Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Wiseman's Primate
#1 In looking at the impulse to accumulate and organize knowledge through archival in Primate, we would like to suggest a closer reading of one of the final scenes where the researchers are surrounding the conference table. The conversation centers on the value of basic research in the absence of practical or immediately applicable results. Following such reasoning, the testing/ biomedicalization of animal bodies can justifiably be performed to an extent which is only limited by the capacities of human labor in so far as it can possibly be supplemented in the future. The value of experimentation seems to be located not in a logical deduced use value, but in a potentiality value which only guarantees the placement of man at the center of his study and the pleasures that result from this focus. In turning to the scientia sexualis referenced in Prehistory: The Frenzy of the Visible, we can consider this sensualized power of sexual knowledge as the foundation and motivation of basic research.
AM
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#2
ReplyDeleteWhen thinking of how the animal body is treated, we thought about a particularly interesting scene towards the beginning of the movie. During it, a female researcher is interacting with newborn primates. She is sitting in a chair, cradling it in her arms. The monkey, who has an animal mother, has been separated from her and is now presented with this researcher, who is acting out all the role of mother according to human behavior, which becomes even more apparent when she walks into the room and addresses the newborns as "babies," and her acting is further emphasized by the male researchers cold and distant interactions with the newborns.
So, we see the animal immediately being taken out of the context where it would be wild animal and reintroduced into the context of domesticated animal. This animal, we see later, is treated like a mechanical machine, that can be manipulated to produce whatever effect the researchers want. Sexual behavior, which one researcher notes is very different in the wild, is studied from behind a glass window using a machine capable of getting the monkey aroused remotely.
This treatment of the animal brings to mind Benjamin's surgeon, who "abstains from facing the patient man to man" by "diminishing distance." In this case, the distance is both physical, namely robbing the monkey of all its defenses by making it immobile and thus allowing the researcher t get close, and abstractly, by taking the animal out of a wild context where he is not mechanized and understandable, but wild and unknowable. It is taking the monkey out of the wild and putting it into the "Umwelt" of the researcher, into a context in which the animal can be understood.
bw, cm