Cary Wolfe

Before the Law: Animals in a Biopolitical Context:

Using examples such as factory farming and the recent decision by the Spanish Parliament to grant fundamental rights to great apes, this commentary explores the extent to which our current legal frameworks (including the legal discourse of “rights”) provide satisfactory responses to the question of justice for non-human animals. After briefly sketching appeals to the rights model (both pro and con) for non-human animals in legal pragmatism and in animal rights philosophy, I turn to recent work in biopolitical theory to rearticulate not just the ethical but also the political status of our treatment of non-human animals.

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 – which is invoked but not really articulated by the phrase ‘animal rights’ – concerns the ethical standing of (at least some) non-human 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 assume that the ethical standing of at least some non-human animals is not just a live issue, but an increasingly taken for granted one (even if the matter of 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.

Response to Christopher Peterson, “The Posthumanism to Come”

When the editors of Angelaki invited me to respond to Christopher Peterson’s essay ‘‘The Posthumanism to Come,’’ I told them I’d be happy to, but my response would be fairly brief. The reason is simple. I am broadly sympathetic (and often quite specifically sympathetic) to Chris’s views on posthumanism, its relation to the question of animals and animality, and the theoretical and philosophical commitments that inform all of the above. As for the broadly sympathetic, anyone who has read my book What is Posthumanism? or even just the introduction to it will know that my approach to posthumanism is deeply informed by Jacques Derrida’s work, and as such it rejects, like Chris’s essay, ‘‘a logic of dialectical reversal’’ regarding ‘‘humanism’s disavowal of the animal.’’ (Looking back beyond What is Posthumanism?, this was, after all, the point of the critique of Slavoj Žižek’s dialectical rendering of Lacan vis-à-vis the question of the animal that, some fifteen years ago, Jonathan Elmer and I undertook in the essay ‘‘Subject to Sacrifice’’ – and undertook, moreover, via the quite different line of understanding made available by Derrida’s analysis of ‘‘carnophallogocentrism.’’) Similarly, What is Posthumanism? does not imagine ‘‘a complete rupture’’ with humanism but is instead interested in teasing out how the philosophical and theoretical commitments of humanism undercut what it says are its aims and desires (often admirable, of course). In the last section of his essay, Chris cites some of the relevant passages in that connection, so I won’t repeat them here. As for more specific sympathies, I agree with him that ‘‘to claim that humans can avow the animal without reservation is thus to endow human consciousness with a self-mastery and agency that disavows the power of our non-power.’’ I explain why this is so in my detailed exposition of what I call the logic of ‘‘double finitude’’ in What is Posthumanism?, and it is the linchpin of how I articulate the relationship between the animal(ity) question and the question of posthumanism, making it clear in the process why the former is a subset of the latter. I develop this idea in some detail using the work not just of Derrida but also of Niklas Luhmann, but the Derridean version goes like this: the first form of finitude that we share with non-human animals is the fact of our embodied being, and thus our vulnerability and mortality, the form highlighted by Derrida’s reading of Bentham’s insistence that the fundamental cary wolfe

Echographies from my life in the bush of ghosts

When Brian Eno and David Byrne’s record My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was re-released on its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2006, it occasioned much reflection on a piece of music that many listeners felt was far ahead of its time – and many felt, upon re-release, had never quite gotten its just critical deserts. The record wasn’t neglected, by any means, but as Byrne points out in the liner notes for the re-release, it took some time for clearance of the legal rights for many of the vocal tracks used on the record, and in that interim the Talking Heads’ third record, Remain in Light (produced by Eno) was released, which relied upon (and thus ‘‘scooped,’’ if you will) much of the polyrhythmic, electronic, funk-inflected synthesis that Byrne and Eno had forged in the making of the earlier record. Still, what My Life in the Bush of Ghosts has that Remain in Light doesn’t are the ‘‘found’’ recordings that became the vocal tracks. It is one thing to hear the angular, clenched, White Guy voice of David Byrne on ‘‘Houses in Motion’’ from Remain in Light, but it is quite another to hear on Ghost’s ‘‘The Jezebel Spirit’’ the crackling, late-night a.m. radio voice of an ‘‘unidentified exorcist’’ recorded in New York on a boom box asking an audibly hyperventilating young woman, ‘‘Do you hear voices?’’ over a pulsating rhythm track straight out of a record by The Meters; or to hear Lebanese mountain singer Dunya Yusin embodying ‘‘The Human Voice of Islam’’ (the source title for her tracks) as that voice, or instrument – whatever this sound is – wends its way over a deep groove that recalls the later Sly Stone or Isaac Hayes. It was this element, I think, that made the record not just cool and fresh but riveting and uncanny. With its vocal elements drawn from what felt like a storehouse of anthropological field recordings – an approach that seemed to render equally strange and foreign (in an ethnographic sense) the contemporary talk radio host, the Lebanese mountain singer of ancient religious hymns, and the evangelical black preacher Paul Morton from New Orleans (just to name a few) – the record seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, all at once. And with this polyglot glossolalia anchored to a musical fusion of electronica, funk, and afro-futurism, the record seemed to issue simultaneously from both the past and the future, communicating the portents of ancient and wrathful gods and demons while at the same time constituting a kind of synth-driven laboratory for the music of the future, or what cary wolfe

(Auto)immunity, Social Theory, and the ‘Political’

There’s a lot of interest recently in what Roberto Esposito calls the possibility of thinking an ‘affirmative’ biopolitics that runs counter to the dominant trend in biopolitical thought thus far (...

The Idea of Observation at Key West, or, Systems Theory, Poetry, and Form Beyond Formalism

When he died, Niklas Luhmann left behind scattered notes on a project on “Poetry and Social Theory.” Central to Luhmann’s understanding of the specificity of poetry is his well-known articulation of the autopoietic closure and difference of psychic systems and social systems, consciousness and communication, each operating by means of self-reference and recursivity. It is within the context of this difference that Luhmann understands the significance to poetry of characteristic themes and problems such as incommunicability, ineffability, silence, and so on-themes that reach their high water mark with romanticism. But he understands them specifically within a posthumanist context: that is to say, as expressions not of a psychological or emotional interiority that reveals itself in language (even if only to gesture toward language’s inadequacy), but rather as expressions of a set of differences--most importantly, the difference between communication and perception, which in poetry are “miraculously” made to coincide when the material form of the signifier duplicates the semantics of communication (in familiar devices such as rhyme, rhythm, and so on). Even more interesting and challenging for rethinking the concept of form, however, is the circumstance in which the material form and semantics of the signifier do not coincide-a circumstance insisted upon with particular rigor in the poetry of Wallace Stevens. This essay deploys Luhmann’s concept of form-and more generally, his understanding of art as a social system-to explore Stevens’ poetics, and uses Luhmann’s theory of first- and second-order observation to explain how Stevens’ “romantic modernism” is most rigorous and systematic precisely where it is most insistently confounding and paradoxical.