Art and Posthumanism: Essays, Encounters, Conversations 1452966567, 9781452966564

Table of contents :
Cover Page
Art after Nature
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1. In Lieu of an Introduction: A Conversation with Giovanni Aloi
Part I: Systems: Social, Biological, Ecological
Chapter 2. Lose the Building: Meaning and Form in Diller+Scofidio’s Blur
Chapter 3. Time as Architectural Medium: Koolhaas and Mau’s Tree City
Chapter 4. The Installation That Almost Ate Me
Part II: “The Animal”
Chapter 5. From Dead Meat to Glow-in-the-Dark Bunnies: Seeing “The Animal Question” in Contemporary Art
Chapter 6. Apes Like Us
Chapter 7. Condors at the End of the World: Rethinking Environmental Art
Chapter 8. Each Time Unique: The Poetics of Extinction
Part III: The Biopolitical
Chapter 9. What Is the Bio- of Biopolitics and Bioart?
Chapter 10. No Immunity: The Biopolitical Worlds of Eija-Liisa Ahtila
Chapter 11. The Miracle of the Familiar: A Conversation with Eija-Liisa Ahtila
Chapter 12. The Biopolitical Drama of Joseph Beuys
Notes
Publication History
Index
About the Author
Color Plates

Citation preview

Art and Posthumanism

ART AFTER NATURE Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard, Series Editors Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters Petra Kuppers Art and Posthumanism: Essays, Encounters, Conversations Cary Wolfe

Art after Nature

Art and Posthumanism Essays, Encounters, Conversations

Cary Wolfe

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance provided for the publication of this book by the Scholarly and Creative Works Subvention Fund at Rice University. Publication History on pages 221–22 gives original and previous publication history for the writings compiled in this book. Every effort was made to obtain permission to reproduce material in this book. If any proper acknowledgment has not been included here, we encourage copyright holders to notify the publisher. Copyright 2021 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu ISBN 978-1-5179-1282-6 (hc) ISBN 978-1-5179-1283-3 (pb) Library of Congress record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021025894. Printed in the United States of America on acid-­f ree paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer. 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21

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Contents

Preface 1. In Lieu of an Introduction: A Conversation  with Giovanni Aloi

vii 1

Part I.  Systems: Social, Biological, Ecological 2. Lose the Building: Meaning and Form  in Diller+Scofidio’s Blur

17

3. Time as Architectural Medium:  Koolhaas and Mau’s Tree City

43

4. The Installation That Almost Ate Me

55

Part II.  “The Animal” 5. From Dead Meat to Glow-­in-­the-­Dark Bunnies:  Seeing “The Animal Question” in Contemporary Art

67

6. Apes Like Us

93

7. Condors at the End of the World: Rethinking  Environmental Art

101

8. Each Time Unique: The Poetics of Extinction

113

Part III.  The Biopolitical 9. What Is the Bio-­of Biopolitics and Bioart?

131

10. No Immunity: The Biopolitical Worlds  of Eija-­Liisa Ahtila

151

11. The Miracle of the Familiar: A Conversation  with Eija-­Liisa Ahtila

163

12. The Biopolitical Drama of Joseph Beuys

177

Notes

201

Publication History

221

Index

223

Preface

This book brings together most (but not all) of my writings and conversations on art from 2004 to 2020, as lightly edited as possible. The motivation for the volume was simple. Since a good bit of this work is scattered among exhibition catalogs, journals, magazines, and the like, why not put it all in one place so that the pieces might resonate with and enhance each other, and in the process give further texture to what I mean by “posthumanism” and how it can illuminate, and be illuminated by, engaging specific artworks in hand-­to-­hand close reading? A further benefit of this collection is that it pushes posthumanism as I practice it out of the realm of the purely theoretical and philosophical, showing how a posthumanist engagement with particular works and their conceptual underpinnings helps to develop in a more fine-­grained way some of the theoretical, ethical, and political commitments that I have developed in my other work over the past thirty years. The essays on Diller+Scofidio, Philip Beesley, Koolhaas and Mau, and bioart draw deeply, for example, on the theoretical framework of systems theory (both biological and social) from the ’60s to the present that has been crucial to my framing of posthumanism begun in my second book, Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside” (1998) and its companion essay collection, Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity (2000), coedited with William Rasch. Those commitments are intensified and developed in later works such as Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (2003), Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (2013), Ecological Poetics, or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds (2020), and What Is Posthumanism? (2010), in which a couple of these pieces first appeared, alongside writings on literature, contemporary music, and film, providing yet another context for exploring vii

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the relationship between posthumanism and art (broadly conceived) quite different from the one provided here. The theoretical spine of my particular approach to posthumanism has increasingly, over the years, involved a braiding together of systems theory and deconstruction (chiefly the work of Jacques Derrida), which became—­beginning with Animal Rites and ending (for the moment) with Ecological Poetics—­i ncreasingly important to my contributions to the field of “animal studies” (or “human–animal studies,” or “critical animal studies,” or “animality studies”—­t he permutations have expanded dramatically since my first writings in this area in the early 1990s). My specific way of coming at “the question of the animal” (as Derrida once put it) is to treat it as but a subset of the larger problematic of posthumanism, and that approach forms the nexus for the essays here on the work of Michael Pestel, the team of Mark Wilson and Bryndís H. Snæbjörnsdóttir, and the performance artist Deke Weaver, where the question of extinction—­at the very moment of the sixth great extinction event on the planet—­receives special attention. After What Is Posthumanism?, it seemed only natural (if I may be allowed the expression at this point) to expand this conversation into the domain of biopolitical thought—­in part because of the direction taken by Derrida’s own work, particularly post-­9/11, toward biopolitical concerns and the paradigm of (auto)immunity, and in part because animal studies and biopolitical thought (at least in its canonical form) emerged from quite separate, and quite different, intellectual and philosophical genealogies. An interchange between the two, very different from Giorgio Agamben’s conjugation of the biopolitical and “the animal,” seemed to me long overdue, in other words, and that formed part of the philosophical motivation for Before the Law, and for the essays here on bioart, on the work of Eija-­Liisa Ahtila (and the related conversation in Bomb magazine between the two of us that follows it), and, especially, the most recent essay in the volume, on the work (and lifework) of Joseph Beuys. My conversation with Giovanni Aloi, editor of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, opens this collection with an overview of much of the landscape I have surveyed here, while casting an eye toward future work, as I hope this volume does. Houston, 2021

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In Lieu of an Introduction

A Conversation with Giovanni Aloi

Giovanni Aloi: Since the publication of What Is Posthumanism? much has changed on the philosophical horizon. Speculative Realism, New Materialism, Object-­Oriented Ontology, and Multispecies Eth­ nography have become increasingly important in contemporary debates on new ontologies and non-­a nthropocentric perspectives. What is your impression of the so-­called ontological turn? Cary Wolfe: I’m not interested in ontology, even though I am interested in what people interested in ontology are interested in. To me, ontology is a seriously misguided philosophical pursuit—­ which doesn’t mean that people who think they are doing ontology don’t have interesting and valuable things to say about this or that topic. Ever since my second book, Critical Environments, I’ve made it clear that the kind of work I do is an explicitly deontologized form of pragmatist theory, so I’m simply not interested in (and in fact find philosophically empty) the kinds of claims that ontology makes. One unfortunate result of the turn that you describe has been a pervasive, ongoing confusion in theoretical circles of the issue of philosophical realism with the question of materialism. In short, realists like to claim that if you don’t believe in philosophical realism’s account of reality then you automatically don’t believe that reality is real. But of course, it is perfectly possible to believe that you can’t have a pure, unmediated encounter with the material world without believing that reality isn’t real (and it is perfectly possible to do so without being a “correlationist,” by the way). A lot of mileage has been wrung out of this confusion (to mix my metaphors). But as Richard Rorty pointed out a long time ago in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, philosophical realism and philosophical idealism, which seem to be opposites, are actually just two sides of the same coin, namely a coin called philosophical representationalism. For me, philosophy and theory are not representationalist enterprises, 1

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and that means that when we talk about “speculative realism,” for instance, the accent for me falls on “speculative,” not “realism.” I’m not the least bit interested in the realist and ontological claims being made, which I think are empty and in fact, in many ways, ultratraditional and intellectually conservative; but I am interested in how the “speculative” enterprise opens up questions in fresh and innovative ways we hadn’t thought of before. GA: How do you see animal studies and posthumanism fitting among these new philosophical waves? CW: Well, just as it is increasingly difficult to generalize about, say, Object-­Oriented Ontology—­I find the work of even its most well-­k nown purveyors quite heterogeneous and increasingly divergent, in many ways—­I think it’s increasingly difficult to generalize about animal studies and posthumanism (and, as you know, “animal studies” is for me but a subset and subproblem of the much larger domain of posthumanist thought). What animal studies and posthumanism share with these movements, obviously, is a commitment to anti-­a nthropocentric thought, to the idea that the “human” is not at the center of the universe and that, in fact, the concept of the “human” should not be allowed to do any heaving lifting, philosophically speaking. So the OOO people are quite right when they say that the “human” is just another kind of object. But of course—­a nd this was the point of an entire chapter in What Is Posthumanism?—­t here are humanist ways of doing anti-­a nthropocentric theory, whether we’re talking about animal studies or the various varieties of ontology and realism you’ve just described. The other part of your question that is worth thinking about is the extent to which promoters and practitioners of these “new philosophical waves” adopt a posture of overcoming or rejecting humanism altogether, which is a sense I have about some of this work. Leaving aside the dubious desire for philosophical purification, I’ve tried to make it clear that, for me, “posthumanism” doesn’t mean a rejection or overcoming of humanism, but rather coming up with better ways of thinking about many of the things philosophical humanism was interested in. Humanism isn’t wholly bad or wholly good; it’s a legacy and an inheritance we have to work through.

In Lieu of an Introduction  3

GA: In Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art, Ron Broglio argued that art “has a particular investment with surfaces that is useful in unhinging philosophical concepts and moving them in new directions.” What role does art play in the relationship between your thinking and writing? CW: I think Ron is right. One of the fundamental roles that art plays for me is that it can undertake what I often call “non-­propositional conceptualization” of the kinds of questions we’re interested in, and in ways that the relatively impoverished medium of language and textuality really can’t. That makes art’s engagement of, say, the question of species loss and extinction potentially more multidimensional, if less precise, than theoretical exposition in the medium of words. I could give a more highly technical answer to your question about how this works, drawing on the work of Niklas Luhmann’s Art as a Social System (among others), but that is available in the chapter of What Is Posthumanism? on architecture that you’re referencing below, which centers on how art makes the incommunicable communicate by using the difference between perception and communication, psychic systems and social systems, in a way that is unique among the various forms of social communication. To paraphrase Luhmann, in art—­and this includes literary art, of course—­t hings that don’t make sense make meaning, and it’s possible for elements that are not present to be maximally meaningful. Or as Miles Davis put it, in a line I’m fond of quoting, “In jazz, what’s important is not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t play.” All of this is an enormous asset for fully conceptualizing the kinds of questions we’re interested in and how they resonate in theoretical, social, and affective registers. The only other thing I’ll add here—­a nd again this is not about what art engages but how it engages it—­is that artists, because of the intensive involvement they have with the media in which they work, start with an understanding that “normate” human ways of perceiving and experiencing are just one way of experiencing the world of light, sound, smell, taste, and touch that involves the potentialities of a much broader nonhuman, “animal” sensorium. There’s a way in which art—­even the most traditional, humanist art—­is always already “animal” in this sense, and this really

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hit me recently when I was in Amsterdam and took a very close look at Rembrandt’s use of paint, especially in some of the later self-­portraits. But of course, the same could be said of Cezanne—­ speaking of paragons of humanist art! GA: In What Is Posthumanism? you focused on a range of artistic media, including Sue Coe’s illustrations, Eduardo Kac’s transgenic projects, Lars von Trier’s musical film Dancer in the Dark, Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau’s urban landscape design Tree City for Toronto’s Downsview Park, Ricardo Scofidio and Elizabeth Diller’s architectural project Blur, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, Wallace Stevens’s philosophical poetry, and Brian Eno and David Byrne’s experimental rock album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. What media are you currently interested in and why? CW: Well, I’ve written a couple of fairly substantial pieces recently on contemporary installation art having to do with animals and extinction—­specifically, Mark Wilson and Bryndís H. Snæbjörnsdóttir’s Trout Fishing in America and Other Stories, which engages the plight of the California condor (among other creatures), and Michael Pestel’s Requiem: Ectopistes migratorius, which centers on the extinction of the passenger pigeon, and specifically Martha, the last of her kind who died in captivity in Cincinnati. They’re both installation art of a fairly familiar type, but they’re also very different from each other. Michael, for instance, is a trained composer and musician, and has done a lot of improvisational work with both Japanese butoh dancer Taketeru Kudo and jazz musician Anthony Braxton, so that inflects his piece in a quite different direction. I’m also quite engaged with the literary medium right now—­specifically, poetry—­i n my book Ecological Poetics, or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds. Working with literature and poetry comes more naturally to me, because that is my field of scholarly training, but because of the theoretical frameworks that I use, there’s probably less distance in my work between textual and other media in terms of how I engage them. Another way to put it is that, when it comes to specific media, I’ve never really been the kind of person who says, “Oh, I’m a film guy,” or “Oh, I work on painting.” That’s not how I think.

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GA: Your discussion of the ethical considerations involved in the representational strategies deployed in Sue Coe’s illustration and in Eduardo Kac’s transgenic projects caused quite a bit of controversy in some circles. More specifically, Steve Baker disagreed with your conception of the relationship between philosophical and artistic representationalism. In Artist|Animal, Baker accused you of “not looking enough”, thus producing a “misleading reading” of the differences involved in their practices. Have you reconsidered your position on Kac’s and Coe’s work in the light of new developments that have characterized contemporary art? CW: No, not really. Look, contemporary art is a vast and heterogeneous field, as you know better than I do, and any incision one makes into that field will thus by definition be reductive, highly selective, and schematic—­but to a purpose, one hopes. And my purpose in that piece was to raise a very specific question that I felt hadn’t really been taken up the way it should: What is the relationship (if indeed there is one) between representationalism and speciesism? As I said earlier, the issue is not just what art does—­expressing outrage and grief over anthropocentric exploitation and violence, in Coe’s case—­but how it does it. Sue Coe’s work is very powerful, no doubt, and I admire her very much for all sorts of reasons. And I like her a lot personally, too; she visited an undergraduate class of mine on animal rights many years ago, at Indiana University. But, you know, her work is what it is: humanist posthumanism. GA: I am personally not in full agreement with Baker’s claim that Coe’s body of work does not rely on a “regime of faciality” as you instead argued. It seems to me that many works by Coe entirely rely on a highly anthropomorphic regime of faciality that echoes a Lacanian conception of “the face,” in the sense that Coe deliberately leverages upon tried and tested representational techniques typical of the photographic or the filmic, strategically employing close ups, exaggeration of eye size, and accentuation of curved lines, in order to instill empathy in the viewer—­a nimals look back, and in many of Coe’s work, animals seem to implicitly implore us to stop. In this sense, my preoccupation with a “regime

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of faciality” in contemporary art involving animals rests upon speciesistic concerns, rather than on the original question in relation to posthumanist/humanist approaches in art. I believe that art which engages with posthumanist themes cannot afford to be speciesistic. Coe’s work, because of the nature of her animal rights commitment, poses interesting questions that extend well beyond the artistic remit. In this context, what kind of ethicalities are, in your view, more suited to art involving animals, and more importantly, can an animal-­studies centered approach to art ever be truly posthumanist to start with? CW: With regard to Coe’s work and Steve’s position, I couldn’t put it better myself. But to your larger question, I think you are absolutely right. Another way to put it is to understand that “species” is not really where the action is from a posthumanist point of view. In this day and age of increasing attention to the microbiome and epigenetics, “species” is obviously, now more than ever, a reductive concept (both scientifically and theoretically) and a very blunt instrument. And one of the real values of biopolitical thought, as I tried to show in my book Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame, is that it reminds us just how blunt it can be when you remember how “race” functions in biopolitical formations, and when you then also realize that you can’t talk about race without talking about species—­my critique of Foucault, and Donna Haraway’s as well. Whatever it is we’re talking about with regard to the relationship between art, ethics, and what we call “life,” it can’t be adequately engaged by indexing these questions to a biological or zoological taxonomic designation. No way. “The animal” can’t be allowed to do any heavy lifting any more than “the human” can. We need another vocabulary, another theoretical framework, within which what we call “human” and “animal” (as Derrida put it) are the eventuations—­not necessary eventuations but possible eventuations—­of processes and relations that are not themselves either “human” or “animal.” And this is precisely what I think Eduardo’s work is on to (and so is Donna Haraway’s, of course). So if the concept of “species” is of any use, it’s in focusing our attention on how the organism/environment relationship is anything but generic. “Species” is simply a place-

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holder, a bookmark, for a more complex and robust form of engagement with the questions of art, ethics, and “life.” GA: In 2012, you interviewed Eija-­L iisa Ahtila, a well-­k nown video artist and photographer residing in Helsinki and whose work has been exhibited at Tate Modern in London and MoMA in New York, amongst other prestigious museums. At the very beginning of your interview, you took care to let your reader know that your conversation with the artist was conducted via email over the period of two weeks, her keyboard docked in Helsinki, Finland; yours, in Houston, Texas. Considering that this issue of Antennae is entirely dedicated to interviews, I am curious to hear about the challenges you encountered in interviewing the artist through this medium. What productivities and challenges shaped this process? CW: To be honest, I sort of like the email medium for interviews, and it was easy for the two of us to converse in this medium. You have to figure out the protocol, of course: How many back-­a nd-­ forths do you have? Do you introduce new questions as subsets of original answers that point toward the need for another chapter, as it were? etc. We were lucky, no doubt, and that luck was produced in part by the fact that we have a deep and sympathetic understanding of each other’s work. One advantage of this medium is that you have already, in a sense, gone through a couple of edits by the time you’re done with the first pass. It’s cleaner, more focused, and more thoughtful, if perhaps less textured in a sense. As it happens, I just did a Skype interview yesterday for a project that a couple of faculty from Queen’s University in Canada are doing, and I shudder to think about all the “ums,” “ahs,” “likes,” and digressions that are built into talking out loud—­at least the way I talk out loud. They’ve got their work cut out for them! GA: Would you classify Eija-­L iisa Ahtila’s work as posthumanist, or have you moved beyond the desire to classify artist’s work within specific categories? CW: These sort of labels are useful to me only insofar as they open up something about the work—­whether it’s artistic or philosophical—­ that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. My writing on Ahtila’s work (in a catalog essay for a big retrospective show of hers a few years

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ago) is actually not framed by the question of posthumanism, but rather in terms of the biopolitical problematic—­and specifically, the immunitary/autoimmunitary paradigm within biopolitical thought. One of the interesting things about her work is how heterogeneous and unexpected it is, both within individual works and in the connections between different pieces (even if we just stick with what are regarded as her major works). Think about the appearance of Santa Clause at the beginning of The Annunciation, or all sorts of stuff that happens in The House. What the immunitary paradigm enabled me to see in her work was a larger coherence, the subterranean connections between pieces that otherwise seem quite unrelated. For example, how is the increasingly psychotic space of home, the heimlich, and the whole inside/outside topography of The House related to the seemingly quite distant concerns about colonial violence against Algerians by the French in Where Is Where? And how are these related, in turn, to the persistent concern for nonhuman life, and the relations of human and nonhuman forms of life, that animate pieces such as The Annunciation and The Hour of Prayer? Or to the question of religion and the biopolitical opened up in the work of Derrida and Agamben? GA: More recently you have collaborated with contemporary artist Maria Whiteman for a project titled Landscape and Inscription, which considers questions of geological time and force, global warming / climate change, circuits of energy production and distribution, and human interfaces with the environmental, among other considerations. Are you at all interested in the aesthetic strategies of Multispecies Ethnographies, for instance? CW: Oh yes, of course. Multispecies Ethnography takes up such questions in a way that is quite consonant, I think, with what I was saying a moment ago about the term “species” in relation to art and ethics. “Species” is a placeholder that gets decomposed, recomposed, and distilled under very specific conditions and sets of coordinates, and in relation to different disciplinary frameworks. A while back, Maria and I participated in an art exhibition and panel on “Hope in an Era of Extinction” at the Princeton Environmental Institute that Eben Kirksey put together as part of his ongoing “Multispecies Salon” project. The panel included leading scholars

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from about five or six different disciplines, with others Skyped in from various locations, to discuss extinction, de-­extinction, wildlife conservation, species loss, ethics, and the broader relations of life and technology in the era of CRISPR and synthetic biology. As one of the people in the audience put it at the reception, it was a great example of “problem-­d riven,” not “puzzle-­d riven,” interdisciplinary exchange around a question we’re all passionately interested in. The other thing I like about Multispecies Ethnography is its explicitly experimental character (sometimes to the point of a sort of Merry Pranksters ethos)—­“let’s do a remix (perhaps ‘in the wet’) and see what happens”! But of course, being a pragmatist, I would like that about Multispecies Ethnography! GA: Can you tell us how the idea for Landscape and Inscription came about and how the work relates to your philosophical work whilst triangulating with that of Maria? CW: I think the installation project, Mountain Pine Beetle, on which the essay Landscape and Inscription was based was Maria’s idea, but I’m not entirely sure. It’s hard to locate an origin for the project because she and I had been involved for a few years in an ongoing collaboration centered primarily on a suite of video installation pieces that we were working on, even as we both have our own quite consuming individual projects. I guess the way I’d describe it is that it emerged as an attempt to unpack and fully ramify why she and I seemed to be drawn to the same elements and forms of engagement of what we used to call “nature”—­she, as an artist and I, as a theorist. So in her video or photographic work, for example, I’d be quite taken by the shots and compositional grammars her work would gravitate toward: you know, a shot of a seascape but with a rearview mirror in it, or a herd of elk, but upon closer inspection wearing radio tracking collars, or herons and egrets traversing the Texas wetlands, but with the faint outline of an oil refinery on the horizon. I think for both of us this opens onto the larger question—­a philosophical question, but also a question for artistic practice and strategy—­of the need to think more deeply in both media about what “nature,” “landscape,” “ecology,” “environment,” and “life” are (and other cognate terms could be added to the list, of course). For example, we’re both passionately,

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intensely interested in nonhuman animal life, but here again, as I said earlier, that question thus becomes reframed within a larger set of considerations in which “nature” itself, “landscape” itself, “life” itself become a medium on which various forces (political, economic, technological, etc.) inscribe themselves. (And in a way, this is a different kind of answer to your earlier question about what sorts of media I’m interested in right now.) All of which, to me at least, is quite consonant with the Foucauldian sense of the biopolitical that I tried to draw out in Before the Law. In other words: environmental thought meets biopolitical thought. GA: Does Landscape and Inscription represent the beginning of a new turn in your career? What role will making art play in your participation in posthumanist discourses? CW: I don’t think so; I see it as more of a continuum. The video installation pieces that we were doing are in part built around longish poems that I wrote (three to five pages, typically, and probably more narrative than I would normally write)—­sometimes in response to the videos, sometimes as a kind of inspiration or script for them. Fragments of the poems show up in each of the videos, and the full text of each poem is available in the installation space. I started out as a poet, actually, and I had to decide whether I wanted to do an MFA or a PhD, so for me, the progression feels quite organic (if we can allow that phrase at this point in the conversation!). I do find making art, writing about art, and working with artists to be incredibly liberating, enriching, and thought provoking—­a different version of what I enjoyed about that Hope in an Era of Extinction program at Princeton that I was talking about a moment ago. It’s just a different and more open-­ended, more experimental process, in many ways, than sitting around talking to a room full of Derrideans or Deleuzeans or whatever—­ less predictable and more unexpected, I guess you could say. GA: Which other contemporary artists are you interested in and why? CW: Wow, that’s such a huge question, there are so many artists doing so many different kinds of work, so I’ll give a different kind of answer. I have pretty eclectic taste in art. The big Mike Kelley

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retrospective at MoMA PS1 several years ago was maybe the best thing I’ve seen recently. Such an accomplished and yet remarkably heterogeneous body of work; it’s hard to believe it was all done by the same person. William Kentridge’s work always blows me away and then I sort of forget about it (though he does make his way into the poem for one of our installation pieces, “Mountain Pine Beetle”—­I think the line is, “the entire Front Range / Under a Kentridge eraser”). Wow what a serious, and seriously talented, artist he is—­again, like Kelley, an amazing skill set. Another artist I love, with a similarly scary skill set but an almost diametrically opposed sensibility, is Wayne White, who is the subject of the film Beauty Is Embarrassing—­a great film to show to students (especially art students), by the way. I saw a Wolfgang Tillmans show at the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea a few years ago that I thought was pretty extraordinary—­a photographer who deals with the photographic image like an architect or a sculptor. The thought that went into the installation of the images, how they spoke to each other, and how each room was built and worked with the overall space, was just really impressive. In one room, as I recall, there were just display cases of different kinds of photographic paper. Wow! Before that, in the same neighborhood several years earlier, Douglas Gordan’s Play Dead; Real Time at the Gagosian. It’s a two-­c hannel installation centered on a huge video of an elephant lying down, playing dead, and getting up, then doing the cycle again, and as you stand there and watch it, it gradually dawns on you that the actual elephant was filmed in the very spot where you’re standing. Like most of Gordon’s work, very simple and razor sharp. What else? Taryn Simon’s A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Stories at the Tate Modern was, I think, a very interesting piece of biopolitical art—­a nd the most expensive (and maybe heaviest) book I own is the catalog for that show. Around the same time, a great—­a nd great big—­Glenn Ligon show at the Ft. Worth Modern that was a very smart and shrewd engagement of the crossing of race, gender, and sexuality. He’s one of my favorite African American artists, along with Carrie Mae Weems and Willie Cole. I like Tony Oursler’s work a lot, and was fortunate enough to see his Influence Machine installation at Madison Square Park years ago. A

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few years ago, I happened to be in LA on my way to Australia when LACMA had the big Pierre Huyghe show and Thomas Demand’s amazing stop-­action video Pacific Sun running at the same time. Of course, LACMA has James Turrell’s Levitated Mass (which I found a little underwhelming); Turrell’s an interesting character I may write about soon, and we have a big, splashy seven million–­dollar skyspace of his on the Rice campus called Twilight Epiphany. We get some amazing stuff in Houston, of course, and the big Joseph Beuys Actions, Vitrines, Environments show at the Menil Collection not long after I moved there really stayed in my head. I’ve been threatening ever since to write a big piece on Beuys, but then it morphed into a Beuys and Frida Kahlo piece (about animality, sexuality, disability, and infirmity)—­but that’s another interview! In the animals and ecology neighborhood we were talking about earlier, it’s a very long list in addition to the people we’ve already discussed, but Annette Messager’s piece The Pensioners is one of my favorites—­very powerful and complex emotionally—­ and Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field in New Mexico should be on everyone’s “To Do” list. They drop you off at this extraordinary little cabin in the middle of nowhere that my friend Helen Winkler Fosdick helped build years ago from old farmhouse scrap wood, and then they come back and pick you up twenty-­four hours later. The duration, the solitude, is very much a part of the piece. Closer to home, Mark Dion’s work is really strong, I think, very intelligent and multifaceted (and often with a great sense of humor!). Mark is a real pro when it comes to understanding context, audience, venue, etc.—­everything that goes into really thinking through a project. His big nurse log piece at the Olympic Sculpture Park, Neukom Vivarium, is one of my favorite works of eco-­a rt by anyone; it’s perfect for someone who thinks about “life,” technicity, and prostheticity the way I do. Oh, and on that note, I love the Brothers Quay! GA: Donna Haraway’s book Manifestly Haraway, published by the University of Minnesota Press, features a conversation between you and the author. Reading cyborgs and companion species through and with each other, you and Donna join in a wide-­ranging exchange on the history and meaning of the manifestos in the con-

In Lieu of an Introduction  13

text of biopolitics, feminism, Marxism, human–­nonhuman relationships, making kin, literary tropes, material semiotics, the negative way of knowing, secular Catholicism, and more. How did this collaboration come about and what is the essential contribution to the field which emerges from this conversation? CW: Donna and I have known each other for a long time—­she came and visited my class when I was a greenhorn assistant professor at Indiana in the early ’90s—­but we really became fast friends when we were together for a couple of days for a program at UCLA, and we discovered that each of us had a very serious involvement with dog training. And then that led, during the same trip, to a bond that we discovered we both shared with Vicki Hearne, who was a very interesting and very smart character but not in a way that a lot of your typical progressive academics really get. This was all before Donna “came out,” as she later put it, as someone seriously involved in agility trial work with her dog Cayenne. We stayed in touch after that, and when I started the Posthumanities series at Minnesota, I got in touch with her about doing a book, even though I assumed, of course, that all of her work for the foreseeable future was already committed. Well, not only was that not the case, she also wanted to sign up for two projects: what would become When Species Meet, and then another project she had in mind, Manifestly Haraway, which would consist of the two manifestos and then a bridge essay she would write about the evolution of her thought and work in the intervening years. Well, as the years went by, she became less and less interested in the bridge essay idea—­i n part, I think, because of everything that was going on in the UC system and at Santa Cruz during the mid-­to late 2000s (especially post-­2008), a period in which she was serving as chair of the History of Consciousness Program—­but she (and the press) still wanted to do the manifestos together in one volume. So I suggested that we just do a long conversation instead, and that would be the bridge text. I was doing a thing at Stanford, so I shot down to Santa Cruz and stayed with Donna and Rusten for three days, and we put about five hours on tape, just sitting at her kitchen table and talking, about three and half to four of which, I’d say, we ended up using, and in very lightly edited form.

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What you read in the book is very, very close to how the conversation itself went, not verbatim, but pretty close. To come to the other part of your question, I think there are very many ways in which the project is relevant to the current context—­too many to name, in fact, but I think they emerge quite clearly in the course of the conversation—­but my main agenda in the project, as I say in the preface, is to recover and reassert the importance of Donna’s work in the context of what would come to be called “biopolitical” thought. One of the things that’s pretty hard to miss about canonical biopolitical thought is that it is largely a procession of white, male, European philosophers, and so part of what I was trying to do for Donna’s work in the context of biopolitics is a lot like what she has tried to do for Lynn Margulis’s work in the field of biology and the life sciences, to rectify a certain lacuna or omission, what she calls “the politics of citational practices,” that has largely written Margulis out of the main story of the development of theoretical biology over the last thirty or forty years. So my main point in the project was to remind people that Donna was “doing biopolitical thought” long before it was codified as such, in essays such as “Sex, Mind, and Profit,” “Situated Knowledges,” the famous essay on immune system discourse—­ really, a whole book’s worth of foundational work in biopolitical thought, and with an interdisciplinary range and skill set unmatched by any of the other major biopolitical thinkers (and I’m not even mentioning Primate Visions, which, similarly, was and is a foundational text in “animal studies” before there was anything called “animal studies”.) So part of the idea was to set the record straight, and part was to draw out how much we can still learn from her work in attempting to think what has sometimes been called an “affirmative,” rather than “thanatopolitical,” biopolitics.

Part I Systems

Social, Biological, Ecological

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2 Lose the Building

Meaning and Form in Diller+Scofidio’s Blur The work of art is an ostentatiously improbable occurrence.

Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System

Ricardo Scofidio and Elizabeth Diller’s audacious Blur project—­a manufactured cloud with an embedded viewing deck, hovering over Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland—­seems to have enjoyed nearly universal acclaim from the moment it opened to the public in October 2002 as part of Expo.02. The reasons for this are not far to seek; they range from what a Swiss newspaper reviewer characterized as the liberating effect of the zany cloud on “the crotchety Swiss”—­“What a crazy, idiosyncratic thing! How deliciously without purpose!” he exclaimed—­to Diller+Scofidio’s knowing deployment of the relationship between public architecture, the history and function of the exposition as a social form, and the manufacture and use of spectacle in relation to both.1 The project went through many different elaborations, enhancements, and embellishments between the invitation to Diller+Scofidio to participate in July 1998 and the closing of the Expo in October 2002. Almost all of these were, for various reasons, unrealized in the final project. At one point, the cloud was to house an “LED text forest” of vertical LED panels that would scroll text—­either from an internet feed (including live “chat” produced by visitors to the structure) or, in a later version, produced by an artist such as Jenny Holzer. 2 Another idea early in the project was an adjacent “Hole in the Water” restaurant made of submerged twin glass cylinders with an aquarium layer in between, in which diners would sit at eye level with the lake and eat sushi; 3 another, an open air “Angel Bar” embedded in the upper part of the cloud, in which patrons could select from an endless variety of the only beverage served there: water—­a rtesian waters, sparkling waters, waters from both glacial poles, and municipal tap waters from around 17

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the world (“tastings can be arranged,” we are told).4 Yet another elaborate idea, rather late in the project’s evolution, involved the distribution of “smart” raincoats—­or “braincoats”—­to visitors to the cloud, which would indicate, through both sound and color, affinity or antipathy to other visitors on the basis of a preferences questionnaire filled out upon entry to the cloud. 5 As even this brief list suggests, the project went through many permutations. But in the end—­not least for reasons of money—­ what we are left with in Blur is the manufactured cloud with the “Angel Deck” (now, not a water bar but a viewing deck) nestled at its crest. For reasons I will try to explain by way of contemporary systems theory, the fact that these permutations and sideline enhancements were not realized in the end is not entirely a bad thing, because it rivets our attention not only on what has captivated most viewers from the beginning, but also on what makes the project a paradigmatic instance of how contemporary architecture responds to the complexities of its broader social environment in terms of its specific medium—­and that is, as Diller+Scofidio put it, “the radicality of an absent building,” the remarkable, audacious commitment to a building that was not a building at all but a manufactured cloud: “the making,” as they put it, “of nothing.”6 This core commitment was sounded by Diller+Scofidio early and often; at the core of the project, as it were, was no core at all, but a commitment to something “featureless, depthless, scaleless, spaceless, massless, surfaceless, and contextless.”7 And this overriding concern was reiterated at the very end of the design phase, about a year before the Expo opened, in a very important communiqué from Diller, in which she writes: BLUR is not a building, BLUR is pure atmosphere, water particles suspended in mid-­a ir. The fog is a dynamic, phantom mass, which changes form constantly. . . . In contradiction to the tradition of Expo pavilions whose exhibitions entertain and educate, BLUR erases information. Expos are usually competition grounds for bigger and better technological spectacles. BLUR is a spectacle with nothing to see. Within BLUR, vision is put out-­of-­focus so that our dependence on vision can become the focus of the pavilion.

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And, she adds in bold type: “The media project must be liberated from all immediate and obvious metaphoric associations such as clouds, god, angels, ascension, dreams, Greek mythology, or any other kitsch relationships. Rather, BLUR offers a blank interpretive surface.”8 But not quite blank, as it turns out. In fact, on the conceptual side of the project, the perceptual experience of the Blur building was thought by the architects at different stages in its development to either metaphorize or, conversely, throw into relief a larger set of dynamics around electronic media and how we relate to it. Midway through the project, in a presentation to a media sponsor, they characterized it this way: To “blur” is to make indistinct, to dim, to shroud, to cloud, to make vague, to obfuscate. Blurred vision is an impairment. A blurry image is the fault of mechanical malfunction in a display or reproduction technology. For our visually obsessed, high-­ resolution/high-­definition culture, blur is equated with loss. . . . Our proposal has little to do with the mechanics of the eye, but rather the immersive potential of blur on an environmental scale. Broadcast and print media feed our insatiable desire for the visual with an unending supply of images. . . . [But] as an experience, the Blur building offers little to see. It is an immersive environment in which the world is put out of focus so that our visual dependency can be put into focus.9

At a different stage—­one in which the LED text forest played a central role—­t he experience of the cloud figures “the unimaginable magnitude, speed, and reach of telecommunications.” As Diller and Scofidio put it, “Unlike entering a building, the experience of entering this habitable medium in which orientation is lost and time is suspended is like an immersion in ‘ether.’ It is a perfect context for the experience of another all-­pervading, yet infinitely elastic, massless medium—­one for the transmission and propagation of information: the internet. The project aims to produce a ‘technological sublime,’ felt in the scaleless and unpredictable mass of fog.”10 There are some interesting differences here, of course. In the first version, the resonance of the project falls on the iconographic

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and visually based forms of mass media; in the second, it is the ephemeral yet pervasive presence of electronic, digital forms of telecommunication generally that is in question. In the first, the point of the cloud is that it deprives us of the unproblematic visual clarity, immediacy, and transparency that the mass media attempts to produce in its consumers; in the second, the cloud’s water vapor metaphorically envelopes us in the electronic ether that we inhabit like a medium in contemporary life, but deprives us of the information that usually accompanies it and therefore distracts us from just how immersed in that medium we are. What I am more concerned with here, however, is not the differences between the two accounts, but rather what they have in common: that this particular form has been selected by Diller+Scofidio, and selected, moreover, to represent the unrepresentable—­hence the notion of the “technological sublime” upon which both accounts converge. We ought not, however, take this notion of the sublime (or the term “representation,” for that matter) at face value. In fact, resorting to the discourse of the sublime here can only obscure the specificity of the project’s formal decisions—­why it does what it does how it does—­a nd how those decisions are directly related to the ethical and political point that the project is calculated to make. At its worst, it leads down the sorts of blind alleys we find in the July 2002 issue of Architecture, where one reviewer reads the project in terms of the symbolic significance of clouds, and of Switzerland, in Romantic literature (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, among others) and painting (J. M. W. Turner, among others), all of which is supposedly mobilized in Blur’s rewriting of the sublime as a “cautionary tale about the environment.”11 And all of which recycles exactly the sorts of “immediate and obvious metaphoric associations” and “kitsch relationships” that we rightly saw Diller railing against a moment ago. It might seem more promising, at least at first glance, to pursue more theoretically sophisticated renderings of the sublime in contemporary theory, most notably in the work of Jean-­François Lyotard (though other, more recent renditions of the concept, such as we find in Slavoj Žižek’s conjugation of Kant and Lacan, might be invoked here as well). In Lyotard—­to stay with the most well-­ known example—­t he locus classicus is a certain reading of Kant.

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The sublime is rendered as a kind of absolute outside to human existence—­one that is, for that very reason, terrifying. At the same time, paradoxically (and this is true of Žižek’s rendering as well), that radically other outside emerges as a product of the human subject’s conflict with itself, a symptom of the Enlightenment subject running up against its own limits. In Lyotard’s famous rendering of the Kantian sublime in The Postmodern Condition, it emerges from the conflict between “the faculty to conceive of something and the faculty to ‘present’ something.” “We can conceive the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful,” he explains, “but every presentation of an object destined to ‘make visible’ this absolute greatness or power appears to us painfully inadequate. Those are ideas of which no presentation is possible. Therefore they impart no knowledge about reality (experience).”12 And the entire ethical stake of modern art for Lyotard, then, is “to present the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible.”13 But how to do this? Here, Lyotard follows Kant’s invocation of “‘formlessness, the absence of form,’ as a possible index to the unpresentable,” as that which “will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain.”14 The sublime, then, is a “feeling” that marks the incommensurability of reason (conception) and the singularity or particularity of the world and its objects (presentation). And it is an incommensurability that carries ethical force, for it serves as a reminder that the heterogeneity of the world cannot be reduced to a unified rule or reason. And this incompleteness in turn necessitates a permanent openness of any discourse to its other, to what Lyotard elsewhere calls the differend.15 Now Lyotard’s rendering of the Kantian sublime would seem to be useful in approaching Blur, and Kant’s invocation of “formlessness” as the sublime’s index would seem doubly promising. But its limitations may be marked by the fact that Kant’s sublime remains tethered to “something on the order of a subject” (to use Michel Foucault’s famous phrase)—­hence it remains referenced essentially to the language of phenomenology, to the affective states of a subject-­supposed-­to-­k now who, in experiencing her nonknowledge, experiences pain, and thus changes her relation to

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herself. What I am suggesting, then, is that in Lyotard’s rendering of the sublime—­a nd it would be far afield to argue the point in any more detail here—­t he price we pay for a certain deconstruction of the subject of humanism (one that will be traced from Kant to Nietzsche in The Postmodern Condition),16 is that the subject remains installed at the center of its universe, only now its failure is understood to be a kind of success. Moreover, the fact that this failure is ethical—­is the hook on which the ethical rehabilitation of the subject hangs in its forcible opening to the world of the object, the differend, and so on—­is the surest sign that we have not, for all that, left the universe of Kantian humanism. For we must remember that the ethical force of the sublime in (Lyotard’s) Kant depends upon the addressee of ethics being a member of “the community of reasonable beings” who must be equipped with the familiar humanist repertoire of language, reason, and so on to experience in the ethical imperative not a “determinant synthesis”—­not one-­ size-­fits-­a ll rules for the good and the just act—­but “an Idea of human society” (which is why Kant will argue, for example, that we have no direct duties to nonhuman animals).17 And this in turn reontologizes the subject/object split that the discourse of the sublime was meant to call into question in the first place. In contrast to this, Diller+Scofidio insist that their work be understood in “post-­moral and post-­ethical” terms. 18 What this means, I think, is not that they intend their work to have no ethical or political resonance—­t hat much is already obvious from their foregoing comments on Blur—­but rather that they understand the relationship between art, the subject, and world in resolutely post-­ humanist terms. That is to say, in Diller+Scofidio, the human and the non-­or anti-­or a-­human do not exist in fundamentally discrete ontological registers but—­quite the contrary—­inhabit the same postontological space in mutual relations of intrication and instability. This boundary breakdown tends to be thematized in their work in the interpenetration of the human and the technological (as in, for example, the multimedia theater work Jet Lag, the Virtue/Vice Glasses series, and the EJM 2 Inertia dance piece); but it is also sometimes handled even more broadly in terms of the interweaving of the organic and the inorganic, the “natural” and the “artificial” (think here not only of Blur, but also of projects

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like Slow House or The American Lawn). Sometimes those unstable relations are funny, sometimes they are frightening, but almost always the signature affect in Diller+Scofidio’s work is radical ambivalence—­a n ambivalence that, in contrast to the sublime, isn’t about a clear-­cut pain that becomes, in a second, pedagogical moment, pleasure, but rather an ambivalence from the first moment of our experience of the work, one that is tied to the difficulty of knowing exactly what is being experienced (as in works that intermesh real video surveillance with staged scenes, as in the Facsimile installation at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco), or how we should feel about it (think here of Jump Cuts or, again, Blur). All of which leads, in turn, to the ultimate question, namely who is doing the experiencing? Who—­in phenomenological and political terms—­a re “we,” exactly? In this light, Diller+Scofidio (like Lyotard’s Kant) show us how questions of ethics are just that: questions; but they do so (unlike Lyotard’s Kant) without recontaining the force of that radical undecidability in terms of a humanist subject, an all-­too-­familiar “we”—­a “reasonable being” directed toward an “idea of society”—­for whom, and only for whom, those questions are. What this suggests, I think, is that a move beyond an essentially humanist ontological theoretical framework is in order if we are to understand the Blur project or, indeed, Diller+Scofidio’s work as a whole. We need, in other words, to replace “what” questions with “how” questions (to use Niklas Luhmann’s shorthand).19 On this point, recent work in systems theory—­a nd particularly Luhmann’s later work—­can be of immense help, not least because it gives us a theoretical vocabulary for understanding the sorts of things that Diller+Scofidio have in mind when they suggest that in Blur, “Our objective is to weave together architecture and electronic technologies, yet exchange the properties of each for the other.”20 Here, the fundamental postulate of systems theory—­its replacement of the familiar ontological dichotomies of humanism (culture/nature and its cognates: mind/body, spirit/matter, reason/feeling, and so on) with the functional distinction system/ environment—­is indispensable in allowing us to better understand the sorts of transcodings that Diller+Scofidio have in mind, because it gives us a common theoretical vocabulary that can

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range across what were, in the humanist tradition, ontologically discrete categories. Moreover, systems theory will allow us to explain not only how those transcodings are specific to particular systems—­how art and architecture, for example, integrate electronic technologies as art—­but also how, in being system-­specific, they are paradoxically paradigmatic of, and productive of, the very situation those systems attempt to respond to. 21 That situation, of course, is “hypercomplexity,” created by what Luhmann calls the “functional differentiation” of modern society (what other critical vocabularies would call its “specialization” or, more moralistically, “fragmentation”), which only gets accentuated and accelerated under postmodernity. 22 For Luhmann, the social system of art—­l ike any other autopoietic system, by definition—­finds itself in an environment that is always already more complex than itself, and all systems attempt to adapt to this complexity by filtering it in terms of their own self-­referential codes that are based on a fundamental distinction by means of which they carry out their operations. The point of the system is to reproduce itself, but no system can deal with everything, or even many things, all at once—­hence the need for a code to be selective. Two subsidiary points need to be accentuated here. First, responding to environmental complexity in terms of their own self-­referential codes is how subsystems build up their own internal complexity (one might think here of the various subspecialties of the legal system, say, or for that matter, the specialization of disciplines in the education system); in doing so, systems become more finely grained in their selectivity, and thus they buy time, as it were, in relation to overwhelming environmental complexity. As Luhmann puts it in Social Systems, “The system’s inferiority in complexity [compared to that of the environment] must be counter-­balanced by strategies of selection.”23 But if the self-­ reference of the system’s code reduces the flow of environmental complexity into the system, it also increases its “irritability” and, in a very real sense, its dependence on the environment. As for this latter point, it is worth noting the complex and seemingly paradoxical fact that the autopoietic closure of a system—­ whether social or biological—­is precisely what connects it to its environment. As Luhmann explains it, “The concept of a self-­

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referentially closed system does not contradict the system’s openness to the environment. Instead, in the self-­referential mode of operation, closure is a form of broadening possible environmental contacts; closure increases, by constituting elements more capable of being determined, the complexity of the environment that is possible for the system.”24 And this is why, as Luhmann puts it in Art as a Social System, autopoiesis and complexity are conceptual coordinates. . . . Assuming that the system’s autopoiesis is at work, evolutionary thresholds can catapult the system to a level of higher complexity—­i n the evolution of living organisms, toward sexual reproduction, independent mobility, a central nervous system. To an external observer, this may resemble an increase in system differentiation or look like a higher degree of independence from environmental conditions. Typically, such evolutionary jumps simultaneously increase a system’s sensitivity and irritability; it is more easily disturbed by environmental conditions that, for their part, result from an increase in the system’s own complexity. Dependency and independence, in a simple causal sense, are therefore not invariant magnitudes in that more of one would imply less of the other. Rather, they vary according to a system’s given level of complexity. In systems that are successful in evolutionary terms, more independence typically amounts to a greater dependency on the environment. . . . But all of this can happen only on the basis of the system’s operative closure. 25

