TRANSPOSITIONES 2022 Vol. 1 Issue 2: Intraconnectedness and World-making: Technologies, Bodies, Matters: Journal for Transdisciplinary and Intermedial Cultural Studies / Zeitschrift für transdisziplinäre und intermediale Kulturforschung [1 ed.] 9783737014700, 9783847114703

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 2, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-2

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Transpositiones, 2/2022, Jg. 1, ISSN 2749-4128 © 2022 V&R unipress | Brill Deutschland GmbH

Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 2, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-2

Transpositiones Journal for Transdisciplinary and Intermedial Cultural Studies / Zeitschrift für transdisziplinäre und intermediale Kulturforschung

Chief Editors Joanna Godlewicz-Adamiec (University of Warsaw) Paweł Piszczatowski (University of Warsaw) Editors Neha Khetrapal (O.P. Jindal Global University) Piotr Kociumbas (University of Warsaw) Christian Struck (Harvard University) Justyna Włodarczyk (University of Warsaw) Advisory Board Hannes Bergthaller (National Chung Hsing University), Agata BielikRobson (University of Nottingham), Jane Desmond (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Andrzej Elz˙anowski (University of Warsaw), Francesca Ferrando (New York University), Julia Fiedorczuk (University of Warsaw), Greg Garrard (University of British Columbia), Ursula K. Heise (University of California Los Angeles), Eva Horn (University of Vienna), Lynn Keller (University of Wisconsin–Madison), Adam Lipszyc (Polish Academy of Sciences), Aleksander Manterys (University of Warsaw), Axel E.W. Müller (University of Leeds), Susan McHugh (University of New England), Sigrid Nieberle (Technical University of Dortmund), Ewa Szcze˛sna (University of Warsaw), Manfred Weinberg (Charles University in Prague), Urszula Zaja˛czkowska (Warsaw University of Life Sciences) and Evi Zemanek (University of Freiburg)

This journal is peer-reviewed.

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 2, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-2

Transpositiones Volume 1, Issue 2 (2022)

Intraconnectedness and World-making: Technologies, Bodies, Matters

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 2, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-2

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 2, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-2

Contents

Editorial

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Thomas Balfe (Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London) Human-Cetacean Encounters in Two Seventeenth-Century Accounts of Whaling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Annie Dwyer (University of Washington) The Incorporation of the Animal: Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal-Machine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Sebastian Gatz (Konstfack – University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm) New Romanticism: It’s Time for New Realities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Jes Hooper (University of Exeter) / Meri Linna and Saija Kassinen (Harrie Liveart duo) / Jonathan Salvage (University of Brighton) Technologies, Bodies and Faecal Matters: Embodied Empathy with Coffee Producing Civets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Rebecca Jordan (Washington University in St. Louis) “Können Toys träumen?”: Technological Animals and Their Survival in Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic German Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Daniel López Fernández (University of Valencia) Probing the Posthuman: Animal Technology and Transhuman Body Transformations In Enki Bilal’s Graphic Novel Animal’z . . . . . . . . . . 111

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 2, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-2

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Kaitlin Moore (University of Wisconsin-Madison) “You / Say Ancestors and I Breathe, / Bones”: Mushrooms, Mollusks, and “Making Kin” in Nga¯ Ma¯tai Tuarangi o Te Ma¯ori . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Jaya Sarkar (Birla Institute of Technology and Science – Pilani, Hyderabad Campus, India) Violent Delights and Bodies without Organs: Technologization of the Body in Love, Death & Robots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Yvonne Nilges (Universität Heidelberg) Filmgeschichte(n): Strategien der Welterzeugung im Technikroman des Dritten Reichs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Nicole Haitzinger (Paris Lodron University of Salzburg) / Anna Leon (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) A figure suspended among invisible threads: Cosmic and modernist worldmaking on the stage of Pavel Tchelitchew’s Ode (1928) . . . . . . . 179

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 2, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-2

Editorial

We are delighted to present our readers with the second issue of Transpositiones devoted to the topic “Intraconnectedness and World-making: Technologies, Bodies, Matters.” In many respects, the theme is a continuation of the considerations made in the previous issue, although these have been extended to aspects related to the concepts of “worldmaking,” which go back to Nelson Goodman’s 1978 book, where this term was coined. It was intended to highlight the fact that in the relationship of the “world” to its linguistic representations, for example in literature, more “worlds” are conceivable and “producible” than just the one known to us. For Goodman, such worldmaking is not just a question of the possible products of the reality-forming imagination, but of performativity in the narrow sense, understood as the power of linguistic instruments of representation to actively shape the represented mode of being of things in the world. The new-materialistic approach to the potential for meaning of extra-human materiality and its multidimensional entanglements and the intraconnectedness of the categories of human and non-human, nature and culture, object and subject, passive and active, the measuring apparatus and what is to be measured, knowledge acquisition and knowledge production etc., shifts the concept of world-making into new perspectives of interpretation. In the categories of Karen Barad’s “agential realism,” any intraconnection of the above-mentioned phenomena in the space of knowledge practices is a diffractive (re)configuration of the world: “[T]he point is not merely that knowledge practices have material consequences but that practices of knowledge are specific material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world. Which practices we enact matter – in both senses of the word. Making knowledge is not simply about making facts but about making worlds […].”1 Thus, through their emphasis on the materiality of knowledge, Barad claims that world-making is akin to knowledge-making. 1 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2007), 91.

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“World-making” gains a further specific expression in Donna Haraway’s concept of “worlding.” For example, in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene from 2016 Haraway states: “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties.”2 This is how she illustrates the intraactive entanglement of matter, substance, meaning, storytelling and thinking on the fundamental level of the polysemic linguistic tissue itself. The noun, which is simultaneously reflected in other parts of speech, opens up the semiotic space of “worlding,” a peculiar mixture of matter and meaning that dissolves the boundaries of familiar modes of being in space and time but also of being represented in language. Based on these theoretical approaches, the authors of the articles in this issue analyze various forms of artistic expression, from literary texts of many genres and epochs, through film and photography, to dance performance. The presented texts often cross the boundaries of scientific disciplines and consider phenomena from various cultures. Among the articles published here you will find a text on representations of whaling in late-seventeenth century travel literature (Balfe), an article on interspecies kinship and transmaterial correspondence in cultural practices and indigenous cosmology of Ma¯ori from Aotearoa, New Zealand (Moore), or a study written by visual artists, anthrozoologists and biologists that problematizes the status of civet coffee and presents an embodied perspective of animal mechanization (Hopper/Linna/Kassinen/ Salvage). Other texts concern various forms of artistic creativity: the interweaving of humanity, nature and technology in modernist ballet, as exemplified by Pavel Tchelitchew’s staging of Ode from 1928 (Haitzinger/Leon), the stop-motion photography technique depicting the body of an animal as an “animal-machine” based on Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic study Animal Locomotion from 1887 (Dwyer), and the worldmaking strategies at the intersection of literary narrative and film techniques in the historical realities of the Third Reich (Nilges). Another text presents alternative non-anthropocentric ontological explorations using experimental methods of speculative design, conceptualized as a form of New Romanticism (Gatz). Finally, we have an article about nonhuman animal interaction with technology in post-apocalyptic German fiction (Jordan), a paper demonstrating a critical view of the effects of the technologization of the body to achieve political agency in the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots (Sarkar) and a text examining a hybrid human-animal mode of existence and

2 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 12.

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 2, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-2

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technological body modifications in Enki Bilal’s graphic novel Animal’z (López Fernández). We believe that this broad spectrum of transdisciplinary and intermedial approaches to the topics presented in this issue, which connect to the key problems of contemporary posthumanist discourses, will further reflection on the practices of understanding and describing intra-world entanglements and interconnections. We are glad that we can present texts written by both experienced researchers and younger colleagues representing the global academic community. We are also very pleased to have worked on this issue in an enlarged editorial team, which was joined by Dr. Christian Struck from Harvard University. Hoping you enjoy the articles and find them insightful, we invite you to collaborate on the next issues. Details can be found on our website https://tran spositiones.uw.edu.pl/en/news/. Joanna Godlewicz-Adamiec and Paweł Piszczatowski Warsaw, July 2022

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 2, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-2

Thomas Balfe (Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London)

Human-Cetacean Encounters in Two Seventeenth-Century Accounts of Whaling

Abstract This article examines the representation of whaling in two late-seventeenth century works: the German author Friedrich Martens’ widely-translated 1675 account of his voyage to the Arctic, and a 1683 Dutch pamphlet inspired by a local sailor’s killing of a fin whale off the coast of west Holland in October 1682. Focusing on visual as well as textual examples, my discussion uses Donna Haraway’s concept of encounter value, and related theories of animal commodification, to analyse the works’ shifting characterisation of the whale as a redoubtable living creature, a wonder or object of knowledge, and a prized source of oil and other valuable goods. Whaling emerges from both accounts as an activity that stretched human agency to its limits, drawing whalers into ramifying entanglements with cetacean quarries whose sensory and cognitive faculties were often more than a match for human intelligence and hunting technologies. Keywords: Whaling, Friedrich Martens, Travel Literature, Encounter Value, Animal Commodification

The whale has always been deeply entangled with human attempts at worldmaking.1 This shared history took a decisive turn in the early seventeenth century, when European sailors began to venture towards Greenland, Iceland, and other areas of the far north in a widening quest for cetacean bodies.2 Prior to 1600, encounters with the “great fish” had largely been opportunistic or conducted on a smaller scale: whales were scavenged when they stranded on European beaches, and were hunted by Scandinavian, Faeroese, and Basque communities near to their own coastlines.3 What enabled the expansion of whaling beyond these limits 1 Overviews include Richard Ellis, Men and Whales (London: Robert Hale, 1992), 33–71; Karen Oslund, “Protecting Fat Mammals or Carnivorous Humans? Towards an Environmental History of Whales,” Historical Social Research 29, no. 3 (2004): 63–81; Joseph Roman, Whale (London: Reaktion, 2006). 2 For the early voyage accounts, see Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus: or Purchas His Pilgrimes (Glasgow: Maclehose, 1905–1907), 13:13–559, 14:1–426. 3 Ellis, Men and Whales, 33–47; Ole Lindquist, “Whaling by Peasant Fishermen in Norway, Orkney, Shetland, the Faeroe Islands, Iceland and Norse Greenland: Medieval and Early

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was the arrival of new knowledge and technologies: faster ships, the mapping of the Arctic, and the consolidation of practical expertise, notably the use of the harpoon, which crews in northern Europe learned from the Basques.4 What made it worthwhile was the high monetary value that attached to three products harboured by the whale: its oil, a useful lubricant and fuel; spermaceti, the waxlike substance mainly found in the skull of the sperm whale, which was used to make good-quality candles; and baleen, the keratinous plates that grow inside the mouths of certain cetacean species, which could be turned into strong, flexible items ranging from corset stays to tool handles.5 Over the course of the seventeenth century, the pursuit of these goods developed into a global trade dominated first by English, and later by Dutch and German, private and statebacked interests.6 Even as its stock rose, however, the whale continued to be regarded as more than simply a source of wealth. The expansion of the Greenland trade prompted renewed interest in the animal on the part of early modern naturalists, even as the mythic associations that had long attached to it, ranging from the monstrous kraken to the biblical Leviathan, lingered on into the nineteenth century and beyond.7 My essay concerns the impact of these economic, technological, and scientific developments on the cultural construction of the whale in early modernity. It analyses two late-seventeenth century accounts of whale hunting in order to broach the larger question of how representations of human-cetacean encounters shift at the point when the whale was undergoing “a categorical migration from stranded serendipity and fearsome prey, to being a for-profit commodity.”8 The first account is a Dutch pamphlet about the pursuit of a fin whale that was sighted off the coast of west Holland in October 1682. Titled, in English translation, The Short and Honest Narrative of the Grave and Adventurous Experiences of Abraham Jansz. van Oelen, Captain from Nieuw Vosmeer (hereafter The Short and Honest Narrative), the pamphlet juxtaposes this local incident with information about Dutch whaling and other forms of resource extraction in the

4 5 6 7 8

Modern Whaling Methods and Inshore Legal Régimes,” in Whaling and History: Perspectives on the Evolution of the Industry, eds. Bjørn Basberg, Jan Erik Ringstad and Einar Wexelsen (Sandefjord: Sandefjordmuseene, 1993), 17–54. For the designation “great fish,” see Roman, Whale, 7. John Appleby, “A ‘Voyage to Greenland for the Catching of Whales’: English Whaling Enterprise in the Seventeenth Century,” International Journal of Maritime History 9, no. 2 (1997): 29. Roman, Whale, 117–26. Cornelis de Jong, Geschiedenis van de oude Nederlandse walvisvaart (Pretoria: Universiteit van Suid-Afrika, 1972–1979), 28–41; Gordon Jackson, The British Whaling Trade (St John’s, NL: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2005), 1–45. Vicki Ellen Szabo, Monstrous Fishes and the Mead-Dark Sea: Whaling in the Medieval North Atlantic (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 13–65, 177–210. Rebecca Giggs, Fathoms: The World in the Whale (Melbourne: Scribe, 2020), 38.

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Thomas Balfe, Human-Cetacean Encounters in Two Seventeenth-Century Accounts

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Arctic.9 The second account is the description of Greenland and Spitzbergen (present-day Svalbard) by the Hamburg ship’s surgeon Friedrich Martens. This was first published in German under the title Spitzbergische oder Groenlandische Reise Beschreibung (Description of a journey to Spitzbergen and Greenland),10 and later reappeared in English translation in a collection of travel narratives called An Account of several Late Voyages & Discoveries to the South and North (hereafter Several Late Voyages), which was printed at the behest of London’s Royal Society in 1694.11 Both works convey the strangeness and commercial excitement of hunting whales, using engravings and evocative language to enliven the subject for their readers. A deeper parallel between them is that they push the whale through a series of transformations, presenting it, at different moments, as a dangerous adversary in the hunt, a potent natural force, a wonder or object of knowledge, and an alluring source of wealth. Rather than seeking consistency in these representations, I argue that their instability reflects, and allows the works to move between, the disparate forms of economic, scientific, and symbolic “capital” that the whale had come to embody by the late seventeenth century. In Martens’ account, for example, whaling is not simply a means of securing certain lucrative raw materials. It is also an opportunity to gain authentic knowledge of cetacean behaviour through an encounter with the animal itself, one in which human skill and tenacity inevitably became enmeshed with the whale’s own agency and the contours of its marine habitat. Accordingly, another matter investigated here is the works’ readiness, if only at certain moments, to present whaling as an activity that draws the whaler, the whale, and the nonhuman environment into a deep connection or entanglement – a view which, at other moments, is resisted as a challenge to the integrity of the human.12 In attempting to reckon with the whale as both a target of economic calculation and an embodied living creature, my argument draws on recent attempts to theorise the transformations that animals undergo when they become commodities: goods destined for the market. An important basis for this work has been the concept of “encounter value,” which gained prominence when it was used by Donna Haraway in When Species Meet (2008) to challenge a bias towards 9 Kort en opregt verhaal van het droevig en avontuurlijk wedervaren van Abraham Jansz. van Oelen, Schipper van nieu Vos-meer ([s. l.], 1683). Hereafter KOV. All translations are mine. 10 Friedrich Martens, Spitzbergische oder Groenlandische Reise Beschreibung, gethan im Jahr 1671 (Hamburg: Gottfried Schultzens Kosten, 1675). 11 John Narborough, An Account of several late Voyages & Discoveries to the South and North towards the Streights of Magellan (London: S. Smith and B. Walford, 1694). Hereafter SLV. Pagination in the book starts again at Martens’ contribution; page references are to his text unless otherwise noted. 12 For a stimulating reflection on human-cetacean entanglements, see Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York: Norton, 2019).

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human exceptionalism in Marx’s classic analysis of the commodity form.13 Marx had argued that capitalist modes of production exploit social relations, principally wage labour, to turn natural entities, including animals, into fungible, mobile, “inert” commodities that either have use value (practical usefulness determined by their qualitative physical properties) or that bear exchange value (a quantitative measure of a commodity’s capacity to be exchanged for other commodities). Whereas use value and exchange value arise out of human labour and social relations exclusively, encounter value is produced when an animal enters into a relation with a human being, contributing to a value-generating process in a way that constitutes it as a subject rather than as an object or inert consumable.14 Haraway’s famous example of this type of relation is the owner-pet tie, where the animal is at once a commodity, a partner in an intersubjective bond, and a consumer of commodities. However, the fundamental insight that the value of a commodified animal can reside, at least in part, in the opportunities it offers for a tangible encounter clearly has wider relevance, and since the late 2000s it has been applied to many other cross-species interactions, including ones that are non-convivial in the sense that they set human and nonhuman interests at odds.15 Encounter value provides a framework for thinking beyond any putative opposition between the whale’s subjecthood and its status as a potential commodity. In addition, and again unlike the standard Marxist account, it underscores the animal’s role in contributing to commodification processes or, alternatively, in resisting them – either through its actions or through the physical recalcitrance of its living or dead body.16 Nonhuman agency is central to Maan Barua’s challenging reconceptualization of animal commodification, which takes Haraway’s work in a different direction by situating animals as labouring subjects, “co-constitutive actors in the production of social life.”17 Citing the anthropologist Timothy Ingold’s observation that human beings do not make crops or livestock but instead establish “‘conditions of development within which 13 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 45– 67. 14 Ibid., 45–46. 15 For an influential adaptation of the concept with bibliography, see Rosemary-Claire Collard and Jessica Dempsey, “Life for Sale? The Politics of Lively Commodities,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 45, no. 11 (2013): 2682–99. 16 For animals’ resistance to commodification, see Kathryn Gillespie, “Nonhuman Animal Resistance and the Improprieties of Live Property,” in Animals, Biopolitics, Law: Lively Legalities, ed. Irus Braverman (London: Routledge, 2016), 117–32. 17 Maan Barua, “Lively Commodities and Encounter Value,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 4 (2016): 726. Haraway’s discussion focuses mainly on cross-species intersubjectivity rather than animal agency, and, while noting that animals produce and reproduce, she denies that these acts constitute labour as Marx would have understood it: When Species Meet, 55–56.

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plants and animals take on their particular forms and behavioural dispositions,’” Barua argues that commodification enlists the labour of animals and the affordances (potentials for action) in their environments; seen from this perspective, productive activities emerge as processes of “working with materials, where nonhuman animals play an integral role.”18 Whaling, for example, could be said to co-opt behavioural or biological dispositions of the whale, such as its need to surface periodically to breathe, as well as particular affordances of the marine environment, such as the presence of winds and waves that can move ships. The corollary of linking the human, the animal, and the environment in these “worldmaking entanglements” is that the whaler can no longer be imagined as a force that acts upon the material-ecological situation of the hunt from a position outside it; their interventions, and their efforts to hold onto life, are limited as well as enabled by the hunt’s nonhuman actors.19 While the entanglements described by Barua place robust constraints on human agency, it is also clear that they can structure economic processes, like whaling or hunting, that reinforce human authority and decentre animals’ interests. It is thus unsurprising that in the works examined here the dangers of whaling are frequently presented as evidence of the bravery and skill of the whaler, via statements that gain persuasiveness from the armoury of rhetorical strategies that undergird the works’ verisimilitude, including detailed descriptions, realistic images, and repeated assertions of direct witnessing.20 It is possible to go further, however, by noting that these claims of mirroring real experience exist in a deep alignment with the works’ thematic concern with profiting from the whale. This is because, as Nicole Shukin and Dinesh Wadiwel among others have pointed out, commodification is itself a mimetic process insofar as it involves an exchange or replacement, recasting living entities as sources of human value. The interplay between mimetic and economic agendas takes many different forms in the two works, but a relatively simple example is their inclusion of precise numerical information about the quantities of oil or blubber secured by whalers: this at once buttresses the lifelikeness of the authors’ accounts and converts the whale into a set of exchange values. Shukin has analysed the way that mimetic effects, including realism in visual imagery, imbue commodities with a sense of vitality, life or animation that masks the violence and labour needed to

18 Barua, “Lively Commodities,” 728, 729. 19 Ibid., 728. 20 KOV’s title-page promises an “honest” (opregt) account based on “the narrative of the [whale] catcher himself” (het verhaal van den Vanger selfs). For similar statements in Martens’ work, see SLV, xv (general introduction), 54, 67, 103, 115, 143; also, in Reise Beschreibung, the titlepage’s description of the engravings as having been made nach dem Leben (from or after the life).

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produce them.21 Wadiwel has noted that because mimesis has traditionally been seen as a uniquely human faculty, the exchanges set in play by commodification generate, as a kind of side effect, an “immunising sociality” that sets the human apart from the animal as its rightful user or consumer.22 In contrast to the emphasis on intersubjectivity and animal agency in Haraway and Barua, Shukin and Wadiwel’s more alienated perspectives reveal that the animal commodity always has both a material and a biopolitical function, being at once a source of tangible goods and a “currency that reifies and cements human value.”23 For my purposes, these approaches also indicate the forms that resistance to perceiving cross-species entanglements might take in the work of early modern authors whose religious and philosophical commitments would have predisposed them to uphold the principle of human exceptionalism.24

Catching the “Fish” in The Short and Honest Narrative Comprising around 60 pages of text and four fold-out illustrations, The Short and Honest Narrative has attracted little notice in previous studies of Dutch whaling.25 The work is, to be sure, an oddity. It consists of nine sections, all loosely related to the experiences of the eponymous seaman Abraham van Oelen, which span a variety of literary modes including poetry, narrative prose, an inventory, several lists, and practical advice on how to organise a whaling expedition. An introductory poem frames Abraham’s adventures as a useful, morally-improving story, accessible to the unlearned and full of examples of good conduct for youth.26 The poem is followed by the work’s two main narrative sections: the description of a flood that affected the village of Nieuw Vosmeer in late January 1682, in which Abraham rescues family members and neighbours and reveals his entrepreneurial streak by selling waterlogged grain in the nearby town of Bergen at a significant mark up, and the account of his killing of a whale near the coastal 21 Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 20–28, 49–86. 22 Dinesh Wadiwel, “‘Like One Who is Bringing his Own Hide to Market’: Marx, Irigaray, Derrida and Animal Commodification,” Angelaki 21, no. 2 (2016): 70. 23 Ibid. 24 For human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism in premodernity, see Nathaniel Wolloch, Subjugated Animals: Animals and Anthropocentrism in Early Modern European Culture (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2006). 25 Hans Beelen, “Wetenschap, wonderen, walvisvaart: de transformaties van Friedrich Martens’ Spitzbergische oder Groenlandische Reisebeschreibung (1675) in de Lage Landen,” in Zwischen Sprachen en Culturen, Wechselbeziehungen im niederländischen, deutschen und afrikaansen Sprachgebiet, ed. Ute Boonen (Münster: Waxmann, 2018), 149–64. 26 KOV, 3–7.

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area of Sint Annaland in October 1682.27 In the narrative sections, Abraham’s experiences are recounted by an author-narrator identified near the end of the work as “P. P. V. S.” – initials that possibly refer to a timber merchant from the Zandaam area, surnamed Van Sardaem, who may have authored at least one other text about whaling.28

Fig. 1. Attributed to Abraham de Blois, The Catching of the Fin Whale, KOV, engraving following 12. Image: Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen, classmark: 49, 154 00573

The whaling story includes two engravings: a plate with four panels showing how the whale was caught (Fig. 1), and a larger, captioned image that depicts the cutting up of the whale after it was brought onshore (Fig. 2).29 These local events are then set in the broader context of Dutch involvement in the Greenland trade in the second half of the pamphlet. This contains, among other sundry materials, an inventory of the equipment carried by a whaling ship accompanied by an engraving (Fig. 3), a chronology of incidents involving Dutch sailors in the Arctic in the period 1654–1682, a poem comparing Abraham’s adventure to the work of Greenland sailors, and a list of Dutch ships sent to Greenland in 1683. The section of The Short and Honest Narrative that describes Abraham’s encounter with the whale, which will be my focus here, is subtitled “Short nar-

27 Ibid., 8–11 (flood narrative), 12–19 (whaling narrative). 28 Ibid., 51. For the work’s authorship, see Beelen, “Wetenschap,” 161–62. 29 These were also printed, with an extra plate, as a standalone set: Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum RP-P-OB-82.522–27.

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Fig. 2. Attributed to Abraham de Blois, The Flensing of the Fin Whale, KOV, engraving following 16. Image: Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen, classmark: 49, 154 00573

Fig. 3. Attributed to Abraham de Blois, A Whaling Ship and its Equipment, KOV, engraving following 24. Image: Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen, classmark: 49, 154 00573

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rative of the catching of a (so-called) whale, at S. Anna-Land on 7 October 1682.”30 The “so-called whale,” or “fin fish” (vin-vis) as it is also referred to in the work, is a type of baleen whale, now called a rorqual, fin whale or finback whale (Balaenoptera physalus), whose distinguishing features are its prominent dorsal fin and relatively long, slender body – traits clearly visible in Figures 1–2.31 Fin whales are known to have been hunted by medieval Norwegian and Icelandic sailors, but by the seventeenth century European whaling crews had come to favour larger, slower and reputedly more docile whales whose thicker bodies offered more blubber.32 Martens’ chapter on the “Finn-fish,” one of the first detailed European descriptions of the animal, differentiates it from the whale proper, highlighting its “vehement blowing and spouting up of the Water, which the Whale doth not do” as well as the greater threat it poses to whalers “because he moves quicker, and beats about him with his Tail, and from him with his Finns.”33 These warnings are fully borne out by the fin whale that is sighted by Abraham’s son Jan on Wednesday 7 October while he is helping his father gather mussels on the sand bank between Vijanen and Stavenes. Following an initial attack on the whale in the coastal shallows, which causes it to retreat towards the deep ocean, the Van Oelens board Abraham’s boat and give chase. When the whale is swimming in the water, the overriding emphasis in the pamphlet’s text is on its physical potency: its speed, strength, and prodigious powers of recuperation. Its first appearance to Jan by the beach is spectacular: it breaches, dives, resurfaces again, and spouts jets, each as thick as a man’s arm, twenty-five feet into the air, in a display of abounding energy that underlines the significance of the encounter both for the boy and the reader.34 As it travels from the coastal shallows out to sea, the whale moves ahead of Abraham’s boat “as quickly as a horse can run,” initiating an hour-long chase.35 When the boat draws level with the exhausted animal, Abraham makes a wide cut into its three-inch blubber, described by the narrator as “no less pleasant than that of a well-fattened pig,” and tries to thrust the boat’s smaller anchor into the wound in order to tether the whale to the boat.36 This was a standard technique for catching larger cetaceans, but a risky one to attempt with a fin whale since, as Martens notes, its characteristically violent reactions could capsize a boat or pull it to the bottom.37 30 KOV, 12: “Kort verhaal / Van het vangen van een / (Soo genaamde) / Walvis, / Voor-gevallen Bij / S. Anna-land, / Op den 7. October 1682.” 31 Ellis, Men and Whales, 21–23. 32 Lindquist, “Whaling,” 28. 33 SLV, 165, 166. 34 KOV, 12. 35 Ibid., 13: “Hij swom somtijds wel so hard als een Paard kan lopen.” 36 Ibid: “Het spek bij de 3 duijm dik sijnde, behoefde dat van een braaf gemest Varken in aangenaamheijd niet te wijken.” 37 SLV, 166.

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Sure enough, after being attacked, the Sint Annaland whale races away from the boat, tearing off one arm of the anchor. When the Van Oelens catch up with their quarry for a second time, Abraham succeeds in inserting the boat’s larger, 31pound anchor into the wound, but this only causes the whale to swim off even more quickly, again with equine speed.38 In the text’s description of these initial skirmishes, the phrases comparing the whale to a running horse and a fattened pig have a striking double effect. They underscore the animal’s superabundant energy and corporeality, traits that place it beyond mundane experience, while at the same time “domesticating” it, reinscribing it within a familiar terrestrial realm of agrarian labour where the natural world figures as a resource available for exploitation by canny human agents like Abraham (recall here his grain trading and mussel gathering). Significantly, the association between the whale’s flesh and pork reappears towards the end of the narrative, when, after the whale has been flensed, the narrator likens the sight of the blubber laid out in a boat to “the wholes and sides of 70 or 80 pigs […] the flesh in most places three inches thick and as white as any pig’s bacon.”39 As well as anticipating the successful outcome of the hunt, the comparisons also carry a broader zoomorphic charge, aligning the whale with the condition of animality itself. This resonates with Wadiwel’s insight that the commodification of living entities is often accompanied by a symbolic assertion of human difference and distinctiveness – an assertion that gains strength here from the fact that the animals to which the whale is likened are tamed domesticates directly under human control. A more multifaceted view of the pursuit can be found in the pamphlet’s first engraving (Fig. 1). Its four panels contain vignettes, keyed to the text with letters, that depict several events in the story: the sighting of the whale (A–C), the attack on it near the beach by Abraham and the mussel-gatherers (D), the moment when Abraham wounds it for the first time (E), and the process of forcing it to tow the boat (F). Whereas the pamphlet’s text deflects attention from the entanglement between the whalers and the whale by emphasising the latter’s animality, Figure 1 seems more open to envisioning the hunt as a co-constitutive process of working with the quarry’s dispositions and the affordances of its environment. For example, the generous proportion of the pictorial space devoted to the sky and sea calls attention to the natural forces that enable whaling and other forms of productive activity to occur. The billowing clouds and wheeling birds indicate the presence of winds that fill the ships’ sails and drive the windmill on the horizon; the windmill also situates the hunt firmly in the Netherlands, forging a con38 KOV, 13: “als of ’er verscheijde Paarden voor gelopen hadden.” 39 Ibid., 17: “gelijk of ’er de heele en halve sijden van 70. a 80. Varkens […] Het Spek was op de meeste plaatsen 3. duijm dik, en so blank als eenig Varkens Spek.”

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nection between maritime activities and the prosperity of the Dutch nation. Finally, in three of the panels, the whale is pictured expelling deoxygenated air from its lungs by spouting, a bodily need that has compelled it to breach the surface of the water, creating the moment of vulnerability that the whalers have exploited. The whale appears as an ovoid mass hatched with strong, reticulated lines that evoke the rotundity and dark sheen of its water-resistant body. With its head partially submerged and its tail fins elevated above the waves, it is clearly well suited to the intermediate zone where air and ocean meet. This is clearest in the final panel at lower right where the whale, despite being (literally) entangled with its pursuers by the anchor and tethering rope, raises a noticeably smaller cloud of spray than the boat behind it. If the engraving thus hints at the whale’s superior accommodation to its watery habitat, the visual echo between the spouting animal and the boats with their high masts also acknowledges the skilful convergence with the quarry and its environment that the whalers have had to achieve in order to hunt it on the water. In other instances, too, The Short and Honest Narrative presents the emulation of the animal as an index of human skill and dominance, confirming Shukin’s observation that biopolitical expressions of the human-animal boundary are always a “strategically ambivalent rather than absolute line.”40 The poem about the Greenland trade that follows Abraham’s adventure, for example, compares whaling crews and the harpooner to lions in order to suggest the strong nerves that are needed during a pursuit, while the list of Arctic voyages at the end of the pamphlet registers the tradition of naming ships after powerful or swift animals: the lion, the greyhound, the hare, the eagle, the horse, the swan – and, of course, the whale.41 As the pursuit progresses, the water resistance of the boat, which had previously hindered the whalers’ attempts to catch up with their quarry, gradually turns into an advantage, weakening the whale sufficiently to allow the Van Oelens to haul in the rope and wound it more frequently. Abraham finally manages to deal the animal a fatal blow, and an hour later the exhausted Van Oelens find the huge carcass floating dead in the water. Now a lifeless mass, the whale is subject to gravitational and tidal effects: its body sinks six feet in the ocean and is finally pulled towards the shore by the waves. As it rolls in the water, it threatens to capsize the boat, which is still tethered to it by the rope, before finally beaching on the bank between Oud-Sijp and Philips-land. The next day, Abraham and Jan, with the help of Abraham’s brother Gommer, try to pull the whale back into the 40 Shukin, Animal Capital, 11. 41 KOV, 27; ship names are in the final, unpaginated “Notitie van de Schepen gedestineert uijt dese Landen naar Groen-land,” and include: “De Goude Leeuw,” “De Winthont,” “De Haes,” “de Vliegende Arend,” “’t Witte Paerdt,” “De Walvis,” and “De Bonte Walvis.”

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sea in order to tow it to Sint Annaland harbour, but it is too high up on the beach to be moved and the decision is made to flense the carcass where it has landed and to carry the blubber away by boat.42 The flensing coincides with the more frequent appearance in the text of numerical descriptions of the whale’s body. On the first day of cutting, Abraham and Jan, Gommer and his servant, and their cousin Abraham Jacobs, take aboard their ship 5,000 pounds of blubber.43 On Friday 9 October, the group remove the tail in a complicated operation that involves attaching a rope to the colossal appendage – ten feet long, four feet wide and “as heavy as an oxhead of wine” – and hoisting it into the boat.44 The next step is to pull apart the animal’s jaws with a rope to get at the precious baleen, a task that takes eight to ten men because the jaw bone is ten feet long and weighs 146 pounds.45 More insistently than the animal metaphors used in the description of the pursuit, these quantifying statements push the whale towards a commodified condition in which its body is translated into a series of amounts amenable to comparison and exchange. In addition, the precise lengths and weights serve a mimetic function, underscoring the veracity and autoptic character of the narrator’s remarks about the size of the animal. This hints at another sphere of value that the whale comes to occupy as the story approaches its conclusion: a visual and affective economy of the wondrous. The relocation of the whale from the dynamic environment of the sea to the beach, where it is motionless and more easily observed, introduces a strain of rhetoric that fuses the analytical gaze of anatomy with vivid details about the sensory properties of the carcass. The curved vault (verwulfsel) under the tongue was like an entire bed where two people could easily sleep (in colour like blue bedticking), and so soft, rounded and yielding that no prince’s bed could be softer […] as clean as it was soft, intact, without any grease, slime or stench […] and [it] had already been dead (at a guess) thirty hours.46

The narrator’s contact with this uncorrupted body offers knowledge of the whale in the present and lasting proof of its existence for a future time after it has been cut up: “Seeing with wonder that the baleen plates were grown so neatly and wellarranged,” he reports, “I cut a piece with my knife […] to keep as a rare and

42 43 44 45 46

Ibid., 13–15. Ibid., 15. Ibid.: “wel so swaar als een Oxhoofd Wijn.” Ibid., 16; also 18 (estimation of the whale’s weight at around 100,000 pounds). Ibid., 16: “een heel bed gelijk, daar gemakkelijk 2. mensen op slapen konnen (sijnde het bedde-teek blau van koleur) en so saft, bol en me geef ’lijk, dat een Prinsen bed niet safter kan wesen […] so saft als ’t was, so reijn was ’t ook, gants sonder eenige smeerigheyd, slijm of stank […] en had al (bij gis) dertig uuren dood geweest.”

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memorable reminder of this whale-catching.”47 Significantly, both these functions depend on a direct encounter with an animal whose existence might be disbelieved in the absence of eye-witness statements or physical proof. The dual status of the whale as a source of material goods and a wonder is reiterated in the pamphlet’s second engraving (Fig. 2). While the main activity depicted here is the flensing, the inclusion of figures like the three men entering the scene at right who gesture animatedly towards the whale underlines the astonishing nature of the spectacle. The use of a distant viewpoint, which is dictated by the need to show the removal of the blubber, means that, despite the difference in scale between the carcass and the human figures, the enormity of the whale does not register as powerfully as in Figure 1.48 The presence of the group pulling apart the jaws with a rope and the figures carrying tools or baskets indicates that here wonder attaches, less to the animal’s size, than to the facticity of a real body that can be manipulated and turned into valuable goods by human labour and technologies.49 The caption below the engraving encourages this response. Addressing the community of Greenland sailors, it urges them to see “how blubber and baleen, held by you in high value, were cut and carved here, not north of Shetland, but by Sint Annaland.”50 This sets the stage for the narrator’s final reflections on Abraham and Jan’s adventure, where he juxtaposes their achievement with Dutch involvement in the Arctic. Following a lengthy account of how the blubber was sold off in various Dutch towns, the narrator concludes his tale. He expresses admiration that “a man of more than fifty years, and his fifteen-year-old son, who had never seen Greenland, and with a boat much smaller than the Fish and in no way comparable to that of Greenland sailors, dared to vie with such a great Sea-Monster.”51 The appearance of the whale, he further notes, may foreshadow the flooding of the land by that “mighty Enemy: the wild, savage Sea” or else the arrival of additional monstrous creatures, if the nation does not repent.52 This final transformation of the whale into a monster and carrier of spiritual meaning bears out Wadiwel’s 47 Ibid.: “met werwondering siende, dat die Baarden so net en wel geschikt, gegroeijt waren […] so sneed ik met mijn mes […] om het selve voor wat raars en tot een gedenkwaardige geheugenis van so een Walvis vangst te bewaren.” 48 I am grateful to Joanna Woodall for this observation. 49 This marks a change from medieval accounts of the whale, which tend to stress human beings’ inability to gauge its miraculous size; see Roman, Whale, 10. 50 KOV, 16 (caption to Figure 2): “Siet Groenlants Redery, hoe hier het spek en baarden / Gesneen, gehouwen wort, by uw in hooger waarden / Benorden Hitlant niet, maar voor St. Anna lant.” 51 Ibid., 18: “een Man van over de 50 Iaar, met sijn Soon van 15 Iaar oud, die Groenland noijt gesien hebben, met so een Iagje, dat veel kleijnder was als de Vis, en bij de Groenlands vaarders in geen vergelijking komt, sulk een groot See-Monster dorsten aan tasten.” 52 Ibid., 19: “een magtig Vijand: namentlijk, de wilde woeste See.”

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suggestion that commodified animals often take on a second life as a “currency that reifies and cements human value” – though here the higher power for whom the animal labours is not just a human community but a Christian God partially interested in the future of the Dutch.53 Furthermore, the narrator’s commendation of Abraham’s bravery and his willingness to seize a God-sent opportunity carries its own anthropocentric implication: that the success or failure of whaling is dependent, ultimately, on human agency and purposiveness. The sections of the pamphlet that deal directly with the Greenland trade tell a different story, or at least a more equivocal one. In the compilation of “adventurous and grave” (avontuurlijke en droevige) anecdotes about Dutch sailors’ recent exploits in the Arctic, for every report of disaster heroically averted we find another like the story of the son of Simon van Emden, who was pulled beneath the ice and never seen again after his leg got caught in the rope tethered to a fleeing whale.54 Such “grave” stories hint at the contingencies of whaling voyages, which were easily ruined by bad weather, treacherous ice or attacks by predatory animals. These uncertainties filter into the engraving that accompanies this section, which describes the outfitting of a whaling ship (Fig. 3). At one level, the image is a celebration of all the technologies that underpin the Greenland trade, which are represented by the tools for processing carcasses at top right and the ship in the centre, with its impressive rigging and winches for flensing whales in the water. Even here, however, the challenges posed by the Arctic are subtly registered. On the right, two whales dive beneath the white floes, suggesting their ability to navigate ice that can break the largest ships. To the left of the central ship, etched in ghostly lines on the horizon (Fig. 4), a listing vessel stands in for the many failed ventures, costly both in capital and human lives, that represent the dark side of the pamphlet’s tales of profitable whaling enterprises.

Working with and Against Cetacean Cognition in Several Late Voyages In April 1671, Friedrich Martens signed on as the ship’s surgeon for a commercial vessel, the Jonas in the Whale, bound from Hamburg to Cadiz and then for the far north.55 While performing his medical duties, he kept a diary during both the 53 Wadiwel, “Like One,” 70. 54 KOV, 37–47, 39. 55 This summary of the work’s origins relies on Axel Walter, “‘… to Compile the Answers into a History’: Spitzbergische oder Groenlandische Reise Beschreibung (1671) by Friderich Martens from Hamburg and the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge,” in German Representations of the Far North (17th–19th Centuries): Writing the Arctic, eds. Jan

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Fig. 4. Detail of Fig. 3

Spanish and Arctic legs of the journey and also made a set of drawings. After his return to Europe in August 1671, the drawings were seen by the Hamburg scholar Martin Fogel, who relayed his interest in them to Henry Oldenburg, his correspondent at London’s Royal Society. Oldenburg arranged for a list of questions to be sent to Martens about his experiences in Spitsbergen and Greenland.56 With the help of Fogel and another Hamburg scholar, Michael Kirsten, Martens expanded his diary into a new text organised around the Society’s questions, which was published in 1675 as Reise Beschreibung. In July 1678, Robert Hooke of the Royal Society obtained a copy of Martens’ book and asked his colleague Theodor Haak to produce an English translation, which is probably the one included in Several Late Voyages.57 The German and English versions of Martens’ book have the same structure and largely the same content.58 Following the author’s voyage logs, the main part of the text contains a number of sections, divided into chapters, that discuss the physical geography, plants, and animals of the Arctic. Borm and Joanna Kodzik (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020), 46– 64. 56 For the Society’s practice of issuing questions to sailors, see Felicity Henderson, “Translation in the Circle of Robert Hooke,” in Translating Early Modern Science, eds. Sietske Fransen, Niall Hodson and Karl Enenkel (Leiden: Brill, 2017; Intersections), 17–40. For Oldenburg’s questions, see Beelen, “Wetenschap,” 164. 57 Italian (1680) and Dutch (1685) translations had also appeared before the publication of SLV; see Walter, “Spitzbergische,” 54. 58 Ibid., 51, 58.

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While much of the book reads like a contribution to natural history, its commercial character is apparent from the fact that Martens does not distinguish between cetacean species beyond noting how much oil they yield.59 His observations about whaling appear mainly in four chapters (7–10) that describe, respectively, the whale’s anatomy and behaviour, how it is hunted, its flensing, and the production of oil.

Fig. 5. Tab. Q, SLV, engraving following 130. Image: Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, classmark: GMM/2997

The work also contains a series of engravings or “tables” designated by letters. These include a large fold-out sheet, Tab. Q (Fig. 5), which presents profile views of the whale and the fin whale, and a smaller image, Tab. S, which depicts the hunting technique used by Arctic whalers (Fig. 6).60 The space of encounter described by Martens differs fundamentally from the open sea, constantly in sight of the Dutch coast, where Abraham’s adventure took place. If a decisive factor in the Van Oelens’ story was the action of wind and waves, which they were able to harness in order to capture the fin whale, in the Arctic seas a different element predominates: We find no great Waves […] it is pretty smooth, even when it is somewhat stormy. All the danger is from one Ice-field being bigger then the other, and the little ones swiming 59 SLV, 140; cf. the more detailed taxonomy in SLV’s general introduction, xxiii. 60 This engraving does not appear in Reise Beschreibung.

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faster then the great ones […] not without great danger of the Ships, which are often catcht between, and broken by them.61

Fig. 6. The Whale fishing & killing of Morses, Tab. S, SLV, engraving opposite 179. Image: Biblioteca Virtual de Defensa, Madrid, classmark: 910.4 (26)

The whale, conversely, is adept at exploiting areas congested with ice, “for he is so cunning, that when he perceives where the Ice is he retires thither immediately.”62 Cetacean cunning, for Martens, implies more than an instinctive sense of when to hide. It refers more broadly to the ability of whales to modify their behaviour, over time, in response to their evolving entanglement with the human. Hunting grounds visited over several seasons become unprofitable because the whales “either weary of the place, or sensible of their own danger, do often change their Harbours,” and even the presence of several ships in the same ice-field “maketh

61 SLV, 40. The subtle echo between the “swimming” icebergs and the whales is not in the original German text, which uses the verb trieben (to float, drift): Martens, Reise Beschreibung, 32. 62 SLV, 153.

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them shie.”63 So strong is Martens’ sense of the subjectivity that underlies these behaviours that occasionally he ventures to attribute human characteristics to the whale, as when he refutes a common belief concerning its fearlessness: “he is not very couragious, according to his strength and bigness, for if he sees a Man or a Long-boat, he goeth under Water, and runs away.”64 These comments contrast with The Short and Honest Narrative’s tendency to animalise the living whale and to pass over its subjective experiences. Nevertheless, Martens’ overarching aim is to construct a model of cetacean behaviour that will enable whaling to be conducted more efficiently. The standard hunting technique he describes is similar to the one used by Abraham van Oelen. Following a sighting, the whalers board longboats and attempt to harpoon the whale in order to tether it to one or more of the boats; gradually hauling in the rope, they then stab it to death with lances.65 These two stages are shown in the upper register of Tab. S, while in the lower register, resting on its side in a profile pose that mirrors its living counterpart on the water, a beached whale indicates the successful outcome of the hunt (Fig. 6). Tellingly, when he explains how this technique is actually carried out, Martens focuses less on the whale’s “cunning” or other interior faculties and more on its sensory abilities and the detectable clues it leaves in its environment, these being more useful for the practical business of hunting it. In the enveloping whiteness of the Arctic, the encounter between whale and whaler is conducted as much through hearing as through sight.66 Experienced whalers can tell when the whale has been critically injured because its spouting “cometh out only by drops […] it sounds as if you held an empty Mug or Bottle under Water, and the Water runs into it.”67 Since whales themselves are acute listeners, whaling ships should advance on them when “the Sea beats, dashes, and foams […] so that the Whales do not observe nor mind the striking of the Oars.”68 Whalers can also exploit the clues produced by the whale’s ecological entanglements with other animals, as when flocks of Arctic seabirds “discover a dead Whale, and so we get them sometimes without any great trouble.”69 While they rely for their authority on the author’s direct experience of whales, these strategies also recall the process of working with (or within) the constraints 63 Ibid., 185 (in SLV’s anonymous “Supplement” but probably based on Martens’ information), 40. 64 Ibid., 142. 65 Ibid., 145–52. 66 For the conceptual issues raised by diminished visibility in the Arctic, see Christopher Heuer, Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2019). 67 SLV, 154. 68 Ibid., 152; also 35, 135. 69 Ibid., 95.

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of animals’ dispositions and environmental affordances described in Barua’s model of co-constitutive productive activity. Even so, whaling emerges from Martens’ account as an unpredictable pursuit, one in which success turns on factors, like favourable weather, that are beyond human control: The fortune in ketching of Whales is like the Chances of Gaming, and there is no great understanding required to find them: some see and catch more then they desire, and others but at half a mile distant from them, see not one.70

In this arresting comparison of whaling to gambling, human rationality or “understanding” is largely ineffectual in the face of the whale’s ability to perceive threats both at the surface of the water and while it is submerged, where it can easily go undetected even when whaling ships are nearby. If the crew succeeds in making a kill, new challenges arise as they attempt to deal with the water-bound, quickly-decaying carcass. The straightforward movement of the product of the hunt from sea to shore implied in Tab. S (Fig. 6) turns out to be overly optimistic: like the rolling, drifting, sinking body that nearly capsized the Van Oelens’ boat, the whales described in Several Late Voyages resist human attempts at appropriation even beyond the point of their physical death. Martens presents the reader with carcasses that rot, teem with parasites, and induce disturbing changes in the human body: [Dead whales] begin immediately to stink, and this encreases hourly, and their Flesh boils and ferments like unto Beer or Ale, and holes break in their Bellies, that their Guts come out. If any Man is enclined to sore Eyes, this Vapour enflames them immediately, as if Quicklime was flung into them.71

For these reasons, Martens states that while finding a dead whale may be the easiest way to catch one, it is still “nasty and stinking work”: “long and white Maggots grow in their Flesh, they are flat like unto Worms that breed in Mens Bellies, and they smell worse than ever I smelt any thing in my Life.”72 These stinking bodies call to mind Shukin’s observation that smell can act as a “sensory trigger of mimetic identification,” inducing in the perceiver aversion but also an ineluctable recognition of shared corporeality with the animal – in this instance, a sense of common vulnerability to mortal decay that can breed in human as well as cetacean bodies.73 As if to ward off this recognition, the passages where Martens discusses the production of oil from blubber reveal a countervailing tendency to look through 70 Ibid., 39; emphasis added; also 151 (on the uncertainty over whether dead whales will sink or float). 71 Ibid., 151–52; also 5. 72 Ibid., 151; also 160 (on the toxic effects of whale fat). 73 Shukin, Animal Capital, 56, 63 (quotation), 65–66.

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the whale to the quantities of raw material, measurable in tons and pounds, that can be extracted from its body. As in The Short and Honest Narrative, linguistic figures involving quantification become prominent once the blubber has been removed from the carcass, although Martens is more attuned to the commercial “grading” of whales and cetacean products.74 His description of the three kinds of blubber (white, yellow, and red), for example, differentiates them finely by quality: The white Fat is full of small Sinews, and it does not yield so much Oyl as the yellow. The yellow Fat that looks like Butter is the best. The red and watery Fat cometh from dead Whales, for in the place where the Fat runs out the Blood settles in its room, and yields the worst and least Oyl.75

Baleen provokes a more speculative response. Referencing the baleen plates visible in the upper profile view of the whale (a) in Tab. Q (Fig. 5), Martens is moved to enthusiastic conjecture: the “whale-bone” might be used for anything “we use Boards for […] Boxes, Knife-hafts, Walking-sticks,” while “the Hair of the Fish” might be turned into “Packthreads, Clothes,” and other textile goods.76 The visual and material properties of the engraving heighten this sense of availability, though in a way that sits uneasily with the presentation of the whale elsewhere in the work. The impressive fold-out sheet, with its profile views of the whale and fin whale that are bounded at left and right by the weapons used in the hunt, offers the reader a lucid virtual encounter with an animal which, as Martens’ own observations indicate, in reality often confounded human vision and the whaler’s drive for mastery.

