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Animal mirrors

2007; Routledge; Volume: 12; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09697250802041004

1469-2899

Michael Ziser,

Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes notes I would like to thank the participants of the “Psychoanalysis and the Human” stream of the 2006 ACLA conference on “The Human and Its Others,” whose helpful reactions to an early version of my argument have been incorporated below. My first zoosemiotic thoughts were stimulated by a deceptively simple question that Barbara Johnson posed to me. 1 Charles Baudelaire found in Poe an uncanny anticipation of his own thoughts and words: “The first time I opened one of his books I saw, to my amazement and delight, not simply certain subjects which I had dreamed of, but sentences which I had thought out, written by him twenty years before” (qtd in Quinn 15; see also Hyslop and Hyslop). Jacques Lacan placed his reading of Poe – “The Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” – at the head of his collected writings (Écrits 11–48). In “Le Facteur de la vérité” Jacques Derrida models his own central critique of the notion of “full speech” on Dupin's signature-within-quotation-marks. 2 The zoological investments of post-phenomenological thought have been highlighted in recent years in a series of monographs, articles, and essay collections on the question of the animal in Continental philosophy and art. See Steeves, Baker, Lippit, Calarco, Wood, Wolfe (Animal Rites and Zoontologies), Haraway, and Agamben. A representative sample of the crucial work is anthologized in Atterton and Calarco. Jacques Derrida wrote searchingly about the question of the animal throughout his career, becoming more explicit in the most recent entries in what he calls his “zoo-auto-oto-bio-bibliography.” 3 Poe is not included in any of the major nature writing anthologies, nor does he play a significant part in any of the ecocritical monographs or essay collections. Despite this, Poe's involvement in the natural-scientific culture of his time – as an avid consumer, reviewer, and producer of scientific (and pseudoscientific) writing, running the gamut from seashell manuals (The Conchologist's First Book) to arcane tracts on cosmogenesis (Eureka) – was extensive. See Swirski. 4 On Lacan's intellectual debts to these figures, see Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan 142–43. For a dismissal of the “language” of bees, see “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (Écrits esp. 245–46); for the distinction between the animal eye and the human gaze, see Lacan's comments in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (102–03, 111–12); on the absolute differentiation from apes, see the analysis of “The Mirror Stage” below. Kojève's scholastic use of the animal runs through his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (39–40 and passim). 5 On Poe's riddles, see the astonishing work of John Irwin. Although there have been a handful of ecocritical arguments that make use of Lacanian theory, I can find none that address, historically or analytically, the ecocritique that is internal to Lacanian thought. Perhaps the best-known application of Lacanian psychoanalysis to ecology comes via Slavoj Žižek in the form of a critique of the self-contradictory elements of fantasy in environmentalism as an ideology and social movement in Enjoy Your Symptom!, which argues that “ecologically oriented ‘decenterment’ relies on a surreptitious teleological subordination of nature to man” (185–86). Timothy Morton's Ecology without Nature is a markedly more sophisticated development of Žižek's basic critique from within the ecocritical canon. 6 On apprentissage and dressage as high-profile zoosemiotic phenomena in human culture, see Sebeok 122–27, and works by Heini Hediger. 7 This proposed fourth turn has the advantage of providing us with the “four kings” in a game of draughts that Poe offers as his model of detection in the peroration to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (Poetry and Tales 398). It also agrees with the intertextual connection made below between the detective tales and Poe's slightly earlier “Four Beasts in One – The Homo-Cameleopard” (Poetry and Tales 181–88). 8 In the philological source Freud consults in the course of his essay on “The ‘Uncanny,’” the unheimlich is specifically identified with an animal that is neither domesticated nor wild – somewhere between captivity and freedom. Section (b) of Freud's lengthy citation of the word heimlich in Daniel Sander's Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache reads in part, in the original: “von Thieren zahm, sich den Menschen traulich anschließend. Ggstz. Wild, z. B.: Thier, die weder wild noch heimlich sind, etc.” (253). Although the definition begins in a conventional opposition between the wild and domesticated, the illustration introduces a mysterious kind of animal described as “weder wild noch heimlich” – that is, neither alien nor familiar – that seems perfectly to embody Freud's vision of the unfamiliar familiarity of the uncanny. 