The information/filter metaphor invoked above is misleading, however, precisely for the reasons we noted at the beginning of this chapter: because systems interface with their environment in terms of, and only in terms of, their own constitutive distinctions and the self-­referential codes based upon them, the “environment” is not an ontological category but a functional one. It is not an “outside” to the system that is given as such, from which the system then differentiates itself—­it is not, in other words, either “nature” or “society” in the traditional sense—­but is rather always the “outside” of a specific inside. All of this leads to a paradoxical situation that is central to Luhmann’s work, and central to

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understanding Luhmann’s reworking of problems inherited from both Hegel and Husserl: what links the system to the world—­what literally makes the world available to the system—­is also what hides the world from the system, what makes it unavailable. Given our discussion of the sublime and the problem of “representing the unrepresentable” above, this should ring a bell—­but a different bell, as it turns out. To understand just how different, we need to remember that all systems carry out their operations and maintain their autopoiesis by deploying a constitutive distinction, and a code based upon it, that is radically contingent, that could, in principle, be otherwise. And this means that there is a paradoxical identity between the two sides of the system’s constitutive distinction, because the distinction between both sides is a product of only one side. In the legal system, for example, the distinction between the two sides legal/illegal is instantiated (or “re-­entered,” to use Luhmann’s terminology) on only one side of the distinction, namely the legal. But no system can acknowledge this paradoxical identity of difference—­which is also in another sense simply the contingency—­of its own constitutive distinction and at the same time use that distinction to carry out its operations. It must remain “blind” to the very paradox of the distinction that links it to its environment. That does not mean that this “blind spot” cannot be observed from the vantage of another system—­it can, and that is what we are doing right now—­but that second-­order observation will itself be based on its own blind spot, thus formally reproducing a “blindness” that is (formally) the same but (contingently) not the same as that of the first-­order system. And here, as I have suggested elsewhere, we find Luhmann’s fruitful reworking of the Hegelian problematic: not the “identity of identity and non-­identity,” as in Hegel, but rather as the “non-­identity of identity and non-­identity”—­a nd a productive non-­identity at that.26 As Luhmann explains it: “The conclusion to be drawn from this is that the connection with the reality of the external world is established by the blind spot of the cognitive operation. Reality is what one does not perceive when one perceives it. 27 Or as he puts it in somewhat different terms, the world is now conceived “along the lines of a Husserlian metaphor,

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as an unreachable horizon that retreats further with each operation, without ever holding out the prospect of an outside.”28 The question, then—­a nd this is directly related to the problems raised by the topos of the sublime—­is “how to observe how the world observes itself, how a marked space emerges [via a constitutive distinction] from the unmarked space, how something becomes invisible when something else becomes visible.” Here, we might seem far afield from addressing the Blur project, but in fact, Luhmann argues, “the generality of these questions allows one to determine more precisely what art can contribute to solving this paradox of the invisibilization that accompanies making something visible.”29 In this way, the problems that the discourse of the sublime attempts to address can be assimilated to the more formally rigorous scheme of the difference between first-­ and second-­order observation. Any observation “renders the world invisible” in relation to its constitutive distinction, and that invisibility must itself remain invisible to the observation that employs that distinction—­which in turn can only be disclosed by another observation that will also necessarily be doubly blind in the same way. 30 “In this twofold sense,” Luhmann writes, “the notion of a final unity—­of an ‘ultimate reality’ that cannot assume a form because it has no other side—­is displaced into the unobservable. . . . If the concept of the world is retained to indicate reality in its entirety, then it is that which—­to a second-­order observer—­ remains invisible in the movements of observation (his own and those of others).”31 And this means not only that “art can no longer be understood as an imitation of something that presumably exists along with and outside of art,” but more importantly for our purposes, “to the extent that imitation is still possible, it now imitates the world’s invisibility, a nature that can no longer be apprehended as a whole.”32 “The paradox unique to art, which art creates and resolves,” Luhmann writes, “resides in the observability of the unobservable.”33 And this is a question of form. It is in these terms—­to return now to Diller+Scofidio—­t hat we might best understand the uncanny effect of Blur’s manufactured cloud hovering over a lake, with the point being, we might say, not that the cloud is not a cloud but rather that the lake is not

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a lake, precisely in the sense that art can be said to imitate nature only because nature isn’t nature (an insight that is surely at work as well in Diller+Scofidio’s Slow House project)—­which is another way of saying that all observations, including those of nature, are contingent, and of necessity blind to their own contingency. To put it in a Deleuzean rather than Luhmannian register, we might say that Blur virtualizes the very nature it “imitates,” but only, paradoxically, by concretizing that virtualization in its formal decisions—­a n “imitation of nature” that formally renders the impossibility of an “imitation of nature.” As Luhmann puts it, in an analysis that is thematized, as it were, in the blurriness of Diller+Scofidio’s project (and in the critical intent they attach to it), “Art makes visible possibilities of order that would otherwise remain invisible. It alters conditions of visibility/invisibility in the world by keeping invisibility constant and making visibility subject to variation.”34 And here, I think we can bring into the sharpest possible focus (if the metaphor can be allowed in this context!) the brilliance of the project’s “refusal” of architecture and its strategy of focusing on “the radicality of an absent building.” In this context, one might say that the strength of Blur’s formal intervention vis à vis the medium of architecture is precisely its formlessness, because it is calculated to bring into focus how “the realm officially known as architecture” (to borrow Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau’s phrase) can no longer “keep invisibility constant and make visibility subject to variation.” “Official architecture” invisibilizes the invisibility of the world precisely by being too visible, too legible. And in so doing, as art, it might as well be invisible. Here, we might recall Luhmann’s suggestive comments about Christo’s wrapping of architectural structures. In an earlier moment of the “postmodern” in architecture, “quotation” of historical styles, elements, and the like attempts, as Luhmann puts it, “to copy a differentiated and diverse environment into the artwork,” but this in turn only raises the further formal problem of “whether, and in what way, the work can claim unity, and whether it can assert itself against its own (!) ‘requisite variety.’”35 “How,” as Luhmann puts it, “can the art system reflect upon its own differentiation, not only in the form of theory, but also in individual works of art?” Christo’s response to this problem, he suggests,

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FIGURE 1. Christo and Jeanne-­Claude, Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin 1971–­1995. Picturebank/Alamy stock photograph.

is “particularly striking: if objects can no longer legitimize their boundaries and distinctions, they must be wrapped.”36 From this perspective, we might think of Blur as a wrapped building with no building inside. Or better yet, as a wrapped building in which even the wrapping has too much form and begins to obsolesce the minute form is concretized—­hence the need for fog and blur. But what can it mean to say that an architectural project is concerned primarily with having little enough form? Here—­a nd once again the otherwise daunting abstraction of systems theory is indispensable—­we need to understand that in no sense are we talking about objects, substances, materials, or things when we use the term “form.” Nor are we even, for that matter, talking about “shape” when we talk about form in Luhmann’s sense. As Luhmann explains: The word formal here does not refer to the distinction, which at first guided modern art, between form and matter or form and content, but to the characteristics of an indicating operation that observes, as if from the corner of its eye, what happens on the other side of form. In this way, the work of art points the observer toward an observation of form. . . . It consists in

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demonstrating the compelling forces of order in the realm of the possible. Arbitrariness is displaced beyond the boundaries of art into the unmarked space. If . . . one transgresses this boundary and steps from the unmarked into the marked space, things no longer happen randomly.37

In this way, form stages the question of “whether an observer can observe at all except with reference to an order,” which is to say that it stages both the inescapability of the fact that the world only emerges through observations employing distinctions, and it stages the production of the unobservable (the “blind spot” of observation) that accompanies such observations. 38 As Luhmann will put it (rather unexpectedly), “The world displays all the qualities that Nicholas of Cusa ascribed to God: it is neither small nor large, neither unity nor diversity, it neither has a beginning nor is it without beginning—­a nd this is why the world needs forms.”39 “From this vantage,” he continues, we can say then that the function of art is to make the world appear within the world—­w ith an eye toward the ambivalent situation that every time something is made available for observation something else withdraws, that, in other words, the activity of distinguishing and indicating that goes on in the world conceals the world. . . . Yet a work of art is capable of symbolizing the reentry of the world into the world because it appears—­just like the world—­incapable of emendation.40

With regard to this “reentry,” two related points should be highlighted here to fully appreciate the specificity of Blur’s formal innovations. First, form is in a profound sense a temporal problem (if for no other reason than because of the contingency of any constitutive distinction); and second, formal decisions operate on two levels, what we might call the “internal” and “external”—­they operate, that is, in relating the formal decisions of the artwork itself to the larger system of art, but also in relating the artwork as a whole to its larger environment, of which the subsystem of art is only a part. As Luhmann explains, What is at stake, operatively speaking, in the production and observation of a work of art is always a temporal unity that is

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either no longer or not yet observed. In this sense, the artwork is the result of intrinsic form decisions and, at the same time, the metaform determined by these decisions, which, by virtue of its inner forms, can be distinguished from the unmarked space of everything else—­t he work as fully elaborated object.41

Even more forcefully, one might say that here we are not dealing with objects at all but rather with what systems theory sometimes calls eigenvalues or eigenbehaviors, recursive distinctions that unfold— and can only unfold—­over time, even as they can only be experienced in the fleeting moment of the present.42 From this vantage, “objects appear as repeated indications, which, rather than having a specific opposite, are demarcated against ‘everything else.’” In fact, Luhmann suggests that we might follow Mead and Whitehead, who “assigned a function to identifiable and recognizable objects, whose primary purpose is to bind time. This function is needed because the reality of experience and actions consists in mere event sequences—­that is, in an ongoing self-­dissolution.”43 These terms, it seems to me, are remarkably apt for understanding how Blur’s significance as a work of art under conditions of (post)modernity goes far beyond the mere thematizations we can readily articulate, and which Diller+Scofidio themselves clearly reject. Indeed, in its unstable form, shifting constantly in both shape and density of light and moisture, this building that is not a building could well be described as epitomizing “a temporal unity that is either no longer or not yet observed”: a something that is also, to use Diller+Scofidio’s words, a nothing. In short, a blur! At the same time, paradoxically, as a “metaform,” one could hardly imagine a more daring and original formal decision that dramatically distinguishes itself from “the unmarked space of everything else.” When we combine this understanding of the artwork as what Luhmann will call a “quasi-­object” with attention to the double aspect of its formal decisions outlined above, we can zero in on the fact that, paradoxically, the “shapelessness” (if you like) of the Blur building is precisely what constitutes its most decisive and binding formal quality—­a nd not least, of course, with regard to adjacent formal decisions in the realm of architecture. Its “refusal” of architecture and its dematerialization of the architectural medium

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paradoxically epitomizes the question of architectural form from a Luhmannian perspective; that is, the shape-­shifting, loosely-­ defined space of Blur only dramatizes what is true of all architectural forms. As the shifting winds over Lake Neuchâtel blow the cloud this way and that, the joke is not on Blur, but rather on any architectural forms that think they are “solid,” real “objects”—­that have, one might say, a compositional rather than systematic understanding of the medium. In this light, one is tempted to read those moments when the winds swept nearly all the cloud away to reveal the underlying tensegrity structure—­leaving, as one reviewer put it, the view of “an unfinished building awaiting its skin”44— as the most instructive of all, insofar as THE BUILDING, “official architecture,” is revealed to be precisely not “the building.” And as we have already noted, the effectiveness of these formal decisions is only enhanced by the fact that they are smuggled inside the Trojan Horse of the work’s savvy play with the “art imitates nature” theme. From a systems theory point of view, we might say that the joke here is not on those who think that art imitates nature, but rather on those who think it doesn’t—­not in the sense of “an imitation of something that presumably exists along with and outside of art,” but rather in the sense that “it now imitates the world’s invisibility, a nature that can no longer be apprehended as a whole.”45 Another name for this fact, as we have already noted, is contingency—­namely, the contingency of the distinctions and indications that make the world available and that, because contingent, simultaneously make it unavailable. And it is against that contingency, of course, that the artwork and its formal decisions assert themselves. Luhmann writes, “All forms, especially forms of art, must persist against the challenge that they could be different. They convince by evoking alternative possibilities while neutralizing any preference for forms not chosen.”46 The genius of Blur from this vantage is that it submits itself to this contingency in the vagaries and malleability of its shape, its “loose” binding of time (to recall Whitehead and Mead’s definition of objects), while simultaneously taking it into account, but as it were preemptively, within its own frame, as “an indicating operation that observes, as if from the corner of its eye, what happens on the other side of form.”47 And in doing so, “it employs constraints for

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the sake of increasing the work’s freedom in disposing over other constraints,” and this includes, of course, those contingencies that, rather than threatening the work with obsolescence, now increase the resonance of the work with its environment (with all that it is not), since those contingencies are now seen to be always already anticipated by the work’s noncontingent formal decision itself. Of course, all of this raises the question of what, exactly, art is, if the formlessness of the object is being equated with the strength of its formal statement, if the strongest form of “something” turns out to be “nothing.” Here, however, we need only remind ourselves that questions of form are not questions of objects (and indeed, if we follow Whitehead, Mead, and systems theory, even objects are not questions of objects). And if that’s the case, then perhaps we are better off rephrasing the question along the following lines: What is the relationship between discourse about art and the art object itself? On this point, we would do well, Luhmann rightly suggests, to remember the lessons of Duchamp, Cage, and conceptual art in general.48 “One can ask how an art object distinguishes itself from other natural or artificial objects, for example, from a urinal or a snow shovel,” Luhmann writes. “Marcel Duchamp used the form of a work of art to impress this question on his audience and, in a laudable effort, eliminated all sensuously recognizable differences between the two. But can a work of art at once pose and answer this question?”49 The answer, as it turns out, is no, because the meaning of Duchamp’s snow shovel—­t he significance of its first-­order formal decisions—­depends upon (and anticipates and manipulates) a second-­order discourse of “art” criticism and theory in terms of which those first-­order decisions are received. The first-­order observer need only “identify a work of art as an object in contradistinction to all other objects or processes.” But for those who experience the work and want to understand its significance, the situation is quite different. Here, the project of Cage and Duchamp is “to confront the observer with the question of how he goes about identifying a work of art as a work of art. The only possible answer is: by observing observations”:50 The observer uses a distinction to indicate what he observes. This happens when it happens. But if one wants to observe

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whether and how this happens, employing a distinction is not enough—­one must also indicate the distinction. The concept of form serves this purpose. . . . Whoever observes forms observes other observers in the rigorous sense that he is not interested in the materiality, expectations, or utterances of these observers, but strictly and exclusively in their use of distinctions. 51

Luhmann argues, in fact, that this is the issue that art and art criticism have been struggling with at least since the early modern period. In the convention of the still life, for example, which assumes great importance in Italian and Dutch painting, we are presented with “unworthy” objects that “could acquire meaning only by presenting the art of presentation itself,” focusing our attention on “the blatant discrepancy between the banality of the subject matter and its artful presentation”—­a process that is only further distilled in Duchamp’s snow shovel.52 Indeed, part of the genius of Duchamp’s work is that it reveals how the formula of “disinterested pleasure” fails to clarify what can be meant by artful presentation as “an end in itself,” which only begs this question: “There is perhaps a special interest in being disinterested, and can we assume that such an interest also motivates the artist who produces the work, and who can neither preclude nor deny an interest in the interests of others?”53 For Luhmann, such questions index the situation of art as a social system under functionally differentiated modernity, of art struggling to come to terms with its raison d’être—­i n systems theory terms, to achieve and justify its operational closure, or “autonomy.” “To create a work of art under these sociohistorical conditions,” then, “amounts to creating specific forms for an observation of observations. This is the sole purpose for which the work is ‘produced.’ From this perspective, the artwork accomplishes the structural coupling between first-­ and second-­order observations in the realm of art. . . . The artist accomplishes this by clarifying—­v ia his own observations of the emerging work—­how he and others will observe the work.”54 Now such an understanding is well and good, but it would seem to leave wholly to the side the question of the experience of art as a perceptual and phenomenological event—­something that would appear to be rather spectacularly foregrounded in Blur, as

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Mark Hansen has recently argued, and foregrounded, moreover, quite self-­consciously in terms of the function of spectacle in the tradition of the international Expo as a genre (a matter emphasized in Diller’s lectures about the project at Princeton and elsewhere). 55 Indeed, one might well argue that this, and not the coupling of first-­ and second-­order observations by means of form, is what motivates contemporary art, its experimentation with different media, and so on—­a rule that is only proved, so the argument would unfold, by the exception of conceptual art. Yet here, it seems to me, we find one of the more original and innovative aspects of Luhmann’s theory of art as a social system. Luhmann’s point is not to deny the phenomenological aspect of the artwork, but rather to point out the fact—­which seems rather obvious, upon reflection—­t hat the meaning of the artwork cannot be referenced to, much less reduced to, this material and perceptual aspect. Rather, the work of art co-­presents perception and communication—­a nd does so in a way that turns out to be decisive for what another theoretical vocabulary might call art’s “critical” function in relation to society. To understand how this happens, we need to remember that, for Luhmann, perception (and beyond that, consciousness) and communication operate in mutually exclusive, operationally closed, autopoietic systems, though they are structurally coupled through media such as language. As Luhmann puts it in a formulation surely calculated to provoke: “Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate.”56 “Communication operates with an unspecific reference to the participating state of mind,” he continues; “it is especially unspecific as to perception. It cannot copy states of mind, cannot imitate them, cannot represent them.”57 At first, this contention seems almost ridiculously counterintuitive, but in fact, upon reflection, it is rather common sensical. At the same time, however, consciousness and perception are a medium for communication. On the one hand, unperceived communications do not exist (if they did, how would we know?); communication, Luhmann writes, “can hardly come into being without the participation of the mind,” and in this sense “the relationship is asymmetrical.”58 On the other hand, “communication

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uses the mind as a medium precisely because communication does not thematize the mind in question. Metaphorically speaking, the mind in question remains invisible to communication.”59 The mind is (of necessity) its own operationally closed biological system, but because it is also a necessary medium for communication, “we can say that the mind has the privileged position of being able to disturb, stimulate, and irritate communication.”60 It cannot instruct or direct communications—­“reports of perceptions are not perceptions themselves”—­but it can “stimulate communication without ever becoming communication.”61 For several reasons, this “irreducibility” of perception to communication (and vice versa) and their asymmetrical relationship is crucial to what a different theoretical vocabulary would call art’s “critical” function. First, as Dietrich Schwanitz notes, perception and communication operate at different speeds—­a nd this is something art puts to use. “Compared to communication,” he writes, the dimension of perception displays a considerably higher rate of information processing. The impression of immediacy in perception produces the notion that the things we perceive are directly present. Naturally, this is an illusion, for recent brain research has proven that sensory input is minimal compared with the complexity of neuronal self-­perception. . . . Together, cultural and neuronal construction thus constitute a form of mediation that belies the impression of immediacy in perception. That does not, however, alter the fact that perception takes place immediately as compared to communication, the selective process of which is a sequential one.62

To put it another way, although both perception and communication operate as autopoietic systems on the basis of difference and distinction, the very different speeds of the processing of these systems makes it appear that perception confirms, stabilizes, and makes immediate, while communication (to put it in Derridean terms) differs, defers, and temporalizes. In the work of art, the difference between perception and communication is “re-­entered” on the side of communication. But because of this asymmetry in speeds, it is re-­entered in a way that calls attention to the contin-

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gency of communication—­not of the first-­order communication of the artwork, which appears incapable of emendation (it is what it is), but of the second-­order observation of the work’s meaning and its “critical” function vis à vis social systems, including the system of art. This can be accomplished, as in Blur, by making perception “outrun” communication, as it were (a process well described by Hansen), the better to provoke a question that the work itself is made to answer; or, conversely, in a work like On Kawara’s Date Paintings, it can be accomplished by using the deficit of perceptual depth or complexity in the “paintings” themselves to call attention to the difference between the work’s immediate perceptual surface and its larger meaning.63 Thus, the artwork co-­presents the difference between perception and communication—­a nd in fact, this difference is what allows art to have something like a privileged relationship to what is commonly invoked as the “ineffable” or the “incommunicable”—­a nd it uses perception to “irritate” and stimulate communication to respond to the question, “What does this perceptual event mean?” As Luhmann puts it in a key passage for understanding his theory of art: The function of art would then consist in integrating what is in principle incommunicable—­namely, perception—­i nto the communication network of society. . . . The art system concedes to the perceiving consciousness its own unique adventure in observing artworks—­a nd yet makes available as communication the formal selection that triggered the adventure. Unlike verbal communication, which all too quickly moves toward a yes/no bifurcation, communication guided by perception relaxes the structural coupling of consciousness and communication (without destroying it, of course). . . . In a manner that is matched neither by thought nor by communication, perception presents astonishment and recognition in a single instant. Art uses, enhances, and in a sense exploits the possibilities of perception in such a way that it can present the unity of this distinction. . . . The pleasure of astonishment, already described in antiquity, refers to the unity of the difference between astonishment and recognition, to the paradox that both intensify one another.64

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And, Luhmann adds—­i n an observation directly relevant to Blur’s audacious formal solution to the “problem” of architecture—­ “Extravagant forms play an increasingly important role in this process.”65 This is not, however, simply a matter of “pleasure” or “aesthesis.” In fact, it is what gives art something like a privileged critical relationship to society, because art “establishes a reality of its own that differs from ordinary reality”; “despite the work’s perceptibility, despite its undeniable reality,” Luhmann writes, “it simultaneously constitutes another reality. . . . Art splits the world into a real world and an imaginary world,” and “the function of art concerns the meaning of this split.”66 By virtue of its unique relationship to the difference between perception and communication, art can raise this question in an especially powerful way not available to other social systems. If we think of objects themselves as eigen-­behaviors (to seize once again on Heinz von Foerster’s term), as stabilizations of various durations made possible by the repeated, recursive application of particular distinctions, then we might observe that “the objects that emerge from the recursive self-­application of communication”—­versus, say, rocks or trees—­ “contribute more than any other kinds of norms and sanctions to supplying the social system with necessary redundancies”; they literally fix social space. This is probably even more true, Luhmann observes, of such “quasi-­objects” (to use Michel Serres’s phrase) “that have been invented for the sake of this specific function, such as kings or soccer balls. Such ‘quasi-­objects’ can be comprehended only in relation to this function”—­indeed it is their sole reason for being. “Works of art,” Luhmann continues, are quasi-­objects in this sense. They individualize themselves by excluding the sum total of everything else; not because they are construed as given but because their significance as objects implies a realm of social regulation. One must scrutinize works of art as intensely and with as close attention to the object as one does when watching kings and soccer balls; in this way—­a nd in the more complex case where one observes other observers by focusing on the same object—­the socially regulative reveals itself.67

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And when we remember that, for Luhmann, this “more complex” case is represented nowhere more clearly than in our experience of the mass media, the relationship between Blur’s formal decisions as a work of art and its critical agenda of shedding light on “the socially regulative”—­on the terrain of an international media expo, no less—­comes even more forcefully into view. In these terms, works of art, in calling our attention to the realm of “the socially regulative,” cast light on precisely those contingencies, constructions, and norms that the mass media, in its own specific mode of communication, occludes. In the first instance (the artwork), we seem to be dealing with completely ad hoc, constructed objects whose realm of reference is not “the real world” at all but rather that of the imagination; in the latter, we appear to be dealing with the opposite, in which the representations of the mass media are motivated by the objects and facts of “the real world.” In fact, however, this thematization in terms of “imaginative” and “real” only obscures the need to rearticulate the relationship in terms of the dynamics of first-­ and second-­order observation of different social systems. As Luhmann points out, “The mass media create the illusion that we are first-­order observers whereas in fact this is already second-­order observing”;68 or, more baldly still, “put in Kantian terms: the mass media generate a transcendental illusion.”69 The mass media’s rendering of reality, however—­a nd this is a point that the “post-­ethical” character of Diller+Scofidio’s work insists on in a very specific way—­is not to be taken, “as most people would be inclined to think, a distortion of reality. It is a construction of reality. For from the point of view of a postontological theory of observing systems, there is no distinct reality out there (who, then, would make these distinctions?). . . . There is no transcendental subject. We have to rely on the system of the mass media that construct our reality. . . . If there is no choice in accepting these observations, because there is no equally powerful alternative available, we have at least the possibility to deconstruct the presentations of the mass media, their presentations of the present.”70 That deconstruction of the mass media in Blur proceeds by means of the artwork’s second-­order observation of the first-­order system of the mass media, but that observation, in turn, only

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happens by art “doing what it does,” as its own first-­order system, with its own code, its own blind spot. That formal symmetry between the two observing systems, however—­the fact that the dynamics of communication in autopoietic social systems operate in the same ways in each system (on the basis of paradoxical self-­reference, constitutive blindness to the unity of the system’s core distinction, and so on)—­only throws into critical relief the difference in the relationship of communication and perception (and in the case at hand, specifically visual perception) that is quite specific to each system: a difference that Blur will put to critical use under the thematization of “spectacle.” We can gain a sharper sense of just how this is the case when we recall that, for Luhmann, electronic mass media is just the latest in a series of powerful developments in the history of what he calls “media of dissemination,” beginning with language and then, crucially, the invention of writing and printing, whose power lies in their ability to make communication independent from a specific perceptual substrate or set of coordinates. “Alphabetized writing made it possible to carry communication beyond the temporally and spatially limited circle of those who were present at any particular time,” he writes, and language per se—­a nd even more so writing and printing—­“increases the understandability of communication beyond the sphere of perception.”71 Unlike oral speech, which “can compensate for lack of information with persuasion, and can synchronize speaking, hearing, and accepting in a rhythmic and rhapsodic way, leaving literally no time for doubt,” writing and printing “enforce an experience of the difference that constitutes communication”—­namely, the difference between communication and perception—­a nd “they are, in this precise sense, more communicative forms of communication.”72 For Luhmann, the electronic mass media represent the culmination of this general line of historical development. Indeed, “for the differentiation of a system of the mass media, the decisive achievement can be said to have been the invention of technologies of dissemination which not only circumvent interaction among those co-­present, but effectively render such interaction impossible for the mass media’s own communications”—­a process begun with the advent of the printing press, when “the volume of writ-

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ten material multiplied to the extent that oral interaction among all participants in communication is effectively and visibly rendered impossible.”73 And so it is, Luhmann argues, that in the wake of the so-­called democratization of politics and its dependence on the media of public opinion . . . those participating in politics—­politicians and voters alike—­observe one another in the mirror of public opinion. . . . The level of first-­order observation is guaranteed by the continuous reports of the mass media. . . . Second-­order observation occurs via the inferences one can draw about oneself or others, if one assumes that those who wish to participate politically encounter one another in the mirror of public opinion, and that this is sufficient.74

It is just this situation that Blur attempts to address, if we believe Diller+Scofidio—­namely, by subjecting communication in its mass-­mediated mode (as something immediately legible and consumable) to a perceptual blur, so that spectacle operates here not in the services of immediately meaningful, prefab ideological content (as in the electronic mass media), but rather as the quite unavoidable provocation to another communication whose meaning is far from immediately clear and, in being so, operates directly in the services of art’s own communication and autopoiesis (i.e., “What does this mean? Is this art?”). In this way, Diller+Scofidio’s project might be understood as bringing into focus (1) how the contingency of communication is managed and manipulated (quite improbably, as Luhmann reminds us) by the “socially regulative” in the electronic mass media, and (2) how that dynamic, in turn, is coupled to a certain “consumerist” schematization of visuality, in which the difference between perception and communication is always already “re-­entered” in mass-­mediated communication to produce a “pre-­d igested,” iconographic visual space readily incorporated by a subject whose (un)ethical relation to the visual might best be summed up as “CLICK HERE.” We might say, then, that Blur uses the difference between perception and communication in a way diametrically opposed to what we find it in the electronic mass media, and then routes that difference between art and the mass media through the work’s formal choices to render them specifically meaningful as art, and not just as well-­meaning

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critical platitude. What is remarkable here, of course, is not that Blur makes this (somewhat unremarkable) observation about the relationship of perception and communication in electronic mass media, a relationship particularly evident in the realm of visuality; what is remarkable is that Blur does so without saying so, by insisting only on itself. This is simply to say that Blur communicates this difference as art. And if it didn’t, we wouldn’t pay any attention to it.

3 Time as Architectural Medium Koolhaas and Mau’s Tree City

The five remarkable finalists for the much-­publicized Toronto Parc Downsview Park competition of 2000—­a design for a 320-­acre site on a former military base, Canada’s first national urban park—­a re, of course, proposals for works in architecture, specifically landscape architecture (though that difference, as I will suggest later, appears to be of some moment, particularly in the winning entry).1 But they are also remarkable for another reason: as experiments in how to think anew the relationship between nature and culture, or—­to use a distinction I borrowed a few years ago from the political scientist Tim Luke—­between “green” and “gray” ecologies.2 (Indeed, one might ask, what else can the seemingly innocuous phrase “urban park” mean at this moment in time other than this very necessity?) Green ecologies are those of the organic, the living, the biomass, while gray ecologies are of the machinic and technological, the electronic. Or, to put it in the terms used by Bernard Tschumi’s proposal for Downsview, ecologies of the “coyote” and ecologies of the “digital.”3 In fact, how the Tschumi proposal handles the term “digital” is a good example of what I mean. On the one hand, it refers to electronically mediated mass culture based on binary coding, the sort of thing associated with the large “image screens” that are a central part of his design; on the other hand, the “digital” harkens back etymologically to the digits, the fingers. Here, it would be tempting—­a nd entirely to the point—­to recall Jacques Derrida’s reading of the figure of the hand in relation to the nature/culture opposition as framed in Martin Heidegger’s work. In Derrida’s “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,” for example, the hand stands as a symptom of Heidegger’s all-­too-­problematic ontological opposition of the world of the human and the world of the animal. For Heidegger, the meaning of the hand, properly understood, is 43

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determined not by biological or utilitarian function—­“does not let itself be determined as a bodily organ of gripping,” as Derrida puts it 4—­but rather by its expression of the geschlecht, or species being (loosely translated), of humanity that, in opposition to the rest of creation, rests upon the human possession of speech and thought, which in turn opens an “abyss” between the grasping or “prehension” associated with the “prehensile” organs of the ape, 5 and the hand of “man” that “is far from these in an infinite way (unendlich) through the abyss of its being.”6 To misunderstand the hand of the human as determined by utility and function is to repeat the sin of “Western conceptualizing as a kind of sublimized violence,” as Stanley Cavell has put it, a sort of “clutching” or “grasping” through what we might call “prehensile” conceptualization. This mode of violence is most famously thematized in Heidegger, of course, as the violence “expressed in the world dominion of technology.”7 For the matter at hand (at hand!), we could scarcely do better than remember Heidegger’s aversion to the typewriter and typographic mechanization, which is “a-­signifying” because it “loses the hand,” as Heidegger puts it; in its anonymous standardization and in its spacing of elements, it destroys the unity of thinking, speaking, and writing. And thus, Heidegger laments, “in typewriting, all men resemble one another.”8 For Heidegger, then, the proper subservience of the technological to the human rests upon a prior ontological opposition between the natural and the human, the prehensile and the comprehensile, we might say, here, figured pointedly as the difference between the Man of the Hand and (to return to Tschumi) the Coyote, who is condemned forever to wander between the ontological orders of the stone at one end of the Heideggerian universe and the world “of spirit,” of Being as such, that is proper only to the human, at the other. Remembering Heidegger on technology helps throw into relief as well the very different and distinctly contemporary reconjugation of the technical and the natural that we find in the Downsview Park proposals. We could call this reconjugation “postmodern,” I suppose, to mark its opposition to Heidegger’s modernism, but it seems to me that what is going on in the Downsview proposals is something quite distinct and different from the associations that

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usually cluster around “postmodernism.” Here, the double take on the “digital” in Tschumi’s proposal is again suggestive for thinking about the proposals as a whole, and it is useful to remember that the etymology of “digit” refers not only to “the terminal divisions of the hand,” as the OED so sharply puts it, but also to a unit of measurement (as used, for example, by the Romans). For the digital, as the Tschumi proposal puts it, refers also to a “perimeter landscape of earthworks” that “interlocks with the interior like the cupped fingers of the left and right hand”—­a figure that appears as well in the ravine structure proposed in the Brown and Storey entry. They are, in the Tschumi proposal, “fingers of nature” that “increase the interface between natural artifacts and cultural ones,” and that “can be compared to the fractal phenomenon of viscous fingering.” Indeed, Tschumi and his collaborators argue, “The fractal dimension of all edges and interfaces in the Park is a crucial element of our strategy”—­hence the relevance of remembering the digit as a unit of measure—­because such fractal phenomena, as John Casti puts it, exhibit “linear self-­similarity, in the sense that any part of the object is exactly like the whole”; that is to say, “they have exactly the same degree of irregularity at all scales of measurement.”9 The “digital” in Tschumi’s proposal points, then, in two different directions, and in doing so it provides a very dense and compressed instance of a new way of theorizing the relations of nature and culture at work in the Downsview proposals as a whole. “Emergence,” “self-­organizational unfoldings,” “circuit and through-­flow ecologies,” “sustaining and multiplying complexity over time,” “webs” of “strong attractors” and “grammar strings,” “open phasing,” “function-­based circuit systems.” There are important differences between these concepts—­a point to which I will return in a moment—­but what they all have in common is that they thoroughly take for granted the conceptual apparatus of systems theory, which is based upon the central innovation of replacing the familiar ontological dualities of the philosophical tradition—­chiefly, for our purposes, culture and nature—­w ith the functional distinction between system and environment. Broadly speaking, biological systems and social systems are self-­referential and self-­producing—­they are “autopoietic,” to use

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Maturana and Varela’s term—­a nd they secure their autopoiesis by using distinctions based on a self-­referential, constitutive code, to selectively filter and respond to an environment that is always already infinitely more complex than any given system. But what is important for our purposes at the moment is that there is a reciprocal relationship here of co-­specification; the environment is not simply “given” (that would land us back into a thinly disguised concept of “nature” in the traditional sense) but is in a crucial sense produced. It is always the environment of the system, the “outside” of an “inside” produced by the constitutive act of distinction and selection that any system uses to secure its operations. As Niklas Luhmann succinctly puts it, “The environment receives its unity through the system and only in relation to the system. . . . It is different for every system because every system excludes only itself from its environment.”10 In this way, what was previously a rigid, uncrossable ontological boundary between two sides of the distinction—­between nature and culture, between the biological and the mechanical, and so on—­is now made dynamic and, as it were, portable in the sense that the same formal mechanism may now be used to think—­a nd link—­across what were in the past discrete ontological domains. (This enables one to compare quite precisely thermo-­regulation in biological systems, warm-­blooded animals, for example, with the self-­regulation of thermostatic mechanical systems, HVACs, let’s say, or to model the firing of neurons and the behaviors of neural nets using digital technologies.) Now the pragmatic payoffs here would seem obvious enough for the attempts to think through the interlacing of ecological, transportational, and other systems in the Downsview proposals. But what I wish to stress is not just a pragmatic and functional shift, but a philosophical one as well, in which the question of the relationship between nature and culture can now be de-­ontologized in the traditional sense and posed anew, not as questions of what but as questions of how, not as questions of substance but as questions of strategy—­which has, of course, profound implications for the design process. It is only in light of such a shift that we can make sense, for example, of Koolhaas and Mau’s contention in their winning Tree City entry that “instead of restoring Downsview to

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a previous natural state, Tree City manufactures nature for civic ends. It is a fabricated landscape . . . 100% ‘artificial’ and 100% ‘natural,’ . . unambiguously administrative in ambition AND entirely organic in spirit.” Here, however, we need to take note of the important differences I have discussed in detail elsewhere between what is often referred to as first-­order and second-­order systems theory, with the former more typically concerned with processes of homeostasis, positive feedback, steering, and the like (think here of the work of Gregory Bateson or Norbert Wiener) and the latter concerned with complexity, contingency, and how they relate to processes that now go by the names of “emergence” and “self-­organization.” In this light, all of the proposals are framed and informed not just by systems theory in some vague sense, but very specifically by second-­order systems theory. Here, the rhetoric of the Emergent Ecologies proposal of Corner and Allen could scarcely be more representative. “Our approach,” they write, “is emergent and dynamic: an organizational matrix for the life of the site to unfold,” in which the “landscape of circuits and flows simply guides or steers the always emergent processes [of] matter and information.” Similarly, Brown and Storey’s Emergent Landscapes project (there’s that term “emergent” again!) proposes “an evolving landscape of stages, phases of order and stability,” a “tableau of evolving relationships, momentum and self-­organizing structures.” Or finally, Foreign Office’s “new synthetic landscape” grows from the commitment, as they put it in their proposal, that, “faced with complexity, we respond by sustaining and multiplying that complexity over time.” Now I do not mean to ignore the quite considerable differences between these proposals and the strategies that they employ, but simply to highlight the fact that embracing the paradigms of emergence and self-­organization creates a new and in fact fundamental problem: a medium associated above all with space now has as its constitutive problem time and temporalization—­more specifically, how to temporalize design and the constraints and selections built into it. What is threatened here—­or promised, depending on how one looks at it—­is that the architectural medium is thereby submitted to a kind of dematerialization or decomposition by the

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problem of time. Here, the problem of time cannot be separated from the question of specific media; indeed, what is brought into sharp focus in the relation of time and media is time’s own asynchronicity, over and against what Louis Althusser once called an “ideological” concept of time as self-­identical, seamless, and continuous across all spaces. Once we pay attention to specific media, the problem of time in relation to design becomes a question of specific speeds and velocities and how to coordinate them; biological and ecological elements and systems have certain rates of development, change, and decay, of course, but so do buildings and other structures, which are subject to quite different speeds of persistence and deterioration. The Downsview entries confront this problem on a spectrum ranging from Foreign Office and Tschumi at one end—­which produce a rather tight coupling of temporal horizons and possible scenarios with relatively hardwired structural commitments up front, ones that predispose some temporal horizons and not others—­to Corner and Allen and Koolhaas and Mau at the other, in which this relationship is one of relatively loose coupling. This problem of time in relation to specific media, which is made inescapable by the embrace of the paradigm of emergence, is registered in an especially pointed way in the Koolhaas/Mau proposal, in which, they write, “the landscape will be prioritized over the realm officially known as architecture,” and which makes what they humorously call “the ultimate sacrifice” of the construction of “costly new buildings,” and devotes those resources instead to the temporalization of the design’s meaning through a different medium with a different speed: the “vegetal.” In Tree City, the reduction of “hard” commitments up front is a strategy for engaging in what Niklas Luhmann calls the “temporalization of complexity”11—­of how the complexity of the internal relations of the park’s elements can remain responsive over time to changing and unanticipated demands from its surrounding environment. To put it schematically, power over space in the short run, in the form of structures and buildings, is swapped for power over time in the long run, and therefore—­to put perhaps too fine a point on it—­t ime, not space, becomes the constitutive medium of the project. In this sense, the “looseness” or “weakness”

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of the coupling of temporal horizons and structural elements in Koolhaas and Mau is precisely its strength. And from this vantage, the constitutive question for the Downsview project becomes something like “Can you wait?” to which Tree City provides what we might think of as the “slowest” answer of all the entries. There is, however, a final, less obvious relation between systems theory and the Downsview proposals at work here, and that is the question of their relationship to different observational schema within what Luhmann calls “functionally differentiated” society. Here, to put it in shorthand, “the park” is not a thing—­ certainly not an object—­but rather an accretion of distinctions and selections made from within a particular observational system and its code: a point registered in the jury report’s concluding statement that “Tree City outlines a vision of future park lands as intriguing as a work of art, but also as malleable as communities of tomorrow could wish to find.” From this vantage, the aesthetic (or anti-­aesthetic) of Koolhaas and Mau may be seen as a refusal of design, composition, pictorialism, and the like in favor of a strategy of production and temporalization. On the other hand, however, insofar as we are to regard these projects as something like art, then those choices must be seen as not only aesthetic ones, but quite exemplary aesthetic ones at that. From one observational schema, then, “the park” may be viewed as a functional component of the larger urban space for which and in which it provides certain services, in which case the question is not its autonomy but precisely the opposite: how it functions as an element within a larger matrix of social systems of which it is part. On the other hand, it may be viewed as part of the social system of art, in which case the question is precisely its autonomy and how that autonomy communicates the larger problem of the autopoiesis of art as a social system in functionally differentiated society. If we keep in mind these differences—­a nd keep in mind that they are irreducible, that there is no totalizing perspective from which one observation may be subordinated to the other—­t hen “the park” is quite literally a different entity depending upon the observational schema we use, which system we choose (transportational, economic, aesthetic, and so on) as the lens through which to view the park as an agent of that system’s autopoiesis.

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And hence, the design decisions about specific media in the pro­ posals—­say, the use or refusal of “the realm officially known as architecture”—­take on quite different functions and meanings depending on which observation we deploy. It is this irreducible difference between different observational schemas that is addressed in a particularly intelligent way by Koolhaas and Mau, precisely because of what we might think of as Tree City’s “weakness”—­its underspecification, its refusal to commit—­which makes it more available to the autopoiesis of other systems in ways not precluded up front, by choices made now. This does not mean that there is no strategy to Tree City; indeed, this is its strategy. At the same time, however, that underspecification must be justified on not merely functional but aesthetic grounds, and it is here that the proposal of Koolhaas and Mau is nimbly anti-­or post-­ representationalist in its refusal to try and “do it all,” to “include” or “represent” the various elements of the society that surrounds it. From this vantage—­t he vantage of the Downsview project seen now as a specific communication within the social system of art—­ the temporal dimension of the proposal is in a way beside the aesthetic point, and might even be seen (to put too fine a point on it) as simply the alibi for quite specific design decisions made right now as interventions in the contemporary fields of architecture, design, and art. Viewed this way, a major challenge faced by all of the entries—­a nd particularly by those that rely upon a tight juxtaposition of the “digital” and the “coyote” (to return to Tschumi’s terms) or that deploy something like the “dual mode” of Foreign Office—­is not so much the problem of composition, but rather how that problem relates to a second one of “thematization,” to which Koolhaas and Mau seem especially sensitive. For once the nature/culture distinction has been replaced by the system/environment distinction—­as is certainly the case with all of these entries—­t he problem then becomes how not to reproduce the historically founding and framing conundrum of what we might call the “ideology of the park” within the park itself. In these terms—­because the system/environment distinction is operative at every level, and has nothing to do with the apparently cognate distinction nature/culture—­the problem is not so much how to escape this conundrum as how to effectively displace it.

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Here, the entries that place a large premium on the initial outlay of large architectural structures and “gray” ecological spectacles face special challenges, I think, since they would seem to run a much greater risk of reinstating, via thematization, the very distinction between “nature” and “the social” that—­t heoretically, at least—­t hey say they have already in principle abandoned. Theoretically speaking, the “outside” produced by such architectural structures—­the unmarked space generated by their constitutive distinctions and selections that make them this structure and not some other—­need not have anything to do with the question of “nature,” and in fact the relevance of those distinctions lies, in the terms we are now using, in relation to other architectural structures. As Luhmann puts it, “A spatial position defines itself by providing access to other places. Architecture determines how the context of the edifice is to be seen. A sculpture defines its surrounding space.”12 And in this sense, the projects that indulge in a strong initial outlay of architectural structures and programming run a greater risk of inviting the “mistake,” we might say, of a thematized reading that they, in principle, reject. To put it another way, as Luhmann does in Art as a Social System: the question is how a work of art “presents itself to perception in such a way as to be recognizable as art”—­or in the case of Downs­ view Park, how we would know that we had wandered not only into a park and not some undesigned wasteland in the middle of the city, but also into a park made now and not a hundred years ago. To address this question, the concept of form is crucial, and in it, Luhmann writes, “two requirements must be fulfilled and inscribed into perception: the form must have a boundary, and there must be an ‘unmarked space’ excluded by this boundary.”13 This is obvious enough in works enclosed with a beginning and end (as in narrative fiction), a stage (as in drama), or a frame (as in a painting). But “sculpture or architecture presents an entirely different case,” he argues: Here, the boundary does not draw the viewer’s attention inward but instead directs it outward. The work permits no view into its depths, no penetration of its surface, (whatever the surface may betray of the work’s mass, volume, or material). The imaginary

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space is projected outward in the form of distinctions suggested by the work itself. Here, too, space is work-­specific space, visible so long as the focus is on the work and disappearing from view when the focus shifts to surrounding objects—­to the weeds in the castle garden.14

Now it would be tempting at this juncture to invoke the well-­ known distinction between the “rhizomatic” and “arborescent” in Deleuze and Guattari—­a reading suggested by what the jury report calls the “mesh” of connections cast over the surrounding area by Tree City. Indeed, one might very well view the project, with its 1,000 pathways and what Robert Somol has characterized as its “viral” or “cancerous” infection of the surrounding suburbs, as an attempt to transform the arborescent (Tree) into the rhizomatic (Tree City) in a perversely humorous literalization whose primary message might be, “Hey, trees are as close to official architecture as you’re going to get in this project!” Indeed, what is immediately most striking about the Koolhaas and Mau proposal is precisely its negativity, its posture of refusal, its repeated insistence on what it has opted not to do as much as what it does (in making “the ultimate sacrifice” of not doing architecture, and so on). And once this fundamental displacement is made, it is as if everything in the proposal must now be read in quotation marks; it is a kind of antiproposal or, better still, the kind of miming that Derrida associates with dissemination, which is not an achievement of representationalism and mimesis but precisely its displacement and erosion.15 This makes Tree City, in the end, a quite contemporary intervention, one very different from an earlier moment of the “postmodern” in architecture, in which “quotation” and the like attempts, as Luhmann puts it, “to copy a differentiated and diverse environment into the artwork,” which in turn only raises the further problem of “whether, and in what way, the work can claim unity, and whether it can assert itself against its own (!) ‘requisite variety.’”16 “How,” as Luhmann puts it, “can the art system reflect upon its own differentiation, not only in the form of theory, but also in individual works of art?”17 In this light, we might well view the mode of negativity and refusal in the proposal of Koolhaas and

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Mau as a kind of effort to displace any materialization of a commitment that might temporally constrain and chain their project to a structural representation that ceases to be relevant the moment it comes into being. And in this—­to reach back now to the Heidegger with which we began—­t he “unhandsomeness” of Tree City (to use Stanley Cavell’s phrase) is exactly what is most fetching about it; it refuses to grasp and fix the present for us, and in so doing it imagines the future, as Derrida has reminded us, in the only sense of the term worth having: as open.

