Monday, April 19, 2010
Screening Question
In looking at William Wegman's Alphabet Soup, the viewer is presented with scenes in which a family of dogs, often accompanied by human limbs, use their physical body to act out letters and associated words of the alphabet. These images are accompanied by the narrator, Wegman, who incorporates instances where the dogs are unable to keep their composure (typically when food is involved) into their narrative dialogue. This is an instance of interspecies intimacy, a term used by Shukin in Animal Capital to represent a human-animal kinship of "contemplative coexistence and interspecies civility". Shukin writes, "the right relationship toward our animal kin... is one of aesthetic appreciation" (pg 200). This is most evident in the final scene when the camera zooms in on a-z letter blocks placed is various positions on top and around the curving lines of dog's body. The film also follows Shukin's descriptions of the Gulf Oil image 'The Creation of Adam' in repeatedly capturing a gesture of trust between animal and man while existing in a time outside of history. With this in mind, to what extent does this treatment of dogs efface a history of the wild beast in support of the tamed animal. Does the limitation of activity to cooking, writing and interpreting words prevent the horrors bound in breaching species barriers (pandemic speculation pg 211)? If not, what does allow these scenes to transcend multispecies intolerance/ 'sickness'? In thinking back to L'enfant sauvage, Wegman's film can be seen as a manipulation of the trope of the civilized man teaching the primitive animal levels of signification. The roles however are not completely reversed -- the man is still always present in voice and hands. What is at stake in the animal as instructor, but only through its corporeal form?
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I think the question you bring up about the “limitation of [the dogs’] activity to cooking, writing, and interpreting words” as a way to “prevent the horrors bound in breaching species barriers” is very interesting. As you pointed out in class, interspecies intimacy, seem to tread a dangerous borderline between a kind of idealized kinship or universality (recall Gregory Colbert’s declaration that “humans are [now] seen as a member of a family the family of animals”) and an Orientalism that uses these same relationships as the basis for its othering. I think what Wegman’s film is not so much a preventative as it is a form of covering up or displacing. If we follow Shukin’s reading of the Bell Mobility ads featuring beavers as what appear to simply be “a harmless source of simulacral enjoyment in an era of postindustrial capitalism,” then we can see how the dogs, engaged in a mimeses of mundane human life may similarly cover up the many ways in which animals are put to work for humans (43). According to Shukin, the “ironic layering of fake fur on fake fur in the Bell ad has an effect of displacing the reality of material violence”; there is a similar displacement at work in Wegman’s film. At the same time, we can view the dogs’ standing in for humans as a form of normalizing a certain relationship between specific animals and humans. The appearance of human arms and hands as the dogs’ limbs allows, I think, for an identification of human with dog that is not as easily argued for the Bell ad. The close association of humans with dogs through the imagining of dogs as humans in a cute and non-threatening film positions the arguably more Western master-pet relationship as more safe, typical, or normal, than the “Eastern” relationships with wild and exotic animals. Whereas the “bodily continuity” between the humans and dogs in Wegman’s film is unproblematic and even generative of a positive affect, this same continuity between the ethnic other that eats civet cats and lives in unhygienic proximity to birds is, as Mei Zhan writes of the 2003 SARS outbreaks, an “exoticized bodily continuity between the wild animal and the Chinese people who readily consume it” (210).
ReplyDeleteWe should also interrogate how the association of the ethnic, non-Western other with the unhygienic and dangerous kind of interspecies intimacy that leads to zoonatic diseases also leads to a closure that pushes back against the flows of globalization. The fear of pandemic as rationale for closing borders to certain groups of people on the basis of their “predilection” for eating certain animals or their proximity to other animals seems to emerge as a mask for racism.