt. In diesen Relationen fasst Uexküll die Zecke nicht als eine Maschine, die auf äußere Reize reagiert, vielmehr ist es die subjektive Organisation der Zecke selbst, die diese Umwelt entwarf (Uexküll und Kriszat 6–7).

11I.O.

kursiv. verwies Heidegger Uexküll in seine Schranken, wenn er der Biologie absprach, auch über menschliche Welten und Umwelten Aussagen treffen zu können, da es auch zwischen Menschen und Tieren grundsätzlich zu differenzieren gilt. Bekannt ist Heideggers Unterscheidung, nach der der Stein weltlos, das Tier weltarm und der Mensch weltbildend sei (Heidegger 263, siehe dazu auch Vagt 93).

12Zugleich

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Am wirkmächtigsten schlossen Gilles Deleuze und Félix Guattari an das Zeckenexempel an, indem sie die Uexküllsche Terminologie der Merk- und Wirkmale durch Affekte ersetzten. Dadurch dass Uexküll, den Versuch machte, die Zecke durch drei Affekte zu definieren, gelänge es ihm, „Tierwelten zu beschreiben, die durch Affekte und die Macht, zu affizieren und affiziert zu werden, definiert sind“ (Deleuze 162–163). Deleuze sieht hier eine Ethologie begründet, die nicht aus der äußeren Form oder der Gattung eines Lebewesens bestimmte Fähigkeiten ableitet. Körper, Tiere oder Menschen, werden stattdessen darüber definiert, zu welchen Affekten sie fähig sind (Deleuze und Guattari 350). Wie Benjamin Bühler zusammenfasst, hat sich Uexkülls exemplarische Zecke in dieser Rezeption verwandelt und steht „nicht mehr für eine eindeutige, feste Relation von System und Umwelt, sondern für das Netzwerk von Beziehungen, das Körper, ob Maschinen, Tiere oder Menschen, allererst konstituiert“ (263). Interessant scheint mir nun, dass Uexküll und Sarris in der praktischen Anwendung der Umwelttheorie und in der Arbeit mit Hunden ein weiteres komplexeres Exempel einführen, das anders als die ikonische Zecke grundsätzlich dynamisch angelegt ist. Worum es ihnen ja gerade geht, ist, die Umwelt der Hunde zu vergrößern, sie um menschliche Merkmale zu erweitern. Zwar ist der Ansatz erst einmal auf die Ausbildung der Hunde beschränkt (sprich: wechselseitige Konstitutionen sind nicht explizit ausgeführt), aber es scheint mir auch und gerade für die Uexküllsche Theorie bemerkenswert, dass die Gefüge hier als entwickelbar und, wie ich zeigen werde, konstitutiv apparativ beziehungsweise medial gedacht sind. Es stellt sich also die Frage, inwiefern hier in der theoretischen Ausrichtung und praktischen Ausführung auch wechselseitige Konstitutionen von Menschen und Hunden angelegt und unterstützt sind. Nach Stefan Rieger geht es in der Konstruktion darum, „die Verschieblichkeit des Hundes so weit zu treiben, daß dieser in der Lage ist, Menschendinge zu Hundedingen zu machen.“ (197), was zugleich bedeutet, dass der relative Charakter eines Lebewesens, in diesem Fall des Hundes, deutlich wird (197–198). Expliziter Ausgangpunkt der Ausbildung ist zunächst weniger die wechselseitige Verschränkung von Umwelten als die Erweiterung der Hundeumwelt um Merkmale aus der menschlichen Umwelt. Hierzu muss erst einmal die Umwelt der Hunde ausreichend erforscht werden. Dies fällt in das Fachgebiet von Emanuel Sarris, der 1931 in Pädagogik und Psychologie zum Wortverständnis bei Hunden promoviert wurde.13 Diese humanwissenschaftlich informierten kynologischen Forschungen bilden zusammen mit Uexkülls biologischen beziehungsweise umwelttheoretischen Konzepten die transdisziplinäre Grundlage für die neue Ausbildungsmethode. In dieser geht es nun also darum, die erforschte hundliche Umwelt mit Dingen aus

13In der Dissertation untersucht Sarris in unterschiedlichen Experimentalanordnungen die hundlichen Sinne (Gehör, Gesichtssinn, Geruch), Gedächtnis, Vorstellungkraft, Intelligenz sowie dingliche und begriffliche Auffassung. Im Vorwort dankt er seinen Lehrern, dem Psychologen William Stern, dem Biologen Jakob von Uexküll, dem Althistoriker Erich Ziebarth und dem Naturforscher Wilhelm Peters.

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der menschlichen Umwelt anzureichern, also mit Elementen, die für Menschen Bedeutung haben – Briefkästen, Treppen oder hohe Hindernisse. Dies geschieht nicht, wie bei Beer oder Reisinger, indem Hund und Mensch sich gemeinsam und durch eine Leine verbunden bewegen und somit Merkmale kommunizieren. Stattdessen wird der zukünftige blinde Halter von einer Apparatur ersetzt.14 Diese „Prothese der Prothese“ (Harrasser, Prothesen 271) präsentieren U ­ exküll und Sarris 1931 in der Umschau, wo sie gewissermaßen die Montaigneschen ­Fragen (wie kann man all das lernen?) umwelttheoretisch umformulieren: „Wie kann man einem Hunde, der doch nur Verständnis für Hundedinge besitzen kann, Verständnis für Menschendinge erwecken, die in der Umwelt der Blinden die entscheidende Rolle spielen?“ (1016). Indem der Wagen es unmöglich macht, Gräben zu überspringen oder Treppen zu laufen, soll dieses Verständnis erweckt und verstetigt werden. Nach einiger Zeit, so Uexküll und Sarris, behandeln die Hunde die Hindernisse, die sich dem Wagen entgegenstellen, so als seien sie ihre eigenen, die Umwelt der Hunde würde erfolgreich modifiziert: „Es tritt eine Art Personal-Erweiterung ein, e i n n e u e s I c h t r i t t i n e i n e n e u e U m w e l t, die neue Hindernisse mit einschließt“ (1016).15 In den frühen 1930er Jahren veröffentlichen Uexküll und Sarris weitere Artikel zur Blindenführhundausbildung. Dabei kritisieren sie teils sehr polemisch die Methoden der etablierten Ausbildungsstätten und stellen diesen ihren Ansatz gegenüber. In der Zeitschrift Der Hund veröffentlicht Sarris, nachdem er die Potsdamer Schule besichtigt hatte, einen Bericht, in dem er über alle wesentlichen Elemente der Ausbildung ein vernichtendes Urteil spricht.16 Das betrifft die Auswahl der Hunde, die Übungen zum Grundgehorsam und vor allem die eigentliche Blindenführhundausbildung (Sarris 1933). Zur Auswahl der Hunde berichtet Sarris, dass die Trainer mit den infrage kommenden Hunden vier bis fünf Tage lange jeweils vier bis fünf Mal am Tag eine halbe Stunde in der Stadt spazieren gingen und dass dies nicht den (etwa von ihm selbst) ausgearbeiteten Methoden entspreche, die erforderlich seien, um zu prüfen, ob ein Hund den komplexen Aufgaben eines Blindenführhundes gewachsen sei.17 Es wird an dieser Stelle deutlich, dass er dem gemeinsamen Spazieren,

14Der Wagen wird auch heute noch vereinzelt in Blindenführhundschulen eingesetzt. Inwiefern der Wagen hier ein wirksames Mittel darstellt oder ob er eine unnötige und sogar tierschutzrelevante Maßnahme darstellt, wird viel kompetenter und auch überaus engagiert in den Ausbildungsstätten und Blindenführhundvereinen diskutiert. 15I.O. gesperrt. 16Zum Zeitpunkt der Veröffentlichung wurden Parteien, Institutionen, Verbände und Vereine aufgelöst oder ‚gleichgeschaltet‘, das betraf auch die Hundeverbände. 17Sarris bemängelt, dass wesentliche Eigenschaften wie „Seh- und Gehörschärfe, Erregbarkeit, Orientierungsfähigkeit, Gedächtnis, Aufmerksamkeit und Intelligenz“ (Hervorhebung i.O. gesperrt) nicht geprüft würden (Sarris, „Über die Potsdamer Führhunddressur“ 295). Jene Fähigkeiten also, denen er sich in seiner Dissertation ausführlich widmete und für die er eigene Versuchsreihen entwickelte.

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den Beobachtungen und Kommunikationen, die in diesen Situationen stattfinden, keinen oder einen nur sehr geringen Erkenntnisgewinn zuspricht und sie aus dem Repertoire wissenschaftlicher Methoden ausschließt. Ein Verhältnis des gemeinsamen Spazierens wertet er gegenüber einem Setting, in dem sich Prüfender und Prüfling begegnen ab. Für den Übungsplatz stellt es sich etwas anders dar. Hier präferiert Sarris eindeutig eine Begegnung von Ausbilder/in und Schüler/in gegenüber Abrichter/in und Hund. Dementsprechend kritisiert Sarris die nach seiner Beschreibung äußerst gewaltsamen Übungen zum Grundgehorsam (Lautgeben, Setzen, Legen, Apportieren).18 Diesen Formen der Dressur stellt Sarris diesmal nicht „streng wissenschaftlich ausgearbeitete Methoden“ („Über die Potsdamer Führhunddressur“ 295) gegenüber beziehungsweise bevorzugt nicht das Setting einer experimentellen Versuchsanordnung, sondern begnügt sich mit dem Hinweis: „dass jedes Kind diese Leistungen dem Hunde s p i e l e n d beibringen kann, und vor allem nicht auf Kosten seiner S e l b s t ä n d i g k e i t.“19 Mit den Methoden der Dressur hingegen, würden die Hunde ihre Aufgabe gar nicht begreifen und deshalb auch nicht richtig ausüben können. Eine Gegendarstellung aus Potsdam folgt in derselben Zeitschrift. Explizit und vehement wird Sarris’ Darstellung der Gehorsamsübungen von Erich Liese, dem Leiter der Potsdamer Schule, zurückgewiesen. Liese spricht Sarris postwendend eine wissenschaftliche Befähigung in der Kynologie mit dem bekannten Argument ab, er würde die Hunde anthropomorphisieren und ihnen „menschliches Wahrnehmungs- und Vorstellungsvermögen“ zusprechen (375–376). Was er hiermit angreift und zu disqualifizieren versucht, betrifft natürlich gerade Kern und Potenzial der Uexküll-Sarris-Methode. Sarris verwirft Methoden der Dressur, also Relationen oder Trainingsmethoden, die eine starke Tradition in Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen besitzen und behavioristisch nach Maßgabe von ReizReaktions-Schemata funktionierten und möchte sie durch Methoden ersetzen, die wahrnehmungs- und kognitive Fähigkeiten im Lernprozess als wesentliches Element nutzen und so praktisch nicht mehr grundsätzlich zwischen Menschen und Tiere unterscheiden. Interessant ist hierzu, dass Sarris selbst einen sowohl tier- als auch humanwissenschaftlichen Hintergrund hat. Er wurde in Athen zum Lehrer ausgebildet und in Pädagogik und Psychologie mit einer kynologischen Studie promoviert. Sein Verweis darauf, man könne Hunden „spielend“ etwas beibringen und auf eine Weise, die ihre „Selbständigkeit“ berücksichtigen, lässt sich so auch auf zentrale

18Laut

Sarris würden beispielsweise, um einem Hund das Apportieren beizubringen in einem ersten Schritt dem Tier der Hals so mit der Leine abgeschnürt, dass es das Maul aufmachen müsse. Daraufhin würde ein Holzblock in das Maul geschoben und der Befehl „Apport“ gegeben usw. 19i.O. gesperrt.

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Elemente reformpädagogischer Ansätze der Zeit beziehen, die er grundsätzlich sowohl als auf menschliche als auch auf tierliche Lernende anwendbar erachtet.20 In der Auseinandersetzung um die Gehorsamsübungen wurde also nicht nur verhandelt, welche Methode erfolgsversprechend ist, sondern auch, welche theoretischen Ansätze überhaupt als wissenschaftlich gelten. Sarris’ sicherlich polemisch geäußerte Kritik an den anderen Schulen würde ich deshalb nicht nur darüber veranlasst sehen, sie als Kontrastfolie für die eigene Ausbildungsmethode zu nutzen. Mit seinen Überzeichnungen hob er bewusst die divergierenden Ansätze von Schwarzer Pädagogik und Reformpädagogik hervor, die sich wiederum mit dem Gegensatz von Dressur und Lernen analogisieren lassen. Auf diese Weise wird auch eine Auseinandersetzung darüber forciert, inwiefern humanwissenschaftliche Ansätze für die Tierwissenschaften beziehungsweise in diesem Fall für die Blindenführhundausbildung fruchtbar gemacht werden können. Lieses Kritik, Sarris würde den Hunden Vermögen zusprechen, die sie womöglich nicht besitzen, folgt einem bekannten Schema. Das beschriebene Setting, seine Argumentationslinien und Konfrontationen erinnern unweigerlich an die Auseinandersetzung um eine ungleich berühmtere Lehrer-Schüler- bzw. Mensch-Tier-Begegnung: die des Elementarschullehrers Wilhelm von Osten mit seinem Pferd Hans, auch als Kluger Hans bekannt. Diese Begegnung, mit der die Frage nach der Vernunft und der Wesensgleichheit von Menschen und Tieren und vor allem wissenschaftliche Kriterien im Umgang mit Tieren zur Debatte standen, warf auch noch auf die Kynologie der 1930er Jahre ihre Schatten.21 Einige Jahre begeisterte der Orlow-Traber Hans die Öffentlichkeit mit seinen Rechen- und Lesekünsten. 1904, zu einer Zeit also, in der Berlin von zehntausenden Droschkenpferden bevölkert war, stellte er seine Fähigkeiten vor einer 13-köpfigen wissenschaftlichen Kommission unter der Leitung des Philosophen Carl Stumpf unter Beweis und beantwortete beispielsweise Rechenaufgaben, indem er das Ergebnis mit seinen Hufen klopfte. Einige Jahre später beobachtete Oskar Pfungst, Psychologe und Doktorand von Stumpf, dass sich Hans’ Intelligenz nicht auf das Lesen von Wörtern bezog, sondern auf das Lesen unbewusster, unkontrollierbarer, feinster Zeichen in Mimik und Gestik der Fragenden (39–40). Das Phänomen wurde als ‚Kluger-Hans-Effekt‘ berüchtigt und die Forschung verpasste die Chance, sich auf die erstaunlichen Fähigkeiten, die das Pferd bewies, zu konzentrieren und zog stattdessen negative Konsequenzen aus dem Verlauf und dem Ausgang des Experiments. Wie Heike Baranzke analysiert, erfolgte eine

20Spielerisches

Lernen und Lehren lässt sich auch auf Sarris‘ Lehrer William Stern beziehen, der sich in seiner Psychologie der frühen Kindheit (1914) umfangreich dem kindlichen Spiel widmete. 21Auch Uexküll mischte sich Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts in die Debatte ein. Hier noch einem mechanistischen Ansatz verpflichtet, analysierte und beschrieb er einzelne Organe analog zu Maschinen. Um mögliche Anthropomorphisierungen auszuschließen, entwickelte er mit Kollegen eine Nomenklatur, die beispielsweise den Begriff des Sehens bei Tieren durch „Fotorezeption“ ersetzen will oder den der Handlung durch Reflex (Uexküll, Beer und Bethe).

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Disqualifizierung der Tierpsychologie zugunsten mechanistisch-physiologischer oder behavioristisch-lerntheoretischer Ansätze. Dies bedeutete, dass von nun an erstens Anthropomorphisierungen auszuschließen waren, dass zweitens Versuchsleiter/innen und Versuchstiere streng voneinander getrennt wurden und in den Wissenschaften drittens nicht mehr das tierliche Individuum auftauchen sollte und deshalb aus der evolutionären Artperspektive „neutralisiert“ wurde (Baranzke 365–367). Vinciane Desprets Relektüre dieses Falls entfaltet dementgegen die Möglichkeiten dieser Versuchsanordnung als Element einer anthropo-zoo-genetischen Praxis, in der sich Lebewesen wechselseitig konstituieren und Menschen sich zum Beispiel unverhofft mit einem Körper wiederfinden, der für Pferde dechiffrierbar ist wie eine Schultafel. Vor allem aber weist Despret zurück, dass Wissenschaftlichkeit bedeuten muss, sich zwischen Wahrheit und eigener Beteiligung entscheiden zu müssen. Sie plädiert dafür, gerade die emotionalen Bindungen zum Ausgangspunkt zu nehmen und auf diese Weise Verhältnisse von Forschenden und aktiven Objekten zu ermöglichen, die an eben diesem Prozess interessiert sind. Zugleich ließe sich so untersuchen, wie Interessen sich verkörpern und somit die Wissenschaften wie ihre Objekte verändern (Despret 127). Auch wenn Uexküll und Sarris behavioristische und mechanistisch-physiologische Ansätze ablehnten, problematisierten sie die menschliche Beteiligung. Für sie lag das Problem jedoch nicht darin, dass diese das Untersuchungsergebnis beeinflussen würde, sondern das Lernergebnis. Nach ihrer Argumentation leide die tierliche Aufmerksamkeit für die Umwelt unter der auf den Menschen. Die Begegnung von Menschen und Hunden, wie sie sie aus anderen Schulen kennen, wird von ihnen beinahe ausschließlich als eine von Wissenschaftler/innen mit Forschungsobjekt, von Prüfendem oder Prüfender mit Prüfling oder von dressierendem Menschen mit konditionierten Tieren vorgestellt. Uexküll und Sarris verknüpfen also gerade die Anwesenheit des Menschen mit einem behavouristischen Modell und mit den Methoden der Dressur. Um anstelle der Dressur die Erfahrung setzen zu können und um einen Hund zu einem selbstständigen Wesen zu erziehen, das „den Umbau seiner Welt sich selbst verdankt und nicht dem Stock des Dresseurs“ (Uexküll 51–52), erscheint es ihnen daher nötig, den Menschen durch ein Phantom, einen künstlichen Menschen zu ersetzen.

3 Karrenhunde: Begegnungen von Hunden und Phantomen in der Blindenführhundausbildung Da die Beziehung des Hundes zum Menschen als Lernhemmnis identifiziert wird, soll also ein nicht-menschliches Objekt die Aufgabe übernehmen, auf für den Menschen wichtige Hindernisse oder Hemmnisse aufmerksam zu machen. Mit dem angeschirrten mannshohen Uexküll-Sarris-Wagen bleiben die Hunde an hohen Querstangen hängen, unter denen sie selbst hindurchgelaufen wären, auch Treppen oder Schienen sind nun ein Hindernis. Der Wagen wird heute zwar noch vereinzelt in Hundeschulen verwendet, die Mehrheit der Ausbilder/innen lehnt ihn

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jedoch als ineffizient und ethisch bedenklich ab. Ich kann hier nicht die Effektivität der Methode beurteilen, möchte sie aber kultur- und wissenshistorisch kontextualisieren. Sarris’ dieser Methode zugrunde liegenden Experimentalanordnungen (­Sarris 1934) ähneln teilweise sehr den Settings, mit denen Wolfgang Köhler seine Intelligenzprüfungen an Menschenaffen vornahm, auch hier wurde teilweise ein Wagen eingesetzt, um die Tiere zu Umwegen zu provozieren (Köhring 116–117). Ein Vorbild der Ausbildungsmethode lässt sich demnach im Experimentalsetting der kognitiven Psychologie ausmachen, einem Ansatz, der sich der klassischen Konditionierung wie auch behavioristischen Ansätzen entgegenstellt. Wesentlich bekannter als Köhlers Wagen, die der Erforschung tierlicher Intelligenz dienen, sind jedoch solche, die primär die Muskelkraft der Tiere nutzen. Als Zugtiere wurden und werden seit Jahrhunderten oder Jahrtausenden unter anderem Esel, Kamele, Elefanten, Schafe und auch Hunde verwendet. Die Karrenhunde dienten zivil als ‚Zugtiere des armen Mannes‘ und militärisch zum Transport von Waren (Drawer). Wo Montaignes Blindenhunde ihre Halter/innen vor Kutschen und Karren beiseite zogen, finden sie sich bei Uexküll und Sarris also wieder selbst davor gespannt.22 Die Frage ist, welche Phantome aus der Kulturgeschichte von Menschen und Tieren mit diesem Phantomwagen transportiert werden. Ich möchte hier problematisieren, was es für die Konzeption der Hunde und für die Möglichkeiten eines Mensch-Hund-Teams impliziert, wenn Uexküll und Sarris hier an Praktiken anschließen, die Arbeits- und Muskelkraft ausnutzen, während die kognitiven Fähigkeiten kaum Aufmerksamkeit erfahren. Die Ausbildung mithilfe des Wagens ist teilweise fotografisch dokumentiert. Deutlich wird dabei, dass die erkennbaren kommunikativen Angebote der Hunde nicht thematisiert werden. Es wird ausschließlich auf die Erfüllung der jeweiligen Aufgabe geachtet. Ebenso gravierend ist, dass die Hunde ihrerseits der kommunikativen Signale eines anderen Subjekts beraubt sind. Wie Riin Magnus in ihrer biosemiotischen Analyse der Blindenführhundausbildung ausführt, sind semiotische Prozesse, die zwischen Subjekten und solchen, die zwischen Subjekten und Objekten stattfinden, grundsätzlich voneinander zu unterscheiden (18–19). Zu einem großen Teil, so Magnus, lässt sich der Unterschied als einer zwischen Kommunikation und Wahrnehmung definieren (19). Daraus folgt, dass die Hunde während des Trainings auf Wahrnehmung reduziert sind und sie als (mit Menschen) kommunizierende Lebewesen frühestens dann wieder gefragt sind, wenn sie die Ausbildung abgeschlossen haben. Zugtiere tauchen auch in Deleuzes Uexküll-Rezeption an zentraler Stelle auf. Bevor er Uexküll als Spinozisten einführt, der Tierwelten daraufhin beschreibt, durch welche Affekte sie definiert sind, gibt er eine kleine Anleitung:

22Im Gegensatz zur späteren Weiterentwicklung des Ausbildungswagens und auch heutiger Führgeschirre liefen die Hunde in Uexkülls und Sarris’ Version dabei tatsächlich vor dem Menschen und nicht daneben (Calabrò 54–55).