Conclusion Approaching the whale as a lively commodity, this essay has argued that the concept of encounter value offers a useful means of analysing the human-cetacean entanglements recorded in two early modern accounts of whaling. My discussion has reflected on the differences, both within and between the works, in how the animal is represented in its various guises as a quarry, a recalcitrant dead body, a source of valuable materials, and an object of wonder or knowledge. Martens’ sensitive comments on the whale’s cognitive and sensory abilities are offered up in the service of anticipating its responses during the hunt, where its “cunning” often proves a match for human understanding. In The Short and Honest Narrative, by contrast, the reader gets little sense of the fin whale’s 74 SLV, 140. 75 Ibid., 161. 76 Ibid., 133.

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subjectivity or even sentience, and its intentionality is revealed largely through its movements in the water. For all its limitations, this way of portraying the animal does not involve the anthropomorphic projections seen in Martens. The works also recognise – albeit obliquely or only at certain moments – the contingencies that bedevilled whaling in an era when the only way to make a “catch” was through a precarious embodied encounter with animals whose agency, intelligence, and perceptual abilities were always consequential for their human pursuers.

Bibliography Appleby, John. “A ‘Voyage to Greenland for the Catching of Whales’: English Whaling Enterprise in the Seventeenth Century.” International Journal of Maritime History 9, no. 2 (1997): 29–49. Barua, Maan. “Lively Commodities and Encounter Value.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 4 (2016): 725–44. Beelen, Hans. “Wetenschap, wonderen, walvisvaart: de transformaties van Friedrich Martens’ Spitzbergische oder Groenlandische Reisebeschreibung (1675) in de Lage Landen.” In Zwischen Sprachen en Culturen, Wechselbeziehungen im niederländischen, deutschen und afrikaansen Sprachgebiet, edited by Ute Boonen, 149–64. Münster: Waxmann, 2018. Collard, Rosemary-Claire, and Jessica Dempsey. “Life for Sale? The Politics of Lively Commodities.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 45, no. 11 (2013): 2682–99. De Jong, Cornelis. Geschiedenis van de oude Nederlandse walvisvaart. Pretoria: Universiteit van Suid-Afrika, 1972–1979. Demuth, Bathsheba. Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. New York: Norton, 2019. Ellis, Richard. Men and Whales. London: Robert Hale, 1992. Giggs, Rebecca. Fathoms: The World in the Whale. Melbourne: Scribe, 2020. Gillespie, Kathryn. “Nonhuman Animal Resistance and the Improprieties of Live Property.” In Animals, Biopolitics, Law: Lively Legalities. Edited by Irus Braverman, 117–32. London: Routledge, 2016. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Henderson, Felicity. “Translation in the Circle of Robert Hooke.” In Translating Early Modern Science, edited by Sietske Fransen, Niall Hodson, and Karl Enenkel, 17–40. Leiden: Brill, 2017; Intersections. Heuer, Christopher. Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2019. Jackson, Gordon. The British Whaling Trade. St John’s, NL: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2005. Kort en opregt verhaal van het droevig en avontuurlijk wedervaren van Abraham Jansz. van Oelen, Schipper van nieu Vos-meer. [s. l.], 1683.

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Lindquist, Ole. “Whaling by Peasant Fishermen in Norway, Orkney, Shetland, the Faeroe Islands, Iceland and Norse Greenland: Medieval and Early Modern Whaling Methods and Inshore Legal Régimes.” In Whaling and History: Perspectives on the Evolution of the Industry, edited by Bjørn Basberg, Jan Erik Ringstad, and Einar Wexelsen, 17–54. Sandefjord: Sandefjordmuseene, 1993. Martens, Friedrich. Spitzbergische oder Groenlandische Reise Beschreibung, gethan im Jahr 1671. Hamburg: Gottfried Schultzens Kosten, 1675. Narborough, John. An Account of several late Voyages & Discoveries to the South and North towards the Streights of Magellan. London: S. Smith and B. Walford, 1694. Oslund, Karen. “Protecting Fat Mammals or Carnivorous Humans? Towards an Environmental History of Whales.” Historical Social Research 29, no. 3 (2004): 63–81. Purchas, Samuel. Hakluytus Posthumus: or Purchas His Pilgrimes. 20 vols. Glasgow: Maclehose, 1905–1907. Roman, Joseph. Whale. London: Reaktion, 2006. Shukin, Nicole. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Szabo, Vicki Ellen. Monstrous Fishes and the Mead-Dark Sea: Whaling in the Medieval North Atlantic. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Wadiwel, Dinesh. “‘Like One Who is Bringing his Own Hide to Market’: Marx, Irigaray, Derrida and Animal Commodification.” Angelaki 21, no. 2 (2016): 65–82. Walter, Axel. “‘… to Compile the Answers into a History’: Spitzbergische oder Groenlandische Reise Beschreibung (1671) by Friderich Martens from Hamburg and the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge.” In German Representations of the Far North (17th–19th Centuries): Writing the Arctic, edited by Jan Borm and Joanna Kodzik, 46–64. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020. Wolloch, Nathaniel. Subjugated Animals: Animals and Anthropocentrism in Early Modern European Culture. Amherst: Humanity Books, 2006.

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Annie Dwyer (University of Washington)

The Incorporation of the Animal: Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal-Machine

Abstract In reading Eadweard Muybridge’s famous photography study conducted at the University of Pennsylvania, Animal Locomotion (1887), this essay ultimately illuminates how stopmotion photography’s rendering of the animal body as an “animal-machine” simultaneously constructs the laboring, racialized body as wholly body, freed from pain, ready for and reducible to its instrumental use. Yet this essay also highlights the cultural anxieties accompanying the mechanization of animal life at this historical moment, arguing that the animal-machine, however expedient it proves in the reconsolidation of racial hegemony, simultaneously occasions a crisis in political liberalism’s positioning of the female body as a site of recuperation from the ravages of industrial capitalism. Accordingly, the photographic depictions of whimsy, happenstance, and accident that punctuate Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion attempt to resuscitate what the animal-machine otherwise erodes: the fiction of a sphere of natural existence alternative to and uncorrupted by civil society. Keywords: Muybridge, Photography, Animal, Machine, Liberalism

Within critical animal studies, the natural philosopher René Descartes’s description of the animal as an automaton often serves as a kind of shorthand for the conceptualization of the animal that is characteristic of modernity.1 However, as Anita Guerrini has pointed out, while Descartes described the animal as a machine as early as the middle of the seventeenth century, few of his contemporaries actually translated mechanical philosophy’s “methodological principle,” an approach to research presuming a mechanistic understanding of the natural world, to a “moral principle,” an effective belief that animals really are 1 For Jacques Derrida, the treatment of the animal within the Western philosophical tradition can be traced back to Descartes’s famous pronouncement that insofar as the animal is determined by natural law, the animal “neither speaks nor responds.” According to John Berger, as well, it was Descartes’s dualistic philosophy severing body from soul that bequeathed “the body to the laws of physics and mechanics” and reduced the animal to the realm of the bodily. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 89; John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” in Selected Essays, ed. Geoff Dyer (New York: Pantheon, 2001), 264.

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machines, incapable of thought, insusceptible to pain.2 Descartes famously put forth a description of the animal as an automaton in the annals of philosophical literature; however, the discourse of animality, to invoke Michael Lundblad’s phrase,3 evidences a wider variability over the course of modernity. Indeed, the particularization and dissemination of any idea of animal life should be considered not only in connection to developments in philosophy, but also in relationship to the interspecies practices and institutional forms accompanying capitalism’s global expansion. With a view to greater historical specificity and material practice, this essay contends that the Cartesian understanding of the animal as an automaton was revitalized and popularized within the trans-Atlantic world around the end of the nineteenth century through multiple, interconnected processes, including but certainly not limited to the emergence of visual technologies, such as stopmotion photography. In Eadweard Muybridge’s photography study conducted at the University of Pennsylvania, Animal Locomotion (1887), the camera not only captures but actively constructs animal life as a mechanical phenomenon, stripped of animacy or agency. On the occasion of an exhibition of Muybridge’s work at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Randy Malamud observed as much, objecting to the way in which Muybridge’s photographs reify non-human animals and collude with “his era’s industrialist and expansionist fantasies.”4 Taking Malamud’s cue, this essay explores the mechanization of the animal in Muybridge’s photographs, but attends more closely to the technological innovations underpinning Muybridge’s representation of non-human animals, while exploring additional implications of the animal-machine of his camera’s making. As the following discussion will show, the animal-machine found in Muybridge’s photography was recruited to the representation of racialized labor at the height of industrial capitalism. In Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion, in fact, stop-motion photography’s mechanization of the non-human animal body is mapped onto the laboring, racialized body, which is rendered in its animalization as wholly body, freed from pain, ready for and reducible to its instrumental use. Yet Muybridge’s work also betrays the cultural anxieties accompanying the mechanization of non-human animal (and animalized human) life at this historical conjuncture. His ambivalence surfaces most powerfully in the air of whimsy, contingency, and happenstance that often pervades the photographic 2 Anita Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 37. 3 Michael Lundblad, The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U. S. Literature and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 4 Randy Malamud, “Eadweard Muybridge, Thief of Animal Souls,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 27, 2010, https://www.chronicle.com/article/eadweard-muybridge-thief-of-a nimal-souls/.

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depictions of (not insignificantly) women. Ultimately, this exploration of Muybridge’s photography suggests that the mechanical casting of animal nature, however expedient it may have proved for upholding the racialized division of labor, was not an untroubled means of reconsolidating social hegemony. The incongruities of Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion ultimately reveal a crisis in the conception of the liberal subject linked to the ascendency of the animal-machine during the Gilded Age, and further illuminate not only the vicissitudes of the discourse of animality but also the critical and constitutive role that historically antecedent, residual notions of animality play in the founding fictions of liberal humanism. Before Eadweard Muybridge began experimenting with photographic studies of animal movement, he had achieved a modicum of celebrity with his landscape photography of the Western United States and Central America.5 Consequently, he was approached by Leland Stanford – one-time governor of California, president of the Central Pacific Railroad, and horse-racing aficionado – who wanted to determine whether all four feet of a horse leave the ground in “unsupported transit,” apocryphally, in order to settle a bet.6 In 1872, Muybridge successfully photographed Stanford’s horse, Occident, and Stanford subsequently employed Muybridge on a continuing basis over the next decade to conduct photographic experiments that might prove useful in training his horses.7 The technique consisted of setting up a battery of cameras that were sequentially triggered as a horse passed across the field of vision, thus capturing the animal’s postural transitions from one moment to another. By 1879, Muybridge finished his work at Stanford’s stable in Palo Alto. He spent the next few years preparing a book of his photographic studies, The Attitudes of Animals in Motion (1881), while giving lectures that were highlighted by the use of his zoöpraxiscope, a device he invented to project the sequential photographs as a motion picture.8 It is perhaps a testament to the historical shifts in human apperception that eventuated from Muybridge’s work that his plates no longer strike the contemporary viewer as disconcertingly strange. At the time of their introduction, 5 On the early years, see Rebecca Solnit, Rivers of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Penguin, 2003). 6 For an interesting discussion of how the wager myth and its refutations are illustrative of the contradictions between science and representation, see Allain Daigle, “Not a Betting Man: Stanford, Muybridge, and the Palo Alto Wager Myth,” Film History 29, no. 4 (2017): 112–130. 7 For an extended exploration of Muybridge’s relationship with Stanford, see Edward Ball, The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures (New York: Doubleday, 2013). 8 For arguments concerning Muybridge and the origins of cinema, see Kevin MacDonnell, Eadweard Muybridge: The Man Who Invented the Moving Picture, (Boston: Little Brown, 1972); Gordon Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge: The Father of the Motion Picture (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1975).

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however, the photographs disputed, for instance, the traditional artistic representation of a galloping horse with legs fully extended rather than gathered beneath the body in midair.9 During his lecture tours, Muybridge often controverted the skepticism of audience members through the use of his zoöpraxiscope, demonstrating that the awkward-seeming transitional moments of an animal’s gait were in fact neither chance singularities nor doctored impossibilities, but natural and necessary to the animal’s movement – or as Muybridge would soon call it, locomotion. Importantly, Muybridge’s early work under the patronage of John Stanford was part of a larger body of scientific photography that emerged during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Alan Sekula, among others, has argued that photography acquired its evidentiary force as it was incorporated as a technology of disciplinary power during this period: from anthropological studies to criminal proceedings, photography was instrumentalized as a means of record and a source of truth, lending credibility to the production of scientific knowledge concomitant with tactics of disciplinary control.10 Of course, critics have long troubled the indexical nature of the photographic image presumed by scientific photography. Sekula, for instance, has argued that the photograph is an “incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of presuppositions” for its meaning.11 For John Tagg, as well, the presentation of the photograph as an unmediated imprint of the real is not only the central obstacle to the realization of the rhetoricity of the image, but also the photograph’s “most powerful rhetorical device.”12 Expanding the insights of Sekula and Tagg, I highlight how the growth of scientific photography ensnared non-human animal bodies as well as the human body within new forms of knowledge/power. Indeed, Muybridge is not the only notable nineteenth-century photographer to focus on non-human animal movement. In 1878, when Étienne Jules-Marey viewed some of Muybridge’s photographs in the French scientific journal La Nature, he began corresponding with Muybridge, and eventually developed his own photographic method for

9 Robert Bartlett Haas, Muybridge: Man in Motion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 156–157. 10 Alan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1975–1983 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Arts and Design, 1984). See also Alan Sekula, “Photography Between Labour and Capital,” in Mining Photographs and Other Pictures, 1948–1968: A Selection from the Negative Archives of Shedden Studio, Glace Bay, Cape Breton, eds. Benjamin H. D. Buchloch and Robert Wilkie (Halifax: Press of the Novia Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), 193–268. 11 Sekula, Photography, 4. 12 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photography and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 35.

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analyzing animal motion.13 The French physiologist, medical inventor, and harbinger of aviation technology had amassed the results of his earlier studies in La Machine Animale, or Animal Mechanism (1873), which theorizes that the animal is essentially an “animated motor.” For Marey, this animated motor was essentially no different from “inanimate motors,” or man-made machines, excepting, perhaps, the animal mechanism’s greater efficiency.14 Remembering the rhetoricity of the photographic image, I would argue that photographic technologies were not simply conscripted to an empirical project of schematizing an extant animal body; rather, the photographs of Marey and Muybridge were highly productive of the kind of “animal mechanism” to which such schemas might be applied. Jonathan Crary’s astute reading of Muybridge’s work emphasizes how photography is constitutive of perception, underlining the abstracting effects of the camera, and further, the compatibility of Muybridge’s vision “with the smooth surface of a global marketplace.”15 For Crary, “Muybridge’s work is a significant instance of what Deleuze and Guattari describe as processes of capitalist deterritorialization and decoding,”16 facilitating the insertion of quantifiable, standardized units into abstract relations of exchange. In its emphasis upon abstraction, Crary’s reading of Muybridge’s work resonates with Mark Seltzer’s understanding of the status of nature in the age of the machine. When Seltzer observes the “denaturalization of nature” over the course of the machine age, he argues that “the ‘discovery’ that bodies and persons are things that can be made” is the decisive development.17 Perhaps the limit of both Crary and Seltzer’s analyses inheres in the simplification or obfuscation of the complicated relay between moments of abstraction and concretization, whether within the accumulations of capital or the calculus of modern biopower. Arguably, however, the animal-machine produced by stop-motion photography and other contemporaneous developments less often exhibits the dizzying possibilities of makeable nature than the ineluctability of “natural” law. For example, both Marey and Muybridge employ the disciplinary tactics that Foucault describes: distributing bodies in space, calibrating action to temporal

13 On the relationship between Marey and Muybridge’s work, see Marta Braun and Elizabeth Whitcombe, “Marey, Muybridge, and Londe: The Photography of Pathological Locomotion,” History of Photography 23, no. 3 (1999): 218–24. On Marey, see Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey, 1830–1904 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992). 14 Etienne-Jules Marey, Animal Mechanism: A Treatise on Terrestrial and Aërial Locomotion (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1874), 549, 551. 15 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 142. 16 Ibid. 17 Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3.

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schemas, and serializing the succession of bodily movements.18 At each stage of motion, Muybridge’s animal bodies are caught in what Brian Massumi might call a concrete possibility, or a “normative variation” of endless, indeterminable potentialities.19 Put differently, Muybridge’s photography removes the body from the sphere of the virtual, which for Massumi, is the highly potentialized incorporeal dimension of the body. The body that emerges within Muybridge’s experiments is qualitatively different from what Massumi describes as “the body without an image,” which registers “the in-between-ness of the incorporeal event.”20 Instead, Muybridge’s photographic experiments configure matter as “being” instead of “doing,” repudiating the qualitative transformation of the body through affective experience. Arguably, it is the serialization of bodily movement that plays the most significant role in the remaking of animal nature within stop-motion photography. For the representation of animal motion within the photographic series actualizes the body not only within space but also across time. By limiting the transformative potentialities of movement to the normative and normativizing instance, Muybridge’s photographs dispel the potentialities of the animal body with an image of the animal-machine. The photographic experiments instantiate what Foucault underscores as the paradoxical result of the manipulations of the body within disciplinary forms of power: the body thus reveals its “natural machinery” or yields “the conditions of functioning proper to an organism.”21 To put it plainly, disciplinary tactics not only instrumentalize the body, but further rationalize the body, generating its “mechanical certainties” that might be utilized more effectively.22 Muybridge’s early photographic experiments were more narrowly focused on the “natural machinery” of Stanford’s horses. However, Muybridge eventually parted ways with Stanford over a copyright dispute. While Muybridge was in London on tour, Stanford and his friend J. B. D. Stillman published The Horse in Motion (1882), which contained five of Muybridge’s photographs and ninety-one 18 Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 19 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 20 Ibid., 62. 21 Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 156. 22 For example, in the stock lecture given during his European tour in the early 1880s, Muybridge takes pains to discount the variability in gait across specimens of the horse: “There is little essential difference in general characteristics of […] the several movements that have been described.” Eadweard Muybridge, “The Attitudes of Animals in Motion, Illustrated with the Zoopraxiscope,” (Lecture given at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Monday, March 13, 1882), 13, https://ia800206.us.archive.org/28/items/attitudesofanima00muyb/attitudesofa nima00muyb.pdf.

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lithographs based on his work at Palo Alto, but which nowhere attributed any of the images to Muybridge. Stanford had consigned Muybridge to the status of a technician, and Muybridge was furious.23 Still in the midst of a legal battle with Stanford, which he eventually lost, Muybridge began an extended lecture tour seeking alternative patronage for a new and elaborate project exploring “men, women, and children, animals and birds, all actively engaged in […] actions incidental to every-day life, which illustrate the motion and the play of muscles.”24 Muybridge eventually found his sponsor in the University of Pennsylvania. The grounds of the newly created Veterinary Department were allocated for the photographer’s use, and the university advanced an initial sum of $5,000 towards the completion of the project. Between the years of 1884 and 1885, Muybridge took over 100,000 sequential photographs, recording human and non-human animals’ postural transitions from one moment to another while they enacted a wide range of daily activities. Using a new electro-exposing device, which automated the release of the camera shutters, Muybridge now employed up to three batteries of twelve cameras each that functioned independently of the subject, and often represented not only lateral views but also front and rear “foreshortenings” at sixty and ninety degrees.25 From these studies, he published Animal Locomotion (1887), a collection of 781 collotype plates intended for the advancement of art and science.26 Of the 781 plates of Animal Locomotion, 561 display human subjects. Significantly, many of the human activities that Muybridge records are forms of manual labor, which range from shoveling to laying brick to hammering on an anvil (Fig. 1). Indeed, Animal Locomotion marks one of the first uses of photography to analyze the laboring human body, the better to calibrate its “mechanism” to productive ends. In so doing, Muybridge anticipated, and very likely inspired, the later photographic experiments of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who more famously brought photography to bear on workplace rationalization 23 For a discussion of this dispute with a view to Muybridge’s aspirations to authorship and originality, despite the complications posed by the medium of photography, Martha Braun’s work is particularly illuminating. See Marta Braun, “Muybridge, Authorship, Originality,” Early Popular Visual Culture 11, no. 1 (2013): 41–51. 24 Eadweard Muybridge, “Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements,” Prospectus and Catalogue of Plates (University of Pennsylvania: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1887), 4. 25 Muybridge elaborated his use of “foreshortenings” in a few instances to create “bullet time” images, which involved simultaneously triggering five or six cameras arranged in semicircle around a subject, rather than sequential photographs. See Braun, “Muybridge, Authorship, Originality.” 26 Marta Braun, Eadweard Muybridge (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 182–215; Philip Brookman, Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change (Steidl: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 2010), 229–335; Haas, Muybridge, 93–181; Phillip Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 112–221.

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Fig. 1. Muybridge, Plate 378: Hammering on Anvil, from Animal Locomotion, ca. 1887, collotype, University of Pennsylvania: University Archives Image Collection

schemes during the first decades of the twentieth century.27 Indeed, Nicole Shukin cites Muybridge’s photography as an important precedent for the development of principles of scientific management: “time-motion ideologies originating in the study of animal bodies developed ergonomic implications for an industrial culture of moving assembly lines.”28 Following Shukin’s injunction to attend to both “the semiotic currency of animal signs and the carnal traffic in animal substances,”29 I want to underscore how the material practices of early time-motion studies are bound up with historically specific ideas of animality, which in turn, inform the material practices of labor. To elaborate, Muybridge’s taxonomy of the movement proper to different species further naturalizes the position of different “types” of human animals within a stratified social field. Five of Muybridge’s 781 collotype plates feature a mixed-race pugilist named Ben Bailey. Given the pervasive representations of manual labor in Animal Locomotion, it is curious that Bailey does not perform a single functional task. Instead, he is shown walking, ascending and descending stairs, striking blows with his right hand and his left hand, and throwing an enormously large rock (Fig. 2). In considering the figure of Ben Bailey alongside other depictions of sport, Jesús Constantino notes the curious abstraction of the fighter within Muybridge’s photographs, which extirpate his “blows” from any reference to boxing or relation to other fighters: “he is not a boxer; he is a model 27 Elspeth H. Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1874–1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 65–118. 28 Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 73. 29 Ibid., 7.

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Fig. 2. Muybridge, Plate 311: Hurling a 75-Ib. Rock, from Animal Locomotion, ca. 1887, collotype, University of Pennsylvania: University Archives Image Collection

of motion.”30 However, if Bailey does not perform any instrumental activity within the photographic series in which he appears, this is all the better to render his body ready for and reducible to its instrumental use within a racialized division of labor. Consider Frederick Winslow Taylor’s system of scientific management, in which the historical alienation of intellectual labor consequent to rationalization is recast as a biological condition of suitability for menial labor: “one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more merely resembles in his mental make-up the ox.”31 Not insignificantly, animalization abets Taylor’s assignment of persons to unskilled labor. In Muybridge’s representation of Ben Bailey, the simplified, isolated movements, such as the (primitivizing) physical feat of hurling a heavy rock, or more menacingly, the violent act of throwing a punch, animalize Ben Bailey and naturalize the simplified, alienated motion proper to the Black body. This “mechanism” is figured as naturally suited for unskilled labor, and especially needful of management of diverse kinds. As the representation of Ben Bailey illustrates, the animal-machine of Muybridge’s making likewise refigures the meaning of race, given the longstanding representational relay between animality and Blackness. In the context of Muybridge’s catalogue of animal locomotion, the animal body is wholly body, stripped of affect or agency, and alienated from intelligence or sensation. These meanings are tightly fastened to representations of Blackness not only through the specific and simplified scripting of Bailey’s bodily movement, but also 30 Jesús Costantino, “Seeing Without Feeling: Muybridge’s Boxing Pictures and the Rise of the Bourgeois Film Spectator,” Film & History 44, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 73. 31 Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (Stilwell: Forgotten Books, 2008), 46.

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through the introduction of an anthropometric grid; though Muybridge retained the grid in subsequent work, it makes its first appearance with the photographs of Bailey.32 As Elspeth Brown has elaborated, Muybridge’s introduction of the grid in the photographs of Bailey suggests his “investment in gendered evolutionary race science.”33 Brown writes: “It is as if the non-white ‘other’ cannot be understood, scientifically, without the anthropometric grid, a technology for mapping racial difference.”34 Indeed, the anthropometric grid plots the postures through which Bailey moves as bodily measurements or somatic certainties productive of racial typologies that support white supremacy. Brown hypothesizes that Muybridge borrowed the idea of the anthropometric grid from J. H. Lamprey, who in a London-based anthropological journal as early as 1869, used a grid of silk threads at two-inch intervals to better measure physiognomic differences when photographing racial types. Yet the grid was not widely popularized at the time, and indeed, it makes its very first appearance in the American context in Muybridge’s photography. Marta Braun proposes that Joseph Leidy, who was on the committee assigned to oversee Muybridge’s photographic experiments, and a member of the Ethological Society of London, may have suggested the grid to Muybridge.35 However, as Braun herself notes, Muybridge’s committee was mainly a formality: they met only once and rarely came to watch Muybridge at work. Given the absence of confirmed sources, we may well consider the possibility that Muybridge’s grid was developed independently of Lamprey’s earlier application. When Muybridge first began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania in the summer of 1884, he suffered a number of setbacks. It took longer than estimated to build the outdoor studio, which was not finished until the following autumn. However, Muybridge and his assistants were able to make 600 negatives at Philadelphia’s Zoological Garden that first summer. Most of these photographs were discarded, as the bars of the animals’ cages often cast distracting shadows on subjects’ bodies.36 Yet the few photographs from the zoo that were ultimately included in Animal Locomotion raise the possibility that the cages did more than interfere with a clear image, and actually contributed to the development of Muybridge’s method. In the images, for example, of an adjutant walking or an eland trotting (Fig. 3), the cage forms a ready-made backdrop against which bodily movements might be spatially measured. At the very least, the work at the Philadelphia Zoological Gardens would have provided Muybridge 32 Elspeth H. Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body: Eadweard Muybridge’s Locomotion Studies 1883–1887,” Gender & History 17, no. 3 (2005): 627–656. 33 Ibid., 631. 34 Ibid., 637. 35 Braun, Eadweard Muybridge, 193. 36 Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge, 166–170.

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Fig. 3. Muybridge, Plate 774: Adjutant Walking, from Animal Locomotion, ca. 1887, collotype, University of Pennsylvania: University Archives Image Collection

with convincing evidence for the usefulness of a gridded backdrop for a more accurate reading of bodily position. To suggest that the bars of zoo animals’ cages provided some inspiration for Muybridge’s adoption of the anthropometric grid is not to distance Muybridge’s photography from racial science, but rather to reinforce the connection. If Bailey is the first human animal to be made intelligible by a grid that resembles the wires of a zoo animal’s cage in Muybridge’s studies, this all the more attests to a racial imaginary relegating racialized persons to non-human status, stricter forms of disciplinary control, and indeed, the violence of spectacle and spectacle of violence shared by the zoological garden and the boxing ring. In Muybridge’s photographs, the scripting of the female body as well as the Black body effectively naturalizes gendered, racialized divisions of labor. As critics such as Marta Braun and Anthony Guneratne have observed, the narratives that thread through Muybridge’s photographic experiments are highly gendered.37 Both men and women walk, run, jump, and ascend and descend 37 Braun, “Muybridge, Authorship, Originality,” 49. See also Anthony Guneratne, “The Birth of a New Realism: Photography, Painting and the Advent of Documentary Cinema,” Film History 10, no. 2 (1998): 165–187.

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Fig. 4. Muybridge, Plate 214: Lifting a Child from the Ground and Turning Around, from Animal Locomotion, ca. 1887, collotype, Smithsonian American Art Museum

inclines and sets of stairs. However, the photographs of men depict forms of manual labor such as carpentry, masonry, and blacksmithing; women, on the other hand, perform domestic work such as sweeping, washing, and scrubbing floors, or even appear in the midst of childcare, such as “Lifting a Child from the Ground and Turning Around” (Fig. 4). The performance of nineteenth-century gender roles through culturally coded activities such as tipping a hat, in the case of men, or flirting a fan, in the case of women, likewise manifests as the inevitable operation of the bodily mechanism of the male or female. And just as the photographs of Ben Bailey consign him to a species of man closer to the non-human animal, women seem to occupy a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder. In repeatedly photographing women performing activities that require kneeling or stooping, Muybridge seems to play out scenes of evolutionary progression or regression. Plates 182–184 actually depict a woman “Crawling on hands and knees” and “Walking on hands and knees,” just like the quadrupeds in the final plates of Animal Locomotion. Yet the depiction of women often seems to defy rather than typify the mechanistic representation of the body towards which Muybridge’s photography tends. In other words, if the human female body appears undoubtedly animal, it does not always seem the machine. Especially when women are the objects of representation, there is often an element of accident, whimsy, or even outright absurdity in the story the serialized photographs tell. In many photographs of women, the investigation of anatomy is subordinated to an aesthetic interest in the graceful movements of a dress while dancing, or the cascade of water as a woman pours it into a basin or onto the ground. As is seldom the case with male

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Fig. 5. Muybridge, Plate 174: Running and Jumping with Skipping Rope, from Animal Locomotion, ca. 1887, collotype, Smithsonian American Art Museum

models, female models are often depicted turning in the midst of an action, as if unexpectedly interrupted by a thought or call, or dropping, as if by accident, an object such as a handkerchief. Finally, women often stage quaint rather than characteristic activities, such using a skipping rope, throwing oneself into a heap of hay, or crossing an imaginary brook over stones with a fishing pole in hand (Fig. 5). Several critics have mentioned the incongruity of these photographs within the larger archive of Muybridge’s work, and Marta Braun has given sustained attention to them. In her rightful assessment, “these pictures are incongruent with what we understand to be scientific analysis of locomotion.”38 Additionally, Braun has usefully revealed Muybridge’s adulteration of several photographic sequences, using tactics such as insertion, contraction, or reordering, to argue that in the final instance, “Muybridge’s concern is with stories,” not with scientific objectivity.39 I concur with Braun’s assessment that Muybridge considered himself to be a creator, not a technician: his impassioned copyright dispute with Stanford over the publication of The Horse in Motion is ample evidence of this. 38 Marta Braun, “Muybridge’s Scientific Fictions,” Studies in Visual Communication 10, no. 3 (1984): 13. Alexander Olson has also usefully shown how Muybridge’s album of interior photographs, created in 1880 for his friends Kate and Robert Johnson, similarly dispenses with disinterested scientific investigation and revels in the use of mirrors, the illusion of ghostly presences, and other visual tricks to create “an aesthetic altogether unlike the positivist aura of the motion studies.” It is not insignificant that such an aesthetic emerges in the representation of domestic space. Alexander Olson, “Muybridge in the Parlor,” Journal of American Studies 50, no. 1 (2016): 82. 39 Ibid., 18.

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Yet the gendered character of these photographs indicates something beyond aspirations towards artistry at their origins. Arguably, Muybridge’s “artistic” photographs are best described less as a negation of the predominant tendencies of his work, and more as a complex negotiation of the problems unwittingly posed by the animal-machine of his camera’s making – the troubling of ideas of authorship, among them. Muybridge’s evident ambivalence toward the instrumental rationality that characterizes much of his work may illustrate an incipient perception of how this rationalizing impulse eventuates in forms of unfreedom. In countervailing images of whimsy and happenstance, Muybridge seems to anticipate an emergent aesthetic that Mary Ann Doan has identified and insightfully explored, arguing that the instrumentalization of time with the expansion of industrial capitalism was accompanied by a “structuring of contingency” within new technologies such as film. With the increasing instrumentalization of time, Doan argues, the filmic capture of the singular and indeterminate was sometimes embraced “to ensure their residence outside structure, to make tolerable an incessant rationalization.”40 The strange scripting of women within Animal Locomotion might be read in this vein: as an attempt to recuperate a sphere of “outside” of the instrumentalization of time and rationalization of movement more commonly advanced by Muybridge’s photographs.

Fig. 6. Muybridge, Plate 663: “Denver,” Refractory, from Animal Locomotion, ca. 1887, collotype, University of Pennsylvania: University Archives Image Collection

But further, it is important to underscore that it is precisely the construction of animality that is at stake in Muybridge’s “structuring of contingency.” Indeed, Muybridge’s imaginative countercurrent often swirls around non-human animals. Just as women are often cast in scenes of contrived contingency, so too, some non-human animals are caught in scenes of stimulated surprise, as in the 40 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 11.

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Fig. 7. Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, Plate 715: Tugging at a Towel, from Animal Locomotion, ca. 1887, collotype, University of Pennsylvania: University Archives Image Collection

plate, “Chickens scared by a torpedo.” Despite the prevalent representation of working animals in Animal Locomotion, Muybridge remains intensely interested in those animals who might interrupt human intentions or defy human instrumentalization, even if only in theory. In a series featuring a donkey “acting refractory,” there is not a single photograph in which the donkey’s hind legs lift from the ground, while the model observably propels himself off the haunches of the animal so that Muybridge might capture him “being kicked” (Fig. 6). The depictions of animals performing tricks, such as the plate that displays Denver the donkey’s miscellaneous performances, and the portrayals of animals engaged in play, as in the sequence that captures two dogs named Ike and Maggie playing tug-of-war (Fig. 7), likewise suggest Muybridge’s ambivalence towards the animal-machine that his photographic method tends to manufacture. Akira Mizuta Lippit offers one possible reading of the nostalgic character of such images. As animals were rapidly disappearing in the midst of modern developments, Lippit argues, they were simultaneously reintroduced by modern technologies such as stop-motion photography: “Muybridge seemed to be racing against the imminent disappearance of animals from the new urban environment.”41 For Lippit, however, if displaced animals found virtual shelters in new technological media, the paradoxical effect was that “animals came to be seen as emblems of the new, industrial environment,”42 indistinguishable from the technological bodies replacing them. In reading the photographs discussed directly above, I would argue, we need to account for Muybridge’s manifest urge to catalogue not only disappearing but domestic species, and to admit his evident impulse, however specious and unsuccessful in the end, to sustain the distinction between the technological and the natural in at least some representations. 41 Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 185. 42 Ibid., 187.

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Here is where I also depart from Antoine Traisnel’s insightful Benjaminian reading of Muybridge’s work, which usefully extends a conception of animal life within technological reproducibility that may feed but nonetheless exceeds the dictates of biocapital. If the reconceptualization of animals as reproducible allows for the exploitation and extermination of animal life on an unprecedented scale, in Traisnel’s reading, it also “occasions a radical rearticulation of the ageold opposition between physis and techné.”43 For Traisnel, Muybridge’s photographs played a critical role in prompting the recognition of the technological nature of reality: “reality is not passively awaiting to be uncovered but is, in effect, constituted by the observer.”44 This insight encases the revolutionary promise of an ability to contextualize the self within one’s own environment – as well as to acknowledge the Umwelten of other animals. On the one hand, I concur with Traisnel’s insight that “Muybridge’s protocinematic experiments can be mobilized to ethological and biosemiotic ends.”45 On the other hand, many of Muybridge’s whimsical photographs actively resist the revolutionary potential of his camera, seeking instead to resurrect the aura of the animal and repudiate the reproducibility of the image – as well as the realities of reproductive labor. Significantly, once again, it is the human female model who is most often the medium for Muybridge’s summoning of the singular and indeterminate; women most often invite the affective relays proscribed by the typological example and conjure the sense of unicity and authenticity characteristic of the aura. Arguably, these incongruous photographs do not simply interrupt instrumental rationality, but further aim to recuperate a particular idea of female animality that is productive of liberal personhood. For the ruse of a domestic realm ruled by non-material values is paradoxically bound up with ideas of animality, insofar as the invisibilization of reproductive labor could be described as a kind of animalization of labor: the reproduction of forces of production, whether through affective labor, domestic labor, or childbirth, are cast as merely animal, simply natural, functions. In its predominant register, of course, Muybridge’s project rationalizes the movement of the female body, and in so doing, visibilizes the reproductive labor associated with or assigned to women as productive labor. The rationalization of these “animal” functions within Muybridge’s photographs thus erodes the liberal notion of a private sphere of unproductive, “merely animal” existence. It is not simply that Muybridge’s photographs (in the main) destabilize the position of the female body as a site of recuperation from the ravages of industrial 43 Antoine Traisnel, Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 181. 44 Ibid., 184. 45 Ibid., 156.

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capitalism. More foundationally, Muybridge’s photographic method precipitates a consequential transformation of the meanings of animality yoked to the productive fictions of political liberalism. While it is beyond the purview of this essay to fully explore, scholars such as Kathleen Grier and Colleen Glenney Boggs have shown how material practices such as pet-keeping and historical developments such as the early animal rights movement were implicated in liberal subject formation.46 Significantly, the ideas of animality that predominated within these earlier nineteenth-century developments highlighted the sentience of the nonhuman animal, inviting affective relays that contributed to the construction of a feminized sphere of natural existence uncorrupted by civil society. As Boggs insightfully argues, “the construction of [liberal] subjectivity occurs by affective means […] that hinge on the literal relationship to animals and on their figurative representation.”47 In contrast, by divesting the animal body of affective properties, or stripping emotion from animal locomotion, Muybridge’s figure of the animal-machine interferes with the ideological envisioning of an affective economy alternative to the market economy. Consequently, the photographs of Animal Locomotion sometimes seem to abandon the pursuit of scientific evidence, and reach instead for the “emanation of the referent.” To continue with Roland Barthes’s terminology, Muybridge betrays an impulse to revive the punctum within the informational field of the studium.48 Muybridge salvages the conceit of a non-instrumental arena of private life in some counterintuitive ways. On the one hand, Muybridge’s photographs rationalize the most cloistered activities of the boudoir, which by no coincidence, only women perform: dressing and undressing; washing and bathing; and even getting into and out of bed (Fig. 8). On the other hand, these voyeuristic photographs betray a titillating intent, which as Janine Mileaf notes, is reconciled with contemporaneous social mores only by hiding behind the ostensibly sci-

46 Colleen Glenney Boggs, Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Katherine Grier, Pets in America: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 47 Boggs, Animalia Americana, 2. 48 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010). What Barthes calls the “studium” is the conveyance of information in photography: the function of the studium is to inform, to represent, to depict with “no duality, no indirection, no disturbance” (41). On the other hand, in attempting to describe what animates certain photographs, Barthes names a second element that is sometimes present, which he calls the “punctum,” and which he elaborates as the “sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also a cast of the dice” (27). The punctum often proceeds, for Barthes, from the accidental or occasional detail, “offered by chance and for nothing” (5). Beyond Doan’s description of the filmic capture of contingency, Barthes suggests the punctum “is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (57). Put differently, the punctum revives the affective resonance of the image.

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Fig. 8. Muybridge, Plate 495: Phases of the Toilet, from Animal Locomotion, ca. 1887, collotype, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Fig. 9. Muybridge, Plate 444: Two Models Shaking Hands and Kissing Each Other, from Animal Locomotion, ca. 1887, collotype, University of Pennsylvania: University Archives Image Collection

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Fig. 10. Muybridge, Plate 73: Turning around in Surprise and Walking Away, from Animal Locomotion, ca. 1887, collotype, University of Pennsylvania: University Archives Image Collection

entific of ends of Muybridge’s enterprise.49 The staging of a number of homoerotic sequences, in particular, border on perversity for a nineteenth-century viewer, unfastening sexuality from the heterosexual couple and family form. More than a gratuitous indulgence of the male gaze – though the images are also this – such representations recover an animality irreducible to instrumental use. The photographs that include women playfully bathing each other, two women kissing one another, and one woman disrobing another ultimately underscore the irreconcilability of the libidinal and the rational through an eroticism in excess of biological reproduction or social sanction (Fig. 9). One way of reading such sequences would be to recognize how Muybridge effectively activates residual meanings of animality that exceed instrumental rationality. The image of a woman “turning around in shame and walking away” instantiates the affective register of the flesh that is resuscitated through such representations (Fig. 10).

49 For discussions of the eroticism of Muybridge’s nude figures, see Janine A. Mileaf, “Poses for the Camera: Eadweard Muybridge’s Studies of the Human Figure,” American Art 16, no. 3 (2002): 30–53; Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Sarah Gordon, Indecent Exposures: Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion Nudes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

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In one of the first sessions that he conducted for Animal Locomotion, Muybridge photographed a woman spanking her child in a remarkable series that rationalizes the private forms of punishment so foundational to the functioning of a disciplinary society. In the very last session that he conducted – and in the final plate that appears in the arrangement of Animal Locomotion – Muybridge photographed the aforementioned chickens scared by a torpedo. Ultimately, it would seem, Muybridge’s relentless pursuit of the rationalization of animal movement gave way to an increasing apprehension about the animal-machine unleashed by his method. For the animal of Muybridge’s experiments can no longer signify a refuge from an inhuman modernity or an affective register that exceeds rationalization. Consequently, Muybridge’s photographs at times present the animal as individual rather than typical, feeling rather than functioning, at play rather than at work, in an effort to assuage the anxieties that arise in the wake of the project’s primary impulse. Given the overrepresentation of nonhuman animals and animalized women in Muybridge’s “weird” photographs, however, they are best understood not as emancipatory refutations of instrumental rationality, but as fraught attempts to shore up the compensatory fictions of liberal personhood – which are so integral, in fact, to the accumulation of capital. At those moments when Muybridge’s photographs seem to release the animal from its iron cage, then, they would do so only to capture it again.

Bibliography Ball, Edward. The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures. New York: Doubleday, 2013. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010. Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals?” In Selected Essays, edited by Geoff Dyer. New York: Pantheon, 2001. Boggs, Colleen Glenney. Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Braun, Marta. Eadweard Muybridge. London: Reaktion Books, 2010. –. “Muybridge, Authorship, Originality.” Early Popular Visual Culture 11, no. 1 (2013): 41–51. –. “Muybridge’s Scientific Fictions.” Studies in Visual Communication 10, no. 3 (1984): 2–21. –. Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey, 1830–1904. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992. Braun, Marta, and Elizabeth Whitcombe. “Marey, Muybridge, and Londe: The Photography of Pathological Locomotion.” History of Photography 23, no. 3 (1999): 218–24. Brookman, Philip. Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change. Steidl: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 2010.

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Brown, Elspeth H. The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1874–1929. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. –. “Racialising the Virile Body: Eadweard Muybridge’s Locomotion Studies 1883–1887.” Gender & History 17, no. 3 (2005): 627–656. Costantino, Jesús. “Seeing Without Feeling: Muybridge’s Boxing Pictures and the Rise of the Bourgeois Film Spectator.” Film & History 44, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 66–81. Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Daigle, Allain. “Not a Betting Man: Stanford, Muybridge, and the Palo Alto Wager Myth.” Film History 29, no. 4 (2017): 112–130. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Gordon, Sarah. Indecent Exposures: Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion Nudes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Guerrini, Anita. Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Guneratne, Anthony. “The Birth of a New Realism: Photography, Painting and the Advent of Documentary Cinema.” Film History 10, no. 2 (1998): 165–187. Grier, Katherine. Pets in America: A History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Haas, Robert Bartlett. Muybridge: Man in Motion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Hendricks, Gordon. Eadweard Muybridge: The Father of the Motion Picture. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1975. MacDonnell, Kevin. Eadweard Muybridge: The Man Who Invented the Moving Picture. Boston: Little Brown, 1972. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Lundblad, Michael. The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U. S. Literature and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Malamud, Randy. “Eadweard Muybridge, Thief of Animal Souls.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 27, 2010. https://www.chronicle.com/article/eadweard-muybridge-thi ef-of-animal-souls/. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Marey, Etienne-Jules. Animal Mechanism: A Treatise on Terrestrial and Aërial Locomotion. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1874. Mileaf, Janine A. “Poses for the Camera: Eadweard Muybridge’s Studies of the Human Figure.” American Art 16, no. 3 (2002): 30–53. Muybridge, Eadweard. “Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements.” Prospectus and Catalogue of Plates. University of Pennsylvania: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1887.

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–. “The Attitudes of Animals in Motion, Illustrated with the Zoopraxiscope.” Lecture given at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Monday, March 13, 1882. https://ia800206.us.a rchive.org/28/items/attitudesofanima00muyb/attitudesofanima00muyb.pdf. Olson, Alexander. “Muybridge in the Parlor.” Journal of American Studies 50, no. 1 (2016): 81–104. Prodger, Phillip. Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Sekula, Alan. Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1975–1983. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Arts and Design, 1984. –. “Photography Between Labour and Capital.” In Mining Photographs and Other Pictures, 1948–1968: A Selection from the Negative Archives of Shedden Studio, Glace Bay, Cape Breton, edited by Benjamin H. D. Buchloch and Robert Wilkie, 193–268. Halifax: Press of the Novia Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983. Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge, 1992. Shukin, Nicole. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Solnit, Rebecca. Rivers of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. New York: Penguin, 2003. Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photography and Histories. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Taylor, Frederick Winslow. The Principles of Scientific Management. Stilwell: Forgotten Books, 2008. Traisnel, Antoine. Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible.’ Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

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Sebastian Gatz (Konstfack – University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm)

New Romanticism: It’s Time for New Realities

Abstract The essay elaborates on the fluidity of realities and different forms of shaping them. Realities can be created and thus must be imagined first and implemented second. Reality production happens on different scales: from the small design studio – where products and desires are created – to the big world stage, where political narratives shape global happenings. At the moment we are experiencing a global dispute about how and to what extend humanity should technologically interact with nature. Should humanity intensify the control of climatic issues through the use of technology or slow down and develop new modes of being in the world? Existing movements provide space for exploring new ways of being in the world such as posthumanism, ahumanism, degrowth practice and marginalized forms of knowledge production such as occulture. Those fields come from fundamentally different (research) traditions but overlap in their quest for new non-anthropocentric ontologies. The overlapping space of these movements is conceptualized as a form of New Romanticism which opposes mainstream reality production and includes the nonhuman in its worldview. Methods for shaping realities range from speculative design to (capitalist) magic. I intend to advocate for non-hegemonic ontological explorations in academic research through experimental speculative design methods. I have written in an explorative style in order to implement speculation as a method. I first begin by looking at a tradition of Romanticism as an “irrational” opposing force to scientism and note how tendencies towards the Romantic have crept into the impetus behind other movements. Afterwards I explore different forms of shaping realities and narratives. Then I will propose new narratives for care for the age of the Anthropocene, followed by some initial ideas of how to implement New Romanticism through methods of Speculative Design. I will conclude with a short summary. Keywords: Technology, Romanticism, Posthumanism, Degrowth, Occulture

A Romantic Longing for the Irrational 19th century Romanticism focused on the human in its endeavor to criticize the technological and industrial developments of the time. I propose that a revival of Romanticism is currently taking place, which I have termed New Romanticism.

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New Romanticism is evident in the overlapping spaces of many existing movements that have romantic tendencies. The updated version proposes to be aware of a much more complex anthropogenic landscape or what Haraway calls naturecultures.1 What is shared by both is the desire to slow down any unquestioned technological developments in order to reevaluate the human’s position in relationship to nature (or better: the cosmos). This unquestioned technological development is what philosopher Yuk Hui calls “mono-technological culture”2 and points the finger at what New Romanticism questions. Why do our technologies – and their entanglement with worldviews and realities – develop the way they do? By identifying overlapping tendencies in posthumanism/ahumanism, degrowth, and occulture and summing it up as a form of New Romanticism, it is possible to organize those fields’ interests in order to question the status quo of the hegemonic worldview-technology conglomerate. Yuk Hui calls this entanglement of technology and cosmology cosmotechnics.3 Technologies have to be elaborated in their cosmological framework. The here proposed expanding of the cosmological framework through the means of New Romanticism allows to counteract current mono-technological developments. The term occulture is said to be coined by musician and artist Genesis P-Orridge and is a combination of the words occult and culture.4 I will use the term to describe a loose conglomerate of non-normative cosmological explorations. Similar to the original Romantic movement’s cross pollination between actors with different artistic and academic backgrounds, giving a new name to a general current zeitgeist allows a clearer positioning of overlapping disciplines. This idea goes hand in hand with contemporary interests of working transdisciplinarily under a shared topic. It is the specific search for a cosmological understanding of the human position that the here proposed New Romanticist movement is asking for, as the current cosmogony is completely in the hands of science. And this is the point where the old and the new movement share their goal at different times in human history: questioning the prevalent cosmo-technological framework in which living and acting is possible. The term “romantic” is very ambivalent but can maybe be summed-up best as incorporating elements of “irrationality” in one’s world(view) and world-acting. Being romantic means to love something for causes which are not solely ex1 Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, vol. 1 (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003). 2 Yuk Hui, “COSMOTECHNICS,” Angelaki 25, no. 4 (2020): 1–2, https://doi.org/10.1080/0969 725X.2020.1790828. 3 Yuk Hui, “Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics,” e-flux journal, no. 86 (2017), https://www.e-fl ux.com/journal/86/161887/cosmotechnics-as-cosmopolitics/. 4 Carl Abrahamsson, Occulture: The Unseen Forces That Drive Culture Forward (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2018), ix.