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4 TheAlmost Installation That Ate Me Philip Beesley’s remarkable work Hylozoic Ground (realized in collaboration with engineer Rob Gorbet) is visually arresting, a diaphanous testimony to the union of function and form, an uncanny melding of the biomorphic and the high tech. Viewers have described it variously as breathtaking, fragile, reverential, magical, and symphonic. But as with the action painting that Beesley cites as an influence, we might well ask what sorts of “queasiness” lurk beneath the stunning formal surface of the work (to invoke a sensation that Beesley associates with our experience of this piece in particular).1 Part of it, no doubt, is the experience of being not just in an enveloping space of extraordinary dimensional depth and texture, but in one that moves peristaltically, at once synchronous and asynchronous with the viewer’s own actions. As Beesley puts it, “It’s an immersive environment, it’s about being inside something, not being on top of it and owning it, but being swallowed by it, with a sense of vertigo.”2 “Once you enter the room,” one journalist observes, “you can only hope it’s friendly.”3 What’s intriguing to me here is the sense of exposure that seems to accompany the experience of the work, one that (for artist and viewer alike) can border on a feeling of fascination and even empathy mixed with a vague atmosphere of menace. “It has a lot of hunger,” Beesley observes, and in fact one reviewer characterizes Hylozoic Ground as a “predator.” “It treats you much like any wild animal would treat a human,” Beasley observes; “You’re its food.”4 Indexed here is a fact crucial to both the phenomenological and conceptual torque of Hylozoic Ground: the fact of our own embodiment, of being a living body in space and time, one for whom there are stakes involved in location, movement, proximity, and proprioception. And following closely on the heels of this first question is a second that the work is bound to provoke: if we have and 55

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FIGURE 2. Philip Beesley, Hylozoic Ground, Canadian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2010. Photograph courtesy of Living Architecture Systems Group.

are a body, is it possible to say the same of this probing, swallowing, pulsing thing that surrounds us in Hylozoic Ground? (Indeed, one might even say that, for the work itself, the gap between having a body and being a body is even more minimal than it seems to be for us, and in that sense the work is even more resonant with contemporary attempts, such as we find in certain strains of cognitive science, to deontologize the question of subjectivity and think of it functionally instead.) 5 To raise such questions is simply to make the point that the issue of embodiment, which seems so natural, so straightforward, turns out to be more complicated than one might think at first blush—­a nd less “natural” too. But why would such a question ever arise about a meshwork of acrylic tiles, monofilaments, and microprocessors in the first place? What gives us the sense that we are less in the presence of a “thing,” an object, than surrounded by something that’s alive, something that fascinates and unsettles us precisely because it has its own animus, its own agenda? Here, it seems to me, Hylozoic Ground generates another kind of “queasiness” or “vertigo”—­the vertigo associated with what has come to be called “posthumanism”: the need to move beyond the comforting philosophical categories and certitudes of the humanism we have inherited from

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the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to a more nuanced and complex vocabulary that allows us to more deftly think the imbrication and enfolding of bodies, machines, codes, discourses, and spaces that we increasingly encounter in our own historical moment—­a nd in Hylozoic Ground. Here, one of the more powerful theoretical approaches associated with posthumanism—­systems theory—­can be of some help, not least of all because it deploys the same theoretical model and explanatory principles across what are, for humanism, ontologically discrete domains: subject vs. object, culture vs. nature, human vs. animal, organic vs. mechanical. From its very origins in the Macy Conferences in New York in 1942, systems theory (or cybernetics, as it was originally called) in the work of figures such as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, Claude Shannon, Gregory Bateson, and others was interested in using the same theoretical model, centered on the formal dynamics of feedback loops (both positive and negative) to explain phenomena as diverse as governors on steam engines, thermoregulation in warm-­blooded animals, neurophysiological processes in the human brain, targeting systems in antiaircraft weaponry, and much else besides.6 “When we talk about the processes of civilization, or evaluate human behavior, human organization, or any biological system,” Bateson writes in a now-­ seminal essay, “we are concerned with self-­corrective systems. Ba­ sically these systems are always conservative of something”—­not in the sense of “ideologically conservative,” of course, but in the sense of conserving a homeostatic norm, baseline, or setpoint.7 In Bateson’s view, the fundamental, minimal characteristics of any system—­be it biological, mechanical, or social—­a re, first, that the system operates according to differences, deviations from a norm or baseline or rule (the setpoint, say, of a thermostat, or the functional range of body temperature of a species of warm-­ blooded animal); second, that a system is composed of “closed loops or networks of pathways along which differences and transforms of differences shall be transmitted” so that they can be processed by the system as information; third, that “many events in the system shall be energized by the respondent part rather than by impact from the triggering part” (a fact neatly demonstrated on the terrain of the visual system by the famous “parallax effect,”

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which shows how the visual system doesn’t simply process input from the visual field in a linear fashion but actively and dynamically constructs it in response to visual stimuli); and fourth, that systems “show self-­correctiveness in the direction of homeostasis and/or in the direction of runaway”—­t hat is to say, in the direction of either negative feedback or positive feedback (for the former, think of thermoregulation in warm-­blooded animals, or cruise control in an automobile; for the latter, think of how coughing in response to an irritated throat only increases the irritation, which in turn increases coughing, or how drinking bottled water to avoid the contaminants caused by the very processes used to package, ship, and advertise bottled water only makes the problem worse). 8 In the rudiments of systems theory, we have the basic conceptual tools to begin to explain how Hylozoic Ground generates its uncanny effects by using some of the same principles and processes that constitute us as viewers. Not least of all, the traditional distinctions between “subject” and “object,” “culture” and “nature,” “spirit” and “matter,” and so on are now replaced by system theory’s fundamental distinction, between “system” and “environment,” and this distinction is not fixed but mobile, not material but formal—­that is to say (also), it is not ontological but functional. This is what Beesley is driving at, I think, when he suggests that he wants to develop “a stance in an intertwined world that moves beyond closed systems. . . . In terms of figure-­g round relationships the figures I compose are riddled with the ground.”9 Or, to put it in systems-­t heory parlance, the system is riddled with the environment, and vice versa, since both are co-­implicated and co-­ specified as part of the same loop of interactive exchange. The basic unit, as Bateson puts it, is not “organism versus environment,” but “organism-­in-­its-­environment”; the relationship between system and environment is “hyphenated,” if you like.10 Here, however, we need to supplement and extend these “first-­ order” systems-­t heory models with important refinements from later, “second-­order” systems theorists such as Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, and Niklas Luhmann to make headway on—­to make productive—an age-­old conundrum: Are systems open or closed? If they are open, how do they maintain their integrity and reproduce themselves? If they are closed, how do they interact ef-

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fectively and adaptively with the world? The answer, according to Maturana and Varela, is that autopoietic systems—­systems that are capable of producing and reproducing the elements that constitute the system itself—­a re both. Autopoietic systems are open in terms of their “structure” (the material nature of their elements and how they are affected by chemistry, energy flows, and the like), but closed in terms of their “organization” (the self-­referential, highly selective logic or code that they use to filter and process environmental complexity: not just “differences” but, as Bateson puts it, “a difference which makes a difference”11). As Maturana and Varela write of the nervous system: The operational closure of the nervous system tells us that it does not operate according to either of the two extremes: it is neither representational nor solipsistic. It is not solipsistic, because as part of the nervous system’s organism, it participates in the interactions of the nervous system with its environment. These interactions continuously trigger in it the structural changes that modulate its dynamics of states. . . . Nor is it representational, for in each interaction it is the nervous system’s structural state that specifies what perturbations are possible and what changes trigger them.12

What this means is that the environment, the “outside,” is always already the outside of a particular inside, since what can be recognized as a perturbation or stimuli for a system depends upon the system’s own qualities and capacities—­what Niklas Luhmann calls the “self-­reference” of the system.13 (This is probably easiest to understand when we think of the neurophysiological differences between different forms of animal life and how they perceive the world—­a fact that led to a famous set of reflections and ruminations by philosopher Thomas Nagel in his essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”)14 Two important consequences follow from this fact. First, it is only on the basis of self-­reference and closure that systems can maintain their integrity long enough to engage in what Maturana and Varela call “structural coupling” with elements of their environment—­a loop of ongoing, recursive relations. And second, it

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is only on the basis of system closure and self-­reference that systems can build up their own internal complexity by recursively processing environmental complexity in the form of information—­ Bateson’s “difference which makes a difference.” Paradoxically, then, what separates us from the world is the very thing that connects us to the world; that which is excluded from the world via system closure—­t he system’s autopoiesis—­is paradoxically the condition of possibility for the system’s interaction with the world. But how can this be? As Luhmann explains it, “The concept of a self-­referentially closed system does not contradict the system’s openness to the environment. Instead, in the self-­referential mode of operation, closure is a form of broadening possible environmental contacts; closure increases, by constituting elements more capable of being determined, the complexity of the environment that is possible for the system.”15 Autopoiesis is thus a way of making the system more sensitive to changes in its environment. Clo­ sure makes possible internal complexity; and internal complexity makes possible increased openness to the environment. Two of the more radical consequences of this view are that (1) all space is therefore virtual space, and (2) the knowledge that we have of the world, and that others in the world have of us, is fundamentally non-­representational. As Heinz von Foerster puts it: (i) Observations are not absolute but relative to the observer’s point of view (i.e. his coordinate system: Einstein). (ii) Observations affect the observed so as to obliterate the observer’s hope for prediction (i.e. his uncertainty is absolute: Heisenberg). After this, we are now in the possession of the truism that a description (of the universe) implies one who describes it (observes it).16

Any observation of the world is thus non-­representational because the observed phenomena is grasped—­ brought into intelligibility—­by the particular biological and perceptual mechanisms of the observer and also (in the case of human beings) by the conceptual schemata and knowledge-­making codes we use to describe what we experience. As Bateson is fond of putting it, “The map is not the territory.”17 This means that observation, cognition, and expe-

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rience are processes of what Maturana and Varela call “embodied enaction,” which in turn means that a space inhabited by different autopoietic observers with different organizing schemata is by definition virtual space—­v irtual not in the sense of “not real,” but rather in the sense of “multidimensional,” and, for that very reason, all the more real, because more replete with more possibilities for different experiences and descriptions.18 And just as crucially, this means (by definition) that the price we pay for our knowledge and experience of the world—­since it is selective and contingent on our own self-­organization—­is a fundamental non-­k nowledge of that which is excluded by our modes of perception and our conceptual coordinates. Or as Luhmann puts it in a Zen-­like moment, “Reality is what one does not perceive when one perceives it.”19 This bears very directly on how Hylozoic Ground deploys a stunning visual surface and a compositional, formal harmony not so different from action painting (which is already, canonically, non-­ representational) as a kind of lure to achieve something else altogether: embedding visuality within the more multidimensional (and for that very reason, unsettling: “queasy”) space of embodiment, in which sight is no longer equated with the viewer’s position of mastery, but is simply part of a larger “animal” sensorium that may not be all that reliable in the instance at hand in helping us to read our situation. Is it going to pet me? Is it going to eat me? If it knows I’m here, how and what does it “know”? The contrast here between Hylozoic Ground and your standard display of animatronics virtuosity is therefore all the more instructive. In the former, nothing is hidden, and yet, in an important sense, everything is. In the latter, everything is hidden and yet, in a sense, nothing is. To wit: in Beesley’s work, the engineering apparatus is more or less in full view, and yet what is not visible—­a nd not visible in principle (as Luhmann or Derrida might say)—­is what the piece is up to, what its agenda might be. In the latter, the engineering and mechanics are meticulously hidden, but only to produce a visible mimesis of a reality—­one might even say an ideology—­ that we already know all too well. (A favorite example I recall from my childhood is a visit to the Hall of Presidents at Disney World. Once you get the trick and have your “Aha” or “Gee whiz” moment, the world as it is simply gets reinforced and redoubled—­“even

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machines think the way we do!” In short—­to use the term we invoked earlier—­t here is no “queasiness.”) In Hylozoic Ground, on the other hand, we are tempted—­even invited—­to encounter the piece within the frame of “art imitates life,” but when we do so, we find a rather uncanny twist on a familiar theme: what is imitated is not the representational ratio and visibility of life as we know it, but rather the invisibility of other ways of being in the world that are extracted as the price of our own ways of knowing and being: “Reality is what one does not perceive when one perceives it.” And those other ways of being—­not just the bat’s sense of echolocation, the bloodhound’s sense of smell, but also the exquisite sensitivity of a machine to our presence even before we know we’ve arrived—­ might know us in ways that we cannot know and master. Might make us, in a word, “queasy.” To put it this way is to sharpen the stakes of a more art-­ historical difference (if you like) between a certain spectatorial relation to an animated object that partakes of an identifiably humanist rendering of visuality, and a more radical experience of “spatialization” that is directly dependent on our own contingent embodiment—­a nd on what that embodiment can and cannot see. Instead of the idea of a visual and perceptual field that is organized around the fixed point of the eye as sole agent of logos and ratio—­a genealogy that runs, to put it in shorthand, from the Renaissance theory of perspective, through Freud’s parsing of the sensorium in its evolution from animal and olfactory to human and visual, through Sartre’s analysis of the Look, and finally to Foucault’s work on the Panopticon—­we find here what Derrida has called the “ruin” of vision.20 What is not seen in Hylozoic Ground is not seen not because it is hidden from view—­as if everything were potentially visible, available to a viewing subject who in principle is capable of seeing all—­but rather because it is, as Derrida would put it, heterogeneous to the visual as the philosophical tradition conceives it. As Derrida says in an interview, “It is within a certain experience of spacing, of space, that resistance to philosophical authority can be produced.”21 This is so because space—­for the reasons I have just been outlining—­is not “essentially mastered by the look.” “Space isn’t only the visible,” Derrida argues, and “the invisible, for me, is not simply the opposite of vision.”22

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Here, however, we need to remember that, for Derrida, “space” doesn’t just refer to a multidimensional, virtual, perceptual field shared by different observers; it also refers to the fundamental logic of “spacing” by which any “difference which makes a difference,” any code, may come into being. In a way, Derrida is simply radicalizing the realization of first-­order systems theory announced in essays such as Bateson’s “Form, Substance, and Difference.” After noting that “the map is not the territory,” and that “what gets onto the map, in fact, is difference,” Bateson asks: But what is a difference? A difference is a very peculiar and obscure concept. It is certainly not a thing or an event. This piece of paper is different from the wood of this lectern. There are many differences between them—­of color, texture, shape, etc. But if we start to ask about the localization of those differences, we get into trouble. Obviously the difference between the paper and the wood is not in the paper; it is obviously not in the wood; it is obviously not in the space between them. . . . A difference, then, is an abstract matter. 23

It is, in other words, a matter of spacing—­namely, the spacing between two elements, which cannot occupy the same place at the same time, between which the abstract relation is set up. And—­ most radically of all, and most directly to the point of how we think about Hylozoic Ground—­t hat spacing doesn’t just apply to human language, human codes; it is the fundamental structuring principle of the “programs” that cross not just the difference between human and nonhuman life forms, but, more radically, the “life/death relation” itself, the difference between the organic or biological and the mechanical or technical.24 “Instead of having recourse to the concepts that habitually serve to distinguish man from other living beings (instinct and intelligence, absence or presence of speech, of society, of economy, etc. etc.), the notion of program is invoked,” Derrida suggests, not to enable familiar cultural fantasies of mastery and control but, on the contrary, to formalize a movement of “difference” and “spacing” that “goes far beyond the possibilities of the ‘intentional consciousness.’”25 What this means is that the concept of “life” is radically denaturalized—not in the sense of being entirely divorced from its

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material substrate, its forms of embodiment, but in the sense that it returns us to a newly expanded examination of which forms of embodiment can give rise to the recursive relations of structural coupling we discussed earlier. The conceptual momentum and trajectory here thus push in two opposite but intimately related directions. On the one hand, it expands the definition of what we call “subjectivity” outward, toward new forms of embodiment. In this connection, the goal, if not quite yet the reality, of Hylozoic Ground appears to be the possibility that it might not just “seem” alive but in some sense be alive. As Beesley puts it, “It is safe in the known territory of robotics, but the liquids add an element that is both nurturing and rather creepy.” Those liquids—­t he brine and soy, among others, that fill the bladders of the piece—­gather information from the environment and are transferred within the system, and “these material exchanges are conceived as the first stages of dependent interactions where living functions might take root within the matrix.”26 But on the other hand, we don’t need to wait for Hylozoic Ground to “come alive” to understand the full force of the posthumanist reframing of the question of “life” that this work brings front and center: that whoever “we” are, we come to be that way by submitting to a fundamentally prosthetic relation between “us” and the external, technical, radically inhuman and nonorganic programs, codes, techniques, and archives, in and through which we can, paradoxically, become who we are only by becoming something we are not. And in this light, the question that Hylozoic Ground confronts us with is not so much “Is it alive?” but rather “Are we, and if so, how?”

Part II “The Animal”

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5 From Dead Meat to Glow-­in-­the-­Dark Bunnies Seeing “The Animal Question” in Contemporary Art

This essay begins at the intersection of two questions: one, apparently quite complicated; the other, apparently quite simple. The first question concerns the ethical standing of (at least some) nonhuman animals. It is a question with which we are confronted every day in the mass media (indeed, entire cable television networks are now built around the presumption of its possibility) and it has increasingly captivated not just scientific fields like cognitive ethology, ecology, and cognitive science, but also areas in the humanities such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, “theory,” and cultural studies generally. For the purposes of this essay, I’m simply going to take it for granted that the ethical standing of at least some nonhuman animals is not just a live issue, but an increasingly taken-­for-­g ranted one (even if how to formulate that ethical standing remains a complex question). And I’m going to allow myself this luxury in no small part because the two artists whose work I will be addressing take that standing for granted, as they have affirmed in a variety of contexts. The second question seems, by comparison, much more straightforward, and perhaps almost trivial in comparison to the weight of the first, but that is part of the reason I want to take it up here: When contemporary artists take nonhuman animals as their subject—­our treatment of them, how we relate to them, and so on—­what difference does it make that those artists choose a particular representational strategy (and—­a question I can’t fully explore here—­a particular medium or art form such as painting, sculpture, installation, or performance, just to name a few)? To put this a little more directly: there clearly has been in contemporary art an explosion of interest in what Derrida calls “the question of the animal” as theme and subject matter.1 When addressing this 67

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topic, however, it is all too easy to fall into what Slavoj Žižek, with characteristic astringency, has in another context called “an un-­ dialectical obsession with content.”2 What I am interested in, on the other hand, is how particular artistic strategies themselves depend upon or resist a certain humanism that is quite independent of the manifest content of the artwork: the fact that it may be “about” nonhuman animals in some obvious way. We can bring the question I have in mind into even sharper focus along the following lines: if, as many of the most important contemporary thinkers have suggested, certain representational strategies (say, for example, the Renaissance theory of perspective, or Bentham’s panoptical rendering of architectural space, or the production of the gaze and spectatorship in film as critiqued by feminist film theory in the 1980s) can be indexed to certain normative modes of humanist subjectivity that they reproduce by the very nature of their strategies, then we are well within our rights to ask—­to put it succinctly, for the moment—­what the relationship is between philosophical and artistic representationalism. These are precisely the sorts of questions that practicing artists routinely engage in connection with the specific demands of particular representational media. And they bear very directly upon, not just the artistic challenge, but also the larger philosophical and ethical challenge, of speaking for nonhuman animals, speaking to our relations with them, and how taking those relations seriously unavoidably raises the question of who “we” are, of the notion of the “human” that the “autobiographical animal” (to use Derrida’s phrase) gives to itself—­a question that may get answered quite indirectly not in the manifest content of the artwork or its “message” but in its formal strategies.

The Ethics of (Dis)figuration: Sue Coe’s Dead Meat We find many faces in the paintings and drawings collected in Sue Coe’s book Dead Meat, a collection of sketches, paintings, and drawings that Coe compiled over a six-­year period while traveling to slaughterhouses and feedlots around North America. 3 Hundreds of faces, even thousands, perhaps. And we don’t have to find them. They find us. As in Cow 13, Pigs in a Circle, or Factory Farm from the

FIGURE 3. Sue Coe, Factory Farm, 1988. Copyright 1988 Sue Coe. Courtesy of Galerie St. Etienne, New York.

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same period, they stare out at us on nearly every page, by turns fearful, afflicted, or innocent. What is remarkable here, though, is that the faces belong mainly to the animals—­“livestock,” so called. In fact, it is hard to find a human being with a face at all, and when we do find them, as in Electrocution or There Is No Escape, they are usually misshapen or contorted. How are we to understand this? One way that suggests itself immediately, of course, is by means of the theorization of the ethics of “the face” in contemporary philosophy and theory—­a debate that has conspicuously involved Levinas, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari, among others. Levinas, as is well known, theorizes the ethical call of the face as the site of an unanswerable obligation to which I am held “hostage,” to use his term, in an infinite responsibility to the other. As Derrida himself has observed, however, even though the subject is held hostage to the other by the first imperative of the intersubjective relation—­“thou shalt not kill”—­i n Levinas (as in the Judeo-­ Christian tradition generally), this is not understood as a “thou shalt not put to death the living in general.” For Levinas, the subject is “man” whose ethical standing is secured by his access to both logos and language, the Word, and so, as Derrida puts it, in Levinas the subject resides in “a world where sacrifice is possible and where it is not forbidden to make an attempt on life in general, but only on the life of man.”4 As Derrida argues, however, the animal “has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever done more to make me think through this absolute alterity of the neighbor than these moments when I see myself naked under the gaze of a cat.”5 And from the vantage of Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida’s critique of Levinas here might be viewed as leaving intact a certain humanist schema of the scopic and the visual, which their critique of “faciality” in A Thousand Plateaus is calculated to dismantle in its insistence that “the face” is not a location, still less a body part, but rather a kind of “grid” or “diagram” that configures the space of intersubjective relations and desire itself, making them available only at the expense of “fixity” and “identity.”6 To put it schematically, Deleuze and Guattari might well ask of Derrida how the moment of being looked at by his cat—­not just “naked” but “seeing myself naked under the gaze of a cat”—­can be divorced from the

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face? How can the looking-­back of the animal—­a nd the ethical call harbored by that look—­be disengaged from the humanism for which the face (and “faciality” generally) is perhaps the fundamental figure? The art historian and critic Michael Fried gives a rather different account from the Levinasian one of the question of the face in his book Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane, where he offers an analysis of figuration and representation that I think will help to shed light on the particular character of Sue Coe’s strategies and how we might assess their ethical force.7 The key point of contact with the motifs we have sounded out thus far, however briefly, is readily voiced in the title of the essay on Crane that makes up the second half of the book, “Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces,” where the intense visuality of Crane’s prose is also indexed to the face—­a nd to the blank page as its double or stand-­i n—­a nd its ethical call upon us. Pertinent here, too, is the fact that in Crane, in Eakins, and in Coe, we will be immersed in scenes of violence and responsibility: primarily war (as in Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage), the surgical theater (of Eakins’s great painting The Gross Clinic), and, of course, the factory farms and killing floors of Coe’s Dead Meat. What Fried finds in Crane is “a mode of literary representation that involves a major emphasis on acts of seeing, both literal and metaphorical.”8 But what is usually called Crane’s “impressionistic” style should instead be understood, Fried argues, as a remarkable plumbing of the relationship of “a primitive ontological difference between the allegedly upright or ‘erect’ space of reality and the horizontal ‘space’ of writing,” which manifests itself in Crane as “an implicit contrast between the respective ‘spaces’ of reality and literary representation.”9 This difference is related to the extraordinary (and extraordinarily haunting and even uncanny) network of faces in Crane’s fiction—­primarily, faces of the dead that stare back at us with unseeing eyes—­by virtue of the requirement “that a human character, ordinarily upright and so to speak forward-­looking, be rendered horizontal and upward-­ facing so as to match the horizontality and upward-­facingness of the blank page.”10 On the one hand (and here, I think, the connection to Coe’s animal faces is quite clear) the faces of the dead—­

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like the blank page—­stare back at us and ask for our conferral of meaning, through re-­presentation, upon their abjection or suffering (this is rendered in an especially powerful way in Crane’s fiction that deals with war, such as The Red Badge of Courage). But at the same time, as figures for the “‘unnatural’ process” of writing itself—­when “the upward-­facingness of the corpse, hence of the page,” is considered “not so much as a brute given [but] as a kind of artifact”—­t hey are products of that very process of representation itself.11 In trying to bring the reader/viewer face-­to-­face with the world through writing, however, the writer only succeeds in defacing the world or, to use Fried’s term, disfiguring it. The dilemma in Crane is that the more he succeeds in this enterprise, the more he, in another sense, fails. This is so, Fried argues, because insofar as those “desemanticizing” aspects of Crane’s writing (visuality, sonority, dialect, and manipulation of perceptual scale, just to name a few) do their job, they interpose themselves, in their own materiality, between the reader and the world that that “realist” project was supposedly intended to represent, so that the world (though he doesn’t put it this way) almost becomes a “host,” if you will, for an essentially vampiristic relationship to the writerly or representational project. As Fried puts it, “Wouldn’t such a development threaten to abort the realization of the ‘impressionist’ project as classically conceived? In fact, would it not call into question the very basis of writing as communication—­t he tendency of the written word partly to ‘efface’ itself in favor of its meaning in the acts of writing and reading?”12 For Fried, this uncanny or vampiristic quality of Crane’s style is symptomatic of Crane’s need to performatively confront “the scene of writing” through “a mechanism of displacement,” and “to do so in a manner that positively obscured the meaning of those representations from both writer and reader.” “And this suggests,” he continues, that the passages that describe the faces and recount responses to them are where Crane’s unconscious fixation on the scene of writing not only comes closest to surfacing in a sustained and deliberate manner but also, precisely owing to the “mani-

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festly” dreadful nature of the faces and of the vicissitudes that befall them, is most emphatically repressed. In other words, the thematization of writing as violent disfigurement and its association with effects of horror and repugnance but also of intense fascination allowed the writer, and a fortiori the reader, to remain unconscious of the very possibility of such a thematization.13

We are now in a position to begin to glimpse how different things are in Coe’s handling of what we could call, after Fried, the scene of representation or figuration, whose index in both cases is a certain rendering—­a nd in Crane’s case, rending—­of the face. We remember Fried’s observation “that a human character, ordinarily upright and so to speak forward-­looking, be rendered horizontal and upward-­facing so as to match the horizontality and upward-­ facingness of the blank page.”14 In Coe, however, we find a double reversal of this dynamic. First, the violence that in Crane renders the human corpse horizontal and upward facing is in Dead Meat associated with a force that takes the “naturally” occurring horizontality of the animals portrayed (living, as they do, on all fours) and renders it strongly vertical—­n amely, in the endless rows and rows of hoisted, hanging animal corpses in the slaughterhouse and the packing plant that we find in images such as Horse Slaughterhouse or Poultry Plant Fire. It is as if the animals cannot be allowed to assume the vertical, upright posture reserved (as Freud tells us in Civilization and Its Discontents) for the human, without at the same stroke being defaced—­i n many cases, quite literally (i.e., beheaded). At the same time—­a strict corollary by this logic—­t he slaughterhouse workers remain mired in a strongly horizontal plane and, not surprisingly, their faces are often “beastly” or “animalistic” in the traditional, speciesist sense of the word, as in Electrocution or Scalding Vat and Scraping Machine. The logic that systematically works its way through most of these pieces, then, is that the concrete, individual animal body (an individuality emphasized in pieces such as Cow 13 and Goat outside Slaughterhouse) is, through the process of factory farming, mechanistically born, bred, killed, and dismembered in a process through which it comes to have

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meaning for the “carnophallogocentric” socius (to use Derrida’s well-­known term) only by being reconstituted as “meat” or “pork”— a semantic transformation and mystification that is itself paralleled by the material manifestation of identical, shrink-­w rapped packages of brightly colored meat in the grocery store counter now thoroughly dissociated from the violent reality of its material production.15 And this systematic violence against the animals is itself doubled by a less brutal, though no less systematic, violence that attends the workers who are forced by the nature of capitalism itself to do such work—­a point graphically captured in Coe’s rendering of the meatpacking workers in painting after painting and explicitly thematized in works such as Capital/Labor. Second, however (and this is the point I would like to emphasize), what we find here is not the “excruciated” relationship to representation that Fried emphasizes in Crane and Eakins, but rather its apparent displacement onto forces external to the work of representation itself—­forces whose effects the artwork registers and then intensifies. The violence we find here is not “artifactual” (associated with the inescapable violence and disfiguration of representation itself) but is instead associated with the external (that is to say, extra-­representational) forces of capitalism and factory farming. We could say, in other words, that (in direct contrast to Fried’s Crane) Coe’s painting aspires to the condition of writing, but writing understood not as representation divided against itself—­not as différance or iterability, to borrow Derrida’s terms that are invoked by Fried 16—­but rather as the direct communication of a semantic and, as it were, external content, of which the artwork is a faithful (or perhaps we should say, “dramatic”) enough representation to didactically incite ethical action and change on the part of the viewer. Yet precisely here an interesting problem manifests itself. While Coe is certainly within her rights to see the ethical function of (her) art, at least in one sense, as drawing our attention, as powerfully as possible, to the untold horrors of the slaughterhouse, on another level—­and it is this level that will be handled with considerable sophistication, I think, in Eduardo Kac’s work—­that ethical function and the representationalism it depends upon rely upon a certain disavowal of the violence (what Fried calls the “disfigu-

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ration”) of representation itself. This immediately leads to a very obvious question we might ask of Coe: If the ethical function of art is what Coe thinks it is, why not just show people photographs of stockyards, slaughterhouses, and the killing floor to achieve this end? To put it another way, what does art add? And what does it mean that her art has to be more than real to be real? Isn’t the “melodrama of visibility” (to use Fried’s phrase) that we find in Dead Meat, which is calculated to “give the animal a face,” also, in another sense, an effacement of the very reality it aims to represent, one that quite conspicuously manifests itself in the hyperbole, disfiguration, and melodrama of Coe’s work? The paradoxical result for Coe’s work, then, is that it appeals to us to read it as directly (indeed, melodramatically) legible of the content it represents, but the only way it achieves that end is through its figural excess, which is precisely not of the slaughterhouse, but of the interposing materiality of representation itself. We can unpack the implications of this point by remembering Fried’s discussion of “what might be called a drama, some would even say a melodrama, of visibility” in Eakins’s The Gross Clinic, which may be brought into sharp contrast with the very different “melodrama” we find in Coe’s Dead Meat project.17 My point here in calling Coe’s work “melodramatic” is not that it exaggerates what really goes on in a slaughterhouse, but rather that in Coe’s work, nothing is hidden from us. On the contrary, the paintings seem to form a kind of theater calculated to produce a “surefire effect” (to use Fried’s characterization of “theatricality”) by “playing to the audience,” as the figures in the paintings—­human and animal—­repeatedly look out at us, imploringly, fearfully, or sadistically, as if the entire affair inside the space of the painting is staged only for us.18 Unlike the experience of the viewer in what Fried calls the “absorptive” tradition in painting that culminates in modernist abstraction, the viewer in Coe’s work isn’t “denied,” as Fried puts it, but rather addressed and held responsible, as it were, even culpable, for what is being shown inside the frame. Here—­to return to The Gross Clinic—­t wo conspicuous features of Eakins’s painting noted by Fried are very much to the point: the rendering of the surgical patient’s body, and the cringing figure of an older woman, usually taken to be the patient’s mother.

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FIGURE 4. Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875. Oil on canvas, 96 x 78 inches. Photograph courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift of the Alumni Association to Jefferson Medical College in 1878 and purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2007 with the generous support of more than 3,600 donors.

As for the first, Fried notes that “the portions of the body that can be seen are not readily identifiable, so that our initial and persisting though not quite final impression is of a few scarcely differentiated body parts rather than of a coherent if momentarily indecipherable ensemble.”19 In fact, Fried likens this presentation to

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something like a dismembering, an act of “deliberate aggression” and even “sadism” that ultimately is an index of “the attitude toward the viewer that that rendering implies”—­a n especially intense version of the attitude typical of what Fried elsewhere famously calls the “absorptive” tradition in painting. 20 Similarly, the cringing figure dramatizes “the pain of seeing,” in both “the emphatic emptiness of her clawlike left hand,” the “violent contortion” of which is “apprehended by the viewer as a threat—­at a minimum, an offense—­to vision as such,” and “the sightlessness that . . . she so feelingly embodies.”21 In these “aggressions,” as Fried calls them, these gestures of “disfiguration,” Fried finds in the painting “an implied affront to seeing,” a “stunning or, worse, a wounding of seeing—­t hat leads me to imagine that the definitive realist painting would be one that the viewer literally could not bear to look at.”22 Here, I think, we get a very precise sense of the differences between the force of “disfiguration” at work in Eakins’s representationalism and Coe’s. For in Coe, although there is disfiguration aplenty, it is never a disfiguration that resists vision or interpretation. Quite the contrary, it invites a single, univocal reading. The violence of Eakins’s “affront to seeing” that manifests itself in The Gross Clinic as incision, deformation, and even, in a sense, dismemberment (a violence displaced and contained by being thematized, as Fried notes, in terms of the “necessary” surgery being performed), is matched by the reverse dynamic in Coe. The almost nightmarish, infernal scenes of violence before us hide nothing, and for that very reason, the artist, as it were, has no blood on her hands. (That is reserved, of course, for the forces of capitalism and Taylorization referenced in the work’s semantic content.) In this light, we can sharpen our sense (if you’ll pardon the expression) of the difference between Coe’s representationalism and Eakins’s by reminding ourselves of the signifying force of the surgeon’s scalpel in The Gross Clinic as glossed by Fried. If Eakins represents himself allegorically through the figure of Gross, then the scalpel serves to remind us—­rather startlingly, even traumatically—­ that Eakins is “divided or excruciated between competing systems of representation.” On the one hand, the scalpel, “being hard and sharp, an instrument for cutting, belongs unmistakably to the

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FIGURE 5. Sue Coe, Ham Scrubber, from Porkopolis, 1988. Copyright 1988 Sue Coe. Courtesy of Galerie St. Etienne, New York.

system of writing/drawing,” but on the other, because the scalpel is marked by an outré, almost three-­d imensional drop of blood on its tip, it “refers, by means of an irresistible analogy,” to the system of painting—­a lmost as if the drop of blood were paint and the surgeon/painter carefully and dramatically deliberates its violent application. 23 In this light, we might well say of Coe’s Dead Meat that the knives and hooks of the slaughterhouse are never associated with the brush of the painter and the violence of representation-­as-­d isfiguration. Thus, if Eakins’s putative “realism” in fact harbors a deeper, more unsettling antirealism (or, perhaps better, irrealism), Coe’s hyperbolic, melodramatic renderings themselves harbor a more fundamental (and a more fundamentally comforting) representationalism, a signifying regime whose

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best name might well be “faciality”—­even if that faciality is extended across species lines to include, even privilege (as if to somehow redeem their suffering), the nonhuman animals around which the paintings are built. The opposite of this regime—­or more precisely, as Derrida would put it, that which remains “heterogeneous” to it, not its simple other—­m ight well be figured in the network of asignifying forms and their serial iteration that wends its way throughout the works collected in Dead Meat.24 Chief among these are the chains, hooks, tubes, belts, hoses, ducts, and the like that form in pieces such as Horse Slaughterhouse, McWorld, and Pecking Order a kind of ongoing cipher in the paintings, often extending beyond the borders of the pictorial space, suggesting their intrication in some larger insidious network—­a logic that is also extended to cover the representation of the masses of animal bodies themselves in pieces such as Lo Cholesterol Buffalo or Feedlot. From Coe’s representationalist point of view, of course, this network is directly associated with the force of capitalism, Tayloriza­ tion, and the disassembly line they put in place. In the sense I am emphasizing here, however, we might see it as figuring instead a kind of displacement or domestication of the Derridean principle of “iterability”—­or, as Fried would have it, a kind of visible repression that traces and scores the otherwise representational logic of the paintings. This logic even extends, I would suggest, to the ubiquitous numbered ear tags that mark the animals as fodder in the larger machine of agribusiness and factory farming, with the sheer abstractness and pure seriality of the numerical system signifying nothing except this force. Here, the painting Goat outside Slaughterhouse is all the more striking in the contrast between the almost sculptural modeling of the animal’s head and the abstract numbers of the contrasting ear tag, which are not only iterations of the same shape, but that also, in their form, recall the network of figures I have just noted in pieces like Ham Scrubber. Given the conceptual coordinates of Coe’s Dead Meat project, we can surmise that this force of abstraction, coding, and seriality would eventually find its most extreme logical extension in genetic engineering and, beyond that, in cloning—­a n eventuality graphically depicted in Coe’s painting Future Genetics Inc. Here

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again, however, we can interpret this in a second sense rather at odds with the artist’s own. For while Coe’s painting depicts the perverse extension of Taylorized factory farming to the production of misshapen and deformed animal mutants in a subterranean laboratory, there is another sense in which we may view this logic as endemic to representation itself. The clone may be “the image of the perfect servant, the obedient instrument of the master creator’s will,” as W. J. T. Mitchell puts it, but it also activates “the deepest phobias about mimesis, copying, and the horror of the uncanny double.”25 Or, to put this in Derrida’s terms, the dream of pure, Taylorized seriality is repetition without difference, but the very meaning and force of iterability is that repetition—­a nd representation—­can only take place in and through the potentially mutating work of difference, the specific material, embodied, pragmatic instance in which a code is iterated, and that therefore threatens any dream of purity, always shadowing pure seriality with the uncanny referenced by Mitchell. And this opens up a second ethical register around the question of representation and its logic—­one quite different from what Coe has in mind—­that harbors very real stakes for how we understand the human/animal relation. On that point, Derrida has argued that the constitutive fantasy of humanism is that the human separates itself from the rest of the domain of “the living” by alone escaping subjection to the deconstructive force of iterability and the trace which in fact extends to all forms of representation and signification, not just its paradigmatic case, language. And in this second ethical register, the critique of speciesism emerges, in fact, from the critique of representationalism along the lines traced by Derrida in “Eating Well,” where he suggests that if one reinscribes language in a network of possibilities that do not merely encompass it but mark it irreducibly from the inside, everything changes. I am thinking in particular of the mark in general, of the trace, of iterability, of différance. These possibilities or necessities, without which there would be no language, are themselves not only human. . . . And what I am proposing here should allow us to take into account scientific knowledge about the complexity of “animal languages,” genetic coding, all forms of marking within which so-­called human language, as

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FIGURE 6. Sue Coe, Goat outside Slaughterhouse, 1991. Copyright 1991 Sue Coe. Courtesy of Galerie St. Etienne, New York.

original as it might be, does not allow us to “cut” once and for all where we would in general like to cut. 26

This may seem to be a very different kind of “cut” from the ones we witness in Dead Meat, but in fact, Derrida suggests, the “sacrificial symbolic economy” of “carnophallogocentrism” that subordinates

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woman to man and nonhuman animals to both is directly related to—­even motivates—­what we witness in Coe’s work. “The subject does not want to just master and possess nature actively,” Derrida writes. “In our cultures, he accepts sacrifice and eats flesh. . . . In our countries, who would stand any chance of becoming a chef d’Etat (a head of State), of thereby acceding ‘to the head,’ by publicly, and therefore exemplarily, declaring him-­or herself to be a vegetarian?”27

The More You Look, The Less You See: Eduardo Kac In October 2001, Eduardo Kac presented his project The Eighth Day in a gallery at Arizona State University, on the heels of what is probably his most famous undertaking, GFP Bunny (2000). Here again, Kac uses “transgenic” life forms (in this case, mice, zebra­ fish, tobacco plants, and a colony of amoebae, instead of a rabbit) modified by introducing into them an enhanced GFP gene (green florescent protein, derived from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria) that makes them glow green under certain lighting conditions. As in that earlier work, however, GFP life-­forms are only part of the story. 28 In The Eighth Day, viewers enter a dark space with a glowing blue-­l it Plexiglas semisphere at its center, surrounded by the sounds of waves washing ashore. Inside the terrarium are the life-­forms just mentioned, as well as a specially designed “biobot,” which contains as its “cerebellum” the GFP amoebae. When the amoebae move toward one of the six legs of the biobot, their movement is tracked by a computer, which makes that particular leg contract. The biobot also serves as an “avatar,” as Kac puts it, of Web participants, who can remotely control its “eye” with a pan and tilt actuator, so that “the overall perceivable behavior of the biobot is a combination of activity that takes place in the microscopic network of the amoebae and in the macroscopic human network.” Meanwhile, viewers in the gallery can see the terrarium from both inside and outside the dome, by means of access to a Web interface installed in the gallery space, which includes, in addition to a biobot view, a feed from a “bird’s eye view” camera installed above the dome. 29

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FIGURE 7. Eduardo Kac, The Eighth Day, 2001 (detail). Transgenic artwork with biological robot (biobot), GFP plants, GFP amoebae, GFP fish, GFP mice, audio, video, internet. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

When we leave behind the technical and logistical aspects of the piece (which are considerable) to address the work’s intellectual, ethical, and social implications, we enter another order of complexity. Arlindo Machado’s comments in the collection of essays that accompanied The Eighth Day are fairly representative of these discussions. He writes:

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Transgenic forms of life are often stigmatized for being produced in the laboratory, in part because of the economic (and possibly warlike) interests that motivate their creation. It is almost inevitable that nontechnical discussions involving biotechnologies take on a conservative bias, recalling scenarios of apocalyptic science fiction or even dogmatic interdictions of religious order. . . . The more experimental and much less conformist sphere of art—­w ith its emphasis on creation, by means of genetic engineering, of works which are simply beautiful, not utilitarian or potentially profit making; along with the relocation of genetically modified products in “cultural” spaces such as museums and art galleries, or in public spaces, or even in homes . . .—­a ll this could help to elevate public discussion of genetics and transgenics to a more sophisticated level. 30

This is essentially the thrust as well of Kac’s own “manifesto” on transgenic art, but the artist takes the additional step there of insisting that “artists can contribute to increase global diversity by inventing new life forms,” and he imagines a day in the not-­too-­ distant future when “the artist literally becomes a genetic programmer who can create life forms by writing or altering a given (genetic) sequence.”31 This insistence, of course, complicates an already complicated situation considerably, because it invites the sorts of trepidations rightly raised by critics such as Steve Baker, who writes that Kac “engages with the animal through techniques that strike many people as meddlesome, invasive, and profoundly unethical.”32 It’s not that any of the animals used in his work are harmed (they aren’t, and Kac has repeatedly made it clear how seriously he takes his responsibility for the care and well-­being of the animals involved), but rather that “Kac seems to overlook the larger picture,” as Baker puts it: namely, that his work depends upon and in a fundamental sense reproduces an entire set of institutions and practices of scientific research that subject millions of animals a year to distressing, often painful, and usually fatal experimentation, a subjection of nonhuman beings of “unprecedented proportions,” as Derrida puts it, in which “traditional forms of treatment of the animal have been turned upside down” and replaced by “an arti-

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ficial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous.”33 Such concerns are very important, of course, but I don’t want to pursue them any further here—­i n part because they have received ample air time in the discussions of Kac’s work, but primarily because certain habitual oversimplifications endemic to addressing those concerns have tended to mask crucial aspects of Kac’s work, features that have a less obvious and, as it were, thematic relation to how his projects ethically intervene in our received views of the human/animal relationship and, beyond that, in the question of posthumanism generally. Something of the different direction I want to pursue is evoked by Kac early on in the “Transgenic Art” manifesto, where he writes, “More than making visible the invisible, art needs to raise our awareness of what firmly remains beyond our visual reach but, nonetheless, affects us directly. Two of the most prominent technologies operating beyond vision are digital implants and genetic engineering.”34 In a recent essay on art and human genomics, critic Marek Wieczorek extends the point when he asks, “How do we picture a new age of genetic manipulation . . . a literal synergy between computing and biology?” This is not just a question of representation in any straightforward sense, because “the digital code of the genome, emblematic of a new mode of consciousness,” is “not a spatial blueprint of life, not a two-­dimensional plan of what a heart or liver looks like, but a long string of nucleotides written in endless permutations.”35 And what this means, in turn, is that the problem of picturing this immense revolution “may not simply be a matter of new forms of visuality,” but rather “reconciling form with principle.”36 Here—­a nd this is a rather different understanding altogether from what we find in Fried—­Wieczorek finds in minimalism a precursor to this new work of Kac’s that thinks the parallels between art and scientific theory, with its “potentially endless sequence of repeated shapes.” Just as “digitally encoded information has no intrinsic relationship to the form in which it is decoded”—­“it is not tied to a singular, inherently meaningful form”—­so in minimalism “repetition replaces singularity.” Moreover, in minimalism “art acknowledges the viewer, whose physical interaction with the work produces ever-­shifting viewpoints over time, through a kind

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of feedback loop,” which parallels a similar emphasis in systems theory on the “autopoiesis” (Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela) or the “self-­reference” (Niklas Luhmann) of the observing system—­a fact we will find Kac’s work insisting on again and again, most obviously in his inclusion in the work itself of remote, internet based observer/participants. Here, however, the point is not (as Wieczorek puts it), that “reflexivity is regressive,” much like the “obsessively pointless variations of LeWitts’ incomplete open cubes or Judd’s boxes.”37 Rather, it is that reflexivity is recursive; it uses its own outputs as inputs, as Luhmann defines it. 38 And it is only on the basis of that recursivity—­a dynamic process that takes time—­t hat reflexivity becomes productive and not an endlessly repeating, proverbial “hall of mirrors” associated with the most clichéd aspects of postmodernity. I want to note that, for our current purposes, there are two points here, one logical and one, as it were, biological. As for the first, Wieczorek captures something of how Kac’s work thematizes the central fact—­a logical and cognitive fact—­about recursive self-­ reference as Luhmann has theorized it: namely, that observation (precisely because it is contingent and self-­referential) will always, to use Luhmann’s words, “maintain the world as severed by distinctions, frames, and forms,” and this “partiality precludes any possibility of representation of mimesis and any ‘holistic’ theory.” Thus, Luhmann writes, “the world is observable because it is unobservable.”39 Of more immediate relevance for Kac’s work, however, is the second point, the biological one: that recursive self-­reference is crucial to how different kinds of autopoietic beings establish their difference from everything else in the world, which is to say their specific ways of being in the world—­a “being” that is now thoroughly subordinated to an autopoietic becoming. For Kac—­and here is where Wieczorek is right that it is not simply a matter of new forms of visuality—­t his calls for the kind of recalibration, redistribution, and displacement of the relationship between meaning and the entire sensorium of living beings, in which visuality itself (as the human sensory apparatus par excellence) is now thoroughly decentered and subjected to a rather different kind of logic. To put it another way, Kac subverts the centrality of the human