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Konkret: Es ändern sich viele Dinge, wenn ihr die Körper und Gedanken als Mächte betrachtet, zu affizieren und affiziert zu werden. Ihr werdet ein Tier oder einen Menschen nicht durch seine Form, seine Organe und Funktionen, auch nicht als Subjekt, definieren: ihr werdet sie durch die Affekte, deren sie fähig sind, definieren […]. Zum Beispiel. Es gibt zwischen einem Arbeits- oder einem Zugpferd und einem Rennpferd größere Unterschiede als zwischen einem Ochsen und einem Arbeitspferd. Und zwar, weil das Renn- und das Arbeitspferd nicht die gleichen Affekte, noch die gleiche Macht haben, affiziert zu werden; das Arbeitspferd hat viel mehr Affekte mit dem Ochsen gemeinsam. (Deleuze 161)

An dieser Stelle wird deutlich, dass Deleuze als Leser Uexkülls nicht nur Begriffe ersetzt (wie Merk- und Wirkmale durch Affekte), sondern die Relation Organismus – Umwelt, die Uexküll entwirft, durch diskontinuierliche Verkettungen und Netzwerke von Verhältnissen erweitert hat. Deleuzianisch ließe sich dann fragen, inwiefern Hunde mit diesem Ausbildungswagen in ihren Möglichkeiten zu affizieren und affiziert zu werden einem Ochsen oder Arbeitspferd ähnlicher werden als beispielsweise einem Haushund. Wenn man voraussetzt, dass der Wagen funktioniert und die hundliche Umwelt sich tatsächlich erweitert – und zwar aufgrund des Wagens und nicht trotz dessen, was auch eine gangbare Deutung wäre –, so brächte er ungeahnte Affekte hervor. Uexküll und Sarris schreiben sich mit dem Karrenhund nun aber in eine Tradition ein, die weniger für ungeahnte Affekte steht. Statt Transformation, Proposition oder Überraschung scheinen hier eher Prinzipien der Bahnung und Disziplinierung wirksam, mit der Hunde auf vom Menschen vorgegebene Wege gezwungen werden. Der Mensch ersetzt sich durch einen Wagen und dieser scheint einen züchtigenden Kutscher zu transportieren – und nicht die andere Hälfte des Mensch-Hund-Teams. Die Wege und Umwege, auf denen die Hunde laufen sollen, sind menschliche Straßen, Wege und Pfade. Es gibt kein querfeldein mehr. Der Umweg macht vielleicht wie bei Montaigne oder Köhler die Denkprozesse der Hunde einsichtig, ist hier aber zugleich Ausweis einer Disziplinierung. Einer Disziplinierung allerdings, die mit neuen Fähigkeiten und Privilegien attribuiert ist. Die Hunde werden von Sarris nämlich mit Verkehrsteilnehmer/ innen beziehungsweise Berufskraftfahrer/innen gleichgesetzt. Er entwirft damit ein Bild des Blindenführhundes, das dem der (leblosen) Prothese entgegensteht.23 Sarris benutzt dieses Bild vor allem, um für neue Ausbildungspraktiken zu argumentieren. In seiner Kritik an der Art und Weise, wie an der Potsdamer Schule die Eignung der Hunde geprüft wird, vergleicht er die Aufgaben und Fähigkeiten der Blindenhunde mit denen von Straßenbahn- und Autofahrer/innen: Diese Eignungsprüfung kann der ungemein schwierigen Aufgabe des Führhunds natürlich nicht gerecht werden, wenn man bedenkt, welche Forderungen die Berufspsychologie an die Straßenbahn-, Auto- und Lokomotivführer stellt, die letzten Endes doch nur

23Zugleich

Hund.

ergibt sich hier auch ein Gegenbild zum Klischee des blinden Bettlers mit seinem

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menschliche Werkzeuge zur Erfüllung ihrer Aufgabe in Anspruch nehmen. Vom Hunde aber verlangt man, daß er Menschendinge, die nicht in seiner Hundeumwelt vorhanden sein können, zu berücksichtigen vermag. (Sarris, „Über die Potsdamer Führhunddressur“ 295)24

Hiermit werden die auszubildenden Hunde als Berufstätige adressiert, die entsprechend ausgebildet und geprüft werden müssen. Auf der praktischen Seite zieht Sarris die Konsequenz, eine streng wissenschaftliche Methode der Prüfung einzufordern, die individuell variierende Fähigkeiten wie Orientierungsfähigkeit, Gedächtnis, Aufmerksamkeit und Intelligenz berücksichtigt (295). Die Individualität der Hunde wird hier also im Kontext von Berufspsychologie und Eignungsprüfungen anerkannt und erforscht. Sarris bewegt sich so im Diskurszusammenhang der Eignungsprüfungen und innerhalb von Auseinandersetzungen, die in den 1920er Jahren vehement geführt wurden. In verschiedensten Berufsgruppen wurden „psychotechnische Eignungsprüfungen“ durchgesetzt, massiv war der Diskurs etwa um die Telefonvermittler/ innen, aber auch Verkehrsteilnehmer/innen, etwa Autofahrer/innen, wurden diesen Prüfungen unterzogen.25 Bemerkenswerterweise finden diese Assoziationen an Berufstätigkeit, die Forderungen nach Eignungsprüfungen und die nach Internalisierung des Gelernten statt bloßer Dressur im historischen Kontext bestimmter Körper- und Subjektivierungsprozesse statt, wie sie Harrasser in ihren Forschungen zur Prothetik analysiert hat. Harrasser beschreibt die Geschichte der Prothetik als Wissenskomplex, in dem sich die Konturen eines neuen Modells der Steuerung von Körpern und Individuen abzeichnen. In der Weise, wie Arbeitskraft wiederhergestellt wird (als hauptsächliches Ziel der Prothetik), werde eine Verschiebung von der Disziplinierung hin zur Selbstregulierung deutlich. Dies zeige sich hervorragend am Beispiel einer neuen Art von Handprothesen. Ein wichtiger Aspekt war hierbei, dass die neuen Prothesen sensibel waren, d. h. dem Menschen Empfindungen rückkoppelten (Harrasser, Prothesen 138–139). Der Körper ist hierbei, so Harrasser, nicht mehr einem mechanistischen Paradigma unterworfen, nach der er wie eine Maschine behandelt wird, die kaputt ist und ersetzt wird, sondern einem „neovitalistisch-steuerungslogische[n] Modell, das den menschlichen Körper als fein abgestimmtes Rückkopplungssystem, das externe und interne Daten verarbeitet, begriff“ (Körper 92). Nach Harrasser gehen diese Verschiebungen auch einher mit einer Einebnung der Unterscheidung zwischen normaler und defizitärer Wahrnehmung. Auch die normale Wahrnehmung ist so prothetisch

24i.O.

gesperrt. Stern und Hugo Münsterberg begannen mit psychotechnischen Untersuchungen; in den 1920er Jahren war Fritz Giese ein Experte auf dem Gebiet. Diese Prüfungen wurden auch eingesetzt, um bei einer Berufsunfähigkeit argumentieren zu können, dass diese aus der Konstitution der betreffenden Person resultiert und nicht aus den Arbeitsbedingungen.

25Wilhelm

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(ein Arzt, der ein Stethoskop benutzt, etc.), eine Einteilung in heile oder kaputte Körper, die wie eine Maschine zu reparieren wären, wird ersetzt durch die Vorstellung von einem „Kontinuum verbesserungsfähiger und verbesserungswürdiger Körper, die prothetisch mit ihren Umwelten verschaltet sind“ (95). Es erscheint mir vielversprechend, diesen Kontext zu berücksichtigen, wenn die historischen Verschiebungen analyisert werden, die sich in der Konzeption von Assistenz und Assistenztieren beobachten lassen. Die Geschichte der menschlichen und tierlichen Begegnungen lässt sich als eine Geschichte von Gewalt, Ausbeutung und Grausamkeit erzählen. Zugleich – sowohl im Gegensatz dazu als auch damit verbunden oder sich daraus ergebend – ist sie eine Geschichte der Allianzen, Ähnlichkeiten, Symbiosen und Ko-Konstitutionen. Sie lässt sich anhand gemeinsamer Jagdpraktiken schreiben (Krüger 111–120), über symbiotische Formen erzählen (Lovelock; Margulis; Latour; Haraway) und in Theorien der Sympathie und der Anthropo-zoo-genese entfalten (Despret). Eine Geschichte der Allianzen ist als solche eine Wissensgeschichte der konkreten Praktiken, in denen sich Menschen und Tiere begegnen und bedeutsamer als die metaphysischen Trennungen, das zeigt ein Blick in die Kulturgeschichte, waren und sind die funktionalen Bündnisse,26 also im weiteren Sinn auch die Gespanne oder Teams von denen dieser Beitrag handelt. Es ging hier auch darum, zu untersuchen, wie sich die Geschichte der Blindenführhunde in diese Kulturgeschichte der Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen einschreibt. An der hier vorgestellten Methode, wird deutlich, dass sich diese Geschichte auch entlang und in ihren Praktiken sowohl als eine der ko-konstitutiven Beziehungen schreiben lässt, aber gleichfalls als eine Geschichte, in der genau diese Form der Begegnung ignoriert wird. Auch deshalb erscheint es sinnvoll, die Perspektive auf Zäsuren und Kontexte in der modernen Blindenführhundausbildung mit einer Perspektive auf die lange Dauer der menschlich-hundlichen Begegnungen, der Kommunikationen, des Trainings, des Sich-Gemeinsam-Bewegens und der geteilten Erfahrungen zu verschränken. Auf diese Weise erschließt sich eine weitere Möglichkeit, die Geschichte von Menschen und Tieren als eine Geschichte der Allianzen zu beginnen – als eine Geschichte der Assistenz.

Literatur Angerer, Marie-Luise. Affektökologie: Intensive Milieus und zufällige Begegnungen. meson press, 2017. Baranzke, Heike. „Nur kluge Hänschen kommen in den Himmel: Der tierpsychologische Streit um ein rechnendes Pferd zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts.“ Die Seele der Tiere, hg. v. Friedrich Niewöhner und Jean-Loup Seban, Harrassowitz, 2001, S. 333–379.

26Aus

kulturgeschichtlicher Perspektive ist, wie beispielsweise Thomas Macho herausstellt, eine starke Abgrenzung vom Tier eher als Ausnahme denn als Regel zu verstehen. So ist die Betonung der Differenz zwischen Mensch und Tier ein eher jüngeres Phänomen (Macho 76). Zur Geschichte der Assistenztiere siehe auch DeMello 2012.

340

K. Kynast

Beer, Georg Joseph. Das Auge, oder Versuch das edelste Geschenk der Schöpfung vor den höchst verderblichen Einflüssen unseres Zeitalters zu sichern. Wien, 1813. Birrer, Jakob. Erinnerungen, merkwürdige Lebensfahrten und besondere Ansichten. Zürich, 1844. Bühler, Benjamin. „Zecke.“ Vom Übertier: Ein Bestiarium des Wissens, hg. v. Bühler und Stefan Rieger, Suhrkamp, 2006, S. 250–264. Calabrò, Silvana. Der Blindenführhund: Aspekte einer besonderen Mensch-Tier-Beziehung in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Wissenschaft & Technik, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Praktische Philosophie. Merve, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles, und Felix Guattari. 1000 Plateaus: Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie. Merve, 1992. DeMello, Margo. Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies. Columbia UP, 2012. Despret, Vinciane. „The Body We Care for: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis“. Body & Society, Jg. 10, Nr. 2–3, 2004, S. 111–134. Despret, Vinciane und Stéphan Galetic. „Faire de James un «lecteur anachronique» de Von Uexküll: Esquisse d’un perspectivisme radical.“ Vie et expérimentation: Peirce, James, Dewey, hg. v. Didier Debaise, J. Vrin, 2007, S. 45–75. Drawer, Klaus. Anspannung und Beschirrung der Haustiere. DLG, 1959. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Harrasser, Karin. Körper 2.0: Über die technische Erweiterbarkeit des Menschen. Transcript, 2013. Harrasser, Karin. Prothesen: Figuren einer lädierten Moderne. Vorwerk 8, 2016. Heidegger, Martin. Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit [Freiburger Vorlesung Wintersemester 1929/30], hg. v. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Klostermann, 2004. Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment. Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge, 2000. Köhring, Esther. „Einsicht einsichtig werden lassen: Experimentelles Theater und Tierexperiment in Becketts Acte sans Paroles I und Köhlers Intelligenzprüfungen an Menschenaffen.“ Tier – Experiment – Literatur, 1880–2010, hg. v. Roland Borgards und Nicolas Pethes, Königshausen und Neumann, 2013, S. 109–126. Krüger, Gesine. „Geschichte der Jagd.“ Tiere: Kulturwissenschaftliches Handbuch, hg. v. Roland Borgards, Metzler, 2016, S. 111–121. Latour, Bruno. Kampf um Gaia: Acht Vorträge über das neue Klimaregime, Suhrkamp Insel 2017. Liese, Erich. „Die Ausbildung des Blindenführhundes.“ Der Hund, Nr. 15, 1933, S. 375–376. Lovelock, James. Gaia: A new Look at Life on Earth. Oxford UP, 1979. Macho, Thomas. „Der Aufstand der Haustiere.“ Herausforderung Tier: Von Beuys bis Kabakov, hg. v. Regina Haslinger, Prestel, 2000, S. 76–99. Magnus, Riin. The Semiotic Grounds of Animal Assistance: Sign Use of Guide Dogs and Their Visually Impaired Handlers. Dissertation, U of Tartu P, 2015. Margulis, Lynn. Der symbiotische Planet. Westend, 2018. Mildenberger, Florian. Umwelt als Vision: Leben und Werk Jakob von Uexkülls (1864–1944). Steiner, 2007. Montaigne, Michel de. „Apologie für Raymond Sebond.“ Essais, v. de Montaigne, Bd. 2, übers. v. Hans Stilett, dtv, 1998, S. 165–416. Pfungst, Oscar. Das Pferd des Herrn von Osten: Der kluge Hans: Ein Beitrag zur experimentellen Tier- und Menschen-Psychologie. Barth, 1907. Rieger, Stefan. „›Bipersonalität‹: Menschenversuche an den Rändern des Sozialen.“ Kulturgeschichte des Menschenversuchs im 20. Jahrhundert, hg. v. Birgit Griesecke u. a., Suhrkamp, 2009, S. 181–198. Sarris, Emanuel. „Die Befähigung des Hundes.“ Die Umschau, Nr. 6, 1934, S. 106–110.

20 Personalerweiterung

341

Sarris, Emanuel. „Der Blinde über seinen Führhund.“ Zeitschrift für Hundeforschung, Jg. 3, Nr. 3–4, 1933, S. 170–187. Sarris, Emanuel. Sind wir berechtigt, vom Wortverständnis des Hundes zu sprechen? Beiheft Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie, Nr. 62, 1931. Sarris, Emanuel. „Über die Potsdamer Führhunddressur.“ Der Hund, Nr. 12, 1933, S. 295–301. Stern, William. Psychologie der frühen Kindheit. Leipzig, Quelle und Meyer, 1914. Stork, Rainer. Der Blindenführhund: Aufkommen und Rückgang in Deutschland; geschichtliche und international vergleichende Untersuchung. Dissertation, Universität Düsseldorf, 1988. Tanner, Jakob. Im Zeichen des Hundes: Acht Hundeleben im Leben eines Blinden. Edition Erpf, 1992. Uexküll, Jakob von. „Das Führhundproblem.“ Zeitschrift für Angewandte Psychologie, Nr. 1–3, 1933, S. 46–53. Uexküll, Jakob von, und Georg Kriszat. Streifzüge – Ein Bilderbuch unsichtbarer Welten: Bedeutungslehre. Springer, 1934. Uexküll, Jakob von, und Emanuel Sarris. „Der Führhund der Blinden.“ Die Umschau, Nr. 51, 1931, S. 1014–1016. Uexküll, Jakob von, T. Beer, und A. Bethe. „Vorschläge zu einer objektiven Nomenklatur in der Physiologie des Nervensystems.“ Biologisches Centralblatt, Nr. 19, 1899, S. 517–521. Vagt, Christina. „»Umzu wohnen«. Umwelt und Maschine bei Heidegger und Uexküll“. Ambiente. Das Leben und seine Räume, hg. von Thomas Brandstetter, Karin Harrasser u. Günther Friesinger. Turia und Kant, 2010, S. 91–106.

Wolle, Wert, Würde. Mensch-Tier-Begegnungen bei der Schafzucht im Spanien des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts

21

Teresa Hiergeist

1 Die Tiernutzung im spanischen siglo de oro Nutztiere sind aus dem lebensweltlichen Alltag des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts nicht wegzudenken: Ob auf dem Acker, für den Transport oder als Nahrungs-, Kleidungs-, Fleisch- oder Medizinlieferanten – der Mensch ist zur Aufrechterhaltung und Ausstattung seines Lebens, im Gegensatz zur heutigen Gesellschaft, die in all diesen Bereichen Alternativen besitzt, grundlegend von der Fauna abhängig (Edwards 75). Vor allem in Spanien, wo in der damaligen Zeit relativ wenig bebau­ bares Ackerland verfügbar ist und die Landwirtschaft aufgrund der teilweise extremen klimatischen Bedingungen, der geringen Bodenfruchtbarkeit und der Wasserknappheit überaus extensiv betrieben wird (Martín 15–17), besitzen Nutztiere eine existenzielle Bedeutung: Wenn Dürreperioden Missernten nach sich zie­ hen, wenn sich Insekten über die Pflanzen und Vorräte hermachen, garantieren sie den Bauern das Überleben (Parma Cook und Noble Cook 19), sodass ihre Relevanz nicht hoch genug eingeschätzt werden kann. Es verwundert folglich nicht, dass sie in den Quellen der damaligen Zeit meist eine überaus positive Bewertung erfahren. Während Ratten, Reptilien, Füchsen und Wildtieren wie Wölfen, Bären oder Wildschweinen ängstlich und verhalten begegnet wird1 und während Jagd-

1Was die Wildtiere anbelangt, sind Angriffe von ihnen auf Menschen und ihr Eigentum in der Frühen Neuzeit keine Seltenheit. Die Gefahr, in Wäldern und nicht kultivierten Gebieten angegriffen zu werden, ist höher als heute, sodass eine gewisse Angst vor dieser Tiergruppe herrscht (Obermaier 5).

T. Hiergeist (*)  Erlangen, Deutschland E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_21

343

344

T. Hiergeist

und Schoßhunde, edle Schlachtrösser und exotische Menagerie-Tiere ausschließlich in aristokratischen Kontexten beliebt sind und vorkommen,2 werden Wachhunde, Esel, Rinder oder Schafe in den Enzyklopädien und Naturgeschichten meist in höchsten Tönen gelobt, denn ohne sie wären die Zeitgenossen zu Not und Hunger, zu einem harten, entbehrungsreichen Leben verdammt. Dementsprechend heißt es etwa über Hunde bei Gabriel Alonso de Herrera: „Welches Tier liebt seinen Herren so sehr wie er? Wer ist ihm eine so wohlbekannte Stütze? Wer ist ein so treuer Aufpasser? Ein so ausdauernder Gefährte? Ein so schlafloser Wächter? Ein so aufrichtiger und lauterer Freund? Ein so mutiger Feind?“ (252, Übers. T.H.)3 und über das Schaf schreibt beispielsweise Sebastián de Covarrbuias, es sei ein „zahmes Tier, von dem wir den allergrößten Nutzen für das menschliche Leben haben“ (842).4 Im Folgenden soll untersucht werden, welche Auffassungen der Interspezies-Begegnung mit diesen Attribuierungen verbunden sind. Zwar trifft man kaum auf Kontexte, in denen der Gebrauch von Nutztieren per se in Zweifel gezogen würde, das bedeutet jedoch nicht, dass Varianzen inexistent wären: In jeder (verbalen oder konkreten) Interaktion mit einem Tier drückt sich indirekt eine Haltung ihm gegenüber aus; wie dieses behandelt, gebraucht oder ausgenutzt wird, spiegelt wider, ob es als Lebewesen oder als Quasi-Objekt, als Freund oder als Fremder zählt (Pfeiler und Wenzel 213), was sich in weiterer Folge auf die Bereitschaft auswirkt, es als moralisches Objekt in Betracht zu ziehen. Nach theoretischen Vorüberlegungen zur Erfassung von Interspezies-Kontakten sollen anhand des Umgangs mit dem wichtigsten spanischen Nutztier des damaligen Spaniens, dem Schaf, über eine diskurshistorische Betrachtung von Enzyklopädien, Naturgeschichten, Agronomietraktaten und literarischen Texten die Grundlinien des Mensch-Nutztier-Kontakts im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert skizziert werden.5

2Bereits

seit dem 13. Jahrhundert ist das Sammeln seltener Tiere als Luxus- und Anschauungsobjekte unter dieser Gesellschaftsschicht in Spanien verbreitet, im 16. Jahrhundert, allerdings erfährt es nicht zuletzt durch die koloniale Expansion eine quantitative und qualitative Ausweitung (Norton 22). 3Original: „¿Qué animal hay que tanto ame a su señor? ¿Qué pan tan conocido? ¿Qué guarda tan fiel? ¿Qué compañero tan continuo? ¿Que velador tan sin sueño? ¿Qué amigo tan sin doblez, ni engaño? ¿Qué enemigo tan brabo?“ 4Original: „animal manso, del qual tenemos grandíssimos provecho para la vida humana, como a todos conta“. Sogar im literarischen Bereich hinterlässt dieses Lob der Haustiere seine Spuren. So tauchen im 16. Jahrhunderts erwachsend aus der Tradition des paradoxen Enkomiums mehrere Texte auf, die Tier für ihre umfassende Nützlichkeit feiern. Hierzu zählen etwa Pedro Mexíasʼ Eselslob im Dialgo „Coloquio del porfiado“ (1547) sowie Augstín de Rojas Villandrandos Schweinelob in El viaje entretenido (1603). 5Die Aussagen über den Umgang mit den Schafen können aufgrund der Entlegenheit der untersuchten Epoche lediglich indirekt, aus Textdokumenten, abgeleitet werden, wobei die restringierte Quellenlage erschwerend wirkt (Roscher 82). Die Ergebnisse einer solchen Untersuchung haben zwangsweise approximativen Charakter und sind in Hinblick auf diese Unschärfe zu reflektieren.