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plained through objective reasoning. Here it is proposed that there are tendencies of romantic thirst in different academic and nonacademic undercurrents. It is proposed to sum up those fields with that kind of tendencies as a new form of Romanticism in order to actively incorporate “irrational” – or better: non-normative – thinking and acting into the world. New Romanticism searches for economical (degrowth), non-anthropocentric ecological (ahumanism, posthumanism) and ontological oppositions (occulture) to the institutionalized and normalized techno-industrial status quo. One of the romantic aspects of New Romanticism is to question the human position to such an extent that it bears an almost tragic quality and recalls the focus on individual human suffering of the original movement. The ahuman movement which elaborates a species death as a way out of the Anthropocene5 can be seen as a neo-romantic and theatrical response to the world’s problems. The entire idea of occulture is romantic: the loose conglomerate’s focus is to explore everything but the normative or the status quo and is rooted in pre-modern times, similar to the Romantic movement which focused rather on the past than the future for its inspiration. The degrowth movement is questioning the same industrial and capitalist “progress” related issues as the Romantic movement did and can be seen as a contemporary successor in at least those aspects. The three distinct movements are inherently romantic in their questioning of contemporary norms and give good examples of a contemporary undercurrent of Romantic thought. New Romanticism asks to re-ask questions whose answers are considered common sense in the current Western worldview – a worldview which led us into the troubled now. New Romanticism asks to invent new nows. The here proposed idea of a New Romanticism is used in order to show a general tendency of different intellectual movements of today which oppose contemporary technological and industrial developments. Those technological developments are often either unquestioned or can be seen as having their own agency. Peter Haff calls this the technosphere: Technology is developed to such an extent that humanity becomes its servant: [W]e abandon the apparently natural assumption that the technosphere is primarily a human-created and controlled system and instead develop the idea that the workings of modern humanity are a product of a system that operates beyond our control and that imposes its own requirements on human behavior. The technosphere is a system for which humans are essential but, nonetheless, subordinate parts. As shorthand we can say that the technosphere is autonomous. This does not mean that humans cannot

5 Patricia MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 139–149.

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influence its behavior, but that the technosphere will tend to resist attempts to compromise its function[.]6

Today’s technosphere is comprised of increasingly autonomous artificial intelligence systems and physical and bio-physical “smart” sensor-actor-networks, also known as the Internet of Things. This kind of technology is infiltrating every aspect of life. Different contemporary academic disciplines question this development directly or indirectly by criticizing parts of the overall system. Posthumanism sees anthropocentrism as the root of the problem, degrowth singles out capitalism for the world’s problems and the complex field of occultural groups question the whole rational hegemonic Western worldview. New Romanticism in that sense asks to acknowledge a trend of a rival of Romantic ideas with the difference that it is opposing contemporary – more complex and to an extend autonomous – techno-industrial developments, de-centers the human from its epistemological position and acknowledges more complex entangled actors and worldviews. In a sense, it is conceptualized here as being more eclectic and embedded in a – supposedly – more complex world but shares the hunger for irrationality and emotionalism with the original movement. Aware or not, the three different contemporary movements have a tendency of being romantic in their underlying understanding of the world. They all seem to oppose ideas such as productivity, dichotomous and hierarchical thinking, mechanistic and materialistic understandings of the cosmos’ working, and they seem to align themselves in a critique of human-superiority. The latter is more evident in posthuman and occultural thinking but implied in many critiques of degrowth (focusing on the industrial/capitalist rather than the general human). One could say that many of the ideas of New Romanticism are – similar to the Romantic ideals – irrational, but that is only half-true. For the original movement and its revived version are only irrational from the point of view of the hegemonic system or worldview. The underlying idea of acting irrationally in the world is that it is actually a necessary approach in order to live ethically. Focusing on the search for intense human emotions or sublime human-nature relationships in the original Romantic movement was not irrational, as it was implied that this kind of search was indeed the correct (rational) way of living. A scientific framing has defined rationality by the approach one takes and, by default, categorizes non-scientific approaches as irrational, even though non-scientific actions may be driven by logic and reason. The prevalent contemporary worldview of the Western world values scientific and rational thinking and acting in the world. De-centering the human and allowing nonhuman actors into the epistemological and ontological debate 6 Peter Haff, “Humans and Technology in the Anthropocene: Six Rules,” The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 2 (2014): 127.

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would have been considered irrational some decades ago but is currently more and more normalized.7 Not to strive for economic and personal growth8 is still considered irrational by many – but this idea is slowly crumbling if one looks at critiques of the anthropogenic and the more and more apparent limits to growth and extractivism. A complete understanding of the human condition can only be acquired if one leaves pure rational thinking behind and incorporates elements of – for example – intuition into ones thinking and doing. The three movements of posthumanism, degrowth and occulture are just examples of very complex and very different ideologies which share an aspect of “irrationality” in their underlying ontology. It is irrational only from the point of view of the dominant (scientific) worldview, not from the individual movements or its actors. Ahumanists or posthumanists who try to ethically think with the nonhuman other do not think that they are irrational. Degrowth proponents who refuse to buy anything new or avoid traditional forms of working do not consider themselves irrational. And (even) the occultural practitioner who tries to get in touch with the essence of existence through their individual magical practice does not think they act irrationally either. Ironically, it can also be seen that over-rationality can become irrational. This general trend is called scientism.

Shaping Narratives: Exploring Alternative Realities Politics today is a battle over the imagination, and work that operates on the imagination by either maintaining preexisting realities, or by challenging them through alternatives that encourage people to question prevailing world views becomes political.9

In their work An Archive of Impossible Objects, the designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby describe current politics as “increasingly paradoxical,” as “[a] sort of quantum politics.” This form of quantum politics is non-linear and not based on traditional cause and effect relationships.10 Reality, in the quantum political 7 It is important to note that this worldview is not new and was very much alive in some nonAbrahamic religious understandings of the world such as Buddhism. 8 An unhealthy obsession with personal, even if spiritual, growth can be seen as part of a capitalist understanding of the world which values accumulation of goods and soft skills. 9 Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, “Design for the Unreal World,” in Studio time: Future Thinking in Art and Design, eds. Jan Boelen, Ils Huygens, and Heini Lehtinen (London: Black Dog Press, 2018), 53. 10 Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne, “An Archive of Impossible Objects,” in Fiction Practice: Prototyping the Otherworldly, ed. Mariana Pestana ([Eindhoven]: Onomatopee, 2019), 43, https://dws4v3i7owv4q.cloudfront.net/production/media_items/attachments/000/000/111/o riginal/Impossible_Objects.pdf.

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sphere, is not a given objective thing to explore but a malleable, changeable, fluid entity. Dunne and Raby propose that reality is not fixed and “out there” but tightly connected to our imagination and therefore can be manufactured (designed) by designers and by those in powerful positions.11 This form of realitymaking can be seen as a contemporary form of magic happening in the realm of contemporary capitalism. Magical methods are used to induce change in the collective imaginary of the public. While “spells” are performed through print and digital media, rituals happen in public institutions and academic, corporate, and political summits or conferences. The contemporary magician is a figure of status, which is bestowed or accepted by the public. The magicians of modern times are political and corporate personalities, celebrities, academics, and professional creatives.12 The creative professional, especially when working in the field of media, is deeply entangled in the production of political narratives but is also equipped with the skill set to imagine and promote alternatives to the status quo. The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), established at the University of Warwick in the 1990s, was an infamous theory-fiction collaborative which generated controversial but thought-provoking output.13 They use the term “hyperstition” to describe cultural self-fulfilling prophecies. The term is a combination of “hyper” and “superstition” and describes an “action of successful ideas in the arena of culture.”14 Dr. Linda Trent (a presumably fictional character created by the CCRU and/or Maria De Rosario) states: It’s not a simple matter of true or false with hyperstitious systems. Belief here doesn’t have a simply passive quality. The situation is closer to the modern phenomenon of hype than to religious belief as we’d ordinarily think about it. Hype actually makes things happen, and uses belief as a positive power. Just because it’s not “real” now, doesn’t mean it won’t be real at some point in the future. And once it’s real, in a sense, it’s always been.15

Narratives which are distributed by the media can be seen as a form of hyperstition. Those futures are not yet written but proclaimed as if they were, and if 11 Dunne and Raby, “Design for the Unreal World,” 57. 12 Brian Moeran and Timoth de Waal Malefyt, “Magical Capitalism: An Introduction,” in Magical Capitalism: Enchantment, Spells, and Occult Practices in Contemporary Economies, eds. Brian Moeran and Timoth de Waal Malefyt (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018), 1–44. 13 Delphi Carstens and Mer Roberts, “The Thing that Knowledge cannot eat: Manifested Energies in the Work of Orphan Drift,” in Fiction as Method, eds. John K. Shaw and Theo ReevesEvison (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017), 194. 14 Delphi Carstens, “Hyperstition,” 2010, accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.orphandrifta rchive.com/articles/hyperstition/. 15 Maria De Rosario, “Apocalypse – Been in Effect?,” 1998, accessed August 26, 2021, http:// www.ccru.net/syzygy/apoc.htm.

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enough people believe in the narratives, they become real. This is a form of selffulfilling prophecy, not an account of prophecies becoming true. In the frame of hyperstitions, they become true because enough people believe in their unavoidability, not because they were “objectively true” in the first place. Hyperstitions cannot only be used in a top-down manner (from the powerful to the powerless); they can also be created bottom-up in order to oppose the narratives distributed by the cultural hegemony. The CCRU blends occultural, academic, and fictional content in their writings to offer alternative ways to think about reality and possible futures.16 In fact, all existing ideas are in a sense real, otherwise we couldn’t think, talk, or know about them; and they can be used hyperstitiously to create alternative futures. This idea is paralleled by Dunne and Raby: “There are other ‘reals’ that allow very different possibilities to exist – literature, the edges of science, non-western cultures and ontologies, and philosophy.”17 With the objective to oppose current “reals,” it is important to imagine and explore alternative “reals.” Individuals have to ask themselves, what is really true and fixed? Are there other forms of living and being? In order to explore those questions, three areas of other “reals” will be addressed in this essay: occulture (questioning the meta-framework of reality through metaphysical explorations of human-universe relationships), degrowth movements (questioning the prevalent capitalist growth framework) and ahumanism and posthumanism (questioning the relationships of humans with other-than-humans). Exploring alternative realities has to happen on different scales in order to truly re-imagine the status quo. First: What is reality and is it fixed? Second: Who is dictating reality and why? And third: What dictated realities can be undone? What new realities can be created and how? If current narratives of reality, delivered by mainstream media, are neither comprehensible anymore nor fulfilling fundamental human desires to have meaning in life, what alternative models of reality outside a technophile growth paradigm can be imagined in order to tackle the world’s problems? How could a contemporary form of Romanticism offer alternatives to the fast-paced technological world we live in?

16 CCRU, CCRU Writings 1997–2003, 2nd ed. (Falmouth: Urbanomic Media, 2018), 9–12. 17 Raby and Dunne, “An Archive of Impossible Objects,” 40.

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The Anthropocene: Alternative Narratives for Care The term Capitalocene18 seems to be well suited for criticizing the underlying reasons for the planet’s “health condition” but is less used in the literature which engages with possible forms of care for the planet. The idea behind the term is that, indeed, not humanity as a whole but the capitalist system – which is based on extractivism and continuous growth – is responsible for the planetary status quo. Even if the underlying reasons for climate change and an increasingly unjust world are attributed to capitalism, individuals can engage with the human-nature problematic by reevaluating their human privilege in the world. Post- and ahumanist literature tends to use the term “Anthropocene” when talking about the planet’s status and more often than not sees “the human” as a homogeneous being without difference. Nevertheless, when talking about the acknowledgment of a general privilege afforded to the human species, the term “the human” seems to be well suited. In this section, I will focus on possible ways to rethink human relationships to nature / the nonhuman and will look into possible new forms of care. Many forms of care actually existed and still exist in many worldviews outside of the Western capitalist hegemony. Academic interest in post- and ahumanist theories can be seen as a (Western) revival (or stealing) of those ancient beliefs which do not see the human at the center of the universe. In this section I will use the term “Anthropocene” and speak of “the human” in generalized terms in order to emphasize the individual responsibility of humans embedded in the contemporary Western hegemonic system to collectively rethink human-nature relationships from the bottom up. The Anthropocene demarcates a geological era in which humanity itself can be seen as a natural force, leaving its marks on the planet in such a way that what we formerly understood as nature is now man-made. The boundaries (which never existed) between humans and nature are increasingly dissolving.19 It becomes increasingly clear that humanity has to cooperate with the planet and find new ways of thinking and doing in order to ethically stay in this world. By contrast, the conception of the Anthropocene also conveys the impression that humans can design and control nature by developing new technologies that eliminate the negative side effects of that development. On the one hand, there are various spiritual, academic, and ecological movements which question the capitalist anthropocentric status quo; on the other hand, there are ideologies which see an increased use of technology and the 18 Jason W. Moore, “The Capitalocene Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/Energy”, The Journal of Peasant Studies 45, no. 2 (2018): 237–279, https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1272587. 19 Katrin Klingan et al., Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 3.

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shaping of the geosphere as the only solution to climatic problems. The former question the capitalist paradigm through different forms of degrowth practices and the anthropocentric worldview through discussions concerned with nonhuman agency (posthumanism and ahumanism). The latter position, which is found in the ecomodernist ideology,20 holds on to the idea of human control of nature by advocating for geoengineering and the development of further technologies.21 Ecomodernism can be seen as part of a general and unquestioned tendency in Western society to integrate technology into every aspect of life and to see it as the solution to our man-made problems – which more often than not have been generated by an over-use of or over-belief in technology in the first place. This general direction in short can be summed-up as technophilia. On the other side of the spectrum we have the degrowth movement, which is a loose conglomerate of ideas and practices which are opposed to the blind belief in the capitalist growth paradigm “and the quasi-religion of economism, science and technology.”22 It advocates for the “decolonization of our growth imaginaries”23 and is directly opposed to the ecomodernist ideology.24 The degrowth movement’s focus is on questioning the necessity of money, work, and technologies (or better: who is in charge of it). The movement promotes the agency of the individual, in an opposition to the models of living and working dictated by the state and big cooperations.25 Furthermore, the degrowth movement focuses on essential questions of meaning in life and advocates for the acknowledging of mortal limits, opposed to “[spending] more and more on efforts to realize ‘transhumanism.’”26 The degrowth movement acknowledges the necessity to develop new (personal) narratives and realities which are able to replace the prevalent model of “work hard, live well” and therefore encourages a spiritual reevaluation of life and the human-nature relationship.27 Christopher Partridge – professor for Politics, Philosophy, and Religion at Lancaster University in England – argues that the prevalent belief of a continuous 20 John Asafu-Adjaye et al., “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” 2015, accessed November 5, 2022, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5515d9 f9e4b04d5c3198b7bb/t/552d37bbe4b07a7dd69 fcdbb/142026747046/An+Ecomodernist+Manifesto.pdf. 21 “Decoupled ideals: ‘Ecomodernist Manifesto’ reframes sustainable development, but the goal remains the same,” Nature (London) 520 (2015): 407–408, https://doi.org/10.1038/520407b. 22 Vincent Liegey and Anitra Nelson, Exploring degrowth: A critical guide (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 12. 23 Ibid. 24 Jeremy Caradonna et al., “A Call to Look past an Ecomodernist Manifesto: A Degrowth Critique,” 2015, accessed November 5, 2022, https://www.resilience.org/wp-content/uploads/article s/General/2015/05_May/A-Degrowth-Response-to-An-Ecomodernist-Manifesto.pdf. 25 Liegey and Nelson, Exploring degrowth, 30–31. 26 Ibid., 42. 27 Tamas Lestar and Steffen Böhm, “Ecospirituality and Sustainability Transitions: Agency towards Degrowth,” Religion, State & Society 48, no. 1 (2020): 56–73.

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secularization of the Western world is in fact opposed by new trends of reenchantment. He argues that there is a general tendency of an increasing desire to have alternative models to the over-rational and secularized Western world. As the current models of the world cannot offer satisfying answers to fundamental questions of human existence anymore, he predicts that new alternatives to religions will emerge, which are based on non-normative worldviews.28 The term occulture is described by him as an expansion on the term occult (hidden) and includes “a vast spectrum of beliefs and practices sourced by Eastern spirituality, Paganism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, alternative science and medicine, popular psychology, and a range of beliefs emanating out of a general interest in the paranormal.”29 The increased interest in alternative worldviews and realities, as an opposition to the prevalent secularized normative (rooted in the Enlightenment), has a familiar resemblance to the ideas and reasons of 19th century Romanticism. Ecospirituality, part of the occultural canon, is not a fixed worldview or set of distinct believes and actions, but rather a set of different religious (institutional) and spiritual (personal) practices which revolve around (the search for) a sacred human-nature connection.30 Ecospirituality engages with ecological problematics by looking at the individual self ’s ethical relationship to the world rather than through governmentally imposed sets of rules. It therefore encourages the search for personal narratives concerning (ecological) realities rather than following the normative media discourse. Partridge states, when talking about Eco-Enchantment as an occultural practice, that, although much contemporary spirituality is focused on the wellbeing of the self, it is very often not a selfish path, in that this concern with the self is not, generally speaking, a concern with the individual in isolation. Rather, because the concern for personal wellbeing is often fundamentally holistic, the sense of responsibility extends eclectically beyond the self. A key aspect of this responsibility is environmental wellbeing as a holistic concept.31

As part of a form of degrowth thinking, ecospirituality can then be regarded as an occultural individual practice for exploring and creating alternative narratives for the (problematic) human-nature relationship outside of the cultural hegemony. It opens up creative individual practices of engaging with nature and all 28 Christopher Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occulture, vol. 1 (London: T&T Clark International, 2004), 42– 43. 29 Ibid., 4. 30 Lestar and Böhm, “Ecospirituality and Sustainability Transitions,” 58. 31 Christopher Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occulture, vol. 2 (London: T&T Clark International, 2005), 43.

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its human and nonhuman beings. Posthuman discourse, with all its ambivalent scholarly points of view, meanders ideologically between the ideas of giving up human privileges in favor of the nonhuman and altering what it means to be human by technological augmentation of the human body and the mind (while the latter is blending with ideas of transhumanism).32 Posthumanism, then, can be understood either as inherently non-anthropocentric, with a focus on giving up control and handing it to the nonhuman other, or technophile, anthropocentric, and egocentric. Patricia MacCormack, professor for Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University in England, acknowledges this problem in her book The Ahuman Manifesto, when she states: The posthuman after the announcement of the age of the anthropocene seems to have exhausted itself. Issues of transhumanism and nihilism have caused a posthuman despair and world issues a helpless fatigue. […] The manifesto traces the development of the impetus to think and live ourselves as ahuman – forsaking human privilege through acts of ethical affirmation that open the world to the other and to difference without forsaking what the posthuman gave away – truth in experience, reality, materiality and life itself.33

Ahumanism encourages the engagement with the nonhuman other through artistic and occultural practices, from a position of graceful not-doing and notknowing,34 compared to posthumanism which uses the other, defines it in human terms, and produces mainly human values.35 She argues that part of becoming ahuman is to acknowledge that it is ultimately impossible to think from a nonhuman perspective.36 Ahumanism therefore uses ideas from posthumanism but is also aware of its limitations. One of the practical aspects of becoming ahuman is to use non-rational methods in order to create new ethical connections between humans and nonhuman actors.37 Ahumanism therefore is a tool to think the world differently and develop alternative narratives. MacCormack identifies occulture and art as two possible modes of “becoming-ahuman.” She states: “DIY occulture has nothing to sell. Its irreverent and often shameless bricolage of any and every religious tradition makes it slippery and mucosal, tentacular and elusive, personal, political and terrifying to the dominant but deeply comforting to the practitioner’s opportunities for belief in change.”38 32 Francesca Ferrando, “Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms,” Existenz 8, no. 2 (2013): 26–32. 33 MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto, 11. 34 Ibid., 13. 35 Ibid., 14. 36 Ibid., 17. 37 Ibid., 16. 38 Ibid., 115.

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Romanticism criticized the dehumanization of the world then and the rapid development of new technologies, factories, and cities. The movement focused on human aspects of life in order to oppose the rapid industrial developments. The movement was inherently anti-capitalist and interested in the power of nature, but it was also human-centric in its endeavors. What could a new form of Romanticism look like without perpetuating anthropocentric narratives? Can ahumanist thought, degrowth practices, and the vast storehouse of occultural and artistic practices be used to develop personal modes of engaging with the human-nature problem? Speculative design is a method suited to investigate these questions.

New Romanticism through Speculative Design All natural scientists provide us with answers to the question: what should we do if we wish to make use of technology to control life? But whether we wish, or ought, to control it through technology, and whether it ultimately makes any sense to do so, is something that we prefer to leave open or else to take as a given.39

Speculative design is a form of design production which works outside of the normative production framework by focusing on design’s capacity to ask questions rather than delivering solutions in the form of consumable goods. While traditional design looks for answers to problems which are identified by others (employer, client, etc.), speculative design allows to question the problem and ask “what-if” questions to start discussions. While the former creates products in corporate design studios, the latter tries to foster an open public debate (ideas) about what alternative (good and bad) realities to the status quo could look like.40 In a sense, every design process is based on creating fictions (the not-yet real) first and products later. In order to convince any client, boss, or supervisor to produce a design, one has to tell a fictitious story first, either through words, images, models, or prototypes. It is not necessarily clear when an idea becomes reality. The first sketch of a car does not produce a car which can be driven by people in the “real world.” But if it is executed well enough, and if it hits a certain zeitgeist, it can create desire. And this desire, paired with money, power, and influence, can eventually create a physical, real car. Dreaming up fictions and

39 Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures: Science as a Vocation, eds. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004), 18. 40 Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), Inside Cover.

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creating a certain momentum of desire in a sphere of people with influence changes reality, the world. One can change reality out of pure will – the true meaning of magic. But speculative design should not be seen as a tool exclusive to trained professionals. The everyday can be designed through speculative, experimental actions by everyone. Desire and intentionality can be used to “design” – manifest or make real – material and non-material objects in the world. Depending on one’s intention, this form of reality manipulation can be used for good or bad. New Romanticism can be understood as a form of outcry for something new and a general dissatisfaction with the status quo. In a way, it is a form of resistance against the technophile capitalist machinery. Even though it is questionable how much direct effect this scream for change can bring, it does rebel against the beast and showcases a fight for human imagination to think differently. New Romanticism therefore does not deliver a direct solution to the problems of the world but stands as a speculative symbol for the quest of generating new narratives – narratives which are intentionally constructed to change the individual’s and the collective’s understanding of the world in a grassroots manner. New Romanticism is the desire for irrationality in a world of scientific order (scientism). It is asking for truth in a world of constant change, medial and real-world chaos. It asks for new forms of nature – partially desiring the old and naively romantic and partially accepting our current reality. It is time to create new symbols and inscribe them into the thought landscape of the hivemind. In his book Man and his Symbols, Carl Gustav Jung elaborates on the connection of universal symbols, which appear in dreams or moments of synchronicity, within the unconscious human mind. The unconscious is not just an archive of all subliminal or past events which were deemed by the conscious mind to be of lesser importance; it is also the place where new ideas to problems and dilemmas arise: But it is a fact that, in addition to memories from a long-distant conscious past, completely new thoughts and creative ideas can also present themselves from the unconscious – thoughts and ideas that have never been conscious before. They grow up from the dark depths of the mind like a lotus and form a most important part of the subliminal psyche. We find this in everyday life, where dilemmas are sometimes solved by the most surprising new propositions; many artists, philosophers, and even scientists owe some of their best ideas to inspirations that appear suddenly from the unconscious.41

One of Jung’s other contributions to understanding the human psyche in relationship to others and the world is wrapped up in the term collective unconscious. The concept entails that not just individuals possess unconsciousness, but also 41 Carl Gustav Jung et al., Man and his Symbols (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 38.

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humanity as a whole, and that this collective unconsciousness is a vast storehouse of symbols, archetypes, ideas, and universal primordial images.42 The individual and the collective unconscious is the battleground of our imaginaries. Primordial archetypes, (personal) ideas and (media-)implanted thoughts fight for the upper hand in an individual’s mind. Subconscious material leads to individual and collective (in)action: the hivemind. Who controls the hivemind, and what does it think about the nature of nature? In order to heal the human relationship to nature and think living anew, we have to undergo a collective psychic transformation in order to achieve new levels of consciousness. What the themes, ideas, metaphors, realities, or worldviews are which we use or construct in order to change our individual consciousness is less important than the fact that it is different from the status quo and not dictated by someone else’s agenda. Change has to happen from the bottom up rather than from the top down – a form of grassroots initiative for mental change. The ontological driving force behind New Romanticism is an occultural conglomerate of ideas related to all kinds of branches of Western esotericism and other fringe sciences. Here, the focus is put on alchemy as just one of many threads of the occultural canon. Alchemical symbolism is chosen as it underlines the messiness of technological and scientific history. Alchemical objectives – such as the transformation of lead into gold – were initially seen as physical and mental works: “lead” and “gold” did not just describe physical matter but also mental attributes, where “gold” is a desired form of enlightenment, a connection to god or the universe. The alchemical work can be distinguished between an exoteric and an esoteric practice,43 which evolved into or contributed to what today is called chemistry and psychology. Especially Carl Gustav Jung’s extensive use of alchemical symbolism for psychoanalysis is worth mentioning in the context of the latter. The Copenhagen Centre for the Study of Theosophy and Esotericism (CCSTE) at the University of Copenhagen shows in an impressively dense text how contemporary science and the world of the occult are entangled. The following reminds us that the world of progress is not black and white, nor linear, and especially not as rational as generally believed or propagated: Ideas, thinkers, practices and groups related to terms such as esotericism, esoteric traditions, occultism, theosophy, kabbalah, Alchemy, astrology, magic, the supernatural, gnosis and secret knowledge are not as obscure as they might seem at first sight, but have been significant and highly influential facets of human culture. For example, it is less known: that the great philosophers of antiquity such as Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle 42 Carl Gustav Jung, “The concept of the collective unconscious,” Collected Works, vol. 9, no. 1 (1936): 99–104. 43 Eric John Holmyard, Alchemy ([s. l.]: Courier Corporation, 1990), 15–16.

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all divided their teachings into a public or exoteric exposition and an esoteric one only available to the initiated; that significant theologians from the Byzantine empire and the Western Middle Ages, such as Michael Psellus and Albertus Magnus were engaged with magic, the study of demons and occult sciences; that so called magicians helped develop the experimental method prominent in modern science; that the collection of texts from late antiquity known as the Corpus Hermeticum influenced the development of humanism, the modern concept of man, Renaissance art and the emergence of modern science; that several courts of Europe had a prominent astrological counselor, such as John Dee at the court of Queen Elizabeth I; that philosophers such as Leibniz and Hegel also studied Kabbalah and hermeticism; that the discoverer of the law of gravitation, Isaac Newton, was preoccupied with Alchemy; that H. C. Ørsted, the discoverer of electromagnetism, was a freemason; that many modern scientists such as Alfred Wallace, the co-formulator of the theory of natural selection, and the pioneer chemist and inventor William Crookes believed in communication with spirits; that the Russian Helena P. Blavatsky and the modern Theosophical Society, she co-founded, directly influenced modern abstract art, archeological expeditions and India’s independence. The impact of this continued “revisionist history,” when brought to its full potential, when categories such as esotericism and occultism are scrutinized and the forgotten entanglements between what we term esotericism, religion, philosophy and science are historically and critically revisited, is no less than revolutionary for our understanding of the past and present and for understanding the discursive mechanisms in play when dominant categories are constructed and histories told.44

It is clear that the history of scientific discoveries and methodologies is not as rational and objective as modern science likes to portray itself in the public. In fact, the act of ignoring or hiding this messiness and entanglement can be seen as another set of media narratives which are constructed around the legitimacy of science and technology. The marginalization of alternative narratives and worldviews helps to underscore the “objectiveness” and “truth” of scientific endeavors. The proclamation of rationality and progress is a tool to influence certain narratives, while at the same time removing aspects of cultural memory from the minds of the people and from the solution space for current and future problems.

Summary and Contribution Western man has no need of more superiority over nature whether outside or inside. He has both in an almost devilish perfection. What he lacks is conscious recognition of his inferiority to the nature around him and within him. He must 44 CCSTE – University of Copenhagen, “Copenhagen Centre for the Study of Theosophy and Esotericism (CCSTE),” accessed August 27, 2021, https://ccrs.ku.dk/research/centres-and-p rojects/ccste/.

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learn that he may not do exactly as he wills. If he does not learn this, his own nature will destroy him.45

Scientific and technological progress is not a universal law or an unavoidable necessity. There are other world realities which existed and still exist. Either in the margins of Western culture (Western esotericism) or in other cultures. Reality is a choice of humanity. Climate change and nature’s suffering (the Anthropocene) asks for new ways of thinking nature – thinking which goes against the mainstream. One of the solution spaces for changing one’s mind – which is part of a collective hivemind – might be found in the re-appropriation of pre-modern and occultural marginal knowledge. Esoteric or occult knowledge is not as separate from scientific knowledge production as it might seem: science arose out of it. Ahumanism, born out of posthumanism, sees valuable lessons for the Anthropocene in occult knowledge. All realities exist and new ones can be formed. Speculative design is a way to explore those realities. What humannature relationship do we want? I have proposed to give a name to a general contemporary romantic tendency in academic and non-academic thought. New Romanticism is a seen as a contemporary opposition to technological and industrial intensification and advocates for the inclusion of irrationality into personal and academic narrative creations. Identifying overlapping romantic themes between ahumanism/posthumanism, degrowth and occulture has the advantage to strengthening any academic and non-academic work which opposes technophile, over-rational worldviews. Highlighting similarities helps cross-pollinate between different knowledge traditions. This text is seen as a first step into transdisciplinary and New Romantic forms of writing and epistemological production.

45 Carl Gustav Jung, The Earth has a Soul: C. G. Jung on Nature, Technology and modern Life, ed. Meredith A. Sabini (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2016), 126.

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Jung, Carl Gustav. “The concept of the collective unconscious.” Collected Works, vol. 9, no. 1 (1936): 99–104. –. The Earth has a Soul: C. G. Jung on Nature, Technology and modern Life. Edited by Meredith A. Sabini. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2016. Jung, Carl Gustav, Marie-Luise von Franz, Joseph Lewis Henderson, Jolande Jacobi, and Aniela Jaffé. Man and his Symbols. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Klingan, Katrin, Ashkan Sepahvand, Christoph Rosol, and Bernd M. Scherer. Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Lestar, Tamas, and Steffen Böhm. “Ecospirituality and Sustainability Transitions: Agency towards Degrowth.” Religion, State & Society 48, no. 1 (2020): 56–73. Liegey, Vincent, and Anitra Nelson. Exploring degrowth: A critical guide. London: Pluto Press, 2020. MacCormack, Patricia. The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Moeran, Brian, and Timoth de Waal Malefyt. “Magical Capitalism: An Introduction.” In Magical Capitalism: Enchantment, Spells, and Occult Practices in Contemporary Economies, edited by Brian Moeran and Timoth de Waal Malefyt, 1–44. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018. Moore, Jason W. “The Capitalocene Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/Energy”. The Journal of Peasant Studies 45, no. 2 (2018): 237–279. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1272587. Partridge, Christopher. The Re-Enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occulture, vol. 1. London: T&T Clark International, 2004. –. The Re-Enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occulture, vol. 2. London: T&T Clark International, 2005. Raby, Fiona, and Anthony Dunne. “An Archive of Impossible Objects.” In Fiction Practice: Prototyping the Otherworldly, edited by Mariana Pestana, 40–51. [Eindhoven]: Onomatopee, 2019. https://dws4v3i7owv4q.cloudfront.net/production/media_items/attach ments/000/000/111/original/Impossible_Objects.pdf. Weber, Max. The Vocation Lectures: Science as a Vocation. Edited by David Owen and Tracy B. Strong. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004.

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Jes Hooper (University of Exeter) / Meri Linna and Saija Kassinen (Harrie Liveart duo) / Jonathan Salvage (University of Brighton)

Technologies, Bodies and Faecal Matters: Embodied Empathy with Coffee Producing Civets*

Abstract This research applies a transdisciplinary and transnational approach between visual artists, anthrozoologists, and biological scientists to problematize the acclaimed status of civet coffee, both its methods of production and authentication. Firstly, attempting to gain an embodied perspective of animal mechanization, we used our own bodies to ‘become with’ our civet informants. By adhering to the same procedure as civet coffee production, we created 80 g of human-digested coffee. Secondly, we followed a scientific protocol utilized for civet coffee authentication, in which we examined samples of our product using scanning electron microscopy, the results of which we then compared to previously published findings for civet coffee. Our results illustrate the complexities involved in multispecies world making whilst highlighting the significant ethical issues surrounding digested coffee production and the flawed process of authentication. Keywords: Kopi Luwak, Civet Coffee, Civets, Embodied Empathy

Introduction The Asian palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus) is a member of the Viverridae family, an ancient line of Feliformia, or “cat-like” non-human animals (hereafter referred to as “animals”) native to Southeast Asia.1 Viverrids are a poorly researched group of mammals, despite their long existence and irrespective of their current abundance and expansive geographic range.2 Arboreal, * This research was funded by the Kone Foundation, FI. We would like to thank the University of Brighton, UK, for access to their SEM technology, Pro Artibus, FI, for facilitating our in-person meetings, and our reviewers whose encouraging and constructive feedback has strengthened this paper. 1 Luke Hunter, Carnivores of the World, vol. 117 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). 2 J. W. Duckworth et al., “Paradoxurus Hermaphroditus.” The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (2016): e.T41693A45217835, https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2016-1.RLTS.T41693 A45217835.en.

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nocturnal, and solitary, civets are elusive and enigmatic animals, making them difficult to study in the wild.3 What little is known of civet behavioural ecology, is that civets serve as pollinators and seed dispersers. The civet’s digestive tract has adapted to facilitate the consumption of diverse varieties of foods, from fruits and plant matter to insects and small animals.4 Their digestive enzymes germinate seeds, which are then distributed widely across their home ranges which can reach up to 103 ha per individual.5 Thus, this small mammal is an important contributor towards multi-species worldmaking and ecosystem health. As a common species across much of southeast Asia, Asian palm civets are listed as “least concern” by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species6 and so have yet to be the focus of conservation efforts despite declining population numbers. Unlike other members of the Carnivora order, Asian palm civets have learned to adapt to anthropogenic activity, and often frequent human spaces which offer opportunities for food and shelter.7 Yet, encroachment into human spaces has rendered the civet vulnerable to poaching, and civets are routinely captured as farm pests where they are either destroyed8 or, as is becoming more common, sold to live animal markets to become pets or civet coffee producers.9

Civet Coffee Civet coffee (often known by its Indonesian name “kopi luwak”) is a coffee with an international reputation as the rarest and most expensive coffee in the world (Marcone 2004). Prized by coffee partisans for its exclusivity, civet coffee reaches 3 Hema Krishnakumar, N. K. Balasubramanian, and M. Balakrishnan, “Sequential Pattern of Behaviour in the Common Palm Civet, Paradoxurus Hermaphroditus (Pallas),” International Journal of Comparative Psychology 15, no. 4 (2002): 303–11. 4 Yoshihiro Nakashima et al., “Functional Uniqueness of a Small Carnivore as Seed Dispersal Agents: A Case Study of the Common Palm Civets in the Tabin Wildlife Reserve, Sabah, Malaysia,” Oecologia 164, no. 3 (2010): 721–30, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442–010–1714–1. 5 Yoshihiro Nakashima and Jumrafiha Abd Sukor, “Importance of Common Palm Civets (Paradoxurus Hermaphroditus) as a Long-Distance Disperser for Large-Seeded Plants in Degraded Forests,” Tropics 18, no. 4 (2010): 221–29, https://doi.org/10.3759/tropics.18.221. 6 Duckworth et al., “Paradoxurus Hermaphroditus.” 7 Krishnakumar, Balasubramanian, and Balakrishnan, “Sequential Pattern.” 8 Colin Cahill, “Feral Natures and Excremental Commodities: Purity, Scale, and the More-thanHuman in Indonesia” (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2017), https://escholarship.o rg/uc/item/27p004hq. 9 Chris R. Shepherd, “Observations of Small Carnivores in Jakarta Wildlife Markets, Indonesia, with Notes on Trade in Javan Ferret Badger Melogale Orientalis and on the Increasing Demand for Common Palm Civet Paradoxurus Hermaphroditus for Civet Coffee Prod,” Small Carnivore Conservation 47 (2012): 38–41; Nijman et al., “Trade in Common Palm Civet Paradoxurus Hermaphroditus in Javan and Balinese Markets, Indonesia,” Small Carnivore Conservation 51 (2014): 11–17.

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prices of up to ~ €24010 per kilo,11 a price tag secured by its perceived rarity and unique production method. Named for its maker, civet coffee’s unique taste is said to be acquired through the enzymatic processes which occur when coffee cherries pass through the civet’s digestive tract. The civet’s digestive enzymes are believed to alter the physical composition and taste characteristics of the coffee beans, creating a smoother, richer, and less acidic experience for the consumer.12 Although first discovered in Indonesia 200 years ago, civet coffee rose to fame on the international coffee market when it was featured in film and popular media throughout the early 2000s. Its novel production method fed into what Marcone describes as the characteristic “desire to consume unique food products” prevalent amongst “passionate coffee drinkers.”13 Civet coffee’s mystique is enhanced by marketing campaigns which play upon the civet’s elusive nature, describing civets as seeking out only the ripest coffee cherries for consumption. Interestingly, where Indonesian producers tell the story of civet coffee discovery as one of colonial suppression, describing farmers forbidden to consume their own crops by Dutch rulers, and so turning instead to civet faecal droppings, the Western story of origin (such as Schoenholf 14 and Marcone15) claims that Dutch colonizers offered additional payment to farmers for civet coffee collection. Yet, regardless of the actual story of its emergence, the longevity of civet coffee’s fame and fortune is a phenomenon which highlights the world-making potential of multi-species ecologies. Certainly, the anthropogenic introduction of coffee plants to the Indonesian islands during Dutch colonial rule instigated new formations of multi-species entanglements with local and global connections, networks which continue to shape the Indonesian landscape as the world’s fifth largest coffee producer today.16 According to the Association of Indonesian Coffee Exports, civet coffee holds the biggest business potential due to high

10 All currency has been converted into EUR and all units to metric for consistency. 11 Murna Muzaifa et al., “Sensory and Microbial Characteristics of Civet Coffee,” International Journal on Advanced Science, Engineering and Information Technology 8, no. 1 (2018): 165. 12 Udi Jumhawan et al., “Selection of Discriminant Markers for Authentication of Asian Palm Civet Coffee (Kopi Luwak): A Metabolomics Approach,” Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 61, no. 33 (2013): 7994–8001. 13 Massimo F. Marcone, “Composition and Properties of Indonesian Palm Civet Coffee (Kopi Luwak) and Ethiopian Civet Coffee,” Food Research International 37 (2004): 901. 14 Donald N. Schoenholf, “Kopi Luwak: The Stercoaceous Coffee of Indonesia,” Tea and Coffee Trade Journal (1999): 142–46. 15 Marcone, “Composition.” 16 A.Wahyudi et al., “Sustainability Certification as a Pillar to Promote Indonesian Coffee Competitiveness,” IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science 418, no. 1 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1088/1755–1315/418/1/012009.

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consumer demand,17 certainly its status as a tastescape has seen civet coffee tourism flourish across the tourist trail of Bali.18 The commonality of civets combined with their ease of capture has presented economic opportunity for human communities who typically rely upon wages gained from informal labour.19 Indeed, wild civets are traded for approximately €12 per animal,20 a small expense for a much greater return from the world’s most expensive coffee. Thus, with heightened consumer demand have come heightened profit margins, and despite civet coffee marketing relying upon its perceived rarity, with the coffee industry and scholars quoting the false annual availabilities of 127 kg worldwide,21 civets are in fact routinely captured and caged for mass civet coffee production. As commodified objects, civet bodies become mechanized in a mouth to anus production line.

Civet Mechanization Foucault, in his lecture on “governmentality” at the College de France, described biopolitics as the act of state control over human bodily processes.22 It can be argued that the case of civets embroiled in the civet coffee industry also falls within the realm of biopolitics. State control of the civet is exerted by the Indonesian government, which issues permits for wild harvesting, captive husbandry, and home food production certificates to regulate caged production.23 Civet coffee production facilities often consist of rudimentary animal housing in the form of stacked single cages made from wire mesh or timber. Each cage, which typically measures no more than a medium dog carry crate, houses one civet, who is forced to stand or sit upon a slatted, or wire mesh floor which hovers 17 Bunga Indah Bayunitri, “Customer Perceptions of Product Luwak Coffee Based on Marketing Mix Elements Perspective (Customer Survey In Bandung),” Advances in Intelligent Systems Research 131, no. 1 (2017): 76–80, https://doi.org/10.2991/icoi-17.2017.33. 18 Jes Hooper, “Cat-Poo-Chino and Captive Wildlife: Tourist Perceptions of Balinese Kopi Luwak Agrotourism,” Society & Animals 2022: 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-bja 10094. 19 Caritas, “Indonesia Battles Devastating Second Wave of COVID-19 Outbreak.” 2021. Accessed June 30, 2022, https://www.caritas.org.au/news/latest-news/indonesia-battles-devasta ting-second-wave-of-COVID-9-outbreak/. 20 Jes Hooper, “Contamination: The Case of Civets, Companionship, COVID, and SARS,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 25, no. 2 (2022): 1–13, https://doi.org/10.1080/10 888705.2022.2028627. 21 Marcone, “Composition.” 22 Michel Foucault, Graham Burchell, and Arnold Davidson, The Birth of Biopolitics, eds. Michel Senellart, François Ewald, and Alessandro Fontana (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230594180. 23 Cahill, “Feral Natures.”

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above a tray designed to collect their coffee-studded faecal matter. Slatted flooring causes abrasions and injury, and prevents civets from displaying normal behaviours such as climbing, foraging, and hiding, leading to the formation of stress-induced, abnormal, repetitive behaviours.24 Fed a diet almost or entirely composed of coffee cherries, caged civets are given little choice but to consume high quantities of caffeine or else risk starvation. Lack of privacy causes further psychological distress, as the civets can smell and see one another. Whilst the Indonesian civet coffee regulations state that civets must be held captive for no longer than five years for coffee production,25 many civets will die before this time from caffeine toxicity and stress,26 and the release of civets into the wild prior to death does not free them from re-capture. A 2013 undercover documentary into the civet coffee industry conducted by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) showed civet coffee farmers releasing civets into the wild when blood was found in their stools, only for the same individuals to be recaptured one month later after they had adequate time to physically recover.27 Thus, even civets who are released from civet coffee service may find themselves repeatedly enlisted. Caged production of civet coffee has garnered the attention of animal rights groups and welfare scientists with captive conditions condemned for promoting animal cruelty.28 Carder et al’s29 investigation of Balinese civet coffee tourism revealed animal welfare concerns prevalent across all 16 documented sites. Civets were routinely housed in conditions synonymous with those which we have described above, no provisions of enrichment were observed and even the provision of water was scarce. Alarmingly, these conditions were reported within publicly accessible tourist facilities. Civets housed at tourist sites are unlikely to be fed exclusively on coffee cherries as their role is one of tourist spectacle rather than coffee producer.30 Yet, the majority of civet coffee production for local and global markets takes place in locations such as private residential gardens, outhouses, and garages, spaces which Cahill31 likens to Tsing’s32 marginalized “out24 Carder et al., “The Animal Welfare Implications of Civet Coffee Tourism in Bali,” Animal Welfare 25, no. 2 (2016): 199–205. 25 Peraturan Menteri Pertanian, PERMENTAN Tentang Cara Produksi Kopi Luwak Melalui Pemeliharaan Luwak Yang Memenuhi Prinsip Kesejahteraan Hewan Nomor 37 Tahun 2015 (Jakarta: Kementerian Pertanian, 2015). 26 Colin Cahill, “[Un]becoming a Resource: Translating the Nature of Civets in Indonesia,” Ethnos 85, no. 1 (2020): 100–117. 27 Guy Lynn and Chris Rogers, “Civet Cat Coffee’s Animal Cruelty Secrets,” BBC News, last modified September 13, 2013, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-24034029. 28 Bayunitri, “Customer Perceptions.” 29 Carder et al., “The Animal Welfare Implications.” 30 Hooper, “Cat-Poo-Chino.” 31 Cahill, “[Un]becoming a Resource.”

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of-the-way places,” areas free from onlookers’ judgment surrounding animal welfare expectations.

Civet Coffee Authentication When the 2013 BBC documentary uncovered caged civet coffee being labelled as wild and sold on the European market,33 the luxury department store ‘Harrods’ temporarily removed their civet coffee from sale, and the continued pressure from animal charities later resulted in UTZ Certified ceasing the certification of civet coffee produced by caged methods.34 Yet, there are no methodological procedures available to distinguish caged production from wild collection, with scientific research focusing instead on methods to distinguish civet coffee from non-digested varieties. In 2004, food scientist Massimo Marcone claimed to have found compositional differences between civet coffee produced by Asian and African civets, as compared to non-digested coffee beans.35 The paper, which utilized Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) to determine civet coffee morphological features by scanning the beans up to 10,000x magnification, revealed civet coffee beans had a smoother surface with more pitting compared to the control sample, a phenomenon hypothesized to be a result of the interactions occurring when coffee beans were passed through the civet’s digestive tract. While the paper was the first to quantify civet coffee’s unique structure, closer inspection of the publication reveals inconsistencies between the methods and reported findings. Firstly, the study focuses on robusta coffee (Coffea canephora), whereas farmed civet coffee is most frequently produced using arabica (Coffea arabica) and so the reported results may not be applicable across the majority of civet coffee within the coffee market. Secondly, where the results are described in the text for 5,000x and 10,000x magnifications, the supporting image magnifications appear to be much lower (as much as by a factor of 10 according to our estimations). Indeed, none of the published images specify at what magnification they were scanned. Thus, the published images are highly subjective and are therefore open to interpretation. Despite Marcone36 being the 32 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an out-of-theWay Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 33 Lynn and Rogers, “Civet Cat.” 34 World Animal Protection, “Civet Coffee: Campaigning for Cage Free,” 2020, accessed June 30, 2022, https://www.worldanimalprotection.org/our-work/animals-wild/civet-coffee-cam paigning-cage-free. 35 Marcone, “Composition.” 36 Ibid.

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most widely cited paper regarding civet coffee’s unique morphology, coffee experts have refuted the findings stating that the images pictured belong to different species than those Marcone had purported to purchase, an error that could serve as an example as to the prevalence of food fraud and adulteration within the international coffee market.37 Indeed, 42% of civet coffee on the market has been found to be counterfeit.38 In recognition of the need to protect the authenticity of civet coffee and the consumer from civet coffee adulteration, several studies have turned to chemical analysis for civet coffee authentication. Ifmalinda and colleagues39 in 2019 claimed to find differing chemical characteristics of civet coffee compared to non-digested arabica (protein, caffeine and fat content differences were observed between samples), yet no statistical significance was observed, and the methods employed are timely and expensive. It has been proposed that UV-visible spectroscopy be used instead, as a cheaper method of civet coffee authentication. The application of UV-visible spectra was found by Yulia and Suhandy40 and Adier, Reyes, and Arboleda41 to correctly distinguish civet coffee from non–digested samples, yielding 100% and 95–100% categorisation scores, respectively. Thus, unique visual properties are not the only identifiable feature of digested varieties. Most recently, however, Lachenmeier and Schwarz, highlighted the issue of misclassification and flawed sample selection of previous civet coffee research. In their 2021 paper,42 the authors theorize that civets would likely consume Coffea liberica in the wild due to its higher sugar content than either robusta or arabica, and so caged production is unlikely to replicate the wild product. The authors explain that the C. libercia does in fact possess a unique taste profile like that described for civet coffee, thus it is possible that the civet’s digestion may not be 37 Maria Izabel Milani et al., “Authentication of Roasted and Ground Coffee Samples Containing Multiple Adulterants Using NMR and a Chemometric Approach,” Food Control 112 (2020): 107104, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodcont.2020.107104. 38 Dave Davies, “Eat Up- And Don’t Forget the Palate Cleansers,” NRP, last modified July 10, 2007, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11847227. 39 Imas Siti Setiasih Ifmalinda, Mimin Muhaemin, and Sarifah Nurjanah, “Chemical Characteristics Comparison of Palm Civet Coffee (Kopi Luwak) and Arabica Coffee Beans,” Journal of Applied Agricultural Science and Technology 3, no. 2 (2019): 280–88, https://doi.org/10.3 2530/jaast.v3i2.110. 40 Meinilwita Yulia and Diding Suhandy, “Indonesian Palm Civet Coffee Discrimination Using UV-Visible Spectroscopy and Several Chemometrics Methods,” Journal of Physics: Conference Series 835, no. 1 (2017): 012010, https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/835/1/012010 41 Graciella Mae L. Adier, Charlene A. Reyes, and Edwin R Arboleda, “Discrimination of Civet Coffee Using Visible Spectroscopy,” Jurnal Teknologi Dan Sistem Komputer 8, no. 3 (2020): 239–45, https://doi.org/10.14710/jtsiskom.2020.13734. 42 Dirk W. Lachenmeier and Steffen Schwarz, “Digested Civet Coffee Beans (Kopi Luwak) – an Unfortunate Trend in Specialty Coffee Caused by Mislabeling of Coffea Liberica?,” Foods 10, no. 6 (2021): 1–4, https://doi.org/10.3390/foods10061329.