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and anthropocentric modes of knowing and experiencing the world by displacing the centrality of its metonymic stand-­in: human (and humanist) visuality. He does this in several different ways, some of which are comparatively straightforward, such as Darker Than Night (1999) and Rara Avis (1996). In the former, the viewer is linked in a communicational loop to roughly three hundred fruit bats via a “batbot” implanted in their cave, which enables the viewer to “hear” the converted echolocation sonar signals of the living bats, while the viewer wears a VR headset that converts the batbot’s sonar emissions into an abstract visual display.40 In the latter, viewers don a headset linked to a camera in the head of a large robotic bird in an enclosure, surrounded by living birds, which enables the viewer to look out from the robotic bird’s point of view. In both works, sounds (Rara Avis) and sonar signals (Darker Than Night) originating from human participants are reintroduced into the animals’ environment, allowing them to experience the presence of an absent, human other.41 More interesting still, I think, is how Kac’s work also exploits what we might call our lust for the visual and its (humanist) centrality by trading upon it repeatedly (the glow in the dark creatures, the rather outré coloring of the bird in Rara Avis, or even the playful visual pun on the human eyeball in Teleporting an Unknown State [1996], just to name a few.) This is not just, as one critic puts it, a matter of the “scopic reversal” that is a “recurring theme” in Kac’s work (particularly the works on telepresence), nor is it just about a “dialogical interchange” that serves “to multiply the ‘points of view’ available,” as in The Eighth Day. Nor is it exactly that “to the extent that something living—­­particularly a mammal—­glows green, we have an index of alterity” (an interpretation resisted by Kac, by the way).42 In fact, I would argue that the use of GFP in Kac’s work, particularly with the rabbit Alba in GFP Bunny, operates as a kind of feint or lure that trades upon the very humanist centrality of vision that Kac’s work ends up subverting (and in this, it has more than a little in common with Diller+Scofidio’s cagey relationship to spectacle in their Blur project). On display here, in other words, are the humanist ways in which we produce and mark the other (including the animal other), our “carnophallogocentric” visual

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FIGURE 8. Eduardo Kac, Teleporting an Unknown State, 1994/1996. Telepresence work. Photograph by Gumparnat Pasaganon. Courtesy of the artist.

appetite, displayed here in the form of spectacle, which gets “fed” in this instance by GFP. From this vantage, the point is perhaps not so much, as W. J. T. Mitchell puts it in his widely read essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction,” that “Kac’s work dramatizes the difficulty biocybernetic art has in making its object or model visible” because “the object of mimesis here is really the invisibility of the genetic revolution, its inaccessibility to representation.”43 Rather, it is that Kac’s work—­w ith its glow-­i n-­ the-­dark creatures and its black lights, drawn as much from the storehouse of cheesy mass culture as anywhere—­makes all of this all too visible by eliciting and manipulating very familiar forms and conventions of contemporary visual appetite. And in doing so, it may be understood against the backdrop of Mitchell’s larger point about the work of art in an age of biocybernetic reproduction: that the “curious twist” of our moment is that “the digital is declared to be triumphant at the very same moment that a frenzy of the image and spectacle is announced.”44

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FIGURE 9. Eduardo Kac, Time Capsule, 1997. Multimedia installation with live performance. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

It is a question, then, of what we might call the “place” of the visual—­but, eventually, for that very reason, of everything else too. And this involves in Kac’s work (as one might now expect) a circular and indeed recursive procedure, where the artist uses or otherwise appeals to specifically human visual habits and conventions for the purposes of making the point that the visual as we traditionally think of it can precisely no longer be indexed to those conventions and habits at all. In this light, one way to underscore the difference between productive recursivity in Kac’s work and a mere “hall of mirrors” reflexivity is to say that the whole point of the glow-in-the-dark rabbit of GFP Bunny and how it seizes upon certain spectacularizing modes of human visuality, is that the harder you look, the less you see. Alba’s “meaning,” if we want to put it that way, is not to be found in the brute fact of the glow of her coat; in fact, one might well say that the “meaning” of the work is everywhere but there.45 From this vantage, we might well think of the strategy Kac deploys in the work Time Capsule (1997) as framed by this same logic. In that piece, Kac was televised and simultaneously webcast injecting into his leg a tiny microchip with a unique identification

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number that reveals itself when scanned—­a device commonly used for registering and recovering companion animals. As part of the work, Kac registered himself in an “Identichip” database as both “animal” and “owner.” In addition, the work included seven sepia-­toned photographs of members of Kac’s family from previous generations, and a telerobotic web-­scanning and x-­ray display of the implant in Kac’s leg. Here again, Kac’s deployment of spectacle and the visual generally makes the point, I think, that the significance of the work is everywhere except in its elements of visuality and spectacle. It begins to dawn on us just how true this is when we understand, as Edward Lucie-­Smith points out, that Kac is of Jewish origin, that a number of his family members (some of them pictured in the sepia-­toned photographs) were Polish Jews who died in the Nazi Holocaust, and how “the microchip incorporating a number alludes to the numbers tattooed on the arms of those who were herded into concentration camps”; but here, of course, the identifying numbers cannot be read.46 “Herded” is indeed a word to be insisted upon here, as this piece also focuses our attention not on livestock animals but the domestic animals—­ mainly cats and dogs—­for whom the chip is designed, animals that a vast majority of owners describe as family members. Are they less “animals,” or more, than those other living beings we call “meat”? Than the Jews in the eyes of the Nazis who forced them into cattle cars at gunpoint? Moreover, this welter of complicated associations and category crossings can be amplified one last time when we remind ourselves of Derrida’s characterization of contemporary forms of animal exploitation in biomedical research and factory farming as a “holocaust.” All of this changes completely, I think, the understanding of “theatricality” as criticized by Fried in his rejection of minimalism. The point is not just, as Fried would have it, that Kac’s work is “theater” (which in his terms it surely would be), but rather that “theater” is not doing the work Fried thinks it does. In Kac, the artwork does indeed “play up” to the viewer, but only, as Derrida would put it, to lead the viewer to the realization that the only place the meaning of the work may be found is no place, not where the viewer irresistibly looks (e.g., at the spectacle of the glow-­in-­ the-­dark creatures) but rather, precisely where the viewer does not

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see—­not “refuses to look,” or, even, “is prevented from seeing,” but rather cannot see. If we keep in mind that theatricality depends first and foremost upon spatial distribution, we can appreciate the resonance of Derrida’s comment, invoked in our earlier discussions, for Kac’s attempt—­a nd the ethics of that attempt—­to situate the visual in ways that fundamentally trouble how we have typically indexed the (human) animal sensorium to the human/ animal ontological divide: that “space isn’t only the visible, and moreover the invisible”—­a n invisible that is itself “not simply the opposite of vision.”47 In this light, we can see more clearly—­or perhaps I should say, more “obliquely”—­how Kac’s theatricalization of visuality doesn’t evade the viewer’s “finitude” and “humanness” (as Fried would have it), but rather underscores it, in the specifically posthumanist sense that the field of meaning and experience is no longer thought to be exhausted by the self-­reference of a particularly, even acutely, human visuality.48 In the end, then, the contrast between Sue Coe and Eduardo Kac helps us to see, in the realm of art, the difference between two different kinds of posthumanism that I discuss in chapter 4 of What Is Posthumanism?: a humanist posthumanism and a posthumanist one. Coe may be viewed as a posthumanist in the obvious and, as it were, thematic sense that she takes seriously the ethical and even political challenges of the existence of nonhuman animals (this latter, in her cross-­mapping of the exploitation of animals and of workers in factory farming within a more or less Marxist frame). But as I demonstrated in some detail in chapters 3 and 4 of What Is Posthumanism?, you can well be committed to this posthumanist question in a humanist way—­t hat is to say, in way that reinstalls a very familiar figure of the human at the very center of the universe of experience (in animal rights philosophy) or representation (in Coe’s work). And it is such a subject who then, on the basis of that sovereignty, extends ethical or artistic consideration outward toward the nonhuman other. In this light, Coe’s work is humanist in a crucial sense, indeed, in the only sense that turns out to be absolutely fundamental to her work as art: that it relies upon a subject from whom nothing, in principle, is hidden. A subject who, if blind, is blind not constitutively (as I think Kac’s work dramatizes in multiple ways) but only because he—­a nd I would insist

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on the pronoun in this instance, for reasons Derrida’s analysis of “carnophallogocentrism” makes clear—­has not yet seen what Coe’s art is calculated to reveal so powerfully, indeed melodramatically. And this complicates considerably, one might even say fatefully, Coe’s conception of art as a form of “witnessing.”49 For what must be witnessed is not just what we can see, but also what we cannot see—­i ndeed, that we cannot see. That too must be witnessed. But by whom if not by the other?

6 Apes Like Us Deke Weaver’s performance piece Monkey begins with a joke. In the title, in fact, the first of many we will encounter, as it turns out. We don’t really know it’s a joke until we get to the list of primate species that MONKEY-­M AN writes—­a nd erases—­on his chalkboard. Is our ignorance about the fact that apes aren’t monkeys responsible in part for that erasure? No doubt. Does that mean that the problem could be solved (like a Monkey Puzzle)2 if we got our facts straight, if the bestiary could somehow be made reliable?3 Nope, not really. Things are a little more complicated than that, as Weaver’s piece aims to show. We all know the old saws from theology, philosophy, and anthropology about the differences between humans and animals, and many of them are on display in some form in Weaver’s piece—­ differences that tend to end up under maximum scrutiny in the comparison of Homo sapiens and other primates, especially great apes. First it was possession of a soul (so the story goes), then later, the possession of reason, then later, tool use, then (when that failed), tool-­making, then language, then (when that failed) the production of linguistic novelty, and so on and so forth. Donna Haraway nicely summed up the fate of such efforts to separate “us” from everything else in her famous “Cyborg Manifesto,” when she observed: 1

By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted, if not turned into amusement parks—­language, tool use, social behavior, mental events. Nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation. . . . Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; 93

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they are a clear-­sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-­etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science.4

It’s both heartening and discouraging to realize that those words were written roughly thirty years ago, and Deke Weaver’s Monkey is on to why that might be the case. Would it were that we could leave it to science to settle once and for all, through the mechanisms of knowledge and proof, our relations to other living creatures! Sorry pal, ain’t gonna happen (as his Husband character later in the piece might say). It ain’t gonna happen for a couple of different reasons, and Weaver gives us a hint as to what one of those might be when it gradually dawns on us that we are being fed, completely deadpan, a cocktail of both fact and fiction, one seemingly as plausible as the other. For example, we get a story about the origins of the expression “freeze the balls off a brass monkey,” immediately followed by one about “monkey traps.” The uninformed reader/ viewer—­or even the nonspecialist informed one, for that matter—­ won’t be able to tell you, I’ll wager, which of these (if either) is true. A visit to the internet will tell you, of course, but “tell you” should be put in scare quotes here, because Weaver has laid another monkey trap for us: when you consult the Wiki Gods, as MONKEY-­ MAN knows you will, you will find that Weaver has cribbed his characterization of the Three Wise Monkeys from the Wikipedia entry—­but with one salient difference. There, the fourth monkey, Shizaru (the one who does no evil) is said to be depicted as “crossing his arms,” not, as MONKEY-­M AN tells us, covering his crotch. However, when you go to the entry for “Brass Monkey,” you will find that cast brass depictions of the Three Wise Monkeys were a common tourist souvenir for Western visitors to China and Japan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and when the fourth, Shizaru, was included, it was typically “with its hand covering its genitals.”5 And as for the Brass Monkey that holds cannonballs,

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FIGURE 10. Deke Weaver, photograph from performance of Monkey, 2009. Photograph by Valerie Oliveiro. Courtesy of the artist. https://unreliablebestiary.org.

that’s a crock of shit, as Husband might put it. But then (and this is Weaver’s point), is this really any stranger than the phenomenon of Marlon Perkins tickling a chimpanzee who has a career in acting (chimp, not Marlon) to the point of hysteria to show how much “like us” he is? Any weirder than Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, with its weekly mix of imperialist adventure narrative, scientific enlightenment, armchair cultural anthropology, and ads for Folger’s coffee all rolled into one? Any more improbable—­to take the craziest idea of all—­t han chimpanzees being trained for space travel? What the hell is going on here? Where I grew up, it was common for parents who were suspicious of the accounts given by their kids to ask them, “Are you telling me a story?” So: “Tonight you’re going to hear some stories. They’re all a little bit different but they’re all a little bit the same.” You bet they are.

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Somewhere along the way, in the movement from Japan to England, East to West, we get from crossed arms to covered genitals—­a nd we get a lot more specific about the causes of doing (no) evil. But is it shame we’re talking about, and if so, whose shame is it? Is it we Calvinist–­Lutheran types who felt the need to uncross our previously “oriental” arms and cover our (now) Christian genitals, or is this a take on one of the most familiar tropes of all of the animal versus the human, the stimulus-­response model of the animal that Descartes codified in Western philosophy, its very paradigm the uncontrollability of sexual response? Or as scientists used to say of the animal in the heyday of Skinnerian behaviorism, “One thought for each paw: food, food, sex, and food.” Or is it instead that we are the warring primates who have the problem, in our inability to be a “left bank chimp”? Husband: “What if I had a prehensile dick?” “What if I had like . . . uh, I don’t know, like a . . . a nose penis. And then, like, penises growing out of my palms.” And this is just the beginning of the spin cycle into which Deke Weaver pitches many of our most familiar theories, tropes, prejudices, longings, and fantasies of animals and their kinship or difference with us. Of course, to raise the question of the covering of the genitals, and of the connection between doing (no) evil and the genitals specifically, brings us to the brink of that most central trope of all for the human in relation to nature: the human being as fallen. Original sin, whether for worse (theology) or better (existentialism and its inheritors). As Jacques Derrida notes in his rich and wonderful introductory essay in The Animal That Therefore I Am, philosophy has typically taken it for granted “that the property unique to animals, what in the last instance distinguishes them from man, is their being naked without knowing it”; and since they have no knowledge of their nakedness, they are thus “without consciousness of good and evil.” For man, on the other hand, “it would be the opposite, and clothing derives from technics. We therefore have to think shame and technicity together, as the same ‘subject.’” We are back to the tool, in other words, and “‘dressing oneself’ would be inseparable from all the other figures of what is ‘proper to man,’ even if one talks about it less than speech or reason, the logos, history, laughing, mourning, burial, the gift, etc.”

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And so, “man would be the only one to have invented a garment to cover his sex. He would be a man only to the extent that he was able to be naked, that is to say, to be ashamed, to know himself to be ashamed because he is no longer naked. And knowing himself would mean knowing himself to be ashamed.”6 But precisely here, Derrida wants to activate his own spin cycle on this assured opposition of human and animal, clothing and nakedness. “Naked without knowing it,” he writes, “animals would not be, in truth, naked. They wouldn’t be naked because they are naked.” Thus, “there is no nudity ‘in nature.’” And “because it is naked, without existing in nakedness, the animal neither feels nor sees itself naked. And therefore it isn’t naked.” This sounds like something MONKEY-­M AN would say. And so, Derrida concludes, “man could never be naked any more because he has the sense of nakedness, that is to say, of modesty or shame.” This “contretemps,” Derrida concludes, “has only just begun giving us trouble or doing us harm [mal] in the area of the knowledge of good and evil.”7 Have Deke Weaver and Jacques Derrida ever met? I doubt it, but here the dizzying cocktail of the Brass Monkey nudges us toward the second half of Weaver’s piece, which takes an abrupt turn via MONKEY-­WOMAN’s donning of the “silver space-­w ig (part monkey, part space-­prophet, part woman-­f rom-­t he-­next-­section),” as we are told in the stage directions. “Apes are super monkeys. And humans are super apes. And gods are super human.” And NASA and space exploration, we are given to understand at this point, have always been about cosmology, mystery, the divine—­i n short, the search for heaven and for the radically alien and other, all at the same time. The second half of Weaver’s piece, to stay with Derrida’s parting terms a second more, is very much indeed about good and evil, suffering and redemption, fallenness and transcendence, but it’s also about how those don’t map in any “rational” way onto the human/animal relation—­a ll of which has to do with the second reason I mentioned at the outset for why scientific knowledge will never settle our relations with other living creatures. The problem is not just getting our facts straight about how much DNA we share with chimps or whether New Caledonian crows really use tools. The problem is what Cora Diamond, in a

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wonderful essay, calls “the difficulty of reality”—­a phrase she borrows from novelist John Updike. For her—­a nd I think for Weaver—­ “the difficulty of reality” means “experiences in which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome and astonishing in its inexplicability.”8 And that inexplicability is held (often in the form of art and literature) explicitly in contrast to what she calls “the difficulty of philosophy,” to an ideal of philosophy that models itself on science: the idea that if we can just get our arguments and concepts straight, then the world will finally be domesticated, as it were, made transparent to sense, and our tumultuous psychological lives as animals in relation to animals finally brought to heel. In this light, Diamond writes, “‘debate’ as we understand it may have built into it a distancing of ourselves from our own bodily life and our capacity to respond to and to imagine the bodily lives of others,” and “argumentation” may be seen “as a way we may make unavailable to ourselves our own sense of what it is to be a living animal.”9 Of course, there is plenty of “awesome” and “astonishing” in the second half of Weaver’s piece, plenty that doesn’t fit our thinking or experience, but the reason I invoke Diamond here is that a particularly vexing and even tormenting instance of “the difficulty of reality” for her is “the awareness we each have of being a living body,” which “carries with it exposure to the bodily sense of vulnerability to death, sheer animal vulnerability, the vulnerability we share with them.” To acknowledge that fact, “let alone as shared, is wounding,” she continues; “but acknowledging it as shared with other animals, in the presence of what we do to them,” is “capable of panicking us.”10 Here, it seems to me, we are close to the core of Weaver’s piece. If the first half trafficked in (and sometimes “lectured” about) some of the many scientific, philosophical, and anthropological stereotypes about the differences between humans and animals, only to playfully expose them as half-­k nowledge, half-­t ruth, the very fabric of our everyday, increasingly mediated life (through TV, through the internet)—­a ll of which may well have nothing to do with what other creatures are really like—­t he second half moves quite decisively to tell a somewhat different story centered on ques-

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tions of suffering, good and evil, divinity, and enlightenment. But it does so in a way that throws out the window the roles that humans and other creatures usually assume in such morality plays, much less the hierarchies between Homo sapiens and everything else that those roles usually sustain. Whatever is going on in the second half of Weaver’s piece, the distinction between Homo sapiens and everything else isn’t of much use in making sense of it. We have a talking beagle. And we have a guy who just wants things to be “normal.” And we have a woman who first levitates, and then grows to be hundreds of feet tall, and then stretches out in the Gulf of Mexico and bursts open, her body devoured by the fish of the sea. You tell me who’s holding the cards. It’s not the philosophers and the Behaviorists. At the core of the second part of Weaver’s piece, I think, are exactly one phrase, one simile, and one symbol. The phrase is “Lift yourself up”; the simile is the description of the orangutan as having “eyes like deep brown lakes”; and the symbol is the ending one: the “enormous bones” of the woman/princess/goddess stripped clean by the creatures of the sea. The phrase “Lift yourself up” is the woman/princess’s moment of enlightenment, her epiphany, to be sure; immediately after that she becomes a healer of the sick and dying (including the aforementioned beagle who returns from the dead to speak in a British accent, or so we are to surmise), and she gains stature commensurate with her rapidly growing powers. Eventually, hawks circle her head and she strides down the Mississippi River as you’d stroll in a creek bed. She becomes, in short, a god—­but a god whose powers are not predicated on her ability to transcend her embodiment. Quite the contrary, her embodiment is what allows her to take the pain and suffering of others into her body. To be a god in this instance doesn’t mean being less embodied—­as if she’s above all that—­it means being more embodied. But what is crucial about that phrase “Lift yourself up” is not that some version of it occurs in virtually every holy text in human history. What matters is its virtual reenactment of what I would call the true moment of enlightenment in her story: the moment earlier when she is lifted into the tree by the three hundred–­pound orangutan. After that, everything changes. But it is a reenactment

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of a central trope of enlightenment with one important difference: she doesn’t “lift herself” up, she is lifted up, and not by some Old Testament god or other deity. She couldn’t do it—­she can’t do it—­ alone, but neither can any of us who share the travail with other creatures explored a moment ago by Cora Diamond. We don’t know what the orangutan’s eyes “like deep brown lakes” really mean, but one thing we do know is that we get at this moment a radical literalization and inversion of what Derrida describes as the canonical “schema of elevation” or “erection” associated with the human’s transcendence of the animal (and, as Weaver well notes, of the gods’ transcendence of us)—­one that reaches back to Freud’s thesis on the origins of the human in “organic repression” in Civilization and Its Discontents, to cite only one well-­k nown example. But here, rather than the human elevating itself above the ground by means of its upright posture and gait, leading to the evolutionary (and eventually, aesthetic) priority of vision over smell and the control of the sexual and the olfactory, we find instead “the old man of the forest” on the plane of elevation, while the human gropes about for days on end on the ground, wandering, almost lost, driven by an inchoate desire for contact, waiting to be “lifted up.”11 Meanwhile, if there is an ape—­or more precisely, a monkey—­ who serves as the orangutan’s other in the second half of the piece, it is surely the Husband. The orangutan says nothing, stares deeply into her eyes. Whatever happens in that tree, it takes “a very long time.” Meanwhile, Husband yammers on. He’s at the airport; his flight’s delayed; he clothes himself in the trappings of That Which Is Most Human and wants everything to be “like IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE. NORMAL. REGULAR.” But she tells him, “Are you going to keep me all tight in your fist? Or are you going to let me go?” So who’s caught in the monkey trap now? And that leaves us, in the end, with her “enormous bones,” these “huge bones sparkling in the moonlight”—­what’s left after the sea life strips her gargantuan body of its flesh, after they’ve eaten the tumors that have soaked up the suffering of the world. Those enormous, glistening bones form an answering cipher—­a n ideogram, almost, angular and geometrical—­to the round, deep, brown pools of the orangutan’s eyes. Husband sees the bones and says, “I got it. I saw. I understood.” But does he? Do we?

7 Condors at the End of the World Rethinking Environmental Art

The question is indeed that of the world. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2

What kind of event is extinction? To answer that question, we have to begin with an assertion that will seem paradoxical to some and commonsensical to others: that extinction is both the most natural thing in the world and, at the same time, is never and never could be natural. On the one hand, 99.9 percent of all species that have ever existed in the history of this planet are extinct; on the other hand, extinction can hardly be regarded as “natural” in any simple sense, and not just because, as a number of people have argued, “nature,” conceived as some realm apart, untouched and unshaped by human affairs, ceased to exist a long time ago, as all the recent talk about climate change and the Anthropocene makes clear.1 Beyond this, the psychoanalytically inclined among us point out that any human registration of the so-­called “fact” of nature is always already radically denaturalized because the symbolic and imaginary realms that register the presence of nature in their different ways for us are anything but “natural.” As Slavoj Žižek put it, roughly twenty-­five years ago, “the fact that man is a speaking being means precisely that he is, so to speak, constitutively ‘derailed,’” an “open wound of the world,” as Hegel put it, that “excludes man forever from the circular movement of life,” so that “all attempts to regain a new balance between man and nature” can only be a form of fetishistic disavowal. 2 One way to intensify and complicate this assertion is to realize that everything Žižek says does not apply only to human beings (because we aren’t the only “speaking beings” in the full sense intended here), even as we cannot say in any neat and simplistic way which nonhuman forms of life fall under the purview of this assertion and which do not—­a desire for neat and tidy distinctions between different forms of life, different ways of being in the 101

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world, that would constitute its own form of fetishistic disavowal, as Jacques Derrida (among others) has pointed out. Indeed, as Derrida argues, in what may seem like a counterintuitive if not outlandish assertion, death is nothing less than an end of the world. Not only one end among others, the end of someone or something in the world, the end of a life or a living being. . . . Death marks each time, each time in defiance of arithmetic, the absolute end of the one and only world, of that which each opens as a one and only world, the end of the unique world, the end of the totality of what is or can be presented as the origin of the world for any unique living being, be it human or not. 3

Now as we shall see in a moment, this seemingly brazen assertion can be redescribed in more naturalistic terms that make it seem a lot less counterintuitive. This will help us, in turn, draw out the fact that what is going on here is not just an excessively Heideggerian hangover on Derrida’s part; rather, he is trying to move us away from what he calls the “dogma” of Heidegger’s famous (or infamous) investigations of the differences between humans, animals, and stones, to the inescapable necessity of paying attention to the different ways of being in the world, and it is on those differences that the hard and detailed ethical and political questions of thinking about extinction depend.4 To put it another way, when a being, human or nonhuman, dies, what goes out of the world? When an entire species becomes extinct, what leaves the world, the world we are left with? To begin to answer these questions is to realize that extinction, whatever else it may be, is never a generic event. The California condor became extinct in the wild in 1987, when the remaining 22 individuals were captured and an ambitious conservation program was launched. In 1991, they were reintroduced into the wild, and as of October 2014 the total world population stood at 425, either in the wild or captivity, making it one of the world’s rarest birds.5 Mark Wilson and Bryndís H. Snæbjörnsdóttir’s ambitious exhibition, Trout Fishing in America and Other Stories, consists of several different elements, but the one I will focus on here

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is a series of photographs of the frozen, preserved bodies of 14 dead California condors, each printed above a transcribed text about the bird taken from conversations with the biologists working in the conservation program. The trail that would lead to these photographs began when the artists visited the Vermilion Cliffs area, near the Grand Canyon, in November 2013 and interviewed biologist Chris Parish from the Peregrine Fund, who was working with the conservation program. During these conversations, the artists were especially struck by the contrast between the scientific protocols driving the project (having to do with body weight, medical regimes, reproductive rates, and the like) and the often heartfelt and passionate stories they heard about each bird from the scientists, mixing anger, frustration, and hope. It was here that they learned about the birds preserved in a freezer at the University of Arizona in Tucson—­many of them dead due to lead poisoning from feeding on animals killed by hunters with lead bullets. Later, once the photographs had been completed, they returned to Vermilion Cliffs and engaged in detailed discussions about each bird with Parish and fellow biologist Eddie Feltes, and it is from those conversations that the final printed transcriptions are taken.6 When I came to the opening of the exhibition I was, at the same moment, in the middle of reading volume two of Jacques Derrida’s seminars on The Beast and the Sovereign, in part in relation to another project I was working on (also about birds), and I felt a powerful resonance between Derrida’s explorations of death, mourning, responsibility, and the concept of “world” (in the Heideggerian sense of the term) and the condor photographs—­not just the images themselves, but also the complex of emotions that bubble up between the lines (and sometimes not even between the lines) in the scientists’ accounts of the life and death of each particular animal. To me, these images called forth a line that ends Paul Celan’s poem “Vast, Glowing Vault,” which Derrida returns to again and again in the second volume of the seminars. Celan’s poem opens by invoking the vault of the sky filled with a “swarm” of stars and then pivots: on to a ram’s silicified forehead I brand this image, between the horns

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And then the poem ends with the memorable line, “The world is gone, I must carry you.”7 Many things could be said, of course, about the relation between these lines and the condors that appear not only in the installation’s photographs but also in its video components. For example, we might seize upon the invitation offered by the figure of the “ram” in the poem, which evokes not only the primary reference of the constellation Aries, but also, as Derrida notes, the ram in the story of Abraham and Isaac, the sacrificial substitute of animal for human that—­paradigmatically, for Judeo-­Western culture—­secures the ontological privilege and specificity of the human “world” over and against that of the animal, to whom the biblical commandment “thou shalt not kill” evidently does not apply. 8 And yet, as Derrida points out elsewhere, “does killing necessarily mean putting to death? Isn’t it also ‘letting die’?”9 I’ll come back to complexities of that question at the very end of this chapter, but for now I want to pursue another invitation suggested by the “vault” of the poem’s title and how it might be linked to the vault from which the condor bodies themselves have emerged to be placed before us in what strikes me, at least in some of these images, as a funereal setting or a scene of exhumation—­a n invitation to raise a question central to Derrida’s seminars, and central to my response to these images: namely, What do we call these bodies before us? Are they “corpses,” “remains”? Or just objects, like a rock, a table, or even a leaf? And if not, if they are remains, what are they remains of ? To whom or to what do they belong? And what, in turn, is owed to them? Or as Derrida puts it in the dizzying opening of the fifth seminar in volume 2, this question of the corpse, that is “both a thing and something other than a thing”10 is a “stumbling block” but at the same time “an unavoidable touchstone”11 in our all-­too-­confident attempts to assume that human beings inhabit an ontologically full and secured world that is barred to animals, an assumption that makes the dead animal body not the remainder of something, or better someone, but rather nothing but an object, on the order of a stone.12 To address these questions is perforce to ask, “What do beasts and men have in common?”13 As Derrida points out, Heidegger’s own answer to this question is one that takes for granted a certain

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difference in kind between scientific knowledge, philosophical inquiry, and ethical and ontological questions—­a difference that this particular art installation seeks to trouble, and nowhere more so than in the texts that emerged from the conversations with the biologists whose dedication to their scientific protocols of observation and quantification could not conceal their intense emotional involvement with these creatures, these worlds, so different from our own. No one limns this feature of Heidegger’s approach to the difference between scientific and philosophical knowledge better than Derrida himself in the seventh seminar, when he notes that Heidegger’s “strange concept” of the animal’s “poverty in world . . . does not consist in a quantitative relation of degree, of more or less.”14 “About this presupposed essence,” he continues, “the zoologist, the zoologist as such at least, has nothing to say to us.”15 As Michael Naas has pointed out, Derrida is often quick to note that Heidegger, more than most philosophers, takes “into account a certain ethological knowledge” with regard to animals.16 But from Derrida’s point of view, that only makes all the more dogmatic Heidegger’s “thesis of essence (‘the animal is poor in world’) independent of zoological knowledge,” a thesis pertaining, as Derrida puts it, to “the animal in general,” to “every animal” as “equally poor in world,”17 whereas Derrida’s focus will be not on “effacing the limit” between human and nonhuman animals (or indeed between different forms of life, human and nonhuman), but rather “in multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiply.”18 Paying attention to the specificity and particularity of other forms of life is central to Derrida’s fundamental strategy in laying out his differences with Heidegger in both The Animal That Therefore I Am and The Beast and the Sovereign seminars. As Naas characterizes it, Derrida’s thought undertakes here a triple movement: first, he “begins by looking at a philosophical discourse that grants the human and denies the animal some attribute—­language, technology, culture, mourning, a relationship to death, and so on,” and then, second, contests, “sometimes with reference to ethology, primatology, or zoology, the supposed fact that the animal does not have such and such an ability or attribute,” while at the

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same time, and thirdly, he “moves very quickly to the other side of the question in order to contest not the fact that animals do not have such and such a capacity or attribute but the principle on the basis of which philosophers have claimed that humans do.”19 One such example—­to return now, quite literally, to the question of “remains”—­is Heidegger’s well-­k nown assertion that animals “perish” but only human beings “die,” because human beings, unlike animals, have an understanding of death as such; they grasp their own mortality, and live in the light of it, in a way that eludes the animal, who simply ceases to exist biologically at the end of its life. And yet, as Derrida wonders in many places, do human beings really have this kind of relationship to death “as such,” one that would allow this apparently radical form of finitude to be reappropriated as a “being-­able,” a “power” or a “potency”?20 Isn’t it the case, rather, that we can never know the “as such” of death because death is always elsewhere and at a distance for us, even though it is, paradoxically, the thing that most testifies to our concrete and unique existence, our singularity?21 After all, you can’t experience your own death; you can only experience death in and through the death of the other, and all attempts to imagine or think about death are always, as Derrida points out, “phantasmatic.” And “this suffices all the less,” he continues, “to distinguish clearly between death as such and life as such because all our thoughts of death . . . are always, structurally, thoughts of survival. To see oneself or to think oneself dead is to see oneself surviving, present at one’s death.”22 Here, then, we find not the finitude referenced by Heidegger—­ the confrontation with my mortality in his famous existential of “being toward Death”—­but rather what we might call the finitude of my finitude, its non-­appropriability for and by me, its radical alterity, one that sets up a relationship of asymmetrical, unpredictable, and finally unappeasable alterity to and for the other. For as Derrida writes, “Without knowing anything of what ‘dead’ means in the syntagma ‘when I am, etc., dead,’” death means above all “to be delivered over, in what remains of me, as in all my remains, to be exposed or delivered over with no possible defense, once totally disarmed, to the other,”23 and so “the other” names “what always might, one day, do something with me and my remains, make me

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into a thing,” and do so, moreover, “as they wish,”24 or as Derrida sometimes puts it, without “calculation.”25 To put it this way is to realize that this relationship of alterity and unpredictability to the other is, without let up and without assurances—­i ndeed, because without assurances—­a scene of ethical responsibility. And that is precisely the situation into which we are thrown, I would suggest, by these images. What shall we do with these remains that are “delivered over” to us? What will we make of them? And what will that make of us? Here, I think, it’s useful to augment Derrida’s insistence on the alterity of other forms of life by redescribing it in terms of biological systems theory, but before we do, we need to follow the penultimate turn in Derrida’s argument—­to come back now to the last line of Celan’s poem—­which is made up of a movement through three possible theses, finished off with a meditation on the last: 1. Incontestably, animals and humans inhabit the same world, the same objective world even if they do not have the same experience of the objectivity of the object. 2. Incontestably, animals and humans do not inhabit the same world, for the human world will never be purely and simply identical to the world of animals. 3. In spite of this identity and this difference, neither animals of different species, nor humans of different cultures, nor any animal or human individual inhabit the same world as another, however close and similar these living individuals may be (be they humans or animals), and the difference between one world and another will remain always unbridgeable, because the community of the world is always constructed, simulated by a set of stabilizing apparatuses . . . never natural, language in the broad sense, codes of traces being designed, among all living beings, to construct a unity of the world that is always deconstructible, nowhere and never given in nature. Between my world . . . and any other world there is first the space and time of an infinite difference, an interruption that is incommensurable with all attempts to make a passage, a bridge, an isthmus, all attempts at communication, translation, trope, and transfer that the desire for a world . . . will try to pose, impose, propose, stabilize. There is no world, there are only islands. 26

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Now it is the first thesis that is usually taken to be “ecological,” but my point here is that, by the logic we are tracing, it is actually the third thesis that is the most radically ecological—­or even better, we might say, environmental. Derrida’s assertion might seem counterintuitive, but it will seem less so if we remember that, in the terms of biological systems theory, “there is no world” precisely for the reasons we may trace back to the work of Jakob von Uexküll on human and animal umwelten and forward to those who work on the biology of consciousness and cognition, such as Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, who demonstrate that what counts as “nature” or “world” or (better still) “environment” is always a product of the contingent and selective practices deployed in the embodied enaction of a particular autopoietic living system. As philosopher of mind Alva Noë argues, “The locus of consciousness is the dynamic life of the whole, environmentally plugged-­in person or animal.”27 And as his work shows, recent research in the biology of consciousness makes it clear that these questions do not neatly break along lines of human versus animal, inside versus outside, brain versus world, or even, for that matter, organic versus inorganic. 28 As Noë puts it, “It is not the case that all animals have a common external environment,” because “to each different form of animal life there is a distinct, corresponding, ecological domain or habitat,” which means, in short, that “all animals live in structured worlds.”29 Now, I think, we are in a better position to follow Derrida as he moves rapidly in the next moment of the seminar from an equally bracing phrase taken from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—­t he phrase, “I am alone”—­to Celan’s memorable line which we have already quoted, “The world is gone, I must carry you.” As Derrida puts it in a later session that year, picking up the thread: We could move for a long time, in thought and reading, between Fort und Da, Da und Fort, between . . . these two theres, between Heidegger and Celan, between on the one hand the Da of Dasein . . . and on the other hand Celan’s fort in “Die Welt is fort.” . . . The world has gone, in the absence or distance of the world, I must, I owe it to you, I owe it to myself to carry you,

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without world, without the foundation or grounding of anything in the world, without any foundational or fundamental mediation, one on one, like wearing mourning or bearing a child, basically where ethics begins. 30

Though I cannot pursue the point in detail here, it is worth noting that this scene of responsibility, generated by the absence of “world,” is also a scene of what is sometimes called spectrality or “hauntology,” a scene of responsibility to those already gone (“wearing mourning”) or those not yet here (“bearing a child”). Hauntology, as Colin Davis characterizes it, “supplants its near-­ homonym ontology,” and marks “a wholly irrecuperable intrusion in our world, which is not comprehensible within our available intellectual frameworks, but whose otherness we are responsible for preserving.” In this domain, the question of what the other asks or requires of us, a question secreted by its alterity, “is not a puzzle to be solved” but is rather “the structural openness or address directed toward the living by the voices of the past or the not yet formulated possibilities of the future.”31 Now it is possible, as I have already suggested, to give a scientific account of how this hauntology or spectrality obtains in our relations to the living and to questions of extinction, an account that we are invited to pursue by remembering that paying attention to the nongeneric character of the system/environment relation for particular creatures is in fact quite consonant with Derrida’s insistence on “complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line” that separates different forms of life—­a move away from simplicity (namely, the simplicity of the ham-­fisted distinction “human/animal”) and toward complexity (namely, the nongeneric complexity of the system/environment relation as that evolves both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, a complexity that is, in Derrida’s terms, infinite in principle). Indeed, as theoretical biologist and MacArthur Fellow Stuart Kauffman argues, the world is “enchanted” precisely because there are no “entailing laws” that govern, in a Newtonian fashion, the evolution of the biosphere and its various forms of life. As Kauffman puts it, even before we reach the level of what he calls “a Kantian whole, also sometimes called an ‘autopoietic system’ that ‘builds

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itself’” (such as California condors), 32 we find the following kind of basal, irreducible complexity: Proteins are linear strings of amino acids bound together by peptide bonds. There are twenty types of amino acids in evolved biology. A typical protein is perhaps 300 amino acids long, and some are several thousand amino acids long. Now, how many possible proteins are there with 200 amino acids? Well, there are 20 choices for each of the 200 positions, so 20200 or 10260 possible proteins with the length of 200 amino acids. . . . Now the universe is 13.7 billion years old and has about 1080 particles. The fastest time scale in the universe is the Planck time scale of 10–­43 seconds. If the universe were doing nothing but using all 1080 particles in parallel to make proteins the length of 200 amino acids, each in a single Planck moment, it would take 10 39 repetitions of the history of the universe to make all the possible proteins the length of 200 amino acids just once! . . . History enters when the space of what is possible is vastly larger than what can actually happen. The universe in making a tiny fraction of all possible proteins the length of 200 amino acids is extremely nonergodic!33

Of course, as Kauffman points out, this principle obtains even more radically at the level of “Kantian wholes,” since “the exploration of the ever-­vaster space of possibilities as the lengths of peptides and proteins increase . . . become ever sparser as complexity increases,” which provides, in turn, “the basis of the antientropic process that undergirds part of why the universe became complex. This is surely true in the evolution of the biosphere, from one or a few living things to hundreds of million species today with ever more myriad molecular and interwoven functional diversity of things and linked processes.”34 And from this vantage, what we confront in the bodies of these dead condors is, precisely, a materialized “trace,” or even better, Derrida suggests, a “cinder,” that he associates with a kind of “crypt” that prevents the completion of the work of mourning and psychic incorporation 35—­one whose inscrutability haunts the present with retentions from an evolutionary past and protensions of an evolutionary future. That is to

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say, as with any trace, this “cinder” confronts us with the presence of that which is not itself present—­in this case, with the reality of the concatenative material processes that resulted in this form of life we call “condor,” and with the evolutionary preadaptations present in the body before us that would, in time, take other, unpredictable forms, precisely, as Kauffman notes, because all possible organism/environment relationships in the future cannot be predicted or ergodically extrapolated from that which is present before us, try as we might to control or direct them. Nevertheless—­a nd I’ve explored this question in some detail elsewhere36—­we do make decisions all the time, even in the face of this impossibility, without “foundational or fundamental mediation,” about the “letting die” and the killing of various forms of life (human and nonhuman). And this leads to the final, and far-­f rom-­t rivial, point about these animals foregrounded by this installation: 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 power, 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,” 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 scène 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.”37 What better way to mark this fact, in these images, than the strange cohabitation, within the same frame, the same “place,” of these singular dead animal bodies, subject to the laws of chemistry, decay, rigor mortis, and the like—­“ultranatural” objects, in that sense, whose decay we try to control through technological means—­a nd what Derrida has called the machinalité of any semiotic code whose epitome is, of course, mathematics, here represented by the “anonymous” numbers that mark each bird’s wing tag but only to become, in time,

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a kind of emotionally charged “proper name” for this particular creature. All of which redoubles and accumulates in the seriality of the photographic series itself: fourteen birds (but is that even the word we want at this point?), side by side, in all. What this means is that, as it is with the archive, so it is with extinction. On the one hand, there is nothing more “natural” than extinction; it is an event that happens “there,” in nature, and has happened with the vast majority of species that have ever existed. But at the same time, extinction is and can never be a “natural” event because it always takes place within a horizon of “world” and its governing principles (including, of course, the conservational principle of “biodiversity”) that we create through “stabilizing apparatuses.” But that stabilization is always marked by something else that is preserved—­maybe even mainly preserved—­in the archive: what Derrida calls the adestination or destinerrance that attends any attempt to make good on our commitments, any attempt to materialize our “world,” any attempt to address the other to whom we feel responsible: an adestination that stems from the fact that the same sign or trace or mark can function variably, even oppositely, in very different contexts.38 The constraints of scientific method and protocol constitute, of course, a canonical attempt to control, even eliminate, this destinerrance, but its most compelling manifestation in this installation is the lead bullet that leaves its trace—­sometimes in the discoloration of the animal’s body by lead poisoning, but sometimes invisible—­in these bodies and these images, but not of them, you might say, the materialization of two “theres” in one “place.” That destinerrance quite literally attends such tidy ethical, legal, and political distinctions as we like to make between the polar opposites of “game” or “trash” animals who are deemed “killable but not murderable”—­the animals that sustain these carrion feeders—­a nd those who, like the condor, are “rare,” “threatened,” and “protected,” with the full backing of scientific and political apparatuses, by the force of law. The archive, in other words, may record the “official story” of body weight, reproductive rate, legal status, and so on, but it also actualizes something more, and in that other space, that other scene, we discover that the world is not given but made. We thus discover, in short, a scene of responsibility.

8 Each Time Unique

The Poetics of Extinction

At the center of Michael Pestel’s installation Requiem: Ectopistes migratorius (mounted in the Fall of 2014) is not just a species of bird, the passenger pigeon—­t he centennial of whose extinction the installation memorializes—­but also the specter of a single bird, Martha, the last of her kind who died in a display in the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914. I’ll come back to the significance of this quite unusual fact in a moment—­namely, knowing the exact date of the extinction of an entire species—­but I’ll begin by noting that the centrality of Martha marks the extinction event of this particular species (and Pestel’s installation) as something qualitatively quite unusual if not unique. At the center of this extremely complex work is a large, round wooden structure called “Martha’s Peel.” The term “peel” refers here not to any kind of sheathe or the removal of one, but to the small square defensive towers of the sort that were built in the sixteenth century in the border counties of England and Scotland, here mimicked by the twelve-­foot-­h igh by eight-­foot-­d iameter wooden structure resembling a large bird cage, with a rotating stool at its center and a video camera mounted on top to record the activities of those who inhabit the structure. “Martha’s Peel” is paired with two other components that stand across from it: “Passenger” is a wooden train trestle about twenty feet long supporting a modified O scale train car that moves back and forth across its length, casting a shadow both inside and outside the trestle as it moves, and viewers are invited to sight down the length of the trestle as the train moves; and “Peel’s Foe” consists of a long palindrome that sits above the train trestle, inscribed on slate panels, reading “Peel’s Foe Not A Set Animal Laminates A Tone Of Sleep” (Pestel has long been fascinated with palindromes, anagrams, and the like). As the artist explains it on the exhibition website, “‘Martha’s Peel’ 113

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is a kind of peel warning us of the rapidly accumulating ecological danger, the sixth extinction. The ‘foe’ who Martha is watching is the overwhelming force of humanity driving global climate change. That foe is ‘not a set animal,’ a static being, but a dynamic process causing the release of greenhouse gasses faster than the planet can absorb them. Thus, the extinction of millions of species (‘laminates a tone of sleep’) is well under way. Many of those species are ones we have never even discovered. Possibly, one of those is we ourselves!”1 These elements thus provide some of the conceptual skeleton of the exhibition by alluding to two of the three main factors that contributed to the passenger pigeon’s extinction: the rifle and the railroad, both of which are evoked by sighting down the interior of the train trestle. The role of the rifle will be clear enough in a moment, but the railroad, it should be noted, played a major factor both in transporting hordes of hunters to the migratory roosting sites and—­crucially, with the invention of refrigerated cars—­i n shipping tons of fresh squab meat (as it was called) to urban centers. The third main factor in the bird’s demise, the invention of the telegraph, allowed masses of hunters to be alerted about roosting locations, where they could arrive in advance and make preparations for the massive slaughter. The telegraph—­a nd specifically its iterability—­is linked in the exhibition to writing, pecking, and musical notation (and of course to the iterability of bird song itself) in numerous ways. These include (1) “Flügel (Catalog of Extinct Birds),” a cluster of elements including a grand piano, a musical composition that algorithmically translates the Latin names of almost two hundred species of extinct birds into corresponding musical phrases, and a large collection of Piano Cluster Boards (or PCBs) utilizing spaced wooden dowels that, when placed on the keys, automatically play the corresponding musical phrases (which means, of course, that the composition will continue to grow as more bird species become extinct); (2) an element called “Erasure,” which consists of a video of the names of extinct birds being written on a chalk board and then erased, which is, in turn, shown on a small screen mounted above “Martha’s Peel” and is viewed through bird-­watching binoculars; (3) one of three “Piano

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FIGURE 11. Michael Pestel, “Martha’s Peel,” from Requiem: Ectopistes migratorius, 2014. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Lafayette College Art Galleries, Easton, Pennsylvania.