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345

2 Zur wissenschaftlichen Konzeptualisierung von Mensch-Tier-Begegnungen Der Begriff ‚Mensch-Tier-Begegnung‘ erscheint auf den ersten Blick schwer greifbar, ist er doch auf keine objektivierbaren, externen Kriterien rückführbar, sondern bleibt in einer Relationalität verhaftet, die eine Bestimmung des menschlichen Standpunkts nur in Abhängigkeit vom tierlichen (und vice versa) erlaubt und somit stets im Werden ist. Wenn trotzdem auf ihn rekurriert wird – und stattdessen nicht etwa, wie dies in zahlreichen wissenschaftlichen Untersuchungen der Fall ist, Tierdarstellungen in den Blick genommen werden –, dann geschieht dies deshalb, weil er dem performativen Charakter der Diskursrealität am ehesten entspricht: Auch in dieser sind die Konzepte ‚Mensch‘ und ‚Tier‘ unlösbar verflochten, bedingen einander und konstituieren sich in der Interaktion gegenseitig.6 Die Untersuchung von Repräsentationen würde so gesehen die künstliche Arretierung einer Dynamik bedeuten und damit zur essenzialisierenden Festschreibung der Kategorie ‚Tiere‘ beitragen, was von ihrer Gemachtheit ablenken würde.7 Um diese Vorannahme zu vermeiden, die sich verfälschend auf das Forschungsergebnis auswirken könnte, behandelt der Beitrag Tiere als diskursive Konstrukte interrelationalen Charakters. Überdies bedeutet die Relativität des Begriffs selbstredend nicht, dass er undefiniert bleiben muss; es lassen sich unterschiedliche Modi der Begegnung von Mensch und Tier differenzieren, die für die Systematik der Untersuchung garantieren. Wenn sie im Folgenden unter der Leitdifferenz ‚Nähe-Distanz‘ subsumiert werden, so möchte sich diese nicht lokal, sondern konzeptuell verstanden wissen, als im Diskurs konstruierte und wahrgenommene (Un-)Gleichheit zwischen den Spezies, die keine Wertung impliziert, sondern rein deskriptiv zu verstehen ist. Insgesamt lassen sich vier Formen ausmachen, nach denen sich Mensch-Tier-Begegnungen aufgliedern lassen und hinsichtlich derer sich Nähe oder Distanz, Gleichheit oder Ungleichheit manifestieren können: Erstens gilt es abzuklären, ob und inwiefern in der jeweiligen Untersuchungssituation von der Verschiedenheit menschlicher und tierlicher Akteure ausgegangen wird. Keine Differenz liegt in Situationen vor, in denen von einer vollkommenen Übereinstimmung von Mensch und Tier (M = T) ausgegangen wird; ein gradueller Unterschied lässt sich konstatieren, wenn beide als ähnliche Wesen wahrgenommen werden, die sich lediglich in der Intensität der Ausprägung ihrer Eigenschaften, jedoch nicht in diesen selbst voneinander unterscheiden

6Dementsprechend

formuliert Giorgio Agamben: „Die Anthropogenese resultiert aus der Zäsur und der Gliederung zwischen Humanem und Animalischem“ (87). Die diskursive Differenzierung zwischen Menschlichem und Nicht-Menschlichem avanciert mithin zum zentralen Politikum der Moderne. 7Bruno Latour zufolge geht die „Geburt des ‚Menschen‘“ im Kontext des Humanismus mit einer „Geburt der ‚Nicht-Menschheit‘“ (22) und in diesem Zusammenhang auch der Tiere einher. Dieses Denkkonstrukt werde diskursiv verschleiert und naturalisiert, weshalb Tiere von außen betrachtet als Essenzen erscheinen könnten.

346

T. Hiergeist

(M ~ T); von einer kategorischen Differenz kann man sprechen, wenn das Tier als wesentlich anders und somit mit dem Menschen als unvergleichbar aufgefasst wird, wobei sich hierunter eine voll-essenzielle (M ≠ T) von einer teil-essenziellen Differenzierung (M = T + X bzw. M = T − X)8 abgrenzen lässt. Die Ausprägung der definitorischen Nähe oder Distanz beeinflusst grundlegend das Sprechen über und den Umgang mit einem Tier sowie den Grad an Empathie, der diesem entgegengebracht wird. Zweitens wird eruiert, ob die wahrgenommenen Unterschiede an statuskonstituierende Wertungen gekoppelt sind, ob diese eher eine neutrale, horizontale Spaltung oder eine hierarchische, vertikale Schichtung implizieren, d. h., ob das jeweilige Tier lediglich als anders empfunden wird, ohne dass hieran eine Kritik oder Idealisierung gekoppelt wäre, oder ob es gleichzeitig als superior oder inferior verstanden wird (Chimaira Arbeitskreis 14). Die Status-Distanz steht in engem Zusammenhang mit dem Verhalten gegenüber dem Tier und dient nicht selten als dessen Legitimator.9 Die dritte Untersuchungsebene betrifft die Art der Kontaktnahme, der zwischen den Spezies in der jeweiligen Situation besteht. Er kann sich zwischen den Extrempolen einer Interaktion, bei der beide Seiten in einem Wechselwirkungsverhältnis stehen und als situationsverändernde Impulsgeber infrage kommen, und einer Funktionalisierung, die eine unilaterale Einwirkung der einen Seite auf die andere impliziert, bewegen.10 Wie stark der Aktionsradius des jeweiligen Tiers durch sein Gegenüber eingeschränkt wird, bringt von allen Ebenen wohl am unmittelbarsten, weil am deutlichsten sichtbar zum Ausdruck, wie diesem begegnet wird. Viertens variiert die Qualität der Mensch-Tier-Begegnung in Abhängigkeit von der Perspektive, aus der ein bestimmter Interspezies-Kontakt betrachtet wird. Als distanzgenerierend erweist sich die anthropozentrische Positionsnahme, die impliziert, dass eine Interaktion mit einem Tier allein vor dem menschlichen Wahrnehmungs- und Wissenshorizont, in Hinblick auf menschliche Bedürfnisse und Interessen betrachtet wird. Nähe hingegen kann entstehen, wenn in Betracht gezogen wird, dass die beteiligten Tiere möglicherweise eine andere Sichtweise, einen anderen Willen und andere Bestrebungen verfolgen als die menschlichen Akteur/innen, und diese nicht ausgeklammert werden. Die Perspektive wäre in dem Fall zoozentrisch, da sie sämtliche Lebewesen einschließt. Wie die

8Ausgegangen

wird hierbei davon, dass Tiere und Menschen einen gleichen Kern besitzen, die einen die anderen jedoch in einem bestimmten Merkmal überflügeln. Häufig findet sich in philosophischen und anthropologischen Texten der Frühen Neuzeit das Argument, Menschen seine Tiere mit Vernunft, Sprachfähigkeit oder Sinn für Moral (Wild 51). 9Die diskursive Abwertung ist häufig Teil einer speziesistischen Ideologie, die der Rechtfertigung der Ausbeutung der Tiere dient (Petrus 55). 10Donna Haraway (77–93) beschreibt diese beiden Formen der Bezugnahme, den interaktiven face-to-face-Kontakt und die externe, unidirektionale Einwirkung, als Vorentscheidung, die bei der Begegnung mit jedem Tier getroffen wird.

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Tab. 1  Determinanten der Mensch-Tier-Begegnung Nähe

Distanz zwischen den Spezies

Definition

Gradueller

Kategorischer Unterschied

Status

Egalitär

Hierarchisch

Kontaktnahme

Interaktiv

Funktionalisierend

Perspektive

Zoozentrisch

Anthropozentrisch

angenommene tierliche Sichtweise im Einzelfall ausgestaltet wird, ist selbstredend Produkt der menschlichen Imagination (Simons 7), die nicht selten anthropomorphistische Züge trägt.11 Entscheidend für die Kategorie ist allerdings nicht die Richtigkeit der rekonstruierten Tierperspektive – diese kann ohnehin nicht erfasst werden und bleibt stets approximativ (Andrews 485) –, sondern vielmehr das Bewusstsein ihrer Existenz und somit die empathische Transzendierung der Eigenwahrnehmung und -interessen. Sie wirkt sich auf den Eindruck der Komplexität des jeweiligen Tiers aus und beeinflusst den Grad an Reflektiertheit, mit dem diesem begegnet wird (Tab. 1). Die vorgestellten Nähe-Distanz-Relationen sind als Instrumentarium zu verstehen, das eine differenzierte Auseinandersetzung mit den Mensch-Tier-Begegnungen ermöglichen und damit für den konkreten Untersuchungsfall greifbar machen soll, welche Prämissen den Diskursen über Tiere, dem Sprechen über sie und dem Verhalten ihnen gegenüber, im Kontext der Schafzucht zugrunde liegen. Sie sind jeweils nicht als binäre Alternativen, sondern als Kontinua aufzufassen; die genannten Realisierungsoptionen stellen Eckpunkte potenzieller Nähe-Distanz-Relationen dar, zwischen denen der Übergang fließend ist und zahlreiche Positionierungen möglich sind. Das Resultat einer Untersuchung nach dem vorgestellten Modell vermag keine einfache Antwort auf die Frage nach der Mensch-Tier-Begegnung zu geben, zumal die Pluralisierung der Ebenen für Vielschichtigkeit sorgt: Wo eine bestimmte Situation beispielsweise in definitorischer Hinsicht eine große Nähe zwischen den Spezies aufweist, kann sie in Hinblick auf den Kontakt ambivalent, in Bezug auf das Wissen gleichzeitig im Distanzbereich verortet sein. Für jede einzelne Interspezies-Begegnung ergibt sich folglich ein vierdimensionales Gebilde eigener Qualität, aus dem im Vergleich mit zahlreichen analogen Situationen die Konstanten des Mensch-Tier-Kontakts für einen spezifischen Kontext oder Zeitraum profiliert werden können. Weiterhin komplexitätssteigernd wirkt in diesem Zusammenhang, dass die Interspezies-Begegnungen individuell, situational, sozial und historisch variieren und somit jede Positionierung auf einem Geflecht unterschiedlicher Parameter fußt.

11Verstanden

wird der Anthropomorphismus hier nicht pauschal als Unterwerfungsinstrument, sondern auch als Versuch der Transzendierung der Eigenperspektive und somit als Instrument neuen Kontakts und neuer Erfahrungen mit und Entdeckungen über Tiere (Daston 52).

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T. Hiergeist

3 Zwischen Profit und Abhängigkeit: Das Sprechen über Schafe Die Schafzucht avanciert im 16. Jahrhundert zu Spaniens dominierendem Wirtschaftszweig: Die Merinowolle stellt damals das wichtigste (und neben den Rohstoffimporten aus der Neuen Welt auch einzige) Exportgut dar (Martinez Carreras XXII) und ist in England, Italien, Flandern, aber auch im restlichen Europa mehr als begehrt (Klein 45). Mit dem Anstieg der Bevölkerungszahlen explodiert auch die Nachfrage nach ihr, sodass 1549 eine Rekordmasse von 50.000 Säcken ins Ausland verfrachtet wird (Rahn Phillips und Phillips 253). Zu den Spitzenzeiten übersteigt die Anzahl der registrierten Tiere im Land die drei-Millionen-Grenze (xi) – eine enorme Menge, wenn man bedenkt, dass die Einwohnerzahl damals bei nur acht Millionen liegt und es sich um eine Phase vorindustrieller Tierhaltung handelt (Martín 36–37). Dieser Boom geht mit einer zunehmenden Kommerzialisierung der Viehwirtschaft einher: Es lässt sich aufgrund des wachsenden Wettbewerbs, der florierenden Märkte (Rahn Phillips und Phillips 55–60), der staatlichen Unterstützung (Martinez Carreras XXXVII), aber auch der Reform administrativer Strukturen innerhalb der Schäferinnung Mesta eine Professionalisierung und Rentabilisierung verzeichnen (Klein 64), die wiederum auf den Umgang mit den Tieren zurückwirkt: Sie werden zunehmend als Wirtschaftsprodukte begriffen, mittels derer sich Gewinn erzielen und gesellschaftlicher Aufstieg erreichen lässt (Wiedenmann 13). Von dieser objektivierenden Kontaktnahme zeugt beispielsweise das Sprechen über Schafe in Fachtexten. In Gabriel Alonso de Herreras Landwirtschaftstraktat12 Agricultura general (1513) etwa weist die Rhetorik eine deutliche ökonomistische Prägung auf, wenn es heißt: „Eines der Dinge, das den Menschen gemeinhin bei der Landwirtschaft finanziell am meisten bereichert, ist die Viehzucht, sofern sie mit Treue betrieben wird, was vernünftig und gottgewollt ist; wenn sie [die Treue] fehlt, ist sie eher eine eitle Ehre als ein Verdienst, wenn der Schäfer aber treu ist, wächst der Bauernhof“ (251, Übers. T.H.).13 Die Lexeme „bereichern“, „Verdienst“, „wachsen“ entstammen der Isotopie ‚Wirtschaftlichkeit‘; die Aufmerksamkeit der Passage gilt allein dem menschlichen Vorteil, ohne dass die tierliche Perspektive berücksichtigt würde. Diese funktionalisierende und anthropozentrisch strukturierte Haltung findet sich auch an anderen Stel-

12Agronomische

Ratgeber erscheinen in der damaligen Zeit gehäuft, um das Fachwissen der Landwirte zu erweitern und zu konservieren. Im Zuge einer Öffnung für empirische Kenntnisse im 16. Jahrhundert (Matzat und Poppenberg 12) wird die Gattung zunehmend „wissenschaftlich“. 13Original: „una de las cosas que comunmente mas enriquece al hombre en este exercicio del campo es criar ganados, y si en ello hay la fidelidad que es razon, y segun Dios, y si esto falta, mas es una honra vana que provecho, que si el pastor es fiel, crece mucho la hacienda.“

21  Wolle, Wert, Würde

349

len des Texts wieder, wenn es heißt: „Man muss immer darauf achten, dass die Widder und Schafe weiß sind, denn die weiße Wolle ist teurer als die braune oder schwarze“14 oder „die alten Tiere, die nicht von so guter Rasse sind, soll man verkaufen, denn es ist mehr wert, in der Herde wenige, aber gute und gut unterhaltene Tiere zu haben, denn sie geben mehr Gewinn und Profit als viele, die schlecht behandelt werden und hungrig sind“ (252–253, Übers. T.H.).15 Die Tiere sind hier als Waren konzeptualisiert und tauchen stets in der grammatikalischen Objektposition auf; selbst der Aufruf zu ihrer guten Behandlung ist dem Ziel der Gewinnmaximierung untergeordnet. Dieser reifizierende und verfügende Gestus lässt auf eine statusmäßige und auch essenzielle Distanz in der Auffassung der MenschTier-Begegnung schließen, die wiederum der Rechtfertigung der Ausblendung moralisch Bedenken dient. Doch obschon sich ein Interesse am Profit in sämtlichen untersuchten Texten ausmachen lässt, ist der funktionalisierende Gestus keineswegs überall so ausgeprägt wie im eben genannten Beispiel. Es finden sich durchaus andere Nuancen, etwa in Miguel Caxa de Leruelas Viehzuchttraktat Restauración de la abundancia de España (1631), in dem es heißt: „Erzielt die Viehwirtschaft Verluste, so ist mit einer dauerhaften Staatspleite zu rechnen“ und dann sogar: „wir müssen eingestehen, was für einen großen Anteil das Vieh am Leben und der Aufrechterhaltung des Menschen hat, denn ohne es kann niemand leben“ (17, 20, Übers. T.H.).16 Die Schafe werden auch hier mit Wohlstand gleichgesetzt, nichtsdestotrotz stehen weniger die großen Gewinne im Zentrum als die Sorge um das finanzielle Auskommen und sogar ums Überleben. Stilistisch wird diese Dramatisierung durch die Absolutheit der dominant negativen Äußerungen („Staatspleite“, „kann niemand leben“), durch den Pleonasmus „Leben und Aufrechterhaltung“ sowie durch die Verwendung des Plurals für die Tiere und des Singulars für den Menschen unterstrichen, die eine hierarchische Unterlegenheit suggeriert. Weiterhin erzeugt die emotionale Tönung eine größere Nähe zwischen den Spezies, schließlich beruht die Beziehung zu den Schafen hier nicht auf Zweckdienlichkeit, sondern auf der menschlichen Abhängigkeit von den Nutztieren. Nicht umsonst endet Caxa de Leruela seine Ausführungen mit einem Appell an die Moral der Schäfer, wonach diese sich nicht aus Habgier rein auf den Ertrag fixieren, sondern stattdessen zu ihrem Wohl und dem der Tiere moderat und umsichtig wirtschaften sollen (269), sodass sich ein Aufbrechen der anthropozentrischen Perspektive ankündigt.

14Original:

„deben siempre procurar, que los carneros, y ovejas sean blancos, porque la lana blanca es de mas precio que la parda o negra.“ 15Original: „Vendan las viejas machorras, las que no son de tan buena casta, y mas vale traer en el hato pocas, y buenas, y bien mantenidas, y mas fruto, y provecho dan que muchas, y maltratadas, y hambrientas.“ 16Original: „De la quiebra de los ganados se ha de tener por constante la ruyna del estado publico […]. [A]vemos de confessar la mucha parte que tienen [los ganados] en la vida y conservación del hombre, pues sin ellos ninguno puede vivir.“

350

T. Hiergeist

Diese Rücksichtnahme auf die vermeintlichen tierlichen Bedürfnisse findet sich in Gerónimo Cortésʼ Naturgeschichte Tratado de animales terrestres y volatiles (1615) wieder, wo es über Schafe heißt: Ich sage also, dass diese Tiere, für das menschliche Leben so notwendig sind wie das andere für den Unterhalt und Genuss Geschaffene; und mir scheint, dass, würden sie auf der Welt fehlen, das Beste und Notwendigste neben dem Brot für das Auskommen des Menschen fehlen würde. Es gibt so viel zu sagen, zu schreiben über diese Tiere, aber das würde bedeuten, dass für die anderen [Gattungen] kein Platz mehr übrig wäre; alles in allem sage ich, dass sie uns, solange sie leben, Leben geben und sie uns dieses nach ihrem Tod bewahren, denn mit ihrer Wolle kleiden und schmücken wir uns, mit ihrem Fleisch erhalten und unterhalten wir uns, was die beste Mischung ist und Teil der Vorsorge, die unser Gott und Herr zur Erhaltung des menschlichen Lebens geschaffen hat. (85, Übers. T.H.)17

Die Relevanz der Tiere wird hier nicht nur inhaltlich expliziert, sondern erreicht durch die wiederholte Rekurrenz auf die Isotopie ‚Existenzsicherung‘ („für das menschliche Leben notwendig“, „Unterhalt“, „Auskommen“, „neben dem Brot“, „solange sie leben, Leben geben“, „erhalten und unterhalten wir uns“, „Erhaltung des menschlichen Lebens“) eine spezifische Drastik – ein Eindruck, der sich durch die religiöse Rahmung der Ausführungen („das für den Genuss geschaffene“, „die unser Gott und Herr […] geschaffen hat“) verstärkt: Die Verfügbarkeit der Tiere erscheint durch sie nicht als Selbstverständlichkeit, sondern als Gnade, die vom Menschen eine dankbare Grundhaltung erwartet. Es findet folglich eine positive Aufladung, um nicht zu sagen: eine Idealisierung der Schafe statt. Diese akzentuiert die rhetorische Inszenierung, die zu einer enkomiastisch-floskelhaften Hyperbolik („fehlten sie, dann fehlte das beste“, „es gibt so viel zu zu sagen, zu schreiben über diese Tiere“, „das ist die beste Mischung“) tendiert. Rhythmisch ist die Passage durch die viermalige Kundgabe der Meinung des Schreibers strukturiert („ich sage also“, „und mir scheint“, „es gibt so viel zu sagen“, „alles in allem sage ich“), die jeweils zu Satz(abschnitts)beginn erfolgt und einen beschleunigenden und klimaktischen und mithin affizierenden Charakter besitzt. In Bezug auf die Mensch-Tier-Begegnung lässt sich somit eine diskursive Egalisierung und eine tendenzielle Entfunktionalisierung zwischen den beiden Parteien konstatieren, die zum einen daher rührt, dass die Tiere mit Majuskeln versehen sind und daher personifiziert erscheinen, zum anderen daher, dass sie sich den grammatikalischen Subjekt- bzw. Objektstatus paritätisch mit den Menschen teilen („sie geben uns Leben“, „sie erhalten uns“, „wir kleiden uns“, „wir erhalten uns“). 17Original:

„Finalmente digo, que estos Animales, en su tanto, son tan necessarios a la vida humana, como todo lo restante criado para el sustento, y regalo de ella; y me parece, que si faltassen en el Mundo, faltaria lo mejor, y mas necessario para el passamiento del hombre, de quánto acá le sustenta, fuera del pan. Ay tanto que dezir, a escrivir destos Animales, que seria no dar lugar a los demás; con todo diré, que viviendo ellos nos dan vida, y despues de muerto nos la conservan, pues con sus lanas nos vestimos, y adornamos, y con sus carnes nos mantenemos, y sustentamos, que es la mejor mezcla, y vianda para el pan de quantas Nuestro Dios, y Señor ha criado para la conservacion de la vida humana.“

21  Wolle, Wert, Würde

351

Obwohl also ein Konsens über die Legitimität der Tierfunktionalisierung besteht, lassen sich in der diskursiven Behandlung der Schafe durchaus Unterschiede ausmachen: Während die einen Tiere reifizieren, unreflektiert über sie verfügen und ihre Bedürfnisse mittels einer anthropozentrischen Perspektive ausblenden und somit implizit ein hierarchisches und essenziell differentes Interspezies-Verhältnis präsupponieren, erkennen die anderen sie als Wesen, von denen sie abhängig und mit denen sie emotional verwoben sind, mit denen sie folglich interagieren. Zweiteres impliziert die zoozentrische Imagination einer angenommenen (von der eigenen Position womöglich divergenten) Tierperspektive und somit eine ausgeprägtere statusmäßige und definitorische Nähe. Diese Stellungnahmen variieren zum einen mit der Gattung: Während agronomische Texte, die in der damaligen Zeit die Landflucht verhindern und zur Weidewirtschaft motivieren möchten (Martinez Carreras XXXVII), häufig eine profitorientierte Perspektive und damit verbunden eine größere Mensch-Tier-Distanz präferieren, tendieren „wissenschaftliche“ Dokumente wie Naturgeschichten zu einer stärkeren Interspeziesnähe. Auch der historische Kontext mag hierbei eine Rolle spielen: Während im florierenden Wollhandel Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts eher der anthropozentrische Fokus dominiert, relativiert sich dieser mit der Branchenkrise Ende des 16. und Anfang des 17. Jahrhunderts (Rahn Phillips und Phillips 259).