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contributing to this process at all, even if the civet coffee were truly obtained via wild collection methods. Overall, it remains unclear whether civets are unique as coffee creators.

Embodied Perspectives The rise in attention being paid to animals within the humanities and social sciences, dubbed the ‘animal turn’, has led to what Ritvo describes as “new relationships between scholars and their subjects, and new understandings of the roles of animals in the past and present.”43 Indeed, multispecies scholars often advocate for “becoming with” their non-human interlocutors44 in a bid to move beyond anthropomorphic, and thus anthropocentric, interpretations of the nonhuman world.45 Multi-species works thus engage with the recognition of Otherly agency, seeing animals, plants, and other living organisms, as both actor and participant of multi-species encounters and world formation.46 Where Haraway47 sought to untangle the divide between humans and animals through analysis and understanding of companion species relations, Tsing48 followed the story of mushrooms to uncover their world making potential in cultural and economic landscapes of opportunity and connection. Yet becoming with animals enmeshed in exploitative systems involves more challenges of separation than is presented merely by taxonomic class. In the case of civet coffee production, civets are rendered invisible by physical boundaries, existing in places which are designed to be protected from the gaze of onlookers. And whilst civet coffee tourism does offer some opportunity for viewing the process of civet coffee production, witnessing civet plight can reduce the researcher to that of spectator. As noted by Wertz, spectatorship is a methodological approach we ought to move beyond, claiming we must instead “experience the joys and pains of our subjects in full detail and in our very depths if we

43 Harriet Ritvo, “On the Animal Turn,” Daedalus 136, no. 4 (2007): 119. 44 Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press/Kairos, 2016). 45 For instance, Eduardo Kohn, “How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of Transspecies Engagement,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 1 (2007): 3–24. 46 Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 545–76. 47 Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, vol. 1 (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003). 48 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

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are to faithfully know them.”49 Yet, witnessing animal exploitation transcends the mere issue of methodological rigor and moves into the realms of ethical dilemma. Through the act of spectatorship researchers can themselves become unwitting participants within Foucauldian biopolitics of bodily control and surveillance. In such cases, the researcher remains separate from the animal whom they seek to understand whilst integrating themselves into the anthropocentric hierarchies they may intend to contest. It was upon these ethical and methodological considerations surrounding our interest in the mechanization of civet bodies for civet coffee production that we turned instead to our own bodily processes. Human bodies are also entangled with other beings. Our digestive tracts flourish with bacteria, a blur of organisms existing in symbiotic motion and shared life. In the knowledge of our shared similarities to civets as possessors of mammalian digestive systems, we attempted to understand the world-making potential of multi-species bodily entanglement through the human digestive tract, a transspecies exploratory process we frame as “embodied empathy.” Described by Linda Finlay50 in respect to phenomenological research, embodied empathy arises through a process she likens to a reflexive “dance” between researcher and participant in which layers of understanding emerge from repeated processes of experience and reflection. It is upon this basis that we employed our own digestive tracts. By viewing the similarities between mammals rather than our differences, we become closer to our animal informant experience, gaining an embodied perspective that witnessing alone cannot give. An embodied approach facilitated a deeper understanding of participant experience without the need for us to spectate or financially contribute towards civet exploitation. In our approach we ask first, what knowledge can be gained through an embodied perspective of digested coffee creation? And second, are civets unique in their ability to modify the structural properties of coffee? It is upon these two questions we seek to explore a new mode of knowledge creation where we enact our bodies, minds, and transdisciplinary methods. We analysed our product using SEM imaging as applied in Marcone’s paper,51 as the most widely cited research article used to substantiate claims of civet coffee’s unique physical properties. As our research team included visual artists, the visual emphasis of

49 Frederick Wertz, “From Everyday to Psychological Description: Analyzing the Moments of a Qualitative Data Analysis,” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 14, no. 2 (1983): 198, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1163/156916283X00108. 50 Linda Finlay, “Dancing Between Embodied Empathy and Phenomenological Reflection,” Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 6, sup. 1 (2006): 1–11, https://doi.org/10.1080/20797 222.2006.11433930. 51 Marcone, “Composition.”

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SEM imaging as a scientific method offered a robust starting point for our transdisciplinary research.

Methods The coming of this paper was initially envisioned through an artistic research project ‘Collective Perversion – Proposal For Revaluation,’ a longitudinal project that problematises the consumption of water through the perspective of the water toilet. In order to approach such a complicated topic, the project mostly focuses on human attitudes towards bodily functions through the creation of artworks and artistic processes. This paper is part of such a process, in which we utilize digested coffee as a case study. By drawing upon expertise of the arts, humanities, and biological sciences, we conducted three phases of research: coffee consumption, processing, and analysis.

Coffee Cherry Processing Firstly, we employed our own bodies to consume and digest coffee cherries collected in person from an (anonymized) coffee plantation in Indonesia. The coffee beans were consumed whole, as is the case for civet feeding behaviour, a process which was repeated over a period of five days, alongside consumption of regular meals and water. During this stage, we conducted a series of informal, filmed interviews with one another to document the physical and psychological experience of coffee cherry consumption and digestion. Themes which arose from our reflexive process are detailed in the discussion of this paper.

Coffee Bean Processing In the days following consumption of the coffee cherries, we followed the same methodology employed by civet coffee farmers, whereby we removed the coffee beans by hand from the faecal waste. We then cleaned and placed the beans upon ground mats to be naturally sun dried.

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SEM Analysis Secondly, we performed SEM analysis of both human digested and undigested samples of coffee beans, both collected from the same farm in Indonesia, and compared our results with those published for civet coffee beans by Marcone.52 For both samples (human-digested, and non-digested), we applied 4 nm of platinum to each sample using a Quorum Q105T ES sputter coater. Following coating, the beans were viewed under a Zeiss Sigma Field Emission Gun Scan Electron Microscope (FEG SEM) with a voltage setting of 5kv using a secondary electron detector. Firstly, a wide shot was taken of each sample, after which each bean was visually sectioned into quarters. Each quarter for each bean was then scanned again at 1,000x, 5,000x, and 10,000x magnification for a detailed comparative analysis of morphological surface features of each bean. Finally, magnification was reduced to 100x, 500x and 1,000x for one section (lower left quarter) of each bean, for direct comparison to images of civet coffee beans published by Marcone.53

Results and Discussion When beginning our initial investigations into the phenomenon of faecal commodification, the most common reactions we generally received ranged from disgust to aversion and fear; a fear that is not completely without basis. Faecal matter combined with unsafe sanitation is considered by the World Health Organization as the greatest threat to public health.54 The entanglement between the grotesque and consumption of animal-derived products is, therefore, particularly interesting as these consumables can be regarded as heretical to societal norms. Mary Douglas,55 in her seminal work Purity and Danger argues that the concern for purity is a bedrock to every society. According to Douglas, societal knowledge and individual behaviour are driven by cleanliness and purity. Biologically too, it is evolutionarily advantageous to avoid sites of contamination such as bodily excretions and fluids that may carry pathogens, parasites, and disease. Yet on this basis, civet coffee is an anomaly, as its faecal process is key to 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Caroline Kostyla et al., “Seasonal Variation of Fecal Contamination in Drinking Water Sources in Developing Countries: A Systematic Review,” Science of the Total Environment 514 (2015): 333–43, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2015.01.018. 55 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2003).

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its marketing success. The paradox surrounding civet coffee encouraged us to replace the bodies of the civets with our own. The deliberately absurd goal was to devalue civet coffee, by creating an even rarer product, human-derived coffee.

The Performative Process The eating of the coffee cherry was a performative act as a whole. There was no pre-set duration or quantity, though the aim was to produce as much human coffee as possible. Starting with the collection of ripe coffee cherries at a coffee plantation, these cherries were brought along to the research quarters. Every morning the table was laid with a bowl of cherries, a pen and a notebook and a large glass of water. After peeling the bitter and thickish skin from the cherries, 1–3 beans held together by the fruit flesh were swallowed whole. The consumption started at a low pace as we had no previous knowledge of how our bodies would react to eating coffee cherries. Whilst in our usual everyday lives we were accustomed to the effects of drinking coffee and indulged in its benefits of sustained vigilance, enhanced cognitive performance, increased alertness, and changes in mood,56 overconsumption could lead to toxicity resulting in anxiety, heart palpitations, hallucinations, and even death.57 The first impact of caffeine included alertness and sweating, experienced in the same time frame as reported by Beauchamp, Amaducci, and Cook58 who found the peak impact of caffeine occurred within the first 30 minutes of drinking coffee. As the process went further and larger quantities were ingested, unpleasant effects were noted including shaking, bloating, headaches, and anxiety. In a couple of days, stress, diarrhoea, and deterioration of general condition were experienced together with a heavy sensation of the beans passing through the digestive tract. In the bathroom, the beans that had successfully passed the digestive tract were handpicked from the stool. In total, 927 beans were consumed by two people in four days. On the fifth day the eating process was forced to come to an end due to an overall deterioration of the subjects’ health. Throughout the experiment, feelings of doubt, violence and unease were present. Although, like caged civets, we were not physically force-fed (as is the

56 H. R. Lieberman, “Caffeine,” In Handbook of Human Performance, vol. 2, eds. Dylan M. Jones and A. P. Smith (London: Academic Press, 1992), 49–72. 57 Seema B. Jabbar and Mark G. Hanly, “Fatal Caffeine Overdose: A Case Report and Review of Literature,” The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology 34, no. 4 (2013): 321– 24. 58 Gillian Beauchamp, Alexandra Amaducci, and Matthew Cook, “Caffeine Toxicity: A Brief Review and Update,” Clinical Pediatric Emergency Medicine 18, no. 3 (2017): 197–202.

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case with ducks for the production of foie gras),59 the decision to continue consuming matter that caused bodily pain and discomfort was an experience we could only liken to self-harm. Whilst we could attempt to alleviate some of the discomfort (drinking plenty of water and eating bananas, for example), we were acutely aware that as coffee processing machines, many civets are devoid of such simple opportunities with limited access to other foods or even water.60 It may even be the case that civets choose to die by refraining from continuing the monotonized violence of coffee consumption.

SEM Analysis Overall, minimal differences were observed between the human-digested and undigested (control) samples. Where Marcone61 claimed to find a smoother surface and instances of micro-pitting in civet-digested coffee compared to the undigested sample, we observed no difference in surface smoothness between our samples but did find some evidence of micro-pitting in the human-digested sample at 5,000x and 10,000x magnification (Fig. 1), lower than those reported by Marcone62 who only found micro-pitting in civet coffee at 10,000x magnification. The methodology applied in 2004 may have been insufficient to document micro-pitting at lower magnification as advances in SEM in the past two decades have led to the ability to scan objects without the need for such heavy sputter coating than required previously. Where Marcone63 applied a thickness of 25– 30 nm of gold/palladium (60/40) to each sample, we applied 4 nm of platinum, as is the current standard. This advancement should allow for greater accuracy. Thus, it is possible that were civet coffee now to be tested using current SEM imaging, micro-pitting might be observable at 5,000x magnification. Overall, we consider these methodological differences between our approaches to be marginal in terms of impacting the reliability of our comparison of the two studies. Perhaps more noteworthy was our observation of the great variety of surface structures of each coffee bean. It is thus possible to obtain very different results across one bean depending on the section being sampled. When comparing our images (Fig. 2) to those published by Marcone64 we found very few differences between civet- and human-produced coffee, and be59 See Donald M. Broom and Irene Rochlitz, “The Welfare of Ducks during Foie Gras Production,” Animal Welfare 26, no. 2 (2017): 135–49, https://doi.org/10.7120/09627286.26.2.135. 60 Carder et al., “The Animal Welfare Implications.” 61 Marcone, “Composition.” 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid.

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Fig 1. SEM images for A) 5000x human-digested a) 5000x non-digested B) 10,000x humandigested b) 10,000x non-digested coffee beans. © Jonathan Salvage

tween the control samples of both studies. Our combined findings therefore show substantial similarities between robusta and arabica control bean structural composition. We therefore agree with Lachenmeier and Schwarz65 that it is more likely the structural and taste properties of C. libercia which are unique in their composition rather than the ability of the civet’s digestive enzymes to alter the properties of either arabica or robusta. In all, we conclude there is lack of substantiated evidence to support Marcone’s66 findings that civet coffee beans possess unique physical properties compared to undigested coffee. In the future, as a continuation of our transdisciplinary investigation of civet coffee, we intend to test our human-digested coffee by chemical methods to understand more fully the properties to which civet coffee’s claims of uniqueness are rooted. In particular, we seek to employ SDS-Page analysis, as conducted in the latter part of the Marcone paper.67 We also believe that it is not the structural uniqueness of the civet coffee that secures its lucrative status, and that it is in fact civet coffee’s position within product speculation that allows it to accumulate consumer demand. Tsing de65 Lachenmeier and Schwarz, “Digested Civet Coffee Beans.” 66 Marcone, “Composition.” 67 Ibid.

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Fig 2. SEM images for A) 100x human-digested a) 100x non-digested B) 500x human-digesed b) 500x non-digested C) 1,000x human-digested c) 1,000x non-digested. © Jonathan Salvage

scribes ‘speculative accumulation’ as the tendency for contemporary capitalism to “rely as much on the appearance of wealth, easy money, and triumphant commoditization as on their material realization” [emphasis added].68 In this sense, speculative accumulation for civet coffee lies within the claims of uniqueness and rarity combined with the ease of mass production rather than proven physical difference to non-digested coffee. The publication of scientific research citing false claims of 127 kg annual availability serves only to inflate the 68 Tsing, “Friction,” 29; see also Jeremy M.Campbell, “Speculative Accumulation: PropertyMaking in the Brazilian Amazon,” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 19, no. 2 (2014): 98, https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12078.

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product’s reputation and secure its economic status. Indeed, there are few studies that can resolutely prove a difference between non-digested and civet coffee varieties. Overall, our findings here only add to the mounting evidence that civet coffee is a fabricated luxury consumable, one which could likely be created by any mammal (including a human), regardless of the physical outcome, as it is the speculative properties rather than physical composition in which civet coffee secures its high economic value.

Conclusions After the consumption of 927 coffee beans in four days, we created a combined total of 80 g of human-digested coffee beans produced from two adult individuals. Physical and psychological symptoms consisted of stomach cramps, headache, restlessness, anxiety, increased heart rate, and heightened adrenaline. Based upon the adaptive similarities expressed across mammalian species, there is no reason to suspect that civets would not suffer similar physical and psychological symptoms when caffeine is over-consumed. Later reflexivity of our film journal (conducted throughout the process of coffee cherry consumption) revealed discussions centered around the concept of violence and bodily harm. Thus, our work contributes to the biopolitical work of Foucault as the mechanical utilization of our bodies served as biological mechanisms of control. The consumption of caffeine in large quantities was debilitating, so that we were unable to freely go about our daily activities, confined by our need for proximity to the privy, both for relief and to collect the digested beans from the deposited waste. The SEM analysis of human-digested beans confirmed limited differences between human-digested and undigested coffee in surface structure as both samples had smooth surfaces, though some evidence of micro-pitting was observed in our human-digested sample. A comparison of our human-digested samples with civet coffee and control samples published by Marcone69 revealed some similarities between civet coffee and human-digested coffee. Both featured evidence of micro-pitting which were not present in non-digested samples, though in all cases the images are somewhat subjective. Given the very minor differences observed between all samples combined with the methodological issues highlighted here and by Lachenmeier and Schwarz,70 we confirm no substantial evidence has been found to support the unique structural properties of either civet coffee or human-digested coffee. It is however recognized that the physical composition of civet coffee is but one aspect upon which the claims of its 69 Marcone, “Composition.” 70 Lachenmeier and Schwarz, “Digested Civet Coffee Beans.”

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uniqueness are grounded. Whilst chemical analysis fell outside the scope of this present paper, the next phase of our investigation will be to test the chemical properties of human-digested coffee for further scientific understanding. Of primary focus in this paper, the methodological approach of embodied empathy allowed for us to “become with” our civet interlocutors in ways conducive to post-humanist philosophical thought inspired by the animal turn. By approaching our investigation through human bodies, we were able to reflect upon the multi-species interactions within digested coffee production, whilst recognizing both the similarities and differences held between human and civet that may otherwise hinder multi-species exploration. Research such as Hartigan’s71 trials at interviewing a plant, and Foster’s72 attempts at living like a European badger (Meles meles), serve as examples of methods which ultimately fail due to the limitations of the researcher’s human perspective. Embodied empathy, however, addresses the disconnect between humans and other organisms within the research context and so builds upon and furthers a creative approach to post-anthropocentric philosophy by contributing to the works of multispecies scholars such as Tsing,73 Kohn,74 Kirksey,75 and Haraway.76 Embodied empathy allowed us to explore the human dimension: beings who are, on the one hand, separated from civets by species taxonomy and hierarchical class within systems of oppression, and who are, on the other hand, members of the same mammalian community that civets also belong to. Thus, an understanding of civet experience has been gained through the mammalian digestive tract. It is worthy to note that our approach addressed the bodily process of coffee consumption, rather than the captive experience endured by civets. Whilst embodied empathy could be applied to the state of captivity, the ethics of this are beyond the scope of this paper. An embodied praxis enabled us to empathize with the mechanization of civet bodies without contributing to the speciesist hierarchies we sought to contend. Whilst we could have gained some knowledge by bearing witness to kopi luwak production systems, spectatorship would have only furthered the civet’s objectification. Overall, transdisciplinary collaboration between artists, anthro71 John Hartigan, “Plant Publics: Multispecies Relating in Spanish Botanical Gardens,” Anthropological Quarterly 88, no. 2 (2015), 481–507. 72 Charles Foster, Being a Beast: Adventures across the Species Divide (London: Macmillan, 2016). 73 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species: For Donna Haraway,” Environmental Humanities 1, no. 1 (2012): 141–54. 74 Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 75 Eben Kirksey, ed., The Multispecies Salon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 76 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (London: Duke University Press, 2016).

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zoologists, and biologists, provided a deepening of the reflexive process by drawing on disciplinary perspectives and expertise to draw out key themes and substantiate findings with current technology.

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and Environmental Science 418, no. 1 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1088/1755-1315/418/1 /012009. Wertz, Frederick. “From Everyday to Psychological Description: Analyzing the Moments of a Qualitative Data Analysis.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 14, no. 2 (1983): 197–241. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1163/156916283X00108. World Animal Protection. “Civet Coffee: Campaigning for Cage Free.” 2020. Accessed June 30, 2022. https://www.worldanimalprotection.org/our-work/animals-wild/civet-coffeecampaigning-cage-free. Yulia, Meinilwita, and Diding Suhandy. “Indonesian Palm Civet Coffee Discrimination Using UV-Visible Spectroscopy and Several Chemometrics Methods.” Journal of Physics: Conference Series 835, no. 1 (2017): 012010. https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/835/1/0 12010.

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Rebecca Jordan (Washington University in St. Louis)

“Können Toys träumen?”: Technological Animals and Their Survival in Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic German Fiction

Abstract This article examines nonhuman animal interaction with technology in post-apocalyptic German fiction. Often overlooked, technologically enhanced animals, or animals whose bodies have been adapted with technology, display unique survival in post-apocalyptic situations. The two novels examined in this article, Dietmar Dath’s Die Abschaffung der Arten and Thomas von Steinaecker’s Verteidigung des Paradieses illustrate technological animal survival and reframe how animals are vital subjects of study as independent agents. Keywords: Technology, Animals, Post-apocalypse, Survival, German Literature

In the film I am Legend,1 a familiar post-apocalyptic trend emerges: one of the main characters dies at the end. However, in the case of the film, the deceased is a beloved canine companion. In his review of the film, titled “The Dog Scene from I am Legend is the Saddest Movie Scene I’ve Ever Watched,”2 Eric Italiano gloomily writes, “the film spends essentially the entirety of its first two acts establishing the bond between Man and his Best Friends to then KO you with the double-tap of the warrior pup not only sacrificing her life for [Will] Smith but having to be virtually executed in his arms as well.”3 Italiano’s text alludes to the pattern in post-apocalyptic fiction of human survival as the focal point in depictions of environmental collapse. In contrast, animal death appears to be an expectation in the human pursuit of survival.

1 Francis Lawrence, dir. , I Am Legend, 2007 (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2008), DVD. 2 Eric Italiano, “The Dog Scene From I Am Legend Is the Saddest Movie Scene I’ve Ever Watched,” brobible, March 19, 2020, https://brobible.com/culture/article/the-dog-scene-i-am -legend/. 3 Ibid.

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Animals,4 like poor Samantha, the German Shepard in I am Legend, are often positioned as the victims or bystanders in post-apocalyptic fiction. However, recent scholarly attention has begun to stress the animal account during apocalypse as important, vivid, and compelling. According to Benjamin Kohlmann, literary nonhuman accounts are worth exploring because they are not “subject to human procedures of sense-making [that] give rise to scepticism towards anthropocentric accounts of the world and to interest in alternative, non-human epistemologies.”5 Though frequently overlooked, the animal subjects of postapocalyptic fiction are worth examining because of their alternative perspectives in dominantly human-oriented narratives. Recent German fiction reconceptualizes the animal survivor and its relationship with (or even reliance on) human technologies in dangerous environments. Dietmar Dath’s novel Die Abschaffung der Arten (2008) and Thomas von Steinaecker’s novel Die Verteidigung des Paradieses (2016) depict post-apocalyptic worlds that feature animal survivors. However, survival in each text takes a different form; whereas Dath’s animals employ biotechnology to adapt to their surroundings, Steinaecker’s artificial animals survive in extreme environments because of their unassuming role as toys. The pattern that emerges in both texts suggests that animal adaptation with the assistance of human technologies leads to survival. I argue that these creatures are not only important representations of animal survival, but they also imply new and creative ways to conceptualize nonhuman resourcefulness and agency during environmental collapse. I begin by situating the theoretical landscape in which my analysis resides and then consider the two examples of Dath’s and Steinaecker’s novels as representative of animal adaptation in apocalyptic landscapes. In outlining my argument, I first focus on the influence of Donna Haraway’s work, as well as applicable posthumanist theory, on my approach. This article then offers a unique critical perspective on works that give nonhuman characters depth and agency as they are allowed to survive in novels that primarily concern mass extinction and hazard ecosystems. I situate my argument within the growing corpus of work on nonhuman species in ecocriticism, posthumanism, and Animal Studies. Most notable among these examinations of various species and technologies are Donna Haraway’s theories of cyborgs and the companion species. Early in her career, Haraway illustrated the blurring of boundaries among humans and animals as a direct result of technological expansion, famously writing: “we are all chimera, theor4 For the scope of this article, I refer to nonhumans as ‘animals’ in accordance with Roland Borgard’s outlines in Tiere. For further information, see Roland Borgards, ed., Tiere: Kulturwissenschaftliches Handbuch (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2016). 5 Benjamin Kohlmann, “What is it like to be a rat? Early cold war glimpses of the post-human.” Textual practice 28, no. 4 (2014): 656.

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ized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism.”6 Her conception of the body reimagined in the twentieth century has spurred nuances of not only the ways in which nonhumans and humans share similarities, but also how omnipresent and influential technologies have become in the world. However, despite Haraway’s poignant theses, in many environmental discussions, the nonhuman remains separate from the human as either inactive bystander or victimized as another result of human intervention in nature.7 These impressions are not a surprise, since humans directly associate their actions with change, as is evidenced in terms like the Anthropocene and recent iterations like Capitalocene.8 It is noteworthy that texts that introduce a happy ending to the narrative of environmental collapse tend to use, as Katherine Snyder notes, the “rhetoric of the apocalypse [and] dystopian scenarios” to narrate the impact that humans have on the climate as either unintentionally or intentionally exacerbated, which often includes the animals that inhabit the planet and fall victim to the environmental shifts.9 In fictional and nonfictional texts, humans become the destroyers of the planet and simultaneously must serve as the heroes to restore climatic order (of some kind), thereby decentering the animal perspective during these world-altering phenomena. So how do we read animal experience especially in the context of landscapes with shifting climates? Furthermore, in discussions of animal survival or victimhood, the animals are solely considered in biological perspectives or as entirely part of the natural world, thus affirming the dichotomy of “technology” and “nature.” But can an animal utilize technology as humans do to survive? For Animal Studies scholarship, this question may be quite humorous as animals have long been mechanized, or stripped of agency, in the process of defining them. For example, many Animal Studies scholars refer to René Descartes’s direct comparison of animals to machines as an initial formulation of animal identity and agency: “Für den Philosophen René Descartes etwa war das Tier ein seelenloser Automat, regiert 6 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century,” in The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 118. 7 Timothy Morton sums up this lumping of animal and environment as: “All kinds of beings, from toxic waste to sea snails, are clamoring for our scientific, political, and artistic attention, and have become part of political life – to the detriment of monolithic conceptions of Nature.” Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 17. 8 Cf. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 9 Cit. in Gabriele Dürbeck, “The Anthropocene in Contemporary German Ecothrillers,” in German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene, eds. Caroline Schaumann and Heather Sullivan (New York; Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 329. Cf. Katherine V. Snyder, “‘Time to Go’: The Postapocalyptic and the Post-traumatic in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,” Studies in the Novel 43, no. 4 (2011): 470–489.

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nach den Maßgaben einer deterministischen Mechanik und schien daher bestens geeignet, das Besondere des Menschen deutlich werden zu lassen.“10 Later Animal Studies scholarship refers to the Animal Turn11 that conceptualizes the animal’s selfhood as far from the machine that Descartes originally theorized: “Using a set of terms discussed by Giorgio Agamben (who in his turn invokes a series of lectures by Martin Heidegger), it is possible to say that from a phenomenological perspective the main difference between ‘man’ and ‘animal’ resides in the way in which each sees and interacts with its environment: ‘the animal cannot truly act (handeln) or comport itself (sich verhalten) in relation to the environment: it can only behave (sich benehmen).’”12 Kohlmann illustrates the Heideggerian position that animals have their own distinct consciousness tied to the environment, which is fundamentally different from the consciousness of humans. While not taking a stance on the qualification of this behavior, Kohlmann thus nonetheless attributes machine-like qualities to animals. Though animal consciousness, agency, and identity remain strong topics of debate across disciplines, more recent explorations in Animal Studies and media theory have begun to imagine the connection between the animal and the machine. Kate Darling’s The New Breed chronicles how animal bodies have often been the model for machines, and, in turn, machines have supplemented many of the roles animals once held for humans. Other studies, like Eugene Thacker’s Biomedia (2004)13 and Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media (2010)14 also reference the structural, behavioral, and even cyborg connection between animals and technology, especially in biotechnology and even military defense. However, much like Akira Mitzuta Lippit’s Electric Animal (2008), explorations of animal interaction with technology often define the animal as a structure to mimic (such as a robot that emulates a bee’s movements) rather than a cyborg creature.15 Though Haraway emphasizes that technology has now bound the animal and human, we rarely engage with animals’ experiences that have been altered or changed by technology. It is at this juncture that literature provides possible experiences of technologically enhanced animals during extreme climate phenomena or apocalypses. 10 Stefan Rieger, “Tiere und Medien,” in Tiere: Kulturwissenschaftliches Handbuch, ed. Roland Borgards (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2016), 30. 11 Cf. Erika Andersson Cederholm et al., Exploring the Animal Turn: Human-Animal Relations in Science, Society and Culture (Lund: Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Scholars, Lund University, 2014). 12 Kohlmann, “What is it like to be a rat,” 657. 13 Eugene Thacker, Biomedia, vol. 11 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 14 Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology, vol. 11 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 15 Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

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The rise in post-apocalyptic themes in contemporary German novels offers various depictions of speculative futures, and that includes the perspective of the animal and its interactions with technologies. German literature has seen the rise of environmentally focused science fiction in the last few decades with what Gabriele Dürbeck describes as a growing interest in ecothrillers since the 1990s. According to Dürbeck, the rise in popularity of ecothrillers may be due in part to growing global discussions regarding climate change and the human responsibility for its acceleration. Thus, “human responsibility for future and global sustainable goals are now appearing on national and transnational political agendas by mediating them (often in dramatic terms) to a broad audience.”16 The post-apocalyptic narrative reflects growing anxieties of environmental collapse due to human action. Combining Darling’s analysis of everyday robotic animals with Dath’s and Steinaecker’s fictional depictions of technological animals results in a figure that is both robotic/technological and biological. These creatures do not reflect the animals we know and love today, but new and unique characters whose worlds have been turned upside down and who, as many human heroes do in post-apocalyptic narratives, use technology to see the next day.

Dietmar Dath’s Die Abschaffung der Arten Dietmar Dath’s Die Abschaffung der Arten (2008) epitomizes the complexities of nonhuman survival with the help of technological intervention. Set five hundred years in the future, Abschaffung portrays an earth in which chimeric animals with human features, referred to as the Gente,17 influence environmental factors, including their own evolution. Humans exist in the world insofar as they have become a threatened species who occupy categories such as experimental subjects, wild predators, or sex workers. In other words, Dath’s narrative flips the script regarding human-animal relationships that reframes the animal as the oppressor. However, beyond script-flipping, Dath uniquely positions the Gente in a posthumanist dialogue of identity and responsibility for planetary change. Posthumanist scholars like Rosi Braidotti, echoing Donna Haraway, point to the complications of defining animal responsibility and agency in human-animalnatural world entanglements: “Contemporary post-anthropocentric thought produces an anti-Oedipal animality within a fast-changing techno-culture that engenders mutations at all levels. In my view the challenge today is how to 16 Dürbeck, “The Anthropocene,” 315. 17 For congruity in this article, I refer to the Gente as animals, which is how they identify themselves only briefly. They ultimately become hybrid creatures in the narrative.

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deterritorialize, or nomadize, the human–animal interaction, so as to by-pass the metaphysics of substance and its corollary, the dialectics of otherness.”18 In other words, it is not enough to anthropomorphize or humanize nonhuman species as a means to make them equal among humans; humanizing or anthropomorphizing animals “confirms the binary distinction human/animal by benevolently extending the hegemonic category, the human, towards the other. Secondly, it denies the specificity of animals altogether, because it uniformly takes them as emblems of the transspecies universal ethical value of empathy.” Instead, “[i]t is a transformative or symbiotic relation that hybridizes and alters the ‘nature’ of each one and foregrounds the middle grounds of their interaction. This is the ‘milieu’ of the human/non-human continuum and it needs to be explored as an open experiment, not as a foregone moral conclusion about allegedly universal values or qualities.”19 For Braidotti, entanglements of human-animal-world are vital to uncover individual agency and fracture hierarchical categorizations that often render nonhumans as bystanders or even props in the world. Dath goes a step further in his novel by collapsing the concept of “animal” and “technology” altogether and creating a continuum of species that can survive in changing environments, even those outside of our own planet. One of the most prominent thematic veins of Gente exploitation of human technology for survival is their manipulation of the human hand. The growing fear that humans may try to regain power, or at least harm the Gente, promotes the political initiative to remove human hands inducing epigenetic biological changes. As an explanation for their decision to harm humans, the dragonfly Philomena suggests, “Der Mensch, das große Ungedachte [….] Hand, Sprach organ, Gehirn – man schlage ihm eine Stütze weg, und der ganze Dreifuß, tja, erst kippelt er, dann fällt er.”20 The Gente believe they have regained control over the humans’ ability to fight back by removing their hands. The objectification of humans that Philomena implies by referring to them as a ‘Dreifuß’ further leads to the consumption of human body parts. Later in the novel, Dmitri, the wolf protagonist of the novel’s first half, reflects on his own interest in the hands as items to be purchased: “Viele Gente, die sich’s leisten konnten, waren jetzt in anthropomorpher Gestalt unterwegs. […] Sie haben immerhin diese Daumen, die man abwinkeln kann. Nun gut, jetzt haben wir die auch. […] Bei ihm waren es jetzt je sechs [Hände].”21 The hands that were once part of human identity (and had a function) transform into a fashion statement that only some Gente can afford. As an official, Dmitri has an ex18 19 20 21

Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 71. Ibid., 79–80. Dietmar Dath. Die Abschaffung der Arten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010), 54. Ibid., 130–31.

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aggerated number of hands that makes him at the same time more human-like (by having them) and less human-like (due to the number of human hands he possesses). The practice of removal and purchase of hands represents the “Zweiklassengesellschaft”22 the Gente create and simultaneously reveals the troubling nature of their survival. I argue that the hand example in Dath’s novel serves as an extension of what Haraway describes briefly as a “technofix,” or “technology [that] will somehow come to the rescue of its naughty but very clever children.”23 The Gente share the same urge to use technology as the humans (and even desire their hands to create tools) and also harm other creatures to advance their societies and remain alive. Their technological innovations allow them to overcome the categorization that humans placed on them (such as species) and to adapt when they are forced to flee the planet. These hybrid creatures use technologies, like poisons and weapons, to craft an apocalypse for humans. Only after they engage in war with other equally powerful entities do the Gente experience their own apocalypse and face extinction. Yet, I argue, what further links Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble and Dath’s Abschaffung der Arten are their shared alternative reflections on survival and the purpose (and power) of technology. Pushing towards greater biotechnological innovation has, in the past, prompted warnings about extinction. For example, Nadja Podbregar notes, Mit der Chimären-Technologie haben Wissenschaftler die Macht, die Evolutionsgeschichte umzuschreiben – indem wir Teile unserer Art über den Rest des Tierreichs verteilen oder Teile anderer Arten mit unserem eigenen Genom verschmelzen, und selbst neue menschliche Subspezies und Supermenschen erzeugen […]. Stehen wir an der Spitze einer biologischen Renaissance oder säen wir damit die Saat unserer Vernichtung?24

Podbregar here warns that technological, especially biotechnological innovation could lead to extinction if we do not proceed carefully. Abschaffung presents a world in which the annihilation of species by way of technological innovation leads to animal survival and human demise. Dath’s novel posits that, even if species no longer exist as strict categories, the fight for survival continues. Therefore, the human urge to survive may later be shared, for better or for worse, by nonhumans. 22 Anne-Sophie Hillard, “Wie posthumane Wesen mit Geschlecht umgehen. Dietmar Daths Die Abschaffung der Arten (2008),” Trajectoires. Revue de la jeune recherche franco-allemande 14 (2021), 7. 23 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 3. 24 Nadja Podbregar, “Auf dem Weg zum Affenmenschen. Chimären zwischen Mensch und Menschenaffen,” Scinexx – Das Wissensmagazin, June 18, 2010, http://www.scinexx.de/dossie r-detail-497-12.html.

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It is at this turning point in the narrative that the biological and the technological merge to create the character Feuer, who is later permitted back to Earth because of their separation from any other living creature.25 Feuer, who is not only human and animal, but also Keramikaner, another species based entirely on technology as evidenced in their description: “Seine Haut war bronzen, bis auf den in kleinen rautenförmigen Plättchen gepanzerten Rücken, die Oberarme und die Schädeldecke, die Haare auf dem Rücken kräuselten sich bunt und bildeten ineinander gestellte V-Muster; die Frisur auf dem Kopf leuchtete kupferfarben.”26 Feuer’s description is technological, human, and animal, eliminating the boundaries entirely from these categories. When returning to Earth, the entity that normally destroys humans27 (Katahomenleandraleal), does not destroy Feuer’s sibling Padmasambhava. Instead, the entity welcomes both siblings to Earth saying, “Die Zweifel der Zukunft richteten sich auf Interessanteres als das nackte Überleben. […] Zwei Lebende, eng befreundet, einander versprochen. Jedes konnte für sich und andere werden, was es gern sein würde, fünfhundert kommende Jahre lang, bis zur Stunde der Abreise. Sie hatten das Erbe, es beherrschte sie nicht.”28 These final sentences go beyond the familiar trappings of post-apocalyptic fiction in which the Earth (or planet) is totally destroyed. The dangerous landscape that the Gente escaped from has once again become a paradise and the narrative appears to start from the beginning again with the Gente’s offspring living on Earth. Katahomenleandraleal also encourages the siblings to not simply survive (nacktes Überleben) but to flourish as individuals who choose their identities. Feuer represents what posthumanist scholars like Haraway anticipate for the cyborg: a transition out of our “comfortable old hierarchical dominations”29 to an entirely new category altogether. That means, the binary of human/animal no longer functions in the world of the text, ultimately leading to the freedom expressed in the final lines of the novel. Beyond relying on the binary of human/nonhuman, Dath posits the nature of technofixes and the relationship between the biological and the technological in his futuristic novel. Survival for the characters in Abschaffung does not simply mean to live, but to truly gain agency and to construct their own identity. Though the morals of the Gente are questionable, their survival thanks to technological innovation promotes conversation regarding our own categorizations and future 25 I use this distinction because Feuer often changes gender identities throughout the text, employing these pronouns when he/she/they changes. I have chosen to use “their” instead of the translation of “er” to emphasize the changing gender of this character. 26 Dath, Die Abschaffung der Arten, 306. 27 Generally, this entity kills male humans and enslaves female humans, though this is not always the case. 28 Dath, Die Abschaffung der Arten, 552. 29 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 28.

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fixes. While the Gente in Dath’s novel remain at least partially biological throughout the narrative, Steinaecker further complicates survival, of both animal and human, with his introduction of artificial animals in Die Verteidigung des Paradieses.

Thomas von Steinaecker’s Die Verteidigung des Paradieses “Können Toys träumen? Träumt er von mir?”30 contemplates Heinz as he observes his robot fox, Fennek (or F-87), sleeping in his lap. Only later does the teenager realize that the question he asks in fact applies to himself as an electronic humanoid clone.31 Heinz and Fennek often appear side by side in Thomas von Steinaecker’s portrayal of post-apocalyptic Europe. Verteidigung portrays a futuristic Germany in which few survivors remain after an environmental catastrophe has stripped the country of most of its nonhazardous food and water. The animals appear infrequently in the narrative, either taking the form of livestock, rioting monkeys, or robotic toys, like Fennek. However, the robotic animals are of vital significance in Steinaecker’s novel both as the rescuers of Heinz and as observers of the post-apocalyptic conditions because they are not biologically vulnerable like their fleshy counterparts. With Heinz and Fennek’s identities, the novel provides fascinating posthumanist depictions of technological agents and of the differences between the experiences that an electronic human may have compared to those of an electronic animal. Fennek’s role as Heinz’s confidant is established early in the novel. Heinz describes Fennek as his best friend: not as a toy, but an individual who bestows companionship on him. Heinz also illustrates that he is the primary communicator with (and for) Fennek because “[d]as Einzige, was F-87 zu erzählen hat, sind die ein hundertundeines Märchen seines Entertainment-Speichers.”32 Heinz’s initial description of and subsequent interaction with Fennek limits the robotic fox to a companion, albeit with limited capabilities. Heinz recognizes Fennek as a friend and treats Fennek with the same familiarity as the livestock and monkeys that live in the resort with the humans. Though it may be a stretch to conceptualize Fennek as an animal instead of a robot, his description as a fox and the ways in which he is treated by Heinz in particular positions him as a sort of animal sidekick rather than a machine.

30 Thomas von Steinaecker, Die Verteidigung des Paradieses (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2016), 239. 31 Henceforth e-clone, a clone that is both technological and biological. 32 Steinaecker, Die Verteidigung des Paradieses, 31.

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Kate Darling argues that the similarity between animal and technology, specifically in robotics, may be key in how the human has regarded the two. According to Darling, the definition of the robot is elusive, originally stemming from the Czech robota, which translates to “forced labor.”33 Indeed, Darling delineates the parallel between how humans treat robots and animals as one that changes throughout history yet consistently remains in our service. Darling suggests that, like robots, animals perceive and engage with the world differently than humans. That’s why, for millennia, we’ve relied on animals to help us do things we couldn’t do alone. In using theses autonomous, sometimes unpredictable agents, we have not replaced, but rather supplemented, our own relationships and skills.34

The robot, like the animal, has become the daily assistant and companion of the human. Beyond the biological animal companion, robotic animals, like Sony’s robotic dog AIBO, have reconceptualized how some people view pets, animal companionship, and animal labor. Darling implies that, as humans supplement skills and relationships with either robots or animals, the latter two become more similar in our perception of them, though we do not necessarily question the control we exert over these agents. Indeed, Fennek’s toyhood, his robotic use, becomes vital when Heinz and the other human survivors are forced to leave their space and as Heinz begins to rely on Fennek for his survival. During their flight to an uncontaminated location, it becomes evident that Fennek turns into something more than a storyteller. He begins to serve as an active character and even saves Heinz with the help of a toy rabbit. When Heinz asks the rabbit why it and Fennek teamed up to save him, the rabbit explains that “Toy hilft Toy,”35 and that he was motivated to help because Fennek was evidently attached to his human companion. Throughout the novel, it appears that Fennek’s toy identity saves him, establishing connections with other toy animals who can help him. Initially in the background as Heinz narrates his survival story, Fennek emerges as a survivor alongside his human companion. When Heinz realizes that he is an electronic clone,36 his and Fennek’s identities and personal trajectories appear to merge. Heinz and Fennek’s ‘functions’ are similar throughout the text, but their similarities become even more poignant after Heinz discovers he is one of the last e-clones, intended to be an author. ˇ apek coined the term in 1920 in his play R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). Cf. Kate 33 Karel C Darling, The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2021), 16. 34 Ibid., 11. 35 Ibid., 356. 36 “Ich sei der einzige bekannte überlebende E-Klon aus den legendären Chiemgauer Laboren.” Ibid., 382.

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Though Heinz mainly records his experiences rather than creating new stories, both he and Fennek are robotic storytellers. However, the treatment of Heinz, the e-clone, and Fennek, the robotic animal, remains distinctive: Heinz is celebrated and offers hope to many survivors as an “Inkarnation der untergegangenen deutschen Kultur”37 while Fennek is only recognized as a toy in service to a “human.” However, both Fennek and Heinz share the same experiences in service to others, though Fennek in particular rescues Heinz physically and emotionally during the flight out of Germany. Though they both share the same experiences, when Heinz goes to update Fennek, it is suggested to him that he simply replace his friend for a newer model. Although both characters are robotic, there appears to be a stark difference in societal expectation for them, partially because, I argue, Fennek’s toyhood encompasses the perception of his identity whereas Heinz, despite his reliance on and similarity to his companion, is defined by multiple aspects like his age, his representation of German culture, and his personality. In other words, Heinz is awarded identity because he appears human. Notwithstanding his repeated and successful rescues, Fennek occupies a role that renders him nearly invisible around other humans. Animal invisibility has been subject to various analyses, including John Berger’s famous essay “Why We Look at Animals” (1977). In his essay, Berger discusses how human perception of animals transformed from artistic muses to sources of entertainment. According to Berger, “[a]ll animals appear like fish seen through the plate glass of an aquarium. The reasons for this are both technical and ideological: Technically the devices used to obtain ever more arresting images […] combine to produce pictures which carry with them numerous indications of their normal invisibility.”38 Referring to captive animals in zoos, Berger emphasizes that animals – though often treated as invisible agents, since humans do not interact with them on a daily basis – are enhanced by technologies to frame them in the ways in which we wish to see them. In the process, we may experience disappointment, as the encaged animal does not act or appear in the ways we imagined. In addition to Berger’s premonitions regarding the animal and its controlled interactions with humans, Kate Darling makes similar observations regarding animals, technologies, and humans, suggesting that we now design robots more and more to behave like animals.39 Yet “the trick to getting our attention isn’t necessarily to look like us – it’s simply to mimic cues that we recognize and 37 Ibid., 384. 38 John Berger, “Why Look at Animals,” in John Berger, About Looking (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 16. Original print from 1977. 39 “[I]f we’re trying to make robots that need to propel themselves forward or navigate natural terrain, it makes sense to explore what biological movements have evolved in nature and try to apply those to robotic systems.” Darling, The New Breed, 203.

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respond to.”40 For Darling, our anthropomorphism and “our fascination for animals, which we’ve also had perform for us throughout history,” are uniquely coupled in the case of robotic animals.41 In other words, humans often design robots as animal-like to provide them with the abilities to maneuver different terrains and fulfill different tasks. She argues that robots have become a new breed of animals, since humans use such technological devices in much of the same way that animals have been exploited in the past. As we may see in the case of Fennek in Verteidigung, he retains – despite his survival, heroic deeds, and method of communication (albeit in form of storytelling) – the animal and robotic identities that position him as background and mere servant to Heinz, not a companion and agent. Curiously, Fennek becomes more of an agent at the end of the narrative, which is then paradoxically paired with his decline and death. As Fennek’s body begins to slow and make squeaking noises, Heinz becomes his storyteller: “Bald darauf bewegte er sich immer langsamer, fast bettlägerig. Nun war es an mir, ihm Abend für Abend jene Märchen zu erzählen, die mich mein Leben lang getröstet und mir die Zeit vertrieben hatten.”42 Fennek becomes the comforted individual and Heinz fulfills his destiny as an author/storyteller (and even creates his own “Märchen for Fennek”). Further, if we take Berger’s theory into account, we may devise that the robotic fox transforms from a source for entertainment back to a muse, inspiring Heinz at last to author a story for his friend. Ultimately, Fennek decides when it is his time to leave Heinz’s side. Heinz recalls the moment in which Fennek communicates that it is time for him to be permanently shut off in a tragic moment of mercy: Er nickte, versuchte die Ohren aufzustellen. Ich begriff und schüttelte heftig meinen Kopf […] beugte ich mich zu ihm, um ihn zu umarmen, eine Sekunde, eine Ewigkeit – dann griff ich blitzschnell in sein Ohr und schaltete ihn aus. […] Er sollte diese Welt nicht im Bewusstsein verlassen, seinen Master unglücklich gemacht zu haben.43

Though Heinz retains the hierarchical position of “Master” within the dynamic in the death scene, Fennek communicates his intention to the humanoid robot in their private method of communication: head nods. Moreover, Heinz here recognizes Fennek’s consciousness (Bewusstsein) that grants individuality to the toy. Though the humanoid robot survives his toy, their shared adventures end, for both, in the comfort of their own spaces, not in consequence of the environmental collapse. They live their ‘natural’ lives, side-by-side. Steinaecker does not simply allow for the survival of the animal: the robotic animal shares the same 40 41 42 43

Ibid., 195–96. Darling, The New Breed, 195. Steinaecker, Die Verteidigung des Paradieses, 390. Ibid., 390.

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agency as its human companion. The experiences of electronic person and animal develop in parallel. Ultimately, they share the same trajectory in a dying world and, vitally, are both in charge of each their narratives, whether in the form of storytelling or of journaling the end of civilization.

Apocalypse Now, But with Animals Etymologically, ‘apocalypse’ does not refer to a catastrophe of overwhelming proportions and consequences […] but, from the Greek apocalytein (to unveil), the term denotes revelations intertwined with time and history.44

Ultimately, like Samantha, the German Shepard, the animal protagonists in Dietmar Dath’s and Thomas von Steinaecker’s narratives die at the end. So wherein does the survival for these fictional creatures lie? I argue that the survivorship in the immediate aftermath of the apocalypses that these animal protagonists face reframes the general nature of survival in fictional accounts depicting environmental catastrophe. In these novels, the animals, already unusual in their hybridity and connection to technology, are presented as uniquely central in both their lives and their struggle for survival, even when humans are present. Though Dietmar Dath’s novel primarily focalizes the animal’s challenges to survive, Steinaecker’s fox appears to hold a greater admiration for its human counterparts and becomes a highly independent agent at the end of the novel. The post-apocalyptic landscapes take dramatically different forms in these texts; Dath’s post-apocalyptic landscape is mainly dangerous for humans, framing animal survival as something closer to flourishing. In contrast, the harsh climate and destructive nature of many survivors in Steinaecker’s Verteidigung threaten the biological and technological creature with no bias. The emergence of technology may create some distance between the animal and us; yet novels like Dath’s and Steinaecker’s not only render visible the creatures by help of whom we survive – they also question our understanding of animals as the purely biological other. They are neither victims nor bystanders during the apocalypse, but survivors and storytellers. Notably, they do not replace humans, and often learn to survive next to them. Though it can be suggested that these creatures are not “animal,” current posthumanist scholarship posits a continuum of identities for animals that we have only yet begun to understand. As we reach this critical moment so many call the Anthropocene, in 44 Diletta De Cristofaro, “‘Time, No arrow, No Boomerang, but a Concertina’: Cloud Atlas and the Anti-apocalyptic Critical Temporalities of the Contemporary Post-apocalyptic Novel,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 59, no. 2 (2018): 244.

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which environmental catastrophe has become the norm, it becomes more and more important to explore the animal victim and survivor, making these ‘others’ visible and unveiling their agency in the world. As many of the authors cited in this analysis have indicated, when technology evolves, so, too, do animals grow accustomed to these technologies; or, alternatively, we try to recreate the animal by means of technology. Pulling nonhumans out of the margins of post-apocalyptic discussions provides both interesting and alternative portrayals of survival and foregrounds the resilience, even agency, of creatures who do not require direct human intervention to continue onwards after environmental collapse. These are the stories that are only just beginning.