9 Poe's sources for his orangutan are unclear, though hypotheses apparently include news accounts of marauding monkeys, folklore about apes, and zoological descriptions from Cuvier and others. See the head-note on the story in Mabbott's edition of Poe's works (2: 521–27), and an update by Mitchell. “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” the middle tale in the trilogy, presents a radical meditation on the relationship between language and life, both of which are aborted in the story of a victim of a back-alley operation. Indeed, an entire line of ecofeminist analysis, focused on the relationship between the chimpanzee's victims, Marie Rogêt/Mary Rogers, and the Queen, would be a welcome complement to the argument I am building here. Such an argument might resurrect, in ecocritical guise, the psychoanalytic arguments of Marie Bonaparte, Lacan's springboard and target in the seminar on Poe's third tale, and focus on the parallels between what Lacan calls the decisive “foetalization” or “specific prematurity of man” and the abortion plot and abortive structure of Poe's middle tale. 10 At first glance, this tale would seem to be radically different from the later “Purloined Letter”: the latter's bloodlessly intellectual and diplomatic game playing out in the insular halls of power, the former's brutish and motiveless violence occurring very much in public. Yet Poe has clearly gone to great lengths to make clear that the crimes and their solutions are different versions of the same process. The most direct evidence of connection is the shared scenes of the crime: a hearth within an apartment building. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the throat of Madame L’Espanaye has been cut so viciously that her head falls off under the touch of detectives and the strangled corpse of her daughter, Mademoiselle Camille L’Espanaye, has been stuffed up into the chimney in a room with an open safe filled with “a few old letters” (405). These details, along with Dupin's discovery of a “greasy” ribbon (425) used to knot the ponytail of a Maltese sailor, which leads to his identification of the orangutan's owner, are echoed in the description of the purloined letter hung dangling by a dirty blue ribbon from a little brass knob just beneath the middle of the mantel-piece […] This last [letter] was much soiled and crumpled. It was torn nearly in two, across the middle – as if a design, in the first instance, had been altered, or stayed, in the second. (695) Likewise, the refined citation from Crébillon's Atrée that closes “The Purloined Letter” recalls the dehumanizing discussion of Chantilly, an actor in Crébillon's Xerxes, in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (698, 402–04). 11 “Instinct vs Reason – A Black Cat” in Poetry and Tales 370–72 (370). Poe's geographical analogy does not divide the USA into brute and rational sections (as would an allusion to the Mason–Dixon line, for instance), but takes for granted that reason resides north of the American border. For Poe, there is no anthropological metalanguage in the USA. 12 On Poe's double use of the verb “to pen” with regard to animals, see Stanley Cavell's musings on “The Imp of the Perverse” and “The Black Cat” 3–36. 13 Not all living things and their semiotic systems, of course, but only those that travel in pathways that are available to the human sensorium. The history of Western biological science can be understood as the extension of the human sensorium through the mediating practices, instruments, and imaging devices of apprentissage and dressage: where the zoosemiotic overlap may once have primarily included prey animals and livestock, it now includes mycoplasmas and mole rats. Good warrant, then, for accepting Bruno Latour's description of modern sciences as the “speech prostheses” of provisional objects in the environment, the variety and attunement of which are constantly growing. 14 The influence of von Uexküll is difficult to gauge, owing perhaps to his persistent self-conception as an anti-Darwinian biologist (though his theory is better seen as of another order altogether than Darwin's), his flirtation with theism (a common idealist position since Berkeley), his association with the Nazi regime in the 1930s, and the inadequacy of his prose style (exacerbated by poor translations). In the past two decades, von Uexküll has resurfaced as a precursor of: zoosemiotics (see below); first- and second-order cybernetics (Maturana and Varela's theory of autopoiesis); the Artificial Life research program (especially in the writings of Rodney Brooks); and the ecophenomenology founded on the writings of Merleau-Ponty (see Brown and Toadvine). Ira Livingston has recently laid out the stakes of the autopoietic revolution in Between Science and Literature. 15 Poe reaches a similarly ecophenomenological conclusion at the conclusion of Eureka, though it is couched in the theological language of his era: He [the Divine Being] now feels his life through an infinity of imperfect pleasures – the partial and pain-intertangled pleasures of those inconceivably numerous things which you designate as his creatures, but which are really but infinite individualizations of Himself. All these creatures – all – those who you term animate, as well as those to which you deny life for no better reason than that you do not behold it in operation – all these creatures have, in a greater or less degree, a capacity for pleasure and for pain: – but the general sum of their sensations is precisely that amount of Happiness which appertains by right to the Divine Being when concentrated within Himself. These creatures are all, too, more or less, and more or less obviously, conscious Intelligences; conscious, first, of a proper identity; conscious, secondly and by faint indeterminate glimpses, of an identity with the Divine Being of whom we speak – of an identity with God. Of the two classes of consciousness, fancy that the former will grow weaker, the latter stronger, during the long succession of ages which must elapse before these myriads of individual Intelligences become blended – when the bright stars become blended – into One. (Poetry and Tales 1358) Viewing Poe's religious cosmology as the interior monologue of an autopoietic zoological process provides an alternative way of understanding Emerson's and Poe's interest in producing a kind of public (intersubjective) privacy in their writings, a subject taken up in Louis Renza's recent book on American privacy (87–103).. 