Harps,” which incorporates a 1914 Oliver typewriter as part of the instrumentation that viewers play to generate a sound field for a looping video of a dancing bird, “Pigeon 98” (and clearly the shape of the piano harps, like the shape of the typewriter mechanism itself, evoke the wings of a bird); (4) “Unveiled,” which consists of rows of letters mounted on the glass wall at the entrance of the exhibition (which I’ll come back to later); and finally, (5) the performances of Pestel himself at various times during the exhibition, which include improvisations on a large handmade wooden recorder called the “Bird Machine” that incorporates a row of various birdcalls mounted to the side, and on a flute that fires wadding

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of the sort used in muzzleloading rifles into a gong mounted on one of the piano harps to punctuate the opening of the exhibition. What we find, then, in this exhibition, is an extremely complex conjugation of the relationship between time and space and how those are related to questions of code, iterability, technology, notation, and performativity—­a ll of which is in turn framed by the relationship of singularity and multiplicity that structures the entire story of the extinction of the passenger pigeon, with its poignant contrast between the singularity of Martha, the palsied, twenty-­n ine-­year-­old sterile sole survivor of her kind, 2 and what the species itself was most known for: flocks that, according John James Audubon’s estimate, could number over a billion birds and were said to darken the skies for days at a time. 3 As Anita Albus recounts Audubon’s experience in her beautiful book, On Rare Birds: Not one pigeon would land unless some of their millions of fiery red eyes could spy some woods with beech mast or acorns, or fields of wheat or rice for their millions of pitch-­black bills. If a falcon tried to seize a bird in the flock, the pigeons quickly closed ranks into a compact mass, generating a roll of thunder with their beating wings. Like a living torrent they plunged down in almost solid masses and “darted forward in undulating and angular lines, descended and swept close over the earth with inconceivable velocity, mounted perpendicularly so as to resemble a vast column, and, when high, were seen wheeling and twisting with their continued lines, which then resembled the coils of a gigantic serpent.” Moved by the beauty of the spectacle, this painter of birds observed how one flock after the other would fly into the space where a pigeon had just escaped a falcon’s talon, and how, even if no raptor were present, they would form a living river in the air and replicate the angles, curves, and undulations of the attacked flock before them. A single memory bonded millions of pigeons together.4

Practically speaking, this strategy of “predator satiation,” as it is called, is precisely what enabled the passenger pigeon’s rapid demise once all the necessary technological ingredients were in place.5 In his Ornithological Biography, Audubon recounts the various strategies employed to produce the mass carnage that led to

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the passenger pigeon’s extinction. Various sorts of firearms were used, of course, but also large pole and net contraptions that would garner thousands of birds at a time. Sulphur pots generated fumes that would asphyxiate birds by the thousands, trees were felled as tens of thousands of nests and nestlings fell to the ground, and birds were poisoned with whiskey-­soaked corn so that they could be rounded up easily, just to name some of the more tried-­a nd-­t rue strategies. Some Native Americans, who had partaken of pigeon flesh as part of their subsistence for years, found these methods disturbing, to say the least. Potawatomi leader Pokagon, disgusted by one 1880 massacre he had witnessed, where birds were burned alive and nestlings exploded upon hitting the ground, wondered about what sort of punishment in the afterlife would be “awaiting our white neighbors who have so wantonly butchered and driven from our forests these wild pigeons, the most beautiful flowers of the animal creation of North America.”6 Both of these—­the scene of slaughter and the moral indignation— are depicted in a famous scene in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (published in 1823), a novel that is a “call to judgment,” as Jerome McGann has argued, about the treatment of “other species, other native peoples” during the period.7 As the massive flocks of passenger pigeons descend upon the fictional town of Templeton, the people of the village are whipped into a frenzy, and, along with the familiar pole and net contraptions, “every species of fire-­ arms, from the French ducking-­gun, with a barrel nearly six feet in length, to the common horseman’s pistol, was to be seen in the hands of the men and boys.”8 But the most significant of these is an old, small swivel cannon, once used in the “inroads into the Indian settlements,” and later deployed for patriotic ceremonies such as Fourth of July celebrations, but now filled with duck shot and fired into the passing column of pigeons.9 As the main character, Leatherstocking, observes the scene, he is “a silent but uneasy spectator” who was “able to keep his sentiments to himself until he saw the introduction of the swivel into the sports.” But then, he objects, “it’s wicked to be shooting into flocks in this wastey manner . . . to kill twenty and eat one. When I want such a thing, I go into the woods till I find one to my liking, and then I shoot him off the branches without touching a feather of another, though there

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might be a hundred on the same tree.”10 In the meantime, he says, taking his leave, “I wouldn’t touch one of the harmless things that kiver the ground here, looking up with their eyes on me, as if they only wanted tongues to say their thoughts.”11 Much could be said, of course, about all the various ethical and political dimensions of this scene (not least of all, the use of the patriotic cannon to “clear” both Indians and pigeons), but one of the things that Leatherstocking’s response draws our attention to is the difference between multiplicity and singularity that frames the entire story of the passenger pigeon. Now this image of the birds as a kind of superorganism or swarm is an easy mark, I take it, for any armchair Deleuzean, and we find here, no doubt, an amazing transindividual intensification that binds thousands, even millions, of birds into something the earth had rarely, if ever, seen. But I want to return now to the installation, and specifically to Martha, and ask what resides at the other pole of this configuration, the pole of singularity. What is Martha, exactly? A pet? A fetish? A curiosity? A relic? We might say that her captivity, display, and the giving to her of a proper name attempt to turn her into all of these things, but these compensatory gestures only underscore all the more that this is a case of fetishistic disavowal, not only of our own grotesque role in the extinction of her species, but also of our own finitude in relation to other forms of life, which calls forth these compensatory attempts to “curate,” you might say, the boundaries between life and death, survival and extinction. Indeed, as much of the media coverage around the centennial of the passenger pigeon reminded us, there has perhaps never been an individual bird who has been more the subject of curatorial care (both during and after life) than Martha.12 All of this and more is indexed, it seems to me, by the strange fact of having an exact date for the extinction of her species. As Derrida points out, a date, like a signature, is an attempt to fix that which cannot be fixed. It simultaneously marks that which happens only once and that which, to be legible as a date, must be able, and unavoidably so, to come around again—­not one “September 1,” but many. As he writes of dates in an essay on Paul Celan’s poetry:

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Assigning or consigning absolute singularity, they must mark themselves off simultaneously, at the same time, and from themselves, by the possibility of commemoration. Indeed, they mark only insofar as their readability announces the possibility of a return. Not the absolute return of precisely what cannot come again . . . but rather the spectral revenance of that which, as a unique event in the world, will never come again. A date is a specter. But this revenance of impossible return is marked in the date.13

The resonance of Derrida’s observation for the feature of Pestel’s installation called “Unveiled” will become clear in a moment, but for now I simply want to register that “on that date,” September 1, 1914, Martha became a specter, an agent for a whole legion of “hauntings.” In fact, as one journalist notes, “people kept ‘seeing’ the birds after the great flocks vanished, or devising outlandish theories to explain where they might have gone. The journal Science speculated that they were in the desert of Arizona; another journal, the Auk, suggested they were east of Puget Sound, and a lumberman claimed to have seen millions in Chile. Henry Ford was convinced that they had all drowned in the Pacific en route to Asia. The flocks were like phantom limbs that the country kept on feeling.”14 But dating and curating Martha’s demise is an attempt to fix that which cannot be fixed in a much more concrete way, and, in fact, Martha was already a specter before her death, a ghostly presence of a gaping absence, a hole in the life of the planet and indeed, if we follow Cooper, of the nation. After all, the passenger pigeon—­considered as a complex of system/environment interactions that evolve over time, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, versus what we might call the “simplex” of the brute material persistence of her body and her DNA—­was already extinct before Martha died. And our exertion of curatorial power over the life/death boundary on the site of extinction is driven, no doubt, by the same desire that drives Martha’s name, for she was, in fact, named for George Washington’s widow, and her mate George (who died a year earlier) named for the president himself—­ the epitome of sovereignty for the young nation if ever there was

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one.15 On this point, it’s worth remembering that Martha was and remains part of an archive (in which the date, of course, plays a central, indeed constitutive, role): in the case at hand, the archive of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, where she is, in the words of its curator of the bird division, “one of the Smithsonian’s most iconic specimens.”16 In this light, Martha’s death—­a nd the extinction of her species in general—­is anything but a “natural” event, even as the archive, and all of the curatorial protocols associated with it, ground their sovereignty in both a “power of ” and a “power over.” For as Derrida writes at the opening of Archive Fever, the archive “coordinates 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.”17 But the whole point, of course, is that the passenger pigeon is neither “beast” nor “sovereign” (to use Derrida’s terms), all of which—­to return now to Pestel’s installation—­is “outed,” as it were, in “Martha’s Peel,” where we are invited to sit and spin around inside the cage, vocalize or play an instrument (in memory of Martha’s birdsong), and draw on the chalkboard floor, remembering how Martha would have rubbed her beak on a chalk block inside her cage, while, as we spin, photographic stills from Eadweard Muybridge’s famous series of the passenger pigeon whiz by, perhaps quickly enough to show the bird in flight, creating a kind of spectral reanimation. Is this a process of “becoming-­bird,” as the title of the live video projection of the inside of “Martha’s Peel” suggests? No, nothing could be further from the truth, I think, because the point is that the birds are already gone, already a part of a historical record archived by Muybridge’s photographs. We are, to be sure, invited to occupy Martha’s space, perhaps to identify with her singularity and isolation by having our attention focused on our own—­we are, in short, invited to open the question of the relationship between her finitude, her death, and our own—­but in the end, I think, we are brought back to the question of dwelling, to what constitutes a proper or appropriate form of dwelling and for whom, with whom—­

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FIGURE 12. Michael Pestel, “Martha’s Peel” (Muybridge detail), from Requiem: Ectopistes migratorius, 2014. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Lafayette College Art Galleries, Easton, Pennsylvania.

back, in fact, to Leatherstocking’s protestation, “Put an ind, Judge, to your clearings.”18 We are back, that is to say, to the relationship between dwelling and the “eco-­” of ecology via the oikos that links it to the “eco-­” of economy—­t he oikos that marks off and delineates a home, inside from outside, as a place where the relation between organism and environment is stabilized, secured, even made calculable and economizable: the “place” where the “eco-­” of a bird species thousands of years old meets the “eco-­” of telegraphs, railroads, and cannons. If the “eco-­” of “ecology” is fatefully linked, as Michael Marder puts it, to “the oikos belonging to the family and standing for property, the proper, domus, one’s own domain,” then the challenge here is how to think an “aneconomic” sense of a “proper” or appropriate dwelling, one divorced from property, the family,

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the proper name (such as “Martha”) and finally from sovereignty itself. 19 Indeed, part of the conceptual and emotional torque of Pestel’s installation is the irony of Martha’s final dwelling, which testifies all the more to the necessity of thinking dwelling otherwise, perhaps as a migratory process, not a process of “clearing”—­ dwelling, precisely, as passengers, we who are “passing through,” along the lines of “lasting” in Stanley Cavell’s reading of Emerson as a process of “onwardness,” what Derrida in the second set of seminars on The Beast and the Sovereign calls a “movement without repose,” “this being-­on-­t he-­path of a finite and lonely being in the world.”20 In another sense, of course, what we have here is a crossing—­ but a crossing in the sense of a “near miss,” of “ships passing in the night,” as they say—­of radically different temporalities that are central to thinking ecology. On the one hand, we have the calculable, bankable, economizable clock and calendar time of “our” mode of dwelling, which enables us to say that the passenger pigeon went extinct precisely on September 1, 1914. But on the other, we find a much more complex and multidimensional kind of temporality that obtains and is made materially manifest in specific system-­environment relationships, so that, for example, Martha both “is” and “is not” a passenger pigeon as she sits in her cage in the Cincinnati Zoo. That is to say, the biophysiology and its associated traits of her species still obtain in her person even though she is long separated from the environment and behaviors that made her a passenger pigeon—­in this sense, she can still feel pain, feel alone, needs rest and nourishment, and so on. And yet, those physical characteristics and behavioral traits did not evolve as a result of her and her kind living in cages for thousands of years, indeed they never could. She is, in that sense, precisely both a “trace” and a “specter,” as Derrida puts it, and she marks how the crossing of these two modes of dwelling, these two “ecos,” constitutes a time (as Derrida says, borrowing from Shakespeare) that is “out of joint.”21 This complex nexus of temporality, dwelling, iterability, and materialization is put very much on the front burner by other elements in the installation: in the component “Eight Voices (Before Columbus),” which references the names for the passenger pigeon

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FIGURE 13. Michael Pestel, “Unveiling” (detail), from Requiem: Ectopistes migratorius, 2014. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Lafayette College Art Galleries, Easton, Pennsylvania.

used by the Lenape, Ojibwe, Kaskaskia, Mohawk, Choctaw, Seneca, and Narragansett Indians, where viewers are invited to drop an acorn (a key food source for the passenger pigeon) into the podium after reciting the name of an extinct bird species (which takes us back, of course, to our discussion of Cooper’s The Pioneers); and, most of all, in the component called “Unveiling,” which consists of the glass wall entrance to the gallery on which are printed letters that turn out to be fragments of the mitochondrial genome sequence of the passenger pigeon supplied by Ben Novak, who is working with the Long Now Foundation and its Revive and Restore program, to bring back the passenger pigeon as part of a larger de-­ extinction project. 22 The complexities of the de-­extinction process,

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let alone the debates about its viability and ethics, are far too detailed to go into here—­suffice it say that there’s plenty to explore online, and in fact an entire TEDx conference was devoted to the topic of de-­extinction 23—­but even its proponents realize that the relationship between temporality and materiality here is quite layered and textured: not just in retrieving one hundred-­year-­old DNA and inserting it in band-­tailed pigeons to produce viable offspring, but also and more crucially, in the raising and socialization of the newly “hatched” pigeons themselves, which involves all sorts of factors, such as training them for migration routes, ensuring habitat viability and associated dietary needs, and so on.24 The “miracle” with de-­extinction initially seems to be that we can make time go backward (a temporal loop that bears interesting lines of relation with the palindrome of “Peel’s Foe”), but that dream is complicated by the fact that there are other, slower and more multidimensional temporalities at work here than what we find in the laboratory—­i n the environmental factors affecting biomorphology and development; in the processes of imprinting, social learning, and communication; and in much else besides. In other words, as Christopher Johnson puts it, “Code is both regulating (before) but also regulated (after) in the sense that the programme is executed in a context that is perpetually changing,” and what this means, quite straightforwardly, is that “the replication of morphogenesis does not involve the repetition of the gene, but its being reiterated in a different context.”25 DNA, in other words, is a “relational determined part of a whole developmental system”26—­a ll of which draws our attention, once again, to the importance of tending to the nongeneric nature of the system/ environment relationship as that unfolds not just as a synchronic paradigm or “diagram” (to use Deleuze’s language), but in real time, subject to recursive contingencies that may be (and often are) redoubled in nonlinear ways, as so much recent work on epigenetics has shown. 27 In a way, then, the simple part is the apparent “miracle” of completing the genetic sequence of a long-­dead animal and implanting it into closely related birds who will create the “proper” offspring. This is important to remember, for the danger in this new “script of life” (as Julian Murphet terms it in relation to de-­extinction ef-

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forts around the Wooly Mammoth), is that it is “playing out along the prototypical contemporary twin axes of commodity production and scientific molecularization,” so that it “has nothing to do with the molar form, or representational shape of the creature . . . and everything to do with parcelized units of production, on the one hand, and strings of mapable code, on the other. Two correlated models of futurity,” he continues, “are implicit in this new script: the implicit eternity of the market, and the promise of species revival, whose innermost impulse is simply the infinite manipulability of life itself.”28 This question of “scripts of life” is certainly in play in Pestel’s installation, not only in the contrast between the time-­based writing and wiping away of chalk on board in “Erasure” (which requires, importantly, the prosthetic device of bird-­watching binoculars to be viewed) and the clean synchronic rows of letters of “Unveiled”; and not only in the PCBs and the “Catalog of Extinct Birds” with its algorithmic translation of Latin to musical notation; but also in the fact that the palindrome of “Peel’s Foe” is inscribed on pieces of slate, emphasizing both the “lamination” of the stones themselves and the “tone of sleep” of geological time that forgets the passing of 99.9 percent of all species that have ever existed, reminding us that the “lamina” of “lamination” means “bone.” We are all, in some sense and at some time scale, extinct: living fossils. As for “Unveiling,” there is much to be said here about glass and windows (both the architectural innovation and the computer operating system) in relation to processes of capture that I can’t go into in any detail, but I’d like to see in Pestel’s glass wall an agnostic if not indeed cautionary note, one that reaches back, it seems to me, to Marcel Duchamp’s concept of “delay” at work in his famous piece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)—­a ll of which is evoked by the title of this component of the installation, “Unveiled,” with the individualized and fetishized Martha now standing in the position of the bride (think back now to “Martha” and “George”). Now this might seem far-­fetched were it not for the fact of an intervening work of art (chronologically speaking) that connects the two: Mel Chin’s early piece “Bird in a Cage” (1976), which is in fact a portrait on glass of Martha that explicitly references Duchamp’s

FIGURE 14. Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915–­23. Photograph courtesy of Tate Images, London. Photograph copyright Tate. Copyright Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2021.

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FIGURE 15. Mel Chin, Bird in a Cage, 1976. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Large Glass and the concept of “delay,” as Chin and others have emphasized. As Jerrold Seigel puts it in his book on Duchamp, the artist used the term “delay” to mark the Large Glass itself as an “icon of perpetually forestalled communication,” and “among the ideas Duchamp treasured in this way were those given voice in the notes on shop windows, where the truth that the world we inhabit is external to ourselves is proved by the disillusionment that comes when we attempt to satisfy desire with the objects life offers”—­a n ascription whose connection to Murphet’s “scripts of life” and its collation of code and market is clear enough, I think. “The personae of the Large Glass,” he continues, “remain forever in the condition of the window-­gazer, whose state of being is expanded and animated by desire without ever experiencing the regret and disillusionment that follow from material possession.”29

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Pestel’s glass, in other words, holds out to us the hope that the passenger pigeon may yet live again, and yet cautions us not to look at the species, or Martha, through a shop window that too readily links genetic code, market, time, and what we call “life.” Finally, of course—­a nd this perhaps hardly needs emphasizing at this point—­what draws me to this reading even more is the salient presence of both performativity and performance in Pestel’s installation. It’s already there, of course, in the multidimensional incorporation of script and writing, musical notation, genetic code, video copying and rebroadcast, and prostheticity—­f rom writing and erasure on a blackboard, to the PCBs and their denaturalization of the algorithm between Latin nomenclature, musical notation, and “expression,” to the pecking of pigeons used in experiments and its associations with both the iterability of bird song and human speech, to the palindrome of “Peel’s Foe,” and much else besides. These aspects of the installation are only redoubled and intensified, of course, by Pestel’s incorporation of his own improvisational practices and those of the viewer, which become part of the unfolding work itself in time. And in this sense, Requiem: Ectopistes migratorius is in fact neither a code nor a script but, as Derrida might say, a “space”30 in which we confront the fact that scripts and codes aren’t the end of the story of “life,” but only the beginning.

Part III The Biopolitical

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9 What Is the Bio-­of Biopolitics and Bioart? In this brief essay I want to put two problematics side by side and examine the extent to which they illuminate each other: biopolitical thought and bioart. The reason I find this a worthwhile endeavor is simple: if we believe that biopolitics is a new and/or dominant mode of the political in modern society, a mode whose distinctive characteristic is that life itself in its barest form becomes the direct object of political power, then the question of the socially and politically representative character of bioart takes on a new and pressing relevance, simply because what distinguishes bioart (or so the story goes) is that life itself becomes the medium of the artwork—­versus say gouache, or Cor-­Ten steel, or the digital image. I want to begin to frame this question of the socially representative character of bioart by providing a bit of background on two fundamental and divergent strands in biopolitical thought centered around the work of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, and then move on to Roberto Esposito’s attempt to split the difference, if you will, in what he calls his attempt to think an “affirmative biopolitics.” While I admire Esposito’s work, I want to suggest that his retort contains a particular danger for biopolitical thought—­namely, a kind of neovitalism—­a nd it is a danger that is even more dangerous for thinking about bioart, simply because a persistent temptation with bioart (for all the obvious reasons) is to think that the meaning or politics of the artwork can somehow be anchored in or indexed to the particular and peculiar character of its medium, its material substrate. What I will argue, however, is that the meaning and politics of bioart cannot be understood in this way, and that a different and more pragmatically effective grasp of the biopolitical meaning of bioart will diverge from such an understanding along two different axes of biopolitical thought: .

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either what we might call a “restricted” sense of the political (and of art, as it turns out) that might be associated with the work of Niklas Luhmann, or a more generalized and diffuse understanding of the complex relationship between the political and “politicization” that is focused not on the problem of sovereignty (as it is in Agamben or Carl Schmitt) but on material dispositifs and apparatuses that constitute political effectivity, a line of thought associated most of all in biopolitics with the work of Foucault. What is needed, to put it another way, is what we might call an “ecologization” of the biopolitical paradigm: an ecologization that drives us not toward a vitalism that wants to derive ethical or political imperatives from life (in the form, let’s say, of the “biocentrism” familiar to us from the moment of “Deep Ecology,” or a prima facie valuing of biodiversity in certain versions of environmental ethics) but rather toward a denaturalized understanding of the ecological paradigm that emphasizes form, time, and the dynamic complexity of their interrelation (in the case at hand, social complexity as that bears upon the forms taken by life) as the key constituents for thinking how biopolitics and bioart operate and signify. This “ecological” or “evolutionary” or “metabiological” emphasis on social complexity, as Hans-­Georg Moeller puts it, “starts from the ‘for itself’ of organic life and goes behind it” to “the cybernetically described, basic phenomenon of the self-­ maintenance of self-­relating systems in the face of hypercomplex environments.”1 A certain (and, I would argue, dominant) understanding of ecology would share with biopolitical vitalism the desire to ground what Esposito calls an “affirmative” biopolitics in the material substrate of life itself as a prima facie good. But the understanding of “ecology” that I am promoting here would instead emphasize the fact that what the immunological paradigm of biopolitics and the ecological paradigm have in common is that, for both, it is not a question of a biological or ecological substrate (good or bad) but rather of thinking the forms and processes by which the system/environment relationship is stabilized and managed by systems that find themselves in an environment of exponentially greater complexity than they themselves possess—­ all of which reaches back to perhaps the most important thinker in the ecological paradigm, Gregory Bateson, who long ago reminded

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us that, in ecological thinking, you don’t ask, “What it’s made of—­ earth, fire, water, etc.,” you ask, “What is its pattern?”2 To put it another way, the immunitary mechanism,3 like Derrida’s pharmakon, can’t be about a grounding in a material substrate simply because the effect and indeed meaning of a given substance—­toxic or therapeutic—­depends on the real-­t ime, dynamic state of the system (and this includes legal and political systems, not just biological systems, as we will see).4 So let me begin with a brief survey of the biopolitical literature, its main lines of fracture and divergence, and how the problem of neovitalism makes itself manifest in Esposito, before moving to a more specific discussion of bioart in its biopolitical dimension. As any number of commentators have observed, the general drift of contemporary thought on the biopolitical—­whether under the influence of Agamben’s large body of work, with its foregrounding of the Nazi death camps, or Derrida’s analysis of the autoimmunitary logic of modern democratic politics—­has been overwhelmingly thanatopolitical: that is, oriented toward the domination of life and the increasing power over the life/death interval at a capillary level heretofore unknown. As is well known, Foucault argues in The History of Sexuality that “for millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.”5 Moreover, as Foucault famously defines biopolitics, it “is the power to make live. Sovereignty took life and let live. And now we have the emergence of a power that I would call the power of regularization, and it, in contrast, consists in making live and letting die.”6 In the three-­volume sequence of which Bios is the third installment, Esposito sets himself two main tasks: trying to understand the extent to which biopolitics is a specifically modern phenomenon, and exploring the extent to which biopolitics is necessarily thanatopolitical, with the eventual aim, as he puts it, of framing an “affirmative” biopolitics that runs counter (most conspicuously) to the work of Agamben.7 The possibility of an affirmative biopolitics hinges for Esposito on a reconceptualization of the “subject” of politics (in both senses), one that can be traced to Foucault’s later work. As we know, Foucault argues in Society Must

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Be Defended that “an important phenomenon occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the appearance—­one should say the invention—­of a new mechanism of power which had very specific procedures, completely new instruments, and very different equipment. It was, I believe, absolutely incompatible with relations of sovereignty. This new mechanism of power applies primarily to bodies and what they do rather to the land and what it produces. . . . It was a type of power that presupposed a closely meshed grid of material coercions rather than the physical existence of a sovereign.”8 Most importantly for our purposes, he argues that this shift from sovereignty to biopower involves a new concept of the subject, one who is endowed with fundamental interests that cannot be limited to or contained by the simple legal category of subjectivity. What Maurizio Lazzarato calls Foucault’s radical “displacement” of the problem of sovereignty “does not neglect the analysis of sovereignty,” but merely points out that “the grounding force will not be found on the side of power, since power is ‘blind and weak’”(as Foucault puts it)—­hence, its growing need, in an increasingly complex and differentiated field, for the various techniques of management, surveillance, and so on that it deploys.9 What we are dealing with here is not, as Esposito puts it, “some kind of withdrawal or contraction of the field that is subjected to the law,” but rather how the law for its force gradually shifts “from the transcendental level of codes and sanctions that essentially have to do with subjects of will to the immanent level of rules and norms that are addressed instead to bodies.”10 As Lazzarato argues, three important points follow from this: first, “Biopolitics is the form of government taken by a new dynamic of forces that, in conjunction, express power relations that the classical world could not have known”;11 second, “The fundamental political problem of modernity is not that of a single source of sovereign power, but that of a multitude of forces. . . . If power, in keeping with this description, is constituted from below, then we need an ascending analysis of the constitution of power dispositifs”; and third, “Biopower coordinates and targets a power that does not properly belong to it, that comes from the ‘outside.’ Biopower is always born of something other than itself.”12

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Here, then—­w ith Foucault’s emphasis on bodies “before” and “outside” the law—­we find a potentially creative, “aleatory” element (to use Foucault’s term) that inheres in the very gambit of biopower, an element that is not wholly subject to the thanatological drift of a biopolitics subordinated to the paradigm of sovereignty. In Foucault’s words, “Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.”13 Indeed, the political payoff of Foucault’s analyses of the mechanisms of disciplinarity, governmentality, and so on resides in no small part in their anatomy of how the machinery of power races to maintain control over the forces it has brought into its orbit—­forces that derive in no small part from animal bodies (both human and nonhuman) that are not always already abjected, as in Agamben. Quite the contrary, those bodies are enfolded via biopower in struggle and resistance. And because those forces of resistance are thereby produced in a specifically articulated form, through particular dispositifs, there is a chance—­a nd this marks in no small part Foucault’s debt to Nietzsche (as Esposito points out)—­for life to burst through power’s systematic operation in ways that are more and more difficult to anticipate. Thus, as Lazzarato notes, “Without the introduction of the ‘freedom’ and the resistance of forces, the dispositifs of modern power remain incomprehensible.”14 But as Esposito observes, all of this leaves us with “a decisive question: if life is stronger than the power that besieges it, if its resistance doesn’t allow it to bow to the pressure of power, then how do we account for the outcome obtained in modernity of the mass production of death?” In short, “Why does biopolitics continually threaten to be reversed into thanatopolitics?”15 Are the Nazi death camps, to use Agamben’s words, not “a historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past,” but rather “the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living”?16 It is this impasse, Esposito argues, that Foucault never really overcomes, because he does not fully develop the “immunitary” logic of the biopolitical that he identifies in his later work (a paradigm also explored in this connection by Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, and Niklas Luhmann). Foucault recognizes in his lectures from 1976 that “the very fact that you let more die will allow

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you to live more,”17 but he is unable to see that the affirmative and thanatological dimensions of biopolitics—­either “a politics of life or a politics over life,” as Esposito puts it—­a re joined in a single mechanism.18 “Rather than being superimposed or juxtaposed in an external form that subjects one to the domination of the other,” Esposito writes, “in the immunitary paradigm, bios and nomos, life and politics, emerge as the two constituent elements of a single, indivisible whole that assumes meaning from their interrelation.”19 So if the fundamental logic of biopolitics is immunitary, then the problem becomes how to keep the immunitary from more or less automatically turning into the autoimmunitary along the lines described by Derrida in the interview “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” where, following the earlier logic of the pharmakon, the very mechanism designed to cordon off and protect the body politic instead makes it all the more vulnerable, attacking it from the inside by a logic of runaway hyperpurification according to some identity principle. 20 For his part, Esposito insists that a turn away from the thanatological and autoimmunitary logic of biopolitics and toward an affirmative biopolitics can only take place if life as such—­not just human (vs. animal) life, not just Aryan (vs. Jewish) life, not just Christian (vs. Islamic) life—­becomes the subject of immunitary protection. Esposito writes, we can say that the subject, be it a subject of knowledge, will, or action as modern philosophy commonly understands it, is never separated from the living roots from which it originates in the form of a splitting between the somatic and psychic levels in which the first is never decided [risolve] in favor of the second. . . . This means that between man and animal—­ but also, in a sense, between the animal and the vegetal and between the vegetal and the natural object—­t he transition is rather more fluid than was imagined. 21

And this is so, he argues, because “there is never a moment in which the individual can be enclosed in himself or be blocked in a closed system, and so removed from the movement that binds him to his own biological matrix.”22 And this leads, in turn, to Esposito’s retrofitting of Spinoza’s concept of natural right to make

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“the norm the principle of unlimited equivalence for every single form of life.”23 The general idea here is that this new norm will operate as a sort of homeostatic mechanism balancing the creative flourishing of various life forms. As Esposito characterizes it, “The juridical order as a whole is the product of this plurality of norms and the provisional result of their mutual equilibrium.”24 But there are a few fundamental problems here. First—­if we are indeed talking about actual political and legal norms—­there are serious pragmatic limitations to this view. For one thing, it replays all of the quandaries around “biocentrism” brought to light during the 1970s and ’80s in North America during the heyday of the “Deep Ecology” movement—­debates that Esposito (or for that matter, his fellow Italian political philosophers) would have little reason, perhaps, to know about. As Tim Luke notes, if all forms of life are given equal value, and if no form of life can be favored over another with regard to ethical and legal norms, then we face questions such as the following: “Will we allow anthrax or cholera microbes to attain self-­realization in wiping out sheep herds or human kindergartens? Will we continue to deny salmonella or botulism micro-­organisms their equal rights when we process the dead carcasses of animals and plants that we eat?”25 There are perhaps those who would respond to Luke’s questions in the affirmative—­who would argue that, yes, all forms of life should be equally allowed to take their course, even if it means a massive die-­off of the species Homo sapiens. But biopolitically speaking, that hardly solves the problem (or even achieves the stated aim), because when we ask what the demographic distribution of such an event would likely be, we realize that the brunt would be absorbed by largely black and brown poor populations who live south of the “rich North Atlantic democracies” (to use Richard Rorty’s phrase), which would protect themselves by whatever means possible. 26 Secondly (and more theoretically, as it were), if all forms of life are taken to be equal, then (as Eugene Thacker has pointed out) it can only be because they, as “the living,” all equally embody and express a positive, substantive principle of “Life” not contained in any one of them. “The problem,” he argues, “is that once one considers something like life-­i n-­itself”—­whether in the form of a

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“life-­principle” or some other “inaccessible first principle”—­t hen “one must also effectively dissociate Life from the living.”27 To put this slightly otherwise, what Esposito is unable to articulate is that what “binds him to his own biological matrix” is nothing “living,” but neither is it “Life.” Instead, as Martin Hägglund has argued, it is the trace-­structure and “spacing” that is “the condition for anything that is subject to succession, whether animate or inanimate, ideal or material.”28 Such a structure (or more precisely, such a system) is, strictly speaking, “dead”; it is a machinalité (to use Derrida’s term) that allows the concatenation of material processes that may (but only may) eventuate in the biological forms we call life. 29 Far from metaphysical, however, such a system is perfectly compatible with a materialist and naturalistic account of how life evolves out of nonliving matter, how even the most sophisticated forms of intentionality or sensibility arise out of the inorganic systematicity of repetition and recursivity, retention and protention. 30 In this way, the arche-­materiality of the structure of succession, of what Derrida calls “living-­on,” allows, as Hägglund puts it, “for a conceptual distinction between life and matter that takes into account the Darwinian explanation of how the living evolved out of the non-­l iving, while asserting a distinguishing characteristic of life that does not make any concessions to vitalism.”31 This is an important point, I think, for making sense of the biopolitics of contemporary bioart. It brings into focus the manifold problems with equating the norm with “the principle of unlimited equivalence” of life pure and simple, just as prominent developments in contemporary biotechnology such as in vitro meat or synthetic biology do. After all, is in vitro meat “real” meat? Is it “life”? Or does it simply underscore what was always already true of life to begin with—­t hat forms of life depend upon a recursive ongoing interaction between the “who” (biological wetware—­ already itself not a “who,” strictly speaking) and the “what” (environment, weather, shared social and semiotic archives and repertoires, “fixed” or “instinctive” stimulus–­response mechanisms, tool use and toolmaking, and the like). Precisely here, it seems to me, it is useful to remember Derrida’s discussion of cloning in his late book Rogues. As he summarizes it, those who oppose cloning

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object to it “in the name of ethics, human rights . . . the dignity of human life . . . and the nonrepetitive unicity of the human person . . . a unique, irreplaceable, free, and thus nonprogrammable living being.”32 But what is overlooked here, he argues, is that so-­called identificatory repetition, the duplication, that one claims to reject with horrified indignation, is already, and fortunately, present and at work everywhere it is a question of reproduction and of heritage, in culture, knowledge, language, education, and so on . . . [—­]so many dimensions that are irreducible, even for “identical” twins, to this supposedly simply, genetic naturalness. What is the consequence of all of this? That, in the end, this so-­called ethical or humanist axiomatic actually shares with the axiomatic it claims to oppose a certain geneticism or biologism, indeed a deep zoologism, a fundamental but unacknowledged reductionism. 33

Derrida’s commentary here—­a nd the example of synthetic biology in general—­enables us to see how the biopolitical frame makes possible the thinking of a more nuanced and differentiated set of ethical and political relations with regard to “forms of life,” but only if we do not succumb to the sort of neovitalism that, at the end of Bios, seems to leave us with a stark choice: either life as “unique, irreplaceable, free, and thus nonprogrammable” and the biocentrism that results from it on the one hand, or, on the other, the autoimmune disorder that, Esposito suggests, is bound to eventuate if the continuum of life is broken. What all the foregoing draws our attention to is the intensely nongeneric and “transversal” (to use Gilles Deleuze’s term) character of the “bio” of biopolitics in its Foucauldian articulation, how it is essentially a strategic problem and object for political power, one that is conjugated and reconjugated anew under very specific coordinates and conditions, which may be ontological (in the sense of specific forms of embodiment and articulation with the environment) or sociological and historical, or both. But what I now want to ask—­to come to the core of the essay—­is what art adds, exactly, to that understanding. What does bioart make available to us that we can’t get elsewhere—­in an essay on synthetic biology and capital, say, or a lecture on genetic engineering, patents, and law? It

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would be easy enough to begin by saying that bioart dramatizes what is always already true of the “bio-­” of biopolitics in general: that it is always a matter of the enfolding and co-­i mplication of the living, the “wet,” and that which is radically not living and nonorganic, technicity and machinalité in the broadest sense, whether that takes the form of the tool and the semiotic, the archive, the gramme of the instinctive program (so-­called) or, most conspicuously in art, the frame and the parergon that is linked, via Heidegger’s famous essay on “The Question Concerning Tech­ nology,” to the entire genealogy of biopolitical thought. But I want to try and be a little more specific about how bioart may be seen to be socially or politically representative, as art, in a biopolitical context, in ways that might seem a little unexpected, while at the same time nevertheless extending a more textured understanding of the Foucauldian idea of the political itself. Here, I want to return to Niklas Luhmann’s work in Art as a Social System, which I used in What Is Posthumanism? to make sense of certain trends in contemporary architecture’s relationship to what we used to call “nature” and “landscape.” As Luhmann tells the story, once the patronage system collapses, art is faced with the problem of justifying and securing its own autonomy, which can no longer be explained by reference to how it serves the church, the Medicis, and so on. In this new situation of modernity understood as a phenomenon of functional differentiation, the social system of art obeys the same formal dynamics that all social systems do. In brief, the art system, like all social systems, faces the dilemma of having to reproduce itself and maintain its autopoiesis under conditions of overwhelming environmental complexity—­a n asymmetry in complexity between system and environment that is axiomatic for systems theory. Like all social systems, it does so by using a highly selective code to reduce environmental complexity. For the education system, the code is knowledge/ignorance; for economics, credit/debit; for politics, power/opposition.34 For art as a social system, Luhmann sometimes says that the code is beautiful/ ugly, but clearly this can’t be right. It makes more sense to say instead, as he puts it, that art under functional differentiation exists to constantly raise the question that it itself also answers—­if only for a fleeting moment—­necessitating the production of more art:

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namely, the question, “What is art?” and, “Is this particular thing a work of art?”35 But all such distinctions that organize the autopoiesis of social systems are built around a constitutive “blind spot,” as Luhmann puts it, because of their tautological self-­reference. To wit, in the legal system, the two sides of its organizing distinction legal/illegal are in fact a product of only one side of the distinction, namely the legal. But the legal system cannot acknowledge the fundamental, tautological identity of both sides of the distinction and at the same time use it to organize and carry out its first-­ order operations. Only another observer, a second-­order observer, using another code or distinction, can do that—­can undertake what Luhmann calls “the observation of observation”—­but of course, the second-­order observer will be bound by the same formal dynamics of blindness and self-­reference.36 Here, however, Luhmann’s theory of art introduces a wrinkle that is important for our purposes. For Luhmann, “The paradox unique to art, which art creates and resolves, resides in the observability of the unobservable”—­a nd this is because art alone is able, uniquely, to reenter the difference between consciousness (or perception, as he sometimes puts it) and communication into its own systematic communication. 37 For all other social systems, the autopoiesis of communication takes place in spite of perception, consciousness, psychic activity, and so on. For art, however, communication takes place through perception and consciousness—­or more precisely, by means of the artwork’s modulation of the difference between perception and meaning, consciousness and communication, against the background of the art system as a whole and the formal selections that are meaningful in that context. (For as Luhmann points out, perception and communication operate in mutually exclusive, operationally closed autopoietic systems—­t he neurophysiological wetware of the brain and body vs. the externality of social systems of communication and their media—­t hough those systems may be structurally coupled through symbolic media such as language.) This difference—­ between perception and communication, and especially between their different speeds and qualitative aspects (perception is fast and “all at once” while communication is linear and sequential, operating by means of delays and deferrals)—­is used by art

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to call attention to the contingency of communication or, to put it another way, to simply raise the question of meaning: namely, is the thing we are looking at or experiencing art, and how does this particular artwork mean in the larger context of art as a social system and its function? And so, as Luhmann puts it, “The function of art would then consist in integrating what is in principle incommunicable—­namely, perception—­into the communication network of society,” thus giving society another way—­indeed, a unique way—­to observe itself. 38 Following Luhmann, we might put it this way: if art, because of its unique use of the difference between perception and communication, has a privileged relationship to the invisible or ineffable (namely, making it visible) then it also makes more visible than other social systems the fact that when one thing is made visible (or formally selected) another is made invisible (because of the “blind spot” of observation and its contingent self-­reference). And if we rewrite that point about the visible versus the invisible in terms of Thacker’s reading of the difference between “the living” and “Life,” then my larger point about bioart comes into view: that the old adage “art imitates life” remains true (and is intensified by bioart) only in the sense that the “the living” makes “Life” invisible—­t hat is to say, art imitates life only by not imitating life. Or as Luhmann puts it, “Art can no longer be understood as an imitation of something that presumably exists along with and outside of art”; rather, “to the extent that imitation is still possible, it now imitates the world’s invisibility, a nature that can no longer be apprehended as a whole.”39 What this means is that “the living” as the medium of bioart is actually able to become a medium for art’s communication about the fundamental unobservability of “Life,” in general and as such. The self-­reference of bioart thus communicates how life is never apprehended “as a whole” or “as such” but always takes specific empirical forms, which are themselves riven by contingency, difference, and “blindness,” and in multiple registers. That is simply to say those forms (of “the living”) are selective. Thus, what Luhmann says about “the world” in the following quote could as well be said about “Life” with regard to bioart’s use of “the living”:

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“The world displays all the qualities that Nicholas of Cusa ascribed to God: it is neither small nor large, neither unity nor diversity, it neither has a beginning nor is it without beginning—­a nd this is why the world needs forms.”40 Or as he puts it later in Art as a Social System: The function of art is to make the world appear within the world—­ with an eye toward the ambivalent situation that every time something is made available for observation, something else withdraws, that, in other words, the activity of distinguishing and indicating that goes on in the world conceals the world. . . . Yet a work of art is capable of symbolizing the reentry of the world into the world because it appears—­just like the world—­incapable of emendation.41

And this is true even of works—­one might actually say especially of works—­such as Genesis or GFP Bunny by bioartist Eduardo Kac, in which changes in the work (in either its medium or its component parts) inevitably become part of the meaning of the work itself, its ongoing recursive build-­up of its own self-­reference: a process that starts, for the artwork, in a decision, a mark, an indication that is absolutely contingent and moves from there, through self-­reference, to demarcate itself from everything else in the universe, as this object and not some other.42 In Genesis, for example, Kac takes a passage from the King James Bible that reads, “Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth,” then translates that first into Morse code, and then into genetic code by making the dashes equal thymine; the dots, cytosine; the spaces between words, adenine; and the spaces between letters, guanine. This “translation” is then used to create the genetic sequence for a unique “artist’s gene,” which is then incorporated into bacteria displayed in the gallery space. Online participants can remotely activate ultraviolet light in the gallery to cause mutations in the bacteria, and the resulting changes are then translated back from the genetic code to the biblical passage, altering its meaning and in some cases rendering particular words gibberish, so that the resulting noncommunicative verbal elements are incorporated into

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the artwork’s own communication. GFP Bunny takes a different tack, which consists not only of the green fluorescent rabbit named Alba that Kac created with the help of genetic engineers, but also of the public dialogue and drama that unfolded around the project when the director of the lab in which she was born in France refused to release her to return home with Kac to Chicago—­to which Kac responded, in turn, by staging various means of protest, such as placing “Free Alba” posters in various parts of Paris and mounting an exhibition of the same name that “reappropriated and recontextualized this vast coverage, exhibiting the productive tension that is generated when contemporary art enters the realm of daily news.”43 Such strategies are not rare; in fact, they are part of the stock in trade of many practicing bioartists, as attorney Lori Andrews points out in her essay “Art as a Public Policy Medium.” She gives several examples of how bioartists integrate into their work various legal disputes, edicts handed down by university committees regulating the use of biological material, and so on. Banks in Pink and Blue, created by artist Inigo Manglano-­Ovalle for the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery, for example, consisted of two sperm bank tanks, each containing sperm more likely to produce boys or girls. When the university’s Institutional Biosafety Committee requested that he destroy the samples when the show ended, he hired lawyers to challenge the order and then used the contracts with the sperm providers, the university, and himself as part of the installation.44 Andrews argues that bioart can thus help society “confront the social implications of its biological choices, understand the limitations of the much hyped biotechnologies, develop policies for dealing with biotechnologies, and confront larger issues of the role of science and the role of art in our society.”45 There is little to argue with here, of course, but when it comes to political theory, the devil is in the details, as they say. Here again, it seems to me that the systems-­t heory perspective can be of use for thinking about the complexities and actual channels of real political effectivity in the context of biopolitics. Andrews argues that “by pointing out the gaps in regulation, the risks of these technologies, the inequities in access, and the way in which ap-

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FIGURE 16. Newspaper headline with photograph of Eduardo Kac and Alba, from “Free Alba!” GFP Bunny, 2001. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

plication of certain technologies may harm important social and cultural values, artists can encourage the social discussion that is necessary to adopt social public policies for biotechnologies.”46 But the question, of course, is what is the nature of this “social discussion” and what are the processes by which public policies are adopted? On this question, Andrews’s problem is not unlike that of Bruno Latour’s “political ecology,” which pays insufficient

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attention to the autopoiesis of the law—­a nd, more broadly, the phenomenon of functional differentiation as the very motor of modernity. As legal theorist Gunther Teubner puts it, Latour imagines a “great unified collective” where professions make their contributions to the decision-­making process in a single conversation, but in fact there is little evidence to suggest that “an overarching societal discourse” called “political ecology” will emerge. Indeed, the phenomenon of functional differentiation and the specialization and self-­reference of the various professions involved in these conversations (not least of all, of course, the specialization and differentiation of the various branches of the law itself) suggests quite otherwise; and thus, the sites on which Latour’s political ecology plays out are fragmented, “dispersed over different social institutions.”47 As Teubner points out, each social subsystem operates “under sharply defined conditions” for attributing actions, responsibilities, rights, duties, and so on. 48 “Using their specific models of rationality,” he writes, “each institution produces a different actor, even where concretely it is the same, human or non-­ human, that is involved.”49 This doesn’t mean that the question of nonhuman actors doesn’t affect the operations of the law or of other social subsystems; it means, rather, that they affect them in quite specific ways (and not others). And it also means that these new social actors—­nonhuman animals, electronic technologies, biological materials, and so on—­t hus “lead a highly fragmented existence in society,” appearing “in very different guises in politics, in the economy, in the law, and in other social contexts.”50 What art can do, then—­as part of the larger environment in which the legal system operates—­is perturb and stimulate the law to respond to changes taking place in the world around it, but that response will take place in and through the law’s own autopoiesis. And so, we end up with a picture of the legal system as both open and closed: open to its environment, but responding to changes in it in terms of the autopoietic closure of its own self-­reference, what the legal code makes possible or forecloses. Indeed, Andrews’s essay ends with the story of a case that bears out this fact quite clearly. When British artist Anthony-­Noel Kelly convinced Richard Heald of the Royal College of Surgeons to grant him access to cadavers so that he could sketch them (a practice in

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FIGURE 17. Anthony-­Noel Kelly, Gilded Man, 1998. Gilded plaster cast. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

keeping with long-­standing artistic tradition, of course) all seemed well. But soon, Kelly began smuggling cadavers and body parts out to take them to his studio where he could make casts of the bodies, burying them in the grounds of his family’s estate when he was done. When a police officer realized at one of Kelly’s exhibitions that the statues must have been cast from dead bodies, the artist was charged with theft, but he defended himself by arguing that the body parts had been “abandoned” (the same argument that protects doctors and scientists who do research on human tissues). And he pointed out that even if he were in violation of the law, so too was the Royal College of surgeons, which kept the body parts even longer without burying them “in a timely manner.” His primary legal argument, however, was a very simple but very broad one: that he could not be charged with theft because

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for centuries judges had made it clear that the human body could not be property. (This is why turn-­of-­t he-­century body snatchers were charged not with theft but with violating public decency.) The prosecutor in the case countered that this legal tradition was the result of an erroneous reading of a case from 1614 where defendants had stolen corpses to take their burial clothes—­a nd the error had been perpetuated since by centuries of legal precedent. 51 The judge in the case, Geoffrey Rivlin, conceded that it was indeed strange that body-­snatching in its heyday was not declared a felony, even though during the same period other offenses, from shooting rabbits to appearing in disguise on a public road, could be punished by the death penalty. Rivlin finally concluded that the reason body-­snatching was not declared a felony was that “Parliament, if not exactly turning a blind eye to it . . . winked at it in the interest of medical science.” And while he agreed that body parts were not, after all, property—­seemingly letting the artist off the hook for the charge of theft—­he then cited a 1908 Australian case that established that altering body parts (as the Royal College had done by putting them in formaldehyde) transformed them into the alterer’s property. And so Kelly was convicted of stealing human remains in April 1998. 52 The final twist in the story is this: as part of the litigation, Kelly’s sculptures were ordered to be given to the Royal College of Surgeons to display in their museum, underscoring the fact, as Andrews puts it, “that medical institutions are allowed to do things with body parts that other individuals and institutions are not.” At the same time, however, she notes that in the United States, artists are in some ways more favored by laws pursuant to the constitutional emphasis on “the progress of science and useful arts.” For while a scientific researcher receives a twenty-­year monopoly on his or her invention under patent law, the copyright of an artist is good for life plus seventy years after the author’s death. Moreover, it is unconstitutional under the First Amendment right of free speech to adopt a law prohibiting art about a particular subject matter (a ban on paintings that parody a president is Andrews’s example), but researchers are routinely blocked from undertaking various kinds of research (on human fetuses, for ex-

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ample) without that constituting a violation of the researcher’s First Amendment rights. 53 Another way to put it, then—­to return to my opening question—­is to say that if bioart is socially representative, what it is socially representative of is the inability of any particular social system to steer or determine the autopoiesis of how other social systems relate to or “code” the question of “Life” (and the difference between “Life” and “the living”) in terms of their own self-­ reference. It is always a matter of “transversal” relations, you might say—­a fact that Luhmann emphasizes and intensifies by rethinking “objects” as “eigen values” (to use Heinz von Foerster’s terminology). From this vantage point, as Luhmann puts it, “giving up the notion of the subject”—­which biopolitical thought, like systems theory, already does (a point that receives particular emphasis in Esposito’s work)—­“requires reconstructing the object, which loses its opposite.”54 In this light, objects appear not as givens but “as repeated indications, which, rather than having a specific opposite, are demarcated against ‘everything else’”; they appear as “eigen-­behaviors of recursive calculations.”55 But even more important for our purposes—­a nd here we extend but also refine the Foucauldian line of biopolitical analysis—­is that “the stabilization of objects (identification, recognizability, and so on) is more likely to contribute to stabilizing social relationships than the famous social contract,” so that “objects that emerge from the recursive self-­application of communication [as eigen behaviors] contribute more than any other kinds of norms and sanctions to supplying the social system with necessary redundancies.”56 And even more significant is that “this may be even more true of objects that have been invented for the sake of this specific function, such as kings or soccer balls”—­or, works of art, which are “quasi-­objects” (to use Michel Serres’s term) in exactly this sense. It is precisely because such quasi-­objects dramatize what is already true of all objects—­ that they are not given but rather produced by recursive social communications and behaviors—­t hat, in the quasi-­object, “the socially regulative reveals itself.”57 And in my view, such a process is political precisely because it is contingent and ontologically ungrounded, always a matter, as Foucault reminds us, of highly

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specific configurations, overdeterminations, histories, dispositifs, and so on. To put it this way is to give a different cast to what is often seen as the “apolitical” character of Luhmann’s social-­systems theory. It allows us to understand how the point is not that art is “political” in the usual sense of having a linear or representational relationship to some political ground that is external to it and that determines or motivates its features or themes. Rather, art’s relationship to the political is non-­representational in making visible for society’s self-­ observation the “socially regulative” and “stabilizing” contingencies that structure the field of objects and observations in which we make art and communicate, the highly selective overdeterminations that bear upon how—­in the contemporary context of the “right to life,” the sixth great extinction event in the history of the planet, the increasing pervasiveness of synthetic biology and genetic engineering, and much else besides in the domain of the “bio-­”—­we conjugate the relationship between what we call “Life” and its empirical instantiations in the domain of “the living.”