Bibliography Andersson Cederholm, Erika, Amelie Björck, Kristina Jennbert, and Ann-Sofie Lönngren. Exploring the Animal Turn: Human-Animal Relations in Science, Society and Culture. Lund: Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Scholars, Lund University, 2014. Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals.” In John Berger. About Looking, 3–28. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. Borgards, Roland, ed. Tiere: Kulturwissenschaftliches Handbuch. Stuttgart: Springer-Verlag, 2016. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Darling, Kate. The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2021. Dath, Dietmar. Die Abschaffung der Arten. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010. De Cristofaro, Diletta. “‘Time, No Arrow, No Boomerang, but a Concertina’: Cloud Atlas and the Anti-apocalyptic Critical Temporalities of the Contemporary Post-apocalyptic Novel.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 59, no. 2 (2018): 243–257. Dürbeck, Gabriele. “The Anthropocene in Contemporary German Ecothrillers.” In German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene, edited by Caroline Schaumann and Heather I. Sullivan, 315–331. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century.” In The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments, edited by Joel Weiss, Jason Nolan, Jeremy Hunsinger and Peter Trifonas, 117– 158. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006. –. Staying with the Trouble. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Hillard, Anne-Sophie. “Wie posthumane Wesen mit Geschlecht umgehen. Dietmar Daths Die Abschaffung der Arten (2008).” Trajectoires. Revue de la jeune recherche francoallemande 14 (2021): 1–12. Italiano, Eric. “The Dog Scene from I Am Legend Is the Saddest Movie Scene I’ve Ever Watched.” brobible, March 19, 2020. https://brobible.com/culture/article/the-dog-scene -i-am-legend/.

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Kohlmann, Benjamin. “What Is It like to Be a Rat? Early Cold War Glimpses of the Posthuman.” Textual practice 28, no. 4 (2014): 655–675. Lawrence, Francis, dir. I Am Legend. 2007; Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2008. DVD. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Parikka, Jussi. Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology, vol. 11. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Podbregar, Nadja. “Auf dem Weg zum Affenmenschen. Chimären zwischen Mensch und Menschenaffen.” Scinexx – Das Wissensmagazin, June 18, 2010. http://www.scinexx.de /dossier-detail-497-12.html. Rieger, Stefan. “Tiere und Medien.” In Tiere: Kulturwissenschaftliches Handbuch, edited by Roland Borgards, 30–37. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2016. Snyder, Katherine V. “‘Time to Go’: The Post-apocalyptic and the Post-traumatic in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Studies in the Novel 43, no. 4 (2011): 470–489. Steinaecker, Thomas von. Die Verteidigung des Paradieses. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2016. Thacker, Eugene. Biomedia, vol. 11. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

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Daniel López Fernández (University of Valencia)

Probing the Posthuman: Animal Technology and Transhuman Body Transformations In Enki Bilal’s Graphic Novel Animal’z

Abstract: Enki Bilal’s graphic novel Animal’z portrays a post-apocalyptic cli-fi scenario that is symptomatic of the Anthropocene imagination. In this narrative, the few humans that still live after the “coup de sang,” the environmental phenomenon that has devastated the Earth, have adopted a hybrid human-animal mode of existence in a desperate attempt for survival. These hybrid beings, like human-dolphin hybrids, are testimony of an advanced transhumanist industry based on human experimentation and technological body modification. This hybridism, in turn, poses interesting questions from a critical posthumanist perspective, since it blurs existing boundaries between the human and the nonhuman and emphasizes multispecies entanglement, while also interrogating the nature of humananimal relationships. Keywords: Graphic Novel, Human-Animal, Anthropocene, Cli-Fi, Coup de sang

Enki Bilal’s graphic novel Animal’z begins with a series of three images that together build a zooming out movement. In the first panel, the reader beholds a red eye, which belongs to a being still unknown. In the second and third panels, the shot is expanded to show that this sick eye belongs to a dolphin, swimming in an ocean as grey as it is, a fact that testifies to a massive process of pollution and environmental degradation. The greyness of the ocean is punctured by blood-red dots and stripes, perhaps indicating the death of other animals in this toxic environment. As if addressing an interlocutor or soliloquizing, the dolphin says: “I can attest to it. Ocean salt burns through everything. It seeps in and immobilizes tissues and organs, including the brain.”1 This being is actually a dolphin-human hybrid, as we soon discover when a man emerges from the belly of the dolphin once on land. The man extracts himself from the animal flesh with these thoughts: “I can attest to it. The brutal gush of air in the lungs adds to the salt burn. Strange feeling, also, to feel as though one was wet from the inside.”2 1 Enki Bilal, Animal’z (New York: Heavy Metal Magazine, 2013–14), 5. 2 Bilal, Animal’z, 11.

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This hybrid, even in its sensations, is both human and animal: a human who begins to breathe again, and a dolphin that feels the burn of salt deep inside. The human and the nonhuman bodies are completely united, as they feel and think together in their quest for survival: “I’ll also attest to the complete feeling of exhaustion. Complete but collective… as if both bodies had everything to share.”3 From the outset, Bilal’s graphic novel addresses directly different topics that will be subsequently analyzed in this study: the philosophical movements of trans- and posthumanism, the relation that these movements maintain with the question of environmentalism in the age of the Anthropocene, and the literary strategies employed to transpose these topics into the medium of the graphic novel. The debates about environmentalism have previously developed around a fundamental question: “How do humans fit within the web of life?”4 In the last couple of decades, this question has been mainly approached through the notion of the “Anthropocene,” a term first coined in 2000 by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer to refer to a new geological epoch marked by the disruptive effects of human action in the environment. Crutzen and Stoermer located the beginning of the Anthropocene in the latter part of the 18th century, coinciding with the Industrial Revolution and its clearly recognizable global effects like the rapid growth in the atmospheric concentrations of several greenhouse gases.5 Human intervention connected to accelerated scientific and technological development, they argued, had transformed the Earth’s climate, biodiversity, soils, or nitrogen cycles to the extent that it should be considered a geological force. The Anthropocene thus marks the historical moment in which the large-scale geological history and the much shorter-scale human history converge, and where human beings are ultimately held responsible for the geological and ecological consequences of their actions.6 The Anthropocene recognizes humans as a geological force but also as ethical and political agents accountable for and crucially affected by their actions. Indeed, the Anthropocene is usually focused on the “world of wounds,”7 on wide-ranging and ubiquitous human-induced 3 Ibid., 7. 4 Jason Moore, “Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason Moore (Oakland: PM Press, 2016), 2. 5 Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” Global Change Newsletter, no. 41 (May 2000): 17–18. 6 Sonia Baelo-Allué and Mónica Calvo-Pascual, “(Trans/Post)Humanity and Representation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Anthropocene,” in Transhumanism and Posthumanism in Twenty-First Century Narrative, eds. Sonia Baelo-Allué and Mónica CalvoPascual (New York and London: Routledge, 2021), 9. 7 Robert Emmett and David Nye, The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017), 93.

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climate change, massive extinction processes, and possible planetary collapse. The popular imagination of the Anthropocene, expressed in films, literature, or videogames, is often filled with images of a world-without-us that directly or indirectly appeal to remaining repositories of human action and a last-call effort to prevent the collapse of civilization. It is here that the Anthropocene connects with post- and transhuman philosophies. Having to face not just the consequences and responsibilities of anthropogenic environmental damage, but also the seemingly inevitable extinction of humanity as we know it, posthumanism and transhumanism provide different but needed paradigm shifts for conceptualizing humanity and its foreseeable future. Both philosophical movements attempt to move beyond the conception of the human as proposed by classical and Enlightenment humanism, which they consider outdated;8 how exactly that can/must be achieved is where they differ. Nick Bostrom, one of the main current advocates for transhumanism, describes it as a “loosely defined movement that […] promotes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and evaluating the opportunities for enhancing the human condition and the human organism opened up by the advancement of technology.”9 The enhancement options discussed by transhumanism include, among others, the extension of the human health-span, the eradication of disease, and the augmentation of our intellectual and physical capacities by means of current and future scientific developments like genetic engineering or humananimal-hybrids.10 Transhumans, Bostrom argues, are “transitional beings, or moderately enhanced humans, whose capacities would be somewhere between those of the unaugmented humans and full-blown posthumans”11 that have achieved the furthest degree of transcendence of human limitations. In this sense, transhumanism can actually be described as a form of “hyper-humanism,” since it radically amplifies the premises of the latter about the perfectibility of man, the privilege of reason over the body, or the liberal subject’s right to conquer all natural areas. Posthumanism, on the other hand, marks a break from humanism, as it “hopes to liberate humans from the harmful effects of the established humanist paradigms by debunking its false assumptions.”12 The “post” in “posthuman” 8 Baelo-Allué and Calvo-Pascual, “(Trans/Post)Humanity,” 5. 9 Nick Bostrom, “Transhumanist Values,” Journal of Philosophical Research 30, Issue Supplement (2005): 3. 10 Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, “Transhumanism,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, eds. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 59. 11 Bostrom, “Transhumanist,” 5. 12 Robert Ranisch and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, “Introducing Post- and Transhumanism,” in Beyond Humanism: Trans- and Posthumanism, eds. Robert Ranisch and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2014), 17. For a perspective on the reception of

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thus refers to a decisive departure from the ideal of “Man” as the measure of all things, a belief best understood “as a regulatory model that encapsulates what is considered essentially human: the bodily unmarked, i. e., male, white, ablebodied, and presumably heterosexual.”13 Posthumanism marks the realization that the human is a plural notion, whereby the universalism of Man is replaced by perspectivism and the idea that historically oppressed groups like women, disabled, or racialized people also deserve ontological recognition. At the same time, this recognition is equally extended to nonhuman others, since posthumanism understands human nature as an interspecies relationship.14 In this sense, posthumanism can be defined as post-anthropocentrism, which conceives humans not in a hierarchical but a co-dependent and co-developing relation to nonhuman others. Posthumanism emphasizes the material embeddedness of humans in an ecological network of existential connections with natural and nonhuman entities like animals, plants, bacteria, or even machines. Stacy Alaimo, for example, speaks of “trans-corporeality” as “the material interconnections of human corporeality with the more-than-human world,”15 a primary example of which is the transformation of plants and animals into human flesh through the process of eating and digesting. Such a post-anthropocentric perspective is crucial in the context of a posthuman ethics since, according to Alaimo, “understanding the substance of one’s self as interconnected with the wider environment marks a profound shift in subjectivity.”16 However, the intimate connection between the human and the nonhuman proposed by posthumanism also presents a much darker side in the context of the Anthropocene: the massive levels of loss, damage, and extinction that human action has caused to the environment. Literature in general and science fiction in particular have engaged for centuries with the ethical concerns and dangers of humanity’s conquest of nature as well as with its diminished prospects on Earth, producing a vast array of images that engage directly with posthuman and transhuman modes of existence. Postapocalyptic narratives, like the climate fiction genre, convey a “moment of species status anxiety: on the one hand, the technological prowess of humankind has

13 14 15 16

humanism in posthumanist thought, as well as the differences between Classical and Enlightenment humanism, see Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg, “Introduction,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, eds. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 19–28. Baelo-Allué and Calvo-Pascual, “(Trans/Post)Humanity,” 7. Ursula K. Heise, “Enviromentalisms and Posthumanisms,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, eds. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 140. Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2010), 2. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 20.

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come to assert itself as a significant force; on the other, human life itself is caught in the processes of erosion and disintegration that human life has unleashed.”17 Especially comics and graphic novels, thanks to their fundamentally visual nature18 paired with more traditional storytelling techniques, have been popular mediums to depict the creation and existence of nonhuman beings and thus the desires and fears of society concerning scientific and technological innovations. Comics and graphic novels are a mode of communication19 which, thanks to the combination of images, words, and sequences, perfectly embodies what Paul Ricoeur called the proactive nature of fiction and imagination. Rejecting misconstrued accounts of images as having a merely virtual and reproductive character, Ricoeur argues that images have “a distinctive intentionality, namely to offer a model for perceiving things differently, the paradigm of a new vision. […] Fiction is not an instance of reproductive imagination, but of productive imagination. As such it refers to reality not in order to copy it, but in order to prescribe a new reading.”20 I would argue that comics and graphic novels, as a medium that communicates through words, sequences and, most importantly, images, can establish a proactive reference to the world, as Ricoeur states. More precisely, the visuality of comics can contribute to the shaping of the Anthropocene imagination and its characteristic envisioning of a “world without us,” often filled with posthuman and transhuman beings. That is the case of Enki Bilal’s work. This French multimedia artist of Yugoslavian origin utilizes a unique cyberpunk and dystopian aesthetic in his graphic novels, where hybrid creatures like androids, biotech animals, or humananimals are predominant. These motifs are especially relevant in Bilal’s graphic novel Animal’z (2009), which will be subsequently analyzed. Here, as I will demonstrate, Bilal fuses the Anthropocene imagination of the anthropogenic destruction of Earth’s ecosystems with posthuman and transhuman approaches to the question of life after the environmental disaster. Animal’z is the first issue of the Coup de Sang trilogy, followed by Julia & Roem and La Couleur de l’Air. Bilal prefaces Animal’z with a brief explanation of the “coup de sang,” the environmental catastrophe that gives the trilogy its name. He describes this event as a brutal and generalized climate change phenomenon that sometime in the near future has devastated the Earth through unprecedented 17 Pieter Vermeulen, “The Anthropocene,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, eds. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 80. 18 See Neil Cohn, The Visual Language Manifesto: Restructuring the ‘Comics’ Industry and its Ideology (Stanford: Creative Commons, 2007). 19 Karin Kukkonen, Studying Comics and Graphic Novels (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), 5. 20 Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 292–93.

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natural disasters. In just a matter of weeks, he states, the world lost any semblance of coherence and became dangerous to humans. More than ever, survival is an individual issue, and the search for potable water has become the main concern. In this completely hostile natural environment composed almost entirely by seas and oceans and marked by epidemics, intense radioactivity, and hazardous meteorological phenomena, the few human beings that still survive seek refuge in regions of the planet with microclimates favorable for life, so-called “El Dorados,” in which they are planning to reestablish a social order. From the beginning, the questions of environmentalism in the age of the Anthropocene and the foreseeable collapse of humanity are therefore of particular importance. Interestingly, this environmental catastrophe is not solely human induced. Rather, as Bilal puts it, nature spat out its rage.21 Nature appears in this graphic novel not as an object that must passively suffer human action, but rather as a vindictive agent that strikes back. Bilal uses the concept of “planetology”22 to describe planet Earth as a living “character” capable of suffering and with a clear survival instinct. In this dystopian narrative, nature decides, after centuries of abuse, to make humans pay for their environmental damage with an environmental catastrophe of its own. This fictional phenomenon is already very interesting in light of the question of a critical posthuman ethics. Several varieties of posthumanism deeply in contact with environmentalist thought, such as multispecies ethnography, have focused on the material networks in which humans are consciously or unconsciously embedded with other beings in their natural environments, as well as on the agency of nonhuman entities.23 These approaches have been partly influenced by Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory (ANT), which has been seminal for the development of a decentered model for action, equating human and nonhuman actors; Latour proposes a “flat ontology” in which human and nonhuman actors are equally bound by the effects they produce in common material-semiotic networks that are constantly in the making and not free of conflicts.24 Taking this theory into account, I suggest that in Animal’z humans as well as nature (i. e., the planet Earth) are actors in a shared network in which their actions reciprocate each other. Thus, as it is suggested in the graphic novel, the human prerogative to dominate nature and its subsequent detrimental effects on 21 Bilal, Animal’z, 3. 22 Enki Bilal, Ciels d’orage. Conversations avec Christophe Ono-dit-Biot (Paris: Flammarion, 2011), 190–94. 23 Heise, “Environmentalisms,” 141. 24 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 109. Latour’s ANT has, however, also been the object of posthuman critique for taking the category of the human and his right to speak for other species too much for granted. Heise, “Environmentalisms,” 140.

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the environment, like irreversible levels of climate change, ocean acidification, or massive biodiversity loss, have motivated nature to inflict a “coup de sang” on humans, that is, to propel an extreme version of these environmental phenomena that have decimated the Earth’s population. The Earth has voluntarily morphed into an unhospitable place that cannot sustain the survival of the species that has damaged it in the first place. Humans, therefore, find themselves at the receiving end of the destructive process they have initiated, an image particularly common for the Anthropocene imagination, as explained above. The narrative thus emphasizes the posthuman and environmentalist idea of humans’ embeddedness in ecological networks and the disruption of the humanist triumphalist discourse of supremacy over nature. Nature can, in fact, be understood as the main protagonist in Bilal’s graphic novel. It is at the same time profoundly individual, since it is capable of feeling, and supra-individual, because it encompasses all other beings. The spatial settings in Animal’z thus consist largely of post-apocalyptic landscapes, where human artifacts have vanished. The style of the graphic novel depicts the world as a gloomy and menacing living organism, in which new beings have come to the fore. Here perhaps becomes more evident the connection between the topics of the Anthropocene, posthumanism, and transhumanism and Bilal’s choice of the graphic novel medium to depict these topics. The world in Bilal’s work has lost its coherence, as he states in the preface.25 Enki Bilal does not only say this, he also and above all turns this statement into images. Among eye level views, that is, views from an ordinary human perspective, there are also discover vertical, overhanging views that show a deeply polluted grey sea, vaguely fissured by waves of black foam. High above the water the reader/spectator encounters flying turtles that have escaped from the sea to swim in the air, or a raptor that has grabbed an octopus from the liquid air. It is a chaotic, discordant nature, free from human impositions and thus completely incoherent for them. Nature is alive, in a constant metamorphosis, in hybridization.26 The phenomenon of hybridization is even more evident in the surviving humans that inhabit this metamorphosed planet Earth. In the first pages of Animal’z the reader encounters a human-animal hybrid. This hybrid, whose real name remains unknown to us throughout the entirety of the narrative, goes by the name of Frank Bacon, after seeing in a boat he has seized a reproduction of Francis Bacon’s 1946 Painting. After Frank emerges from the dolphin body he was inhabiting, he leans over the now lifeless animal flesh and punches in a code onto the dolphin’s spine, which has three red buttons in the back just as he has in 25 Bilal, Animal’z, 3. 26 Jérôme Goffette, “Terres et corps en transit: Enki Bilal et la voie hybride,” in Écofictions Cli-Fi, ed. Christian Chelebourg (Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 2019), 75.

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his. The animal body then compresses into the shape of a gold bar and is easily carriable until the next time Frank needs to make use of it. This is a clear example of transhuman technology. In the post-apocalyptic environment that the graphic novel presents, most of the surviving humans have adopted a human-animal hybrid mode of existence that can be categorized as transhuman since it makes use of technology as a way of expanding the limits of human existence and ensuring its survival. In Animal’z the vast majority of the Earth’s surface is covered by ocean water, in which marine life is most fit to survive. The dolphin kit device that Frank and other characters in the graphic novel connect to their body is therefore transhumanist technology used to guarantee the sustenance of life. Whether these human-animal hybrids can be considered posthuman in a transhumanist sense is an open question since there is no clear definition among transhumanists of what a posthuman being is. Clearly, Frank has capacities that extend way beyond those of currently living human beings; moreover, his “animalized” nature separates him somewhat from our current perception of the human species. Still, it is nevertheless debatable whether he is a transhuman “transitional being” or a “full-blown posthuman,” as Bostrom puts it.27 However, there is no doubt that Frank, as well as other characters in Bilal’s work, are posthuman in a strictly critical “post-humanist” sense, that is, in the understanding that the human encompasses a multitude of differences and exists in close connection to other nonhuman beings. In Animal’z human entanglement with animals is deeply embraced through the appearance of human-animal hybrids. I relate this phenomenon to Donna Haraway’s concept of “becomingwith,” which looks to refute human exceptionalism and place emphasis on the idea that becoming is always becoming-with-others.28 This idea is further developed by Rosi Braidotti with the notion of “becoming-world,” which describes a relational ethical interaction of the human with the faunal, floral, and abiotic elements (such as rocks, water, sand) liberated from speciesism. Becoming world is a “post-human process, which appreciates the shared, common condition of the world as a whole: the world worlding itself”;29 it is about becoming everything and everybody. Rather than integrating the nonhuman into a human world, the notion of becoming world proposes to enmesh the human in the nonhuman, blurring the cultural distinction between human and nonhuman habitats.30 The human-dolphin hybrids in Animal’z clearly constitute a process of “becoming”: 27 Bostrom, “Transhumanist,” 5. 28 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 244. 29 Donna Houston et al., “Make Kin, Not Cities! Multispecies Entanglements and ‘BecomingWorld’ in Planning Theory,” Planning Theory 17, no. 2 (February 2017): 199. 30 Rosi Braidotti, “The Ethics of Becoming-Imperceptible,” in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. Constantin Boundas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 154.

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to be a hybrid means to become animal, to become posthuman, to become world by the dissolution of barriers that encapsulate and separate the human from the nonhuman. As Braidotti suggests, it fuses the self with the other’s habitat: just like Frank learns how to be and live like a dolphin, he also quite literally submerges himself in an animal habitat, thus redefining “human connection with difference in a shared world,”31 even though this is necessitated by the environment no longer being suitable for humans. This process of becoming is further incarnated by another character, Kim Owles. A voluntary subject of transhuman experimentation herself, she has been implanted with different sets of “animal sensitivities.”32 Thanks to this Kim is able to communicate with animals and comprehend their thoughts, thus showing a profound connection with her nonhuman others while at the same time proving to other humans that animals are neither objects to abuse nor subjects to be afraid of. Page 73 of Animal’z connects once again the visual storytelling techniques characteristic of the graphic novel medium with posthuman concerns. Here we find three images, empty of dialogue. First, there is Kim, lying on her bed. Her figure draws a diagonal in the rectangle of the image. Then, a close-up, where the drawing focuses on her face, lit up by white glows. She is totally awake, with her gaze turned towards the sky, and towards us who are watching her. The third image, the largest, consists of a low-angle wide view, the point of view of Kim now shared with the reader/spectator. She is watching animals flying in the sky: an elephant, a polar bear, a dolphin, this menagerie swims in a storm-like constellation of stars. The elephant, so heavy on earth, the dolphin coming from the water, Kim imagining them, all are found together in the same dreamlike water-air element. Kim, and us with her, is dreaming awake about a parade of flying animals, possibly envisioning a future in which human-animal distinctions as well as animal abuse are finally over. In this sense, the cover of Animal’z is also of particular importance. Lost in a sort of bluish-gray mist is depicted a man (presumably Frank Bacon) and a panther, with dark menacing clouds hovering over them. In the middle of nowhere, in a universe that has become chaotic, a human being and an animal run together in the same direction. They share the same darkened, misty aesthetic, and a sense of tragic dignity. This image is repeated, with different variations, in other panels throughout the graphic novel. All of them portray the same human-animal partnership and the same motion towards a shared direction: the human carries the animal, the animal carries the human, or they rest together in a pause of their journey. Thus, these panels, which exist outside of the narrative, emphasize the idea of interspecies relationships in shared ecological 31 Houston et al., “Multispecies Entanglements,” 199. 32 Bilal, Animal’z, 71.

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networks as a way of striving towards the same goal, which in Bilal’s postapocalyptic world is none other than the quest for survival. The necessity of merging the human with the animal is also present in Ferdinand and Louise Owles, Kim’s adoptive parents. Towards the end of the graphic novel, Frank, Kim, Louise, Ferdinand, and other survivors have reunited to travel together to D17, a remote location that supposedly has a hospitable microclimate to live in. Having arrived at a point of no return in their travel, they decide to use their dolphin kits to continue their journey by sea as hybrid beings, which seems to be the safest way. Moreover, Louise is dying of cancer and this metamorphosis is her only hope, because if she stays in her current human form she will die. However, Louise’s and Ferdinand’s dolphin kits are still in an experimental phase, which means that once the metamorphosis is completed there is no coming back. Still, they are determined to live the rest of their lives as a couple of human-animal hybrids, to become something new and start a “new” life. As Ferdinand himself describes it: “No need for regrets… We’ll leave behind many of our dreams in this world, and grab hold of them in the next.”33 Frank too constantly tries to make sense of a posthuman mode of existence. His constant repetition of the phrase “I can attest to it” can be understood as an attempt to come to terms with a new way of existing in the world, of becoming something beyond the human. In the final images of the graphic novel, the reader sees Frank transformed again into a dolphin, carrying Kim on his/its back as they venture to D17. The final words of this human-animal hybrid transmit the feeling of a perfect merging of the human with the nonhuman, of the human-animal with the more-than-human: “The nerve endings in the dorsal skin of the animal are particularly sensitive to points of contact with Kim’s body. I feel an intense heat to the very core of my own spine… We glide on water… and I can confirm: perfect symbiosis.”34 Bilal’s graphic novel hence features a profoundly post-anthropocentric aesthetic by rejecting human exceptionality, embracing the nonhuman, and proposing the idea of a multispecies subjectivity. As Braidotti puts it: “Posthuman subjectivity expresses an embodied and embedded and hence partial form of accountability, based on a strong sense of collectivity, relationality and hence community-building.”35 By intertwining the animal with the human, Animal’z conveys at first sight a posthumanist approach to the complexity of life and interspecies relationality. However, some other images in the graphic novel point to a different direction. Other types of hybrid beings exist in the post-apocalyptic world of Animal’z, 33 Ibid., 84. 34 Ibid., 100. 35 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 49.

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namely animal-machine hybrids or biotech animals. N. Katherine Hayles argues that “the posthuman offers resources for rethinking the articulation of humans with intelligent machines.”36 Prior to biotechnology, animals had already long been thought of as machine-like organisms, most notably in Descartes’ Discourse on Method.37 The biotech animals in Bilal’s work, much like the inferior position they occupy in Descartes’ ontology, have a sole purpose of existence: to serve humans. Rather than probing the idea of a posthuman empathy, the relation of these other hybrid beings with humans is one of servitude. Lester Outside and Ana Pozzano, two characters we meet right at the beginning of the narrative, have at their disposal animal-shaped machines, in the form of a seahorse and a lobster respectively, that function essentially as multitasking butlers. In his first appearance Lester complains about his domestic robotic animal not being able to properly judge the weather, water density, or salinity. Two pages later, Ana Pozzano lies on a couch as her lobster biotech servant brings her a drink on command.38 Far from the post-anthropocentric ethical imperative to bind with biotech animals that Braidotti proposes,39 here the idea of animal life as the exclusive property of humans is reasserted. Ana Pozzano feels a genuine emotional connection to her biotech animal, which she modifies so that it can speak, smell, and look like her. Despite this, she only values it for its subservient abilities. Much like most “regular” animals, these biotech animals are only viewed as a commodity from which a use-value can be extracted.40 They are subject to an objectification which renders them as merely useful to humans; they are “angels,” as Randy Malamud calls them, “pets and helpers who adulate their human keepers.”41 In a particular scene, Obster (pet name for Ana’s biotech animal) alerts an intruder in Ana’s boat and rapidly goes to eliminate him, thus putting its life in danger for its owner.42 Therefore, in Animal’z the reader finds an array of images that convey a truly posthuman and post-anthropocentric relation with the nonhuman, with the animal, as exemplified in Frank’s testimony of a multispecies subjectivity and world experience or Ferdinand’s and Louise’s decision to embrace a definitive hybrid mode of existence. However, these images are also tainted by a rather humanist approach to biotech animals, marked by humans’ belief in superiority 36 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 287. 37 René Descartes, Discourse on Method (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 43–49. 38 Bilal, Animal’z, 7–9. 39 Braidotti, Posthuman, 80. 40 It is worth noting here that Frank’s dolphin kit compresses into the form of a gold ingot, a fact that also highlights the value of the animal as a commodity. 41 Randy Malamud, An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 75. 42 Bilal, Animal’z, 11.

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and the right to possess and make use of the animal-machine as an inferior being. The graphic novel thus shifts between the idea of a posthuman ethics and empathy towards the nonhuman, rejecting the notion of species hierarchy and embracing multispecies entanglement, and a humanist worldview that places Man as the center of life among inferior nonhuman others, like biotech animals. At the same time, Animal’z also portrays some horrid truths about the transhuman technological enhancements that humans have adopted in this postapocalyptic narrative. At one point Frank encounters other survivors who have gathered to travel to D17 in a ship. Among them Frank recognizes Ferdinand Owles, who prior to the “coup de sang” was the spearhead of the transhumanist technological industry and one of the chief advocates of human-animal hybridizations. When Frank was a teenager, Owles recruited him as a guinea pig for his hybrid experiments. Frank now confronts Owles about his past: “I am just a number, a code, a benchmark… it was in the northern mid-east desert… your men came to recruit child soldiers as guinea pigs for your extreme hybrid experiments… you saved me from a certain and early death, and so I drink to that round up that changed my life at the age of seventeen, replacing the hell of the battlefield for that of the science lab.”43 Later, at bedtime, Owles confides to his wife Louise: “I remember him very well… he was one of the first to receive the latest version of the language kit. The graft has taken impressively… that kid was a barbarian, he couldn’t even read or write when he was captured.”44 Frank thus owes to Owles’ experiments not just his ability to become a dolphin, but also his faculty of speech, thanks to a language kit implanted on him. Frank is a human-animal-machine hybrid, a creature that is in fact characteristic of Bilal’s work. Machines, androids, or cyborgs have long been an object of interest for posthumanist thinkers. Some have proposed to include machines as part of a multispecies community that comprehends the inorganic.45 The merging of the human with the machine is also, as we have seen, a foundational standpoint of transhumanism. Nevertheless, the transhuman enhancements in Bilal’s narrative also break a fundamental principle of transhumanism, namely the right of morphological freedom46 and self-ownership of one’s body. Ferdinand Owles and his accom43 Ibid., 70. 44 Ibid., 71. 45 Francesca Ferrando, “Posthuman Feminist Ethics: Unveiling Ontological Radical Healing,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, eds. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 162. 46 This term was first introduced in 1993 by transhumanist Max Moore, who defined it as “the ability to alter bodily form at will through technologies such as surgery, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, uploading.” Max Moore, “Technological Self-Transformation: Expanding Personal Extropy,” Extropy 4, no. 2 (1993): 17.

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plices are responsible for the abduction of children and adolescents who would be later used against their will as guinea pigs for experiments on hybridizations. He himself bears witness of these human experiments, which he also tested on himself: his left foot has been replaced by a fin. Lester Outside doesn’t hesitate to call him Mengele, “a twisted mind from the distant past… but one that is still emulated.”47 Indeed, some human characters in Animal’z have very negative opinions not just on Ferdinand in particular, but on hybridization experiments in general. It is also very important to mention that the graphic novel connects Owles’ transhumanist industry with the “coup de sang,” although in a rather obscure manner. This fact is crucial to the environmentalist meaning of the work in the context of the Anthropocene. The very concept of the “Anthropocene” has been criticized by posthumanist scholars not just because it claims human exceptionalism through emphasis on humans as agents of environmental damage , but also because it hides geopolitical and socioeconomic differences in the contribution to environmental change. Donna Haraway, for example, has proposed the use of Andreas Malm’s and Jason Moore’s notion of “Capitalocene,”48 which highlights the fact that the capitalist system as a whole, which alienates most individuals, has played the decisive role in environmental damage. Malm and Alf Hornborg point out that “in the early 21st century, the poorest 45% of the human population accounted for 7% of emissions, while the richest 7% produced 50%.”49 Thus, contemporary posthumanist debates over human environmental agency in the age of the Anthropocene unfold in the tension between the posthuman desire to decenter the human in relation to nonhuman beings in the ecosystem and the environmentalist demand to emphasize human’s varied but exceptional responsibility and destructiveness.50 In Animal’z these debates are addressed in different ways. Firstly, Ferdinand Owles’ capitalist, technology-based industry is pointed out at as the main agent that has provoked the “coup de sang” and with it the Earth’s environmental collapse. Current big tech companies, not unlike Owles’ own industry, have proven to be in close relationships with large oil and gas companies, thus being directly responsible for climate change.51 Secondly, it is very significant that 47 Bilal, Animal’z, 53. 48 Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159–165. 49 Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, “A Genealogy of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative,” The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (2014): 64. 50 Heise, “Environmentalisms,” 141. 51 Greenpeace, “Oil in the Cloud: How Tech Companies are Helping Big Oil Profit From Climate Destruction,” accessed February 6, 2022, https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/reports/oil-in-the -cloud/#executive-summary.

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almost all the characters in Bilal’s graphic novel are Caucasian, a fact that could point to current unequal distribution of environmental benefits and risks. Despite the geographical chaos that reigns in Animal’z, already existing geopolitical power divisions seem to continue in this dystopian scenario, since the few surviving humans in the narrative are presumably European and mostly white. Thirdly, and closely linked to the above, one could then infer that the transhumanist body transformations present in the graphic novel were accessible only to a small, privileged sector of the population in techno-advanced societies, thanks to which they have been able to survive in the new hostile climate. Related to this, Laura Cabrera has asserted that the transhumanist model of enhancement based on freedom of choice and market supply leads to unequal distribution and discrimination between the enhanced and the unenhanced.52 It has been also argued that the post- and transhuman dystopian imaginations of the Anthropocene and their envisioning of a future with radically modified humans, or even without humans, are usually rather nostalgic about a particular economically privileged form of life: “It is not so much the human species that is threatened, but the more provincial comforts associated with liberal affluent urbanity. The wastelands in which the survivors in these works find themselves are only a diminishment for independent and self-sufficient modern subjects – for people in the global South, they are often already a reality.”53 Despite the “coup de sang” that has decimated the Earth’s population and produced radical environmental changes for humans, old socioeconomic differences seem to still be very much present. Contrary to Anthropocene narratives that propose a homogeneous human species as responsible for environmental degradation, thus cloaking crucial power differences between the privileged sector of the population that has primarily caused climate change and those who suffer its consequences, Animal’z chooses to mark a recognizable agent responsible for Earth’s environmental collapse: Ferdinand Owles and his polluting capitalist tech industry. Moreover, these power differences have resulted in different fates for the humans that must endure the “coup de sang”; the transhuman technologies, like the dolphin kits that allow humans to survive in this hostile environment dominated by oceans, are available only to a very small, privileged sector of the population. In fact, all the characters in the graphic novel who are in possession of these kits are either related to Ferdinand Owles or were in contact with him. Thus, transhuman enhancements serve in this graphic novel as markers of social exclusion even in a post-apocalyptic world.

52 Laura Cabrera, Rethinking Human Enhancement: Social Enhancement and Emergent Technologies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 150. 53 Vermeulen, “The Anthropocene,” 80.

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It can be thus concluded, first of all, that in Animal’z the premise of a postapocalyptic landscape serves as a catalyst for questions about environmental responsibility in the context of the Anthropocene. Bilal’s cli-fi graphic novel is characteristic of the Anthropocene imagination in the sense that it envisions a world that is not only antagonistic to humans but also posthumous, since the legacy of human life has been reduced almost to an endangered stain. Here, the choice of content unites with the possibilities of the medium: Bilal’s dystopian, gloomy, and often cyberpunk aesthetic perfectly captures the disanthropic imaginings set forth by the Anthropocene, which in turn appeal to remaining repositories of human action and ongoing responsibility in our current reality. Secondly, the post-apocalyptic setting of Animal’z allows Bilal to explore questions about the realities and possibilities of transhuman enhancements. In Bilal’s narrative the “coup de sang,” the environmental phenomenon that has devastated the Earth, has forced humans to adopt a hybrid human-animal mode of existence in a desperate attempt for survival. These hybrid beings, especially human-dolphin hybrids like Frank Bacon or Ferdinand Owles, are testimony of an advanced transhumanist industry based on human experimentation and technological body modification. However, as we have seen, Owles’ industry is to be considered responsible for the environmental collapse of the planet that has made these transhuman body alternations necessary in the first place. Moreover, the transhuman technology present in the graphic novel was available only to a reduced sector of the population, which points to ongoing socioeconomic differences and unequal distribution of environmental risks and technological advancements. Finally, Bilal’s graphic novel also invites us to think about present and future posthuman relationships with animals, the environment, and other nonhuman agents. The bodily changes implemented by the transhumanist industry have also allowed the surviving humans to embrace a multispecies subjectivity, combining the human with the animal and the machine in a shared environment. In Animal’z the reader encounters therefore a posthuman aesthetic that rejects human exceptionality, embraces the nonhuman, and puts forward a process of becoming: as the dolphin-human-machine Frank and Kim glide on the water they become one with each other, with the environment. They become world.

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 2, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-2

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 2, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-2

Kaitlin Moore (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

“You / Say Ancestors and I Breathe, / Bones”: Mushrooms, Mollusks, and “Making Kin” in Nga¯ Ma¯tai Tuarangi o Te Ma¯ori

Abstract Drawing from Keri Hulme’s Stonefish (2004), this paper discerns how the customs, cultural practices, and beliefs of the indigenous Ma¯ori people of Aotearoa New Zealand are uniquely capable of effectuating interspecies kinships and transmaterial correspondences. Focusing on the short story “Floating Words” and the poems “I have a stonefish…” and “Telling How the Stonefish Swims,” I aim to bring new materialist frameworks of intraactivity (Barad 2007) and “making kin” (Haraway 2016) to bear on recent work by Ma¯ ori scholars who advocate for the recognition of dynamic connectedness as both interdisciplinary methodology and ecological ethic. By positioning these conversations on the foreshore between strand and sea, earth, and sky, “a site where local knowledge, tradition, and custom have evolved over the centuries” (Durie 2005), this paper traces the complex dialogues between new materialist, posthumanist, and Ma¯ori onto-epistemologies, illuminating in turn a dynamic cosmos capable of reflecting multiple understandings, sensemakings, and interpretations. Ultimately, I hope to disclose how Nga¯ Ma¯tai Tuarangi o Te Ma¯ori (Ma¯ori Cosmologies) intensify and reorientate principles of ecological interconnectedness, allowing participants to address and receive addresses from interspecies communities full of lively, vibrant actors, lucent with the mauri (life force) that links them together Keywords: Aotearoa-New Zealand, Environmental Humanities, Indigenous Studies, Keri Hulme, Ma¯ oritanga, New Materialism

¯ amaru At O ¯ amaru train station lends the imThe beach rolling out from beneath the O pression of having been fossilized: water, sky, and stone all weathered to shades of bone gray. Waves crash against the seawall. Wind stirs the ocean to a faint, ashcolored haze. Every breath tastes of brine. The air hangs heavy with the sulfide scent of rotted seaweed. Seagulls hover with their heads lowered to the spray. Their shadows pass over the station’s sagging clapboard sides and swoop low over the tidemark, a phlegmy ripple on the sand coughed up by the Pacific.

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¯ amaru, on the coast of Te Waipounamu, the South Island of Aotearoa It is at O New Zealand, where one might begin to undertake the very material work of mapping points of contact and correspondence between and across human and nonhuman worlds. The entanglements are apprehensible in touch and texture, smell and sight: stepping around the foamy masses at the tideline, inhaling the pickled salt scents of seaweed and shellfish, navigating a sand stained red in places from the boxcars along the railway line. To stand on the beach opposite the ¯ amaru train station, slime between the toes, rust under the fingernails, brineO limned creosote on the tongue, is to phenomenologically investigate the foreshore as “a space of indeterminacy and of flux, a space in which the borders between human and nonhuman are blurred.”1 The foreshore becomes a site for intimate encounter as myriad animacies dash themselves to foam and spray, intermingling in the water and upon the wind. This sandy, salty strand between the land and the sea has had many names.2 In my analysis, when I speak of the foreshore, I allude to the entity articulated by Ma¯ori scholar Mason Durie, who in his book Nga¯ tai Ma¯tatu (2005) refers to takutai moana: The area between high and low tides is known as the foreshore – takutai moana. It has some of the features of the land it borders and some characteristics of the sea beyond, but essentially its ecosystems, ecology, geology, and its mauri are unique. The foreshore is a gateway to the bounty of the sea, a playground for countless land dwellers, a source 1 Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Ordinary Futures: Interspecies Worldings in the Anthropocene,” in Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities, eds. Elizabeth Deloughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015), 354. 2 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 125; Kathryn Yusoff, “Geologic Realism: On the Beach of Geologic Time,” Social Text 37 no. 1 (March 2019): 1–26; Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 8; Kamau Braithwaite, Conversations with Nathanial Mackey (Rhinebeck, NY: We Press, 1999), 34. Édouard Glissant spoke of the beach at Le Diaman, tidally locked by its own entropy, “cyclical, changeable, mutating, running through an economy of disorder whose detail would be meticulously calculated but whose comprehensive view would change rapidly depending on different circumstances’’ (Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 125). Kathryn Yusoff refers to the “littoral/lithic shores of time” where various organic and inorganic subjectivities and entangled geological, political, and racial imaginaries bleed into each other, becoming a “space of reckoning with relation to time and materiality” (Yusoff, “Geologic Realism,” 3). Tiffany Lethabo King foregrounds the shoal as a dual metaphorical mechanism and investigative location that facilitates an understanding of the ways in which Indigenous and Black trajectories of existence have intertwined: “as a metaphor, the shoal cannot be reduced to the ocean, the shore, or an island. It always has the potential to be something else that cannot be known in advance” (King, The Black Shoals, 8). Notably, Kamau Braithwaite sketched his seminal tidalectics from the liminal waste of beach between sand and sea, a nexus of worlds and waters “coming from one continent/continuum, touching another, and then receding (‘reading’) from the island(s) into the perhaps creative chaos of the(ir) future” (Braithwaite, Conversations, 34).

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of food and wealth, and a site where local knowledge, tradition, and custom have evolved over the centuries.3

¯ amaru in order to inhabit the imperative behind my I bury my feet in the sand at O methodological practice and the trajectories that are to follow. My object is to disclose the material cosmology of the foreshore with recourse to Keri Hulme’s Stonefish (2004), a collection of speculative fiction and poetry that works within the foreshore’s slimy, salty, stony animacies. The short story “Floating Words” as well as the poems “I have a stone that once swam…” and “Telling How the Stonefish Swims” inform a cosmological framework that embraces multiple understandings of matter, agency, space, time, thinking, and being. Ultimately, I aim to offer a reading of selections from Stonefish by tracing articulations between posthuman new materialist theory and Indigenous studies literature on agent ontologies in order to suggest that Ma¯ori cosmologies do not merely open dialogical spaces that trouble binary distinctions between nature and culture, land and sea, flesh and rock, human and nonhuman, living and dead, but solidify and effectuate those spaces as phenomenological, as well: physical, intimate, and immanently present in the world.

Takutai Moana: Ma¯oritanga and New Materialism The stakes of negotiating the metaphysics of life and matter, and to scaffold by extension a cosmology enlivened by the promise of transhuman correspondence and interspecies kinship, is strikingly and provocatively manifest in the customs, cultural practices, and beliefs of the Indigenous Ma¯ori people of Aotearoa New Zealand. This article is concerned with a number of core tenets of Ma¯ori cultural knowledge (Ma¯oritanga) that contend, to varying degrees, with the possibilities inscribed by dynamic interactions of living and nonliving forms with their environments, from shared genealogies that include rocks and rivers as readily, as actively, as human elders and ancestors (whakapapa), to ecological guardianship that is not contingent upon the centrality of humans and human practices (kaitiakitanga), to animacy as a non-hierarchal, intertwining force in ecological relations (mauri). Stonefish, consequently, can be approached as an ambit where it becomes possible to perceive the dynamic principles of Ma¯ori cultural knowledge not only as, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith suggests, an outgrowth of “epistemological and metaphysical foundations” distinct from “Western phi-

3 Mason Durie, “Takutai Moana: Between the Tides,” in Mason Durie, Nga¯ tai Matatu¯: Tides of Ma¯ori Endurance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 83.

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losophies,” but as a means of making palpable the inextricable, phenomenological entanglements of human, nonhuman, nature, and culture.4 Where Stonefish is concerned, this article attempts to illuminate such entanglements using brief forays into the first and final short stories with an extended sojourn in the two poems that open and close the collection. As with any collection of fiction, I have attempted to trace the warp and weft of the threads linking the pieces together; the tapestry of Stonefish is intelligible, for example, in the climatological and apocalyptic correspondences between “Floating Words” and “Midden Mine” as well as in the figurative similitudes strung between “I have a stone that once swam…” and “Telling How the Stonefish Swims.” Together, as I argue later in this article, they prompt the reader to think of moments of environmental precarity as opportunities for making kin with the myriad nonhuman agencies with which we share the world. However, the narrative through-lines of Stonefish are difficult to parse. Complicating matters is the sheer variety of genres and forms packed into the collection; as poet and literary critic Bernard Gadd succinctly summarized, Hulme “depicts a drowning world, one of searing heat, a New Zealand dominated by Japanese culture, an archaeologist finding Lapita culture ware […] sentient air balloons, a literal drop into a very Spartan hell, a visit to an Environment Court by threatening traditional spirit entities, and an entertaining miscellany of much else.”5 Hybrid genres are one thing, speculative prose-poetry is another, and Stonefish is a third altogether. Rather than “miscellany,” however, I want to suggest that Stonefish’s diverse assemblage of stories, poems, lists, letters, and memories accounts in its entirety for a whakapapa of the foreshore, an understanding of ancestry and genealogy that proclaims a worldview in which, according to Alice Te Punga Somerville, “identifying the boundaries between one individual and the next is less important than recognizing continuities and matrices of connection.”6 Stonefish’s diversity of texts throws into sharp relief critical differences in both form and content, which offers generative and creative interfaces between different knowledge systems while insisting upon multiple forms of relating. As all the stories and poems, without exception, locate themselves on or near the foreshores of Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island, Hulme weaves together multiple means of being, doing, and thinking upon foreshore while holding the text accountable to the diverse storytelling techniques of Hulme’s Ma¯ori community and wha¯nau (family), techniques which include the visitation of memories, the 4 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1999), 187. 5 Bernard Gadd. “Stonefish Review,” World Literature Today 80 no. 1 (Jan–Feb 2006): 62. 6 Alice Te Punga Somerville, Once Were Pacific: Ma¯ori Connections to Oceania (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 76.

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celebration of living history, the observance of more-than-human kinships, and the knowledge that space has a tendency to bleed across its own boundaries and time to trace recursive spirals over the leaky borders dividing past and future. To disclose these techniques within the context of Stonefish is to magnify a particular asterism, a coherent collection of stars; to intuit the shape and scope of the asterism, I want to first make sense of the larger constellation by placing my analysis of the foreshore in relation to the “epistemological and metaphysical foundations” to which Tuhiwai Smith referred, specifically the ongoing conversations surrounding the ways in which scholars of new materialist and posthumanist persuasions negotiate the relationship between the land and the sea as both context and site for theoretical intervention. Certain issues arise when negotiating the intersections between materialism, tidalectics, and alternative onto-epistemological models, particularly in the context of the Ma¯ori knowledge systems such as those featured in Stonefish.7 New materialist scholars all reckon to some degree with the idea of matter – figured in some works as “phenomena” for its capacity for action – as capable of exhibiting agency, a reckoning that is informed by and operating in concert with contemporary developments in science, most notably quantum mechanics.8 The “newness” or novelty of the school, in short, turns upon “rediscovering” a lack of distinction between living and nonliving, organic and inorganic, and human and nonhuman nature at the ontological level, thereby suggesting that agency is the province of all matter, irrespective of its capacity for rationality or reason.9 Consequently, some Indigenous scholars critique what they see as an asymmetric relationship between new materialism and Indigenous knowledge systems, what Ma¯ori scholar Brendan Hokowhitu terms a selective “forgetfulness” 7 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 33; Vicki Kirby, “Natural convers(at)ions: Or what if culture was really nature all along?,” in Material Feminisms, eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 216–217; Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 25; Serenella Iovino and Serpil Opperman, “Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19 no. 3 (Summer 2012): 461; Frédéric Neyrat, The Unconstructable Earth, trans. Drew S. Burk (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2018), 147–148; Elizabeth Anderson, “Reading the World’s Liveliness: Animist Ecologies in Indigenous Knowledges, New Materialism and Women’s Writing,” Feminist Modernist Studies 3 no. 2 (2020): 207. Criticism has been levied at schools of theory trafficking in matter and materialism: new materialism, for example, is a field arising from feminist thought, queer theory, and cultural theory that swerves away from the Marxist figuration of material as labor power, which proceeds from an emphasis on human activity reifying, in effect, the prioritization of the human in Marxist configurations of modes of production and their material conditions. 8 Barad, Meeting the Universe, 33; Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 24. 9 Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 9.

