Nicole Shukin's Animal Capital: Rendering Life in the Biopolitical Times provides a unique critique of the inadequacies of the emergent field within cultural studies and literary theory of "animal studies." Shukin, through her proposed project of "rendering," accounts for her desire to formulate what she calls a "biopolitical approach to mimesis." This methodology, "suggest that textual logics of reproduction can no longer be treated in isolation from economic logics of (capitalist) reproduction" (20). Shukin notes rendering not only as a dominant or hegemonic discursive practice but also as a critical practice. By doing so, she not only addresses the material and therefore capitalist economic conditions of animal capital but also the metaphorical and textual value of animal capital in economies of meaning. This setting allows us to understand her critique not only as an attempt to bring these discourses together, but in doing so to create a counter-hegemonic logic. It is by this logic that Shukin continues to show the productive task of biopolitical critique--a critique that emerges and resists power at the source of its hegemonic production--that we saw in not only Foucault but also Rey Chow in the previous week.
With this in mind I would like to turn to a particular section of Shunkin's work Automobility of which she says,
names a complex of cultural and economic relationships that are by no means finished and that exceed historical containment in the past. The material-semiotic network of automobility emerges, but does not end, with three early time-motion economies: animal disassembly, automotive assembly, and moving picture production. Automobility refers to the "moving" effects of cars and cinema, effects achieved by technologically as well as semiotically mimicking the seamless physiology of animals in motion.(90).
With the notions of motion in mind Shukin attempts to render what she notes as the "material unconscious" of culture surrounding the production animal capital. The notion of the material unconscious is borrowed from Bill Brown and his invocation of Walter Benjamin's formulation of history, "not as a past chronology of finished events but as unsettled fragments still up for revision" (89).
Shukin suggest that the vertical abattoir can serve as a proto-cinematic spectacle, one in which the "animals hoisted onto moving overhead tracks and sped down the disassembly line constituted one of North America's first 'moving pictures'" (92). Just a sentence later, Shukin points out that the exhibition of the world's developing motion picture technologies at the World's Columbian Exposition signaled a dangerous possibility. This possibility is one in which the "mimetic media were, for a brief historical instant, dangerously contiguous with their material unconscious" (93). In constructing the tours as a "material 'negative'" of the moving cinematic image and linking the production of gelatin to the creation of photographic mimetic media, the exhibition of these technologies appears to have threatened the distinction between the metaphorical and material currencies of animal capital. Shukin earlier notes "the contradictions of animal rendering are productive so long as they are discursively managed under the separate domains of culture and economy" (21). In footnote 24 to chapter 2, Shukin comments on this "dangerous" moment noting the movement of slaughter from a productive (in terms of capital gain) "visibility" to a cultural invisibility.
Do you find Shukin's reading of this historical moment to be productive in thinking through the politics of animal capital? Can we read her suggestion of the contiguousness of the mimetic media and the abattoir as symptomatic of her view of history through Brown (and Benjamin)? How can one see the work of discursive productions of (bio)power at stake in the transformation from "visible" slaughter to one that is "invisible" and used for political means (see Shukin's note 24 on page 255)?
-Sean F
Shukin's conjunctions/conflations of terms such as animal and nature, as well as these two historical moments are certainly sites to interrogate her logic (term used loosely), however once forced to closely look at the text and look at her moves in light of her theoretical position:
ReplyDeleteAll that distinguishes rendering as hegemonic discourse from rendering as critical discourse, ultimately, is it self-recognition, as a politically motivated articulatory practice. Without this self-reflexivity, the act of bringing disparate, unlikely things together under its rubric risks becoming a metaphorical exercise in suggesting that they share an underlying an underlying, unifying likeness rather than an effort to make their contingencies visible. (28)
I think that moments when we struggle to see how rendering is used, or why animal and nature were conflated, we are sent into a state similar to what Benjamin calls Profane Illumination, in which the reader sees the arbitrary absurdity of the linguistic, lexical connection and then extrapolates this conclusion to the rest of the society, thus exposing contingencies.
Furthermore, her use of words has a definite goal of political articulation. By using rendering and theories of immanence she foregrounds the importance she feels must be paid the material, bodily contingencies on the political