10 No Immunity

The Biopolitical Worlds of Eija-­Liisa Ahtila

I want to begin with an apparently simple question, for which there appears to be no apparently simple answer: In Eija-­ Liisa Ahtila’s recent cinematic installations, what do domestic space, immigration and colonialism, sexuality, gender, and animality (to take only a few of the prominent subjects) have in common? Is there an underlying logic or framework that binds them together to form a unified exploration of related problems? One thing we know for sure is that her work is devoted to exploring the relations between the realms of the human, the animal and the divine (or transcendent). This is perhaps most obvious in her work The Annunciation (2010), centered on the rehearsal and enactment of a biblical story. It begins with quotations about the phenomenology of animals by early twentieth-­century German life scientist Jakob von Uexküll, and ends with a donkey—­or, more precisely, a human and a donkey (both of whom have roles in the play), walking side by side, in a kind of existential partnership, as a voiceover from a famous song by Townes Van Zandt sings, “If I had no place to fall, / . . . could I count on you?” We’ve already been prepared for human–­a nimal partnerships by Ahtila’s earlier work The Hour of Prayer (2006), in which the main character says of her dog, Luca, “In a way, we shared our senses, and used them to think about our surroundings together.” And we were also shown by that work how the artist thinks of the mysteries of human and animal worlds as a kind of gateway to the realm of the divine and the holy; The Hour begins in darkness, with the sound of barking dogs, a sound that, by the end of the piece, has become its own “hour of prayer,” as the village dogs howl at the ringing of the church bells with each breaking day. But, even as the worlds of humans and animals are shared in these works, species are also, by their very nature, closed off from 151

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each other in ways that can never be fully known or plumbed. Indeed, that is precisely why those other worlds are a permanent reservoir of mystery and surprise for us—­even of the miraculous, as The Annunciation frames it early on. Such is the force of the quotation from Uexküll that opens that work: We are easily deluded into assuming that the relationship between a foreign subject and the objects in his world exist on the same spatial and temporal plane as our own relations with the object in our human world. This fallacy is fed by a belief in the existence of a single world, into which all living creatures are pigeonholed. This gives rise to the widespread conviction that there is only one space and one time for all living things. Only recently have physicists begun to doubt the existence of a universe with a space that is valid for all beings.

Uexküll—­i nfluenced by Kant and, in turn, influential upon Heidegger and his analysis of the differences between humans and animals—­provides an important precursor to the contemporary “autopoiesis” theory of the biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, a theory that paradoxically insists that it is only by virtue of self-­referential and autopoietic closure in their own highly specific modes of existence that different kinds of beings in the world can be open to any other environment or beings. In short, seeing is always also a mode of not seeing, and unavoidably so. And what one sees is not simply given but is, in a profound sense, made.1 A near contemporary of Uexküll’s, the American poet Wallace Stevens, provides his own sort of multichannel installation on this problem in his famous poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and a close cousin of Stevens’s bird appears in the opening minutes of The Annunciation, framed, like Stevens’s bird, by a snowy landscape and evergreen trees: Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird. 2

And then—­just like that—­we enter in The Annunciation another “spatial and temporal plane” as we see none other than Santa Claus

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FIGURE 18. Eija-­Liisa Ahtila, The Annunciation, 2010. Video still taken from three-­channel projected high-­definition installation with 5.1 channel audio, 28 minutes, 25 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Copyright Eija-­Liisa Ahtila.

himself emerging from behind the trees, all in red, walking along a snowy path. Well, whose trees are these, anyway, Santa’s Christmas trees or the blackbird’s snowy home? And—­a similar question that the work poses in the next moment—­what’s the story with those other winged creatures in The Annunciation, not just the doves in the canonical paintings of the biblical subject matter and the pigeons hanging out in the rehearsal hall, but the angels as well? They seem to be opposites—­t he earthly animal body, on the one hand, the ethereal and spiritual winged beings on the other—­but already Ahtila invites us to ask whether there might be some subterranean connection between them, as the poets have suggested for centuries. Both bird and bard sing of otherworldly realms, whether above (as in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”) or below (as in Poe’s “The Raven”). Ahtila suggests, however, that those otherworldly realms are all around us at every moment, part of the here and now, but a here and now that contains its own secret

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passageways, its own magic and also, for that very reason, its own dangers, as the bird from Rimbaud’s poem “Enfance” warns us at the opening of Where Is Where? After all, what we find in the wake of that bird’s song is not jolly old Santa Claus walking on a well-­ trodden path, but “footprints abandoned in the bushes.” One way to tie this seemingly diffuse group of threads together is through a philosophical topos that has interested a wide range of leading figures in contemporary thought, including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Donna Haraway, Roberto Esposito, Judith Butler, and Jacques Derrida: the biopolitical. A key distinction of biopolitical thought—­one that Agamben draws from Aristotle—­is between bios (or “form of life” in a social and political sense) and zoe (usually translated as “bare life”), life reduced to sheer physical existence and exposure. 3 In its modern form, the fundamental work of biopolitics is to adjudicate and enforce the constantly shifting line between bios and zoe—­a line that exists in a relationship of constant transposition in the distinction between “human” and “animal.” Exhibit A of modern biopolitics in the work of both Esposito and Agamben—­the Holocaust—­demonstrates what is evinced more generally in the history of colonialism, slavery and imperialism: that membership in the zoological designation Homo sapiens is no guarantee that one will not be reduced to a condition of “bare life,” a condition in which the human becomes subject to “a non-­criminal putting to death.”4 At the same time, while it usually coincides with relegation to “bare life,” membership in the group known as “animal” may, in fact, afford a measure of protection and care, as the modern institution of pet-­keeping well shows. The biopolitical frame, then, draws our attention to the ways in which we have tended to recode the difference between the familiar and the foreign as the difference between human and animal (and have used designations of race and ethnicity in the same way). As Derrida, among others, has suggested, this recoding is itself a disavowal of the finitude and mortality we share with our fellow creatures as embodied beings. 5 This helps to explain not only the constant, hovering spectre of death in Ahtila’s work but also its specific valences. The relevance of the biopolitical frame for a work such as Where Is Where? is probably clear enough, where “bare life” is figured almost canonically—­not only in the twinned

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bodies of the dead Algerian villagers and the flock of sheep being held in their pen (awaiting, no doubt, their own slaughter), but also in the lines of Rimbaud’s poem with which the piece opens—­“I am a saint praying on a bed—­/ like all the other docile animals, grazing”—­for which Agamben’s study, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, could serve as an extended gloss.6 And that spectre is made even more explicitly biopolitical by the fact that Where Is Where? draws upon a historical event in which two young Algerian boys killed their European playmate in retaliation (so they testified) for the rounding up and execution of forty Algerian men in 1956 during the Algerian War of Independence—­ the so-­called Massacre of Meftah, in which an ethnically marked group was suddenly subjected to “a non-­criminal putting to death.” Where Is Where? fits within the immediate post-­9/11 context that also spurred texts such as Judith Butler’s Precarious Life and Frames of War, which ask, in Butler’s words, “Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, what makes for a grievable life?” Is there a way in which the body, she asks, “opens up another kind of normative aspiration within the field of politics,” in which we can “consider the demands that are imposed upon us by living in a world of beings who are, by definition, physically dependent on one another, physically vulnerable to one another?”7 For Ahtila, of course, “grievable life” isn’t limited to human beings alone, as her earlier work, The Hour of Prayer, powerfully demonstrates. And this makes the exclusion of human populations from the domain of care and interdependency, for reasons of race or ethnicity, all the more disturbing, Butler argues, as the events of both Gulf Wars graphically demonstrated. That context, both geopolitical and biopolitical, is invoked in the opening moments of Where Is Where?: a map of North America, the waves of the sea being crossed, then the Muslim call to prayer, posing the question figured by Rimbaud’s “footprints” and “path”: How does the artist (here figured in the guise of the poet) walk or stand between the two towers—­Muslim on one side, Christian on the other—­a nd the death they sponsor in the name of life? With these different valences in mind, we can begin to glimpse an even more specific logic of the biopolitical at work here, one that enables us to address what all of this has to do with questions of

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gender and sexuality, domesticity and religion. It is what Derrida, Esposito, and others have characterized as the essentially “auto­ immunitary” logic of the biopolitical. 8 As the name suggests, the fundamental insight here is that once we start drawing lines between “human” and “animal,” Aryan and Jew, Christian and Muslim, as a means of securing the immunity of “me” and “mine” against its pathogenic others, that logic is bound to turn back upon the space of bios itself (How human is human enough? How white is white enough? How Christian is Christian enough?), attacking it from within and exposing it to the very thing it wishes to avoid. (That logic is readily apparent, of course, in Where Is Where?, and in the main character’s remark in The House—­that the ships on the horizon are “full of refugees that come to every shore”—­which takes on a rather different and more specifically political cast when viewed in this light.) This movement of what Derrida calls “auto-­i mmune auto-­i ndemnification” is a kind of “fundamentalism” that links the idea of “us” and “ours” to “blood and soil, to the family and to the nation,” that drives us back to “the family (heimisch, homely), to the familiar, to the domestic, to the proper, to the oikos of the ecological and of the economic, to the ethos, to the place of dwelling.”9 And it seeks to recast—­or purge—­a ll forms of subjectivity in the name of an ideal of the self as a kind of “ipseity,” a sovereignty that is not hybrid, divided, and pluralistic, but rather phallic, singular, and masculine: the “auto-­” of “autonomy” and of “man” as the “auto-­biographical animal”—­none of which will be news, of course, to the strong postfeminist, Ahtila, who burst onto the international art scene in 1995 with If 6 Was 9.10 The (auto)immunitary logic of the biopolitical allows us to excavate more deeply the relations between the works I have already discussed and earlier pieces such as The House and Me/We, Okay, Gray (1993), which center on the domestic space, the home, the family, gender and their “proper” forms. In Me/We, the central character, the father, tell us “it pays to stand firm on what is decided,” and, when he tickles his child, it is his own face that emerges from under the covers. His daughter speaks, but out of her mouth we hear his voice. The toxic fallout of that form of subjectivity also pervades the space of Okay (1993), where the male voice, issuing from the mouth of the female lead, reminds us that “the

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majority of men are animals,” and the woman herself tells us, “if I could only change myself, I would transform myself into a dog, and I would bark and bite everything that moves—­WOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF!” (a form of speech that turns out to be more meaningful and more truthful, in fact, than the concluding incantation, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay”). And Gray is quite literally biopolitical, as the questions of nuclear catastrophe and national borders force us to rethink relations between inside and outside, spaces of safety and spaces of exposure. (It is all the more suggestive, in this light, that one of the main characters is with child.) Most striking of all in this context, perhaps, is The House, which we can now see is not “about” madness, exactly. Rather, that work explores the (auto)immunitary movement in which the more the main character seeks to protect and preserve a space of interiority and the domestic, the more she is exposed to an “outside” that she can’t control. The house “can’t keep things out anymore, can’t preserve its own space”—­a statement immediately followed by shots of power lines and roads stretching all the way to who knows where. Algeria, perhaps. Pretty soon, the cow she sees on her television screen—­a consumable image, at a safe distance—­wanders through her living room, anticipating a similar moment in Where Is Where? in which the roundup of Algerian men by the French forces is suddenly taking place in the poet’s own study. The two boys who kill their friend sit in a boat in her swimming pool, even as the poet walks among the corpses of the village dead, as if they had just been killed. (And yet, they are posed in mannerist fashion, as if drawn from the inventory of canonical paintings in The Annunciation, preserved for all time for those who will look and not turn away.) The relation between form and theme in both The House and Where Is Where? is clear, and the question of space becomes fundamentally an issue of relationality; it becomes, you might say, a qualitative rather than quantitative problem. In both pieces, as the artist puts it in an interview, the question is “how near or far things really take place—­is it in our yard or thousands of kilometres away and how do we measure the distance?”11 (A similar question is figured at the opening of The Hour of Prayer, with its evergreen tree inside the hotel room of the dreaming main character,

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and its many opening shots of doors, windows, and liminal zones, like the roads and power lines of The House.) One way not to measure that distance, perhaps, is with a sewing machine and the black curtains that the main character in The House hangs over all her windows—­not because she is “wrong” exactly, but rather because, by the logic of autoimmunity, such measures will only intensify that which they attempt to hold at bay. Indeed, immediately after hanging her black curtains, she finds herself “outside” in every sense, floating among the treetops. And then it’s back to the “place of dwelling” that configures the site of immunitary protection, poised against the ships “full of refugees who come to every shore.” She learns what the main character in Where Is Where? learns: “everything is now simultaneous, here, being,” and “no place is just one anymore.” But she responds to it differently. Not “wrongly”; it’s not a question of being a “good” person or a “bad” person (a scene between a female priest and a poet, whistling to call up the devil in Where Is Where?, makes this clear, as does Foucault’s analysis of “madness” in relation to the birth of biopolitics and the role of medicalization and “health” in establishing its norms). Instead, it is a question of the bearing, or posture, that one assumes toward such exposure, how one is equipped (or disempowered) to take it on. And for the poet in Where Is Where? (and, by extension, for the artist herself), it is also a question of the responsibility one assumes in the face of that exposure. Here, we find a plausible explanation for the attraction to Rimbaud’s poem that opens Where Is Where?—­not only is there a bird, cousin to the raven, that opens The Annunciation, but also, as Ahtila puts it, “his song stops you, / and makes you blush.” But why? Because it confronts the artist with the question of responsibility in the face of death and destruction. As the scenes with the female priest suggest, the artist will now take on the risk that religion no longer takes upon itself. But it quickly becomes a case of “Be careful what you wish for,” because taking that responsibility seriously is precisely what leads to the violent biopolitical outcomes that we deplore. There really is “only one god,” as Where Is Where? puts it, and, for better and for worse, that god is both the god of life and the god of death. The logic at work here is one

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FIGURE 19. Eija-­Liisa Ahtila, The House, 2002. Installation view, three-­channel projected installation, 14 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Copyright Eija-­Liisa Ahtila.

with no guarantees; after all, the immunitary logic is about proximity and exposure, proportion and duration, not the certainty that Entity X is good or bad. The exposure to a toxin, to the strange and the foreign, in the right proportion strengthens the body and opens it to a greater range of life and experience. Life has to be tested to be alive, but overexposure can lead to madness or morbidity. This is why the specter of death must always hover around the edges of such questions. The space of the foreign, the other, the miracle is also a space of risk, a place from which one may return transformed—­or not return at all. The opening of The Annunciation poses this problem in the

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reverse: “How does one know what things are, unless they’re already familiar?” And the biopolitical frame not only helps us to stitch together the apparently unrelated hardcore epistemological questions raised by Uexküll and the geopolitics of Where Is Where?; it also allows us to answer in the affirmative the question raised a little later in that piece, one that The Hour of Prayer prepares us for in its own way: “Can one be shaken with surprise by something one knows through and through?” The opening movement, from the foreignness of the raven’s world, what it sees and how it sees, to the familiarity of Santa Claus (with the evergreen tree as a kind of mediator, or switch point, changing from the animal’s natural habitat to the symbolic Christmas tree) is repeated time and again in a work that is (even by Ahtila’s rigorous standards) meticulously crafted in its composition and editing. As we move from the familiar street scenes of Christmas decorations to shots of the donkey who will appear in the play, we see his perked ears on one screen as Christmas hymns play behind decorations of the season on the other two, suggesting that he is listening to the music we hear. But is he? He is listening, to be sure, but one might say (remembering our Uexküll) that he is listening for how (and whether) he will be heard, since we are told straightaway that “they’re misunderstood animals.” And then we migrate into a very different kind of soundtrack—­barking dogs and birdsongs. Will the donkey simply be a prop in our show, a vehicle and conveyance—­ not just for its human master, but also for the myths and customs with which we’re most familiar? Or can it somehow be taken on its own terms? And what are its “own” terms anyway, if, as we’re informed, all the donkeys of Finland are in fact immigrants too, originally from Africa, part of the larger story of the global traffic in human and animal flesh, cousins of those “refugees who come to every shore?” The Annunciation wants to say “yes” to the question it raises early on: “Can something already familiar fulfill the criteria for a miracle?” And it wants to answer it by suggesting that traditional understandings of the transcendent actually miss the same point that they struggle to express, domesticating the wonder and strangeness of the worlds of others (whether human or animal), draining them of their capacity to leave us “shaken with surprise.”

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What is remarkable and mysterious, it turns out, is not so much the angel with wings who flies above the earth and comes down from heaven, dramatized in the play, but the humble donkey who is “misunderstood,” the lowly pigeon who just escapes our grasp (as in the “sorry, birdie” scene, in which a red-­headed actress can’t quite get her hands around the bird she has scared away, left to gaze up at this supposedly “lowly” animal). Similarly, anyone who watches the flying angel rehearsal scene can’t help but remember the floating women in both The House and Where Is Where?—­ the first, floating in the “outside” of psychosis, let loose in the world she’s trying to wall out; the second, in the form of the female priest who, as it turns out, is all-­too “above” the moral complexities that our poet takes upon herself. Here, however, both are brought back down to earth, as it were, as the actress playing the angel, suspended by wires, flips upside down in the harness while rehearsing. Indeed, just afterward she exclaims, “Hey, I’m an angel.” Another act of meticulous editing cuts to another screen, to an albatross whose odd, dangling legs double with those of the awkward actress “flying” through the air. Whatever the “miracle” is here, it certainly doesn’t align neatly with the traditional Great Chain of Being, from animals at the bottom, through humans, to angels on high. And then, in the next scene, we learn about the amazing worlds of ultraviolet perception in which blackbirds live, even as a sustained shot of a stuffed owl on a branch keeps watch, every bit as domesticated as the vacuuming being done by the play’s director on the set. It comes as less of a surprise, then, when in the next short scene, the actress playing Mary looks over her shoulder (as if rehearsing the various poses she takes up in canonical paintings of the Annunciation as she encounters the angel), and sees not the approaching angel, but rather the donkey that we thought “beneath” her.12 But the end of The Annunciation teaches us something different, its own “small song.” As the last scene of the play concludes, we cut to a shot of the actress who plays Mary walking down a country road beside the donkey, not riding on him, while, on a second screen, two, then three, then four horses mill about restlessly, and on a third we are given a sustained shot of a single, small evergreen tree. Whose tree is it now, Santa’s or the raven’s,

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FIGURE 20. Eija-­Liisa Ahtila, The Annunciation, 2010. Video still taken from three-­channel projected high-­definition installation with 5.1 channel audio, 28 minutes, 25 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Copyright Eija-­Liisa Ahtila.

or both? In the background, a vocalist with guitar sings more lines from Van Zandt’s “No Place to Fall”: “I won’t tell you no lies / . . . won’t you spin me around?” Interestingly enough, the donkey, like two of the horses, is bare, while the actress’s red sweater is matched by blankets that two of the horses wear. This is interesting in light of Derrida’s observation in The Animal That Therefore I Am, that clothing is traditionally taken to be “proper” to the human (as part of the larger domain of technics and culture), while animals (so the story goes) are naked, but naked without knowing it, hence without consciousness of “shame” at their nakedness, hence “without consciousness of good and evil.”13 Is this relevant to the entire topos of the biblical story of The Annunciation? Certainly, and in multiple ways, but Ahtila’s work has a different story to tell. Here, nakedness and clothing, exposure and protection, zoe and bios, follow a different logic, and the question is not are you human or animal, divine or earthly, but rather—­like the actress who exclaims “I’m an angel,” only to be “spun around”—­can I count on you to catch me if I fall?

11 The Miracle of the Familiar

A Conversation with Eija-­Liisa Ahtila

Eija-­Liisa Ahtila and I met in person only a few years after this conversation, which we conducted via e-­m ail over a period of about two weeks in April 2012, her keyboard docked in Helsinki, Finland; mine, in Houston, Texas. Worlds apart in many ways, not the least of which would be landscape and climate—­ things that matter very much to this artist. And yet, as she reminded me in our conversation, one of her most ambitious pieces, The Annunciation, ends with a song by Townes Van Zandt, the legendary Texas singer and songwriter from just up the road in Fort Worth. “Coincidence?” I can hear him asking in his Texas drawl, even though he died on New Year’s Day, 1997. Our paths originally crossed when I was contacted by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and asked to write a piece for the catalog of a major retrospective of Eija-­L iisa’s work called “Parallel Worlds.” She had read some of my work (What Is Posthumanism?, I think) and asked them to contact me—­a nd that made for an invitation that was hard to resist. Any number of critics and commentators will tell you that her work is meticulous in its execution, razor sharp in its intelligence, and both beautiful and strange at the same time. But what I find most appealing about it is what I would characterize as a rather unique kind of gravitas, a willingness to raise the Big Questions, but in fresh and unexpected ways, as if they are part of the fabric of the ordinary and the everyday, as if we could stumble upon them—­or they could come upon us—­at any moment, while staring blankly at the computer screen, say, or out for a walk with the dog: What is the nature of the miraculous, of divinity or grace? What does it mean to share the planet with other creatures who inhabit very different lifeworlds from our own? What are my responsibilities as an artist or a person for historical events that transpired in another time and place? Can something 163

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familiar become strange, and in so doing transform who I am, and how I see? As many of her recent works attest—­multichannel installations that bring space and time in and out of synchronicity, impossible to experience in a single take or point of view—­such questions aren’t to be simply answered, but are rather staged, lived through, in a world neither wholly visible nor wholly ours. Cary Wolfe: As you know, there’s been a lot of discussion in contemporary philosophy and theory (in Jacques Derrida, in Slavoj Žižek, in many others) about a so-­called “return of the religious.” I wonder if you could talk about the role of religion in your work. It’s certainly prominent in more recent works such as The Annunciation, Where Is Where?, and even The Hour of Prayer, but it seems to take on quite different meanings in those pieces. Eija-­Liisa Ahtila: I should first say a few words about this context, this country where I grew up. To put it briefly, Finland is a Scandinavian society where the Christian—­or here, more precisely, Lutheran—­ethics has been adopted as part of our political system and climate of ideas. The Lutheran ethics has assimilated into the ideas of democracy and become part of our multiparty system. And I’m not talking about the small Christian-­Democratic party that also is present in the parliament, but rather how the Lutheran ideas have affected both the Right and the Left, the result of which has been milder versions of both, and how the role of the state with regard to its citizens has been influenced by all this. I think that this assimilation has also affected our comprehension of religion and our approach to it; our religion does not start with a capital letter, it is not a gateway to heaven, rather it resembles a “social security system”—­t hat everyone will be taken care of and will not be left alone. I suppose the sacred is not too sacred here. . . . I want to mention this because I feel this kind of context makes it easy to approach religious issues like any other issue from the surrounding reality—­seeing it as part of culture and history. Maybe this point is most visible in The Hour of Prayer, where the story ends in a house in Benin located next to a Catholic church. The bells ring at dawn, and the dogs bark and run to the church, with the narrator listening. The piece is about death and loss, and that

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moment at the end is, I suppose, a kind of reference to the idea or possibility of sacred or religious experience, but it’s really the stray dogs that run to the gates of the church—­not the narrator/ observer. I see The Hour of Prayer as a turning point among my other works. Before that piece, the works are something that I once called human dramas—­a definition that is misleading if we have the new pieces in mind, but telling in relation to the earlier moving image installations. In those, the story is created around a situation that involves humans as protagonists, with the topics being questions of identity, close relationships, and family relations. Even though the stories are experimental and nonchronological, the idea of character, for example, is left intact. In The Hour of Prayer, even though there’s a narrator who takes the story forward, there is no protagonist in the traditional sense. One could say that empty spaces become the protagonist. The Hour of Prayer is also a farewell to a certain kind of drama and narration. In the next piece, called Where is Where?, the way of presenting things in an installation using the moving image and narration, as well as the approach to religion, is different. Where is Where? aims at presenting a historical event that took place during the Algerian independence war in the late ’50s and bringing it to the present day. I use theatricality to do this, both in the narration and in the installation space. In the story there’s two different times and two different places present—­1950s Algeria, and the present day in a European city. In the installation structure, the aim is to maintain that difference: Four screens surround the viewer, creating a cinematic space on the screens and another space for the viewer. It creates a situation where there’s the cinematic space on the screens and another space in the middle for the viewer. When the actors talk to each other from the opposite screens they also temporarily incorporate the viewer’s space in the story. The viewer is kind of in the center of the narration, or to put it another way, on a stage—­ having to choose what to look at and how to navigate through the story. S/he is present in the installation and at the same time in the middle of the events, on and off. The topic and the situation in the piece is the presence of two different cultures, two different political systems and two different

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religions. The piece aims at showing religion’s role in the past and present as part of identities—­i ndividual as well as national—­both in Islamic society and politics and in the West. When the work was exhibited for the first time at Jeu de Paume in Paris, some nationalist party members came out and handed out leaflets in front of the gallery asking people not to go see the work. The Annunciation was first shown in Paris early December 2010. I remember we needed a carpet the color of Mary blue for the floor of the installation space and it had to be ordered from Belgium. There were snow storms and no one was certain the truck would arrive in time. As opposed to the other works, The Annunciation begins with a religious topic—­a central motif of Christian iconography, which was constructed and re-­enacted through the moving image. It is an installation of three projected images on three walls. Both human and animal actors, during the project, reconstruct the sacred. The Annunciation started with the idea of a miracle and what meaning it could take on today. As usual, I did write a script, but in this case it was used as a support structure. I wanted to keep the question open and explore it with the actors. All of the human actors except for two were nonprofessionals, and many of them clients of the Deaconess Institute’s women’s support services. Even though the frame of the work is religious, I see the topic of the piece as perception and knowledge—­t he order of things. During the Renaissance, central perspective entered painting with the Annunciation theme. It meant a whole new system of seeing and organizing things—­a new system of emphasizing certain figures or elements in the painted environment and valuing them. In my Annunciation, I contrasted this way of seeing with Jacob von Uexküll’s idea of umwelt—­of different but simultaneous worlds existing for different living creatures (for example, how the living space of a rabbit is different from a human one). Breaking up perspective has long been one of the central themes in my works—­ both in the multiscreen installation structures and in the way of rearranging drama and narration in the stories. CW: I was fascinated—­a nd of course excited!—­to come across Uexküll in your work. (As you know, we just brought out a new translation of his famous essay on human and animal umwelt, to-

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gether with his “Theory of Meaning” essay, in the Posthumanities series that I edit for the University of Minnesota Press.) EA: That’s fantastic. When I was writing the script for The Annunciation I ordered Uexküll’s text from Amazon. At the time it was only available as an old sold-­out hardcover called “Instinctive Behaviour,” including texts of several writers. But when the work was completed, a new translation came out in French, and yours in English, both 2010. CW: Uexküll’s work on umwelt enables you, in a way, to sort of naturalize religious questions, along the lines you suggested in your opening remarks. The idea that the everyday or the familiar can become the site of the miraculous, a place of transformation or even of grace—­perhaps what we think of as divinity—­clearly becomes important in The Annunciation, where there’s a sort of inversion of the place of the iconic humble, lowly donkey and the virgin Mary, so that being able to see, or imagine, the world from the animal’s point of view is actually the site of the otherworldly—­ another world inside this world, as Uexküll would put it. And in that wonderful final scene, the actress playing Mary and the animal walk side by side: partners—­f riends, even—­i n a shared world. EA: The scene is accompanied by the song “No Place to Fall,” originally by Texan Townes Van Zandt. I wanted the song to be interpreted by a young male voice. A friend of mine recommended someone I did not know. Into the studio came a young Finnish guy who was tall, blond, and so beautifully innocent looking with his woolly hat that I did not know where to look. When he was singing with his perfect voice and playing his guitar in the studio I thought I should have cast him in Mary’s role. CW: Townes Van Zandt—­that would require another entire interview! Then we would have to talk about Steve Earle too and we would never finish! Anyway, that crossing of the ordinary, the everyday, the familiar and the unusual, the strange, the transformative—­that which challenges us to think and feel outside ourselves—­can also take a different form, as it does in The House or Where Is Where? There, the “home,” “me,” and “mine,” the everyday, entail a kind of desperation, a violent reaction to the

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different, to the outside and the other, so that that which is most foreign or distant suddenly seems most intimate and threatening. In that light, the sense of “home,” “land,” and the everyday takes on a different cast, and a kind of subterranean passageway in your work opens up between works that seem very different such as The House and Where Is Where? (as a similar sort of passageway opens up between the time and place of the historical events recounted in the latter and the contemporary time and space of the narrator). In that light, oddly enough, Where Is Where? might be said to develop on a grander and more explicitly geopolitical scale the remark that the protagonist in The House makes about “immigrants, who arrive from every shore.” EA: In both works the house turns out to be not only a private home but a place where the outside can enter and where the limits and borders of things can be examined. What is of our concern, what is our history and where does one’s being end? (I remember when I was a child, that sometimes in the evenings I was afraid of being in our house, with the lights on—­as on a stage—­a nd I felt it was somehow safer to go outside to the darkness of nature.) It has been transformational and of the utmost importance for me to find Uexküll and the links to Giorgio Agamben, J. M. Coetzee, and all the writings about the question of the animal, as well as your own texts about posthumanism and biopolitics. It all offers another kind of world view which respects the other—­a nimals and nature. And it also touches the questions of seeing the world, of perception and representation. This idea of different worlds of different living creatures existing simultaneously also brings with itself a certain notion of limits, and living in the world then inevitably means living with and next to others (which is somehow very relieving). That affects immediately the way one can portray things as an artist or filmmaker. It sets questions that need to be answered in the works, questions concerning the presentation of things, the relation of the artist and the “object,” and finally, of course, the validity of the languages of representing the other. Which then again touches on the question of colonialism. Based on these kinds of thoughts, I made a series of drawings called Anthropomorphic Exercises on Film. In those sets of draw-

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ings, I aimed at exploring the rules of filmmaking. In the drawings I replaced a human as the protagonist with a spruce. And then, with different drawn situations with the spruce, I approached questions of action, drama, point of view and aspect ratio of a film frame, etc., and how this all effects what we get to see. CW: Your response helps us better understand the overall trajectory of your work: how we get from the earlier pieces that one might call feminist (if that’s the word we want, and it may not be), such as If 6 Was 9, Me/We, and Okay to The Annunciation, where the story is, after all, central to an old-­fashioned, patriarchal religion and the main character is a virgin! Those earlier works also focused on some of those “other others” you just mentioned (women in alienating relationships, young girls), but one way to describe it is that the earlier work challenges dominant, habitual modes of organizing reality from the outside in, whereas a piece such as The Annunciation undoes them from the inside out. Your comments on your more recent work (and your earlier remarks about The Hour of Prayer) help us connect these concerns to how your visual and spatial approach has changed, how these concerns have shaped the formal characteristics of your work as it has evolved. EA: Yes, in the earlier works the feminism was kind of inside the drama and the performed action, whereas in the more recent ones like The Annunciation the arsenal of creating a moving image piece—­f rom dramaturgy and acting (or showing oneself to others through the image) to editing rhythms—­is used to question the validity of languages that we draw on to represent others. I had this odd experience last September at the Venice Film Festival. I was there as a member of the main Jury and we were watching a Chinese film, People Mountain People Sea, by Cai Shanghun, in a huge tent which was packed. About halfway through the film there was a rape scene during which a woman in front of us stood up and left. Then two others behind us did the same, and more and more people left the space. My immediate thought was their leaving was a reaction to the rape scene on the screen. I made a comment about this to Darren Aronofsky, sitting next to me, to which he replied that no it can’t be, it must be a fire alarm situation. I

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suppose it was something like that even though there was no alarm sound or smell of smoke, but then gradually all of us went outside. Nevertheless, this was an episode that I will remember—­ the people’s reaction to rape even as it lasted for a short moment only. There were actually some problems with screening the film, and all in all I saw the rape scene three times. CW: That is weird. And interesting. I remember that one of the things that drew me to write in What Is Posthumanism? about Lars von Trier’s film Dancer in the Dark—­t he one with Björk in the starring role—­was everything I read about how extreme the reaction was by different audiences who viewed it. Some people found it profoundly moving and were visibly shaken, sobbing, just completely blown away. And other audiences literally jeered and threw stuff at the screen—­they thought it was a manipulative piece of junk, the worst thing they had ever seen. So I wondered: What is this about? Is it a feminist film? Yes, I think so, profoundly. But not in any straightforward way, and it takes a while to explain why—­ which is why that chapter in the book is so long! EA: I remember I was really impressed by Dancer in the Dark—­t hat and Dogville. The Chinese film was as well a great narrative about a certain region in China, about violence and problems in that society. CW: One question that may sound odd, but I think it is related to what we’ve been discussing. Can you say something about your choice of which language to use in your work? The difference between your native language and English (which you use in The Hour of Prayer) is so striking that it makes for a quite different experience of your work for those who don’t speak your language. “English” as a kind of apparatus of standardization and globalization seems important in light of your work’s concern with juxtaposed and coexisting umwelts, since we know how important language differences are to constituting those lifeworlds, the texture they have for us, and so on. EA: In all works except The Hour of Prayer, the dialogue is in Finnish. It was a clear choice, to maintain that difference and remind the audience about other cultures. We try to get subtitling done

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in the language of the place where the works are shown. Sometimes it is unfortunately not possible, and then we use English. I don’t really like subtitling because there’s a lot of visual information in the multiscreen pieces, and it makes it more difficult to follow. The Hour of Prayer is in English because I originally made an audio work of the material for an art collector. A few months later I decided to do a video installation as well and use the same actor. Then it was kind of natural to use English. CW: Let’s return to your most recent work, Anthropomorphic Ex­ ercises on Film and Horizontal. In both, a spruce tree is, as you put it a moment ago, the protagonist. I find this very suggestive for a few different reasons. For one, it foregrounds just how uncertain and contingent the boundaries are between subjects and objects, things acting with agency and things acted upon. And it raises that question in relation to another one: the question of the frame and framing. In my mind, this reaches very directly back to one of the most important philosophical discussions of the frame in modern philosophy, namely Heidegger’s in “The Question Concerning Technology,” where he asserts that “the essence of technology is nothing technological,” and he reads technology as gestell or a kind of framing that can operate properly or improperly—­it can in fact turn nature, or human beings for that matter, into what he calls bestand, or “standing reserve,” resources that are quantified and ready to be exploited. (It’s interesting in this connection that you mention somewhere in an interview that the spruce tree in your country is seen as a fairly common or lowly species, used for building materials, and so on.) Heidegger’s essay is seen by many people today as a key early text in biopolitical thought, one that reaches forward to Michel Foucault and others regarding technology—­t he dispositif, as Foucault puts it—­as something that not only frames our relationship to others (including nonhuman others) and to ourselves, but also dictates the ethical and political disposition of different kinds of life forms as subjects of biopower, so that animals used in factory farms, for example, can been seen as “killable but not murderable,” as it is sometimes put—­or spruce trees can be seen not as homes for ravens or squirrels, but as building materials in reserve, lumber in waiting. So this leads to

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an interesting question for me: Do you think of film, and perhaps art generally, as a biopolitical apparatus, whether that is what it intends to be or not? After all, in both of these new pieces, the tree is shown to be the object of a kind of visual violence or even, in the case of Horizontal, a kind of dismembering—­a violence created by the frames we force it into. EA: Before answering, let me ask: By biopolitical apparatus are you referring to what you said about Heidegger and question of framing? That a biopolitical apparatus has similar functions? CW: The question of the biopolitical apparatus can be addressed in terms of Heidegger and framing but is not limited to that. By “biopolitical” I mean simply that questions of sovereignty, law, “rights,” etc. are no longer seen to be fundamental to the political reality in which we are now living (as philosophers and theorists such as Foucault, Judith Butler, and Derrida have argued). Those terms (of sovereignty) are, if you like, seen to be a leftover from an earlier philosophical and political paradigm that can no longer really describe where the real political action is, “on the ground,” as it were. Anyway, this is not limited to “framing” a la Heidegger, although that very much suggests itself in light of your work with the frame in the recent work (and I would say more generally in how your work operates spatially from The Hour of Prayer forward). This leads to an interesting question: Is installation work more committed in this way or not, since all art, after all, depends upon being framed as such in some sense. There are other ways of coming at my question. So, for example, in the seminar I’m teaching right now on biopolitics, we looked at your work alongside Ari Folman’s film Waltz with Bashir and Bill Viola’s piece I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like, which are both biopolitical pieces of film/video making, I would say, but in very different ways—­ neither explicitly concerned with the question of framing in the way that you are. EA: Yes, I can easily relate to Heidegger’s question of framing that you present. Let me try to approach your questions from an artist’s point of view. I think both film and art can be seen as biopolitical apparatuses, but they are different. I think that commercial film

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FIGURE 21. Eija-­Liisa Ahtila, Series B: Action/Stumble, from Anthropomorphic Exercises (On Film), 2011. Green pastel on Parisian paper, 21 ½ x 65 ½ inches. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Copyright Eija-­Liisa Ahtila.

is something that reproduces its own apparatus again and again, but art is where the apparatus is a question—­i n art one has to be aware of it. When building a new piece, one needs to come up with the means of framing and find something that realizes the work. Or it can be very interesting to compare different forms of art—­ for example, rules of composition in drawing to those in dramaturgy in the moving image—­w ith both being a kind of arranging of things and information but from different premises. The Anthropomorphic Exercises on Film drawings—­as the name says—­concentrate on presenting the principles of the moving image by altering the viewpoint. Taking up another artistic medium and its means of expression helped to show the edges of this human-­constructed medium for perceiving and presenting the world. The drawings are little exercises, easy to go near and react to, and funny, I hope. For example, I wanted to include a really important concept in film narration: point-­of-­v iew. I just did not know how to do it with a spruce. How could one make a drawing of a spruce’s point-­of-­v iew? The whole series deals also with the question of subject and object—­problematics you referred to above. And will we really be able to see the spruce; or how close can we get to it? Finally, I decided to draw a vertical piece—­a portrait of a tall tree in four parts—­but I replaced the top part with a mirror. In front of the piece I placed a little stool that a viewer

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can climb up and see her/his face in the mirror on the top part of the spruce. The beginning of the synopsis written for the work Horizontal says: “Horizontal is a six-­channel moving-­i mage work of a living spruce tree. The idea of the work is to show the tree in its entirety, as far as possible retaining its natural size and shape. Because the life-­size tree does not fit in a standard-­sized human space, the tree is presented horizontally in the form of successive projected images. The work is a portrait of the tree. It is a record of its existence as a living organism.” Everything that this excerpt of the text says concerning the spruce is, we could argue, not true. What we see and hear in an exhibition space is a huge tree moving in a heavy wind. But if we take a closer look we’ll see that it’s not a portrait of a tree but an image of the technical apparatus constructed as an extension of the human eye and perception. Any attempt to show a fully-­grown spruce or some other tall tree using the moving image is bound to run into difficulties. First comes the problem of the film frame: you cannot get the entire tree into one horizontal frame. Special lenses will distort the image. If one steps back what one gets is a landscape not a portrait of a tree. We filmed our spruce tree on a windy day in early October. The preparations had taken much longer than we had anticipated. Although we had decided to shoot the tree in parts in order to avoid distortion and maximize the amount of visual information, finding a tree of suitable size was difficult. The proportion of the width to the height of the tree was important to allow us to present it using five projectors. Secondly, the background had to be “empty” to give prominence to the tree and its form. The tree also needed to grow in a place where we were able to set up scaffolding or use a scissor lift. We discussed what kind of a camera and lens we should use, and how many would be needed. We knew from experience that using multiple cameras would also multiply the horizon and the background, which would be visible in more than one picture in the final work. We weighted different solutions both for the shooting and for postproduction. It soon became obvious that the more we tried to reproduce in the portrait of what we saw standing next to the tree, and combine that with our ideas about

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the portrait of the tree, the more the final work would be about the devices and technology of cinematography, and about us humans as observers. Again, the spruce returned us to Uexküll’s ideas about the coexistence of separate spatial and temporal worlds of different living beings, and to the idea of existence next to and with something else.