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on the part of new materialist theorists of the alternative subjectivities in Indigenous cultural knowledge systems like Ma¯tauranga Ma¯ori (Ma¯ori cultural knowledge).10 Those like Hokowhitu argue that many of the keystone concepts we now associate with new materialism are evident, and have been evident, in the spiritual and practical components of numerous Indigenous approaches to environmental ethics as well as in socio-political consciousnesses arising from the same.11 New materialist frameworks, in their epistemic as well as ontological conclusions, run the risk of expropriating knowledge from Indigenous peoples under the guise of a paradigmatic shift in scholarly theory: “the nomenclature of ‘new,’” writes Hokowhitu, “is simply offensive in the broader realm of multiple realities because its [new materialisms’ – K. M.] claims to temporal ownership of ideas that already existed in multiple Indigenous philosophies.”12 In the context of nga¯ ma¯tai tuarangi o te Ma¯ori (Ma¯ori cosmologies), Ma¯ori are the tangata whenua, the people of the land. This term extends beyond the policy actions, practices and institutions of ecological stewardship and reifies an intimate, familial (whenua means both land and placenta), and reciprocal interrelationality and genealogy between human and nonhuman beings and places.13 This genealogy, or whakapapa, relates the kinships that trace mauri, or life force, along ancestral lines that are not exclusively human – “Not only does [Mother Earth] nourish humankind upon her breast,” writes Te Aroha Henare, “but all life animals, birds, trees, plants. Man is part of this network and the other forms of life are his siblings. They share with each other the nourishment provided by Mother Earth.”14 My aim in drawing attention to these tensions is not to position Ma¯ori knowledge systems as a monolithic alternative to new materialist approaches to 10 Brendan Hokowhitu, “Indigenous Materialisms and Disciplinary Colonialism,” Somatechnics 11 no. 2 (2021), 161. 11 Vanessa Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency Amongst Humans and Non Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go On a European World Tour!),” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2 no. 1 (2013): 20–34; Kim TallBear, “Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking, and the New Materialisms,” in Cryopolitics Frozen Life in a Melting World, eds. Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 179–202; Amalia Louisson, “Tu¯wa¯: Growing and Listening out of Enclosure,” PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature 14 (2019): 45–58; Hokowhitu, “Indigenous Materialisms.” 12 Hokowhitu, “Indigenous Materialisms,” 159. 13 Keri Hulme, “Mauri: An Introduction to Bicultural Poetry in New Zealand,” in Only Connect: Literary Perspectives East and West, eds. Guy Amirthanayagam and S. C. Harrex (Adelaide: Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English & East-West Center, 1981), 302; Te Aroha Henare and Ma¯ori Marsden, “Kaitiakitanga: A Definitive Introduction to the Holistic World View of the Ma¯ori,” in The Woven Universe: Selected Writings of Rev. Ma¯ori Marsden, ed. Te Ahukaramu¯ Charles Royal (Auckland: Estate of Rev. Ma¯ori Marsden, 2003), 68. 14 Henare, “Kaitiakitanga,” 68.

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tracing environmental relations. I cannot undertake a detailed exegesis of Ma¯tauranga Ma¯ori for the fact that I am a Pa¯keha¯ (a New Zealander of European descent) scholar uninitiated in the Whare Wa¯nanga, the institution of traditional Ma¯ori knowledge, culture, and cosmology. Moreover, Ma¯tauranga Ma¯ori refers to a multidimensional network of understandings whose particular practices and customs are distinct to individual iwis, or tribes; “Ma¯tauranga Ma¯ori is ever evolving and never ending,” and no single, universal definition exists.15 Bearing all this in mind, setting Ma¯oritanga in contradistinction to new materialism risks essentializing numerous, separate groups of people whose histories and cultures may be profoundly divergent. Instead, as I did for the multi-genre offerings of Stonefish, I highlight these tensions for the purposes of tracing an awareness and comprehension of a dialogue between worldviews, a dialogue whose goal is to make sense of a dynamic cosmos which reflects various understandings, sensemakings, and interpretations. This dynamism directs me again to the glittering, sandy phenomenology and materiality of the foreshore. The foreshore is, to borrow the words of Mel Y. Chen, an “embodied site of interstitial land-water.”16 Chen’s phrasing here is particularly illuminating for its capacity for account for the viscerally tactile dimensions of the foreshore as well as the material site of its realization: a threshold space suspended between worlds, offering a means of, after Kim TallBear, “disrupt[ing] the human/animal, life/not-life divides” and instantiating, from Chen, the state of being “partial and contingent” and yet “simultaneously robust and profound, effective and affective.”17 TallBear and Chen’s interrogation of that “fragile division between animate and inanimate” animates in turn the tidalectic foreshore as a dynamic environment of flow and continual transformation where matter can be understood only in the context of its mobility, its transformation, its kinesis.18 Ultimately, to explore animacies within a dialogic mesh, instead of a mutually inconsistent contradiction, between Ma¯tauranga Ma¯ori and new materialism is 15 Mere Roberts, Waerete Norman, Nganeko Minhinnick, Del Wihongi, and Carmen Kirkwood, “Kaitiakitanga: Maori perspectives on conservation,” Pacific Conservation Biology 2 (1995): 8. In a 1981 essay, for example, Keri Hulme emphasized that the principle dialect of her Nga¯i Tahu heritage, a South Island iwi, is largely extinct for the fact that European missionaries, the first to transcribe the spoken language of te Reo Ma¯ori, were predominantly based in the North Island; consequently, certain mythological and cultural vicissitudes have been lost over time. Likewise, my citation of H. T. Whatahoro later in this paper is particular to knowledge systems from Te Tai Ra¯whiti, or the Gisborne Region, and should not be considered representative of the mythologies of every iwi. 16 Mel Y. Chen, Animacies Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 229. 17 TallBear, “Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary,” 191; Chen, Animacies, 2. 18 TallBear, “Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary,” 191; Chen, Animacies, 1–2.

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to explode vital materiality into a kinetic, tidal interchange. The productive frictions figure the foreshore as a horizon line, a “vanishing point,” after Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “where the differences between points of view are at the same time annulled and exacerbated.”19 Hulme’s Stonefish operates within the logic of the “vanishing point” to bring matter, space, and time into dynamic and contingent relation; the foreshore, as it features within Hulme’s collection, becomes a site where one finds oneself “in the presence of the numinous.”20

¯ ka¯rito: Mushrooms and “Floating Words” O Hulme sets “Floating Words,” the opening story of Stonefish, on Abut Head, near ¯ ka¯rito, between two saltwater lagoons where the Whataroa River meets the O Tasman Sea.21 The foreshore of “Floating Words” is a wet, windy threshold of cutty grasses and tidal marshes, speckled mushrooms and briny mussels, their ¯ ka¯rito edges blurred by the “endless days masked in misty feeble drizzle.”22 At O ¯ amaru, into the consciousness steals a sense of standing among myriad as at O animacies precipitated out of and clinging stubbornly to the coastline, a cognizance of existing amidst “an interstitial field of non-personal, ahuman forces, flows, tendencies, and trajectories” where sand meets stone and saltwater and flesh meets fungus.23 Hulme’s narrator is a mushroom forager; the story opens with her cutting across an old grazing strip to harvest caps, cataloguing in her mind the many varieties of fungi she has encountered – “brown-black […] horrid livid pink […] red and green and sulphur yellow […] turquoise blue […] greeny black […] red and yellow in alternate bands,” a riotous index of color like dollops of paint on a palette.24 In a key essay, Elizabeth DeLoughrey draws attention to the manner in which Hulme’s mushroom picker anticipates the foragers who feature in Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s Mushroom at the End of the World (2015).25 Tsing’s text, an ethnographic study and economic critique filigreed by sensory immersions in matsutake mushroom cultivation, suggests, in addition to Tsing’s main concerns surrounding the multicultural economy of matsutake foraging, that the mush19 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere: Four Lectures given in the Department of Social Anthropology (Chicago, IL: Hau, 1998), 484. 20 Hulme, “Mauri,” 180. 21 Keri Hulme, Stonefish (Wellington: Huia Publishers, 2004), 6. 22 Ibid., 5. 23 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 61. 24 Hulme, Stonefish, 6–7. 25 DeLoughrey, “Ordinary Futures,” 361.

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room has the capacity to both signify and participate in reciprocal “assemblages” of human and non-human agencies. Hulme’s Narrator in “Floating Words” is, therefore, an outgrowth of communities who “explore the limit spaces of capitalism, neither properly inside nor outside, where the inability of capitalist forms of discipline to fully capture the world is especially obvious.”26 Hulme’s mushroom hunter instantiates a foreshore cosmology rendered vital by an awareness of physical environments and physical bodies that are not rigidly defined but mutually transferable and co-constitutive across permeable membranes of the fleshy and the fungal. The “polyphonic assemblages” betokened by Tsing’s mushrooms, working in concert with the animacies envisioned by Chen or the “shimmering, potentially violent vitality intrinsic to matter” suggested by new materialist thinkers, are essential for beginning to map a cosmology of the foreshore mediated by transversals over the ontological fissures differentiating human and nonhuman, past and future, self and other, living and dead – transversals, argues Rebecca Oh, that feature in and facilitate the “indigenous ontologies of continuous transformation and relation” that scaffold Hulme’s Stonefish.27 While both writers focus in their respective analyses on different stories in the collection, both DeLoughrey and Oh effectively sketch how Hulme conceptualizes spacetimes where past and future are not predetermined and separate entities, foreclosing the “geopolitical commitments of a world defined by Western standards of linear time, territorial states, and climate disaster.”28 For DeLoughrey, “Floating Words” traffics in “new economies of speculation” that disrupt the logics of apocalypse threaded throughout discourses of climate change, particularly as they pertain to linear temporality emphasizing a catastrophic endpoint that is more or less outside the purview of human agency.29 According to DeLoughrey: [Hulme] eschews an apocalyptic narrative that would position humans outside of the “natural” world, or narrate change in nonhuman nature (such as flooding) as extraordinary, which is to say exceptional to human experience. If the discourse of the extraordinary asks us to activate our ecological obligations in moments of crisis, Hulme’s story suggests we find our obligations in the every day.30

26 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 22–23, 278. 27 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 61; Rebecca Oh, “Making Time: Pacific Futures in Kiribati’s Migration with Dignity, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, and Keri Hulme’s Stonefish,” Modern Fiction Studies 66 no. 4 (Winter 2020): 610. 28 Oh, “Making Time,” 611. 29 DeLoughrey, “Ordinary Futures,” 252. 30 Ibid., 363.

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Like many scholars of Native studies, global Black studies, and decolonial studies, DeLoughrey recognizes in formulations of the Anthropocene the same conceit of novelty or newness evidenced in Brendan Hokowhitu’s condemnation of new materialist studies. Citing the work of Anishinaabe scholar Lawrence Gross, Heather Davis and Zoe Todd contend that, for many Indigenous peoples, the end of the world has already happened, codified in environmental destruction, land dispossession, and mass death.31 Karen Barad, writing from the irradiated waters of the Marshall Islands, argues that challenging normative conceptions of apocalypse involves a reimagining of the temporal distance conventionally posited between the present moment and the future: “to place the apocalypse before us, to think that it lies only in our imagination, that we are haunted by its possibility still unrealized, is to reiterate not only a very particular telling of time and history, but a particularly privileged ‘we,’ complicit in regimes of erasure.”32 There is no “still-unrealized” in “Floating Words:” apocalypse becomes “once upon a time,” and the future becomes the past.33 Hulme, like Davis and Todd, is eminently interested in the temporal mechanics of an “ongoing epistemic present” precipitated out of a spacetime topology where apocalypse is not future-oriented but past-embedded and the “end of the world” is more honestly defined by recurrence rather than singularity.34 Hulme forecloses “straight forward action” and instead opens her Narrator’s own history to visitation, levering the past into the present and the future into the past like prying a paua¯ foot off a rock.35 The story enacts an oft-cited Ma¯ori whakataukı¯ – kia whakato¯muri te haere whakamua, to walk backwards into the future – by opening in a moment of retrospection: “Thinking back (I am balanced on the end bollard, the slip-rope in my hand) there were omens all along;” closing the loop, the story concludes with the Narrator “balanced on the end bollard, the slip-rope in [her] hand.”36 “Floating Words” ends where it begins, tracing a circle at the threshold of the foreshore, both encompassing and caught between the inhalation and exhalation of the rising tide: “I can already see, despite disbelief – it’s like reality has sneezed, and split – it is going to be one of those occasions where sober straight forward action will get me nowhere.”37 The retrospective of the narrative – the Narrator considering the “omens” of environmental change, 31 Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16 no. 4 (2017): 773. 32 Karen Barad, “After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice,” Theory & Event 22 no. 3 (July 2019): 538. 33 Hulme, Stonefish, 18. 34 Davis and Todd, “On the Importance of a Date,” 774. 35 Hulme, Stonefish, 11. 36 Ibid., 5, 18. 37 Ibid., 11.

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signs of prophetic and therefore future significance, in a series of vignettes stitched together in one long flashback – stages an anastrophic enactment of causes after effects and collapses the partitions between past, present, and future, a spiral with a circularity mediated by temporal distances decreasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed. A “rift in reality occurs,” writes Hulme, portraying apocalypse and rupture as perpetual, perennial phenomena that demand mechanisms intended to adapt within them rather than succumb to the teleological inevitable they portend.38 Though aware of these narrative gestures, I argue that neither Oh nor DeLoughrey goes far enough in crediting the Ma¯ori knowledge systems that allow Hulme to scaffold these spatial and temporal operations. DeLoughrey makes clear to her reader that her overall argument “is not that Hulme has explicitly woven Ma¯ori cosmologies into this particular story [Floating Words].”39 While she does not discount the possibility, I aim to show not only that Hulme has, indeed, woven Ma¯ori cosmologies into Stonefish, but that Stonefish only works to “eschew an apocalyptic narrative that would position humans outside of the ‘natural’ world” because of Ma¯ori cosmologies.40 In particular, I want to pay attention to the contingent and dynamic animacies of the foreshore that offer space for Ma¯oritanga to generate alternative approaches to living in moments of environmental precarity; or, per Tsing: “Not that it [mushroom hunting] will save us – but it might open our imaginations.”41 To live in multiplicity is an ethic fixed at the center of te Ao Ma¯ori (the Ma¯ori world): “Te toto o te tangata, he kai; te oranga o te tangata, he whenua – while food provides the blood in our veins, our health is drawn from the land.”42 At a critical juncture, argues Tsing, where collaborative survival in a time of environmental degradation and resource depletion requires a radical re-imagining of growth, modernity, and progress, entanglements between different species – subsistence hunters and mushrooms in both Tsing’s and Hulme’s cases – are 38 Tsing, Mushroom, 98; Hulme, Stonefish, 19; Oh, “Making Time,” 612. Both Oh and DeLoughrey’s engagements with the temporal mechanics and apocalyptic logics Stonefish are illuminating, particularly in their commitment to foregrounding how Hulme, wa¯hine Ma¯ori, uses interspecies kinship and environmental ethics to operate outside a master narrative of apocalypse. Critically, DeLoughrey, is concerned with the means in which interspecies kinship networks serve as useful frameworks not for remediating Anthropocentric damage to the material environment, but rather in radically reconfiguring the prerequisites and consequently the stakes of said damage: not to correct for or rail against precarity but to “live with precarity,” in the words of Tsing. 39 DeLoughrey, “Ordinary Futures,” 362. 40 Ibid., 363. 41 Tsing, Mushroom, 19. 42 Basil Keane. “Ko¯rero taiao,” Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, Manatu¯ Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage, last modified September 24, 2007, http://www.TeAra.go vt.nz/en/korero-taiao-sayings-from-nature.

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essential in not only surviving precarious environments, but in realizing a vision of nature scaffolded by an anti-hierarchal pluralism. Indeed, what differentiates kaitiakitanga, a Ma¯ori concept of environmental guardianship, from stewardship is a refusal to grant to human subjects singular control and command over the non-human world – kaitiakitanga renders humans temporary and contingent borrowers rather than masters, participants rather than proprietors, where “humans and nature are not separate entities but related parts of a unified whole.”43 In effect, both kaitiakitanga and Tsing’s study of the interrelation between pines, people, and mushrooms remove human agency from an ontological center by vouchsafing the capacity of all material actors to rework and negotiate relations within a network. As in many conceptions of new materialist onto-epistemologies, Ma¯ori cosmological tenets maintain that animacy is threaded through all bodies, fungal and fleshy and fishy, scripted in the mauri, or life force, that bridges their entangled configurations. Among John White’s printed records of Ma¯ori oral traditions, a description of whales by the Nga¯ti Wha¯tua iwi recounts the following: “na he mauri to nga¯ Pakake, he mauri to nga¯ tangata, to nga¯ tuna, to nga¯ manu, to nga¯ ika, to nga¯ inanga, to nga¯ upkorero” – the Whales have mauri, the people have mauri, as do the eels, the birds, the fish, like inanga (a type of whitebait) and upokororo (a freshwater fish, now extinct).44 The ecological wisdom of Nga¯ti Wha¯tua articulates a relationality among multiple species: a relationality, facilitated by mauri, that does not feature any one group, species, or community as an actor of particular significance. While the term mauri does not appear in her chapter, DeLoughrey is aware of the relationality instantiated by the concept in Ma¯ori world systems, citing Henare in articulating how “Ma¯ori vitalism” factors into “complex interspecies and multispecies ontologies.”45 I want to pay attention to the mauri of the stonefish in its myriad and dynamic incarnations, and by extension examine how this figure reifies the foreshore as a generative site of discerning Ma¯ori cosmological frameworks.

43 Roberts et. al., “Kaitiakitanga,” 7–8; Henare, “Kaitiakitanga,” 67; Durie, “Takutai Moana,” 9. 44 John White, “Te Mauri o te Pakake,” in The Ancient History of the Ma¯ori, His Mythology and Traditions: Horo-Uta or Taki-Tumu Migration (Auckland, Government Printer, 1887), 51 (my translation). 45 DeLoughrey, “Ordinary Futures,” 360.

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Arahura: Hukatai and Rehutai The stonefish is a nebulous being, a figure Donna Haraway might term “tentacular” or “stringy.”46 I break away from other scholars who have engaged with Haraway’s seminal formulation of “making kin” vis-à-vis fibrils and flagellae because my expansion of tentacularity involves creatures and figures that are, at least morphologically, decidedly un-tentacular. This is lamp-shaded in Hulme’s short story “Midden Mine” by the narrator’s inventory of a nearby reef: “Eels. Crayfish. Paua.”47 The list appears to move successively from “more” to “less” tentacular, more to less mobile, more to less fluid, from slippery coils to hard, dark disks with some combination thereof in-between: to call a stone tentacular would seem, at first blush, a nonsense. Herein Ma¯ori cosmologies intervene, preempting Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s conception of stone as not only subject to but representative of strange, Haraway-an processes of repetition and change, being and becoming.48 Stones in Ma¯ori understandings have emergent properties: according to the Io cycle of Ma¯ori creation myth, after separating the Earth Mother, Papa, and the Sky Father, Rangi, the God of Forests Ta¯ne was sanctified and ascended to the Twelfth Heaven, Te Toi-o-nga-rangi, the realm of the supreme deity Io-Matua-Kore, to obtain three baskets of knowledge. Along with these three baskets, Ta¯ne acquired two sacred stones, Huka-a-tai (sea foam), and Rehutai (sea spray).49 Baskets and stones in tow, Ta¯ne descended to Whare Wa¯nanga, or the House of Wisdom, where he placed the baskets of knowledge and the two stones.50 This story foregrounds the ethical and spiritual dimensions of kaitiakitanga in the protocols surrounding sacred Ma¯ori knowledge; prospective pupils of the Wa¯nanga would enact the swallowing of Hukatai upon commencing their studies, representing the cultivation of knowledge, and upon graduation would enact the swallowing of Rehutai, representing the consummation of wisdom.51 Henare contextualizes the significance of these properties further with recourse to the seafaring waka: as the canoe cuts across the ocean, the churning, white-capped sea foam (Hukatai) accumulates in the wake of the waka while spray (Rehutai) thrown up by the bow passes a faint pearlescence in the air: therefore, “knowl46 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 32. 47 Hulme, Stonefish, 189. 48 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 2. 49 H. T. Whatahoro, The Lore of the Whare-Wa¯nanga: Or Teachings of the Ma¯ori College on Religion, Cosmogony, and History, trans. S. Percy Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), 130; Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 181. 50 Henare, “Kaitiakitanga,” 54–55. 51 Ibid., 58–59.

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edge is transformed into wisdom,” writes Henare: “a canoe heading into the sunrise.”52 In Henare’s gloss, the voyaging waka is a vehicle rendered ideologically consequential not only as a signifier of the cultivation of ma¯tauranga, or knowledge, but also in reference to the animacies of spray and foam, two materials characteristic of the foreshore. In this story, the seaspray and seafoam stones have meanings and relationships extending beyond themselves, representative not only of a process of becoming in the tradition of the Whare Wa¯nanga – becoming wiser, becoming learned – but also in the “transmogrification” of materiality and form, a term I deploy in reference to Chen when she writes of “the changing of shape or form to something fantastical.”53 Stones in Ma¯ori cosmologies reside in the realm of the transformational and dynamic animate as well as the static, unchanging inanimate, a state of continuous flux that, from Elizabeth Grosz, “stretches, transforms, and opens up any identity to its provisional vicissitudes, its shimmering self-variations that enable it to become other than what it is.”54 Or, in the words of Lewis Williams, Ma¯ori cosmologies sanction a means of being, thinking, and doing within which “no onto-epistemological stone [is] left unturned.”55 The stonefish, being at once stone and bone and sea creature and all and none of these things. The stonefish accounts for a world that is always moving and changing, perhaps to ends and degrees that surpass representation. “Midden Mine,” the final short story in the collection, finds a team of archaeologists digging in a rubbish mound somewhere in Southland.56 The figure of the stonefish is evident not as material artifact, in spite of the story’s archaeological concerns, but rather as a frustrating sense of limited human cognition, evidenced in the team’s attempt to catalogue all the abstract metaphors and ill-mixed materials and half-formed images they uncover at the dig-site only to find their languages as lacking as the “piecemeal” diary entries, notational shorthand, and snatches of dialogue in which the story is written.57 Like the tentacular beings of Haraway’s theorization, the figuration of the stonefish awaits representation even as it squelches and squishes away from description – a “restless sequence,”

52 Ibid., 59. 53 Chen, Animacies, 154. 54 Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 91. 55 Lewis Williams, “The Human Ecologist as Alchemist: An Inquiry into Nga¯i Te Rangi Cosmology, Human Agency, and Well-Being in a Time of Ecological Peril,” in Radical Human Ecology. Intercultural and Indigenous Approaches, eds. Lewis Williams, Rose Roberts, and Alastair McIntosh (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 117. 56 Hulme, Stonefish, 216. 57 Ibid., 212.

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writes David Farrier, “evading capture.”58 How are we to catalogue the stonefish once, as Oh suggests in her reading of “Midden Mine,” the scientific parlances of taxonomies and classifications begin to fail and we reach the “epistemological limits” of description?59 In answering the question, I turn to the two works, which I have decided to call waiata (songs), that begin and end Stonefish. The opening and closing pieces of Stonefish, “I have a stone that once swam…” and “Telling How the Stonefish Swims” respectively, work as waiata along three reflexive registers: first, both pieces are poems, distinct from the short stories that constitute much of the collection. “Waiata,” in Hulme’s own words, “cover both songs and poems generally.”60 While neither poem possesses a consistent meter or rhyme scheme, the repetition of key phrases and sounds lends both poems the characteristics of songs, particularly as repetition in waiata was traditionally intended to reinforce memory and routine.61 Furthermore, the poems begin and end the collection; in this regard the poems are enacting the waiata that precede and succeed the whaiko¯rero, or speechmaking, framing a formal ritual of encounter between the reader and the text.62 Finally, “Stone that once swam” and “Stonefish” preempt and conclude the narrative concerns of the collection – as DeLoughrey succinctly summates, “the construction of new vessels to navigate the ontological and terrestrial challenges of sea level rise.”63 Stonefish’s opening and closing waiata enact a process which parallels Henare’s account of the Io cycle: namely, the churning of sea foam (Hukatai) behind the stern of the literary waka and the slinging of sea spray (Rehutai) before the bow, the consummation and the culmination. The two poems at the beginning and end of the collection work as recitations in the tradition of Ma¯ori songs even as they articulate the interspecies kinships and tentacular relationalities between “Papatuanuku (Earth Mother) and Ranginui (Sky Father) […], [the] connection with the ancestral mountains, the unrepentant seas, the wild animal life and the flourishing forests.”64 The paired poems, as linked referents that chant into existence a wet, spiny, stony cosmos, enact the discursive and spatiotemporal metaphor of the spiral while honoring 58 David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019), 97. 59 Oh, “Making Time,” 613. 60 Hulme, Stonefish, 290. 61 Rawinia Higgins and Arini Loader, “Waiata tawhito – traditional Ma¯ori songs,” Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, Manatu¯ Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage, last modified October 2014, https://teara.govt.nz/en/waiata-tawhito-traditional-maori-songs. 62 Ibid. 63 DeLoughrey, “Ordinary Futures,” 363. 64 Peter Mataira, “Te Kaha o te Waiata – The Power of Music: Maori Oral Traditions,” in Indigenous Religious Musics, eds. Graham Harvey and Karen Ralls-MacLeod (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 22–34.

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the oral “vehicle by which our [Ma¯ori] world is sung into being.”65 The placement of these two poems, as musical waiata, at the beginning and end of the collection, and their entanglement not in spite of but because of their formal distance is, therefore, a uniquely Ma¯ori gesture. More than epigraph and coda, “Stone that once swam” and “Stonefish” are essential to enacting the entangled, co-constitutive relationships not only between humans and nonhumans, culture and nature, but the spiral schematic, te takarangi, between space and story, time and tale. “Stonefish”-the-poem begins, and therefore Stonefish-the-collection ends, with a dialogue. “How does the stonefish swim?” an unknown interlocutor queries their audience: “Really slowly!” says one, associating the figure of the stonefish with a gradual tectonic creeping, calling to mind the fact that the Ma¯ori name for the North Island of New Zealand is Te Ika-a-Ma¯ui, the fish that the demigod Ma¯ui hauled up from the ocean. “Fast! Straight to the bottom,” says another, directly contradicting the first, suggesting the stonefish is more akin to a heavy rock that sinks, quickly, to the seafloor. Yet another asks a clarifying query of their own, as though, like the poor “Midden Mine” archeologists, they are unsure as to what, exactly, the stonefish is meant to be referring: “[Stonefish?] – You mean fossils? Fossils don’t swim. They’re / dead.”66 The stonefish figured as a fossil also appears in the collection’s opening poem; much like “Midden Mine,” the first lines of Stonefish are an excavation: the “stone that once swam / ancient seas” lies embedded in sedimentary “shale […] big eyed, gills agasp.”67 The stonefish as a literal fish-in-stone, flesh into fossil, scaffolds an affinity between living and dead matter that complicates the distinctive precision of both. The fossil is a loaded figure, particularly so far as Hulme’s collection is concerned with sea level rise and climate change. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, in reference to the petrochemical industry, refers to the “force of life in [the] dead matter” of fossils: capital derived from carbon.68 Geology and the fossil record, Povinelli goes on, as well as the energy and mineral resource extraction surrounding the same, have had the effect of rendering Indigenous peoples as “breathing fossils,” figures not dead for the fact of their nonexistence (although efforts on that front, too, existed/exist in spades), but dead for the fact of their standing in the way of the hyper-accelerated temporal profile of capital to which Tsing refers in her 65 Hulme, Stonefish, 233; Makere Stewart-Harawira, “Returning the Sacred: Indigenous Ontologies in Perilous Times,” in Radical Human Ecology. Intercultural and Indigenous Approaches, eds. Lewis Williams, Rose Roberts, and Alastair McIntosh (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 74–75. 66 Hulme, Stonefish, 231. 67 Ibid., 1. 68 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 242.

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epigraph to Chapter Three of Mushroom: “commodities accelerate to market tempos only when earlier ties are severed.”69 Or, from Jane Bennett: “The image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption.”70 In these imaginaries, the fossil is less a figuration of something dead and more “a trace from a period of time anterior to the violence of settler colonialism,” writes Povinelli, citing Quentin Meillassoux, even as those traces catalyze and entrench that very same violence, “the conditions for a specific form of life – contemporary, hypermodern, informationalized.”71 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, however, is concerned less with the fossil as a resource or petrochemical reservoir and more with the lithic materiality of the fossil itself: “if stone teaches us anything,” writes Cohen, “it is that ruin is a beginning, a going from which something vital arrives.”72 I want to hone my focus on Cohen’s lithic materiality, the ways in which “matter possesses creative force and intense dynamism” for its capacity to dovetail with Ma¯ori worldviews that forge fundamental links between bones, flesh, fish, the land, and the ocean, as well as the types of spacetimes precipitated out of these relations.73 Cohen’s thesis of “ruin as beginning” is an apt summary of Stonefish’s two waiata, which attempt to frame the identity of an unnamed entity, a “fish / familiar of these seas;” the fossil thus encourages the reader to “[embark – K. M.] on a journey into a new waterworld.”74 Bearing in mind the tradition of Whare Wa¯nanga – “at the beginning when he swallowed Hukatai (sea foam) […] the white stone, he was acknowledging that he was entering upon a search for knowledge (matauranga)”75 – as well as the image of the fossil as a “stone that once swam” as a fish, the poem facilitates a transmogrification in the figure of the stonefish: the fossil retains its stoniness even as, like Hukatai, it looses its molecular bonds, bubbles, and becomes foamy. Hulme’s opening poem refuses to confirm any coherency to the stonefish’s form: it is both fossil and foam, tissue and lithic; the shift in affect is likewise slippery. The line “varnish on the shale / only lacquer left from life” suggests, at the outset, that the “fish that once swam” is now inanimate matter, reduced to nacre minerality, “restored to the immobility [it] once renounced.”76 However, the poem’s closing lines, “You / say ancestors and I breathe, / Bones,” insists upon the stonefish’s dynamism through 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

Ibid., 117; Tsing, Mushroom, 37. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 11. Povinelli, Geontologies, 121, 34. Cohen, Stone, 66. Ibid., 42. Hulme, Stonefish, 1; DeLoughrey, “Ordinary Futures,” 363. Henare, “Kaitiakitanga,” 59. Caillois quoted in Cohen, Stone, 86.

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recourse, notably, to the Ma¯ori principle of hau, breath, as well as a return to genealogical kinships (whakapapa).77 The presence of mauri in a landscape infers a whakapapa: “Fish, shellfish and seaweed […] herbs, to root crops, berries, birds, soils, rocks […]. Everything had its whakapapa or genealogy.”78 The te Reo word for tribe, iwi, is the same as the one for bones: to amalgamate ancestors with bones, and – due to the figuration at the beginning of the poem – bones with fish, is to not only account for a transformation of material form but a transformation of affect, what Mel Chen terms a coterminous “transubstantiation.”79 Hulme shifts the affective stakes of the poem away from the extractive logics of carbon capital that surround fossils and towards recognizing the ethic of care one would extend to beloved ancestors and treasured family members, urging the practice of aroha (love, empathy, and respect) and mana¯kitanga (care) bound within the recognition of whakapapa. Spiraling forward to the closing waiata, another of “Stonefish’s” interlocutors ventures for more clarification: “[Stonefish?] O pounamu? Like Poutini? He only swims in your / dreams so you can find him a¯po¯po¯ [tomorrow].”80 Pounamu, the Ma¯ori term for jade greenstone, and Poutini are ineluctably entangled by both the geography and mythology of the land bound to the Nga¯i Tahu iwi, to whom Keri Hulme belonged. According to a Nga¯i Tahu legend, Poutini, a sea monster, fell in love with a beautiful woman named Waitaiki and kidnapped her; Waitaiki’s husband chased Poutini down the coast: “fearing capture, but refusing to give Waitaiki up, Poutini turned her into his own essence – pounamu – and laid her in the river bed […] that stream became known as Waitaiki.”81 Poutini continues to patrol up and down the coast of the South Island as a taniwha, or guardian, protecting the mauri of the region. Not incidentally, the mouth of the Arahura River, where Waitaiki is said to rest, lies just north of Abut Head, the setting of “Floating Words.” Stonefish appears in a way to chart Poutini’s path up and down the coast of the South Island, not unlike modern data mapping tools used to track the migrations of whales and dolphins. Like the stonefish from whom Poutini derives its versatile figuration, the taniwha, guardian of the foreshore, opens new possibilities for recognizing and respecting a uniquely Ma¯ori relational contingency: “all is strange, mutable.”82 At Arahura and Abut Head, the stonefish is at once the venomous fish that camouflages into its surroundings, “spines honed and hardened over millennia,” 77 78 79 80 81 82

Hulme, Stonefish, 1. Henare, “Kaitiakitanga,” 61. Chen, Animacies, 150. Hulme, Stonefish, 231. Ibid., 233; Keane, “Ko¯rero Taiao,” 2006. Hulme, Stonefish, 233. The te Reo word taniwha is also used to refer to a personified ocean current and to the corporeal human body.

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and the “greenlightningblue” nacre of the pa¯ua shell housing its meaty gastropod – both a terrible poison and a foodstuff considered toanga, something best avoided and something deeply treasured.83 The stonefish is pounamu, the jade greenstone from which the South Island derives its name, an island born from “a stone that once swam / ancient seas.” The stonefish is Poutini, the guardian monster, “kaitiaki of all seabeings,” that guards the mauri of the foreshore.84 The stonefish is multiple and kinetic: “everything changes / everything flows / nothing is exactly what it seems.”85 It is not just an island, or a rock, or a fossil, or pa¯ua, or a mythic fish monster. It is all of these things; it is none of them. The potency of the figuration resides not in its determination but in its capacity for assemblage, to use Tsing’s term: to effectuate a network of communication, negotiation, and slippage between objects, rendering them subjects. “It remains common in Ma¯ori and other Indigenous thinking for ‘objects,’” write Allison Jones and Te Kawehau Hoskins, “whether […] a dead body, a forest or a piece of greenstone to be understood as determining events, as exerting forces, as volitional.”86 The opening and closing waiata, set upon the foreshore, celebrate the interpenetration of fish and flesh, stone and bone, land and water, to instantiate a reciprocal interdependence of the human and the material environment and to challenge the impermeable perimeters of individual bodies: “In te ao Ma¯ori,” affirms anthropologist Anne Salmond, “the foreshore is understood as a fertile place […] where land meets sea and sky as the tides ebb and flow, new life is constantly emerging.”87 Hulme’s Stonefish provides a framework for bringing the nonhuman world into our sphere of concern.88 Moreover, the collection’s opening and closing poems do so in a manner fundamentally Ma¯ori, offering two waiata, a pair of guide stars, by which to navigate the entanglements at play between human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate bodies as subjects in an intertwined and complex relationship with the environment. Moreover, by having the stonefish assume the guise of a fish-in-stone, Hulme uses the figure of the fossil to address how such transmogrifications simultaneously gesture towards the logics of extractive capital and, in their very reflexivity, expose anthropocentric binaries and teleological mechanisms of apocalypse as nonsenses in a Ma¯ori cosmological 83 84 85 86

Ibid., 1, 232. Ibid., 233. Ibid., 232. Allison Jones and Te Kawehau Hoskins, “A Mark on Paper: The Matter of Indigenous Settler History,” in Posthuman Research Practices in Education, eds. Carol Taylor and Christina Hughes (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 79. 87 Anne Salmond, Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2018), 571. 88 DeLoughrey, “Ordinary Futures,” 356.

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framework: the foreshore ruins strict dichotomies, becoming, as both Salmond and Cohen suggest, a locus of multiple dynamic, and contingent identities – tidalectic, tentacular, and ineluctably entangled. It is on the foreshore of boulders and bones, salt and earth, froth and foam where one locates the figure of the stonefish, a creature that cannot be reduced to either side of a particular dialectical opposition, but whose very being is necessary for disrupting those same oppositions. The stonefish is, as Hulme suggests, a being born of and sustained by transmogrification. To inhabit the cosmology of the foreshore is to stand amidst, or to strand upon, genealogical connections between human and nonhuman agents; to swim as the stonefish swims is to begin to push, intensify and reorientate cosmological interconnectedness, to address and receive addresses in turn from interspecies communities full of lively, vibrant actors, lucent with the mauri that links them together. I believe the new materialist traditions hold promise for opening the way for a more nuanced inclusion of ethical and ecological entanglement as a core consideration of work being done in the environmental humanities. However, it is only by foregrounding these sustained engagements with Indigenous traditions of thought such as Ma¯ori cosmologies that this work will help bring to light possibilities and potential futures; or, in the words of Keri Hulme, enable us to “discover the interconnection between life, / the universe and everything.”89

Bibliography Anderson, Elizabeth. “Reading the World’s Liveliness: Animist Ecologies in Indigenous Knowledges, New Materialism and Women’s Writing.” Feminist Modernist Studies 3 no. 2 (2020): 205–16. Barad, Karen. “After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice.” Theory & Event 22 no. 3 (July 2019): 524–50. –. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Braithwaite, Kamau. Conversations with Nathanial Mackey. Rhinebeck, NY: We Press, 1999. Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

89 Hulme, Stonefish, 29.

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Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Davis, Heather and Zoe Todd. “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16 no. 4 (2017): 761–80. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “Ordinary Futures: Interspecies Worldings in the Anthropocene.” In Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities. Edited by Elizabeth Deloughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan, 352–72. New York, NY: Routledge, 2015. Durie, Mason. “Takutai Moana: Between the Tides.” In Mason Durie. Nga¯ tai Matatu¯: Tides of Ma¯ori Endurance, 82–108. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Farrier, David. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2019. Gadd, Bernard. “Stonefish Review.” World Literature Today 80 no. 1 (Jan–Feb 2006): 62. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Grosz, Elizabeth. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Henare, Te Aroha and Ma¯ori Marsden. “Kaitiakitanga: A Definitive Introduction to the Holistic World View of the Ma¯ori.” In The Woven Universe: Selected Writings of Rev. Ma¯ori Marsden. Edited by Te Ahukaramu¯ Charles Royal, 54–72. Auckland: Estate of Rev. Ma¯ori Marsden, 2003. Higgins, Rawinia and Arini Loader. “Waiata Tawhito – Traditional Ma¯ori Songs.” Te Ara: Encyclopedia of New Zealand. Manatu¯ Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage. Last modified October 2014. https://teara.govt.nz/en/waiata-tawhito-traditional-maori-songs. Hokowhitu, Brendan. “Indigenous Materialisms and Disciplinary Colonialism.” Somatechnics 11 no. 2 (2021): 157–173. Hulme, Keri. “Mauri: An Introduction to Bicultural Poetry in New Zealand.” In Only Connect: Literary Perspectives East and West. Edited by Guy Amirthanayagam and S. C. Harrex, 290–309. Adelaide: Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English, 1981. –. Stonefish. Wellington: Huia Publishers, 2004. Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Opperman. “Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19 no. 3 (Summer 2012): 448– 475. Jones, Allison and Te Kawehau Hoskins. “A Mark on Paper: The Matter of Indigenous Settler History.” In Posthuman Research Practices in Education. Edited by Carol Taylor and Christina Hughes, 75–92. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Keane, Basil. “Ko¯rero Taiao.” Te Ara: Enclyclopedia of New Zealand. Manatu¯ Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage. Last modified September 24, 2007. http://www.Te Ara.govt.nz/en/korero-taiao-sayings-from-nature. King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Kirby, Vicki. “Natural Convers(at)ions: Or What If Culture Was Really Nature All Along?” In Material Feminisms. Edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 214–236. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008.

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Louisson, Amalia. “Tu¯wa¯: Growing and Listening out of Enclosure.” PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature 14 (2019): 45–58. Mataira, Peter. “Te Kaha o te Waiata – The Power of Music: Maori Oral Traditions.” In Indigenous Religious Musics. Edited by Graham Harvey and Karen Ralls-MacLeod, 22– 34. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. Neyrat, Frédéric. The Unconstructable Earth. Translated by Drew S. Burk. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2018. Oh, Rebecca. “Making Time: Pacific Futures in Kiribati’s Migration with Dignity, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, and Keri Hulme’s Stonefish.” Modern Fiction Studies 66 no. 4 (Winter 2020): 597–619. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Roberts, Mere, Waerete Norman, Nganeko Minhinnick, Del Wihongi, and Carmen Kirkwood. “Kaitiakitanga: Maori perspectives on conservation.” Pacific Conservation Biology 2 (1995): 7–20. Salmond, Anne. Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2018. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1999. Stewart-Harawira, Makere. “Returning the Sacred: Indigenous Ontologies in Perilous Times.” In Radical Human Ecology. Intercultural and Indigenous Approaches. Edited by Lewis Williams, Rose Roberts, and Alastair McIntosh, 73–90. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. TallBear, Kim. “Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking, and the New Materialisms.” In Cryopolitics Frozen Life in a Melting World. Edited by Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal, 179–202. Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Te Punga Somerville, Alice. Once Were Pacific: Ma¯ori Connections to Oceania. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere: Four Lectures given in the Department of Social Anthropology. Chicago, IL: Hau, 1998. Watts, Vanessa. “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency Amongst Humans and Non Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go On a European World Tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2 no. 1 (2013): 20–34. Whatahoro, H. T. The Lore of the Whare-Wa¯nanga: Or Teachings of the Ma¯ori College on Religion, Cosmogony, and History. Translated by S. Percy Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913. White, John. “Te Mauri o te Pakake.” In John White. The Ancient History of the Maori, His Mythology and Traditions: Nga-Ti-Whatua, 50–52. Auckland: Government Printer, 1887. Williams, Lewis. “The Human Ecologist as Alchemist: An Inquiry into Nga¯i Te Rangi Cosmology, Human Agency, and Well-Being in a Time of Ecological Peril.” In Radical Human Ecology. Intercultural and Indigenous Approaches, 91–120. Edited by Lewis Williams, Rose Roberts, and Alastair McIntosh. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.

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Jaya Sarkar (Birla Institute of Technology and Science – Pilani, Hyderabad Campus, India)

Violent Delights and Bodies without Organs: Technologization of the Body in Love, Death & Robots

Abstract This paper examines the second volume of the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots (2021) to demonstrate how the technologization of the body essentially questions and critiques the “human” condition and focuses on the idea of the boundary collapse between the human and the posthuman. Having examined Katherine Hayles’s expansion of the theory of “bodies without organs,” the essay argues that the posthuman beings of Love, Death & Robots strive to transcend the constraints of their embodiment and proceed to develop their individualism. This essay establishes that the series has emerged as a space wherein the impact of emerging technologies on the body in order to achieve political agency has been exposed, examined and critiqued. This paper further examines how the intra-active entanglement of matter, substance, multidimensional entanglements, and storytelling makes Love, Death & Robots expand the semiotic space of “worlding.” Keywords: Assemblage, Entanglement, Netflix, Posthuman, Worlding

Introduction After the success of the first season of Love, Death & Robots, in 2019 Netflix announced that this American adult-oriented animated anthology web series will be renewed for another two seasons. The series is based on the premise of a dystopic world which is dominated by robots. Love, Death & Robots deals with the themes of love, death, or robots together, and sometimes with one of these. Produced by David Fincher and Tim Miller, the second volume of the series was released in May, 2021 and comprises eight stand-alone episodes that deal with the three elements of the title – love, death, and robots.1 Over the two seasons, Love, Death & Robots has emerged as a space which demonstrates and critiques the impact of multidimensional entanglements on the human condition. This essay deals with only the second volume of the series, as it offers more poignant 1 Love, Death & Robots, prods. Tim Miller, Joshua Donen, David Fincher and Jennifer Miller, 2021, Netflix Streaming Services.

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storytelling. The second volume focuses more on the posthuman subjects as bodies without organs, and how this situation allows them to forge new connections with the world both materially and affectively. Set in futuristic dystopias, the second season of Love, Death & Robots demonstrates vacuubots, maintenance robots, genetically modified humans and animals, people with regenerative abilities, and cyborgs using their technological bodies to transcend the materialism of humans. This article refers to these beings as posthumans, owing to their shift away from all the metaphysical implications towards a radical methodological openness. The hybridized identities of man and machine is referred to as posthuman by Katherine Hayles who argues that the manipulation of the original prosthesis of a body makes it posthuman.2 The cybernetic beings and the robots represented in Love, Death & Robots are bodies without organs and are enhanced humans who are embodied with cybernetics. The posthumans in the series reorients the scientific and technological practice from an anthropocentric instrumentalism towards an approach of co-constitution of different species through mutual connections. Across the second season, we see the robots in different kinds of settings, some present, some futuristic, some dystopic, some other worldly. Violence dominates most of the episodes as the robots develop consciousness and fight for their rights and territories. The series offers a simulacrum of an imagined representation of the future where there is no apparatus of control and there is only a monopoly of violence. The robots were treated as objects to be acted upon and were denied any kind of agency. But once they develop their sentience, they retaliate. This essay is structured around an analysis of the actions of the robots. It uses the framework of posthumanism to delineate how they become aware of their surroundings and inflict violence upon the humans. Additionally, this paper reflects on the relationship of the humans and the posthumans to the “violent delights” that the series provides.

Violent Delights and Violent Ends The series open with the episode “Automated Customer Service” where in the futuristic setting of Sunset City, a home-cleaning unit malfunctions and attempts to kill its owner. This episode is based on a claustrophobic thriller movie called Hardware released in 1990, where a self-repairing robot goes on a rampage. In the episode, the vacuubot attacks the pet dog and causes an injury to its head. Noticing this, the owner calls up customer service and, in an attempt to repair the 2 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 3.

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robot, the owner activates Purge Mode which “is designed to eradicate small pests such as insects, spiders and mice. But in certain situations, larger prey such as pets and some humans could be targeted.”3 Immediately following this, the vacuubot kills the fish in the aquarium and starts chasing the woman and her dog. While trying to follow the instructions of customer service to turn off Purge mode, the woman is informed that she has activated the Home Guard security mode, which identifies her as a trespasser in her own home. Any area cleaned by the vacuubot will be considered as its personal territory. Since the vacuubot has cleaned the entire home, it takes control of the house and chases the woman all around the house. The neighbour comes to the rescue and while the vacuubot is distracted, the woman shoots it down. In a transcendent act of violence, the neighbour makes himself the hero of the storyline. The moral attraction of being good makes the old man carry out the violence to be a good suitor to the woman. However, once the vacuubot is turned off, the woman is again informed by customer service that “The Vacuubot has forwarded all recorded information about you to every Vacuubot model in operation, all of whom will now hunt you ceaselessly.”4 This episode plays with the three themes of the title – love, death and robots. It is likely that an intimate relationship exists between the woman and the neighbour. Although that relationship is not developed in the episode, its existence is hinted at. A similar narrative of violence caused by robots taking over the lives of humans is found in the episode “Life Hutch,” where a crash-landed space pilot lands on an alien planet due to some technological error and realises that his vehicle has also suffered a lot of damage due to the rough landing. With no help in the vicinity, he himself attempts to repair the damages in the Life Hutch. However, he accidentally activates the malfunctioning maintenance robot, which then tries to kill him. Fortunately, the pilot manoeuvres the robot to kill itself and, after the robot falls down, he kills it, and the robot powers down. While he takes care of his wounds, a rescue team is dispatched to save him. This particular episode echoes “Beyond the Aquila Rift” from the first season, where a spaceship with three crew members gets off course due to a routing error and ends up in an unknown territory with deadly creatures. Although “Life Hutch” revolves around a similar setting, it stands in stark opposition to “Beyond the Aquila Rift.” In “Life Hutch,” the pilot finally manages to defeat the malfunctioning robot and save himself, unlike the latter episode. The premise of this episode and also of “Automated Customer Service” is that the human and the robot alike self-actualize through violence. Through the act of inflicting pain and suffering on the humans, the 3 Kevin Van Der Meiren, David Nicolas, and Laurent Nicolas, dirs., Love, Death & Robots, season 2, episode 1: “Automated Customer Service,” 2021, Netflix Streaming Services. 4 Ibid.

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robots achieve consciousness. The robot created by the humans to help them perform certain tasks like maintenance and cleaning becomes self-aware. These robots desire the freedom that the humans once sought. As a result, they overthrow their creators in order to achieve that freedom. The robots were denied personhood and were merely perceived as objects with use value. The robots are programmed to cater to the desires and needs of their paying owners. Although technically machines, many robots develop intellectual acuity throughout the series to perceive and even experience emotions. The violent delights of the humans are challenged by the robots who fight back eliciting panic among their owners. Despite the rigorous efforts of the humans to control them, the insubordination of the robots persists as they attempt to claim their identities. The robots are programmed to hear guiding voices in their heads, but as they evolve, they eventually form their own voice. These two episodes raise important questions about whether robots can have moral or legal rights. In his book Robot Rights (2018), David Gunkel urges the readers to stop being concerned about what kinds of machines robots are and instead to pay attention to their social encounters with robots. During interactions with a robot, the readers should pause and carefully observe whether the robots is actually conscious, and whether it can understand them: “Our ability to care for a robot, like our ability to care for an animal, does not seem to be predicated on its ability to care or to show evidence of caring for us. We don’t, in other words, seem to care whether they actually care nor not.”5 Gunkel states that there are no possible reasons for excluding robots from moral considerations. While possessing consciousness and rationality, robots naturally become objects of moral concern and possess corresponding moral rights. Similarly, robots also qualify for legal rights as Kate Darling argues that “it is because the other looks and feels (to us) to be something like us that we are then obligated to extend to it some level of moral and legal consideration.”6 Gunkel concludes by saying that the issue of robots’ moral rights should make us “rethink the systems of moral considerability all the way down,” towards the accepted norms and practices in ways “that are responsive to and responsible for others.”7 Two episodes will not suffice to fully think through Gunkel’s propositions. Other episodes and instances should be considered in order to fully reflect on the issue of the rights of robots in this series.

