academic and applied social movement—animal studies—continues to gather strength a decade later, and shares with these lyrics the affirmation of “animal,” “instinct,” and “animal instinct” as not only a force demanding new reckoning but a “lovely thing,” through which we may find our way to a healthier understanding of “human.”
Speaking of humans and all animals, John Berger argues in About Looking that the gaze exchanged from the animal to human world and back again crystallizes the profound atavistic connections between humans and animals, a connection that surfaces in both metaphor and visual art. W. J. T. Mitchell underlines this idea, noting that “as figures in scenes of visual exchange, animals have a special, almost magical relation to humanity.”3 As we’ll see, this kind of mystical language about the animal-human relationship closes the circle no matter what the starting point, whether the discussant is an academician, novelist, memoirist, or musician. The enigmatic relationship between animals and humans is part of a long-standing philosophical tradition dating back to Plato and Aristotle and proceeding through the usual greats of Western philosophy—Descartes, Kant, and Foucault, for example—as a range of commentators have documented.4 In an article prosecuting the dishonesty of metaphysics, B. A. G. Fuller discusses “the messes animals make in metaphysics.” In most philosophy, it is impossible to find a place for other kinds of conscious beings, and yet we routinely award dogs a kind of consciousness that automatically confers on them moral agency and purpose. And if they have some kind of moral purpose as conscious and communicative beings, then how will we address their lives, not to mention their suffering, in a philosophical universe composed of rational agency, free will, and divine decrees? The only way to keep the “system in order and man master of it is to shoo [the animals] out of the house altogether and stop one’s ears against their scratching at the door.”5
Writing in 1949, Fuller long preceded the animal studies movement that has so complicated and enriched our contemplation of animals in the past decade or so. His questions remain unanswered, although animal studies proponents are making a concerted effort to open that door, permanently. So challenging is this territory that Cary Wolfe compares giving an overview of the field to herding cats. “My recourse to that analogy is meant to suggest that ‘the animal’ when you think about it, is everywhere (including in the metaphors, similes, proverbs, and narratives we have relied on for centuries—millennia, even).” Additionally, once the animal is foregrounded, we are confronted with a “daunting interdisciplinarity” that makes the relationship between literary studies and history look like an orderly affair by comparison.6
Animal studies is moving beyond representative collections of animal images that document the presence of animals in art and photographs, although those treatments are a valuable platform. Art historians regularly have taken note of dogs in Western painting. While these presentations offer some commentary about the shifting functions of dogs in human life or the potential symbolic meanings of the dog, their primary purpose is to trace the presence of the animal over the centuries, thereby illustrating the close, but largely unexamined, relationship between humans and animals.7 Most of these treatments tell us more about the artist or the artist’s subjects than about the animal. However, multiple sources that document the presence of animals, and especially dogs, in cultural representations finally have compelled scholars and historians to train their gaze upon how all animals become troubling mirrors to humanity. With that awareness intrudes a counterreflection, an intense consideration of the ethical dimensions of this relationship. The animal nature of humanity intersects the human nature of animals as we jockey for some purchase on ideas about consciousness, ethical behavior, and spiritual selfhood, which may not be the exclusive province of the superior human. Indeed, in anthropomorphizing animals, we humans have created visual and textual images that at once trivialize our own lives but also the lives of animals, taking for granted that their lives may be manipulated for symbolic purposes that seemingly have no consequence for them or for us. But is this true? May we do this with impunity?
One response through animal studies is to reexamine our representations of animals, looking for what the animal might mean to us but with a concern for what our representation might mean for the animal. This approach tries to take seriously the proposition that our representations have meaning and import in ways beyond the “merely” visual or the “merely” literary. Susan McHugh asks that we take literary animals seriously, arguing that, “now that scientists are identifying the interdependence of life forms even below the cellular level, the pervasive companionship of human subjects with members of other species appears ever more elemental to narrative subjectivity.”8 Steve Baker, in Picturing the Beast, says that the representation of animals in popular visuals is an important pathway to understanding how we see them, and how we use them in our own cultural constructions. Erica Fudge calls for an animal studies that will promote an “interspecies competence,” by which she means “a new way of thinking about and living with animals,” such that the meaning of “human” and “nonhuman” must shift radically.9 Finally, scholars are asking about the difference between “animal” and “animality,” in reviewing cultural representations of animals and humans.10 Whether they are referencing painting, literature, film, or photography, what all these scholars have in common is their shared urgency about how much our intellectualized perspectives on “animal,” and thus on “humanity,” must change. “Animal” is, in Wolfe’s words, “in the heart of this thing we call human,” whether we approach it from a humanistic point of view or a postmodern point of view.11 We must engage in animal studies, for it is a crucial pathway for rediscovering ourselves as human animals who live in what Donna Haraway, in The Companion Species Manifesto, calls “natureculture.” Moreover, many of these discussions share a common trope, that of the liminal territory between the animal and the human.
In reviewing the philosophical tradition about animals, Akira Lippit offers a dense semiotic discussion leading to the conclusion that animals are neither here nor there, but in this liminal state they trouble our conscious reflections by their indeterminate status. Just as we toggle between our contemplation of the brain and our musings on the meaning of the mind, animals become the emblem of that journey. We imbue them with, or they possess, more meanings than are apparent in the mere facts of physical existence. In Lippit’s words, “animals are exemplary vehicles with which to mediate between the corporeality of the brain and the ideality of the mind.”12 We may perceive and understand more about animals than we are able to put into words, another conundrum for human beings who are so thoroughly determined in Western philosophy, if not overdetermined, by our ability to live by words. Animals may also perceive and understand more about us than they are able to put into words, although for different reasons. Again, humans meet other species in this liminal space where words largely dissolve but communication persists, perhaps because animals are more important for constituting human reality than we have realized or acknowledged. Lippit concludes that the presence of the animal is always poised to “disrupt humanity’s notions of consciousness, being and world. . . . Contact with animals turns human beings into others, effecting a metamorphosis. Animality is, in this sense, a kind of seduction, a magnetic force or gaze that brings humanity to the threshold of its subjectivity.”13
Thus we return to the mystical language of a visual force created and sustained by our relationship with animals. Temple Grandin has famously and successfully argued that persons on the autism spectrum have many things in common with animals. In particular, they share a common sensory field. Her groundbreaking work doesn’t denigrate “regular” people, but it does gently suggest that autism might be our doorway to a better way of understanding animals, and to understanding ourselves as animals with more capacity than we have realized. And Grandin wouldn’t mind if we reversed that statement and said that a better understanding of how animals perceive and respond to their world might open latent parts of our brains that we have closed off, including our understanding of autism as part of a spectrum of human creativity. “The animal brain is the default position for people,” she suggests, and in her hands the animal instinct is indeed a lovely thing.14
THE ROMANCE PLOT
This language of mutuality, visual force, and the liminal space occupied by animals and humans well suits my exploration of