16 In addition to introducing von Uexküll's concepts of Innenwelt and Umwelt in “The Mirror Stage” (1949) and “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (1953, Fink 244), Lacan refers directly to the Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere in his 1932 doctoral dissertation, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (337). 17 For von Uexküll's zoological mirror, see “Environment and Inner World of Animals” 234. For Merleau-Ponty on the fold, see The Visible and the Invisible 250. Bernard Stiegler, in contrast, views the epiphylogenetic mirroring that propels the individual into temporality and community as fundamentally technological (175–79). Stiegler's analysis, which will be elaborated in a second volume, depends fundamentally on an understanding of language as definitively divided into animal (“signaling”) and human (“signifying”) dimensions, an obvious begging of the question and an avoidance of both evidence from the biological sciences and the critique of metalanguage from Derrida and Lacan. 18 A question now arises as to Lacan's motives in downplaying or denying the zoological continuism of his thought. Why does he turn instead to the language of mathematics, a historically anthropological kind of non-human semiotics? There is no way to answer this question with any certainty, but one suspects that it may have something to do with the fact that the popular late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourse of human–animal continuism was already inhabited by the kind of romantic assumptions concerning human intention that Lacan was interested in dismantling. This is particularly true of George Romanes, whose anecdotal and anthropomorphizing work on animal behavior was widely circulated in Europe during Lacan's education. It is possible, then, to view Lacan as interested in freeing the animal from its entrapment in the conscious human projection of the animal as interlocutor, his failure to cite or fully engage with the comparative psychology of the times constituting not an abandonment of the animal but a recuperation of it in an authentic form through the backdoor of mathematicized cybernetic theory. This would be, from an ecocritical point of view, an admirable strategic abstraction, one that might find some support in the gestures towards zoology in the official inaugural text of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics, and indeed one that some writers on the posthuman have adopted in an attempt to unite the zoological and technological strands of posthumanism. See Heise 59–82. 19 John James Audubon, “Myself” in Writings and Drawings 765–84 (765–66). Curiously, Irmscher's edition offers a misprint, “Migonne” (me, gone), for the “Mignonne” (“cutie”) of Maria Audubon's two editions of this essay, first published in 1893. 20 Audubon 3. There has been a great deal of work on Audubon that assesses this association between violence and natural history. Constance Rourke's Audubon ascribes violence to the realities of frontier life, while Elsa Guerdrum Allen's scholarly History of American Ornithology before Audubon attributes it to standard scientific practice. Annette Kolodny argues in The Lay of the Land that Audubon's artistic project was indebted to a nineteenth-century American worldview that equated knowledge with violence in a national project of conquest under cover of exploration. For more nuanced views of the relation between art and violence in Audubon, see New 53–104 and Irmscher 188–235. 21 Joel Barlowe's “Advice to a Raven in Winter” (1812) is the best-known example, but there are many more ephemeral verses that dwell upon the bird. For one example that closely parallels Poe's later work, see G.F.W. 's “The Raven.” 22 On the sources of “The Raven,” see Mabbott 1: 353–74. 23 One way of explaining Poe's interest in the more-than-human dimension of poetic speech is through recourse to the classical topos of ars longa, the notion that a durable poetic act escapes from the conditions of mortality that define the human condition. See Brown's “The Poetics of Extinction.” Brown, reiterating J. Gerald Kennedy's argument in Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing, holds that Poe's signature move is to alienate the specifically anthropoform consciousness from the human body and then memorialize it in the structure of the artwork. Brown's reading ignores a great deal of the phenomenal complexity of Poe's writing – which is clearly embracing extinction as much as trying to outrun it – and too hastily assigns a human identity to the “other minds” that form the central problematic of his work. There is no reason to assume that all signs of intelligibility in Poe necessarily imply an anthropological foundation, as that is the precise question with which Poe always wrestles. Although Barbara Johnson makes no mention of the anthropozoological situation of “The Raven,” her argument that Poe's experiment in mechanical language ultimately destroys the distinction between mechanism and naturalness so central to basic understandings of Romanticism also destroys the rationale for distinguishing between the repetitive, mechanistic, empty “languages” of animals and the full language of man. See A World of Difference.