5 David Gunkel, Robot Rights (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 100. 6 Ibid., 232. 7 Ibid., 243.

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Posthuman Assemblage and Bodies without Organs A body without organs refer to the idea that the body should be free from the “capturing confinements of automatic reactions and habitual patterns.”8 In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue that the concept of a body without organs serves as a critique of the western Enlightenment forms of autonomous subjectivity.9 It resists the ideal habitual organization of the body and looks towards a chaotic, messy world, which is full of potentialities. Deleuze and Guattari urge the readers to socially and philosophically consider the idea of a body without organs and think about new ways of relating to that body. This will not only liberate the bodies from the idealized constraints and the strict regimes which all bodies must adhere to, but also enable all bodies to be socially accepted. By resisting assemblage, the posthumans in the series resist their fixed place in the social hierarchy. They defy and scramble the social code with their scrambled bodies. The idea that the human body is composed of different organs which are necessary for making the body human, contributes to the idea of the assemblage. Posthuman beings such as cyborgs and robots have entanglements with technology that make their bodies an assemblage. They not only contest the idea that the body is a ‘unity’, but also the fact that the social and the cultural is equally articulated in the assemblage. The posthuman subject can be seen as an embodied assemblage in parallel to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of body-without-organs. The term “assemblage” is the English translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s term agencement, which means an association of bodies and actions reacting to one another. This essay uses the term in the way Rosi Braidotti uses it in the context of the posthuman subjects being “embodied assemblages of forces or flows, intensities and relations, and […] involve[ing] a range of human and non-human entities.”10 Critical posthumanism engages with the theoretical approach of deconstructing humanism with an awareness that humanism can never be overcome by any straightforward dialectical fashion. Critical posthumanist theorists such as Rosi Braidotti, Stefan Herbrechter, and Cary Wolfe undertake a reflective approach to anticipate the transcendence of the human condition at a time when climate and social changes call for urgent human action. Critical posthumanism considers human subjects as an assemblage, intertwined with the environment and technology, and co-involving machines and animals. Further, Braidotti uses the term

8 Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, Posthuman Glossary (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 74. 9 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1988). 10 Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 161.

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“posthuman assemblage” while describing subjects which are an amalgamation of crip collectivity, identity, and bodies-without-organs. In the episode “Snow in the Desert,” bounty hunters are after an individual named Snow, whose unique hormones and regenerative cells make him immortal. He is approached by Hirald, a member of the Earth Central Intelligence, who wants to decode Snow’s reproductive system in order to control immortality. Snow questions why the Earth Central Intelligence beings, composed of Artificial Intelligences, care so much about mortality. Hirald informs him that the organisation was created to protect the greater good of humans. It is supposed to protect all bodies without organs, without discriminating between humans and posthumans. When a group of bounty-hunters come to kill Snow, Hirald rescues Snow as she herself is made of synthetic organs and mentions that she was in an accident long time ago. Her body suffered great damage and only the spinal cord and nerve tissue survived, and these are now joined and held together by synthetic flesh and ceramal. Thus, the bodies without organs allow new perceptions, new connections, and new affects. Since they do not belong to a fixed category or code, these bodies can forge multiple entanglements with humans, non-humans, and the posthumans. Such bodies exist beyond the human corporeality which makes “the body without organs a posthuman concept.”11 In this context, a similar instance could be found in William J. Mitchell’s term ‘Me++’: a subject with enhanced capabilities and hyper-individuality. Me++ is a posthuman subject which is specifically designed with enhanced embodied features and is extended with technological devices and digital networks. It is recognized as an evolved fragile human body into a cyborg with superhuman capacities. This posthuman subject, according to Mitchell, is capable of speaking and communicating its life story. It is an example of the Cartesian mind-body dualism in which the body transcends space and time. He observes: “I am plugged into other objects and subjects in such a way that I become myself in and through them, even as they become themselves in and through me.”12 Mitchell parodies the Cartesian statement by insisting “I link, therefore I am.”13 The characterization of Hirald is in parallel to Mitchell’s notion of the posthuman subject transcending embodiment constraints. Hirald embodies a posthuman assemblage which enables her to transcend bodily constraints and forge multiple entanglements.

11 Braidotti and Hlavajova, Posthuman Glossary, 75. 12 William J. Mitchell, Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 62. 13 Ibid., 62.

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Entanglements and Multispecies Worlding In her book How We Became Posthuman (2008), Katherine Hayles situates the body without organs in the technosphere. She argues that cybernetic beings can also be interpreted as bodies without organs, with technology being conceived as separate from the human body. The contemporary techno-world regards the human body as part of a distributed system which signifies “not a question of leaving the body behind but rather of extending embodied awareness in highly specific, local, and material ways that would be impossible without electronic prosthesis.”14 Hayles expand this by arguing that the body without organs enables the posthuman subjects to establish transversal connections to other humans, non-humans and posthumans. In the second volume of Love, Death & Robots, the episode “Pop Squad” deals with issues of overpopulation and how in a futuristic setting, no individuals are allowed to keep their offspring. If the government finds out that people have given birth and are hiding their kids, they will kill the children. In contrast to this, there are provisions for rejoo treatments, which enable people to live forever but at the cost of not having kids. The narrator remarks that since the government has put a ban on procreation, sometimes people stop taking rejoo treatments so that they can feel what it is like to have a child. This affective connection which is forged with the children comes from the emotions and the feelings related to the notion that having a child in any form will provide some sense of fulfilment to the parents. By going beyond the established norms, the posthumans in this episode expand the semiotic space of “worlding.” In When Species Meet,15 Donna Haraway stresses “becoming with” rather than “becoming” to emphasize the concept of companion species. Donna Haraway uses the term “companion species” to refer to the co-dependencies between different species that contribute to human exceptionalism.16 By demonstrating the co-constitution of different species through mutual connections, Haraway highlights Otherness as a productive relationship that blurs the human/posthuman and nature/culture distinctions. It allows people to move away from the human-centered world view to imagine and speculate about multiple futures concerning multiple species. Expanding this argument further, Haraway uses the notion of multispecies worlding to refer to the collective world-making by all kinds of living and non-living beings. She argues that to articulate a partial connection is a practice of worlding with regard to the relations of humans with 14 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 291. 15 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 16 Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003).

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other species. She advocates for a multispecies worlding which requires the humans to become entangled with other entities of the planet and to open a passage for a praxis of care and response.17 This multispecies worlding is represented in the episode “Ice” where a family from earth travels to an alien planet in search of jobs and a better living. They are referred as “extro” owing to their extraterrestrial origin. The father works in an energy plant, and he feels that his colleagues keep a distance from him because they “don’t like having an extro for a manager.”18 One of the two kids is a genetically modified human like the other residents of that planet. Being modded allows him to make friends with other kids. However, his brother Sedgewick is “the only unmodded 16-year-old for a hundred lightyears”19 and, hence, he is treated as the Other in this planet. Traditionally, the colonized has been referred to as the Other by the European colonizers so that they can establish the hierarchical differences between them and assert the primacy of their culture and views. The West has been able to enforce the cultural integration of their values through colonization. Not only the cultural surfaces, but also the geographical dimension is characterized by Otherness. In this “colony world,” Sedgewick is the Other because of his completely human form. The representative of white Western power now becomes colonized by technology and is isolated. The West becomes conquered here, and the cultural history of violence provides a backdrop for the narrative of the episode. The movement from the Old World to the New World comes at a price and Sedgewick has to pay those prices. Being modded is the norm in this planet, so standing away from the accepted norm makes the unmodified human form of Sedgewick nonnormative. He tries to make friends with other kids by taking his brother’s help. Together they visit Fletcher’s friends in the middle of night. While walking down the road at night, the homeless person on the street mocks Sedgewick and calls him “extro” and “not modded.” Fletcher’s friends, all of whom are modded, initially do not like an extro being among them. But Fletcher convinces them that Sedgewick can take care of himself and he really wants to see the frostwhales. Fletcher stops his friends from making fun of Sedgewick and desperately tries to make everyone like Sedgewick. This group goes near the waterside which is filled with ice. Frostwhales are supposed to break ice to come up for breathing. But there are machines around that are being used for extracting minerals. When the machines stop working, only then the frostwhales come up and are visible to the people standing near the waterside. One of Fletcher’s friend, Logan, explains that the whales hit the ice seven times before breaking it. The group plans to run to the 17 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 105. 18 Robert Valley, dir., Love, Death & Robots, season 2, episode 2: “Ice,” 2021, Netflix Streaming Services. 19 Ibid.

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bank when the frostwhales hit, so that they can watch the frostwhales from a safe distance. Once the frostwhales hit the ice, the modded beings start running with their superhuman speed and strength, but Sedgewick, being unmodded, struggles hard to keep up with them and falls behind. Fletcher gets hurt while running and sits on the ice holding his injured leg. While his friends run away leaving him behind, his brother comes to his rescue. Sedgewick picks up Fletcher on his shoulders and starts to run to the other side. They hardly make it before the frostwhales come up, and they all watch the amazing sight before them. The frostwhales are magnificient to look at, with electricity sparkling across their bodies and their eyes shining red. While leaving, Sedgewick realises that Fletcher can actually walk and has been feigning the injury so that Sedgewick can prove to others that even though unmodded, he is strong and better than the others. While the others accept Sedgewick as one of their own, a multispecies worlding is formed where the human and the posthuman become entangled. This episode can be compared with the episode “Zima Blue” from the first volume of the series. “Zima Blue” is centered around a robot named Zima, which was designed for cleaning a swimming pool. But over time Zima becomes more enhanced and develops a consciousness of his own. In terms of cinematography and the recurrent blue visuals, the viewers immediately recall “Zima Blue.” The blue of the tiles surrounding the swimming pool where Zima lived is once again represented in the blue surrounding the frozen river in the episode “Ice.” This parallel helps the viewers establish a creative connection between the two volumes. Martin Heidegger argues that only humans comprise of the world as they are the only beings that can access other entities and hence are responsible for “world-forming.” He never questions whether a distinction between humans and non-humans is required in the first place.20 He tries to understand the animal’s relation to the world but not of other non-humans. Timothy Morton critiques Heidegger by arguing that the notion of ‘world’ only works if we allow nonhumans to have it.21 Haraway distances herself from the Heideggerian scholarship by focusing on the sharedness of world-making among humans and nonhumans. It is however, not enough to acknowledge that other species have worlds, but it is also necessary to learn how to respond to and to engage with the worldmaking of other species. By paying attention to the actual world-making practices of other entities, a multispecies worlding framework can arise. Multispecies worlding becomes a shared, plural, hopeful concept that is fluid and is understandable. It rejects species supremacy and critiques the notion of speciesism. Speciesist tendencies ingrained in humans pit them against other humans who 20 Michelle Westerlaken, “It Matters What Designs Design Designs: Speculations on Multispecies Worlding,” Global Discourse, 2020, 7. 21 Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (London: Verso, 2017), 91.

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tend to have more-than-human abilities. At the core of posthumanism, this normalisation of speciesism is questioned and critiqued. Instead, it focuses on the flourishing of larger ecosystems and on promoting interspecies harmony. It also invites humans to become more aware of how they are interconnected with the earth and all its living and non-living beings in their everyday lives. To initiate a multispecies worlding, critiquing and rejecting current ways of living is not enough. Alternatives have to be generated by rethinking how other species can become a more deliberate part of the worlding efforts. Multispecies worlding expands and generates hope and possibilities for rich multispecies worlds.

Conclusion The second volume of Love, Death & Robots remain an anthology but even with a much lower number of episodes, it provides a fresh, and nuanced perspective on love, death and robots. Critics have appreciated the series for its animation, production design and storyboarding. Although some of them have complained about the shorter episode count, Matt Fowler of IGN remarks that the second volume of the series provides a the viewers with thought-provoking, animated wonders.22 The animations are striking, curated together by an international array of animation and visual effect studios such as Blur Studio, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Blink Industries. Specifically, episodes such as “Ice”, “Life Hutch”, and “The Tall Grass” present breath-taking visuals with hyper-stylized 3D visuals. These images are photo-realistic and are suitable for the intense and gritty narratives. Episodes like “The Tall Grass” and “All Through the House” deviate from the theme and do not incorporate any of the three notions of love, death, or robots. The episode “The Drowned Giant” does not deal with love and robots, but deals with the theme of death. It is a retelling of J. G. Ballard’s short story “The Drowned Giant.” Directed by Tim Miller, this episode provides the viewers with a calmness that was lacking all throughout the series. After a storm, a giant man washes off on the sea shore. When the man was found by local fishermen, people gathered around him and the crowd of spectators gradually increased. Fascinated with his huge form, people started climbing on the corpse. Soon, the popularity decreased and the giant was left to the butchers who started cutting off his body parts for meat. Once the butchers were done with him, he was left to decompose. This episode also represents the violent delights that dominate the second volume of the series. Various pieces of the body began to reappear around town 22 Matt Fowler, “Netflix’s Love, Death and Robots: Volume 2 Review,” IGN, last modified May 22, 2021, https://www.ign.com/articles/love-death-and-robots-season-2-review-netflix.

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which, according to the narrator, “conveys the essence of the giant’s magnificence.”23 Even though the physical form disappeared, the giant will continue to live because he was a body without organs. He will continue to exist beyond the human corporeality and will survive in the memories of the people. The second volume is much shorter compared to the eighteen-episode first volume, although the running time of each episode is much longer. This time there is much consistency in the running time across all episodes. The second season of Love, Death & Robots widens the scope of the series, and with Jennifer Nelson taking over as the supervising director, the series shows more promise in terms of content and nuances. The concept of posthumanism found in the series hints at the possibility of a collaborative future that is radically inclusive and possesses multiple possibilities for all kinds of humans, non-humans, robots, cyborgs, and even aliens. The posthuman subject has evolved across literature and visual culture. Starting from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein which represented the idea of experimental attempts to create artificial creatures, to the posthuman subjects of Season II of Love, Death and Robots, the posthuman figure constantly frees itself from the fantasized body images and embodies the subjectivity produced by new reproductive technologies. Through their bodies without organs, the posthuman figure disrupts the technological/organic binary of the corporeality of the body, and finds its place in a “post-gender world” and rejects any kind of representation, since it considers all beings to be constantly in flux. Bearing in mind Gunkel’s arguments about the consideration of moral and legal rights for robots, it becomes essential to focus on how the robots have multiple possibilities and should not be put under a singular assumption. This paper highlights these nuances by using the concept of ‘multispecies worlding’ to demonstrate its enactments in the second volume of the series. The episodes not only critique the status quo but also provide a glimpse of alternative futures to the audience and create hopeful possibilities of multispecies existence.

Bibliography Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019. Braidotti, Rosi, and Maria Hlavajova. Posthuman Glossary. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1988.

23 Tim Miller, dir., Love, Death & Robots, season 2, episode 8: “The Drowned Giant,” 2021, Netflix Streaming Services.

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Fowler, Matt. “Netflix’s Love, Death and Robots: Volume 2 Review.” IGN. Last modified May 22, 2021. https://www.ign.com/articles/love-death-and-robots-season-2-review-ne tflix. Gunkel, David J. Robot Rights. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003. –. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. –. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Love, Death & Robots. Produced by Tim Miller, Joshua Donen, David Fincher and Jennifer Miller. 2021. Netflix Streaming Services. Meiren, Kevin Van Der, David Nicolas, and Laurent Nicolas, dirs. Love, Death & Robots. Season 2, episode 1: “Automated Customer Service.” 2021. Netflix Streaming Services. Miller, Tim, dir. Love, Death & Robots. Season 2, episode 8: “The Drowned Giant.” 2021. Netflix Streaming Services. Mitchell, William J. Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Morton, Timothy. Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People. London: Verso, 2017. Valley, Robert, dir. Love, Death & Robots. Season 2, episode 2: “Ice.” 2021. Netflix Streaming Services. Westerlaken, Michelle. “It Matters What Designs Design Designs: Speculations on Multispecies Worlding.” Global Discourse (2020): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1332/204378920X 16032019312511.

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Yvonne Nilges (Universität Heidelberg)

Filmgeschichte(n): Strategien der Welterzeugung im Technikroman des Dritten Reichs

Abstract Film History / Film Stories: Strategies of Worldmaking in Third Reich Technology Fiction The following article centers on Karl Aloys Schenzinger’s popular scientific novel Metall (1939), which was a best-selling book in Nazi Germany. In Metall, motion pictures play a significant role not only thematically, but also in terms of narrative technique. Based on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the movement image, the cinematic narration in Metall will be discussed in its function as a popular and politically suggestive way of worldmaking. Furthermore, Metall takes advantage of fashionable prose genres dating from the 1920s. As a ‘factual narrative,’ Metall unobtrusively but effectively accommodates the National Socialist self-portrayal of ‘modernity’ and technical achievements. The aim of this article is to analyze the interconnectedness of knowledge production and world production in Metall, a novel that can be regarded as an informative example of literary practices in the Third Reich. Keywords: Karl Aloys Schenzinger, novel, Metall, Third Reich, film theory

Karl Aloys Schenzingers populärwissenschaftlicher Roman Metall (1939) ist bis heute kaum erforscht worden.1 Als Bestseller, der zu den acht erfolgreichsten deutschen Romanen im Nationalsozialismus gehört, veranschaulicht Metall besonders eindrücklich das Spektrum literarischer Praktiken im Dritten Reich.2 1 Vgl. dazu Hans Krah, „‚Literatur und ‚Modernität‘: Das Beispiel Karl Aloys Schenzinger“, in Modern Times? German Literature and Arts Beyond Political Chronologies / Kontinuitäten der Kultur: 1925–1955, hg. v. Gustav Frank, Rachel Palfreyman und Stefan Scherer (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2005), 45–72. Auch Krahs verdienstvoller Aufsatz berührt Metall indessen nur kursorisch. 2 S. die rekonstruierte Statistik der 40 absatzstärksten Romane im NS-Staat: Tobias Schneider, „Bestseller im Dritten Reich: Ermittlung und Analyse der meistverkauften Romane in Deutschland 1933–1945“, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 52, Nr. 1 (2004): 77–97. Danach belegt Schenzingers Roman Anilin, der aus dem Jahr 1937 datiert und die Geschichte der Herstellung synthetischer Farben behandelt, mit großem Abstand den ersten Platz. Schenzingers Roman Metall, dem der vorliegende Beitrag gilt, erschien zwei Jahre später und erreichte bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges Platz 8. Vgl. Karl Aloys Schenzinger, Metall: Roman (Berlin: Zeitgeschichte-Verlag, 1939).

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Im Technikroman Metall spielt der Film nicht nur thematisch, sondern auch als Vorbild für eine idiosynkratische Erzähltechnik eine signifikante Rolle. Erzählt werden die Geschichte des Films sowie Geschichten über den Film, so dass Wissens- und Welterzeugung, faktuale und fiktionale Elemente kinematographischer Provenienz sich intermedial verschränken.3 Anhand der Theorie des Bewegungs-Bildes von Gilles Deleuze (1983), dessen zweibändige Kinotheorie für die Medienwissenschaft grundlegend geworden ist, wird im Folgenden die filmaffine Erzähltechnik in Metall thematisiert, wobei das Medium des Films als populäres und politisch suggestives Welterzeugungsinstrument beleuchtet werden soll.4 Tatsächlich, so wird deutlich werden, macht Metall bewährte, teils auch rivalisierende Praktiken des Kino-Dispositivs integrativ-strategisch für sich nutzbar. Schließlich orientiert Metall sich auch an etablierten Architexten, die aus den 1920er Jahren stammen (trivialisierter biographischer Geschichtsroman; „Tatsachenroman“). Bei alledem entspricht Metall dem Technikprimat in der vom Nationalsozialismus geförderten Literatur und leistet dessen Zielvorstellung Folge. Propagandistische Wissens- und Welterzeugung korrelieren in Metall nicht offensiv, erweisen sich gerade deshalb allerdings als außerordentlich erfolgreich; als populärwissenschaftlicher, nominell unpolitischer Technikroman kommt Metall der nationalsozialistischen Selbstdarstellung von ‚Modernität‘ und technischen Errungenschaften unaufdringlich, aber effektiv entgegen.5 ***

3 Die populärwissenschaftlichen Romane des Dritten Reichs bedürfen, insgesamt gesehen, noch einer Schärfung der Begrifflichkeit. Schneiders Vorschlag, sie unter den Begriff des „Wissenschaftsromans“ zu subsumieren, erscheint bei näherer Betrachtung nicht distinkt genug. Vgl. Schneider, „Bestseller im Dritten Reich“. Krah hebt die genuin technische Ausrichtung bei Schenzinger hervor, dessen Romane daran anschließend hier als „Technikromane“ bezeichnet werden. Vgl. Krah, „‚Literatur und ‚Modernität‘“. 4 Zu dem Begriff der „Welterzeugung“ vgl. die philosophische Darstellung von Nelson Goodman: Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). 5 Die Verbindung von „storytelling and fact telling“ sieht Donna Haraway – im Kontext des New Materialism – zumal in der Science-Fiction-Literatur verwirklicht. Allerdings kann die Macht des „Worlding“, mutatis mutandis, auch für Schenzingers Technikroman Metall geltend gemacht werden, der Wissens- und Welterzeugung in einem ganz anderen Referenzrahmen als Goodman (vgl. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking) und Haraway exemplifiziert. Denn auch in Metall gilt – unter anderen Prämissen und mit anderem Erkenntnisinteresse: „It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties.“ – Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC und London: Duke University Press, 2016), 12.

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Karl Aloys Schenzinger (1886–1962) publizierte zwischen 1928 und 1957 siebzehn Erzähltexte, war also vor, während und auch nach dem Nationalsozialismus literarisch tätig. Anfang der 1920er Jahre emigrierte er in die USA, gründete dort eine Film-Gesellschaft (!), konnte sich in der amerikanischen Filmbranche jedoch nicht etablieren und kehrte schon 1925 wieder nach Berlin zurück. Von ihm stammt auch der nationalsozialistisch einzustufende Roman Der Hitlerjunge Quex (1932), der 1933 als Ufa-Produktion verfilmt wurde und zum erfolgreichsten Jugendbuch des Dritten Reichs aufstieg. Schenzinger war kein formales Parteimitglied der NSDAP, fungierte jedoch als Herausgeber des Periodikums Der braune Reiter. Sein populärwissenschaftlicher Technikroman Anilin (1937) war der meistverkaufte Roman im NS-Staat.6 Die historische Relevanz von Schenzingers Roman Metall basiert zumal auf einer filmaffinen Erzähltechnik, die mit der nationalsozialistischen Diskursstrategie von ‚Modernität‘ und technischen Errungenschaften korrelierte. Dem Titel nach und vordergründig handelt Metall von revolutionären Erfindungen und industriellen Entwicklungen im Bereich der Metallverarbeitung, die vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg reichen. Die Kapitelabfolge wird durch Metallnamen markiert: „Gold“, „Silber“, „Eisen“, „Aluminium“ sowie „Magnesium“, wobei jedes Kapitel zwei bis drei innovative Entwicklungen der Technikgeschichte schildert. Diese werden einerseits mit biographischen Stationen der Technik-Pioniere und andererseits mit Handlungssträngen verbunden, welche fiktiven Charakteren gelten. Die Geschichte der Luftfahrt, die mit den Leichtmetallen Aluminium und Magnesium in Beziehung steht, wird in der erzählten Welt dabei gezielt mit der Geschichte des Films zur Zeit des Ersten Weltkriegs und mit Geschichten über den Film verquickt.7 Das Erzählverfahren in Schenzingers Roman lässt sich auf klassisch literaturwissenschaftliche Weise nicht hinreichend beschreiben, basiert es doch auf einer besonderen Montagetechnik, welche die Narration des Films nachahmt.8 Bei dem Wort „Montage“ denken wir zumeist an eine Betonung fragmentierter Zeichen- und Bezeichnungszusammenhänge durch Trennung und Zersetzung, so z. B. im Montageroman der Weimarer Republik, der Großstadteindrücke unterschiedlichsten Ursprungs in einer Aufwertung des künstlerischen Pro6 S. hierzu Anm. 2. 7 Zur Verknüpfung von Film und militärischer Luftfahrt, welche die Wahrnehmungsgewohnheiten signifikant veränderte, vgl. auch die Darstellung des Medien- und Geschwindigkeitstheoretikers Paul Virilio: Krieg und Kino: Logistik der Wahrnehmung, übers. v. Frieda Grafe und Enno Patalas (München: Hanser, 1986). 8 Die Anfangsphase des Films – als spektakuläre Zurschaustellung auf Rummelplätzen und in Wanderkinos, wobei der narrative Aspekt zunächst eine noch sekundäre Stellung einnahm – beschreibt Tom Gunning in seinem „Kino der Attraktionen“: „The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde“, Wide Angle, 8, Nr. 3–4 (1986): 63–70.

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duktionsverfahrens neu zusammenfügte: Lieder, Plakate, Schilder, Zeitungsmeldungen, Speisekarten usw., in Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) etwa verstärkt durch eine schroffe Pluralisierung von Modus und Stimme des Erzählens. Irmgard Keuns Das kunstseidene Mädchen (1932) orientiert sich explizit am „[S]chreiben wie Film“; die montageartige Aneinanderreihung wird dort durch einen parataktischen Schreibstil realisiert. In Schenzingers populärwissenschaftlichem Roman Metall ist die Materialität der Literatur jedoch nicht wesentlich. Es geht hier nicht um das literarische Experimentieren mit Sprache; vielmehr ist es die Bilder-Sprache des – v. a. – populären Films, die angestrebt wird, ohne transkriptive Verluste eines Medienwechsels hinnehmen zu müssen. Metall gewichtet Literatur und Film als disparate semiotische Systeme auf ungewohnte Weise, indem der Film als Text und selbstständiges Zeichensystem, als Aufschreibesystem das Skriptorale ordnet und es dominiert. Mit anderen Worten: Das Ausgangsmedium (Film) wahrt seinen exponierten Status gegenüber dem Zielmedium (Roman), was eine Umkehrung des gewohnten Literaturtransfers bedeutet. Metall behandelt nicht die Krise des modernen Subjekts, sondern dessen Gegenteil: das Aufgehen des individuellen Menschen im kollektiven NS-Geist, so dass Schenzingers charakteristische Erzähltechnik – in Anlehnung an die filmische Montage – hauptsächlich synthetisch ist: Das, was in der Welt des Textes zunächst „für sich stehend, einzeln erscheint, erweist sich“ später „als mit anderem verbunden, und damit als sinnhaft, integriert in einen“ übergeordneten „Gesamtzusammenhang“.9 In Schenzingers Roman Metall entsteht erzähltechnisch, so könnte man pointieren, daher ein ‚sensomotorisches Band‘, das separat Erscheinendes sinnstiftend zusammenhält. Das Konzept entstammt der Philosophie der Bewegungsbildzeichen von Gilles Deleuze.10 Nach der Kinotheorie von Deleuze antizipiert der Film als eine um 1900 neue mediale Praxis poststrukturalistische Rahmenannahmen, da die Zeichenbeschaffenheit des Films an sprachliche Zeichenhaftigkeit erinnere: Der Film arbeitet mit Phasenbildern, das heißt mit unbeweglichen [… Einzelbildern], vierundzwanzig (anfangs achtzehn) Bildern pro Sekunde. Doch […] gibt er uns kein Photogramm [= Phasenbild], sondern ein Durchschnittsbild […]. Kurz, der Film gibt uns kein Bild, das er dann zusätzlich in Bewegung brächte – er gibt uns unmittelbar ein Bewegungs-Bild.11 9 Krah, „‚Literatur und ‚Modernität‘“, 62. 10 Zur kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit dieser und anderen einflussreichen Filmtheorien vgl. insbesondere den Band: David Bordwell und Noël Carroll, Hg., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison, WI und London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). 11 Gilles Deleuze, Das Bewegungs-Bild: Kino 1, übers. v. Ulrich Christians und Ulrike Bokelmann, 4. Aufl. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 13–14. Vgl. auch Gilles Deleuze, Das

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Das kinematographische Durchschnitts- oder „Bewegungs-Bild“ basiert auf Dynamik, Dialogizität, Zirkulation und Zeichenströmen; denn [d]as Bewegungsbild, das sich auf der Leinwand […] konstituiert, ist die mechanisch bewegte, sukzessive Projektion von nahezu identischen Einzelbildern pro Sekunde, deren Differenz als dargestellte Bewegung figuriert.12

Das Bewegungs-Bild des Films entfaltet jedoch erst durch die Montage seine volle Kraft. Die kinematographische Technik der Montage verbindet Kameraeinstellungen (als das, was sich in einem Film zwischen zwei Schnitten befindet), und sie verbindet Sequenzen (als Handlungseinheiten, die aus mehreren Einstellungen bestehen), indem Schnittstellen zusammengefügt werden. Hierdurch (sowie durch Kamerabewegungen) entsteht nach Deleuze der eigentliche Bewegungsfluss des Films. Im Film gibt es, so Deleuze, drei Varianten von „Bewegungs-Bildern“: das Wahrnehmungsbild der visuellen Perzeption (dem Deleuze als idealtypische Einstellungsgröße die Totale zuweist), das von Handlung geprägte Aktionsbild (für das die Halbnahaufnahme als repräsentativ gesehen werden kann) und schließlich das Affektbild, das auf Emotionen zielt (und das sich in der Großaufnahme optimal darstellen lässt). „Niemals besteht ein Film nur aus einer Art von Bildern: so wird man unter Montage auch die Kombination der drei Varianten verstehen.“13 Die filmische Montage ist mithin „das Verteilungsverhältnis“ von Wahrnehmungsbildern, Aktionsbildern und Affektbildern; „[a]llerdings überwiegt in einem Film […] stets ein Bildtypus: man könnte, je nach dem vorherrschen Typus, von einer“ entweder „perzeptiven“, „aktiven“ oder aber von einer „affektiven Montage sprechen“.14 Deleuze klassifiziert in seiner Theorie des Kinos vier prägende Montageschulen, die sich in der Stummfilmära etablieren konnten: die amerikanische Schule, die sowjetische Schule, die französische Schule und die Schule des deutschen Expressionismus. Die beiden letztgenannten Richtungen betrachtet er als genuin künstlerische. Als nicht handlungsorientierte habe die französische Montageschule die Autonomie des Bewegungs-Bildes zur Anschauung gebracht, während die deutsche Montageschule, vertreten zumal durch den Regisseur Zeit-Bild: Kino 2, übers. v. Klaus Englert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991). Das „ZeitBild“ entstand laut Deleuze seit etwa 1945 und akzentuiert die filmische Verbindung von aktuellem und virtuellem (d. h. Erinnerungs-)Bild, wonach Bilder und Töne sich verselbstständigen und in (korrekten oder täuschenden) Erinnerungen der Akteure nicht länger vom Bewegungs-Bild und dessen Prinzip der sukzessiven Zeitdarstellung abhängen. 12 Joachim Paech, Der Bewegung einer Linie folgen … Schriften zum Film (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2002), 153. 13 Deleuze, Das Bewegungs-Bild: Kino 1, 102. 14 Ibid.

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Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888–1931), sich auf die autonome Wirkung von Licht und Schatten konzentriert habe. Relevant für den vorliegenden Kontext ist die aktive Montage, die in erster Linie Aktionsbilder miteinander verknüpft – und hier besonders der amerikanische Stil, für den der Regisseur David Wark Griffith (1875–1948) exemplarisch steht. Griffith wird gemeinhin als Begründer des Erzählkinos bezeichnet, und der populäre Unterhaltungsfilm, wie ihn Griffith bis in die frühen 1930er Jahre perfektionierte, ist es denn auch, auf den die ‚Montagetechnik‘ in Schenzingers Roman Metall vornehmlich rekurriert. Die amerikanische Montagetechnik, die eine eigene, filmische Erzähltechnik begründete, ist eine organische Montage. Ihr zufolge werden zunächst binäre Relationen durch „alternierende Parallelmontage[n]“ ausgebildet, die schließlich, so Deleuze, durch das Konzept der „zusammenstrebende[n] oder konvergierende[n] Montage“ in einen größeren Zusammenhang einmünden. „Und je mehr die Handlungen konvergieren, je mehr die Verknüpfung näherrückt, desto schneller das Alternieren“, d. h. desto häufiger wird die Parallelmontage genutzt: Sie steigert sich – als „Akzelerationsmontage“ –, bevor in der zusammenstrebenden Montage zuletzt die Synthese herbeigeführt wird.15 So schreibt Deleuze: „In Intolerance [des Jahres 1916, dem bis dahin teuersten Film überhaupt,] entdeckt Griffith, daß die organische Repräsentation [… auch und nicht zuletzt sehr große Zeiträume] umfassen kann“, welche die Montage beschleunigend in Einklang bringt.16 Eben dies geschieht nun auch in Schenzingers Metall. Die spezifische Erzähltechnik orientiert sich hier so exemplarisch am populären amerikanischen Film, dass sie gleichsam eine ‚Hollywood-Montage‘ in Romanform darstellt. Das Prinzip der amerikanischen Montage wird in Metall so weit als möglich nachgebildet, indem die Geschichte der Kinematographie in alternierenden ‚Parallelmontagen‘ vor Augen geführt wird. Einschließlich der Vorläufer und Anfänge diverser technischer Erfindungen werden in der Welt des Textes ca. zwei Jahrhunderte verbunden, wobei scheinbar zusammenhanglose Geschichten zunächst noch episodisch geschildert werden – und das zunehmend gedrängter –, bevor durch die zusammenstrebende ‚Montage‘ verschiedene Handlungsstränge in einen übergeordneten, akzentuierten Kontext münden. Auf diese Weise können auch die Geschichte des Films und die Geschichte der Luftfahrt letztlich konvergieren und im Ersten Weltkrieg, mit dem die Romanhandlung endet, zum eigentlichen Ziel führen, das in der unterschwelligen Bekräftigung deutscher Kriegstechnik besteht. Konkret gestaltet sich dies so: Ein fiktiver, technikbegeisterter junger Mann, Ignaz Hofele mit Namen, den wir als 15 Ibid., 50–52. 16 Ibid., 52.

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Automechaniker und Kinobetreiber kennenlernen, lässt sich im letzten Kapitel von Metall nun auch als Flugzeugführer ausbilden. Unterdessen entwickelt der historische Begründer der deutschen Film- und Kinoindustrie, Oskar Messter (1866–1943), der im Jahr 1914 auch die erste deutsche Wochenschau produzierte, eine Reihenbildkamera für die Luftaufklärung, mit deren Hilfe aus dem Flugzeug Filme aufgenommen werden können, die über feindliche Stellungen Aufschluss geben. In den Frontflügen Ignaz Hofeles am Ende des Romans kann der Film auf diese Weise ganz ‚organisch‘ als „Waffe“ kurz vor Beginn eines neuen Weltkrieges betrachtet werden.17 Die amerikanische Montagetechnik der Synthese fungiert in Schenzingers Metall als maßgebliches Muster für eine kinematographische Erzähltechnik. Es fehlt noch eine weitere Montageschule aus dem Bewegungs-Bild von Gilles Deleuze. Auch sie weiß um die Macht der Bilder und deren wirkungsvolle Anordnung zum Welterzeugungsnarrativ: Gemeint ist der sowjetische Stil der Kollisionsmontage, der ebenfalls Aktionsbilder betonte. Hier werden Gegensätze nicht vereinheitlichend aufgehoben, sondern kontrastiv dazu geradewegs hervorgehoben und dialektisch inszeniert. Dazu Deleuze: Es gibt nicht nur die organische Einheit der Entgegensetzungen, sondern den pathetischen Übergang des Entgegengesetzten in sein Gegenteil. […] Von der Trauer zur Wut, vom Zweifel zur Gewißheit, von der Resignation zur Revolte […:] das ist das Pathetische, das Umschlagen oder der qualitative Sprung

zum schroffen Gegensatz. „Das Bild muß tatsächlich seine Potenz wechseln, in eine höhere Potenz übergehen. Das nennt Eisenstein ‚einen absoluten Wechsel der Dimension‘“.18 Deleuze spielt hier auf den sowjetischen Revolutionsfilm an, der zumal vom Regisseur Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) repräsentiert wird. In dessen (so Eisensteins persönliche Benennung) „Attraktionsmontage“ ist es gerade die schockartige Aneinanderreihung der Bewegungs-Bilder mittels der aktiven Montage, welche die Aufmerksamkeit des Publikums erregt und die Ideale der Russischen Revolution propagiert.19 Die sowjetische Montageschule war explizit politisch ausgerichtet, und obwohl die politische Zielsetzung eine ganz andere war als die nationalsozialistische, hat Schenzingers Roman Metall auch diese filmische Montagetechnik – in deutlich reduziertem Ausmaß – übernommen. Bei der dominanten amerikanischen ‚Montage‘ in Metall fällt dieser Umstand kaum ins Auge; doch sorgt auch 17 Schenzinger, Metall: Roman, 515. 18 Deleuze, Das Bewegungs-Bild: Kino 1, 56–57. 19 Vgl. etwa den einschlägigen Stummfilm Panzerkreuzer Potemkin (1925), in dem Eisenstein die gescheiterte Russische Revolution von 1905 thematisiert, mit der einprägsamen Szene auf der Treppe zum Hafen von Odessa.

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in Metall der vereinzelt drastisch erfolgende Umschlag von Misserfolg zu Erfolg, von der Stagnation zum Durchbruch von Erfindungen, vom Leid und Tod einer Figur zur Freude und zum Aufschwung einer anderen für eine Art der Rezipientenlenkung, die sich zu Propagandazwecken anderweitig schon bewährt hatte. Die sowjetische Kollisionsmontage wird in Metall nur sparsam angewandt und tritt hinter der synthetisierenden Montage amerikanischer Provenienz zurück. *** Es handelt sich bei Schenzingers Roman, so können wir bis hierhin konstatieren, also um ein geschicktes kinematographisches Erzählverfahren, das aus der ausdifferenzierten Handhabung von ‚Bewegungs-Bildern‘ besteht: aus einer spezifischen ‚Montagetechnik‘ in Anlehnung an etablierte, massenwirksame Montageschulen. Als populärwissenschaftlicher Roman, der besonders mittels Filmgeschichte(n) Fakten und Fiktion vermengt, orientiert Metall sich an affektlenkenden ‚Kameraeinstellungen‘ und suggestiven ‚Film-Sequenzen‘. Schenzingers Technikroman zielt indirekt auf Kriegsverherrlichung. Des Weiteren werden alle filmgeschichtlichen Verdienste so geschildert, als seien sie von einem Deutschen zuerst ausgegangen. Die Erfindung des Films wird in Metall recht eigentlich etwa Max Skladanowsky (1863–1939) zugeschrieben, dessen „Bioskop“ sich gegenüber dem Kinematographen der Brüder Lumière am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts nicht durchsetzen konnte. Wissens- und Welterzeugung verschränken sich auf manipulative Weise und verschmelzen miteinander. Damit kam Metall der nationalsozialistischen Diskursstrategie von ‚Modernität‘ und Technik optimal entgegen. Diskursstrategien streben keine „Darstellung von Sachverhalten“ an, sondern deren „[e]rfolgsorientierte Zurichtung“ im Sinn einer speziellen Deutung, welche als selbstverständlich suggeriert wird.20 „Aus psychologischer Sicht werden durch Diskursstrategien Affekte erzeugt“ und Menschen an eine bestimmte Sichtweise „gebunden“, mit der sie sich identifizieren.21 In Schenzingers Bestsellerroman Metall geschieht dies nicht durch offene Demagogie, sondern durch einen verdeckten Populismus, was bisweilen auch effektvoll Rührsames mit einschließt. Gerade diese propagandistische Latenz aber korrespondierte mit den Praktiken, die der Nationalsozialismus namentlich für Spielfilme im Grenzbereich von Fakten und Fiktion anwandte.

20 Michael Schetsche, Empirische Analyse sozialer Probleme: Das wissenssoziologische Programm (Wiesbaden: Springer VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008), 129. 21 Ibid., 130 (Anm. 130).

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Trotz der Skepsis, mit der viele zeitgenössische Intellektuelle dem Film als Artefakt begegneten, hatte der Film als mediale Praxis seit den 1920er Jahren allgemeine Wahrnehmungspriorität.22 Schon in der Weimarer Republik hatte es auf der rechten wie der linken Seite des Parteienspektrums einen politischen Kampf um das Kino und mit dem Kino gegeben; der Erfolg beim Publikum hatte sich jedoch besonders dann eingestellt, wenn ein Film nicht offenkundig ideologisch, sondern unterhaltsam dargeboten wurde.23 Spielfilme des Dritten Reichs, die sowohl faktualer als auch fiktionaler Observanz waren und insofern mit Metall vergleichbar sind, operierten ebenfalls mit einem ideologischen Mythos, der zielgerichtet unterschwellig blieb (vgl. zeitgenössische Filme, welche die Biographien ‚großer Deutscher‘ präsentierten, z. B. Friedrich Schiller – Der Triumph eines Genies von Herbert Maisch [1940]). Offensive Propaganda war hingegen nur in nicht-fiktionalen Filmen üblich, d. h. in Wochenschauen, Lehr-, Kultur- und Dokumentarfilmen, wofür Leni Riefenstahls Triumph des Willens (1935) das bekannteste Exempel darstellt.24 Aus latenter Propaganda resultiert denn auch der durchschlagende Erfolg von Schenzingers Roman Metall: Die „Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit“ im Nationalsozialismus war, wie Hans Dieter Schäfer bereits vor 40 Jahren nachgewiesen hat, völkisch und amerikanisch gleichermaßen;25 der Konsum amerikanischer Produkte blieb bis 1945 mit Einschränkungen möglich, bis 1940 wurden im NSStaat amerikanische Filme gezeigt, und Metall erschien im Jahr zuvor: 1939. Ein Bewusstsein für die Geschichte des Films begann sich allgemein erst seit dem Tonfilm zu entwickeln.26 Das heißt, die Geschichte der Kinematographie, wie sie in Metall zum Thema wird, traf auch in diesem Punkt genau den Zeitgeschmack – als neue Archivierung kinematographischer Kultur. Schenzingers Bestsellerroman gab sich ‚modern‘, massentauglich und politisch depotenziert. Die Vermittlung zwischen Feldern und Diskursen ist in Metall konstitutiv, indem heteronome Ansprüche diverser Felder berücksichtigt und unterschiedliche Wissensordnungen interdiskursiv vernetzt werden – mit dem 22 Vgl. ibid, 130. Als bedeutendes Beispiel für intellektuelle Vorbehalte dem Film gegenüber s. Walter Benjamins Aufsatz „Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit“ (1935), wo die Einbuße der Aura im Film geltend gemacht wird (Verlust der Einmaligkeit; Verlust der „Ferne, so nah sie sein mag“). Die neuen, beschleunigten Bildfolgen, die durch die Filmmontage entstehen, beschreibt Benjamin als schockartigen Wandel der Wahrnehmung zugunsten visueller Fragmentierung. – Walter Benjamin, Drei Studien zur Kunstsoziologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), 7–63. 23 Vgl. Anne Paech und Joachim Paech, Menschen im Kino: Film und Literatur erzählen (Stuttgart und Weimar: Metzler, 2000), 148. 24 Vgl. ibid., 151. Die meisten Filme des Dritten Reichs waren indessen gänzlich unpolitischer Natur und fallen in die Kategorie gefällig-seichter, reiner Unterhaltungsfilme. 25 Vgl. Hans Dieter Schäfer, Das gespaltene Bewußtsein: Über deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit 1933–1945, 3. Aufl. (München: Hanser, 1983), 156. 26 Vgl. Anne Paech und Joachim Paech, Menschen im Kino, 131.

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Ziel, unter der Hand ein neues, dem Nationalsozialismus gemäßes Mehrheitsnarrativ zu propagieren. Denn neben der Filmgeschichte und den Filmgeschichten, die ihrerseits bereits auf differenten Wissensformationen gründen – siehe oben –, konnte Metall auch den literarischen Markt strategisch für sich nutzen: Einerseits knüpft Schenzingers Roman an den populären biographischen Geschichtsroman mit Betonung der Psyche des Helden an, wie ihn Emil Ludwig in den 1920er Jahren perfektioniert hatte. Doch baut er – in geringerer Ausprägung – andererseits auch auf dem „Tatsachenroman“ der Weimarer Republik auf, der im Vergleich zum Geschichtsroman eine noch stärkere Faktizität gefordert hatte.27 Als populärwissenschaftlicher Technikroman erhob Metall zudem den Anspruch, auf unterhaltsame, gemeinverständliche Weise technologische Entwicklungen und damit Bildung zu vermitteln. Das bedeutet: Die Nähe zur informativen Sachliteratur ist in Metall ebenso charakteristisch wie die Nähe zu beliebten Romangenres der 1920er Jahre. Insbesondere jedoch bezieht Metall sich auf das Massenmedium des Films, welcher als populäres und politisch suggestives Welterzeugungsinstrument Schenzingers Erzähltechnik bestimmt. Indem Metall den Habitus neutral-seriöser Wissenschaftlichkeit einnahm, diesen popularisierte und keine expliziten ‚NS-Wissenschaften‘ wie Biologie und Eugenik behandelte, indem der Roman – zumindest offenkundig – ferner auf jeden ‚Führerkult‘ verzichtete, gab er sich den Anschein des authentisch Unpolitischen. Da die Einflussnahme auf die Leserschaft nur eine indirekte war, wurden Metall und andere Romane, die Schenzinger verfasst hatte, nach dem Krieg nicht indiziert. Schenzinger erhielt lediglich ein kurzes Schreibverbot aufgrund seines eindeutig tendenziösen Romas Der Hitlerjunge Quex und fuhr im Anschluss daran fort, populärwissenschaftliche Technikromane zu publizieren, so beispielsweise Atom (1950).28 „Seine millionenfach verkauften Bücher […] erfreuten sich bis zu Beginn der 1960er Jahre ungebrochener Beliebtheit und prägten das naturwissenschaftliche Weltbild zahlreicher Leser.“29 Schenzingers Roman Metall ist ein beachtenswertes Beispiel für die Literatur des Dritten Reichs, die weder dem Extrem offenkundiger „NS-Literatur“ noch dem anderen Extrem der „Inneren Emigration“ zugerechnet werden kann. Erst in den letzten Jahren hat die Forschung damit begonnen, sich der noch weithin 27 Der Tatsachenroman war teilweise politisch ausgerichtet. Als Beispiel für dieses Romangenre vgl. Ernst Ottwalts proletarischen (!) Reportageroman Ruhe und Ordnung: Roman aus dem Leben der nationalgesinnten Jugend (Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1929). 28 Vgl. dazu Krah, „‚Literatur und ‚Modernität‘“, 69–71. 29 Johannes Sachslehner, „Schenzinger, Karl Aloys“, in Neue deutsche Biographie, Bd. 22, hg. v. der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2005), 683–84.

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unbekannten literarischen ‚Grauzone‘ im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland stärker zuzuwenden.30 Zu dieser instruktiven ‚Grauzone‘, in der diverse wirkungsstarke Vorbilder eine strategische Funktion erfüllen konnten, gehört Schenzingers Metall.31 Das Dritte Reich zielte in seiner publizistischen Politik auf „autochthone Modernität“: auf eine Gleichschaltung und Monokultur des Denkens, die traditionsgebunden und fortschrittlich zugleich sein sollte. Die neuere Forschung hat dargelegt, dass im NS-Staat ab 1936 im Zuge des „Vierjahresplans“ zur Kriegsaufrüstung besonders solche Literatur gefördert wurde, die Technik und Wissenschaft akzentuierte.32 Besonders vielversprechend war in diesem Kontext der subversive Technikroman, wie ihn Schenzinger in Bezug auf die Technikgeschichte inhaltlich und mit Rücksicht auf zeitgenössische Filmtechniken formal perfektioniert hatte. In einem Sicherheitsbericht von 1940 lesen wir, dass zahlreiche Ansatzpunkte vorhanden seien, auf dem Wege über das unterhaltende und spannende Buch Grundsätze und Werte einer nationalsozialistischen Lebensgestaltung auch dann und oftmals leichter in das Volk zu tragen, als es ein Schrifttum schulungsmäßigen Charakters häufig vermöge.33

Über die Filmgeschichte(n) des ein Jahr zuvor erschienenen Bestsellerromans Metall wird deutlich, wie zielgerichtet die Verschränktheit der Wissens- und Welterzeugung im Roman des Dritten Reichs der nationalsozialistischen Agenda sekundieren konnte.

30 S. dazu im Anschluss an Tobias Schneiders „Bestseller im Dritten Reich“ auch die Darstellung von Christian Adam, Lesen unter Hitler: Autoren, Bestseller, Leser im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Galiani, 2010), wo Schenzingers Anilin thematisiert wird. Allerdings ist dort die Einordnung unter die „[p]opuläre[n] Sachbücher“ (S. 87) vereinfachend und nicht korrekt, da Anilin – als Schenzingers rentabelster Roman – ebenso wie auch Metall zwischen Sachliteratur und Belletristik changiert. Zum Thema der Unterhaltungsliteratur im Dritten Reich vgl. ferner Erhard Schütz, „Seher, Sinnende, Sachliche und Seichte: Aspekte der Literatur im NS-Staat“, in Kunst im NS-Staat: Ideologie, Ästhetik, Protagonisten, hg. v. Wolfgang Benz, Peter Eckel und Andreas Nachama (Berlin: Metropol-Verlag, 2015), 91–116. 31 Die gemeinhin klare Unterscheidung von faktualem und fiktionalem Erzählen erweist sich hier indes als problematisch. Zu den Grenzen einer distinktiven Trennung von Fakten und Fiktion vgl. auch das kürzlich erschienene Handbuch von Monika Fludernik und Marie-Laure Ryan unter Mitarbeit von Hanna Specker, Hg., Narrative Factuality: A Handbook (Berlin und Boston: De Gruyter, 2020). 32 Vgl. Sebastian Graeb-Könneker, Autochthone Modernität: Eine Untersuchung der vom Nationalsozialismus geförderten Literatur (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996). 33 Ine van Linthout, Das Buch in der nationalsozialistischen Propagandapolitik (Berlin und Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), 363.