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12 TheofBiopolitical Drama Joseph Beuys Whether or not Joseph Beuys is the most important artist of the post–­World War II period is certainly open to debate, but what isn’t is that he is one of the most iconic, provocative, and (for some) notorious. An essay after his 1979 Guggenheim retrospective captured a widespread sentiment at the time in its title, “Joseph Beuys: Shaman, Sham, or One of the Most Brilliant Artists of All Time?”1 On the basis of biographical fact alone, Beuys was an interesting character, to put it mildly: a member of the Hitler Youth (one account says he joined to defy his conservative Catholic parents), a radio operator and dive-­bomber pilot in the Luftwaffe who was injured numerous times in action, a member of the Fluxus movement in the 1960s along with Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, and others, and one of the founding figures of the Green Party in Europe. 2 The lead catalog essay for the major Beuys retrospectives at the Menil Collection in Houston and the Tate Modern in London, in 2005, tagged Beuys as the quintessential art star whose “self-­generated persona” could be compared to his contemporaries John Lennon and Bob Dylan. 3 As Benjamin H. D. Buchloh wrote in a review essay first published in Artforum in 1980 on the major retrospective of Beuys at the Guggenheim—­a piece that was to shape powerfully if not fully determine the reception of Beuys in the United States for the next twenty years or more—­“No other artist (with the possible exception of Andy Warhol, who certainly generated a totally different kind of myth) managed—­a nd probably never intended—­to puzzle and scandalize his primarily bourgeois audience to the extent that he would become a figure of worship,” creating in time “the public myth of Beuys’ life and work, by now having achieved proportions that make any attempt to question it or put it into historic perspective an almost impossible critical task.”4 Indeed, the “drama” of my title refers not only to the aspect 177

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of Beuys’s vast body of work I’ll be focusing on here (his “actions,” as he called them), but also to Beuys’s remarkable knack for self-­ promotion and self-­mythologizing, which is probably nearly as important to the Beuys phenomenon as the body of work itself. An easy part of this drama to overlook is its important relationship to the contemporary question of disability, which Beuys brings in and out of focus by complicating the relationship between “performance” and “performativity” (in Jacques Derrida’s sense of the term), which are usually taken to be opposites.5 There is performance aplenty in Beuys’s work and career, of course, but in the glare of his often charismatic performances, it is easy to miss the deeper underlying message of his work regarding performativity: that one is always already bound by and imbricated in the material context that constrains and even overdetermines the theatre (as it were) in which performance operates. First and foremost in Beuys, that includes the materiality of the body itself, but in an even more radical and, as it were, impersonal sense of embodiment that links the human body not just to nonhuman life, but also to the material world of wood, honey, fat, and felt (among other media that, for Beuys, carry with them their own powerful associations—­sometimes historical, sometimes ecological, sometimes mythical, and sometimes all three). Beuys’s relationship to the question of disability is complex, and I won’t be framing my analysis here in precisely that discursive context, but in any event, I would suggest that disability in Beuys always passes through a biopolitical lens, in part for historical and biographical reasons (as we shall see), and in part because embodiment in Beuys is usually explored in the register of what Giorgio Agamben famously calls “bare life,” where life, law, and the distinction between human and nonhuman life converge. 6 Ontologically speaking, this expanded sense of “the body” and “embodiment” means, in Beuys, that there are no “normal” bodies, and that disability is only (but not simply) what we might call an “inflection” on a continuum that includes animality, precarity, infirmity, debility, and embodied vulnerability, all of which may be (as we shall see) the site of revelation and transformation. Politically speaking, Beuys’s message is that this fact short-­circuits any attempt to transcode the “normal” or “healthy” body as a

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FIGURE 22. Joseph Beuys, performance of Kukei/Akopee-­No!/ Brown Cross/Fat Corners/Model Fat Corners, Fluxus Festival of New Art, Technical College of Aachen, July 20, 1964. Photograph by Peter Thomann, 1964/2021, www.peterthomann .net. Photograph copyright Peter Thomann. Copyright 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn.

marker of citizenship. As we will see later—­not just in his engagement of the Holocaust (and with it, the notorious Nazi practice of eugenically rank-­ordering the relationship between the material aspects of the body and citizenship in precisely this way), but also in the very materiality of his work—­Beuys constantly contaminates any “immunitary” attempt (to use biopolitical language) to cordon off a phantasmatic “proper” body from its imbrication in a larger performative context of material overdetermination. Hence the thick, sometimes even gritty and grimy, texture of his work. In this light, when Beuys, in performance mode, takes upon himself the signs of disability and, more broadly, debility and infirmity (as he does in several of his “actions”), it is usually presumed to be in the services of a “healing” to come. But on a deeper, biopolitical level, what needs to be healed is precisely the presumption that the body could ever be “whole,” “proper,” or (to use a term mobilized by both Agamben and Derrida) “sovereign”—­t hat is, cordoned off

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from the animality, materiality, and vulnerability of life, and thus ready (so the story goes—­a nd again the Nazis are the salient reminder here) to take on the political mantel of citizenship. The storied history of Beuys’s “actions,” and their explicit invocation of what I am calling a biopolitical problematic, took a dramatic turn in 1964, during the period of his association with the Fluxus movement, to which he was introduced by Nam June Paik.7 The action in question was held at the Festival of New Art in Achen on the twentieth anniversary of the failed attempt on Hitler’s life (though as one critic notes, the participating artists “have publicly disagreed about whether that timing was intentional or accidental”). 8 Be that as it may, the action began with a performance by Bazon Brock, which included a tape played at high volume of the 1943 Berlin Sportpalast speech by Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, in which he screams at the crowd, “Do you want total war?,” at which point the audience at the Achen festival—­ around eight hundred of them, mostly students—­became loud and abusive, even as Beuys began his part of the piece, performing an increasingly distorted piano accompaniment.9 Later in the action, Beuys ritualistically engaged with a number of objects—­most important among them, a portable stove that was later included in the assemblage Auschwitz Demonstration. During the sequence called Kukei, Beuys began to melt some blocks of fat over the stove’s two burners, evoking the rising heat with the movements of his hands. Later, during another sequence, a flask containing acid was accidentally knocked over, as some of the incensed spectators rushed the stage. One of them claimed that the spilled acid burned a hole in his suit, and he attacked Beuys and struck him in the face, at which point Beuys’s nose began to bleed. Beuys happened to have with him a wooden crucifix on an expandable base, called Pneumatic Cross, and he held it in his left hand, nose bleeding, while stretching out his right hand in a gesture of what looks like a mix of greeting and placation—­a ll of which was captured in a famous photograph by Heinrich Riebesehl which was widely circulated in the press. And “just at that moment,” one biographer writes, “the legend of Joseph Beuys was born.” The event, another adds, “transformed the struggling artist into a media personality.”10 But more importantly for our purposes, the date of the perfor-

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FIGURE 23. Joseph Beuys, performance of Kukei/Akopee-­No!/ Brown Cross/Fat Corners/Model Fat Corners, Fluxus Festival of New Art, Technical College of Aachen, July 20, 1964. Photograph by Heinrich Riebesehl. Copyright 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy of Kicken Berlin.

mance, with its historical allusion and the response of the audience, suggests, as Gene Ray notes, “that the melting of the fat on the burner was a blunt allusion to the crematoria of the Holocaust,” as was Beuys’s later inclusion of both the stove and two blocks of fat in the piece Auschwitz Demonstration.11 And Kim Levin has added further that the twenty-­ton tallow block that occupied a prominent position in the 1979 Guggenheim retrospective, “losing its heat, having its temperature monitored—­is certainly more than autobiographical,” noting that “its formal allusion to boxcars and its material allusion to the millions executed in concentration camps is inescapable.”12 But the medium of fat, which works its way throughout Beuys’s body of work, has a broader significance as well—­one that, when coupled with the associations invoked in Auschwitz Demonstration, will point us toward a broader biopolitical interpretation of Beuys’s project. Ray’s insistence that the ground tone of Beuys’s work is a powerful, sustained, and complicated act of mourning, and working through, the Holocaust is a much-­needed corrective to Buchloh’s harsh, at times even shrill,

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dismissal of Beuys in his famous essay from Artforum. But Ray misses the broader philosophical and political sweep of Beuys’s work by narrowing the focus too much on the historical events in Germany and leaving aside the powerful role that animality, infirmity, and finally finitude (in Derrida’s sense of the term) play when coupled to the historical events of the Holocaust—­a connection that is legible to us now in a way that it was not when Ray’s essay was written, roughly twenty years ago. To put it another way, I am persuaded that Ray is right about Beuys’s engagement with the Holocaust through what he calls “negative presentation” rather than direct representation and explicit reference, but I think Beuys’s strategy, and his ambitions as an artist, are broader than that, and are engaged more generally with a radical transvaluation of finitude in ways that contemporary biopolitical thought can help us understand. Supplying the necessary biopolitical context is all the more important because the framework that Beuys himself provided is not, in the end, particularly helpful (even if the social causes associated with that framework were admirable). If we believe Beuys’s various pronouncements, the transvaluation of finitude—­both human and animal finitude—­h inges on the fact that it is (to use Derrida’s language in his critique of Heidegger and the existential of Being-­ toward-­death) appropriable,13 that it can be put to the services of a larger existential project that is grounded in the dialectical relationship between human beings and nature, which expresses and realizes itself in a broad social and anthropological undertaking that eventuated in Beuys’s famous slogans of “social sculpture,” “the expanded concept of art,” and the contention that “every human being is an artist.” As Beuys summed it up: “Every human being is an artist who, from his own state of freedom, a state determined by the individual’s personal experience, learns to define his contribution to the total work of art; this total work of art is the social order of the future.”14 These ideas, in turn, were heavily influenced by the work of Rudolph Steiner and his theory of the “Threefold Social Organism,” and its vision of a society based on “freedom in the cultural sphere, equality in the rights sphere, and solidarity in the economic sphere.”15 To this, Beuys added a premium on human creativity as the driver of social progress, and a

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vision (a quite conventionally humanist one, in its way, influenced by the work of both Fichte and Schiller) of human beings as the creative pinnacle of nature, through which the whole expresses itself, with animals, trees, and the rest of nature viewed as “external organs” (as Beuys sometimes put it) through which humanity could more fully realize itself and thereby carry out its creative role in relation to the larger whole. These were the underpinnings of Beuys’s famous slogan, “Every human being is an artist,”16 and this was the overarching context in which the finitude of life—­ particularly, in Beuys, animal life—­was to be redeemed. As one sympathetic critic glosses one of Beuys’s most famous actions—­ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965)—­its intention is “to make people aware of the ecological damage that results from the actions of humanity.” The dead hare becomes reframed as “a dead external organ of humanity,” and “if,” as Beuys put it, “I am able to explain the paintings to this external organ, then, I believe, art will be understood as a genuine rectification of human creative powers.”17 Assessments of this broadly anthropological, social, and political program that comes to occupy Beuys from the early ’70s on range from the dismissive to the charitable. Buchloh, in his notorious essay after the Guggenheim retrospective, writes that “nobody who understands contemporary science, politics or esthetics, for that matter, could want to see in Beuys’ proposal for an integration of art, science, and politics . . . anything more than simple-­m inded utopian drivel lacking elementary political and educational practicality.”18 More representative, perhaps, is the feeling, as another critic put it, that “as time goes by, the impact of the originality of Beuys’ political ideas recedes. . . . One imagines, or hopes, that Beuys himself knew the difficulty of achieving these dreams; his primary job as an artist—­a dreamer by birthright—­was to introduce and encourage notions of a better world.”19 To be clear from the outset, I am not very interested in the explicit social and political programs that Beuys promoted, including his founding role in the Green Party, in which his involvement gradually diminished in the early ’80s as the party became more and more oriented toward the traditional Left and focused on pragmatic politics.20 I think Beuys’s work has a more profound and more contemporary

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political story to tell, and it is woven into the very fabric and texture of his work. The signature use of felt and fat in Beuys’s oeuvre provides a direct route into the question (though eventually we will need to range beyond it) and it has, from the beginning, been referenced repeatedly to what one critic simply (and aptly) calls “the story,” which became, early on, part of the Beuys mythology. On March 16, 1944, Beuys was piloting a Ju-­87 dive-­bomber for the German Luftwaffe on the Russian front and was shot down over Crimea. The next day, he was delivered to a German field hospital, where he stayed until April 7.21 In between, Beuys reported, he was recovered from the wreck, unconscious or largely so, by nomadic Tartars who ministered to his condition. Here is Beuys’s most well-­ known version of the story: Had it not been for the Tartars I would not be alive today. They were the nomads of the Crimea, in what was then no man’s land between the Russian and German fronts, and favoured neither side. I had already struck up a good relationship with them, and often wandered off to sit with them. “Du nix njemcky” they would say, “du Tartar,” and try to persuade me to join their clan. Their nomadic ways attracted me of course, although by that time their movements had been restricted. Yet it was they who discovered me in the snow after the crash, when the German search parties had given up. I was still unconscious then and only came round completely after twelve days or so, and by then I was back in a German field hospital. So the memories I have of that time are images that penetrated my consciousness. The last thing I remember was that it was too late to jump, too late for the parachutes to open. That must have been a couple of seconds before hitting the ground. Luckily I was not strapped in—­I always preferred free movement to safety belts. I had been disciplined for that, just as I had been for not carrying a map of Russia—­ somehow I felt that I knew the area better than any map. My friend was strapped in and he was atomized by the impact—­ there was almost nothing to be found of him afterwards. But I must have shot through the windscreen as it flew back at the same speed as the plane hit the ground and that saved me, though I had bad skull and jaw injuries. Then the tail flipped

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over and I was completely buried in the snow. That’s how the Tartars found me days later. I remember voices saying “Voda” (“Water”), then the felt of their tents, and the dense pungent smell of cheese, fat and milk. They covered my body in fat to help it regenerate warmth, and wrapped it in felt as an insulator to keep the warmth in.22

Now, much ink has been spilled over the years regarding the veracity or lack thereof of Beuys’s account—­it is a matter of historical record that he was shot down on March 16 and arrived at a German field hospital the following day—­a nd Beuys had already, before the famous account just given, framed the story in such a way as to emphasize (as one of his more sympathetic critics puts it) that he “is clearly at pains to establish that his account is not necessarily factually true, that key experiences can be composed in part of imagined, intuited, subconscious elements—­i n this case, his experience of images while unconscious.”23 As Beuys put it in that earlier account, from 1976, When I then had this crash, and they hadn’t found me because of the deep snow, if they hadn’t accidentally discovered me in the steppe while herding sheep or driving their horses. . . . Then they took me into the hut. And all the images I had then, I didn’t have them fully conscious. I didn’t really recover consciousness until [approximately] twelve days later, by which time I was already in a German field hospital. But all these images fully entered into me then. In a translated form, so to speak. The tents . . . the felt tents they had, the general behavior of the people, the issue of fat, which anyway is like . . . a general aroma in their houses . . . also their handling of cheese and fat and milk and yogurt—­how they handle it, that all in effect entered into me. I really experienced it. You could say, a key experience to which one could forge a link. But of course it’s a bit more complicated. Because I didn’t make these felt pieces to represent something of the Tartars or, as others say, to represent something that looks like a concentration camp mood, gray blankets . . . that plays a part of course, that is what the material itself brings along with it. Especially when it is gray. But those are all admixtures. Later I took felt and tried to insert it fully into theory. As an insulating element.24

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As Peter Nisbet notes, one of the many remarkable things about this earlier version “is that nowhere does Beuys claim to have been wrapped in fat and felt”; they are rather invoked as part of the environment in which he was rescued and cared for, suggesting that the link between fat, felt, and Beuys’s body of work, “while indicated, is by no means as anecdotal or literal as it was to shortly become” (an example of which we presumably find in Ray’s reading of Auschwitz Demonstration and other works). 25 What often goes unremarked about “the story”—­perhaps because it has typically been read as a story of shamanistic rebirth—­is that it is above all a story of injury, infirmity, and precarity. As Mark Rosenthal, among many other critics, has noted in his magisterial overview of Beuys’s work and legacy for the Menil/ Tate Modern retrospective, Beuys’s body of work is organized and held together by a series of leitmotifs, and chief among these is that of illness and the wound, beginning with the very first entry in Beuys’s extended project Life Course/Work Course—­an entry that marks his birth: “Exhibition of a wound patched with tape, 1921.”26 “Wounds are ubiquitous in Beuys’ thinking,” he writes, “and are multivalent in meaning,” referring to “illnesses of all kinds, literal incursions in a body, openings into the ground, including trenches and graves, inner spaces that are empty of any incident, and, of course, emotional scars and suffering.”27 And they are also, of course, an allegory for the embodied finitude we share with the other living creatures that populate Beuys’s oeuvre from beginning to end. 28 Here (to glance ahead for a moment) it is worth remembering that in one his most famous actions, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), Beuys attached an iron sole with a magnet to one of his shoes, so that, he recalls, “I had to walk on this sole when I carried the hare around from picture to picture, so along with a strange limp came the clank of iron on the hard stone floor.”29 And it is also worth noting that in perhaps his most well-­k nown action, I Like America and America Likes Me from 1974, Beuys, upon arrival by airplane to the United States, exited the terminal building while covering his eyes—­blinding himself, as it were—­u ntil he was immediately wrapped in felt, placed on a stretcher, and driven in an ambulance to the gallery space in which the action was to take place over a three-­day period, his feet never

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touching American soil from the time he left the airport until he arrived at the site. What one might call a biopolitical recontextualization of the significance of felt and fat, then, does not by any means evacuate the significance noted by Ray regarding the Holocaust, but rather encompasses it and indeed extends it by the linkage with infirmity and the finitude we share with other creatures, which biopolitical thought makes legible. Moreover, it is well worth foregrounding yet another biopolitical dimension of “the story” easily missed with the overwhelming focus on fat and felt. Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres project will help us conceptually bridge the differences between fat and felt in the two versions of “the story” that we traced above (in one, Beuys is covered in fat and wrapped in felt; in the other, they are simply strong physical and sensuous presences of the interior space of the Tartars into which he is taken). In the most general terms, Sloterdijk in Spheres provides what he sometimes calls a “topological” redescription of Heidegger’s concept of Dasein (being-­there) as a “being-­in” and a “being-­w ith,” one that is grounded in the fundamental biological condition of exposure for the human, which leads, in turn, to an “immunological” concept of dwelling—­the prosthetic being-­in and being-­w ith that begins with the exit from the mother’s body and ends with the phenomenon usually called “globalization.” As he writes in volume one of Spheres, “In warm-­ blooded live-­bearing mammals, birth constitutes a triple shell rupture” made up of the bursting of the amniotic sac, the exit through the uterine orifice and, third, “the passage through the birth canal into the extra-­maternal, completely other milieu.” This change of milieu, he writes, “takes place among all higher life forms that produce highly immature and nest-­dependent offspring.”30 And this means that, “for humans, being-­in-­spheres constitutes the basic relationship—­admittedly, one that is infringed upon from the start by the non-­interior world, and must perpetually assert itself against the provocation of the outside, restore itself and increase. In this sense, spheres are morpho-­immunological constructs.”31 For Sloterdijk, the fundamental fact of human dwelling (and this extends to the ecological sense of the term as well) 32 is a sphere-­building process rooted in a fundamental embodied vulnerability and dependency from birth that we share with many

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nonhuman animals. And it is the driver for increasingly complex technologies of immunological space management, culminating in one of Sloterdijk’s iconic images of homo habitans: astronaut Neil Armstrong floating in the void in his space suit. 33 As Timothy Campbell glosses the development of the figure in Spheres, “For Sloterdijk, modernity essentially consists of the struggle to create these metaphorical space suits, immunitary regimes, he will call them, that will protect Europeans from dangerous and life-­ threatening contact with the outside (outside understood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the imperial heart of darkness and as the ruinous effects of too close a proximity to one’s neighbor in twentieth-­century totalitarianisms).”34 Of course—­as is clear from Sloterdijk’s discussion in the introduction to volume 3 of the Spheres project, where he explores the invention of the modern air force and other technologies of war (including the use of poison gas and the invention of Zyklon A and B) during the World Wars—­t he Stuka bomber piloted by Beuys would be just such an immunitary, spherical technology used to rupture the space of the Russian enemy. 35 As Sloterdijk characterizes it, “Military aircraft, like rocket artillery later on, act primarily as access weapons; they negate the immunizing effect of the spatial distance between army groups and force access to objects that could scarcely be reached on the ground, or only with great losses.”36 And even more significant, given Campbell’s characterization of the trajectory of homo habitans, is the repeated admiration of the Tartars’ nomadism in Beuys’s recounting of the story, and his repeated insistence on their words to him, “You not German,” “You Tartar.” I’ll come back to this point below. One of the virtues of Sloterdijk’s iconoclastic and original framing of the biopolitical problematic in Spheres is that it makes explicit and indeed underscores the links between the biopolitical problematic and the themes of animality, infirmity, finitude, and embodied precarity that were already between the lines in the work of Agamben and, in a different way, in Derrida’s focus on “not being able” in The Animal That Therefore I Am (which in turn opens onto the larger framework of the prosthetic as the fundamental human situation that has been amplified in the work of Bernard Stiegler, David Wills, and, now, Sloterdijk). Agamben, for his own part, ar-

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gues that the fundamental structure of the biopolitical is the production, by means of sovereign power, of the distinction between bios (the “form or way of living proper to an individual or group,” a kind of protopolitical ascription) and zoē, usually translated as “bare life” (which refers to “the simple fact of living common to all living beings”). 37 In his analysis of the “hidden point of intersection between the juridico-­institutional and the biopolitical models of power,” Agamben argues that “the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original—­if concealed—­nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.”38 And this claim undergirds his controversial contention in Homo Sacer that “this will lead us to regard the [Nazi] camp not as a historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past (even if still verifiable) but in some way as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living.”39 What Agamben in The Open: Man and Animal calls “the anthropological machine” is first and foremost a logic, not of distinguishing the human from the animal (so-­called), but rather of using that distinction to transcode and retroactively ground a distinction of the human from the inhuman precipitated within the domain of the human itself. As he puts it in that text, “Insofar as the production of man through the opposition man/animal, human/inhuman, is at stake here, the machine necessarily functions by means of an exclusion (which is also always already a capturing) and an inclusion (which is also always already an exclusion). Indeed, precisely because the human is already presupposed every time, the machine actually produces a kind of state of exception, a zone of indeterminacy, in which the outside is nothing but the exclusion of an inside and the inside is in turn only the inclusion of an outside.”40 What this means is that “the division of life into vegetal and relational, organic and animal, animal and human, therefore passes first of all as a mobile border within living man. . . . But if this is true, if the caesura between the human and the animal passes first of all within man—­t hen it is the very question of man—­a nd of ‘humanism’—­t hat must be posed in a new way.”41 And this is a question in which Beuys, in my view, is keenly interested and deeply invested.

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Here, it is crucial to underscore once more the relationship between law and life, sovereign power and bare life, and to remind ourselves that Nazi Germany, and with it the death camps, are the very paradigm of the law distilled in what Agamben, following Carl Schmitt, calls the “state of exception” that exposes the very essence of what law is and how it works—­up to this very day, if we believe Agamben. What is brutally exposed by the supposed anomaly and exception of the camps is, in fact, the truth of the law itself—­not just its tautological structure (legal is legal, law is law), and not just the fact that sovereignty, to be sovereign, cannot seek its justification or grounding in anything but itself, but more importantly, what will come to be called the “thanatopolitical” effect of law on life. As Claire Colebrook and Jason Maxwell write—­addressing what is called in the biopolitical literature the difference between “constituted” (legislative and juridical) and “constituting” (sovereign) power—­“ There is law because of an event of force that divides a body of law (or a sovereign power) from the domain over which it governs. This means that law must have an outside that it also ostensibly denies (the event of force by which it became law).”42 And as Agamben announces at the opening of State of Exception, “It is this no-­man’s land between public law and political fact, and between the juridical order and life,” that he sets out (following Schmitt) to excavate, for “only if the veil covering this ambiguous zone is lifted will we be able to approach an understanding of the stakes involved in the difference—­or the supposed difference—­between the political and the juridical, and between law and the living being.”43 Given Beuys’s particular biographical circumstances, it is worth mentioning that the larger historical context here comprises the ongoing debate in Germany, beginning in 1925, between Walter Benjamin and Schmitt (“the fascist public law theorist,” as Benjamin calls him)—­and especially Schmitt’s reading of Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence” from 1921—­which Agamben summarizes in State of Exception: a conversation that Derrida will later join in earnest (in the long essay “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’”).44 My aim here, however, is not to delve further into this literature (something I have done in detail elsewhere),45 but to suggest—­returning for a moment more to

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Sloterdijk—­t hat it is this “no-­man’s land,” this “zone of indistinction,” into which Beuys is literally ejected during his crash in the Crimea and his rescue by the Tartars (real or imagined).46 It is as if “the story” registers the violent ejection out of an immunitary sphere in which the state of exception is fully operative, completely encompassing the biopolitical relationship between law and life, and into another space where that logic is suspended. (And literally speaking, Beuys is, to use his own words, in a “no man’s land” between two warring, sovereign states during his stay with the Tartars.) This other space—­which Beuys will inhabit, as it were, for the rest of his life—­is a different “zone of indistinction,” before life and law become opposed (precisely by being entangled and captured, as Agamben notes). As we know from one of the founding essays of biopolitical thought avant la lettre—­ Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism—­it is precisely in the zone of nomadic statelessness that the question of “the right to have rights” is dramatized:47 a question that stretches from the displaced, stateless masses of World War II in her text, right up through her discussion of human vs. animal rights in The Human Condition, to the invocation of cases such as Karen Ann Quinlan in Agamben’s Homo Sacer and Nicolas Perruche in the opening pages of Esposito’s Bios.48 And in this context, it is all the more suggestive that Beuys in his recounting says, “I felt that I knew the area better than any map,” that the Tartars are nomadic, and that they tell him, “You Tartar,” “You not German”—­a kind of flash-­forward to the zone Beuys will inhabit as an artist in the coming years. Beuys reenters this zone dramatically with I Like America and America Likes Me—­a period during which “the story” begins to take on more and more importance, even as Beuys’s ongoing biographical project Life Course / Work Course comes to a close in 1970 and he converges more and more on explicitly social and political projects.49 This “other” biopolitical zone we have been discussing is associated in I Like America not with the Tartars but with Native America—­a nd much more explicitly with the nonhuman animal, a coyote, which itself provides a kind of bridge between the two moments, because Beuys, in his own mythology, “embraced the coyote as the progeny of the paleo-­Siberian, Eurasian steppe-­wolf” that came across the Bering Strait to North America

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thousands of years ago (importantly, a native of the steppes where the Tartars of the Crimea lived, in Beuys’s story). 50 Beuys had been deeply engaged with animal life, of course, since the very beginnings of his career as an artist. The hare, the stag, the bee, the sheep, the elk—­a ll were central figures in Beuys’s oeuvre, and they make appearances, directly or by association, in some of his most important pieces. As Rosenthal writes in the lead essay for the Menil/Tate Modern retrospective, Beuys’s engagement with animals often revolved around themes of innocence, sacrifice, and redemption—­a nd by extension, responsibility. In Siberian Symphony, 1st Movement (1963), for example, Beuys tore the heart out of an already dead hare—­a n animal Beuys associated with incarnation and rebirth, but also with a nomadic, premodern Eurasia before the separation of East and West. “Although one could argue that Beuys was testing the hare’s powers of renewal,” Rosenthal writes, “his performance must also be considered a reenactment of a monstrous act committed on a defenseless innocent.”51 Similarly, in one of his most famous pieces two years later—­How To Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare—­Beuys walked through the action mumbling and whispering to the dead animal held in his arms, the artist’s head covered in honey and gold leaf, and then (in what has become an iconic photograph for the period and its art) cradled the animal in his arms, “very much like a grieving Madonna in a Pietà.”52 In another movement from Siberian Symphony, Beuys, “having painstakingly attached (crucified?) the body of a hare to poles, hauled it through space. Again, he mourned, and perhaps yearned on behalf of his audience, for the animal’s rebirth.”53 And during that same period, The Chief (Fluxus Song) from 1964, involves Beuys lying on the floor wrapped in felt with two dead hares in line with his body, one at his feet and on at his head. As many critics have noted, Beuys often thought of himself as a kind of shepherd figure (in addition to his usual role as shaman), and in fact, he even proclaimed himself the “chief” of a political party for animals, who could not speak for themselves.54 In I Like America and America Likes Me, however, something else is going on, perhaps propelled by the shift toward a more political and social framework at the beginning of the 70s, after his break with Fluxus. Beuys had made it clear he would not visit the

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FIGURE 24. Joseph Beuys, performance of How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965. Photograph by Walter Vogel. Copyright 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn. Photograph from bpk Bildagentur, Germany/ Art Resource, New York.

United States as long as it was fighting in Vietnam, and during his entire lifetime, he only visited the United States three times: in January 1974 to deliver a series of lectures called Energy Plan for the Western Man in New York, Minneapolis, and Chicago (a tour which, by most accounts fell flat because of the long, rambling, pedantic monologues about his political and aesthetic ideas); five months later to perform I Like America; and then for the big retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1979. 55 The logistics of I Like America and America Likes Me are easy enough to describe: when Beuys arrived at JFK Airport in New York, he was wrapped in felt, placed on a gurney, and driven in an ambulance to the Rene Block Gallery on West Broadway in New York, where he was delivered, still wrapped in felt, into the room where the action was to take place. Though actually witnessed by only a handful of people, and essentially ignored by the art press

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in its immediate aftermath, it became perhaps Beuys’s most iconic action. He arrived at the gallery in his usual costume (felt hat, fishing vest), and occupied the large space in the gallery enclosed by a chain link fence that he would share with the coyote for the next three days. Beuys had with him a flashlight, two large pieces of felt, a musical triangle, a pile of straw, thick brown leather gloves, and a staff that (appropriately enough, given the contexts we have been developing) could be read as a cane or a shepherd’s crook. Each day, two stacks of twenty-­five copies each of that day’s issue of The Wall Street Journal were placed in the space, and the action began with the same sequence of events: Beuys would strike each side of the musical triangle, at which point a loud recording of turbine engine noise was played. Beuys would then put on his gloves, surround himself with a large piece of felt, and extend his staff out the hole in the top, keeping it pointed in the coyote’s direction at all times. A series of postures and interactions ensued, with Beuys often shaping the felt to resemble a teepee or, it has been suggested, the cast bronze lightning element from the sculptural installation Lightning with Stag in its Glare (1958–­85). Sometimes Beuys would shine the flashlight inside the felt enclosure, sometimes cast its beam outward. He would engage the coyote with various noises, encouraging him (for it was indeed a male coyote, whom Beuys dubbed “Little John”) to pull and tear the felt. 56 After these interactions went on for a while, Beuys would emerge and end the gestural sequence, moving to stretch out on the pile of straw, while the coyote (often before or after urinating on the copies of The Wall Street Journal) eventually came to sleep on the artist’s felt. At the end of the three-­day action, Beuys gave a final embrace to the coyote, who had become comfortable with his presence, was wrapped in felt again, placed on a gurney, the gurney in an ambulance, and was driven to JFK airport, having seen or experienced little or nothing of New York City outside the gallery space.57 Most interpretations have read this action as a “shamanistic” undertaking, an act of healing. David Levi Strauss, for instance, traces a number of shamanistic motifs at work in the piece, suggesting that the gallery space replaces the cave as temenos from a famous masked shamanistic dance dating from the Upper Paleolithic,

FIGURE 25. Joseph Beuys, performance of I Like America and America Likes Me. Photograph by Caroline Tisdall, 1974. Copyright 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn.

FIGURE 26. Joseph Beuys, performance of I Like America and America Likes Me. Photograph by Caroline Tisdall, 1974. Copyright 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-­ Kunst, Bonn.

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and reading the staff or crook as Beuys’s equivalent of a shamanic phallos.58 Beuys himself has suggested, as Strauss notes, that the intentions in the action were primarily of a therapeutic nature.59 As Beuys put it, “You could say that reckoning has to be made with the coyote, and only then can this trauma be lifted.”60 The trauma was, of course, the treatment of Native Americans by the white man, its modern-­day avatar, the activities of the United States in Vietnam, and the aim was to uncover “the psychological trauma point of the United States’ energy constellation,” as Beuys had put it: the “schism between native intelligence,” Strauss writes, “and European mechanistic, materialistic, and positivistic values.”61 In this context, Beuys suggested that the recorded turbine audio tracks were meant to evoke “indetermined energy,” and the daily Wall Street Journal was likewise an index of the misguided and misspent energies of a materialistic, consumerist society.62 Regardless of the shamanistic trappings of the action, a few things seem unequivocal: Beuys’s opposition to the role of the United States in Vietnam; that the Coyote was a revered, even sacred animal for the Native Americans; and the fact that the parallels are clear enough between the war on Native Americans in the settlement of the American West and what are called “the Coyote Wars” (in which, by some estimates, six million or more coyotes were shot or poisoned from the 1820s to the 1980s).63 As one of Beuys’s German biographers puts it, “The persecution of the coyote was an example of man’s tendency to project his own sense of inferiority onto an object of hate or a minority,” yet another example of “the scapegoat and the eternal victim in every society—­as the Europe of pogroms and concentration camps well knows, or prefers to forget. America is rich in minorities, but the Indians, as the aboriginal inhabitants, are a special case in the history of persecution.”64 Beuys’s action—­shamanistic or not, therapeutic or not—­carries out a triple rebuke against the United States: its actions in Vietnam; its extirpation of native animal species seen to threaten or inconvenience its expansion of an extractive and/or agricultural economy; and its treatment of Native Americans in the context of “bare life,” which makes Beuys’s title, I Like America and America Likes Me, all the more acidic. Beuys is focusing our attention here on what we could call

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(using Derrida’s language) “another sovereignty,” those “other nations” that include both human and nonhuman beings before their capture by the law and its founding act of constituting violence. As Derrida points out in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, if we take democracy seriously, then we must also take seriously the democratic possibility, even duty, of questioning democracy—­not just the “what” of democracy but also the “who.” The challenges raised by international law and declarations of human rights lead ineluctably, Derrida shows, to the question: Does democratic equality “end at citizenship, and thus at the borders of the nation-­state? Or must we extend it to the whole world of singularities, to the whole world of humans assumed to be like me, my compeers [mes semblables]—­or else, even further, to all nonhuman living beings, or again, even beyond that, to all the nonliving, to their memory, spectral or otherwise?”65 This question, Derrida writes, “comes before any other metaphysical determination as subject, human person, or consciousness, before any juridical determination.”66 We’re now in a better position to see how, in biopolitical terms, Beuys’s engagement with this nonhuman being is all the more profound in light of Kalpana Seshadri’s observation that modern racism in a biopolitical context is not just a process of “dehumanization or ‘animalization,’” but is also grounded in “the manipulation of the impropriety between human and animal through the withholding of language as speech.” If the “force” of law for Agamben is “its capacity to suspend itself—­to withhold itself as sovereign silence—­t hen the work of alterity or resistance in this biopolitical scenario” may be viewed as “a certain other silence,” one that “appears to neutralize the exercise of power as the play of difference at the limit between law and lawlessness, norm and exception, speech and silence, human and animal.”67 And in that context, the coyote’s silence here speaks volumes; it communicates “we are still here,” “your law is only law.” And indeed, as one historian writes, “Many people feel that the Vietnamese mistake was the first war that the United States didn’t win. That isn’t true. For forty-­five years, Uncle Sam has fought a war against coyotes . . . and lost!”68 But the coyote is equally significant—­to return to a point we touched on above—­because of its place in Native American lore.

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There, it is most associated with the Trickster figure, and that association helps provide a crucial counterbalance to the trope of the shaman with which Beuys’s work is so often laden. It isn’t just that the coyote suggests, as Donna Haraway famously puts it, that we keep “searching for fidelity, knowing all the while we will be hoodwinked.”69 It is also and more importantly (as Mark Rosenthal notes, borrowing from Lewis Hyde), that the Trickster is the one who can “erase or violate that line between the dirty and the clean.”70 Indeed, American poet Gary Snyder has underscored the “Rabelaisian-­Dadaist overtones” of the coyote tales in Native American lore.71 Of all the attributes of the Trickster, this one is perhaps the most crucial for our purposes, because policing the line between the dirty and the clean is, as Roberto Esposito reminds us, one of the fundamental mechanisms through which biopolitical regimes justify themselves as the protectors of the health and well-­being of the citizenry, which in turn opens up a space in which the immunitary mechanism and its work of violence may operate. As Esposito shows in chapter 4 of Bios, it is just this trope of the “body politic” and its health that gets gruesomely literalized in Nazi Germany on the basis of contemporaneous developments in medicine and biology. On the one hand, German medicine of the period was some of the most advanced in the world, and the country launched “the most powerful campaign of the period against cancer, restricting the use of asbestos, tobacco, pesticides,” and other pathogens, while promoting “organic vegetables and vegetarian cuisine.” But on the other hand, it carried out the actions in the camps that, Esposito suggests, are more properly characterized as “extermination” rather than the more religiously inflected term “Holocaust.” “What does all this suggest?” he writes. “The thesis that emerges is that between this therapeutic attitude and the thanatological frame in which it is inscribed isn’t a simple contradiction, but rather a profound connection. . . . In short, and although it may seem paradoxical, it was in order to perform their therapeutic mission that they turned themselves into the executioners of those they considered either nonessential or harmful to improving public health.”72 Beuys’s staunch resistance to this biopolitical, immunological policing of the line between the dirty and the clean, the impure

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and the pure, is woven into the very texture of his work from the early ’60s to the end of his career (and not just in his use of fat and felt), and it accounts for the strong first impression most viewers have of his work, I’ll wager: its gritty, grimy texture, unmistakable in so many of the vitrines, and populated not just by felt and fat, but by canes, used bars of soap, wash basins, clumps of straw, X-­rays, apothecary jars of mysterious substances—­what Arthur C. Danto characterizes as “left-­over, broken, dated objects, distressed and discarded,” fragments that are “scarred and patinated by grime and time.”73 All of them confront, in their dense singularity, the idealized “healthy,” “normal,” “human” body with what it seeks to ignore, repress, and clean up—­a nd of course, we find the same confrontation dramatized in the straw, urine, and shredded copies of The Wall Street Journal in I Like America and America Likes Me. This is the larger resonance, I think—­“political” in a different way—­of Beuys’s confronting us with “the ordinary, and even distasteful” in his work, a deployment of rigorously mixed media that possesses “a tremendous physical presence and visceral energy,” resolutely opposed, as Rosenthal shrewdly notes, to the slick surfaces and clean lines of Minimalism and Conceptualism and the shallow, “What, me worry?” surfaces of Pop Art that seemed to suggest that America in the ’60s and ’70s had no biopolitical traumas to work out—­t hat problem, that trauma, was for Germany and Germans.74 Rosenthal has suggested that “the unrelenting redolent ugliness of Beuys’ debris” is “a reaction against Nazi aesthetics, with its sentimental emotions, pseudo-­classical order,” and its extravagant reliance upon marble in ersatz classical motifs.75 But even more to the point for our purposes (to return specifically now to I Like America) is his reminder that Beuys was “a beacon” for European artists in the ’60s who were trying to situate themselves in the context of the overwhelming, taken-­for-­granted hegemony of the American art scene, “the hard-­nosed, what-­you-­see-­is-­ what-­you-­see ethos of the Minimalists, and the equally hardboiled, sometimes cynical or ironic but always deadpan, position of Pop Art.” In these terms, what that art represented, and what is politically “outed,” you might say, in Beuys’s coyote action, is the fantasy that America, the land of clean surfaces and materialist

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abundance, was presumed to be a land with no biopolitical traumas. As Rosenthal shrewdly observes of I Like America, after the arrival each day of the copies of The Wall Street Journal, “the coyote would usually urinate on the Judd-­like stacks. In the same year, Beuys took another jab, renaming the postcard image of the World Trade Center Towers of Lower Manhattan ‘Cosmos and Damian,’” suggesting that “the power-­base of the country, like a Judd stack (which it resembled), needed the healing mission of the iconic doctors.”76 This is an even more crucial point of emphasis for getting at the biopolitical specificity of Beuys’s work, because Beuys himself often trafficked in the analogy between the “organic notion of the human being” and “the organism of society” that, Esposito shows, underwrote (at least in part) the Nazi ideology of the body politic and the need to destroy the pathogens that threatened it. (And as Joan Rothfuss has suggested, these sorts of pronouncements were taken in the United States context as even more evidence of Beuys’s “Germanness,” going back at least to his break with the Fluxus movement.)77 So when Beuys characterized his Honey Pump installation as a work about “the bloodstream of society,” it is not surprising that many in America heard an echo of Hitler’s invocation of the health of “the bloodstream of our people.”78 But despite Beuys’s advertised political visions and ideals (however seriously we may or may not take them), here, I think, we can draw a bright line between the humanism, idealism, and even utopianism that often animated Beuys’s “official” political activities, and the very different, more profound biopolitical intervention that I have been tracing here, one woven into the very fabric of his work.

Notes

2. Lose the Building 1. For both references, see Diller+Scofidio’s book that documents the project from beginning to end, Blur: The Making of Nothing (New York: Abrams, 2002). The comments from the Swiss newspaper article on Die Wunder-­Wolke (the wonder cloud), appear on page 372; Diller’s comments regarding spectacle and expositions—­i n her seminar at Princeton, where she was teaching at the time, and in presentations by the team in Switzerland—­may be found on pages 92 and 162. 2. Diller+Scofidio, 163, 324. 3. Diller+Scofidio, 100–­1 1. 4. Diller+Scofidio, 146–­55. 5. Diller+Scofidio, 209–­51. 6. Diller+Scofidio, 15. 7. Diller+Scofidio, 162. 8. Diller+Scofidio, 125. 9. Diller+Scofidio, 195. 10. Quoted in Edward Dimendberg’s essay “Blurring Genres” from the catalog produced for the retrospective of Diller+Scofidio’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art from March 1 to May 25, 2003, entitled Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller+Scofidio (New York: Abrams, 2003), 79. 11. Ned Cramer, “All Natural,” Architecture 91, no. 7 (July 2002): 53. 12. Jean-­F rançois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, fwd. Fredric Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 77–­78. 13. Lyotard, 78. 14. Lyotard, 78. 15. In Jean-­F rançois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. George Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 16. See specifically Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 77. 17. See my discussion of Lyotard’s rendering of Kant and ethics in Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 54–­62. 18. Dimendberg, “Blurring Genres,” 79. 201

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19. Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 89. 20. Diller+Scofidio, Blur, 44. 21. As is abundantly clear in the Whitney catalog, Scanning (among other places), the distinction between “art” and “architecture” is of comparatively little moment for Diller+Scofidio, and indeed their body of work is calculated toward their intrication. The same is true for Luhmann, who treats architecture as a subspecies of art, even while addressing here and there its differences from, say, painting. 22. It should be noted that the term “postmodern” is one for which Luhmann has no use. For him, the postmodern is merely an intensification of features already fully present in modernity. On this point, see, for example, Niklas Luhmann, “Why Does Society Describe Itself as Postmodern?,” in Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity, ed. William Rasch and Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 35–­49. 23. Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr. with Dirk Baecker, intro. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 25. 24. Luhmann, 37. 25. Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 158. 26. See my Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 67–­68. 27. Niklas Luhmann, “The Cognitive Program of Constructivism and a Reality That Remains Unknown,” in Selforganization: Portrait of a Scientific Revolution, ed. Wolfgang Krohn et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), 76. 28. Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 92. 29. Luhmann, 91. 30. Luhmann, 91. 31. Luhmann, 91. 32. Luhmann, 92. 33. Luhmann, 149. 34. Luhmann, 96. 35. Luhmann, 298–­99. 36. Luhmann, 400n220. 37. Luhmann, 148. 38. Luhmann, 148–­49. 39. Luhmann, 15. 40. Luhmann, 149, emphasis added. 41. Luhmann, 72. 42. As Luhmann puts it, “Objects are therefore nothing but the eigenbehaviors of observing systems that result from using and reusing their previous distinctions.” “Deconstruction as Second-­Order Observing,” New Literary History 24 (1993): 768. 43. Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 46.

Notes to Chapter 2  203 44. Ashley Schafer, “Designing Inefficiencies,” in Scanning, 93. 45. Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 92. 46. Luhmann, 92. 47. Luhmann, 148. 48. In this connection, I would note, with Roselee Goldberg, how influential conceptual art was for Diller and Scofidio’s early career. See her essay “Dancing About Architecture” in Scanning, 46. 49. Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 34. 50. Luhmann, 71. 51. Luhmann, 66–­67. 52. Luhmann, 69. 53. Luhmann, 69. 54. Luhmann, 69. 55. See Mark Hansen’s essay “Wearable Space,” Configurations 10 (2002): 321–­70. For Diller’s remarks, see Blur, 92–­94. 56. Niklas Luhmann, “How Can the Mind Participate in Communication?,” in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 371. 57. Luhmann, 381. 58. Luhmann, 374. 59. Luhmann, 378. 60. Luhmann, 379. 61. Luhmann, 379–­80. 62. Dietrich Schwanitz, “Systems Theory and the Difference between Communication and Consciousness: An Introduction to a Problem and Its Context,” MLN 111, no. 3 (1996): 494. 63. Kawara’s Date Paintings consist of a date (the date the painting was executed) in simple white letters painted on a monochromatic field in one of eight predetermined shapes of horizontal orientation. Each painting is stored in its own cardboard box alongside a news item taken on the date of the painting from the newspaper in the city in which the painting was executed. He has created date paintings in more than one hundred and twelve cities and continued the project until near the time of his death. 64. Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 141. 65. Luhmann, 141. 66. Luhmann, 142. 67. Luhmann, 47. 68. Luhmann, “Deconstruction as Second-­Order Observing,” 775. 69. Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 4. 70. Luhmann, “Deconstruction as Second-­Order Observing,” 776. 71. Luhmann, Social Systems, 161. 72. Luhmann, 162–­63. 73. Luhmann, Reality of the Mass Media, 15–­16. 74. Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 64– ­65.