4 Zwischen Gewinnmaximierung und Nachhaltigkeit: Die Tötung von Schafen Bislang ist lediglich etwas über die Bewertung der Schafe im Nutzungskontext, nicht jedoch über konkrete Anweisungen zum Umgang mit ihnen in der Praxis ausgesagt. Diese Frage soll, obschon sich dies aufgrund der restringierten Quellen- und Realienlage als schwierig erweist, zumindest ansatzweise angegangen werden. Generell eignet der Schafzucht ein durchwegs funktionalisierender Grundgestus, nichtsdestotrotz lassen sich innerhalb dieser Kategorie durchaus graduelle Unterschiede ausmachen. Einen Brennpunkt moralischer Stellungnahmen zur Schafnutzung stellt der rechte Zeitpunkt der Tötung dar: Schafe werden in der damaligen Zeit wie viele andere Tiere in der Regel so lange wie möglich für ihre regenerativen Produkte, Wolle und Milch, gehalten; sie werden meist erst dann verzehrt, ihre Haut erst dann abgezogen, wenn sie krank geworden oder ohnehin an Altersschwäche gestorben sind (Pascua Echegaray 158).18 Ein Töten vor der Zeit, um an Fleisch zu gelangen, wird als unverantwortlich angesehen, da es einerseits nicht den größtmöglichen Nutzen aus dem Tier zieht, andererseits

18Dies

klingt etwa im eben erwähnten Beispiel von Gerónimo Cortés an, in dem es explizit heißt: „nach ihrem Tod unterhalten wir uns mit ihrem Fleisch“ (Original: „después de muerto […] con sus carnes nos mantenemos“; de Herrera 273, Übers. T.H.).

352

T. Hiergeist

dessen Leben, statt es als Gottesgeschenk wertzuschätzen, unnötig vergeudet.19 So schreibt etwa Alonso de Herrera: „Ich sage ja nicht, dass man sie lassen soll, bis sie so alt sind, dass sie sterben oder nichts mehr wert sind, aber bis sie acht Jahre alt sind, gelten sie als gut, erst danach soll man sie töten.“ (de Herrera 273, Übers. T.H.).20 Laut Miguel Caxa de Leruela steht das Töten eines weiblichen Tiers, das noch Nachkommen haben und Milch liefern hätte können, unter einer Strafe von 1000 Dukaten; nur wenn ein Schaf aufgrund seines Alters oder seiner Sterilität nicht mehr anderweitig einsetzbar sei, werde die Schlachtung legitim (162–163). Dieselbe Haltung findet sich im rekurrierenden Gedanken wieder, nach der Tötung möglichst alle Teile eines Tiers weiterzuverwenden. So führt Gerónimo Cortés in der Aufzählung der Verwertungsmöglichkeiten eines Widders nicht nur das Fleisch und die Wolle, sondern auch die Haut als Rohstoff für Schuhe und Kleidung, den Schwanz als Bestandteil von Pergament und Musikinstrumenten sowie die Innereien und Knochen als Nahrung und Medizin an (83–88). Wie auch bei anderen Nutztieren hebt der Verfasser dabei würdigend hervor: „Es gibt am ganzen Schafsbock nichts, was nicht nützlich wäre“ (85, Übers. T.H.).21 Hierzu passt die Empörung Caxa de Leruelas, wenn er berichtet, dass seit kurzem Tiere gehäuft ausschließlich für ihre Häute und Felle abgestochen würden, während das Fleisch und die übrigen Bestandteile „verloren auf weiter Flur“22 zurückgelassen würden (162, Übers. T.H.). In diesem Ausdruck spiegeln sich erneut die bei­ den Dimensionen der Nutzung wider, denn es impliziert sowohl den Gewinn, der durch das Wegwerfen eingebüßt, als auch den Wert des Tiers als Lebewesen, der missachtet wird. Wie ausgeprägt der Unrechtseindruck ist, manifestiert sich auch in der (pädagogisch motivierten) Aufzählung von Strafen, die in anderen europäischen Ländern auf ein verantwortungsloses Tiertöten stehen: In Neapel würde beispielsweise die Schlachtung ohne umfassende Verwertung mit hohen Geldstrafen für den Besitzer und mehreren Peitschenhieben für den Metzger geahndet (162). Eine unnötige, weil zu frühe oder kurzsichtige Tötung wird nahezu flächendeckend verurteilt, weil verantwortungsvoll mit den gottgegebenen Ressourcen umzugehen sei. Auch hierin klingt eine Bereitschaft zur Imagination einer Tierperspektive an. Zu dieser Debatte um die Schlachtung sind lediglich wenige Quellen verfügbar und sie wird in Fachtexten nur angerissen; allerdings finden sich ihre Reflexe in fiktionalen Kontexten wieder, wobei in diesen auch die Emotionen durchscheinen, die mit ihr verknüpft gewesen sein mögen. Dies ist etwa der Fall für die Episode aus Miguel de Cervantesʼ Don Quijote, in welcher der Protagonist verblendet von

19Hierzu

passt, dass das Lammfleisch in der damaligen Zeit das teuerste ist (Marcos Aguiar und Montiel Bretón 98), zumal für dieses mit dem Prinzip der umfassenden Wertschöpfung gebrochen wird. 20Original: „no digo que los dexen hasta que sean tan viejos que se mueran, o no valgan nada, mas que hasta los ocho años hacen buena generacion, y en pasando allí los maten.“ 21Original: „no ay cosas en todo el Carnero que no sea de utilidad.“ 22Original: „perdidas en el campo“.

21  Wolle, Wert, Würde

353

der Idee, es handle sich um ein feindliches Heer, mit scharfen Waffen gegen eine Schafherde kämpft. Wie für den ersten, stärker didaktisch motivierten und satirischen Teil des Werks typisch, verrennt sich Don Quijote in seine Illusionen, während Sancho die realistische Gegenposition einnimmt und seinen Herrn (freilich erfolglos) von seiner Fehleinschätzung abzubringen versucht (Alonso 128). Die Kontraste prallen in dieser Passage besonders schonungslos aufeinander: Zunächst geht Sancho – im Gegensatz zu manch anderen Kapiteln – nicht auf die Rechtfertigungen Don Quijotes, böse Zauberer würden die Ritter als Schafe erscheinen lassen, ein, wobei die Richtigkeit dieser Meinung durch den Erzähler bekräftigt wird (Cervantes 161), sodass Don Quijotes Entrücktheit für den Leser außer Frage steht. Überdies findet Sancho im Vergleich zu anderen Episoden überaus deutliche Worte zur Abstrafung seines Gegenübers: ‚Kehrt um, Señor Don Quijote, denn ich schwörʼs zu Gott, es sind Hammel und Schafe, die Ihr angreifen wollt; kehrt um! Weh über den Vater, der mich gezeugt! Was für Tollheit! Seht doch nur hin, es ist kein Riese da und kein Ritter, keine Katzen, keine Rüstungen, keine geviertelten und keine ganzen Schilde, keine Eisenhütlein, blaue nicht und nicht verteufelte; was tut Ihr? O ich armer Sünder gegen Gott und Menschen!‘ (161, Übers. Braunfels)23

Der wiederholte Imperativ „kehrt um“, die Verwendung der reflexiven Verbform (im Spanischen: „vuélvase“), die interjektivischen Flüche, die rhetorischen Fragen sowie die polysyndetische Reihung auf „keine“ bringen die emotionale Involviertheit und Entrüstung der Figur zum Ausdruck, sodass Don Quijotes Entgleisung besonders schwerwiegend erscheint. Fürderhin versuchen die Schäfer, den Protagonisten mit verbalem Protest und dem Werfen faustgroßer Steine von seinem Tun abzubringen, was insofern besonders bedeutungsvoll ist, als im vorherigen Kapitel Schäfer gemäß dem bukolischen Topos friedfertig in Harmonie mit der Natur und den Tieren gezeigt worden sind. Nicht zuletzt ist auch der Abschluss der Episode aussagekräftig, in dem es heißt: „Die Hirten liefen auf ihn zu und glaubten, sie hätten ihn getötet; und so trieben sie denn in großer Eile ihre Herde zusammen, luden die toten Tiere auf, deren es über sieben waren, und ohne sich nach was anderm umzutun, zogen sie von dannen.“ (162, Übers. Braunfels).24 Während die negativen Auswirkungen des quijotesken Wahns in anderen Kapiteln häufig der Fantasie der Lesenden überlassen werden, sind sie hier konkretisiert. Außerdem erreicht die Unrechtmäßigkeit der Schafstötung dadurch eine besondere Prägnanz, dass der Protagonist und die Schafe durch die doppelte Verwendung des ‚Töten‘

23Original:

„Vuélvase vuestra merced, señor Don Quijote, que voto a Dios que son carneros y ovejas las que va a embestir. Vuélvase, ¡desdichado del padre que me engendró! ¿Qué locura es esta? Mire que no hay gigante ni caballero alguno, ni gatos, ni armas, ni escudos partidos ni enteros, ni veros azules ni endiablados. ¿Qué es lo que hace? ¡Pecador soy yo a Dios!“ 24Original: „Llegáronse a él los pastores y creyeron que le habían muerto y, así, con mucha priesa recogieron su ganado y cargaron de las reses muertas, que pasaban de siete, y sin averiguar otra cosa se fueron.“

354

T. Hiergeist

und durch die Nennung im gleichen Satz sprachlich parallelisiert und mithin egalisiert sind. Insofern erscheint Don Quijotes Heldenstreich als sinnlose Grausamkeit, die textuell negativ bewertet ist und sich darin vom sonst häufig komischen Grundton abhebt.25 Es ist folglich möglich, dass diese Episode sich implizit kritisch zur beginnenden professionellen Vermarktung von Schafen und der damit verbundenen anthropozentrischen Funktionalisierung positioniert. In Bezug auf die Tiertötung wird insgesamt also deutlich, dass im Spanien des 16. Jahrhunderts trotz der Abhängigkeit von Tierprodukten sehr wohl Überlegungen zur Gestaltung der Vermarktung angestellt werden, die an Ergiebigkeitsargumente geknüpft sind: In dem in allen analysierten Texten anklingenden Plädoyer für eine umfassende Schafsnutzung, kommt einerseits der Wunsch nach Gewinnmaximierung, andererseits aber auch eine gewisse Wertschätzung für die Tiere als Lebewesen zum Ausdruck, die wiederum auf eine ansatzweise statusmäßige und definitorische Interspeziesnähe, eine interaktive Kontaktnahme sowie eine gewisse Bereitschaft zur Transzendierung der anthropozentrischen Perspektive verweist.

5 Fazit Die Beispiele zum Sprechen über und Handeln mit Schafen im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert sollten einen Einblick in die Mensch-Tier-Begegnungen im wirtschaftlichen Kontext zu einer Zeit geben, in der die Beziehung zu diesen Nutztieren in Spanien aufgrund der zunehmenden Kapitalisierung einen Umbruch erfährt. Die Interspezies-Begegnung gestaltet sich grundlegend funktionalisierend, allerdings lassen sich graduelle Unterschiede im Ausmaß dieser Rentabilisierung der Schafe für menschliche Zwecke ausmachen, zumal sich manche Texte – und dies sind tendenziell die agronomischen Traktate aus der ersten Hälfte des siglo de oro – ausschließlich auf den Profit und somit auf die menschlichen Interessen konzentrieren, während andere – eher naturgeschichtliche Abhandlungen ab den Wirtschaftskrisen Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts – die Dankbarkeit und Abhängigkeit betonen und die Zucht nicht als unilaterale Einflussnahme, sondern als Interaktion konzeptualisieren und punktuell ihre eigenen Interessen auch einer angenommenen tierlichen oder kreatürlichen Perspektive gegenüberstellen. Es deutet sich folglich zum einen an, dass die Auffassungen vom Interspezies-Kontakt in der spanischen Schafzucht situativ variieren, und zum anderen, dass sich im Untersuchungszeitraum diesbezüglich ein diachroner Wandel vollzieht. Ob dieser de facto proklamiert werden kann, welche unterschiedlichen Faktoren ihn bedingen und er wie in Hinblick auf die moralische Haltung gegenüber Schafen und in Relation zum Kontakt mit anderen Tierarten zu bewerten ist, wäre in vertiefenden Studien zu überprüfen.

25Wenn

die Schäfer die Kadaver wegtragen, so geschieht dies, weil sie zumindest vom Fleisch ihrer Tiere profitieren möchten, sodass hierüber der Schaden betont wird, der ihnen durch Don Quijotes Untat entstanden ist.

21  Wolle, Wert, Würde

355

Literatur Agamben, Giorgio. Das Offene: Der Mensch und das Tier. Suhrkamp, 2003. Alonso, Dámaso. „Sancho – Quijote, Sancho – Sancho (1950).“ Don Quijote: Forschung und Kritik, hg. v. Helmut Hatzfeld, WBG, 1968, S. 416–449. Andrews, Kristin. „Beyond Anthropomorphism. Attributing Psychological Properties to Animals.“ The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, hg. v. Tom L. Beauchamp und R. G. Frey, Oxford UP, 2011, S. 469–494. Caxa de Leruela, Miguel. Restauración de la abundancia de España o pretantissimo unico a facil reparo de su carestia presente. Madrid, 1713. Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Real Academia Española, 2004. Chimaira, Arbeitskreis für Human-Animal Studies. „Eine Einführung in gesellschaftliche Mensch-Tier-Verhältnisse und Human-Animal Studies.“ Human-Animal Studies: Über die Gesellschaftliche Natur von Mensch-Tier Verhältnissen, hg. v. Chimaira, transcript, 2011, S. 7–42. Cortés, Geronimo. Tratado de los de los animales terrestres y volatiles. Valencia, 1672. Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de. Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. Madrid, 1611. Daston, Lorraine. „Intelligences. Angelic, Animal, Human.“ Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, hg. v. Daston und Gregg Mitman, Columbia UP, 2005, S. 37–58. Edwards, Peter. „Domesticated Animals in Renaissance Europe.“ A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance, hg. v. Bruce Boehrer, Berg, 2007, S. 75–94. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Herrera, Gabriel Alonso de. Agricultura general, que trata de la labranza del campo, y sus particularidades, crianza de animales, propriedades de las plantas que en ella se contienen. Madrid, 1777. Klein, Julius. La Mesta: Estudio de la historia económica espanola 1273–1836. Alianza, 1979. Latour, Bruno: Wir sind nie modern gewesen: Versuch einer symmetrischen Anthropologie. Fischer, 1998. Marcos Aguiar, Daniel, und Lorenzo Montiel Bretón. Historia del comercio: De los albores del Comercio a las Grandes Superficies. Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca y Alimentación, 2003. Martín, Alberto Marcos. España en los siglos XVI, XVII y XVIII: Economía y sociedad. Crítica, 2000. Martinez Carreras, José Urbano. „Estudio preliminar.“ Obra de agricultura, hg. v. Gabriel Alonso de Herrera, Yagües, 1970, S. XI–XCVIII. Matzat, Wolfgang, und Gerhard Poppenberg. „Einleitung.“ Begriff und Darstellung der Natur in der spanischen Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit, hg. v. Matzat und Poppenberg, Fink, 2012, S. 7–22. Mexía, Pedro. „El coloquio del porfiado.“ Silva de varia lección, by Mexía, Imprenta Real, 1966, S. 413–466. Norton, Marcy. „Animals.“ Lexicon of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation, hg. v. Evonne Levy und Kenneth Mills, U of Texas P, 2014, S. 17–24. Obermaier, Sabine. „Tiere und Fabelwesen im Mittelalter: Einführung und Überblick.“ Tiere und Fabelwesen im Mittelalter, hg. v. Obermaier, de Gruyter, 2009, S. 1–28. Parma Cook, Alexandra, und David Noble Cook. The Plague Files: Crisis Management in Sixteenth-Century Seville, Louisiana State UP, 2009. Pascua Echegaray, Esther. Señores del paisaje: Ganadería y recursos naturales en Aragón, siglos XIII–XVII. PUV, 2012. Petrus, Klaus. „Die Verdinglichung der Tiere.“ Tiere, Bilder, Ökonomien: Aktuelle Forschungsfragen der Human-Animal-Studies, hg. v. Chimaira, Arbeitskreis für Human-Animal-Studies, transcript, 2013, S. 43–62.

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Pfeiler, Tamara, und Mario Wenzel. „Psychologie: Von Mensch zu Tier.“ Disziplinierte Tiere? Perspektiven der Human-Animal Studies für die wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen, hg. v. Reingard Spannring u. a., transcript, 2015, S. 189–228. Rahn Phillips, Carla, und William D. Phillips. Spain‘s Golden Fleece: Wool Production and the Wool Trade from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century. Hopkins UP, 1997. Rojas Villandrando, Augustin de. El viaje entretendio. Castalia, 1972. Roscher, Mieke. „Geschichtswissenschaft: Von einer Geschichte mit Tieren zu einer Tiergeschichte.“ Disziplinierte Tiere? Perspektiven der Human-Animal Studies für die wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen, hg. v. Reingard Spannring u. a., transcript, 2015, S. 75–100. Simons, John. Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation, Palgrave, 2002. Wiedenmann, Rainer E. Die Tiere der Gesellschaft. UVK, 2002. Wild, Markus. „Anthropologische Differenz.“ Tiere: Kulturwissenschaftliches Handbuch, hg. v. Roland Borgards, Metzler, 2016, S. 47–59.

Berührung als die Grundoperation des In-Gebrauch-Nehmens der Tiere: Theorie und Praxis der reiterlichen Arbeit

22

Marcello Pocai

Das lässige Streicheln […] über Tierfell heißt: die Hand hier kann vernichten. (Horkheimer und Adorno 226)

Die einzige Möglichkeit, nicht umstandslos Gewalt auszuüben gegenüber den Tieren, die wir halten, mit denen wir Umgang haben, die wir „nutzen“ und in Gebrauch nehmen, besteht darin, eine aufgeklärte Arbeitsbeziehung mit den Tieren zu führen, also eine mehr als zweigliedrige Beziehung. Gewalt hieße, Herrschaft über das Tier als unserem Schutzbefohlenen auszuüben, in Kenntnis seiner Bedürfnisse und zugleich in der Vernachlässigung dieser Bedürfnisse. Woher wissen wir nun, welche Bedürfnisse die des Tieres sind und welche die, von denen wir bloß annehmen, dass es die des Tieres sind? Wir müssen die Rede über Tiere von der Rede über Tiere fortwährend unterscheiden, wobei wir uns an den Äußerungen und Reaktionen des Tieres orientieren müssen. Unter Bedürfnis will ich alles verstehen, was vom Tier ausgeht, also etwa dessen Intentionen, die auch mich betreffen können. Im Folgenden stütze ich mich auf die reiterliche Arbeit mit dem Pferd, die schon am Boden, also nicht erst im Sattel stattfindet, um den Theorie-Praxis-Bezug herzustellen bzw. die Rede über „Tiere“, „die Tiere“, „das Tier“ usw. nicht im Vagen zu belassen.

