The World that is More than Human
Anna Barcz
Dorota Łagodzka
The title of the book Animals and Their People was inspired by the children’s novel The Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis. It is a rhetorical procedure meant to draw attention to the fact that nonhuman animals are not our property in the ontological sense, as has been almost universally misconceived by human societies. The title also strengthens our emphasis on the animal perspective; some animals may feel that we are “their” people (i.e., we belong to them), whereas others are afraid of us, and yet others are indifferent—we still have an undeniable impact on the fate of all of them.
Will this new perspective lead to the fall of the anthropocentric paradigm, or less utopian—how to think while taking the anthropocentric into the brackets? The likelihood that this paradigm will one day fall remains dubious, despite the fact that a rough outline of a new non-anthropocentric paradigm is emerging. This book shall serve as an example of how this non-anthropocentric approach may function in philosophy and culture studies. We hope that it will demonstrate that the critical approach to anthropocentrism would not put an end to the humanities. On the contrary, a new, non-anthropocentric humanities can be intellectually invigorating as well as theoretically and methodologically creative. A non-anthropocentric humanities does not accept the status of humankind as the sole object of research and comprehension, nor does it accept a secondary focus on nonhuman animals. People are not the only actors structuring the landscape of the humanities, even though we are the subjects who actively practice it, who are engrossed in the act of learning and experiencing other animals, being with them, as well as understanding them, speaking and writing about them. Unprejudiced consideration of animals will open up research possibilities into other areas of understanding: this is one of the most promising characteristics of the zoocentric paradigm for cognition and cultural development. Considering the interests of animals as living beings remains the primary focus of this approach; it is centered around that precious moment when intellectual limits are overcome and we observe, or even experience, a revival reconstruction of inherited humanities. No matter how the efforts to reach the side of
This volume is devoted to animals, from the range of not only different species as in biology but of different cultural representations. However, “animals” here also include Homo sapiens, which as a species has established a wide spectrum of relationships with nonhuman animals. We recognize that the human-animal studies field encompasses not only diverse cultural issues that are discussed in this publication, but also the viewpoint from which they are tackled. We perceive the development of human-animal studies as a significant new area of research that requires the creation of new methodologies. In addition, it promises to serve as a paradigm and a critical theory, which may become identified with the post-humanist discourse. The incorporation of such a perspective into the humanities seems to us both inevitable and desirable.
One of the aims of this book is to illustrate how human-animal studies are reflected in the humanistic thought in Poland, and indirectly to bridge the distance between Anglo-American and Central European studies. The volume is not wholly dedicated to Polish culture; however, it highlights certain Polish elements relating to animal issues that were previously unfamiliar to most foreign researchers. The focus is primarily on culture studies, with a particular emphasis on philosophy, literary studies, history and theory of art. We would like to indicate especially that the disciplines of human-animal studies and anthrozoology have been developing since the 1960s, mainly in English-speaking countries. Animal studies have gradually become more popular in German-speaking countries as well, and in the 1990s they were recognized as an important research trend. However, only a few publications or translations focusing on animal issues could be found in Poland in the 1980s and 1990s. The real development of animal studies there and in other Central-Eastern European countries has occurred over the past few years. Still new emerging countries on the animal studies map are entangled in the problem of too normative discourse. We tried to escape it and let the texts of culture speak for themselves.
We would like to note this book is one of the outcomes of the conference Animals and Their People: The Fall of Anthropocentric Paradigm?, which took place in Warsaw in March 2014 and was organized by the editors of this volume. The conference occurred within the framework of “The Importance of Animal Studies for Culture Studies in Poland” project, financed by the National Science Centre, which we conducted in the Institute of Literary Research at
We present here a selection of texts chosen from the eighty presentations at the conference. Most of the texts have been significantly expanded from the original talks. This collection was designed to serve as a coherent synthesis, focused on the domains of thought, language, and image. It has been divided into five overlapping and intertwining sections, blurring previously sharp distinctions between disciplines in order to provide a more flexible way of thinking about animal representations in human culture. We have included materials covering a wide range of philosophical, artistic, and literary issues representing major trends of Western, Euro-American thought, further enriched by the Central-Eastern European and especially Polish perspective.
The first section of the book, “Correlation in Arts,” consists of texts that refer to representations of animals in the visual and musical arts. Martin Ullrich writes about the interdisciplinary approach of human-animal studies and the recent focus within this field on the phenomena of animal music and interspecies art. He demonstrates the catalytic role that nonhuman animals have played in human music and addresses the epistemological challenge posed by the phenomenon of animal music.