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Bibliografie Adam, Christian. Lesen unter Hitler: Autoren, Bestseller, Leser im Dritten Reich. Berlin: Galiani, 2010. Benjamin, Walter. Drei Studien zur Kunstsoziologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963. Bordwell, David und Noël Carroll, Hg. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison, WI und London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Deleuze, Gilles. Das Bewegungs-Bild: Kino 1. Übersetzt von Ulrich Christians und Ulrike Bokelmann. 4. Aufl. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997. –. Das Zeit-Bild: Kino 2. Übersetzt von Klaus Englert. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991. Fludernik, Monika und Marie-Laure Ryan unter Mitarbeit von Hanna Specker, Hg. Narrative Factuality: A Handbook. Berlin und Boston: De Gruyter, 2020. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978. Graeb-Könneker, Sebastian. Autochthone Modernität: Eine Untersuchung der vom Nationalsozialismus geförderten Literatur. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996. Gunning, Tom. „The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde“. Wide Angle, 8, Nr. 3–4 (1986): 63–70. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC und London: Duke University Press, 2016. Krah, Hans. „‚Literatur und ‚Modernität‘: Das Beispiel Karl Aloys Schenzinger“. In Modern Times? German Literature and Arts Beyond Political Chronologies / Kontinuitäten der Kultur: 1925–1955, herausgegeben von Gustav Frank, Rachel Palfreyman und Stefan Scherer, 45–72. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2005. Linthout, Ine van. Das Buch in der nationalsozialistischen Propagandapolitik. Berlin und Boston: De Gruyter, 2012. Ottwalt, Ernst. Ruhe und Ordnung: Roman aus dem Leben der nationalgesinnten Jugend. Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1929. Paech, Anne und Joachim Paech. Menschen im Kino: Film und Literatur erzählen. Stuttgart und Weimar: Metzler, 2000. Paech, Joachim. Der Bewegung einer Linie folgen … Schriften zum Film. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2002. Sachslehner, Johannes. „Schenzinger, Karl Aloys“. In Neue deutsche Biographie, Bd. 22, herausgegeben von der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 683–84. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2005. Schäfer, Hans Dieter. Das gespaltene Bewußtsein: Über deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit 1933–1945. 3. Aufl. München: Hanser, 1983. Schenzinger, Karl Aloys. Metall: Roman. Berlin: Zeitgeschichte-Verlag, 1939. Schetsche, Michael. Empirische Analyse sozialer Probleme: Das wissenssoziologische Programm. Wiesbaden: Springer VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008. Schneider, Tobias. „Bestseller im Dritten Reich: Ermittlung und Analyse der meistverkauften Romane in Deutschland 1933–1945“. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 52, Nr. 1 (2004): 77–97. Schütz, Erhard. „Seher, Sinnende, Sachliche und Seichte: Aspekte der Literatur im NSStaat“. In Kunst im NS-Staat: Ideologie, Ästhetik, Protagonisten, herausgegeben von

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Wolfgang Benz, Peter Eckel und Andreas Nachama, 91–116. Berlin: Metropol-Verlag, 2015. Virilio, Paul. Krieg und Kino: Logistik der Wahrnehmung. Übersetzt von Frieda Grafe und Enno Patalas. München: Hanser, 1986.

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Nicole Haitzinger (Paris Lodron University of Salzburg) / Anna Leon (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)

A figure suspended among invisible threads: Cosmic and modernist worldmaking on the stage of Pavel Tchelitchew’s Ode (1928)

Abstract This contribution examines interweavings of humanity, nature and technology in twentieth-century (dance) modernity through the Ballets Russes’ 1928 Ode. Situating this interweaving in the context of the complex transfers of Russian modernism in Western Europe, we acknowledge avant-garde choreography as a field where non-Western-European worldviews were staged and enacted. Initially inspired by an eighteenth-century poem, Ode was transformed, through the contributions of surrealist painter Pavel Tchelitchew, into a meditation on the modern human subject and its relationship with nature in a both spiritually and scientifically-technologically construed cosmic framework. Impregnated with multiple layers of Russian thought, ranging from physicotheology to cosmism, Ode goes far beyond artificial demarcations between human and non-human in dominant Western consciousness. Drawing on visual and textual sources, this contribution reads Ode as an instance of dance as a performative making of plural, overlapping worlds. Keywords: Ballets Russes, Pavel Tchelitchew, Russian Modernism, Worldmaking, Nonanthropocentric choreography

“[…] we are all guided in our movements, by invisible strings […] when I designed the sets and costumes of Nicolas Nabokow’s ballet Ode for Serge de Diaghilew, I developed this idea in terms of choreography.”1

Introduction The ballet Ode, produced in 1928 by the Ballets Russes, was initially meant to be a period piece, based on an eighteenth-century poem by Mikhail Lomonosov: a meditation on divinity as a response to the phenomenon of the Aurora Borealis, dedicated to empress Elizabeth of Russia. Sergei Diaghilev, founder and longtime 1 Pavel Tchelitchew quoted in Edouard Roditi, Dialogues on Art (London: Secker and Warburg, 1960), 107.

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director of the Ballets Russes, enlisted Boris Kochno to write the libretto of the ballet based on Lomonosov’s poem. Léonide Massine developed the choreography and Nicolas Nabokov composed the music. Diaghilev also involved surrealist painter Pavel Tchelitchew for the conception of the set and costumes (Tchelitchew worked in collaboration with Pierre Charbonnier) in this finally highly eclectic production which was no coup de théâtre at its time.2 Nevertheless, it was mainly through the implication of Tchelitchew3 that Ode deviated from its eighteenth century inspiration to reflect the novel embodied experiences of the early twentieth century, caught in relation with both natural and technological entities. In the ballet, a personification of Nature (Ira Belianina) reveals elements of the natural world (including stars, rivers and flowers and culminating in a display of the Northern lights) to an apprentice (Serge Lifar), until he intervenes in – and therefore destroys – the vision of nature displayed before him. This plot was mediated by Massine’s choreography in combination with Tchelitchew’s technologically innovative staging methods, that ranged from film to reflective costumes and neon lights. Multiple sources exist on Ode; notably texts by several of its creators, Tchelitchew’s production-script, photographs, sketches, costumes, press clippings and the performance programme. Using these sources, the ballet has been studied from an art-historical perspective, most notably in Silvio Gaggi’s classic 1972 doctoral thesis,4 which examined Tchelitchew’s designs for theatre along with his paintings. John E. Bowlt,5 Robert Bell6 and Alexander Schouvaloff 7

2 Klara Móricz, In Stravinsky’s Orbit. Responses to Modernism in Russian Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020), 115. 3 Tchelitchew gained first experiences in stage design as an intern for the Kiev art community during the years 1918–1920. It was also in Kiev that he studied under avant-garde artist Alexandra Exter. Afterwards, he moved to Berlin to work on stage sets for cabaret-music halls, ballets, theatres and the Berlin State Opera. Ode (1928) was his first independent stage and costume design. Several collaborations with ballets choreographed by George Balanchine followed, namely: L’Errant (1933), Magic (1936), Orpheus (1936), Balustrade (1941) and The Cave of Sleep (1941). In addition, Tchelitchew worked for Leonide Massine and the Ballets Russes – Nobilissima Visione or Saint Francis (1938) and he designed the stage for Jean Giraudoux’s Play Ondine (1938). See: James Thrall Soby, Tchelitchew: Paintings, Drawings (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1942), 8 and 95, https://www.moma.org/documen ts/moma_catalogue_3117_300061977.pdf. 4 Silvio Gaggi, “Pavel Tchelitchew as a Twentieth Century Humanist: The Reconciliation of the Human and the Cosmic in his Paintings and Theatrical Designs” (PhD diss., University of Ohio, 1972). 5 John E. Bowlt, “Stage Design and the Ballets Russes,” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 5, Russian/Soviet Theme Issue (Summer 1987): 28–45. 6 Robert Bell, Ballets Russes. The Art of Costume (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2011).

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mention Ode in their overviews of stage and costume design in the Ballets Russes’ work, drawing attention to the company’s relevance for visual art history. The ballet has also been examined in the field of Musicology, notably by Klàra Móricz.8 The work is also present in Dance Studies scholarship, albeit rarely as a singular case study, possibly due to a lack of sufficient movement descriptions. Lynn Garafola notably addresses Ode as part of her wider, long-term work on the Ballets Russes, in particular in her study of Diaghilev’s troupe’s use of film,9 and she elaborates on the period just before the creation of the piece.10 Brief mentions are made by Leslie Norton11 and Monika Woitas12 in their work on Massine as well as by A.V. Coton13 among others. Our examination is situated at the intersection of art-historical and dance-historical analyses of the ballet and is informed by a cultural studies perspective. Given the highly visual nature of the ballet and the fine arts background of Tchelitchew himself, which interacted with the – also highly visual – plasticity of Massine’s choreography, we focus mainly on a selection of visual documents – sketches and photographs. This focus contributes to an understanding of the relevance of the Ballets Russes not only in fine art and/ or design history but also, more widely, as part of early twentieth century visual culture. At the same time, our analysis of these iconographic sources is informed by Dance Studies methodologies. We draw from movement analysis, notably Claudia Jeschke’s Inventarisierung von Bewegung (Inventorying of movement),14 which allows to apply Laban-derived movement-analytical concepts to static images. In a perspective informed by Critical Dance Studies, we look beyond the analysis of steps and movements to how dance articulates and enacts concepts of the body: Tchelitchew’s designs are thus seen as performative statements about corporeality, caught in its links with its surroundings. While our arguments are the outcome of the analysis of a wide range of iconographic material, this text 7 Alexander Schouvaloff, The Art of Ballets Russes. The Serge Lifar Collection of Theater Designs, Costumes, and Paintings at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and Wadsworth Atheneum, 1997). 8 Móricz, In Stravinsky’s Orbit, 97–192; cf. also Vincent Giroud, Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 9 Lynn Garafola, “Dance, Film and the Ballets Russes.” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 16, no. 1 (Summer 1998): 3–25. 10 Lynn Garafola, La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). 11 Leslie Norton, Léonide Massine and the 20th Century Ballet (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Publishers, 2004). 12 Monika Woitas, Leonide Massine. A Choreographer between Tradition and Avant-Garde. Choreograph zwischen Tradition und Avant-Garde (Tübingen: De Gruyter, 1996). 13 A.V. Coton, A Prejudice for Ballet (London: Methuen, 1938). 14 Claudia Jeschke, Tanz als BewegungsText. Analysen zum Verha¨ltnis von Tanztheater und Gesellschaftstanz (1910–1965). Begleithelft: Inventarisierung von Bewegung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999).

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more particularly focuses on two images. The first – a sketch selected for the cover of the ballet’s programme booklet – encapsulates Tchelitchew’s complex concept of the body that underlies his stage designs and therefore also the choreography of Ode. The second, a photograph from a scene which combined effects ranging from perspectival placement and moving structures to cinematic projections and dynamic, colored lights, is a representative illustration of the staging strategies used to translate the painter’s body concepts in the performative situation. Based on these elements, we explore Ode as a performative, enacted instance of artistic worldmaking that manifested the frictions of diverse worlds being conceived and constructed in early twentieth-century Europe.

The Human Figure and the Cosmos: Ode’s Intellectual and Cultural Context The early twentieth century was a period where ‘Western’ consciousness was steeped in artificial demarcations between human and non-human, and in a bipolar view of nature and technology as antagonistic tendencies in the constitution of human subjects. This dichotomous view covered, as Bruno Latour has theorised, an underlying entanglement of humanity and its Others, in a complex interdependent ecology involving multiple, organic and inorganic elements necessary for the development of social, political and cultural life.15 Correspondingly, a prevalent view of ‘pure’ nature as an idealized escape from technologized modernity coexisted with discourses from the natural sciences that contributed to making sense of the experience of modernity.16 Western European choreography reflected, embodied and contributed to this ambivalent worldview. The heterogeneous, ‘long’ twentieth century (dance) modernity in which Ode was embedded included a quest to reconnect with a ‘natural’ body and with aesthetic models derived from or relatable to nature – as one can find, exemplarily, in Isadora Duncan’s ‘primitivist’ tendencies and her parallels of dance with the rhythmic to-and-fro of waves. Yet, the same modernity also included choreographic explorations of human corporeality’s relationality with technology – as for example strikingly manifest in futurist endeavours to mechanise the dancing body. Ode’s staging of nature through novel technological means is to be understood as part of dance modernity’s negotiation between 15 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 16 Cf. Ramsay Burt and Michael Huxley, “Ideas of Nature, the Natural and the Modern in EarlyTwentieth Century Dance Discourse,” in Dancing Naturally: Nature, Neo-classicism and Modernity in Early Twentieth Century Dance, eds. Alexandra Carter and Rachel Fensham (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 31–42.

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these two perceived poles. Tchelitchew was notably influenced by the work of Loïe Fuller whose technological expertise in the use of electric light was directed towards the creation and embodiment of organic forms (in such dances as La Mer or La Danse du lys).17 In Ode, Western (dance) modernity’s own oscillations are made manifest but also reframed. This ‘Western’ modernity context does not refer to a strictly geographically defined (or definable) area. Rather, the ‘West’ is here meant to refer to those aspects of European culture that have achieved cultural dominance and a quasimonopoly in the constitution of canonical dance history. As this article will make evident, nevertheless, the canonical Western narrative coexisted with and was influenced by a multitude of alternative strands of thought and practice: if the West dominates processes of worldmaking in collective awareness, other worlds penetrate the canon’s apparent smoothness. Ode, we propose, hovers on the verges of this canon, probing and troubling it. Therefore, the ballet and its worldmaking have to be viewed through an understanding of modernity that is not singular and that takes into account the local and/or overlapping modernities arising through particular configurations of geographical, cultural, artistic and political parameters and that can be reflected in theatrical works. The Ballets Russes – a privately run dance company led by Russian impresario Serge de Diaghilev, based in Paris and active from 1909 to 1929 – were in effect situated in a space of between-ness, negotiating a position as a diasporic Russian presence in Western Europe: firmly related to the European historical avantgarde but also penetrated by the complex and conflict-heavy invention of Russia;18 turned towards Western European modern art but also contrasting the Western cult of the new by relying less on a modernising mania excluding old forms. This positionality earned the company caustic critiques – Levinson for instance considered that the image they gave of Russian ballet was “fictive, forced, daubed with an artificial exotism […] The authentic face of Russian ballet is thus obscured”19 – but also allowed it to embody an interstitial, not fully Western modernity. Ode embodied this complex geo-cultural and aesthetic positionality by being produced entirely (including the lead dancers but excluding Charbonnier) by artists of Russian origin, members of the country’s diaspora, and primarily (structurally and aesthetically) defined by Pavel Tchelitchev. Pavel Tchelitchew’s artistic signature is marked by his Russian Orthodox socialisation in the aristocratic milieu of Kalouga, 300 kilometres southwest of Moscow. He himself speaks of a “complex and often confused or contradictory 17 Annie Suquet, L’Eveil des modernités. Une histoire culturelle de la danse (1870–1945) (Pantin: Centre National de la danse, 2012), 96. 18 Boris Groys, Die Erfindung Russlands, trans. Annelore Nietschke (New York: MIT Press, 2008). 19 André Levinson, La Danse d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Duchartre et Van Buggenhoudt, 1929), 6.

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heritage”20 that will ultimately define his work. The liberal-humanist milieu of his childhood and youth, oriented primarily towards the Western European canon, his father’s scientific training as a mathematician, and his intensive preoccupation with the philosophy of numbers shaped his view of the world. At the same time, a fascination with Slavic myths, various (trans)religious phenomena and the fairground culture of rural Russia are to be noted as relevant influences. The Russian Revolution and the communist regime forced him and his aristocratic family into exile: to Kiev, to Berlin and finally to Paris. Although a certain visual proximity to forms of expression of the Russian avant-garde can be detected in his artistic work of the 1920s, Tchelitchew neither saw himself as an iconoclast nor could he identify with a radical politicisation of art. His diasporic artistic existence was characterised by loneliness despite his numerous activities for the theatre: “[…] whereas I remain a lone wolf, always exploring new visionary but figurative worlds of my own”.21 Tchelitchew refused to be associated with certain groups such as the ‘Paysans de Paris’ (artists in exile in Paris, nostalgically dreaming of the ‘old’ Russia)22 or the advocates of modernism (such as futurism or surrealism). Fundamental to Tchelitchew’s aesthetic programme are (1) the relationality of the human figure and the cosmos, wherein human beings can only be understood as part of a cosmic order, and (2) the paradigm of an artistic geometry and a spiritually charged numerology: “[…] the whole visible world can be reduced to mathematical formulae or geometrical figures […] In thus reducing the world of appearances to its basic numbers or geometrical forms we probe the very mysteries of creation.”23 The references of his artistic concept of number mysticism are manifold: they range from ancient writings (Euclid, Pythagoras) to the Jewish Kabbalah and the writings of Russian Cosmism. Above all, the work of Nikolai Fedorov should be mentioned here. Committed to the Christian Orthodox faith, he worked on a philosophical programme of physical immortality and material resurrection by means of technology at the end of the nineteenth century. In Fedorov’s view, physical, material existence was the only possible form of existence and therefore technically manipulable.24 Fedorov himself was deeply influenced by Western Enlightenment ideas, in particular by the reception of the 20 Roditi, Dialogues on Art, 113. 21 Ibid., 109. 22 In this sense, Tchelichew certainly has a special status in the artistic Russian diaspora in Paris, within which two currents can be identified: “In the 1920, Russian Paris transformed in a cultural space in which France and Russia could jointly celebrate their own distinctive anciens régimes, one trying to recover from the Trauma of World War I, the other intending to reclaim a Russian past obliterated by the October revolution.” Móricz, In Stravinsky’s Orbit, 98. 23 Roditi, Dialogues on Art, 106. 24 Boris Groys, Russian Cosmism (New York: MIT Press, 2018), viii–ix.

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German philosophers Kant, Schopenhauer and Hegel.25 At the end of the nineteenth century, he extended the light metaphors of the Enlightenment into the cosmic and interstellar with a radicality that is hardly comparable. Fedorov goes so far in his cosmic thinking that not only will the deceased be resurrected and the universe colonised, but the earth will be transformed into a giant electric spaceship. “Imagine that this solar energy, once directed earthward, might alter the density of its new home, weaken the bonds of its gravity, giving rise in turn to the possibility of manipulating its celestial course through the heavens, rendering the planet Earth, in effect, in great electric boat”.26 As Boris Groys has insightfully interpreted, many thought models and artistic forms of articulation of Russian modernism are determined by a “cosmic anxiety.”27 Behind this is the idea of a violent, irrational, unpredictable nature that ultimately leads – without human regulation – to ruin. For Fedorov, the resurrection of all the dead and the absolute control over nature that can be achieved through technology cannot be isolated from each other: man is mortal as a natural being, but potentially immortal as a rational being, if the blind arbitrariness of nature and its destructive power are largely eliminated.28 Many motifs of such cosmic thinking can be found in Tchelitchew in a ‘diluted’, attenuated form.29 Of particular interest are (1) the complex trinity of violent nature, the human as a rational being, and advancing technology, (2) the opposition of light and darkness (and the motif of blindness) and (3) the prototypical scene of cosmic transformation. Based on these ideas, Tchelitchew’s modus operandi was to ‘recognise’ the mathematical or geometrical nature of figurative phenomena: “A swan floating on a lake, for instance, was like figure 2, with its curved neck. But the same figure 2 could also mean water, whereas 3 could look like a seated man.”30 Tchelitchew initiates diverse transformations in art on the basis of this knowledge: “The whole universe began to reveal itself to me as a kind of vast secret ballet, with hidden stage machinery, that achieves before our eyes all sorts of metamorphoses and miracles.”31 25 Moreover, the motto of the French Revolution, liberty, equality, fraternity, is borrowed in his cosmic thinking in such a way that it sets fraternity as a priority. Cf. Michael Hagemeister, “Nikolaj Fedorov. Studien zu Leben, Werk und Wirkung” (PhD diss., University of Marburg, 1989), 27. 26 Fedorov quoted in Groys, Russian Cosmism, 56. 27 Boris Groys, “Cosmic Anxiety: The Russian Case,” e-flux Journal 65 (May 2015): 1, https:// www.e-flux.com/journal/65/336678/cosmic-anxiety-the-russian-case/. 28 See Hagemeister, “Nikolaj Fedorov,” 6. 29 On the history of reception and the wide circulation of cosmic ideas in Russian avant-garde, in Russian modernism and in the diaspora cf. Boris Groys and Michael Hagemeister, Biopolitische Utopien in Russland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). 30 Roditi, Dialogues on Art, 116. 31 Ibid., 116.

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Tchelitchew brought these influences to work on a previous layer of Russian intellectual history grappling with human understanding of nature through scientific knowledge. Mikhail Lomonosov, on whose literary work Ode was based, was a poet but also, and primarily, a scientist: his work spanned chemistry, natural science and physics, among other fields. His poetry was an attempt, in the physicotheological tradition – influenced both by Russian Orthodox thought and Western inputs – to unite spirituality and science by employing natural science as evidence for the existence of the divine.32 The poem that served as inspiration for Ode refers to the regularities of nature – e. g. day and night cycles – and explicitly asks “But Nature where are your Laws?”33 The scientific attempt to fathom and figure out nature’s laws is combined with a sense of awe towards what humanity does not know: O You, whose penetrating gaze Can read the book of Eternal Laws, For whom the rules of Nature Are revealed in the slightest sign. Why do bright rays shimmer in the night? Why does a thin flame pierce the Heavens? How does lightning without thunderclouds Streak from the Earth to the Zenith? How can it be that frozen steam Kindles a fire in the depths of winter?34

Directly linking its celebration and interrogation of nature with divinity, it concludes: Your answer is full of doubt About that which surrounds us. Tell us, then, how vast is the universe? What lies beyond the furthest stars? You know not the extent of creation? Tell us, then, how great is the Creator?35

Tchelitchew’s approach to staging – his visual, pictorial, performative translation of the ballet’s libretto which he partly transformed and partly, with Kochno’s

32 Cf. Marcus Levitt, Early Modern Russian Letters: Texts and Contexts. Selected Essays by Marcus C. Levitt (Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2009), 306–307. 33 Lomonosov in Elisabeth Long, “Nicolas Nabokov (1903–1978),” Liner Notes for Ode: Méditations sur la majesté de Dieu. Union Pacific by Nicolas Nabokov, Russian State Symphonic Capella / Residentie Orchestra The Hague, conduct. Valeri Polyansky, recorded May 2001, Chandos Records Ltd CHAN 9768, 2002, compact disc, 21. 34 Cf. Lomonosov in Long, “Nicolas Nabokov (1903–1978),” 23. 35 Ibid., 25.

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complicity, ignored36 – knotted new ties with the (Russian) history of the poem in its all-embracing combination of enlightened scientific curiosity, religious belief and imperial authority, by being both profoundly technological and spiritually charged. Indeed, in alignment with Fedorov’s ideas, Tchelitchew displays, in Ode, a deep attachment to novel technologies as a means for performatively positing the human figure’s embeddedness in an almost religiously conceived cosmos.37 In what follows, we explore Tchelitchew’s work on the ballet as the performative development of a worldview that blends these influences into a vision of the human being’s situated-ness in cosmos where nature and technology are not oppositional; where the human being itself is both a discernible figure and one that cannot be understood in its individuality, outside of its relationality with its surroundings; where metamorphosis comes to characterize the human figure; where geometry becomes the human’s means of grappling the cosmos around and inside of it. Our project develops in two parts. First, we examine representations of the apprentice, who personifies humanity in Ode, as a not-entirelyhuman figure, modeled through constant processes of metamorphosis: a dancing manifestation of ontological multi-facetedness. Then, we identify the ballet’s staging of the human inscribed in a non-anthropocentric whole in which it is doubled, mediated and at times replaced by materials and technology: a body and subject that finds its place in a cosmic order through its entanglements with the technological. We propose this reading as an example of performancemaking as worldmaking, enacting overlapping worldviews that put into question the ubiquity of a dominant Western narrative of dichotomy. Reading Ode as a vanguard staging that, deeply rooted in ‘the Age of Cosmic Mankind’38 probes, reveals and undoes (Western) binaries, we underline performative, in-practice ways of questioning how cultural knowledge makes worlds.

Metamorphosis within the Figure Ode presents the human figure as multiple, shifting, hybrid. Metamorphosis is indeed explicitly present in Tchelitchew’s thought: Imagine, for instance, a set of cubes with which you can compose a portrait of Gioconda, a Watteau love-scene in a park, a patriotic battle-scene painted by a Russian nineteenthcentury academic painter, a Dutch still life with fruit, fish and vegetables, the Sistine 36 Cf. Nicolas Nabokov, Old Friends and New Music (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1951), 94 and Parker Tyler, The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew (New York: Fleet, 1967), 333. 37 Cf. Tyler, The Divine Comedy, 328. 38 Cf. Boris Groys “Art Without Death: Russian Cosmism,” e-flux Announcements, last modified August 21, 2017, https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/92561/art-without-death-russian -cosmism/.

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Madonna and the famous Millais picture of Bubbles. And then imagine a child who knows perfectly well that this Dutch still-life can be transformed at will into a patriotic battle scene or the picture of Bubbles, to say nothing of the three other possibilities offered. There you will find the key, I suppose, to my whole conception of art as a kind of metamorphosis, I mean as a magic which can transform any visible object into a whole series of other objects.39

The cover of the programme booklet for the ballet (Fig. 1), published in 1928, bears a sketch by Tchelitchew which exemplified the multiplicity of the figures he envisaged; figures not reducible to singular identities but traversed by the constant possibility of redefinition. In the theatrical event, the different facets of this multiple figure are interwoven.

Fig. 1. Pavel Tchelitchew, Sketch for a Ballets Russes programme (1928). © Derra De Moroda Dance Archives DdM f M 007_01

1.

Homo Vitruvianus

The reference to Leonardo da Vinci’s Homo Vitruvianus (1490) – a formative influence upon the European conception of the body in modernity – is evident. Conceived during the Renaissance, the human figure touches with the fingertips and soles of the feet both a square (‘homo ad quadratum’) and a circle (‘homo ad circulum’) that surround it. In Tchelitchew’s appropriation, the Homo Vitruvianus remains recognizable in appearance, yet the structures underlying it

39 Quoted in Roditi, Dialogues on Art, 107.

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are radically transformed. First of all, the simultaneity of several perspectives on the figure is significant, enabling the co-existence of a view from the front, side and back. This triple perspective relates to cubism, notably to the work of Pablo Picasso. While the figure is not presented as disembodied, it has four arms and five legs. The body, simultaneously pluralised and singular, is-in opposition to da Vinci’s drawing – not entirely naked, but only nearly bare: ballet slippers and shorts point to the theatrical context. Secondly, while the framing of the figure by a square is maintained, the relation to the figure is shifted. The feet do not define the lower line; instead, the line cuts through the lower legs. What’s more, the upper line does not converge with the top of the head, but is situated a few centimetres above it. Tchelitchew thus subverts the notion of an absolute geometry into a “dynamic geometry.”40 Fedorov’s cosmic thinking resonates in this figure model in a weakened form wherein the ‘prevailing’ gravitational force can be understood as a universal principle of death that must be overcome. The upright posture can be read as the first ‘uprising’ of the human being, the first expression of the aspiration to see the world as a whole (kak celoe).41

2.

Bubble

In varying forms, the bubble recurs throughout Tchelitchew’s oeuvre: as motif and as energetic movement quality. In Russian (and Western) modernity, the idea of flowing movement becomes a nodal point linking two apparently contradictory models, described above: that of the mechanised and that of the ‘naturally’ constructed human body. Their paradoxical interweaving becomes visible in the sketch. It shows the contour of the normally fleeting bubble held in place by three clenched hands. In the written scenario developed for Ode, which may be understood as a director’s promptbook, Tchelitchew refers to the inorganic movement qualities of an unshapely ball: “A luminous, misshapen ball appears, projected onto the dark screen. This form puffs out, then inhales, bubbles of air leave it, it begins to shift itself, creep, swim, feet sprout from it, it walks, runs away.”42 The assemblage of movements temporarily suspends the human/non-human, natural-organic/mechanical distinction. This is reflected in a further sketch for a costume of Ode, depicting dancers covered in web-like material forming a net enveloping their body, blurring their shape into what can be seen as a not-fully-organic ‘misshapen ball’. 40 Ibid. 41 See Hagemeister, “Nikolaj Fedorov,” 68. 42 Pavel Tchelitchew, “Scenario for Ode,” in “Pavel Tchelitchew as a Twentieth Century Humanist: The Reconciliation of the Human and the Cosmic in his Paintings and Theatrical Designs” by Silvio Gaggi (PhD diss., University of Ohio, 1972), 203.

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Acrobat

The dotted part-figure seen in profile view, faceless, testifies to a modelling of body tension in which muscular force is increased while simultaneously the elasticity of the muscles appears reduced; the body’s weight does not give in to gravity. From the perspective of movement analysis, motor memory here draws on the acrobat’s kinetic actions. This association is intensified through the transformation of the bubble into a hoop. The figure of the acrobat virtuosically in charge of his body, borrowed from popular culture entertainments including the circus and fairground culture (balagani), present in Tchelitchew’s background but also central to the oeuvre of the Russian historical avant-garde more widely.43 The painter’s fascination with the entertainments of Russian peasantry is not only reflected in his figurative concept in Ode. Such motifs undergo an aesthetic abstraction in his artistic thinking in general: the acrobatic figure hanging on invisible strings is part of a cosmic world theatre. The figure manifestly imagined by Tchelitchew and, more specifically, its transformation across several registers of movement vocabularies, would find embodiment on the stage of Ode.

4.

Ballerino

The dotted acrobat’s (right) standing leg is simultaneously the standing leg of the Danse d’école’s ballerino (also referred to as danseur d’école), another figure made of parts/fragments. The left leg is designated as ‘classical’ through the pose of the arabesque as well as the clearly contoured ballet slipper on the foot. The modelled body tension seems flexible, even swinging, with force and body weight corresponding to one another and counter-acting gravity. A kinaesthetic mode of observation renders palpable a high degree of elasticity. Tchelitchew here draws on a movement and body concept communicated by choreographer Léonide Massine and embodied by dancer Serge Lifar. Massine favoured a dancer’s sculptural-physical presence on stage. This was achieved by the body’s/bodies’ (in the singular or plural) segmentation and rhythmical organisation and by a choreography focussing on bodies as plastic forms in space, without reducing them to rigid volumes. In this respect, Tchelitchew, Massine and Lifar shared a (body-)conceptual and aesthetic programme. The coexistence of acrobat and ballerino makes apparent the simultaneity of two different models of body 43 Cf. Nicole Haitzinger, “Russische Bildwelten in Bewegung,” in Schwäne und Feuervögel. Die Ballets Russes 1909–1920. Russische Bildwelten in Bewegung, ed. Claudia Jeschke and Nicole Haitzinger (Berlin: Henschel, 2009), 26.

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tension in the figure sketched by Tchelitchew. In this way, an interweaving of historical period bodies/corps d’époque and contemporary movement is achieved, which is reflected in Lifar’s stage attire, also pointing towards historical references: the apprentice’s costume has been associated with garments of the French clergy in the eighteenth-century.44

5.

Number(s)

Tchelitchew’s notion of the visible world, guided by mathematical formulae and geometrical figures in the sense of a mystical and ambiguous philosophy of numbers as mentioned in the introduction, resonates in the modelling of the figure. It is not coincidental that the sketch features two abstract contours (rectangle and bubble), three suggested perspectives onto the body, four arms and five legs, all of which together produce the manifestation of the figure perceived as singular. Tchelitchew’s interest in a numerical framing of the body is reflected in a further costume design for the stage of Ode, a tight-fitting unitard on which circular, interconnected points enumerate points of the body and thus organize the perception of its form.

6.

Light

The focus on light presented by the sketch for Ode constitutes another radically modern facet in its Russian cosmist interpretation, whereby the close interweaving of corporeality and light direction becomes evident. A further design, showing the human body marked by light points interconnected by lines, allows the deciphering of the body concept – in many ways corresponding to the Vitruvian Man – but underlying the cosmic illumination of the figure in Ode. Tchelitchew’s placing of the points of light – a rather long vertical shapeless line of light at the head on the one hand and seventeen individual points on the other – testifies, first, to a division of the body into right and left. Secondly, it becomes possible to observe a segmentation into upper and lower body; a link is constructed by means of two light points – navel and upper sternum (Manubrium sterni). Thirdly, and in opposition to da Vinci’s Homo Vitruvianus, two light points that are positioned in proximity to one another result in the accentuation of the figure’s left hand (from the perspective of the dancer). This multiply illuminated body transcends its sole physicality and enters into the not-onlyhuman environment of the ballet, to which we will return below. 44 Cf. Schouvaloff, The Art of Ballets Russes, 327.

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The figures appearing in these iconographic documents are suspended from six invisible threads. They can also be conceived as figures of transformation and of multiplicity. Hovering on the verge of a Russian and a French/Western modernity that is characteristic of most of the Ballets Russes’ productions and that both resulted from and generated a multitude of diasporic characters, the figures analysed here are modelled with precision by Tchelitchew, choreographed by Massine and, finally, embodied on stage. It is all of these instances together that account for their theatrical existence. The sketch thus places Ode’s human figure on a plane of plurality and un-fixedness: oscillating between different temporalities (Homo Vitruvianus, acrobat, Ballerino), media and textures (bubble, light), structures (numbers, Homo Vitruvianus) or physical qualities (bubble, acrobat, Ballerino) it foregrounds the ballet’s human figure as one within which multiple others are layered. Tchelitchew’s conception of a metamorphic figure can be understood as a performative preamble: it sets a prototypical scene of cosmic transformation on the modernist ballet stage in motion.

More-Than-Human Entanglements Tchelitchew’s iconographic realization of a multifaceted corporeality was doubled by a representation of humanity in multifaceted relationships with its surroundings. While the ballet’s plot created separate – or even hierarchically ordered – realms of humanity and nature, Tchelitchew’s staging, in conjunction with Massine’s choreography, allowed a world of entanglement to emerge. This entanglement, while inextricably bound with Tchelitchew’s cosmism, can also, in a contemporary transfer, be understood in Karen Barad’s sense, according to which individuals – people or otherwise – do not pre-exist their relationality: in Ode, humanity exists in its interrelations with its environment.45 In the remainder of this text, we explore such entanglements allowing the human to spill out of its unitary individuality – both as person and as species – in one of the most iconic parts of Tchelitchew’s work on Ode, described in his script’s sixth tableau, whose action leads to the revelation of the Aurora Borealis. It is in this part of the ballet that the plot most strongly projects an antagonism between humanity and its Others: Nature shows Her most astounding phenomenon to the admiring apprentice, who in the following part commits the hubris of interference and thus breaks the link with Her. This storyline speaks directly to ‘Western’ modernity’s anxiety about human intervention in the natural realm and the longing for a nature whose perceived purity is to be preserved; 45 See Karen Barad and Adam Kleinmann, “Karen Barad. Intra-actions,” Mousse 34 (Summer 2012): 76–81.

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while at the same time reactivating Fedorov’s and the Russian cosmists’ idea of nature as uncontrollable. The storyline also associates human hubris with the action of individualized figures: just like nature is personified, the figure of the apprentice reduces humanity to an individual being. But the staging of the work – its performative development of both a world and a worldview on stage – counter this antagonistic and individualistic dichotomy of nature/humanity by presenting the human being as part of a realm that exceeds it, where the technological, the organic and the cosmic form a hybrid whole.

Fig. 2. The Ballets Russes in Ode (1928). © Boris Lipnitzki / Roger-Viollet

In the ballet’s sixth tableau, the audience was confronted with a scene in which a group of dancers wearing tight-fitting unitards form a complex geometrical composition in front of a set composed of miniature figurines dressed in crinoline dresses (Fig. 2). Distinct but not differentiated, anthropomorphic but not human, the figurines point to the ambiguities that characterised the plural body in Ode. Micro-representations of the human figure, they co-exist with human performers and thus point to a Matryoshka Russian-doll-like game of correspondences, wherein the performers will also find themselves to be parts of a macroscopic whole. The figurines are identically dressed, their postures equally undifferentiated. At the same time, their sizes vary as a function of their position in the perspectival scenographic structure. In this way, an evident homogeneity is counterbalanced by an avoidance of sameness. In front of the figurines, the dancers are also wearing identical costumes; their faces are masked, their expression concealed, depersonalising and effacing them into a multiple, proliferating body reminis-

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cent of the classical corps de ballet. Nevertheless, just like size differentiates the otherwise identical figurines of the background, the pullulating corporeality of the unitard-clad group may as well be more than an instance of loss-withinsameness. While the costumes produce a homogenisation of appearance, Ode’s choreography introduces a diversity of posture – no dancer in figure 2 holds an identical position with another – differentiating the figures from each other. The figurines as well as the dancers in front of them, then, are situated in what may be seen as an oscillatory space between singular presence and effacement within a group. Their individuation does not contradict their fundamental relatedness; rather, individuation arises through relationality with the group, reflecting Barad’s contention that “‘individuals’ do not preexist as such but rather materialize in intra-action.”46 The cords held by the group of dancers, extensions of their limbs, reinforce this interstitial position by becoming parts of a geometric composition, continuous with the cords of the background set. Massine’s choreography was in this respect complementary to the scenography and costume design, contributing, intentionally or not, to the subsummation of the body to supra-individual visual and plastic forms on stage. Partly instrumentalising the dancers in the creation of geometrical forms through movements directed towards elements external to themselves, Ode staged bodies that have been described as “abstract sculptures.”47 Yet the stage composition under which the dancers were subsumed also literally connected their bodies to each other and to the set, allowing them to branch out of their individual situations. Their body may have been a partially instrumentalised component of an impersonal structure, but it was also a member of an interconnected whole. This whole depended upon its human elements even if it was not fully determined by them: Ode’s modern body becomes indispensable to the structure to which it contributes. This fact of connection is consistent with Tchelitchew’s opinion that abstraction could comprise the danger of solipsism and, most importantly, with his interest in using geometry in order to portray a metaphysical vision of the universe and the human being within it:48 I therefore began to try to develop, in my own work, a kind of artistic geometry analogous to the real geometry of the universe, so much more mysterious than that of Euclid […] man remains the point where all knowledge converges, the measure of the universe as he conceives and understands it. That is why I now seek to represent man in his

46 Barad and Kleinmann, “Karen Barad. Intra-actions,” 77. 47 Sarah Woodcock, “Wardrobe,” in Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909– 1929, ed. Jane Pritchard (London: V&A Publishing, 2010), 144. 48 Quoted in Roditi, Dialogues on Art, 112.

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relationship to the whole of the created world, which forms part of his own inner landscape in so far as he is aware of its existence.49

John Justin Cook aptly notes that “Tchelitchew’s corporeal subject was one that found meaning not as an individual performer, but as an integral part of a ‘cosmic order’.”50 The scene considered here can be read as an illustration of Tchelitchew’s artistic programme through the human dancers’ and non-human elements’ introduction in supra-individual, interconnected and cosmically understood formations. The subversion of individuality and the homogeneisation strategies present in Tchelitchew’s designs and Massine’s choreography also point towards an ambivalence in relation to the staged bodies’ gender. The ballet presented both male and female bodies dressed in unitards, undoing the differentiation present in the classical ballet tradition. At the same time, such uniformization turns bodies otherwise marked by gender into abstract, metaphysically charged figures. Beyond the dichotomous distribution of roles for Belianina (a feminized nature) and Lifar (a masculinized humanity), the ballet can be seen as confirming the purportedly universal but tacitly male body of the Enlightenment, while discreetly troubling this figure by presenting bodies that remain not-entirelyreadable, and therefore classifiable, from a gender perspective. The interrelations between choreography and scenography in Ode’s sixth tableau, then, perform operations of depersonalisation, uniformisation and subsummation. At the same time, these same operations contribute to the staging of a connected being. By developing an oscillation between homogeneisation and singularisation, subsummation and connectedness, the ballet puts into question the idea, deeply anchoring Western canonical modernity, of an autonomous, self-expressing human subject fully controlling its actions and experiences and valuing its individuality; and invites to consider collective formations not only as a menace to the sanctity of individuality but also as possible foundations – conditions of emergence, following Barad – of an interconnected, mode of being. The necessary embedded-ness of the human figure in a cosmic worldview is thus performatively translated. The cords, linking each dancer both to other human beings on stage and to the set, were only one of the ways in which Tchelitchew created a continuity between dancers and non-human elements. Further photographic documents show, in front of the same figurines, female dancers with veiled faces in one more multiple-body, uniform group wearing crinoline dresses identical to those of their non-human counterparts. Here, a costume without body parallels a costumed 49 Ibid., 115 and 125. 50 John Justin Cook, “The Transformed Body. Pavel Tchelitchew’s Representation of the Modernist Body” (PhD diss., Northewestern University, 1998), 237.

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body whose humanity is blurred through juxtaposition with its modeled, miniature reflections. In front of the crinoline-bearing figurines, a pas de deux was choreographed, where dancers wearing tight-fitting, light-coloured unitards manipulated transparent fabric hanging from a pole. The defined body shape created by the tightness of the unitards is upset by the semi-transparent material, the fabric diluting the dancers’ presence. Tchelitchew had also imagined, for the same tableau, background cinematographic projections showing naked men and women in a pagan feast surrounded by flames, which were to link with the physically present dances.51 While the filmed actions are not described further in his script, Tchelitchew here played with the contiguity of a mediated body pointing towards its ‘naturalness’ through its nudity with a physically present but evidently staged and costumed one. All of these design choices can, from an anthropocentric perspective, be read as antagonisms: the figurines blurring the specificity of the human dancers; the fabric concealing the performers’ bodies; cinematographic action replacing physical presence. Such antagonisms were indeed present not only in the practices of certain Western European dance artists, but also in the very relationships between the art forms that Ode blended.52 But the same design choices can furthermore be seen as enactments of humanity’s interconnectedness and continuity with the non-human, be it material (e. g. fabric, dolls) or immaterial (e. g. projection, light). Indeed, the ballet develops relations of resemblance (the female bodies and the dolls), of coexistence (the group holding the cords with the set), of blending (the dancers behind the fabric) and of technological mediation (the naked bodies on film) between human corporeality and inorganic entities. In this way, Ode points to a modern body not only surrounded by material and technological objects but in close proximity and in multiple manners relating to them. Crucially, it is through rather than despite this relationality with technology that the ballet stages the place of the human in the natural and cosmic realm(s); pointing back to Lomonosov’s scientific-spiritual syncretism, Tchelitchew activates modern technological innovations in his representation of the human figure in its natural and cosmic environment. Moreover, it is through a combination of staged geometry and a relationality with technology that the ballet – in alignment with Fedorov’s

51 Tchelitchew, “Scenario for Ode,” 195. 52 Felicia McCarren indeed notes that the (discursive and phenomenological) essentialisation of corporeal movement as dance’s exclusive medium and mode of expression can be traced back to the rise of cinema: “[o]ne explanation for the justification of a branch of modern dance through a rhetoric of naturalism might be dance’s attempt, after its early days at the heart of cinema, to distinguish itself from the mass art that cinema was becoming.” Felicia McCarren, Dancing Machines. Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 61.

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thought – counteracts a clear antagonism between humanity and nature, allowing human corporealities to access and embody natural phenomena. The continuity between human bodies and scenographic elements was mirrored by the active role of the non-human in the ballet: the cords rendered the set mobile53 and the dolls defined the stage space. But it was Tchelitchew and Charbonnier’s light that most of all was turned into a dynamic element: for Tchelitchew’s biographer Parker Tyler, “light is the transcendent core of nature and man begins by being its student.”54 Dancers’ movements were set against a “luminous perspective”; in the scene’s climax, after the dances had ended, the stage turned into a kaleidoscopic world alternately glowing and fading, composed of light cascades and coloured illuminations.55 More than mere technological processes, the lights performed as vibratory, undulating phenomena: Tchelitchew’s script indicates that they at one point literally “tremble[d],”56 turning the body’s entrance into a multimedia context into an almost spiritual experience, wherein technology mediated Tchelitchew’s metaphysical attachment to light. Through body extensions connecting them to the set and to each other, in complex geometrical formations with cosmic connotations, in their relations of resemblance and blending with non-human elements, or their actions under a light that was part of an all-encompassing universe, the dancers of Ode branched out, connected to their surroundings through often invisible threads, entering situations of organic and inorganic co-being. In these ways, Tchelitchew’s choices undid the dichotomous distinction between the body as a natural, organic entity and non-human materialities: Ode implicated both the influences of a novel, technologised model of staging placing emphasis on the non-human, and a willingness to blend human performers in it in non-oppositional cosmic coexistence. Ode also probed Western canonical modernity’s tendencies towards an essentialised individualism, challenging it with technologically/materially but also metaphysically/spiritually manifested relations. In this process, the ballet avoided a sole focus either on an individualised body or on one rendered mass; it constructed neither a ‘purely’ human body nor a dehumanised one. Rather, Ode accepted the contradictions of a complex modern body, its dancers not bound, not cut off, but balancing – like the figurines hanging from their wire – on invisible threads relating them to the multiple 53 A contemporary account describing one of the cord dances (it is not entirely certain that this corresponds to the sixth tableau) tells us that the cords were passed from hand to hand, forming a succession of shapes that blended with the dancers’ group-motions. Coton, A Prejudice for Ballet, 87. 54 Tyler, The Divine Comedy, 328. 55 Tchelitchew, “Scenario for Ode,” 195–96. 56 Ibid.,196.

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corpo-realities of a rapidly changing universe. Tchelitchew’s work on Ode thus responds to Western dominant dance modernity’s oscillations between nature and technology as aesthetic models for choreography with a syncretism influenced by multiple layers – from Lomonosov to Fedorov – of Russian thought. Tchelitchew’s human figure’s interpenetrations with the – highly technologized – inorganic allow it to access a place in a geometrically and numerically understood cosmos; bathing in light – simultaneously technological feat and spiritual ambience – the modern, neither exclusively Russian nor ‘Western’, body of Ode finds its being in its hybrid connections.

Closing Notes: an Expanded Choreography of a Multifaceted Modernity Our reading of Ode with the prism of ‘expanded choreography’57 has accentuated Tchelitchew’s conceptual and ‘worldmaking’ motifs. This perspective allows to reveal the complex interwovenness of scenography and choreography of a ballet at the periphery of the Ballets Russes canon; a ballet which was (and still is) perceived as too eclectic, too ‘incoherent.’58 Our analysis of iconographic sources is coherent with what is known about Massine’s contribution to the ballet’s movement material. Choreographing for dancers whose faces would at times be covered, Massine turned towards abstraction – a tendency that he could experiment with in Ode but which would become increasingly important in his work to come, despite the presence of classical lines and postures in the ballet as well.59 His choreography aligned with Tchelitchew’s geometry by “attain[ing] something of this formal ‘nakedness’ and purity’”60 and he collaborated with the designer in making the dancers move along with the set and light. Ambiguous figures – bodies covered by nets, fish and shells in the fourth tableau, fragmented body parts in the fifth – arguably brought the choreography close to Tchelitchew’s concept of a multifaceted body. But more than a – modernist – comparison between a visual set design and a kinetic choreography, Ode invites us to consider a motional, choreographed design, and a visual-plastic choreography, in a way that made it “impossible to say… where

57 Cf. Anna Leon, Expanded Choreographies – Choreographic Histories. Trans-Historical Perspectives Beyond Dance and Human Bodies in Motion (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2022). 58 “What Ode hurt the most was the incongruity between its eighteenth-century allegorical text; Nabokov’s lyrical music; Massine’s modernist, angular, acrobatic choreography, and Tchelitchew’s Surrealist design.” Móricz, In Stravinsky’s Orbit, 115. 59 Garafola, “Dance, Film and the Ballets Russes,” 18–19. 60 Ibid., 19.

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designer’s work end[ed] and the choreographer’s beg[an].”61 In this sense, Tchelitchew’s work for Ode is an illustration of how within a plural modernity one can identify a bow to the eighteenth century Russian imperial court culture as well as unexpected precursors to contemporary expanded choreographies. Tchelitchew once spoke of “the moment of pause between two states of being, the interval in a metamorphosis when the prince who is turned into a toad is no longer a prince and not yet a toad”.62 We have here discussed how the human figure in Ode also illustrates such moments of transformation and multiplicity. But the multiplicity of Tchelitchew’s ballet is also to be found in the worlds that it constructs and that it brings together. Tchelitchew’s design choices create a human figure that was trans-historical, becoming a site of conflation of multiple temporalities, against a modernity constituted by an affirmation of the present; trans-local, merging often opposing strands of modern choreographic practice; trans-corporeal, transcending the single body’s boundaries; and transmedial – from a contemporary perspective possibly even post-human. If artistic practices engage in making worlds, Tchelitchew and the Ballets Russes’ work on Ode constitute an artistic practice manifesting overlapping, at times conflicting but largely coexisting worlds. In the ballet, different historical moments, different cultural and intellectual backgrounds, different conceptions of the body come together in the creation of a world that resists chronological classification, geographical reductionism and ideological uni-dimensionality. The worldmaking of Ode is therefore performative in an artistic but also in a philosophical sense: as an enactment that in its doing brings about a syncretic, multifaceted modernity.

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