1 Die Grundoperation der Berührung Ich fasse den Term „Berührung“, neben den verschiedenen Formen sinnlicher und taktiler Berührungen, als ein grundsätzlich räumliches Geschehen auf. Die Wendung „In Berührung kommen mit“ gibt einen Hinweis auf den komplexen Sachverhalt, der

M. Pocai (*)  Berlin, Deutschland E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_22

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gemeint ist. Das Grimmsche Wörterbuch verzeichnet für „Berührung“ als Grundwort „contactus“ (1: 1538). Auch Wildtiere, deren Reviere, Wege und Pfade durch den Menschen lediglich gekreuzt worden sind, sind bereits in Kontakt getreten mit dem Menschen. Der Mensch ist – durch die Spuren, die er hinterlässt, am Boden und in der Luft (Gerüche) – nun dem Tier bekannt. Mensch und Tier teilen einen gemeinsamen Raum. Die Rituale der Domestikation wiederholen wir immer wieder, auch wenn wir mit domestizierten Tieren Umgang haben. Das Pferd war anfangs jagdbares Wild, und nur insofern sich der Jäger nach seinem Opfer richten muss, wird die basale Einseitigkeit von Jäger und Wild, Mensch und Pferd bzw. Pferdeherde irritiert. Die späteren Verlaufsformen der Domestikation – Zucht und Zusammenleben – können den primären Zug der gewaltsamen Naturbeherrschung durch den Menschen oder die Transformation der ersten zur zweiten Natur nicht vergessen machen. Wenn wir das Verhältnis von Mensch und Tier epistemologisch betrachten, so ist evident, dass wir „das Tier“ ohne die menschliche Zurichtung nicht haben können. Wenn wir von einem formierten Dinge das wieder wegnehmen, was das Werkzeug daran getan hat, so ist uns das Ding […] gerade wieder soviel als vor dieser somit überflüssigen Bemühung. Sollte [das Ding] durch das Werkzeug uns nur überhaupt nähergebracht werden, ohne etwas an ihm zu verändern, wie etwa durch die Leimrute der Vogel, so würde es wohl, wenn es nicht an und für sich schon bei uns wäre und sein wollte, dieser List spotten […] (Hegel, „Einleitung“ 69).

Vor der Zucht der Tiere in Menschenhand steht das Einfangen und Binden der Tiere und damit die Verknappung des Raumes, der den Tieren zugänglich ist. Die Rituale der Berührung sind logisch und zeitlich vorgängig. Unabhängig von unseren Intentionen, mit denen wir mit Tieren in Kontakt treten wollen, wir ein Wild erlegen wollen, also auf der Lauer liegen, oder wir ein junges Pferd zum Reitpferd ausbilden wollen, wir vollziehen immer die Grundoperation der Berührung. Diese, ohne dass wir sie überbestimmen, umfasst Blickvor- und -nachzeichnungen, also etwa, wenn ein Jäger sich des Wildes an einer Stelle vergewissert und zugleich erwarten muss, dass es fortläuft. Berührungen müssen nicht in der Nähe, taktil-handgreiflich sein, über die eigene Körperwärme, den Geruch usw. stattfinden, sie können auch auf Distanz, durch Hilfsmittel oder Werkzeuge, durch deiktische Akte, Gesten und Zeichen erfolgen. Allen verschiedenen Formen von Berührung ist dreierlei gemeinsam: Erstens überwinden wir eine räumliche Distanz zu dem Tier, wenn wir es berühren (wollen). Zweitens deuten wir dem Tier gegenüber eine Richtung an, in die es sich bewegen soll. Ob wir wollen oder nicht, jeder Berührung inhäriert eine Richtung und damit eine Bewegungsrichtung. Drittens: Wenn wir ein Tier berühren wollen oder berühren, schaffen wir einen Kontakt, der in sich sozial strukturiert ist, da wir von nun an mit dem Tier zusammenleben, falls das im starken Sinne möglich ist, und von nun an zusammenarbeiten wollen. Der ersten Berührung eines individuell aufzufassenden Tieres kommt dabei, wenn wir unsere Organe dabei unter Kontrolle haben, eine besondere Rolle zu: Unsere grundlegende Intention dem Tier gegenüber wird für das Tier spürbar.

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Wenn wir ein Fohlen das erste Mal anfassen, können wir anhand seiner Reaktionen erkennen, ob es sich nah bei uns wohlfühlt oder nicht. Windet es sich unter unseren Händen und verkrampft, oder kommt es von sich aus zu uns? Im Grunde gibt es zwei Typen – die, die sich gerne anfassen lassen, und diejenigen, bei denen das komplizierter ist. Wenn wir uns an den Bedürfnissen des Tieres orientieren, müssen wir, bevor wir das Fohlen berühren, wissen, ob es ein Vertreter von Typ 1 oder von Typ 2 ist. Wenn wir das Raumverhalten der Pferde und im Besonderen das dieses Fohlens nicht schon kennen, so müssen wir es zum Gegenstand der konkreten Berührung machen. Wenn wir ein Pferd putzen, so streichen wir mit der Bürste in eine Richtung. Die auf dem Fuße folgende Antwort des Pferdes ist, sich umzudrehen und zu gucken, was da passiert. Der Körper selber wird also in sich bewegt, oder das Pferd bewegt sich von der Stelle weg, an der es stand, in die Richtung, in die wir geputzt haben. Sobald ein Pferd von uns berührt worden ist, ist eine Art Gemeinschaft gestiftet, die wir kultivieren und ausbuchstabieren können.

2 Berührung und Raumverhalten Wenn wir das Raumverhalten der Tiere betrachten und studieren, erhalten wir eine Ahnung davon, wie wir die Tiere bestimmen. Die Geschichte der Domestikation, der Haustierwerdung des Tieres, ist, wie bereits angedeutet, eine Geschichte der Verknappung des Raumes, der den Tieren zugestanden wird. Oder anders gesagt, eine Geschichte der Nihilierung aller Räume, die dem Tier zur Verfügung stehen, um vor uns zu fliehen. Allerdings ist für das domestizierte Tier die Feindvermeidung nicht mehr notwendig, sodass sein Fluchtverhalten nicht mehr so stark ausgeprägt ist. Im Anschluss an Heini Hedigers Analyse der Fluchttendenz des gefangenen Tieres (Wildtiere 25–26) unterscheidet Edward Hall vier Distanzen, die „Fluchtdistanz“, die „Kritische Distanz“, die „Individualdistanz“ und die „Gruppendistanz“, die er in Bezug auf das menschliche Verhalten in die „intime“, die „persönliche“, die „soziale“ und die „öffentliche“ Distanz überführt (24–28, 119–130). Obwohl er grundsätzlich einen blasenförmigen Raum, den jeder Körper um sich herum habe, ansetzt, gibt er konkrete Messdaten für diese Distanzen an, durch die sich die vorsprachlichen und nonverbalen Äußerungen des Menschen strukturieren lassen. Diese Räume müssten also regelmäßige Radien aufweisen. Demgegenüber setze ich diese Räume, Sphären oder Zonen, die jedes Lebewesen für sich beansprucht, mengentheoretisch als bereits auf Schnittmengen bezogen voraus, wobei ihre Form nicht festgelegt ist. Die ersten beiden Distanzen hat Hediger zur Charakterisierung des Verhaltens des Tieres bei einer Bedrohung von außen, das heißt bei Angriff auf die Reviergrenzen, eingeführt. Die „Fluchtdistanz“ ist die Distanz, die, wenn sie unterschritten wird, das Tier zur Flucht treibt. Die „Kritische Distanz“ ist die Distanz, die, wenn sie unterschritten wird, das Tier zum Angriff zwingt. Allerdings gibt es zwischen beiden Distanzen einen Zwischenraum, den Hall als zur Kritischen

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Distanz zugehörig betrachtet. „Die ‚Kritische Distanz‘ umschließt die enge Zone, die die Fluchtdistanz von der Angriffsdistanz trennt“ (25). Hediger ordnet in ähnlicher Perspektive eine „Wehrreaktion“ der „Kritischen Distanz“ zu (Wildtiere 25). Mit der Grundunterscheidung von Fluchtdistanz und Kritischer Distanz lassen sich aber auch innerartliche Aggressionen beschreiben. Unter „Aggression“ sind zunächst nur die Distanzverkürzungen zu verstehen, die die Raumansprüche der verschiedenen Lebewesen artikulieren. Beide Autoren stimmen darin überein, dass die räumliche Kommunikation oder das Raumverhalten der Tiere gegenüber jeder Form von Aggression nicht ausreicht, um das Mit- oder Gegeneinander zu regeln. Stattdessen schafften erst soziale Hierarchien die ersehnte Ruhe (Hall 27; Hediger, Wildtiere 172; Tierpsychologie 300). Während Hall umstandslos das Distanzverhalten der Tiere aus der Verhaltensforschung nach Hediger auf das Distanzverhalten des Menschen überträgt, betrachtet demgegenüber Hediger das Raumverhalten der Tiere als abkünftigen Modus, der durch die Domestikation des Tieres an Erklärungskraft eingebüßt hat. Das moderne Tier ist „raumemanzipiert“, es hat kein festes Revier mehr, Standortwechsel bzw. Stallwechsel machen ihm nichts aus (Hediger, Tierpsychologie 278). Dennoch behält der Rekurs auf das Raumverhalten der Tiere auch im ethologischen Sinn Erklärungskraft. Denn obzwar das grundlegende Angstverhalten des Tieres, vor seinem größten Feind, dem Menschen, zu fliehen, abgeschwächt worden ist, ist es dennoch nicht ganz verschwunden. „Auch das leistungsfähigste Pferd […] wäre[] für uns wertlos, wenn diese[s] Tier[] noch mit der unverminderten Fluchttendenz der wilden Stammform ausgestattet wäre[…]. Fluchttendenz schließt die Nutzbarkeit aus“ (Hediger, Tierpsychologie 132). Ich vertrete aus hippologischer Sicht die Gegenthese. Zwar ist der Umgang mit schreckhaften, scheuen und allzeit fluchtbereiten Tieren unpraktisch und prekär; aber die Nutzung der mechanischen Kraft des Pferdes, erst vor dem Wagen, dann unter dem Sattel, war nur aufgrund des nicht zu unterdrückenden Fluchttriebs möglich. Hall wie Hediger rekurrieren in ihren Rekonstruktionen des urtümlichen Verhaltens der Tiere auf die psychologische Disposition des Verhaltens, das einen Perspektivwechsel auf das dem Tier eigene Erleben indiziert. Beide Autoren führen aber diesen Perspektivwechsel nicht aus. Hall (27) spricht von der Gruppendistanz als „psychischer Distanz“: Das Tier, das in Gruppenverbänden lebt, wird nervös, wenn der Abstand zur Gruppe zu groß wird und das Tier nicht sicher sein kann, ungehindert zur Gruppe zurückkommen zu können. Hediger (Wildtiere 40) deutet diese Perspektive an, indem er die „psychologische“ Seite des Fluchtverhaltens anspricht.. So wie das Tier in dem oben angeführten Zwischenraum (den es mit dem Eindringling teilt) zwischen Kritischer Distanz und Fluchtdistanz noch nicht notwendig angreift oder flieht, sondern die Reaktion kurzzeitig in der Schwebe ist, so werden die Reaktionen auf den Verlust der Gruppenanbindung ähnlich, aber nicht deckungsgleich ablaufen. Verfolgen wir den ethologischen Ansatz, dass das Verhalten des Tieres immer eine Reaktion auf die Verletzung der Reviergrenzen ist und durch die Raumemanzipierung des domestizierten Tieres das Revier und damit das Revierverhalten

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wegfallen, dann bleibt ein neuer sozialer Raum übrig, den wir mit den Tieren teilen. Diesen Aspekt behandelt Hediger nicht ausdrücklich, implizit allerdings in der Verwischung des Unterschiedes von natürlichem Habitat und Zoogehege: Die Differenz von „Raumquantität“ (des freilebenden Tieres) und „Raumqualität“ (des gefangenen Tieres) wird zugunsten der Raumqualität, also des Geheges aufgelöst (Wildtiere 36–37). Im Unterschied zu Hediger setzt Hall die Distanzen nicht mit einem bestimmten Verhalten in eins. Vielmehr eröffnen die mit den Distanzen verbundenen Räume verschiedene Möglichkeiten, sich zu verhalten. Wir strukturieren den Raum, den wir mit den Tieren teilen, idealiter mit diesen zusammen, indem wir ihre Reaktionen vor dem Horizont ihres Raumverhaltens deuten. Im Vorgriff auf die Skizze zum Praxisbezug im vierten Teil artikuliert sich unsere Aggression dem Tier gegenüber in der veränderten Bewegungsrichtung. Kommen wir in die Fluchtzone, bewegt sich das Tier von uns weg; kommen wir in die kritische Zone, bewegt es sich auf uns zu oder zu uns hin. Hieraus ergibt sich die Notwendigkeit, dass wir uns in dem mit dem Tier geteilten Zwischenraum bewegen müssen, damit das Verhalten des Tieres nicht stereotyp, einseitig, nur triebgesteuert, mechanisch, also unlebendig wird. Ohne den Unterschied von innerartlichem Raumverhalten und dem Verhalten gegenüber Aggressionen von außen zu verwischen, müssen wir auch einen Zwischenraum zwischen Individualund Gruppensphäre ansetzen.

3 Die Raumkategorien Hall wie Hediger gehen davon aus, dass das Raumverhalten der Tiere den sozialen Kompetenzen des Tieres nachgeordnet ist. Wenn es also eine neue stabile Ordnung geben soll in einem Gruppengefüge, etwa wenn neue Mitglieder hinzukommen oder sich die heranwachsenden Mitglieder verändern, dann könne dies nur durch soziale Rangfolgen geschehen. Irrig ist diese Auffassung allein schon deshalb, weil die ersehnte Stabilität einer sozial verfassten Gruppe nur in einem dynamischen Modus zu haben ist. Abgesehen davon, dass im Festhalten an Dominanzhierarchien die Übermächtigung des Tieres durch den Menschen besiegelt ist, will ich die Gegenthese vertreten. Basal für eine soziale Gemeinschaft ist das Verständnis der Raumkategorien und ihres Zusammenhangs. Da das Pferd schon in einem gemeinsamen Raum mit uns lebt, müssen wir diesen (zusammen mit dem Pferd) nachträglich strukturieren. Ich betrachte Pferd und Mensch bzw. Pferd und Reiter am Boden als Wesen mit verschiedenem Raum und verschiedenen Raumansprüchen, Pferd und Reiter zusammengenommen, sofern dieser auf jenem sitzt, als einen gemeinsamen Raum oder Leib (Der Ausdruck „Reiter“ hat hier keine geschlechtliche Bedeutung.). Die räumliche Grundkategorie Leib setze ich mit der Neuen Phänomenologie von Hermann Schmitz an (Leib im Spiegel 7–36). Mit ihr lassen sich die unwillkürlichen und zugleich gespürten Erlebnisse gerade im Blick auf eine innige Beziehung zwischen Pferd und Mensch beschreiben. Schmitz spricht im Fall des Reiters auf dem Pferd von „wechselseitiger Einleibung“, da Reiter und Pferd in

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einer „Wechselwirkung von Initiative und Resonanz“ aufeinander bezogen sind („Kommunikation“ 18). Diese Beschreibung, die unvermeidlich idealisiert, macht allerdings sehr anschaulich, womit wir es zu tun haben, wenn wir die Zusammenarbeit mit dem Pferd thematisieren. Gegen das perzeptive Körperschema, also die instrumentelle Auffassung, dass der Körper und seine Funktionen Wahrnehmungsgegenstände für das menschliche Bewusstsein sind, setzt Schmitz seine Konstruktion eines dynamischen Leibtyps. Wenn wir von Nähe, Distanz und der Überwindung der Distanz sprechen, so setzt Schmitz die Kategorien „Enge“, „Weite“ und „Richtung“ an. Die leiblichen Vorgänge sind die an den sozusagen alltäglichen Lebensäußerungen wie dem Atmen abgelesenen vitalen Prozesse. Verführerisch ist diese Kategorisierung, da wir annehmen könnten, dass, wenn Pferd und Reiter im gleichen Rhythmus atmend sich gemeinsam fortbewegten, die Wechselseitigkeit schon erreicht sei. Aber gerade in diesem Falle, würde sich der Reiter den Atem- und Bewegungsrhythmus des Pferdes zu eigen machen, läge eine bloß „einseitige“ Einleibung vor, die mit dem „Selbstverlust“ des Reiters einherginge (20). Die Raumkategorien Position und Grenze gehen einen Schritt zurück und thematisieren den Körper des Pferdes, sofern er von außen oder in der Umwelt betrachtet wird. Den erwähnten Zwischenraum setze ich auf der leiblichen Ebene an, er wird (von Reiter und Pferd) geteilt. Unter Position fasse ich den Standort, den wir gegenüber einem Pferd einnehmen können. Dabei können wir uns im Stand und in der Bewegung, wenn wir das Pferd führen und longieren, vor dem Pferd, auf Höhe der verschiedenen Partien des Pferdes, auf Höhe des Halses, auf Höhe der tiefsten Stelle des Rückens, auf Höhe der Kruppe, hinter dem Pferd aufhalten. Wir können also verschiedene Positionen einnehmen oder aber auch mit einer Position verschiedene Implikationen verbinden (Solinski 174). Mit der Position ist der Anspruch an uns verbunden, stabil an dem Standort bzw. an einer bestimmten Stelle bezogen auf das sich vorwärtsbewegende Pferd zu bleiben. Dadurch werden wir der Effekte gewahr werden können, die wir dadurch zeitigen. Bevor wir in den Nahbereich des Pferdes kommen können, also dessen Individualdistanz kennen und uns darin aufhalten können, müssen wir den Zwischenraum erobern und also weder das Pferd von uns wegschicken, noch es geradewegs auf uns zukommen lassen. Der Begriff der Grenze markiert eine Etappe im Verlauf der Annäherung von Mensch und Pferd. Er bezeichnet die Getrenntheit von Mensch und Pferd, die wir als die Konfrontation zweier Körper auffassen können. Dennoch sind beide über die Grenze verbunden. Im Gegenzug zum gemeinsamen Leib, der über das räumliche Erleben bestimmt ist, geht es hier um die Ausdehnung der verschiedenen Körper (Hegel, Lehre vom Sein 123–124). Ich will im Folgenden – vor dem Horizont eines bereits geteilten, aber noch zu strukturierenden sozialen Raumes – ein Konzept produktiver Grenzverletzungen vorstellen. Aggressionen oder Distanzverkürzungen will ich auffassen als die Aktivität eines ranghohen, anders gesagt sozial kompetenten Tieres, dem es um etwas geht. Dabei setze ich zwei Voraussetzungen an.

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Ich fasse das Pferd als Bewegungstier auf, das seine Bedürfnisse in Bewegung ausdrückt. Die Bewegungen sind vielfältig; einher mit der Ortsbewegung (etwa von A nach C) geht die Bewegung, die den Körper des Pferdes verändert. In der Reitersprache wird vom Takt gesprochen. Das sind die Gangarten des Pferdes, wobei der Schritt als ein Vier-, der Trab als ein Zwei- und der Galopp als ein Dreitakt angesehen werden. Davon unterscheiden möchte ich den individuellen Rhythmus des jeweiligen Pferdes, die Art und Weise, wie es die von uns als Takte rekonstruierten Gangarten realisiert. Hinzu kommt die Bereitschaft des Tieres, sein Vermögen und sein Wille, sich selbsttätig vorwärts zu bewegen, gerade wenn es nicht zur Flucht getrieben wird. Die Reitersprache wartet hier mit dem Ausdruck Impulsion auf (Solinski 313). Die Charakterisierung des Pferdes als Bewegungstier, ebenso wie die als Herdentier, wird in der Verhaltensforschung der Bestimmung des Pferdes als Fluchttier nachgeordnet betrachtet. Dass das Huftier Pferd lange und ausdauernd laufen kann, weil es dadurch Feinden entkommt, heißt natürlich nicht, dass wir die Bewegungen, die uns mit dem Pferd verbinden sollen, nur im Fluchtmodus haben können. Demgegenüber sind die gemeinsam mit dem Pferd geteilten Bewegungen sozial strukturiert. Gerade das Bild eines Reiter-Pferd-Paares wird traditionell als ein harmonisches Ganzes betrachtet, in dem bereits so etwas wie ein für beide Seiten produktiver Austausch realisiert sei. Diese Idealisierung unterschlägt die Rituale, die gemeinhin nötig sind, damit das Pferd ein Reitpferd wird. In jedem Falle müssen wir das reiterliche Verhältnis zum Pferd als kritisches ansetzen, wobei das Pferd den Maßstab der Kritik abgibt. Hauptkriterium dafür, ob das Pferd mehr ist als Instrument seines Reiters, ist, in Reitersprache ausgedrückt, die bereits erwähnte Impulsion, das Vermögen und Verlangen des Pferdes, sich selbsttätig immer weiter zu bewegen, Bewegung und Bewegungen, also verschiedene Gangarten oder Fußfolgen, anzubieten. Den Vorgang, das Pferd zu motivieren bzw. zu etwas zu bewegen, nennen die Reiter treiben. Die zweite Voraussetzung betrifft zwei Analogieschlüsse. Erstens setze ich eine Analogie an zwischen dem qua Domestikation mit dem Pferd geteilten gemeinsamen Raum bzw. dem uns gemeinsam umgebenden Raum und der Reitbahn an, die wir in der konkreten reiterlichen Praxis strukturieren (Abb. 1). Wenn diese Hufschlagfiguren als Linien mehrfach durchlaufen werden, traditionell im besten Falle zur gymnastischen Ausbildung des Pferdes, in unserem Kontext zur gemeinsamen „Raumeroberung“, sodass die Reitbahn kein fremder Ort mehr für das Pferd darstellt, können wir sehen, dass es immer „Unorte“ gibt, Stellen, die ausgespart bleiben (Abb. 2). Im traditionellen Reitunterricht, der im Abteilungsreiten erfolgt, bei dem also eine Gruppe von Schulpferden mit ihren Reitern hintereinander die Bahnfiguren absolviert, gibt es immer wieder Schulpferde, die sich der Arbeit entziehen und just an den Stellen stehen bleiben, die nicht auf der Karte der Bahnfiguren verzeichnet sind. An dieser Stelle setzt die Kritik an: Kritik des Pferdes an uns durch den Abbruch der Bewegung, und Kritik an dem fehlenden Raum, der für die ungehinderte Vorwärtsbewegung nötig ist.