In her chapter, Anna Barcz suggests that a mere psychological impression is insufficient to explain the visible similarity between humans and related animals. The relationship is not a direct one, unlike the similarity between parents and children commonly used as an example. She associates this with pre-evolutionary theories, especially in the field of physiognomy developed in the 18th century, which anticipated in certain ways the main postulates made by Darwin in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (2009). Next, Barcz analyses the way in which Darwin was perceived by his contemporaries and how he was aesthetically popularized. She also investigates how the notion of similarity between humans and animals was reconstructed using Darwin’s input, and some of the consequences of this, such as the anthropomorphism of animal behavior.
The second section of the book, “Canine as a Framework,” provides a number of materials that look at the paradigmatic role played by dogs in animal studies. Jessica Ullrich introduces different approaches to presenting mostly performative, transgressive dog-human-metamorphoses in contemporary art that serve to reflect, analyze, criticize, or ironize the ambivalent, volatile relationships between humans and their “best friends.”
Piotr Urbański analyzes different models of the relationship between humans and dogs in early modern Latin poems, focusing on lap dogs. The material collected, c. 100 poems, not only offers exemplification but also suggests some general statements. The second issue considered in this paper is the use of classical tradition: using the same phrases and topoi to express some feelings, especially grief in funeral laments, is evidence of effacing the border between a nonhuman animal and a human being. The comparative materials used are cynologic Latin treatises, Cynographia Curiosa (Paullini, 1685) and De Canibus Britannicis (Caius, 1570).
Oksana Weretiuk examines dog “speech” by analyzing two literary works representing two different eras, Flush (2014) by Virginia Woolf and Two Caravans (2007) by Marina Lewycka. She focuses on the narrations of speakers to examine how changes in narration strategies and grammatical forms of utterances influenced the subjectivity of dog protagonists, and to what extent they anthropomorphized it. Furthermore, she analyzes the imagological perception of the dog (the Other) in the works of both authors, discovering and developing the concept of the Other.
Małgorzata Rutkowska analyzes the question of inter-species communication as presented in contemporary American companion animal memoirs: Mark Doty’s Dog Years (2008), Ted Kerasote’s Merle’s Door (2007), Joanna Burger’s The Parrot Who Owns Me (2001), and Abigail Thomas’s A Three Dog Life (2007). Rutkowska stresses that verbal communication is crucial in developing a bond with a companion animal (naming, training, speaking to or “for” a pet), but points out that essential non-verbal messages are conveyed through the body as well (touching, preening, gesture, and gaze). Interactions with pets
In the third section, “Animals in the Ecriture Feminine,” we focus on the ways in which women’s studies and feminist criticism contribute to animal studies. Monika Rogowska-Stangret defines and describes a category of “bodily encounters with the animal,” underlining the role of the body as a space that enables the meeting of humans and animals. She elaborates on the notion of the body involved in this situation, as well as the body’s nature and how it comes to create a common ground between various kinds of living beings. This is analyzed with specific reference to the dog-human relationship (Donna Haraway and Marjorie Garber).
Małgorzata Myk proposes a reading of the experimental post-genre writing of American author Thalia Field (2010) through the lenses of Donna Haraway’s trope of “companion species,” as theorized in The Companion Species Manifesto (2003) and When Species Meet (2008). While Haraway’s work examines the complex transactions of humans and nonhuman animals against the backdrop of global civilization, Field’s collection of writings brings into focus the medium of narrative as a crucial, critical tool in approaching a number of familiar, if conflicted, interactions, as well as some less commonly recognized human-animal encounters.
Anna Filipowicz analyzes the works of contemporary Polish poets – Anna Świrszczyńska (a poetic cycle: Mother and Daughter [Polish: Matka i Córka] Vol.: Wind [Polish: Wiatr]; In Wybór Wierszy [Selected Poems]; 1980) and Anna Nasiłowska (A Book of the Beginning [Polish: Księga Początku]; 2002)—in the context of neo-Darwinian ideas. The concept of the intransgressible difference between the two kinds of beings is replaced by the conviction that all species share a common biological and cultural potential, which differs only in degree. A similar representation of human-animal continuity can be found in the writings of Świrszczyńska and Nasiłowska.
The fourth section concerns human-animal relations and animal representations in social and cultural contexts in the postmodern world. It begins with Justyna Wlodarczyk’s text, in which she defines the “discourse of animal breed” and analyzes the recent crisis of this discourse in the dog world via a theoretical framework originally formulated to discuss “the crisis of race” (using Paul Gilroy’s [2000] term from Against Race). The article proves, using a number of
In his article People Like Animals?, Bartłomiej Szleszyński takes a look at the post-apocalyptic world of video games in terms of the role attributed to nonhuman animals: whether and how it differs from the role of animals in our real world. The main cultural text that is analyzed is a game called The Last of Us, which was created by Naughty Dog studio. This game not only utilizes and creatively transforms existing post-apocalyptic themes, but also adds a new level of moral reflection, referring to Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006). While the key analytical topic of the game is the transformation of human morality, expressive animal motifs complement the meaning of the text in an interesting way.