204  Notes to Chapter 3

3. Time as Architectural Medium 1. The finalists were Tree City by Rem Koolhaas, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rotterdam, Bruce Mau Design, Toronto, Oleson Worland Architect, Toronto, Inside/Outside, Amsterdam (winner); Emergent Landscapes by Brown and Storey Architects, Toronto; Emergent Ecologies by James Corner/Field Operations, Philadelphia, Stan Allen, Stan Allen Architect, New York; A New Synthetic Landscape by Foreign Office Architects, Tokyo, Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects, Toronto, Tom Leader and James Haig Streeter of PWP Landscape Architects, Berkeley; The Digital and the Coyote by Bernard Tschumi Architects, New York, Dereck Revington Studio, Toronto, Sterling Finlayson Architects, Toronto. 2. Specifically, in the special Critical Ecologies issue of EBR: Electronic Book Review, which I coedited with Joe Tabbi, to which Luke contributed: http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies. 3. All quotations from the architectural teams are taken from the original submissions for the Downsview Park competition, Toronto, 1999. For a useful overview of the competition and each finalist project, see Marco Polo, “Environment as Process,” Canadian Architect, October 2000, 14–­19. 4. Jacques Derrida, “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,” in Between the Blinds: A Derrida Reader, ed. and intro. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 172. 5. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 11. 6. Derrida, “Geschlecht II,” 172. 7. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 38, 41. 8. Heidegger, qtd. in Derrida, “Geschlecht II,” 178–­79. In opposition to all of which Cavell finds Heidegger’s emphasis on thought as “reception,” as a kind of welcoming, elaborated by Heidegger in passages that insist on “the derivation of the word thinking from a root for thanking and interprets this particularly as giving thanks for the gift of thinking.” Conditions Handsome, 38–­39. On the point of technology and the typewriter, as Derrida notes, “The protest against the typewriter also belongs—­this is a matter of course—­to an interpretation of technology [technique], to an interpretation of politics starting from technology,” but also and more importantly to a “devaluation of writing in general” as “the increasing destruction of the word or of speech” in which “the typewriter is only a modern aggravation of the evil.” Derrida, “Geschlecht II,” 180. 9. John Casti, Complexification: Explaining a Paradoxical World through the Science of Surprise (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), 237, 232. 10. Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz with Dirk Baecker, intro. Eva Knodt (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 17.

Notes to Chapter 4  205 11. Luhmann, 46. 12. Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 114. 13. Luhmann, 45. 14. Luhmann, 45–­46. 15. As Derrida notes, with the mime, “the plays of facial expressions and the gestural tracings are not present in themselves since they always refer, perpetually allude or represent. But they don’t represent anything that has ever been or can ever become present. “The Double Session” in A Derrida Reader, 184. In this sense, “the act always plays out a difference without reference, or rather without a referent. . . . The mime mimes reference. He is not an imitator; he mimes imitation” (188). 16. Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 298–­99. 17. Luhmann, 299.

4. The Installation That Almost Ate Me 1. Terri Peters, “Philip Beesley Envisions an Architecture that Breathes and Grows,” Mark 21 (August–­September 2009): 201. 2. Beesley, qtd. in Peters, 201. 3. Peters, 200. 4. Beesley, qtd. in Tim McKeough, “This Art Bites,” Wired, November 2007, 134. 5. See, for example, Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991). 6. For an overview, see Steve Joshua Heims, Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetics Group, 1946–­1953 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). 7. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), 429. 8. Bateson, 482. 9. Philip Beesley, Hylozoic Soil: Geotextile Installations, 1995–­2007 (Cambridge, Ont.: Riverside Architectural Press, 2007), 20. 10. Bateson, Ecology of Mind, 451. 11. Bateson, 453. 12. Humberto Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, rev. ed., trans. Robert Paolucci (Boston: Shambhala Press, 1992), 169. 13. This is a point recognized by Bateson but never really fully ramified by him in its implications. He notes, for example, that “such systems are, however, always open: (a) in the sense that the circuit is energized from some external source and loses energy usually in the form of heat to the outside; and (b) in the sense that events within the circuit may be influenced from the outside or may influence outside events.” Ecology of Mind, 404. 14. For Nagel’s classic essay and an interesting commentary on some of

206  Notes to Chapter 4

its assumptions, see Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 15. Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr. with Dirk Baecker, intro. Eva Knodt (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 37. 16. Heinz von Foerster, Observing Systems, 2nd ed. (Seaside, Calif.: Inter­ systems, 1985), 258. 17. Bateson, Ecology of Mind, 449, emphasis in original. 18. On this point, see Maturana and Varela, Tree of Knowledge, 26. 19. Niklas Luhmann, “The Cognitive Program of Constructivism and a Reality That Remains Unknown,” in Selforganization: Portrait of a Scientific Revolution, ed. Wolfgang Krohn et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), 76. 20. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, trans. Pascale-­A nne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 65–­70. 21. “The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts, ed. Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 10. 22. Derrida, 24. 23. Bateson, Ecology of Mind, 451–­52. 24. Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow: A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 63. 25. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 84. 26. Beesley, qtd. in Peters, “Philip Beesley,” 201.

5. From Dead Meat to Glow-in-the-Dark Bunnies 1. Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More To Follow),” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (2002): 369–­418. 2. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), 202. 3. Sue Coe, Dead Meat, intro. Alexander Cockburn, fwd. Tom Regan (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995), v. 4. Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Who Comes after the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-­ Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 112–­1 3. I have discussed the Derrida/ Levinas difference on this point in some detail in my essay “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of the Animal,” in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1–­57, esp. 17–­18, 23–­28. 5. Derrida, “Animal,” 380. 6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 167–­91. See also my Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University

Notes to Chapter 5  207 of Chicago Press, 2003), 227–­28n1; and Alphonso Lingis’s essay “Animal Body, Inhuman Face,” in Wolfe, Zoontologies, 165–­82. 7. Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 8. Fried, 114. 9. Fried, 99. 10. Fried, 99. 11. Fried, 100. 12. Fried, 119–­20. 13. Fried, 120–­21. 14. Fried, 99. 15. Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’” 114. For a by-­now classic analysis of this process of production and renaming, which is also concerned with its phallocentrism, see Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat (New York: Continuum, 1990). 16. Fried, Realism, 163n1, 185n28. 17. Fried, 59. I use the term “melodrama” in the sense that has some centrality to Fried’s body of criticism and its fundamental contrast of “theatricality” (or “literalism”) and “opticality” (or “absorption”), about which I will say more below. 18. See Fried’s discussion in “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 40. 19. Fried, Realism, 59. 20. Fried, 59. 21. Fried, 62. 22. Fried, 64–­65. 23. Fried, 88. 24. Jacques Derrida, “Afterword,” Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 116. 25. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 25. 26. Derrida “‘Eating Well,’” 116–­17. 27. Derrida, 114. 28. Eduardo Kac, Telepresence and Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits, & Robots, fwd. James Elkins (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 66. 29. Kac, 291–­92. 30. Arlindo Machado, “Towards a Transgenic Art,” in The Eighth Day: The Transgenic Art of Eduardo Kac, ed. Sheilah Britton and Dan Collins (Tempe: Institute for Studies in the Arts, Arizona State University, 2003), 94–­95. 31. Kac, Telepresence and Bio Art, 237, 243. 32. Steve Baker, “Philosophy in the Wild?” in Eighth Day, 29. 33. Derrida, qtd. in Baker, 34–­35.

208  Notes to Chapter 5

34. Kac, Telepresence and Bio Art, 236. 35. Marek Wieczorek, “Playing with Life: Art and Human Genomics,” Art Journal 59, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 59. 36. Wieczorek, 60. A misrecognition of which by artist Thomas Grunfeld has led several critics—­r ightly to my mind—­to find Grunfeld’s well-­ known taxidermy “hybrids” of body parts from different animals to be a radically unsatisfactory way of addressing this question. See Wieczorek, 60, or Edward Lucie-­Smith’s criticism in “Eduardo Kac and Transgenic Art,” in Britton and Collins, Eighth Day, 20–­26 (esp. 23). 37. Wieczorek, “Playing with Life,” 59–­60. 38. Niklas Luhmann, “The Cognitive Program of Constructivism and a Reality That Remains Unknown,” in Selforganization: Portrait of a Scientific Revolution, ed. Wolfgang Krohn et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), 72. 39. Niklas Luhmann, “The Paradoxy of Observing Systems,” Cultural Critique 31 (Fall 1995): 44, 46. 40. Kac, Telepresence and Bio Art, 202–­3. 41. Kac, 162–­66. 42. Dan Collins, “Tracking Chimeras,” in Britton and Collins, Eighth Day, 99. For Kac’s resistance, see the section “Alternatives to Alterity” in his essay “GFP Bunny,” in Telepresence and Bio Art, 273–­75. 43. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 328. 44. Mitchell, 315. 45. This is directly related not only to the general point that Kac’s work is to be viewed against the background that immediately precedes it (namely, conceptual art) as Mitchell notes (What Do Pictures Want?, 328), but also, as we’ll see in chapter 8, to Luhmann’s insistence that the meaning of any work of art cannot be referenced, much less reduced, to its phenomenological or perceptual substrate. 46. Lucie-­Smith, “Eduardo Kac and Transgenic Art,” 22. 47. Peter Brunette and David Wills, “The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” trans. Lauri Volpe, in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts, ed. Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 24. 48. Fried, Art and Objecthood, 42. 49. Coe, Deat Meat, 72.

6. Apes Like Us 1. The script for Weaver’s Monkey on which the following commentary is based may be found in Animal Acts: Performing Species Today, ed. Una Chaudhuri and Holly Hughes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 141–­55. 2. Actually, a Monkey Puzzle is not a puzzle (solved by monkeys or anyone else) but is (a) a type of South American evergreen pine tree, and (b) a species of butterfly (Rathinda amor) that is a member of the lycaenidae family.

Notes to Chapter 7  209 3. The larger project of which Monkey is a part is Deke Weaver’s Unreliable Bestiary. For more on the project, go to www.unreliablebestiary.org. 4. Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991), 151–­52. 5. Specifically, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_wise_monkeys, and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_monkey_(colloquial _expression). 6. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-­L ouise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 4–­5. 7. Derrida, 5. 8. Cora Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” in Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe, Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 45–­46. 9. Diamond, 53. 10. Diamond, 74. 11. For a larger discussion of the “schema of elevation” and Freud’s text, see Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 2–­3, 108–­9.

7. Condors at the End of the World 1. For one version of this argument, see Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 2. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 36–­37. 3. Jacques Derrida, “Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue—­Between Two Infinities, the Poem,” in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 140. 4. Derrida’s characterization of Heidegger’s “dogma” appears in “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,” trans. John P. Leavey Jr., in Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 173. 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_condor, last accessed May 13, 2015. 6. Details about the process that eventuated in the photographs were reported to me in an email from Mark Wilson on December 30, 2014. 7. The translation I use here is from Poems of Paul Celan, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea, 2002), 275. Derrida first cites the passage in The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-­L ouise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 9.

210  Notes to Chapter 7

8. Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 2:104–­5. 9. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 108. 10. Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 2:118. 11. Derrida, 2:6. 12. Derrida very much intends the play between “stone” (drawn from Heidegger’s canonical discussion of the ontological differences between stones, animals, and humans) and “touchstone.” Beast, 2:6. For two exemplary literary instances that worry this question in especially powerful ways, see the latter chapters of J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace (New York: Penguin, 2000) and the behavior of its central character, David Lurie, toward the dead bodies of dogs killed at the animal shelter at which he works and, in nonfiction literature, Berry Lopez’s Apologia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). 13. Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 2:8. 14. Derrida, 192. 15. Derrida, 194. 16. Derrida, qtd. in Michael Naas, The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 149. 17. Derrida, Beast, 2:196–­197. 18. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-­L ouise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 28. See also pages 34–­35. 19. Naas, End of the World, 26–­27. 20. Derrida, Beast, 2:122. 21. See, for example, David Farrell Krell’s discussion in Derrida and Our Animal Others: Derrida’s Final Seminar, “The Beast and the Sovereign” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 66. 22. Derrida, Beast, 2:117. 23. Derrida, 126. 24. Derrida, 127. 25. See, in this connection, Derrida’s interview “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Who Comes after the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-­Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 96–­1 19. 26. Derrida, Beast, 2:8–­9. 27. Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil, intro. Dorion Sagan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), xiii; Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, rev. ed., fwd. J. Z. Young, trans. Robert Paolucci (Boston: Shambhala Press, 1998).

Notes to Chapter 8  211 28. For more on how these questions cross-­pollinate with Derrida’s work, see my book Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 78–­94; and, more recently, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 60–­86. 29. Noë, Out of Our Heads, 43. 30. Derrida, Beast, 2:105. 31. Colin Davis, “Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms,” French Studies 59, no. 3: 373, 378–­79. 32. Stuart Kauffman, Humanity in a Creative Universe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 67. 33. Kauffman, 43. 34. Kauffman, 66. 35. See Jacques Derrida, Cinders, trans. Ned Lukacher, intro. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 36. Namely, in the last two chapters of Wolfe, Before the Law. 37. Derrida, qtd. in Naas, 129. 38. See J. Hillis Miller, “Derrida’s Destinerrance,” MLN 121 (2006): 896.

8. Each Time Unique 1. http://galleries.lafayette.edu/2014/06/15/requiem-exhibition/. 2. http://www.audubon.org/magazine/may-june-2014/why-passenger -pigeon-went-extinct. 3. Anita Albus, “The Passenger Pigeon’s Eclipse,” in On Rare Birds, trans. Gerald Chapple (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2011), 4. 4. Albus, 2. 5. http://www.audubon.org/magazine/may-june-2014/why-passenger -pigeon-went-extinct. 6. http://www.audubon.org/magazine/may-june-2014/why-passenger -pigeon-went-extinct. 7. Jerome McGann, “Fenimore Cooper’s Anti-­aesthetic and the Representation of Conflicted History,” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 2 (June 2012): 124. 8. James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers, ed. and intro. James D. Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 244. 9. Cooper, 245–­46. 10. Cooper, 246–­47. 11. Cooper, 248. 12. See, for example, Chris Heller, “Martha, the Very Last Passenger Pigeon,” Atlantic, September 18, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/ technology/archive/2014/09/meet-martha-the-very-last-passenger -pigeon/380473/. 13. Jacques Derrida, “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan,” in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 18.

212  Notes to Chapter 8

14. Jonathan Rosen, “The Birds: Why the Passenger Pigeon Became Extinct,” New Yorker, January 6, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine /2014/01/06/the-birds-4. 15. Albus, “Passenger Pigeon’s Eclipse,” 8. 16. Heller, “Martha.” 17. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1. 18. Cooper, Pioneers, 248. 19. Michael Marder, “Ecology as Event,” in Eco-­Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy, ed. Matthias Fritsch, Philippe Lynes, and David Wood (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 143–­4 4. 20. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2, trans. Geoff Bennington, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-­Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 99. On Emerson and “onwardness,” see my What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 246–­49. Here, on this precise terrain, is where I would spell out my differences with Marder’s reading of the desire for what he calls an “aneconomic” concept of ecology he finds missing in deconstruction, “another sort of positivity underneath various negations of exchange, circulation, memory, and the subject’s odyssey without falling into the traps of metaphysics” (144). My point is that “ecology” from my vantage is not and cannot be a form of “positivity” or, as he puts it later in that same essay, a “place” (145). 21. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 2006), 1. 22. For more on the Long Now Foundation, see http://longnow.org/revive /what-we-do/passenger-pigeon/. 23. To view, see https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsRNoUx8w3r OvYdQ51_t9yrQPqiKlFSHR. 24. In this connection, see Ben Novak’s TEDxDeExtinction talk “How to Bring Passenger Pigeons All the Way Back,” https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=rUoSjgZCXhc&index=3&list=PLsRNoUx8w3rOvYdQ51 _t9yrQPqiKlFSHR. 25. Sam Solnick, “Reverse Transcribing Climate Change,” Oxford Literary Review 34, no. 2 (2012): 280–­81. 26. Solnick, 282. 27. See, for example, the work of Giuseppe Testa and Helga Nowatny, in Naked Genes: Reinventing the Human in the Molecular Age, trans. Mitch Cohen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010). 28. “Scripts of Life,” unpublished manuscript, 6. 29. Jerrold Seigel, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 96–­97. 30. See Peter Brunette and David Wills, “The Spatial Arts: An Interview

Notes to Chapter 9  213 with Jacques Derrida,” in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, ed. Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 9–­32.

9. What Is the Bio- of Biopolitics and Bioart? 1. Hans-­Georg Moeller, The Radical Luhmann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 23. 2. Gregory Bateson, “Form, Substance, and Difference,” in Steps to An Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972). 449. 3. In fact, as Moeller points out, “That a system is in an environment means that it functions while other systems function simultaneously. A more appropriate example than the fish in the water is the immune system. We can well say that the immune system is within the body, but this does not mean that it has any principal seat in the body. The immune system can only exist within the complex environment of the body—­it cannot work without blood circulation, digestive processes, and respiratory activity all functioning simultaneously. There is, however, no pineal or other gland that serves as the nexus between the immune system and its bodily environment. The very concept of nexus is what the system/ environment distinction is no longer in need of,” opting instead for “a highly complex pluralism of simultaneously operating systems.” Radical Luhmann, 63. Opting, that is to say, for ecological thinking. 4. As Leonard Lawlor characterizes the pharmakon, “Always in Derrida, the concern is with the logic of the limit—­say, between evil and good—­ that is not oppositional, a logic in which the two poles are not external to one another” (8). “Indeed,” he writes later, “Derrida says that the pharmakon is the milieu prior to any possible dissociation of opposites, even the opposites of form and content or form and matter” (35)—­a ll of which is to say (and the point is nailed down by remembering the links between milieu, “medium,” and environment that so many thinkers have underscored) that the pharmakon is ecological or environmental; it names the (non)place where environmental complexity gets “re-­entered,” as Luhmann will say, on the system side of the system/environment relation, and in terms of the system’s own self-­reference, thus creating what Lawlor, like Luhmann, calls the “blind spot” that “amounts to the only way . . . to twist free of Platonism” (35). Leonard Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). For Esposito’s own conjugation of the immunitary mechanism and the pharmakon, see his Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (London: Polity, 2011), 127. 5. Foucault, qtd. in Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. and intro. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 33. 6. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège

214  Notes to Chapter 9

de France, 1975–­76, trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 2003), 247. 7. Esposito, Bios, 7. 8. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 35–­36. 9. Maurizio Lazzarato, “From Biopower to Biopolitics,” Pli 12 (2002): 104. 10. Esposito, Bios, 28. 11. Lazzarato, “From Biopower to Biopolitics,” 101. 12. Lazzarato, 103. 13. Foucault, qtd. in Esposito, Bios, 38. 14. Lazzarato, “From Biopower to Biopolitics,” 104. 15. Esposito, Bios, 39. 16. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 166. 17. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 255. 18. Esposito, Bios, 32, emphasis added. 19. Esposito, 45. 20. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 21. Esposito, Bios, 180. 22. Esposito, 188. 23. Esposito, 186. 24. Esposito, 187. 25. Tim Luke, “The Dreams of Deep Ecology,” Telos 76 (Summer 1988): 51. 26. Richard Rorty, “Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 198. For a discussion of these questions in relation to biocentrism and Deep Ecology, see Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, Defending the Earth: A Dialogue between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, ed. and intro. Steve Chase, fwd. David Levine (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 123–­27. 27. Eugene Thacker, After Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 234. 28. Martin Hägglund, “The Arche-­Materiality of Time: Deconstruction, Evolution and Speculative Materialism,” in Theory After Theory, ed. Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 2011), 265. 29. Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, trans. and ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 136. 30. Hägglund, “Arche-­M ateriality of Time,” 272–­7 3. “Far from metaphysical” for the following reason: “The deconstructive notion of the trace is logical rather than ontological. Accordingly, my argument does not assume the form of an unconditional assertion (“being is spacing, hence arche-­materiality”) but rather the form of a conditional claim (“if your discourse commits you to a notion of succession, then you are commit-

Notes to Chapter 10  215 ted to a notion of spacing and hence arche-­materiality”). The discourse in question can then be ontological, epistemological, phenomenological, or scientific—­i n all these cases the logic of the trace will have expressive power insofar as there is an implicit or explicit commitment to a notion of succession” (270). 31. Hägglund, 275. 32. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. and ed. Michael Naas and Pascal-­A nne Brault (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 146–­47. 33. Derrida, 147. 34. See my What Is Posthumanism?, 203–­38. 35. Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva Knodt (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 69. 36. See Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism?, 15–­16. 37. Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 149. 38. Luhmann, 141. 39. Luhmann, 92. 40. Luhmann, 15. 41. Luhmann, 149, emphasis added. 42. For a much longer version of this discussion of Kac’s work, see my What Is Posthumanism?, 158–­67. 43. Eduardo Kac, ed., Signs of Life (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2009), 170. 44. Lori B. Andrews, “Art as a Public Policy Medium,” in Kac, Signs of Life, 139. 45. Andrews, 126. 46. Andrews, 142. 47. Gunther Teubner, “Rights of Non-­humans? Electronic Agents and Animals as New Actors in Politics and Law,” Journal of Law and Society 33, no. 4 (December 2006): 518. 48. Teubner, 518. 49. Teubner, 519. 50. Teubner, 519. 51. Andrews, “Art,” 140. 52. Andrews, 141. 53. Andrews, 141. 54. Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 46. 55. Luhmann, 46–­47. 56. Luhmann, 47. 57. Luhmann, 47.

10. No Immunity 1. For Uexküll’s key texts and a pair of useful overviews of his work and career, see Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil, intro. Dorion Sagan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). For an accessible

216  Notes to Chapter 10

introduction to the theory of autopoiesis and its phenomenological consequences, see Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, rev. ed., trans. Robert Paolucci, fwd. J. Z. Young (Boston: Shambhala Press, 1992). 2. Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” in The Collected Poems (New York: Random House, 1982), 92. 3. Some of the key texts here are Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–­1976, trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 2003); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-­ Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998); Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. and intro. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004); and Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-­A nne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005). 4. Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Who Comes after the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-­Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 112 5. See Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-­Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 6. See in particular part 2, chapters 1 to 3. 7. Butler, Precarious Life, 26–­27. 8. For a summary of the immunitary and autoimmunitary nature of the biopolitical, see Esposito, Bios, chapter 2; Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—­A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. and intro. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 85–­1 36; and Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1–­78. 9. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 46, 45, 42. 10. On “ipseity” and the “phallic,” see Derrida, Rogues, 11, 109 and “Faith and Knowledge,” 45–­52; on the “auto” and the human as the “autobiographical animal,” see The Animal That Therefore I Am, chapter 1. 11. Eija-­L iisa Ahtila and Doris Krystof, “Interview,” in Eija-­Liisa Ahtila (Helsinki: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 177. 12. I will have to leave aside the question of how we may, through “a fantasy, an image, or a piece of writing,” as the work puts it, momentarily “step inside the particular worlds” that other beings inhabit, which is directly connected to the brief sequence that precedes the scene I am discussing, as the director sits in her home, while the formal, nearly mathematical symmetries of the organ music she is listening to are immediately doubled—­first, by architectural arches and flying buttresses captured in

Notes to Chapter 12  217 an etching, and then by the abstract prints of the three-­d imensional geometrical grid that occupies first one screen, then two, then all three, suggesting that the underlying “language” of form shared by different kinds of art may offer access to these other worlds, thus constituting is own kind of “visitation”—­one that goes beyond the essentially representationalist and cultural force of art figured by the canonical paintings of the Annunciation referenced early in the work. 13. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 4–­5.

12. The Biopolitical Drama of Joseph Beuys 1. Kay Larson, “Joseph Beuys: Shaman, Sham, or One of the Most Brilliant Artists of All Time?,” Art News, 79 (1980): 126–­27. 2. Heiner Stachelhaus, Joseph Beuys, trans. David Britt (New York: Abbe­ ville Press, 1987), 13. 3. Mark Rosenthal, “Joseph Beuys: Staging Sculpture,” in Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments, ed. Mark Rosenthal (Houston: Menil Collection / Yale University Press, 2004), 13. 4. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol; Preliminary Notes for a Critique,” in Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, ed. Gene Ray (New York: DAP, 2001), 201, 200. 5. Derrida explores the performative and performativity in many places in his work, but the canonical instance is probably Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff, trans. Samuel Weber et al. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988). 6. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). 7. Stachelhaus, Joseph Beuys, 128. 8. Gene Ray, “Joseph Beuys and the After-­Auschwitz Sublime,” in Ray, Joseph Beuys, 62. 9. Ray, 62. 10. Ray, “Joseph Beuys,” 62; Stachelhaus, Joseph Beuys, 130. 11. Ray, “Joseph Beuys,” 62. Ray, in a footnote, quotes Holocaust historian Andrzej Strzelecki on the apparent historical reference at work here in Ray’s reading: At Auschwitz, “the fat that dripped from the bodies burned in pits or on pyres was collected in ditches dug for that purpose near the incineration sites, then used as fuel for the fires that burned the bodies” (63n28). 12. Kim Levin, “Some Neglected Bequests: The Inheritance of Beuys,” in Ray, Joseph Beuys, 180– ­81. 13. For a more detailed discussion of finitude and Derrida’s engagement of Heidegger on this question, see Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 83–­92. A useful summary of Derrida’s position on this question, and its stakes, may be found in Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (New York: Routledge, 1996), 111–­1 2.

218  Notes to Chapter 12

14. Lukas Beckmann, “The Causes Lie in the Future,” in Ray, Joseph Beuys, 96. 15. Beckmann, 102. 16. Max Reithmann, “In the Rubblefield of German History,” in Ray, Joseph Beuys, 139. 17. Beuys, qtd. in Beckman, “Causes,” 110. 18. Buchloh, “Beuys,” 201. 19. Rosenthal, “Joseph Beuys,” 13. 20. Beckmann, “Causes,” 107. 21. Peter Nisbet, “Crash Course: Remarks on a Beuys Story,” in Ray, Joseph Beuys, 8n12. 22. Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1979), 16–­17, qtd. in Nisbet, 6–­7. 23. Nisbet, 10. 24. George Jappe, “Interview with Beuys about Key Experiences: September 27, 1976,” trans. Peter Nisbet, in Ray, Joseph Beuys, 188. 25. Nisbet, “Crash Course,” 10. 26. Nisbet, 14; Rosenthal, “Joseph Beuys,” 68, 72, 80. 27. Rosenthal, 68. 28. In this regard, it is worth noting that Beuys emphasized more than once that the significance of felt in his work is its insulating rather than haptic properties. Nisbet, “Crash Course,” 11n20. 29. Beuys, qtd. In Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, 105. 30. Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, vol. 1, Bubbles: Microspherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011), 328–­29. 31. Sloterdijk, 45–­46. 32. For a fuller discussion, see my Ecological Poetics, or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 119–­21, 140–­54. 33. Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, vol. 2, Globes: Macrospherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014), 783. 34. Timothy C. Campbell, Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 88. 35. Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, vol. 3, Foams: Plural Spherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2016), 122 ff. 36. Sloterdijk, 122. 37. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1. 38. Agamben, 6. 39. Agamben, 166. 40. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 37. 41. Agamben, 16. 42. Claire Colebrook and Jason Maxell, Agamben (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2016), 48. 43. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 1–­2 .

Notes to Chapter 12  219 44. Agamben, 52. See also pages 32–­40, 52–­64. 45. In Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 46. Agamben, State of Exception, 26. 47. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973), 298. 48. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 163 ff; Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 3. For a discussion of Arendt in the larger context of nonhuman life, see my Before the Law, 3, 6–­9, 90. 49. Nisbet, “Crash Course,” 15–­16. 50. David Levi Strauss, Between Dog and Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Autonomedia, 2010), 40. 51. Rosenthal, “Joseph Beuys,” 28. 52. Rosenthal, “Joseph Beuys,” 28. Walter Vogel’s famous photograph may be viewed online at https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/JOSEPH-BEUYS -1965/7BB68C522954B43A. 53. Rosenthal, “Joseph Beuys,” 28. 54. Rosenthal, 13. 55. Joan Rothfuss, “Joseph Beuys: Echoes in America,” in Ray, Joseph Beuys, 50–­51. 56. Part of Caroline Tisdall’s wonderful photographic record of the action may be viewed online at http://largeglass.co.uk/Joseph-Beuys-Coyote -Photographs-by-Caroline-Tisdall. 57. Stachelhaus, Joseph Beuys, 174–­75; Strauss, Between Dog and Wolf, 43– ­45. 58. Strauss, 43–­4 4. 59. Strauss, 42. 60. Beuys, qtd. in Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys: Coyote (Munich: Schirmer/ Mosel, 1980), 24. 61. Strauss, Between Dog and Wolf, 42. 62. Strauss, 44. 63. Strauss, 40. 64. Stachelhaus, Joseph Beuys, 174. 65. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-­A nne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 88, 53. 66. Derrida, 86. 67. Kalpana Rahita Seshadri, HumAnimal: Race, Language, Law (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 17. As she points out, “The relevance of this contemporary paradigm to the political economy of Southern U.S. slavery as much as to the Nazi concentration camps is unmistakable,” but “for the slave, the inaccessibility of the law was usually but not consistently legislated and enforced, whereas apropos the Nazi concentration camp, the law is in force by not signifying. If the camp is a site of violence as pure abandonment, where criminal impunity reigns,

220  Notes to Chapter 12

slavery presents a face of violence where the same impunity prevails through legal dictum and abandonment” (71–­7 2). And, of course, the situation of Native Americans would present a third distinct case: an indige­ nous population tied to its land before the arrival of the law that subjugates it, rather than previous members of the political body suddenly abandoned by the law (the Nazi camps), or a population forcibly brought to a new continent as property (slavery). 68. Charles L. Cadieux, Coyotes: Predators & Survivors (Washington, D.C.: Stone Wall Press, 1983), 113, qtd. in Strauss, Between Dog and Wolf, 40. 69. Donna J. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 199. 70. Rosenthal, “Joseph Beuys,” 24. 71. Snyder, qtd. in Strauss, Between Dog and Wolf, 38. 72. Esposito, Bios, 115. 73. Arthur C. Danto, “Foreword: Style and Salvation in the Art of Beuys,” in Joseph Beuys: The Reader, ed. Claudia Mesch and Viola Michely (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), xvi. 74. Rosenthal, “Joseph Beuys,” 57. For a more detailed discussion of the reception (or nonreception) of Beuys in the United States in this period and the general antagonism between the U.S. and European art scenes in which Beuys was caught up, see Dirk Luckow, “The Reception of Joseph Beuys in the USA, and Some of Its Cultural/Political and Artistic Assumptions,” in Mesch and Michely, Joseph Beuys, 287–­303. 75. Rosenthal, “Joseph Beuys,” 108–­9. 76. Rosenthal, 95. 77. Rothfuss, “Joseph Beuys,” 52–­53. 78. Reithmann, “Rubblefield,” 171; Kim Levin, “Some Neglected Bequests: The Inheritance of Beuys,” in Ray, Joseph Beuys, 181.

Publication History

Chapter 1 was originally published as “Interview” (with Giovanni Aloi), Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 38 (Winter 2016): 5–­17. This publication was reprinted in Antennae: A Decade of Art and the Non-­human 07–­17, ed. Giovanni Aloi (Stockholm: 284 Publishing, 2017), 286–­302. Portions of chapter 2 are adapted from “Shifting Ground: The Downsview Park Competition,” in Beyond Form: Architecture and Art in the Space of Media, ed. Peter Dorsey, Christine Calderon, and Omar Calderon (New York: Lusitania Press, 2004), 82–­92; and “Lose the Building: Systems Theory, Architecture, and Diller+Scofidio’s Blur,” Postmodern Culture 16, no. 3 (May 2006): http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern _culture/toc/pmc16.3.html. They were then combined to form “Lose the Building: Form and System in Contemporary Architecture,” in What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 203–­37. Portions of chapter 3 are adapted from “Lose the Building: Form and System in Contemporary Architecture,” in What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 203–­37. Chapter 4 was originally published as “Queasy Posthumanism: Hylozoic Ground,” in Hylozoic Ground: Liminal Responsive Architecture, Phillip Beesley, ed. Pernilla Ohrstedt and Hayley Isaacs (New York: Riverside Architectural Press, 2010), 56–­65. Portions of chapter 5 are adapted from “From Dead Meat to Glow in the Dark Bunnies: Seeing ‘The Animal Question’ in Contemporary Art,” in “Animal Beings,” ed. Tom Tyler, special issue, Parallax 38 (January–­March 2006): 95–­109. This publication was reprinted in Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature, ed. Sid Dobrin and Sean Morey (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 129–­51. It then appeared as “From Dead Meat to Glow-­i n-­t he-­Dark Bunnies: The Animal Question in Contemporary Art,” in What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 145–­67. 221

222  Publication History

Chapter 6 was originally published as “Apes Like Us,” in Animal Acts: Performing Species Today, ed. Una Chaudhuri and Holly Hughes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 156–­62. Chapter 7 was originally published as “Condors at the End of the World,” in You Must Carry Me Now: The Cultural Lives of Endangered Species, ed. Mark Wilson and Ron Broglio (Stockholm: 284 Publishing, 2015), 151–­67. The publication was reprinted in expanded form as “Condors at the End of the World,” in After Extinction, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 107–­2 2. Chapter 8 was originally published as “Each Time Unique: The Poetics of Extinction,” in Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies beyond the Human, ed. Michael Lundblad (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 22–­42. Reprinted with permission of The Licensor through PLSclear. Chapter 9 was originally published as “Ecologizing Biopolitics, or, What Is the ‘Bio-­’ of Biopolitics and Bioart?” in General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm, ed. Erich Hörl with James Burton (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 217–­34. Chapter 10 was originally published as “No Immunity: The Biopolitical Worlds of Eija-­Liisa Ahtila,” in Eija-­Liisa Ahtila: Parallel Worlds, ed. Lena Essling (Göttingen: Stiedl, 2012), 13–­21. This publication was reprinted in Eija-­Liisa Ahtila: Ecologies of Drama—­Collected Writings, Interviews, and Scripts, ed. Cathleen Chaffee (Buffalo, N.Y.: Albright-­K nox Art Gallery, 2015), 82–­89. Chapter 11 was originally published as “Eija-­L iisa Ahtila: A Conversation,” BOMB, No. 120, Summer 2012. Copyright BOMB, New Art Publications, and its Contributors. All rights reserved. The BOMB Digital Archive can be viewed at www.bombmagazine.org. This publication was reprinted in Eija-­Liisa Ahtila: Ecologies of Drama—­Collected Writings, Interviews, and Scripts, ed. Cathleen Chaffee (Buffalo, N.Y.: Albright-­ Knox Art Gallery, 2015), 116–­23. Chapter 12 was originally published as “The Biopolitical Drama of Joseph Beuys” in “Animality/Posthumanism/Disability,” ed. Michael Lundblad, special issue, New Literary History 51, no. 4 (Autumn 2020): 835–­54. Copyright 2020 New Literary History, The University of Virginia. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Index

Agamben, Giorgio, 8, 131–33, 135, 154–55, 168, 178, 179, 188–91, 197 Ahtila, Eija-Liisa, viii, 7–8, 151–62, 163–75 Andrews, Lori, 144–46, 148 animals (nonhuman), viii, 2–6, 10, 12, 22, 43, 46, 57–59, 61–62, 67–73, 75, 79–80, 82, 84–87, 90–91, 93–94, 96–100, 102–9, 111–14, 117, 124, 133–36, 146, 151–54, 156–57, 160–62, 166–68, 171, 178, 180, 182–83, 188–89, 191–92, 196–97, 210n12 animal studies, 2, 6, 14 autoimmunity, 8, 133, 136, 139, 156, 158. See also biopolitics; immunity autopoiesis, 24–26, 35–36, 40–41, 45–46, 49–50, 59–61, 86, 108–9, 140–41, 146, 149, 152. See also systems theory Baker, Steve, 5–6, 84 Bateson, Gregory, 47, 57–60, 63, 132, 205n13 Beesley, Philip, vii, 55–57, 58, 61–64 being, concept of, 44, 56, 63, 86, 96–98, 101–2, 104–7, 122, 133, 139, 152–55, 168, 171, 175, 182–83, 187–91, 197, 214n30. See also ontology Beuys, Joseph, 12, 177–88, 190–200 biopolitics, viii, 6, 7–8, 10, 11, 13–14, 131–40, 144, 149, 154–58, 160, 168, 171–72, 178–82, 187–91, 197–200

Brown and Storey (architectural firm), 45, 47 Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., 177, 181, 183 Butler, Judith, 154, 155, 172 Cavell, Stanley, 44, 53, 122, 204n8 Celan, Paul, 103–4, 107–8, 118 Chin, Mel, 126–27 Christo (and Jeanne-Claude), 28–29 code, 24–26, 40, 43, 46, 49, 57, 59–60, 63–64, 79–80, 85, 107, 111, 116, 119, 124–25, 127–28, 134, 140–41, 143, 146, 149. See also technicity Coe, Sue, 4–6, 68–71, 73–75, 77–82, 91–92 Cooper, James Fenimore, 117–18, 119, 121, 123 Corner and Allen (architectural firm), 47–48 Crane, Stephen, 71–74 Deleuze, Gilles, 28, 52, 70, 118, 124, 139 Derrida, Jacques, viii, 6, 8, 36, 43–44, 52, 53, 61, 62–63, 67, 68, 70, 74, 79–82, 84, 90–92, 96–97, 100, 101, 102–12, 118–20, 122, 128, 133, 135–36, 138–39, 154, 156, 162, 164, 172, 178–79, 182, 188, 190, 197, 204n8, 205n15, 210n12, 213n4 Diamond, Cora, 97–98, 100 Diller (Elizabeth) and Scofidio 223

224  Index

(Ricardo), vii, 4, 17–20, 22–23, 27–28, 31–32, 34–35, 38–42, 87, 202n21 disability, 3, 12, 178–80, 186–87, 198–99 Duchamp, Marcel, 33–34, 125–27 Eakins, Thomas, 71, 74–75, 76–78 ecology, 8–10, 12, 43, 45, 48, 51, 67, 108, 114, 121–22, 132–33, 137, 145–46, 156, 178, 183, 187, 212n20, 213n3, 213n4. See also environment Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 4, 122 environment, 6, 8–9, 10, 23–26, 28, 30, 33, 45–46, 48, 50, 52, 55, 58–60, 64, 87, 108–9, 111, 119, 121–22, 124, 132, 138–40, 146, 152, 166, 186, 213n3, 213n4. See also ecology; world, concept of Esposito, Roberto, 131–39, 149, 154, 156, 191, 198, 200 ethnography, multispecies, 8–10 extinction, viii, 3–4, 8–9, 101–2, 109, 112, 113–14, 116–20, 122–25, 150 faciality, 5–6, 70–73, 75, 79 factory farming, 68–69, 71, 73–74, 79–80, 90–91, 171 finitude, 91, 106, 118, 120, 122, 154, 182–83, 186–88 Fluxus, 177, 180, 192, 200 Foerster, Heinz von, 38, 60, 149 Foreign Office (architectural firm), 48, 50 form, concept of, 20, 21, 27–35, 37–41, 46, 51–52, 57–58, 61, 68, 79, 85, 125, 132, 140–41, 157, 169, 181, 213n4, 217n12 Foucault, Michel, 6, 10, 21, 62, 131– 35, 139–40, 149, 154, 158, 171–72 Freud, Sigmund, 62, 73, 100 Fried, Michael, 71–77, 79, 85, 90–91, 207n17

genetics, 79–80, 84–85, 88, 123–24, 128, 138–39, 143–44, 150. See also code Haraway, Donna, 6, 12–14, 93–94, 135, 154, 198 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 26, 101 Heidegger, Martin, 43–44, 53, 102–6, 108, 140, 152, 171–72, 182, 187, 204n8, 210n12 Holocaust, 90, 154, 179, 181–82, 187, 198, 217n11. See also Nazis humanism, 2, 3–4, 5, 22, 23, 56–57, 68, 71, 80, 189, 200 Husserl, Edmund, 26–27 immunity, viii, 8, 14, 132–33, 135–36, 156–59, 179, 187–88, 191, 198, 213n3, 213n4. See also autoimmunity; biopolitics Judd, Donald, 86, 200 Kac, Eduardo, 4, 5, 74, 82–91, 143–45 Kant, Immanuel, 20–23, 39, 109–10, 152 Kauffman, Stuart, 109–11 Kelly, Anthony-Noel, 146–48 Koolhaas (Rem) and Mau (Bruce), 4, 27, 43, 46, 48–50, 52–53 Lacan, Jacques, 5, 20 Latour, Bruno, 145–46 law, 24, 26, 111–12, 120, 133–35, 137, 141, 144, 146–48, 172, 178, 190–91, 197, 219n67. See also sovereignty Lazzarato, Maurizio, 134–35 Levinas, Emmanuel, 70–71 life, concept of, 6–10, 12, 14, 55–58, 59–64, 70, 84–85, 98, 101–13, 105–9, 111, 118–19, 124–25, 128, 131–33, 135–39, 142, 148–51, 154–55, 159, 171, 174, 178, 180, 183, 187, 189–90, 191–92

Index  225 Luhmann, Niklas, 3, 17, 23–42, 46, 48–49, 51–52, 58–61, 86, 132, 135, 140–42, 149–50, 202n22, 202n42, 208n45, 213n4 Luke, Tim, 43, 137 Lyotard, Jean-François, 20–23 Marder, Michael, 121–22, 212n20 Maturana, Humberto, 46, 58–59, 61, 86, 108, 152 minimalism, 85, 90, 199–200 Mitchell, W. J. T., 80, 88, 208n45 Moeller, Hans-Georg, 132, 213n3 Murphet, Julian, 124–25, 127 Native America, 117–18, 123, 191, 196–98, 219n67 Nazis, 90, 133, 135, 177, 179–80, 189–90, 198, 199–200, 219n67. See also Holocaust Nietzsche, Friedrich, 22, 135 oikos, 121, 156. See also autoimmunity; immunity ontology, 1–2, 22–25, 43–46, 55–56, 57–58, 62, 71, 86, 91, 96–98, 101–2, 104–6, 108–9, 111, 120, 122, 139, 149, 178, 182–83, 187–90, 197, 214n30. See also being, concept of Paik, Nam June, 177, 180 performativity, 72, 116, 128, 178, 217n5 Pestel, Michael, viii, 4, 113–16, 119–25, 128 quasi-object, 31, 38, 149 race, 6, 11, 90, 154–55, 197, 219n67 Ray, Gene, 181–82, 186–87 realism, 1–2, 71–72, 77–78 representation, 1–2, 5, 20, 50, 52–53, 59–62, 67–68, 71–75, 77–80, 85–86, 88, 91, 125, 150, 166, 168, 169, 172–75, 182, 217n12

Rimbaud, Arthur, 154, 155, 158 Rorty, Richard, 1–2, 137 Rosenthal, Mark, 186, 192, 198–200 Schmitt, Carl, 132, 190 Serres, Michel, 38, 149 Sloterdijk, Peter, 187–88, 191 Snæbjörnsdóttir (Bryndís) and Wilson (Mark), viii, 4, 102–3, 111–12 sovereignty, 91, 119–20, 122, 132–35, 156, 172, 179, 189–91, 197. See also biopolitics; law species, 3, 6–7, 43–44, 93–97, 100, 102, 104–8, 151–52, 154–55, 160–62, 178–79, 187–89, 197. See also animals (nonhuman) Stevens, Wallace, 4, 152 Strauss, David Levi, 194, 196 sublime, 19, 20–23, 27 systems theory, vii, viii, 3, 18, 23–42, 45–52, 57–64, 86, 107–9, 119, 122, 124–25, 132–33, 136, 138, 140–44, 146, 149–50, 164, 202n42, 205n13, 213n3, 213n4 technicity, 9, 10, 12, 22, 43–44, 63–64, 96, 105, 111, 116, 140, 171, 188, 204n8. See also code Thacker, Eugene, 137–38, 142 Tschumi, Bernard, 43–45, 48, 50 Uexküll, Jakob von, 108, 151–52, 160, 166–68, 175 Varela, Francisco, 46, 58–59, 61, 86, 108, 152 visuality, 18–21, 27–28, 40–42, 52, 57–58, 61–62, 70–72, 77, 79, 85–91, 100, 142, 152, 166, 168, 172 Weaver, Deke, 93–100 Whitehead, Alfred North, 31–33 Wieczorek, Marek, 85–86, 208n36 Wiener, Norbert, 47, 57

226  Index

world, concept of, 3, 21–22, 26–28, 30–32, 38–39, 43–44, 58–62, 86–87, 101–12, 127, 142–43, 151–52, 160–61, 163–64, 166–68, 170, 173, 175, 187–88, 197, 216n12. See also ecology; environment

Zandt, Townes Van, 151, 153, 162, 163, 167 Žižek, Slavoj, 20–21, 68, 101, 164

Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University, where he is founding director of 3CT: Center for Critical and Cultural Theory. His books and edited collections include Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minnesota, 2003); What Is Posthumanism? (Minnesota, 2010); and Ecological Poetics, or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds. In 2007 he founded the Posthumanities series at the University of Minnesota Press, which has published more than sixty volumes to date.

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PLATE 1. Diller+Scofidio, Blur Building, 2002. Photograph by Beat Widmer. Courtesy of Diller Scofidio+Renfro.

PLATE 2. Philip Beesley, Hylozoic Ground (detail), Canadian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2010. Photograph courtesy of Living Architecture Systems Group.

PLATE 3. Eduardo Kac with Alba, GFP Bunny, 2000. Transgenic artwork. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

PLATE 4. Michael Pestel, “Martha’s Peel” (detail), from Requiem: Ectopistes migratorius, 2014. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Lafayette College Art Galleries, Easton, Pennsylvania.

PLATE 5. Bryndís H. Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson, Trout Fishing in America and Other Stories. Installation view, Arizona State University Art Museum, featuring the video knock on wood and photographic series You Must Carry Me Now. October 4, 2014, through January 17, 2015. Photograph by Peter Bugg. Photograph courtesy of the artists.

PLATE 6. Bryndís H. Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson, “Condor 082,” from Trout Fishing in America and Other Stories. Arizona State University Art Museum, October 4, 2014, through January 17, 2015. Archival photograph from 2015 courtesy of the artists.

PLATE 7. Bryndís H. Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson, “Condor 210,” from Trout Fishing in America and Other Stories. Arizona State University Art Museum, October 4, 2014, through January 17, 2015. Archival photograph from 2015 courtesy of the artists.

PLATE 8. Eija-Liisa Ahtila, The Annunciation, 2010. Video still from three-channel projected high-definition installation with 5.1 channel audio, 28 minutes, 25 seconds. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Copyright Eija-Liisa Ahtila.

PLATE 9. Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Where Is Where? 2008. Video still from six-channel projected high-definition installation with eight-channel sound, 53 minutes, 43 seconds. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Copyright Eija-Liisa Ahtila.

PLATE 10. Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Where Is Where? 2008. Video still from six-channel projected high-definition installation with eight-channel sound, 53 minutes, 43 seconds. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Copyright Eija-Liisa Ahtila.

PLATE 11. Eija-Liisa Ahtila, The House, 2002. Video still from three-channel projected installation, 14 minutes. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Copyright Eija-Liisa Ahtila.

PLATE 12. Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Horizontal-Vaakasuora, 2011. Installation view, sixchannel projection with 5.1 channel audio, 6 minutes. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Copyright Eija-Liisa Ahtila.