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Abb. 1  Hufschlagfiguren in der Reitbahn. (Nissen 1976, 229)

Abb. 2  Hufschlaglinien, 2017. (Lelia Pocai)

Die zweite Analogie bezieht sich darauf, dass wir aus der Beobachtung des Herdenverhaltens des Pferdes auf unsere Arbeitspraxis schließen. Ich gehe von einer stabilen Herde aus, deren Mitglieder sich kennen. Ihr aufeinander abgestimmtes Verhalten lässt auf Teamwork schließen. Den Teamworkgedanken finden wir in der Tradition wieder. Die preußische Militärreiterei bildete die jungen Pferde mithilfe älterer Lehrpferde aus. An der Spanischen Hofreitschule in Wien wird das junge Pferd von drei Ausbildern, die verschiedene Funktionen übernehmen, longiert.

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In der Herde bewegen sich die Pferde zueinander oft in verschiedenen Figuren, und man geht davon aus, dass die sogenannten ranghohen Tiere die rangniedrigen treiben, also vorrangig die Richtung bestimmen, in die das getriebene Pferd gehen soll. Aber auch die Art und Weise, in der das Pferd sich auf die Aufforderung eines Herdenmitglieds hin bewegt, kann bestimmt werden, die Gangart, die Geschwindigkeit, die Körperhaltung usw. Für unseren Zusammenhang sind der Sinn und die Intention des Treibens entscheidend. Wir imitieren nicht ein Pferdeverhalten, das wir eher zufällig beobachten konnten, sondern wir rekonstruieren das Verhalten des Pferdes sub specie Treiben. Meine Arbeitshypothese hierzu lautet, dass das Tier getrieben wird, dessen Kompetenzzuwachs wichtig für die gesamte Gruppe bzw. Herde ist. Hiermit ist die Hoffnung verbunden, dass das Pferd ‚aus freien Stücken‘ Bewegung anbieten kann, ohne dass es im Fluchtmodus ist. Dabei geht es nicht so sehr darum, dass das Pferd von uns etwas lernt; vorrangig geht es darum, dass wir das Pferd nicht stören, Bewegung im Zusammenhang mit unseren Bemühungen anzubieten. Es geht darum, die Aufmerksamkeit des Pferdes zu wecken und zu erhalten, die Aufmerksamkeit auf unsere Position ihm gegenüber (Rees 162–163, 179–180). Kooperieren kann dabei nur ein Pferd (Pocai 97), das nicht abgerichtet oder auf Gehorsam verpflichtet ist. Mit dieser Orientierung am Herdenverhalten des Pferdes geht die Schwierigkeit einher, dass wir dennoch ein Pferd von seiner Gruppe isolieren und also die Gruppendistanz des Pferdes missachten. In meiner eigenen Praxis arbeite ich mit den Pferden auf einem offenen Reitplatz, der inmitten des von allen Gruppenmitgliedern geteilten Auslaufs angelegt ist, mit „offenen Grenzen“ aus im Boden versenkten Bohlen, die die Ecken der Reitbahn markieren. Diese Konstruktion ist sehr voraussetzungsreich, denn ich darf die anderen Pferde nicht einfach aus der Reitbahn verjagen, um mit dem jeweiligen einzelnen Pferd arbeiten zu können. Es ist der Versuch, das Tier in seiner eigenen Welt anzusprechen (Matsuzawa 127–142). Pferd und Reiter am Boden: Das Longieren und die Grenzverletzung Die Reitbahn oder der Reitplatz ist der beide umgebende Raum, der in verschiedenen Figuren, sogenannten Bahnfiguren, durchmessen werden kann: Diagonal, durch die Länge parallel zu den langen Seiten, in Zirkeln und kleineren Kreisen (Volten), in Volten mit Richtungswechsel usw. Indem der Longierende einen bestimmten Abstand zum Pferd auf einer bestimmten Position bezogen auf den Körper des Pferdes einhält, ist er sich bewusst, dass er sich in einem prekären Zwischenraum, zwischen sich und dem Pferd, aufhält. Daraus resultiert die Vorwärtsbewegung des Pferdes, weil man, in Reitersprache ausgedrückt, in die treibende Position kommt. Das Einnehmen dieser Position ist nicht zu verwechseln mit dem Bedrängen des fluchtgestimmten Tieres. Vielmehr geht es darum, genau die Position zu finden, in der das Pferd sich anschicken kann, vorwärts zu gehen. Der schwierige Moment ist der des Losgehens, denn die Intention, dass wir wollen, dass sich das Pferd vorwärts bewegt, kann nicht verheimlicht werden. Das Pferd setzt sich selbsttätig in Bewegung als Effekt der Einnahme unserer Position.

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Der Hauptpunkt bei der Arbeit vom Boden mit dem Pferd in einem gewissen Abstand zum Pferd, sodass wir alle Körperveränderungen wahrnehmen können, besteht darin, dass wir uns, indem wir die kanonisierten Linien durchlaufen, in einer Position zum Pferd aufhalten, deren Einnahme so etwas wie eine Zumutung für das Pferd sein und verschiedene Effekte zeitigen kann. In jedem Falle müssen wir uns unserer Aggression gegenüber dem Raum des Pferdes bewusst sein, der jeweils ganz individuell groß, weiträumig oder klein sein kann. Je nachdem wie geschickt wir am Boden eine bestimmte Position während der Bewegung des Pferdes einnehmen, können wir den Raumansprüchen des Pferdes gerecht werden. Der Effekt des Longierens besteht also darin, dass das Treiben nicht mehr die landläufige Bedeutung hat. Treiben heißt nicht, dass wir auf das Pferd einwirken, damit das Pferd sich vorwärts bewegt. Sondern Treiben heißt nun, dass zwei Räume, der des Pferdes und der des Reiters, miteinander konfligieren. Bevor es zum Abbruch der Beziehung kommt (durch Flucht oder Kampf), bewegen wir uns mit dem Pferd in einem Zwischenraum weiter, ähnlich dem markierten Raum der kritischen Distanz. Wenn wir eine bestimmte Position einnehmen, setzt sich das Pferd selbsttätig als Effekt darauf in Bewegung. Allerdings ist die Bewegungsrichtung beim Longieren niemals die von uns weg, sondern idealiter verläuft sie vor-uns-her-um-unsherum-zu-uns-hin. Dieser letzte Richtungsverlauf zu-uns-hin kann niemals von uns bestimmt werden, sondern ist eine Aktion des Pferdes. Das Reiten und der Leib Die Schwierigkeit, mit der wir nun konfrontiert sind, besteht darin, dass es für das junge Pferd zunächst gar keinen Grund gibt, sich mit uns auf dem Rücken vorwärts zu bewegen. Denn wenn es nicht fluchtgestimmt ist, also keine Angst vor uns hat, und wir uns ihm so vorgestellt haben, dass wir nichts Fremdes auf seinem Rücken sind, muss die Impulsion von ihm selber kommen. Technisch betrachtet akkumulieren wir Bewegungsenergie durch das Longieren des Pferdes, indem Körperhaltung und Muskulatur aufeinander abgestimmt ein stabiles körperliches Ganzes erzeugen, das einen Reiter auf dem Rücken verträgt, ohne irritiert zu werden. Die Körperspannung des Pferdes ist nun Garant für dessen Vorwärtsbewegung. Aber woher wissen wir nun, dass dieses Vorwärtsgehen des Pferdes ein leiblicher Prozess ist und nicht bloß ein körperlicher Vorgang, der ganz unabhängig von unserer Longenarbeit stattfindet? Reiten als leiblicher Vorgang beschreibt das dynamische Geschehen, das sich zugleich als Orts- und Selbstbewegung vollzieht. Wenn nun der Reiter mit dem Schenkel, seinen Beinen, das Pferd berührt, Hilfen gibt, auf das Pferd einwirkt, so wäre das auf körperlicher Ebene eine Einwirkung von außen, auf leiblicher Ebene eine leibliche Veränderung und Bewegung. Der Reiter wird, indem er die Bewegung des Pferdes erleidet, auch berührt, etwa, wenn durch die Atmungsbewegung der Brustkorb des Pferdes sich weitet und verengt und die Schenkel des Reiters mitbewegt werden. Leiblich beschrieben, geht es nicht darum, dass der Reiter auch berührt wird, sondern dass alles, was er erleidet und spürt, die gemeinsam geteilte Bewegung nicht stört oder abbricht.

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Im Sinne einer Bewegung mit sozialem Index, so wie ich die Bewegungen des Reitpferdes auffassen möchte, bringt sich das Pferd auch in bewusster Weise ein. Zwar verlassen wir die leibliche Ebene der unwillkürlichen und unmittelbaren Reaktionen nicht. Dennoch wird ein sozial kompetentes Reitpferd sich nach einer gelungenen Reitstunde anders dem Reiter gegenüber präsentieren, sodass die Herausforderung an den Reiter beständig wächst.

4 Zusammenfassung und Ausblick Die Grundoperation der Berührung ist im Wesentlichen bereits sozial strukturiert, da sie als kontrollierte, provokative und produktive Grenzverletzung angesehen werden kann. Was da in aggressiver Einstellung verletzt wird, sind die mit den sozialen Distanzen zwischen den verschiedenen Lebewesen einhergehenden Gewissheiten. Diese leiblich-räumlichen Prozesse werden unmittelbar erlebt und verändern die Beteiligten. Mit dieser reiterlichen Praxis ist die Hoffnung verbunden, dass die Beachtung der Distanzen oder besser: der sozialen Räume wieder eine Bedeutung erlangt, die auf einer Wechselseitigkeit von Reiter und Pferd beruht. In einem doppelt angelegten Vollzug, im Modus des Longierens als Arbeit vom Boden auf Distanz und im darauf aufbauenden Modus des Reitens als Arbeit in der Nähe müssen wir zunächst das gemeinsame Raumverhalten reaktivieren. In einem zweiten Schritt müssen wir offen sein für alle Effekte, die diese Arbeit zeitigt. Abbruch der Bewegung, Verweigerung des Pferdes, sich mit uns vorwärts zu bewegen, Stillstand, prekäre Richtungswechsel sind die negativen (und alltäglichen) Effekte. Aufbau von Bewegungsenergie, Durchlaufen der Linien in einem uns und das Pferd umgebenden Raum und in einem gemeinsam geteilten Gleichgewicht, ein Weiterfließen der Bewegung, das Finden des eigenen, nicht irritierten Rhythmus des Pferdes sind die positiven Fluchtpunkte (und erst zukünftigen Effekte). Am Beispiel des Pferd-Reiter-Paares, das sich in der Reitbahn bewegt, haben wir ein Bild vor Augen, das die Übermächtigung des Tieres leiblich aufgefasst auf eine andere Ebene hebt. In der Spannung von erlittener Bewegung und Zusammenarbeit mit dem Tier, unwillkürlicher und bewusster Einflussnahme auf die Bewegung des Tieres steht der Reiter unter großen sozialen Ansprüchen, die das Pferd an ihn stellt. Kann er angemessen, schnell genug und vorausschauend auf das, was vom Pferd kommt, reagieren? Wenn er nicht ‚hinter der Bewegung‘ bleibt, dann kann er auch die soziale Herausforderung annehmen, dass er nämlich spürt, was diese gemeinsam geteilte Bewegungsfolge etwa für das jeweilige Tier bedeutet. Es bleibt aber das reiterliche Unwissen bestehen, ob eine reiterliche Berührung wirklich angebracht war, auch wenn das Pferd sich gerne hat berühren lassen. Daher muss immer mit den gelingenden Reiterfahrungen die Abwehr sich unvermeidlich einstellender Konditionierungen und Angewohnheiten einhergehen, die uns intim, in zu großer Nähe mit dem Tier zusammenbringen. Die Abwehr erfolgt in den immer wieder neu zu realisierenden Ritualen der Strukturierung des gemeinsamen Raumes. An der Longe muss die treibende Position immer wieder aufs Neue bestätigt werden

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im immer wieder Auffinden und Einnehmen des gemeinsamen (Zwischen-)Raums. Mit der Arbeit im Sattel ist die Hoffnung auf, wenn auch nur kurzzeitige, wechselseitige Einleibung verbunden, deren reiterlicher Ausdruck das Aussetzen der Hilfen (Guérinière 39) ist: Der Reiter hört auf einzuwirken.

Literatur Grimm, Jakob, und Wilhelm Grimm, Hg. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Bd. 1, Leipzig, 1854. Guérinière, Francois Robichon de la. „Die Zügelhand und ihre Einwirkungen.“ Die Reitschule, 1733, Stratmann, o. J., S. 37–42. Hall, Edward. Die Sprache des Raums. Schwann, 1976. Hediger, Heini. Beobachtungen zur Tierpsychologie im Zoo und im Zirkus. Henschelverlag, 1979. Hediger, Heini. Wildtiere in Gefangenschaft. Schwabe, 1942. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. „Einleitung.“ Phänomenologie des Geistes, 1807, Suhrkamp, 1986, S. 68–82. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Die Lehre vom Sein. 1832. Wissenschaft der Logik, Bd. 1.1, Meiner, 1990, S. 118–125. Horkheimer, Max, und Theodor W. Adorno. „Mensch und Tier.“ Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente, 1947, Fischer Taschenbuch, 1973, S. 219–227. Matsuzawa, Tetsuro. „Evolutionary Origins of the Human Mother-Infant Relationship.“ Cognitive Development in Chimpanzees, hg. v. Matsuzawa, Masaki Tomonaga und Masayuki Tanaka, Springer, 2006, S. 127–142. Nissen, Jasper. Großes Reiter- und Pferdelexikon. Bertelsmann, 1976. Pocai, Marcello. „Leibliche Kommunikation und die Kommunikation zwischen Reiter und Pferd.“ ZusammenRücken – Das Wechselspiel zwischen Reiter- und Pferderücken in den Gangarten Schritt, Trab, Tölt und Galopp, hg. von Bettina Schürer, Edition Schürer, 1994, S. 83–98. Rees, Lucy. Das Wesen des Pferdes: Persönlichkeit, Entwicklung, Verhalten. Müller, 1986. Schmitz, Hermann. Der Leib im Spiegel der Kunst. Bouvier, 1987. Schmitz, Hermann. „Über leibliche Kommunikation.“ Zeitschrift für Klinische Psychologie und Psychotherapie, Jg. 20, Nr. 1, 1972, S. 4–32. Solinski, Sadko G. Das ABC des Freizeitreitens: Die Voraussetzungen für artgemäße Pferdeausbildung. Olms P, 2000.

Encounters with The Visitor Centre: Art and Interspecies Relationships

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Nicola Grobler

The Visitor Centre is an artistic intervention devised to interrogate humans’ perception of urban nonhuman animals, especially to critique conventional notions of species hierarchy, cultures of classification and anthropocentrism. The artwork engenders a practice of co-operation, where leaving nooks and crannies open for co-habitation present an alternative empathetic model for human-nonhuman animal encounters. As artist, witness and interlocutor, my invested perspective of these events is offered from a somewhat blinkered position of care. I focus on the participatory and experiential aspects of the work as it unfolded during a series of public interventions held at Ditsong Tswaing Meteorite Crater reserve in Tshwane, South Africa. The chapter argues that the ensuing conversations between artist and participants could initiate a reconsideration of established views on interspecies encounters.

1 Introduction In a relational, participatory view of the world, bodies impact and are affected by each other. Although it is widely understood that human social worlds are mutually constituted, conventional binary understandings of humans and nonhuman animals tend to exclude the ‘more than human’ from the social mix. In this chapter I will present a relational artwork as a means to enliven interspecies relationships.

N. Grobler (*)  Pretoria, South Africa E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_23

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The Visitor Centre1 is a mobile artistic hub devised to encourage conversations about nonhuman urban animals. I have presented the work in South Africa’s capital, Pretoria, also known as Tshwane. The artwork demonstrates that the diverse assemblage of humans, companion species, wild and semi-wild populations of reptiles, birds, insects, spiders, amphibians and mammals is a relational web. I will discuss how an encounter with The Visitor Centre could contribute to a reconfiguration of interspecies relationships to encourage sociability and empathy across species boundaries. Informed by notions of participation and affect that circulate in contemporary art and museum practices, The Visitor Centre is an agential and relational art object. The artwork is a backpack (Fig. 1): it is lightweight and mobile, thus easy to take into homes and to remote locations reachable on foot. The Visitor Centre offers an alternative to the traditional pedagogical environments of local museums, which positions the viewer as a passive receiver of information. The artwork is inclusive in response to the lack of relational representations of species and it contravenes boundaries. It is a roving mini-museum that travels to its audiences, without an attachment to a parent establishment. Its contents are adjustable and custom-made unlike the permanent displays that feature in conventional museums. As such, The Visitor Centre can be understood as a flexible communication device as it initiates conversations, it is context-specific and the artwork continuously morphs into different arrangements in a series of developing prototypes.2 The artwork’s interior houses multiple objects that are crafted with particular ­nonhuman creatures in mind. When these objects are handed out to visitors, they act as touch and social objects that spark conversations between participants. The Visitor Centre seeks to establish interspecies relationships along the lines of “multispecies assemblages”3 (Kirksey, Emergent 3). Multispecies co-existences are relational and responsive: within these communities all ‘actors’ are co-constitutive; they are shaped through their interactions with others. From this perspective pop­ ular conventions such as hierarchical models of speciation and binary separations

1The

Visitor Centre is the creative component of Impossible Neighbours: Artistic Reconfigurations of Interspecies Interactions in an Urban Environment, a Fine Arts doctoral project based at the University of Cape Town. The research is supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Unique Grant No 84414) and the University of Pretoria, where I am employed. Any opinion, finding and conclusion or recommendation expressed in this material is that of the author and the NRF does not accept any liability in this regard.

2This

discussion is focused on the first prototype, namely The Visitor Centre I. Kirksey uses the term multispecies assemblage, he proposes a new disciplinary field “multispecies ethnography” for the study of multispecies relationships. The root of the word “ethnos” means “a multitude” which recognise that the unit of the human is a multiple (including the bacteria and microbes that constitute a human body). Kirksey et al. extend the term ‘ethno­ graphy’ to include nonhuman actors, argued from Tsing’s point that “human nature is an interspecies relationship” (1–2).

3Although

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Fig. 1  Nicola Grobler. The Visitor Centre, 2016. Walking towards Tswaing Meteorite Crater rim. (Photo by Josly van Wyk)

between human and nonhuman animals cease to hold sway. The term ‘multispecies’ describes the plurality of living entities. According to Eben Kirksey et al., the realisation that each human is made up of 90 % microbial genetic material that is part of our “microbiome” means that ‘the human’ as a unit of measure, has become (a) multiple (8). Donna Haraway’s lead, that “to be one is always to become with many” (When Species 4) is not limited to relationships with exterior entities. Multispecies co-existences require one to reconsider borders and indi­viduals, as mutual affections transgress beyond what is visible. “We change in our collaborations both within and across species”, according to Anna Tsing (Mushroom 29). Notions of mechanical, instinctual interspecies responses are challenged when one considers that nonhuman actors, including insects and plants, engage in inspired interspecies relationships as affected, playful entities (Despret, “Interagency” 34–35). Therefore, multispecies assemblages present ways of decentering the human, since lively engagements between nonhuman animals often signify that their capabilities extend beyond those that are recognised by humans. Vinciane Despret uses the term “interagency” to describe how co-emerging creatures “render [each] other … capable” (“Interagency” 37). Multispecies assemblages works against the notion that humans are either ‘outside’ of nature, or that humans stand to benefit from ecosystems. In multispecies assemblages, humans are enmeshed alongside nonhuman creatures where all stand in line to benefit, or to lose.

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Relational considerations of speciation are grounded in established concepts such as co-evolution and gene-transference. One would expect to find speciation mapped out according to its relational properties in all institutions that have an educational role, including natural history museums. The researchers based in natural history museums are actively engaging with current ideas in the natural sciences and are mandated to translate their research into public-facing exhibition displays. However, in most natural history museums,4 animal representation is still largely entrenched in binary divisions between humans/animals and culture/nature. Museums present material culture as evidence of a perception of nature and of particular systems of classifications. The nonhuman animals on display are indexes within a system of classification; they are signs that connect to a signifier within the taxonomy. The cultures of display of traditional museums promote a distancing and objectifying stance, as visitors move through spaces as passive consumers of information. Further, the division between natural history museums and cultural history museums in itself supports these binaries.5 However, the neglect that is visible within the displays, creates the impression that the pursuit of knowledge about nonhuman life has lost its impetus and that the status of the nonhuman is in decline. Yet there is opportunity to focus on interspecies relationships in exhibitions, instead of individual species, and to revise and adjust the shortcomings of previous scientific concepts. In response to the slow pace with which conventional ideas about the representation of speciation are updated, The Visitor Centre circumnavigates typical museum challenges such as static, dated permanent displays, costly overheads, disengaged visitors, inefficient bureaucratic structures and the like, to meet audiences in a non-institutional setting in an attempt to shift prevailing hierarchies. The artwork borrows freely from the language of contemporary natural history museums, where audience interaction, experiential design and touch objects have become widely used. But it retains its status as an artwork, albeit one that uses pedagogical tools to chisel against the grain of conventions. Enmeshed within the workings of The Visitor Centre is the notion that empathy towards nonhuman species offers a route to kindle respectful and caring interspecies relationships. It may seem at odds with multispecies assemblages—does the spider have empathy towards the fly?—as popular predator-prey conceptions would suggest. This route will invite anthropomorphic comparisons, as it is difficult to imagine how nonhumans perceive the world from a human perspective. Yet, Lori

4I

use the Ditsong National Natural History Museum, located in Pretoria, as a case study to highlight the static nature of its public facing exhibitions. The main halls opened in 1972, 1978 and 1987 with the last major update in 1992 (Legwase). The outdated exhibitions are partial to particular approaches in science displays that contribute to an understanding of nonhuman animals as separated from the human. 5These artificial divisions are “culturally constructed” and ideologically bound (Davison 149), and have influenced the course of racial discrimination in South Africa. My approach of working against the embedded practices of separating out and established hierarchical alignments, recognises the violence and damage that these divisions have caused.