Mateusz Tokarski presents a new hermeneutic approach to moral conflicts involving animals, resulting from a surge of representations of wild animals in European cities as a result of successful environmental protection policies and programs. Many people now recognize these animals as having some moral status, but they do it in different ways, which can cause moral conflicts. Although traditional monistic, and more recently pragmatic, approaches have provided some ways of dealing with these conflicts, Tokarski claims to offer a constructive way of engaging with conflicts within the environmentalist community.
The final section of the book is dedicated to recent philosophical ways of thinking about animals, which have the potential to make us rethink our approach to nonhuman animals, both in the field of theory and our relationships with them. Amadeusz Just reminds us of the famous philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who, despite the fact that his ideas about animals are philosophically and ethically meaningful, is somehow nearly absent from contemporary animal studies.
Krystian Grądz’s article aims to scrutinize and juxtapose the phenomenon of language as an expression of attitude towards the world in both nonhuman animals and humans. Engaging the writings of such scholars as Jacques Derrida, Emile Benveniste, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben, the author endeavors to trace the differences between human language, which has long been a topic of discourse, and animal “language,” which has been characterized by its “openness”—to use Agamben’s parlance—and its unobstructedness.
Particular texts tend to represent a variety of the approaches that have been developed within the field of animal studies in the English-speaking countries: animal studies, human-animal studies, critical animal studies, animality studies, and anthrozoology. In this book, the above categories have not been considered to be of the highest importance; the author’s participation in the specific trends is disputable. This book as a whole, however, attempts to introduce a research attitude into the humanities that does not omit animal ethics. Even though the texts do not speak in a political or activist language, they do pose questions, raise doubts, and provoke to rethink ethical problems regarding animals and human-animal relations. What is more, the book does not seek to imitate axiological neutrality in the name of “objective science,” but strives to refer animal representations to the living beings, because excessive abstraction leads to old conclusions.
In art and literature, animals are always in a way loaded with semiotic content and they are not liberated as real beings. But in these texts the semiotic content refers to animals as themselves, as living creatures, not as symbols of something non-animal. Our primary goal was to draw the reader’s attention to the importance of animal issues in the humanities, going beyond the perception of nonhuman animals serving as literary and iconographic themes as well as the traditionally understood “animality of human nature” and the simple perception of animals as a “part of nature.” The materials included in this publication indicate common areas of experience and crossing points of human and animal biographies. At the same time, the diversity of the animal subjects we refer to is respected as belonging to the more-than-human world. Respecting the otherness of animals is a prerequisite for any attempt to say something from their perspective or to represent their interests.
The materials in this collection are not strictly to be read as ethical considerations, nor are they manifests. The authors, however, establish their attitudes to animal issues indirectly through their choices, selected examples, animal representations, critical theory, referred events, and their own interpretations of cultural texts and social and ontological situations. At the same time, it is intended that the conclusion of the book should serve as one of a number of possible answers to our research questions: When considering animal issues, what can the humanities offer us that ethology, evolutionism or the natural sciences cannot? What can cultural studies offer that has not already been exhausted by animal rights ethics or sociological research on human-animal relationships? What do animal studies provide that has been lacking from the current scientific model, as well as from the animal rights social movements?
Burger Joanna. The Parrot Who Owns Me: The Story of a Relationship. New York: Random House, 2001.
Caius Joannes. De Canibus Britannicis Libellus. London: G. Seresium, 1570.
Darwin Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Edited by Francis Darwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Derrida Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
Doty Mark. Dog Years; A Memoir. London: Jonathan Cape, 2008.
Field Thalia. Bird Lovers, Backyard. New York: New Directions, 2010.
Gilroy Paul. “The Crisis of ‘Race’ and Raciology.” In Paul Gilroy (Ed.), Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, pp. 11–53. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Haraway Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
Haraway Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Kerasote Ted. Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog. Orlando: Harcourt, 2007.
Lewycka Marina. Two Caravans. London: Penguin Books, 2007.
McCarthy Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.
Nasiłowska Anna. Księga Początku. Warszawa: W.A.B., 2002.
Paullini Christianus Franciscus. Cynographia Curiosa Seu Canis Descriptio ... Norimbergae: Sumptibus Johannis Georgii Endteri, 1685.
Shapiro Kenneth. Understanding Dogs through Kinesthetic Empathy, Social Construction, and History. In Clifton P. Flynn (Ed.), Social Creatures: A Human and Animal Studies Reader, pp. 31–48. New York: Lantern Books, 2008.
Świrszczyńska Anna. Wybór Wierszy (Selected Poems). Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1980.
Thomas Abigail. A Three Dog Life: A Memoir. Orlando: Harcourt, 2007.
Woolf Virginia. Flush: A Biography. The University of Adelaide. Accessed April 23, 2014. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91f/.