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Gruen proposes that empathy can be a useful means for improving human-animal relationships, especially when humans can overcome their imaginative limitations. Gruen’s “entangled empathy” is based on care ethics, which holds that moral reasoning based on a contextualised and emotionally responsive evaluation will provide a holistic and more compassionate outcome (33–34). To conceive of interspecies relationships differently, empathy and care offer an approach that allows for affinities and differences to be acknowledged, beyond narrow binary categories and abstract mechanisms that guide a traditional ethics of justice (36). Even though Gruen emphatically excludes many of the smaller urban species6 that I draw into the web of relations, I propose that there is room for enlarging the realm of empathetic concern. Therefore, my approach is to foreground a practice of co-operation, where writing letters to spiders, administering hourly doses of homeopathic medicine to ants and leaving nooks and crannies open for co-habitation present an alternative empathetic model to counter destructive human behaviour. It is worth remembering that art provides “different tools” (Baker 2) for enquiry, and certain freedoms that allow artists to press beyond limits. Artists are disrespectful of disciplinary borders; they borrow with disregard for conventions and get away with it. Steve Baker asserts that art can “unsettle” and disturb (178), to bring certainties and established facts into dispute. Despite its unpredictable results, art can have a transformative effect, “if one considers this notion of incremental change and the wider significance of singular acts” (Grobler 72). I acknowledge that art can be didactic and inductive when framed as a means towards an end. In such instances, the viewer’s experiences are directed towards a predictable outcome bound to the artist’s intention in disregard of the viewer’s own subjective interpretive skill.7 My claims for affect and empathy are complicated by these concerns, especially as I fulfil multiple creative roles: as artist, as the actor between artwork and audiences and as the intermediary who documents its effects. However, as creator, witness and interlocutor my invested view affords me a proximity to ideas and events that others do not have access to. I offer my somewhat blinkered view from a position of care. The Visitor Centre sparked conversations about interspecies relationships. I will explain how these conversations may be understood as a means to reconfigure existing interspecies relationships into more empathetic relationships. To do so, I will reflect on how the work positions the viewer-participants, the physical properties of the artwork, and its characteristics as a relational artwork. The discussion will exceed the artwork as a material articulation, to include the web of relations that makes the work, in the moment of encounter and beyond. 6The Visitor Centre focuses mainly on small species that co-exist with humans in urban spaces. The scale relates to the species fall-out that happen with urban encroachment: larger species are inclined to disappear in urban areas, whereas smaller species can adapt better to fragmented habitats. The scale also refers to the negative value that ‘small’ often has, as scale is often used to designate importance. Many species of insects are not valued as they are perceived as numerous and not individually important. 7In this regard, see Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator.

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2 Experiential Spectatorship: Encountering Art The Visitor Centre is a relational artwork that is orientated towards the viewerparticipants’ embodied experiences. The artwork provides a platform for public conversations about interspecies encounters within people’s own homes and it is therefore important to create a convivial atmosphere for these informal conversations to take place. I seek to create an affective space, where easy interaction is possible, even though the audience’s responses are impossible to predict or to control. Embodying aspects such as kinesis, tactile qualities and environmental stimuli enhance the participants’ sensorial experiences, and draw the audience into the art experience. In June 2016 I introduced The Visitor Centre as a first prototype to audiences during a series of events held at Tswaing Meteorite Crater reserve in Soshanguve, Tshwane. Members of the public, conservationists, artists, scientists, colleagues, teachers and a group of Grade 6 learners from a local school attended. Additionally, I conducted workshops with local artists and postgraduate students, and presented the project to Grade 10 learners at a nearby nature reserve. The art intervention commenced with a walk to Tswaing crater8 rim accompanied by butterflies, birds and the occasional zebra. Walking is a physical, embodied activity and gave opportunity to take in the reserve’s fauna and flora, to talk to other people and to relax.9 As one of the participants, remarked, “us being here in this environment and amongst the grass with the hot sun and the leaves […] we are affected in a particular way because of all those sensory things” (“The Visitor Centre”). The walk stimulated curiosity about the contents of the oversized backpack, which was revealed as a fold-out container housing wrapped objects (Fig. 2). When the objects are handed out (Fig. 3), the receiver is compelled to unwrap the artwork, which, as one of the participants remarked, adds another layer of anticipation and surprise to the art experience. For me, excitement is a crucial emotional ingredient as it already shows engagement with the work. The audience’s physical encounter with the art objects affected their bodily and analytical responses. These physical encounters relate to contemporary museum practice, where touch objects are used to encourage active engagement from audiences. Participants had a few moments to literally and figuratively weigh up each artwork as it was passed around. The materiality of solid bronze, heavy brass, feather-light plastic and fragile acrylic casts influenced attitudes towards the objects, for example when someone commented that the thickness and sturdiness of an object’s walls could provide a sense of security to homing insects and spiders (Fig. 4) (“The Visitor Centre”). In these instances, the material aspects guided the audience when they became attuned to the variations of weight, detail and the artistic appropriation of different functionalities. Participants were tasked to overcome their

8Nearly

200 000 years ago, a meteorite impacted the earth and formed the crater at Tswaing (which means ‘place of salt’ in Sepedi). 9I had a captive audience without the typical distractions associated with urban spaces.

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Fig. 2  Nicola Grobler. The Visitor Centre, 2016. The backpack houses multiple objects packed away in purpose-made containers. (Photo by Carla Crafford)

Fig. 3  Nicola Grobler. The Visitor Centre, 2016. An exchange of objects during the event. (Photo by Lelani Nicolaisen)

reliance on sight alone to evaluate the meaning of the work. There is also a need to trust their own evaluations of touch in relation to analytical responses. In a museum context, states Michelle Henning (83), interactivity is employed to counter distanced ‘consumers’ of information and to influence the production of a desired subjectivity. In hands-on exhibitions, the focus shifts from visual engagements to multi-sensorial experiences. The viewer’s body becomes central to the

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Fig. 4  Nicola Grobler: 6 bedrooms from The Visitor Centre, 2016. (Photo by Carla Crafford)

experience and registers a turn from object-centered to visitor-centered exhibitions (83). In traditional Victorian-era museums,10 visitors were cast as observers and sight was perceived as the prominent sense for gaining knowledge. Contemporary museum practices support the notion of embodied viewers, whose engagement is multi-sensorial and personal. This indicates that the mind/body dualism, inscribed by Enlightenment thought, has eroded as a result of improved understandings of how human thoughts and emotions are intertwined (Damasio 159). Further, when the hierarchical arrangement of binaries, in consideration of gender, culture and race, was deconstructed and later discontinued11 in an ongoing project to establish a more equal and just society, the traditional museum was tasked to identify and remove its own biases. Museums are required to speak to the multiple histories and experiences of diverse audiences. Visitor participation can be a means to overcome perceptions of museums as stifling, authoritarian public spaces by providing opportunities for communities to interact with the content and with each other, notes Nina Simon (i–iv). 10A

format that was followed in museums established in British colonies, such as those in South Africa. 11I am not suggesting that issues of race, culture and gender are resolved by any means, as discussion on race in South Africa indicates. Binary constructions are persistent. I am pointing out that Cartesian Dualism is not a dominant ideology, as it was in the past.

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Participatory museum exhibits conceive of visitors as ‘active participants’ that perform a dynamic role in interpreting educational displays. One needs to understand this role in relation to contemporary pedagogies which are learner-centered. Teachers create enticing learning experiences which may include play, kinesis, or other methods suited to the learner’s abilities and preferences. The process of learning is conceived as a co-active process between learner and teacher. In comparison, traditional pedagogies positioned learners as passive receptacles to knowledge imparted by an expert teacher. Where traditional museums exhibits followed a didactic approach, the contemporary museum has to adapt to collaborative methods and this is why participatory and hands-on methods are deemed to be useful. In both museum and art environments, the ability to touch objects aids in adjusting hierarchical constructions that exist between the audience and institution or artist/curator. The method of construction and material of the objects convey particular associations to visitors/participants. Audiences responded more spontaneously to the non-hierarchical and cobbled together found objects contained within the The Visitor Centre. The reverence reserved for plinth-bound art evaporated. For example, when migratory medicine for ants was passed around, the grade 10 learners shook a vial, poured its contents into the cap and proceeded to smell and nearly taste the remedy. One of the objects, comfortable distance TM (Fig. 5), appears at first to ­encourage abstraction and reduction. This implement invites participants to consider their feelings towards spiders as a spatial measure. By presenting a tapemeasure measured in small spider legs, the size and vulnerability of small spiders are inferred. As the relationship is determined by the participant’s bodily ­comfort,

Fig. 5  Nicola Grobler. The Visitor Centre, 2016. Sikho Siyotula, Erik Lubisi and Abre Crafford inspecting comfortable distance TM. (Photo by Carla Crafford)

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it becomes a very personal expression of a unique set of relationships. Even though the spider-human relationship is expressed in quantifiable data, by subverting the human measure to a spider measure, one is encouraged to find the spider’s perspective in this relationship, as one participant remarked (“The Visitor Centre”). Many participants were uneasy about spiders. It is my hope that by expressing negative perceptions such as fear or discomfort in a public forum, participants could domesticate their fears. At least, that they would find their own comfortable and respectful distance in order to co-exist with spiders in a peaceful manner. Participants drew on their emotional and physiological states in order to describe their personal encounters with spiders. Thus the artwork encouraged embodied responses when weighing up past and future interactions with spiders. According to Jenni Lauwrens, embodied art experiences arise from a “corporeal material encounter”, where the work of art appeals to the viewer’s “gut feeling” (84). In phenomenological interpretations of art, bodily and mental responses are entangled and responsive to worldly encounters (Lauwrens 87). A ‘purely cerebral’ response is impossible, as the entire mind-body organism responds to environmental stimuli (Damasio xvii). Lauwrens describes how her own empathetic response towards nonhuman animals advanced from an artwork’s appeal to her bodily states (90–95). Her experience is supported by the findings of Freedberg and Gallese, which outline the neural base of empathetic and whole-bodied responses to art (202). Freedberg and Gallese report that aesthetic responses (not lack of responses) would always involve motor simulation, where mirror neurons are triggered in an “embodied simulation” of what is observed. Embodied simulation is a useful, spontaneous empathetic response, where neurons in the brain mirror the “actions, emotions or sensations” that are observed in, for example, artworks, real life interactions and literature (Freedberg and Gallese 198). Although many factors underpin the viewer-participant’s aesthetic experience, Freedberg and Gallese state that objects and visualisations can encourage empathy in a similar manner to real life observations (202). I find it necessary to highlight that the viewer has to attend to certain aspects in the work of art, thus focused attention is necessary to elicit empathetic responses. Therefore, an openness to the aesthetic experience, combined with attentiveness, may result in an immersed and embodied participant. A participant’s affective response could in itself suggest an empathetic orientation towards the work. In such a way the legacy of disembodied vision in art appraisals is challenged by a re-consideration of the locus of thought. When the physiological workings of brain and body are considered concurrent and mutually responsive,12 then the artifice of binary separations is upended. From this perspective, comfortable distance TM can be discussed as a means to encourage a momentary and inventive shift in the viewer’s perception. Ellen Esrock states that the limits of the body can be extended or permeated by an artwork (236). In an immersive art experience, the participant’s body merges with

12According

to Antonio Damasio, (human) thoughts and emotions emanate from an “indissociable organism” (xvi–xvii).

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the properties of the work, what she terms “somatic reinterpretation” (Esrock 234). I extend her description of the “fusion with objects and others in the world” (234) that occur whilst viewing art, to suggest that artworks can encourage a unity amongst humans and nonhuman species outside the realm of aesthetic affects. In other words, an immersive art experience could predict a deeper entanglement with nonhuman beings. Esrock suggests that an immersive experience affects the participant’s self-image, as interior body states connect to exterior matter—the art object (236). It signals a shift from an objectifying gaze to an experiential encounter with art. Esrock’s description of an embodied experience hinges on the readiness of the viewer-participant to ‘show up’ and to take part. Equally, The Visitor Centre relies on a willingness to experience and for audiences to momentarily suspend their typical defensive tactics. When open responses lead to an embodied experience, the participant’s understanding of the work will be richer. My point is not that participants should necessarily follow my reasoning about particular creatures. The objects presented are relational and not representational. Each artwork demands a subjective response from the viewer—an investment in figuring out what it is and what it could mean. In the section above, I described how embodied participants are orientated to respond through kinetic, multi-sensorial and environmental stimuli. But, ultimately, that their own willingness to attend to the work, and, by extension, to smaller creatures, determines the outcome. The relation between audience and artwork mirrors the recognition for smaller species that I wish to encourage with the work. I found that embodied engagement with The Visitor Centre can foster empathy towards nonhuman species, depending on participants’ subjective responses to the invitation of the work. The conversational mode of the work becomes a means by which to renegotiate interspecies relationships and to foster an openness towards future encounters with smaller species.

3 Conversational Props and Prompts In both art and museum practices, the centrality of the artefact has lost ground to the prevalence of experience. As Henning (83) explains, with the shift from objectcentered to viewer-centered exhibitions, the visitor’s body becomes the subject of exhibitions. From a positive estimation, the visitor’s own experience is valued, and the creative process of making meaning is given importance—as opposed to expecting visitors to absorb didactic statements. In this section I will draw parallels between the participatory workings in museums and art to explain the educational aspirations and contradictions that The Visitor Centre suggests. Further, as a method that invites considerations of co-production, disassembled hierarchies, presence and participation, relational art is prone to easy assumptions that are difficult to prove. It is therefore important to attend to the specifics of The Visitor Centre, to provide a fuller understanding of its workings. Relational or participatory artworks command the whole-bodied presence of the participant. Without ‘being there’ the audience cannot participate as the

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r­elational aspects of an artwork cannot be experienced via its documentation.13 As Nicolas Bourriaud14 notes, the relational artwork exists in the situational and intangible relations between participants, which are realised in various artistic “forms” (43). Similar to participatory museum displays, the unit of analysis shifts from art object to the viewer-participant’s experience of the event. A web of relations between participants and artist is established where the experiential effects of the work are valued above a cognitive-visual aesthetic evaluation. These intangible effects are difficult to trace and assess. As with participatory museum exhibits, participation in itself is not a measure of the success or artistic merit of an artwork (Bishop, Artificial Hells 12–13). An artwork such as The Visitor Centre invites multiple perspectives from its audiences. As with previous relational artworks, my aim is to create a space for shared authorship and to reduce the hierarchy between audience and artist (Grobler 59–60). The work is partly collaborative, as audiences are invited to participate in a ‘work in progress’ that is still being developed and refined. The conversational input of audiences will influence my creative process during the next prototype phase. At the same time, certain parameters are already in place, thus the audience is not entirely free to act outside of those artistic borders. It would also be difficult to ascertain whether the authoritative position of the artist became leveled out during The Visitor Centre event, even though the makeshift quality of the objects encouraged informality. Participants were ultimately concerned with ‘getting it right’, to interpret the art objects in ways that does not violate the ‘inherent’ meaning of the props and prompts. My presence was admittedly an obstacle to achieving a non-hierarchical space, after all, as the creator of The Visitor Centre, I am the only ‘expert’ on its workings and motivations. To encourage a more openended conversation, I stepped back and allowed the conversations to unfold.15 Of the objects contained within The Visitor Centre, the cardboard box with two funnels and a test tube suggest a particular purpose (Fig. 6). Small creatures may exit or enter the box via the open funnel. The glass cylinder is standard ­laboratory equipment and indicates experimentation and scientific research. In my view, the duel funnels in blue and white invite comparisons and imply a choice to be made.

13Similar

to performance art and happenings, which also rely on the presence of the viewer. Documentation of such events excludes all the embodying aspects of the work, including the interpersonal interactions that are crucial to its reception. 14In Relational Aesthetics the critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud encapsulated key ideas at the moment when relational art practices became more widely established. But his particular view on relational art is not sufficient in its scope of practices, as argued by Bishop (“Antagonism” 51–79), Kester (The One 29–36) and Brown (3–7). 15As mentioned, I held a number of events with different groups during which I could adjust my own ‘performance’ and presentation. A smaller group of adults responded particularly well, not only in response to the objects, but also to each other. Participants chatted to each other along the walk and made jokes.

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Fig. 6  Nicola Grobler. Still life with funnel from The Visitor Centre, 2016. (Photo by Carla ­Crafford)

The work provides clues to the audience as to what the object is, and what it could be used for. still life with funnels becomes the provocation that sparks a conversation. Simon explains that, in museum practice, “social objects are the engines of socially networked experiences, the content around which conversation happens” (127). As the icebreakers of participatory events, social objects shift attention away from other participants—and one’s own uncertainty—and can make awkward social interactions more convivial (127–128). However, sometimes an object can fail in its provocations, as ‘the audience’ is a fictional and uncertain entity, as Kathryn Brown asserts (3–4). Audiences are prone to respond in unpredictable ways, rendering the interactions between artist, artwork and audience productive, yet unstable (Grobler 58, 67). The concept of co-production is central to The Visitor Centre. As visitors engage with the work and in their encounters with each other, the artwork—a web of relations—is created. By offering a space for participants to contribute with their own ideas, they may feel included as producers of a cultural experiences. Simon notes that “visitors construct their own meaning from cultural experiences” (ii); it may well be that contributors are more invested to reflect on these experiences, after the event.

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For audiences, the sensation of being free to contribute can be hampered by the restrictions imposed by the artist. It is possible to make big emancipatory claims for participatory artworks, whilst missing subtle nuances where audiences are co-opted into covert political aims. Claire Bishop has critiqued Bourriaud’s utopianism which promotes relational aesthetics for an art elite (“Antagonism” 67). Likewise, in a museum context, the experiential turn can conjure very different experiences. In an effort to determine particular experiences, which are nowadays frequently measured and used in annual reports, the audience is often approached as a homogeneous entity (Henning 83, 93). Some participatory exhibits under the guise of interaction are still didactic, for example when visitors are expected to follow a specific route (89–90). There is a scope of options for artists to consider (Grobler 68–69) from predetermined outcomes of participation to creating a space for collaboration or antagonistic responses. These are subtle inclinations that may not be foregrounded in artworks and displays, whether purposefully or misguidedly. I consider these aspects as indicative of an openness by the artist to trust the audiences’ aptitude for creativity. The idea of co-production and participation extends to the artworks within The Visitor Centre, which I regard as “objects to think with”, with reference to the collection of evocative objects in Sherry Turkle’s study of resonating object biographies. The strange objects of The Visitor Centre are intentionally makeshift, lacking the polish of gallery artworks. They are assemblages, which can be explained as an activity where disparate fragments are combined, arguably in a process of synthesis. However, synthesis implies a coherent whole, and the practice of assemblage often results in heterogeneous provisional outcomes, where different components of the assemblage are still recognisable as individual elements within the artwork (Cooper). I chose to retain gaps of incompleteness, as the ‘cobbled together’ juxta-positioning of these assemblages are productive in allowing space for multiple interpretations. A do-it-yourself aesthetic is often called upon in response to slick art commodities, to create a disjuncture between engineered fabrication and the human hand. I make use of assemblage to signify a way of constructing meaning and to suggest how established views could be reconfigured. This process of assembling information from various fragments is reflective of “how we learn painstakingly by gathering and arranging bits and pieces in the dark” as Barbara Stafford has stated (34). Stafford refers to this process as the “dialogic aspect of visualisation”, namely when objects or artifacts put viewers to work in deciphering meaning (35). By reviewing disparate fragments or objects, the viewer can reassemble the various parts to synthesise their own assemblage of meaning. This process of assimilation is visual and verbal, as the objects act as props and prompts to initiate conversations about animal encounters. Further, Henning asserts that a makeshift aesthetic as found in collage and montage has a “demystifying” effect when used in museum displays, as visitors are able to see how things are put together and how they can be taken apart (86). In her discussion of science museums, Henning

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points out that such objects remind visitors that contingency and doubt propel scientific developments (87). The dialogic and relational aspects of The Visitor Centre extend to the processes of visualisation and visual interpretation. The conversations between participants have meanders and spikes that unfold according to the various perspectives offered. It is a co-productive process that finds echoes in Grant Kester’s dialogic approach, with his emphasis on organic and pragmatic involvements. Kester finds value in socially-engaged art practices that evolve from processorientated exchanges between artist/s and participants, without a pre-determined outcome (Conversation Pieces 90). Accordingly, conversations can be generative as a means to negotiate boundaries through proximity and responsive, open exchanges that evolve over time (112). I view snippets of The Visitor Centre ­conversations as the fragments that make up an assemblage of meaning. Even prior to the event, my informal discussions with conservationists, scientists, artists and members of the public were constructive, as pieces of data and personalised accounts of interspecies interactions informed my approach to the creative work. Conversational fragments behaved dialogically, to inform, confuse and disturb my efforts to cohere a unified approach, in much the same way as assemblages resist oversimplification. In artworks such as The Visitor Centre, the conversational ‘content’ of the work is dependent on individual dispositions, the audience’s receptiveness to the work and the group dynamics between participants. The objects within act as props and prompts for experiences, where the visitor’s curiosity about these objects would supposedly trigger a level of engagement, similar to museum and art experiences. Even though museum and art viewing experiences are also subjective and contextual, participatory exhibitions are riskier as these hinge on particular types of public engagement with the material. In museum’s environments, exhibition designers have to understand their audiences and how to facilitate the desired type of interactions. Still, institutions cannot “guarantee the consistency of visitor experiences” (Simon 2). It is difficult to ascertain whether someone who interacted at an event was more engaged than someone who merely observed, but who later reflected quite deeply about the exhibition’s meaning. When the visitor’s body is addressed directly to yield a particular experience, it is worth asking how these bodies are produced when answering to this invitation. In the context of science displays, Henning discusses how the mind and body can learn together in order to “dismantle hierarchies of knowledge” (84–86). Museum experiences may afford visitors a sense of their own capacity to figure out complicated concepts, when visitors find confidence in their own sensorial responses. However, the opposite may occur when visitors are left confused and uncertain after visiting an exhibition, where the spectacle of the experience limits a deeper engagement (86). For The Visitor Centre, the outcome is not to facilitate learning; it is directed towards encouraging a shift in perception and care for smaller species. When audiences perceive the artwork’s parameters as too restrictive, it would limit their co-creative, imaginative capabilities. These abilities are what the artwork calls forth.

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4 Towards Empathetic Interspecies Relationships The Visitor Centre invites an imaginative ‘play along’. Participants air their experiences and opinions and it is hoped that the ensuing discussion could initiate a reconsideration of established views on interspecies relationships. One of the participants remarked that, as a result of the conversations “… I am starting to see spider webs as something else. Other than seeing a spider, I’m seeing other things that can start conversations …” (“The Visitor Centre”). The theatrical props and prompts that are employed are not didactic tools, but a means to ‘frame’ the subsequent conversations. For example, a concern was raised as to how one would relocate a spider. The suggestion of using a matchbox evokes a sense of care—to consider a scale suited to spider dimensions. As Josephine Donovan remarks, acts of care require attentiveness to each subject’s distinctive qualities and environments (84), to be able to make adjustments for species-specific needs. The Visitor Centre presents a practice of co-operation based on principles of care, even when responding to unwanted invasions within the home. Participants are introduced to migratory medicine for ants: a homeopathic remedy that will inspire ants to find alternative abodes. These vials of medicine are specifically intended for “Grobler ants”—the ants residing in my home or garden. The prescription states that the contents of vial A and B are to be sprinkled at one- to two-hourly intervals close to the ants’ nest. Alternatively, one could sprinkle the remedy in pathways that lead towards a future nest, as one participant suggested, inspired by the fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel (“The Visitor Centre”). Both these processes involve a personal commitment and an act of care—I will continue to ‘nurse’ the ants at regular intervals, until they find inspiration to migrate elsewhere. Ironically, whilst the aim is to encourage the ants to relocate (with the aid of mythical medicine), this absorbing process may bring me closer to their habits and ways of being. With its focus on care, The Visitor Centre advocates that an emotional connection to nonhuman species is needed to improve interspecies relationships. This connection begins with the realisation that we are already entangled in interspecies relationships, as Gruen explains (64). By paying attention and noticing the specifics of multispecies neighbours, one can then embark on a process to establish more empathetic and caring multispecies relationships. Tsing refers to the “arts of noticing” as a means of employing refined skills in “observation and description” (Mushroom 144, 142). My claim to enlarge the realm of empathetic concern is echoed in Tsing’s call to widen the extent of human attention to include less charismatic species that invigorate multispecies assemblages (158). She describes the “arts of inclusion” as a means to “enlarge what is possible” and to draw attention to the variables inherent in multispecies assemblages that emerge in uncertain and shifting ways (156, 158). These acts of noticing and inclusivity are predicated on an ardent entanglement with nonhuman lives, termed “multispecies love” (Tsing, “Arts of Inclusion” 201), instead of a calculated and objective approach. Donovan uses the phrase “attentive love” to indicate that proximity and emotional

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investment informs a particular type of responsiveness. “Attentive love” is about noticing qualities that are overlooked when observing according to “prescripted value” (Donovan 14), in other words, when looking without care. Artists are familiar with the “arts of inclusion” and “noticing”. Firstly, artists are known to transgress boundaries in order to expand the realm of normative art practices and subjects. Further, artists attend to things in order to create art. Making art is an act of caring, when the artist directs attention and care towards the artwork’s subject. Iris Murdoch exemplifies the attentive gaze of artists upon their subjects as one filled with compassion (65). Therefore, artistic drive can be equated to an act of love, directed towards the subject and the artistic processes that are involved. Baker describes the artistic process of Olly and Suzi as a means to capture the vividness and “unfamiliarity” of their encounters with nonhuman animals (24). The artists venture into remote habitats to meet their animal subjects. Olly and Suzi create their artworks in a state of “embodied attentiveness” (31). Observational drawings, as many have agreed, require focused attention that is free from distraction, and ‘loving care’ is needed to produce sensitive drawings. But Baker emphasises that Olly and Suzi’s artworks act as a record of a bodily experience and an intense engagement with life (25–32). For the artists, the moment of encounter must be truthfully reflected in the artwork, as opposed to a truthful representation of a particular animal. Their practice adheres to Murdoch’s assessment of morality as a corporeal practice of attentiveness, reflection and expression (39–40). Morality is not a prescribed code of instructions. The artists’ moral concern for nonhuman animals is embedded in the work and accordingly, their artwork’s form gives the viewer access to their central concern of ‘truth to experience’ or, a visualisation of love. Artworks express the artist’s moral interests and may suggest a wider scope of concern to the viewer. In their studies on empathy, Freedberg and Gallese argue that a process of “embodied simulation” makes it possible for viewers to formulate a “direct experiential understanding” of the purposeful and expressive “content” of works of art (202). For example, viewers of artworks could experience empathy when seeing depictions of people in pain and when observing gestural marks in an artwork, as if they themselves are engaged in that activity (198–199). Freedberg and Gallese state that the body-brain faculty responds as if the observer is acting out the observed activity (201). The ‘as-if’ response is empathy: a cognitivecorporeal imaginative ability that exists in humans and large-brained mammals (de Waal 874) and possibly in other creatures too. Thus empathy is an emotional state that occurs when an observed activity is ‘mirrored’ in the section of the brain that would be activated when the observer performs the same action (Freedberg and Gallese 200). My suggestion that art can encourage empathy for nonhuman species is supported by Jaime Berenguer’s report that humans respond with empathy towards human and animal subjects in narratives of harm (120, 128). The Visitor Centre calls upon the imaginative capabilities of audiences to act ‘as if’ and by doing so, to interrupt standard responses and disbelief. The props and prompts provide a scope of concern and suggests a kinder approach. By

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e­ voking opportunities for nonhuman animals to choose, the work promotes communal and responsive relations across the species lines. These choices include their place of habitation (6 bedrooms), alternative living arrangements (migratory medicine for ants) and co-operation to facilitate a rental agreement (spider pants). The artwork can assist in embodying smaller species, as their capabilities to choose are imaginatively inferred in the work. Donovan proposes that one can identify an aesthetic of care in artworks that encourage the vitality and responsiveness of nonhuman animals to be felt (237). In order to do so, artists need to attend with sensitivity to the contextual specifics of animal lives. The Visitor Centre presents nonhuman animals as subjects that exceed ordinary expectations, inasmuch as caring enhances the “potential aspects of entities that might otherwise remain unseen or unrealised” (223–224). In a similar vein to Despret’s counter-questions16 that dismantle established modes of thinking, art can present idiosyncratic ‘arguments’ in visual form. And yet, the props and prompts are not purely fictional devices, as the work acts in a space of possibility. As the artist-poet Lefifi Tladi reflected, The Visitor Centre is a ‘cognition centre’ (“The Visitor Centre”), which I interpret as a recognition centre—a rewiring of models that are in existence, a means to ‘open up’, ‘unsettle’ and create space for other possibilities. Regarding animal cognition and the capabilities that nonhuman animals share with humans, some things are proven, and other things not (yet). There are many probable correlations and many uncertainties, which characterise a space of possibility. Haraway insists on the notion of “speculative fabulations” or SF17 as a mode for thinking-with the possibilities of a world in peril (Making Kin 10). An imaginative approach is necessary to bypass established, harmful ways of being in order to create opportunities for thriving multispecies co-existences (Kirksey, Emergent 6). When directing my request to spiders for their shed exoskeletons in return for board and lodging, I am presenting a fabulation of tiny proportions. To present, with confidence, evidence of this contract: the ‘spider-pants’, without negotiating the difficult matter of interspecies communication via the written language, I ask of the visitor to act ‘as if’ human-spider contracts are commonplace. My contractual method is inspired by Edward Evans’ accounts of medieval jurisprudence that obliged nonhuman animals to follow human laws (3). The pre-scientific outlook on speciation was not ordered according to difference and hierarchy. The anthropomorphism inherent in such historical and current conjuring acts sits uncomfortably with a modern scientific outlook. But there is something equally powerful in these visualisations. Despret states that in a process of “acting as if”, transformation occurs. She refers to Spinoza’s notion of conative bodies that “can affect and be affected” by others (Despret, Animals 17). When bodies are inscribed into a relational “agence16I

refer to Despret’s mode of inquiry as practiced in the abecedarium What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? 17Defined as “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far” (Haraway, Making Kin 2).

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ment” of “exchange and proximity” they are reciprocally configured whilst attuning to other bodies (17). Multispecies assemblages are dependent on proximity: to be attuned each actor must act in the moment of encounter. By encouraging kinder and closer relationships in homes the artwork appeals to a sense of multispecies kinship and a review of artificial boundaries. My concern is whether empathy for smaller creatures will be felt as a result of the particular framing of the work, where nonhuman animals are recognised as responsive correspondents. Will the artwork encourage kinder relationships when audiences return to their own homes? The Visitor Centre is a place where humans encounter a world constructed on principles of co-operation, respect and care. If this world remains intact once the visitor leaves, in that the artwork’s affect lingers past the event, then an encounter with The Visitor Centre can be deemed transformative in its creative interpretation of multispecies care.

References Baker, Steve. Artist | Animal. U of Minnesota P, 2013. Berenguer, Jaime. “The Effect of Empathy in Environmental Moral Reasoning.” Environment and Behaviour, vol. 42, no 1, Jan. 2010, pp. 110–134. SAGE Publications, https://doi. org/10.1177/0013916508325892. Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October, vol. 110, Autumn 2004, pp. 51–79. Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. Verso, 2012. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Trans. by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with Mathieu Copeland, Les presses du réel, 2002. Brown, Kathryn J., ed. Interactive Contemporary Art: Participation in Practice. Tauris, 2014. Cooper, Philip. “Assemblage.” Grove Art Online, 2003. Oxford Art Online, https://doi. org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.t004631. Accessed 26 Feb. 2018. Damasio, Antonio R. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. Avon, 1994. Davison, Patricia. “Rethinking the Practice of Ethnography and Cultural History in South African Museums.” African Studies, vol. 49, no 1, 1990, pp. 149–167. Despret, Vinciane. “From Secret Agents to Interagency.” History and Theory, Theme Issue 52, Dec. 2013, pp. 29–44. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10686. Accessed 30 Dec. 2016. Despret, Vinciane. What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? Trans. by Brett Buchanan. U of Minnesota P, 2016. De Waal, Frans. “The Antiquity of Empathy.” Science, vol. 336, 18 May 2012, pp. 874–876. Donovan, Josephine. The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals. Bloomsbury, 2016. Google Play eBook, play.google.com/books/reader?id=C5PECwAAQBAJ&pg=GBS. PT11.w.2.0.1. Esrock, Ellen J. “Touching Art: Intimacy, Embodiment and the Somatosensory System.” Consciousness and Emotion, vol. 2, no 2, 2001, pp. 233–253. Evans, Edward P. The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. William Heineman, 1906. Project Gutenberg eBook, www.gutenberg.org/files/43286/43286-h/43286-h.htm. Accessed 31 July 2017. Freedberg, David, and Vittorio Gallese. “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 11, no 5, May 2007, pp. 197–203. ScienceDirect, https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2007.02.003.

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Grobler, Nicola H. “Participatory Art and the Everyday: A South African Perspective.” Interactive Contemporary Art: Participation in Practice, ed. by Kathryn J. Brown, Tauris, 2014, pp. 57–74. Gruen, Lori. Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals. Lantern, 2015. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Henning, Michelle. Museums, Media and Cultural Theory. Open UP, 2006. Kester, Grant. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. U of California P, 2004. Kester, Grant. The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Duke UP, 2011. Kirksey, Eben. Emergent Ecologies. Duke UP, 2015. Kirksey, Eben, ed. The Multispecies Salon. Duke UP, 2014. Kirksey, Eben, et al. “Introduction.” The Multispecies Salon, ed. by Kirksey. Duke UP, 2014. Lauwrens, Jenni. “Trust Your Gut: Fleshing Out an Embodied Encounter with Nicola Grobler’s The Visitor Centre.” Critical Arts, vol. 32, no 2, May 2018, pp. 83–99. Legwase, Bongi. “Re: Interview and Presentation.” Received by Nicola Grobler, 9 Aug. 2017. Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. 1970. Routledge, 2002. Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. 2009. Trans. by Gregory Elliot, Verso, 2011. Simon, Nina. The Participatory Museum. Museum 2.0, 2010. Stafford, Barbara M. Good Looking, Essays on the Virtue of Images. MIT P, 1996. Tsing, Anna L. “Arts of Inclusion, or How to Love a Mushroom.” Manoa, vol. 22, no 2, Winter 2010, pp. 191–203. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/407437. Tsing, Anna L. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton UP, 2015. Turkle, Sherry, ed. Evocative Objects: Things We Think with. MIT P, 2007. “The Visitor Centre at Tswaing Meteorite Crater Reserve: 5–11 June 2016.” YouTube, uploaded by Nicola Grobler, 12 July 2017, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ1658Qt1mM.

VI  Artistic Human-Animal Encounters

Music for Animals Marek Brandt

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Music for Animals is a long running art project of Marek Brandt where he composes and performs music for animals in their natural habitat. Together with musicians, artists, and scientists he develops a soundtrack and/or a composition for each performance that fits with the specific animal. The artist documents and presents his performances via photos and videos in international galleries, museums, and art spaces.

Fig. 1  Marek Brandt. Music for Animals part I: Music for Monkeys, Gibraltar, UK, 2004 M. Brandt (*)  Leipzig, Germany E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_24

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Fig. 2  Marek Brandt. Music for Animals part IV: Music for Highland Cows, Dundee, Scotland, 2004 Fig. 3  Marek Brandt. Music for Animals part IV: Music for Highland Cows, Dundee, Scotland, 2004

Fig. 4  Marek Brandt. Music for Animals part VIII: Music for Wolves, German Polish Border, 2008

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Fig. 5  Marek Brandt. Music for Animals part XIV: Dragonflies, Lübben, Germany, 2013

Fig. 6  Marek Brandt. Music for Animals part XI: Music for Dust Mites, Kirschau, Germany, 2010

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Fig. 7  Marek Brandt. Music for Animals part XV: Wildcats, Saarland bei Saarbrücken, Germany, 2014

Fig. 8  Marek Brandt. Music for Animals part VIII: Music for Wolves, German Polish Border, 2008

Heading South into Town Catherine Clover

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Dear Reader, Thank you for reading and voicing this score. The reading should last about 5–10 min. There is no need to read linearly or consecutively and you are encouraged to move around the score, pausing on one part or one word that particularly appeals to you before moving on. I encourage you to respond to the sounds in the room as much as following the score directly. This reading or sounding is not about virtuosity or accuracy but about listening, voicing, improvisation and ­imagination. The birds in the score are Rainbow lorikeets Trichoglossus haematodus Spotted doves Streptopelia chinensis Common myna Acridotheres tristis Red wattlebird Anthochaera carunculata Australian magpie Cracticus tibicen Grey butcherbird Cracticus torquatus

C. Clover (*)  Melbourne, Australia © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_25

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Flying Thoughts Hugo Fortes

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Artist’s Statement This series of images shows artworks from my solo exhibition “Landing for Thoughts and Birds”, in which the conflictual relationships between humans and birds are discussed in videos, photos, installations, artists’s book and objects. The works focus on the human desire of flying and the manifold meanings of birds. The photo series Requiem (Figs. 1, 2, 3, 4) shows dead birds which became objects, were eternalized as a fossil, were taxidermized, or simply rotted and disappeared, without being noticed as individuals. The dead, winged animals seem to be contrary to the dream of freedom that they represent. Phoenix (Fig. 5) depicts a dead bird that underwent a kind of rebirth through digital manipulation. The video Egrets (Fig. 6) shows winged animals that hover like ghosts in an undefined achitectural space. Flight Manuals (Fig. 7) are artist books whose pages have the shape of wings. Only (Fig. 8) is a wooden box that contains real pigeon feathers together with feathers made of lead. Instead of the expected lightness, the weight of the lead feathers makes flight impossible. Even though we cannot fly, our thoughts can. Every free flight crosses space and time and demands our human efforts to recognize the animal within us.

H. Fortes (*)  Cambuci, São Paulo- SP, Brazil © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_26

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Fig. 1  Requiem I, Digital Print, 2016. (©Hugo Fortes)

Fig. 2  Requiem IV, Digital Print, 2016. (©Hugo Fortes)

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Fig. 3  Requiem III, Digital Print, 2016. (©Hugo Fortes)

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Fig. 4  Requiem II, Digital Print, 2016. (©Hugo Fortes)

Fig. 5  Phoenix, Digital Print, 2016. (©Hugo Fortes)

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Fig. 6  Garças (Egrets), Video, 2016. (©Hugo Fortes)

Fig. 7  Flight Manuals, Artist’s books, 2016. (©Hugo Fortes)

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Fig. 8  Apenas (Only), Wooden mirrored box with real feathers and lead feathers, 2016. (©Hugo Fortes)

Free to Be Dog Haven René J. Marquez

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Free to Be Dog Haven is a small sanctuary for dogs who—as articulated in our mission statement—“face challenges sharing their lives with humans.” Based outside Philadelphia, the sanctuary works with local animal shelters and rescue groups to accommodate dogs who are deemed unadoptable for behavioral reasons, the so-called “problem dogs.” The sanctuary provides a home and quality of life for these dogs, acknowledging, as much as possible, who they are as individuals and allowing them to live their lives on their own terms. The sanctuary emerges from the recognition that “problem dogs,” in most cases, are deemed so only because of their incompatibility with human expectations and human society. I started the sanctuary because I do not believe dogs and other animals should suffer for simply not conforming to humans’ definitions and sense of order. The sanctuary is, in fact, my house, my home, and I typically share it with around 20 dogs (currently 18). Living with so many dogs, I can’t help but see each dog as an individual and embrace their personhood. The task I have set for myself is to respect their individuality and offer each dog a life on their own terms. That task is never ending and often contradictory and difficult. The duty I face is to unravel the anthropocentric worldview that complicates my—and all humans’—relationships with non-human animals; the sanctuary is a space where this unraveling can occur. My ultimate charge is to provide a home for dogs that is unburdened, as much as possible, by human expectations. But how do I do that? And what does such a space look like, both physically and conceptually? With regard to our physical space, my early enthusiasm for the sanctuary prompted me to take in more dogs than planned, and, in no time, I had virtually filled my four-bedroom house with as many dogs as could fit in its ­approximately

R. J. Marquez (*)  Newark, Delaware, USA E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2019 A. Böhm und J. Ullrich (Hrsg.), Animal Encounters, Cultural Animal Studies 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04939-1_27

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3000-square feet. I committed the sanctuary to admit dogs with any variety of needs, and individual dogs’ needs began to require ongoing reconsideration of space. Our current space configuration for 18 dogs has them divided into four groups, plus three dogs living by themselves (because they have difficulty living with other dogs). Each group has their own room, and some groups are able to interact with others. Of the current dogs, the most who can interact together at one time is 12. Group interactions occur mostly in communal spaces of the house: the family room, main backyard, occasionally the kitchen, and also, at times, my artist’s studio. In their respective spaces, the groups are free roaming. Three dogs live in kennel spaces in their rooms due to reactivity to other dogs. Our outside space spans about four acres, divided into seven fenced-in areas. Conceptually, the sanctuary extends my work as a visual artist. The most significant connection between my art work and my animal work is the empathy I derive from exploring identity in the context of ‘otherness’: of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and culture. I realize that the concerns that drive my studio work are essentially the same concerns that drive the sanctuary. Affirmations of identity, subjectivity and agency constitute the core of both the studio and the sanctuary. These affirmations come in the form of dog-human collaboration, those moments and feelings when dog and human each exercise their full agency independently but together. As an artist, I view collaboration as the creation of something new, brought about by the coming together of independent thinkers/creators; the creation is greater than the sum of its parts and can exist only through the collaboration. The sanctuary is very much a collaboration—I call it collaborative being—as it is a creation of mine and the dogs’. It is not my sanctuary, it is ours.

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Fig. 1  René J. Marquez. Overview, © Mike Podolak

Fig. 2  René J. Marquez. House

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Fig. 3  René J. Marquez. Yard, © Mike Podolak

Fig. 4  René J. Marquez. Familyroom

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Fig. 5  René J. Marquez. Familyroom

Fig. 6  René J. Marquez. Mealtime

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Fig. 7  René J. Marquez. Door

Fig. 8  René J. Marquez. Sam

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