Politics, Animal-Style

A review of Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 2014.

Brian Massumi’s book arrives after a more-than-ten-year multidisciplinary brainstorm on “the question of the animal.” While the question has proven as hard to pose as it is to address, it is possible to point to some key moves that have inaugurated the field of animal studies and instigated a great deal of research activity across the humanities, social and life sciences. Examinations of the legal, religious, scientific, and social channels through which nonhuman animals have remained outside the purview of subjects figure large in this output (How are animals considered objects?). So too are critiques of the autonomy and stability of the human vis-à-vis that which is designated as beastly, wild, more-than-human, or otherwise animal (How does the objectivity of animals secure the subjectivity of humans?). Some of this work is empirical: studies and practices attesting to a bio-social complexity of animal species that matches if not exceeds the human, while troubling established distinctions between the two more generally. Some of it is ethical, asking how animal alterities, vulnerabilities and traumas echo or prefigure those of historically minoritized human communities and call for particular responses. Other research considers how animals come to mean what they mean, to whom, when, and why: the representations through which animality itself is conjugated. Another approach takes what Kari Weil has called a counterlinguistic turn, arguing that representation has muffled what animals might be and/or do and concealed the animality always already within the human. What Animals Teach us About Politics makes its intervention into political theory from this fourth angle, and is also sustained by a shared expectation in the field that nonhuman animals point to alternate and more hopeful ways of being in and relating to the world. If only we could tap into that promise. If only we could figure out how to think with or as animals rather than at or about them. Massumi’s offering responds to both desires; the book’s 97 pages consider how animality can help us re-evaluate “the all-too-human ways of working the political” (3).
 
The opening dedication to Massumi’s “childhood friendship” with a daily playmate “with whom I became many an animal” sets the book’s tone and aspirations. For Massumi, any meaningful discussion of animals and politics begins with the recognition that humans are also animals, that we belong on an “animal continuum,” the spectrum of which includes capacities traditionally allocated to humans but that are in fact prevalent across species (3). Our task is to read for those capacities. The risk of anthropomorphism is quickly acknowledged here, echoing other recent attempts to understand what is human-ish about the nonhuman realm.[1] Massumi’s caveat, however, carries its own risk of undermining precisely the animality he seeks to highlight as constitutive of human-to-human relations. It takes a lot of practice to think as an animal, and the suggestion that such animality might have inflections of the human is a distracting conceit to the experiment at hand.
 
The experiment is to build on the concept of “becoming animal” first laid out by Massumi’s philosophical forebears, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in a way that feels less arrogant than its initial imaginings of a nonhierarchical pack animality that defies knowable type. This is how play comes to serve as both the central motif and method of Massumi’s political theory: a process of becoming animal awash in routine-yet-still-vital “ludic gestures” that create “zones of indiscernibility” between two or more participants while also respecting and playing with their differences. Play also matters to Massumi for its ability to disrupt assumptions held about instinct more generally – for example, instinct as a state of bare and inflexible nature or instinct as pre-linguistic and oriented towards the continuity of species. Massumi reassesses instinct in light of the dynamics of animals-at-play. Contra your parents’ sociobiology, the appeal of instinct as a form of play lies in its distance from survival imperatives and its proximity to qualities of sympathy and creativity. Using Gregory Bateson’s 1972 essay on the subject, and with a possible nod to Deleuze and Guattari’s wolf pack, Massumi draws attention to two wolf cubs engaged in a play fight. “The [first] wolf cub says through his teeth: ‘this is not a bite; this is not a fight; this is a game; I am hereby placing myself on a different register of existence, which nevertheless stands for its suspended analogue” (4). From here, we learn that the bite made during play is always already gestural; a kind of lived abstraction, performed in the conditional mode, whose very execution as gesture defines the scenario of play. Importantly, the gestural aspect of the play bite is highly stylized: it produces an aesthetic yield. The cubs do not aspire to approximate real combat; there is too much flourish for that. “It is not so much ‘like’ a combat move as it is combatesque.” (9) Play is thus a “surplus-value of life [which] it performs with enthusiasm of the body, overspills instrumentality” (11), and “opens the door to improvisation” (12). Joining Bateson’s story of the cubs are Charles Darwin’s account of burrowing earthworms and Niko Tinbergen’s studies of feeding herring gull chicks, which Massumi mobilizes to argue that the social lives of animals (humans included) gravitate more towards singular expressive exuberance than toward mechanistic, normative survivalism. If true, then the lesson would seem to be that relations of conflict exercised as animal play can be full of open-ended affective life, affirming differences without reifying them.
 
Readers who are not conversant in the philosophies of Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari, as well as current developments in affect theory and the so-called new materialisms will struggle through the main essay. To assist, Massumi includes a series of enumerated propositions that could be consulted first for some bearings on the overall argument. In these propositions, for example, the author critiques Bruno Latour’s “parliament of things” (too many nouns, not enough verbs), the default quest to assign agency to animals (too many subjects, not enough subjectivity), and the value of singular situations over particular-yet-generalizable contexts (the historian’s bread and butter). The effect of the essay, with its concluding propositions, is accretive; it helps readers grasp its emphatic but often cryptic claims, such as “Animal politics is an ethico-aesthetics of appetition’s self-driving toward ever more inclusive immanent excess” (43). More assistance comes by way of the book’s three supplements. Essays in their own right, the supplements elaborate on some of the underpinnings of Massumi’s approach. In Supplement 1, “To Write Like a Rat Flicks Its Tail,” he builds on Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of writing as a form of becoming animal. In Supplement 2, “The Zoology of Play,” he interrogates the zoo as a visual and spatial site through which Bateson generated his observation-based analysis. Supplement 3, “Six Theses on the Animal to Be Avoided,” critiques the field of animal studies with advice on how to do it better and shift it towards animal politics. Even with these helpful extensions, however, there is no mastering of the text, and this is likely the point. In its content as well as its frisky delivery, What Animals Teach Us About Politics is dedicated to animal play as both a topic and mode of theorizing: a contingent, rollicking sociality that reimagines the political as the “aesthetico-political” (40).
 
One lingering concern amidst this playfulness is precisely the conditions under which it takes place. Recalling Donna Haraway’s position that Deleuze and Guattari’s is a philosophy “of the sublime, not the earthly, not the mud; becoming-animal is not an autre-mondialisation,” we might ask if Massumi’s variant thereof is chaotic and micro enough, if it is locatable in the lived relations between actual humans and animals, humans and humans, and animals and animals (28). On the one hand, the reconsideration of historical animal behavior studies and the theoretical propensity for unrestrained “bodying” across species signals Massumi’s eagerness to get into the ontological groove irrespective of the species confusions that flow from it. This is admirable and exciting. But at what point does his process-ontology lose the singularity of the politics he seeks to theorize and veer towards generalization? More on the tendencies of wolf cubs to bite, worms to burrow, gulls to peck, and children to play animal would be welcome. So much is riding on all of them. Consider, for instance, remarks on a child who sees a tiger, however momentarily and through whatever medium:
 

The child immediately sets about, not imitating the tiger’s substantial form as he saw it, but rather giving it life – giving it more life. The child plays the tiger in situations in which the child has never seen a tiger. More than that, it plays the tiger in situations no tiger has ever seen, in which no earthly tiger has ever set paw. The child immediately launches itself into a movement of surpassing the given, remaining remarkably faithful to the theme of the tiger, not in its conventionality but from the angle of its processual potentiality. (83)

 
In fairness, the discussion carries on, forming one of the most detailed, and euphoric, descriptions of animal play in the book. Missing throughout, though, is any consideration of how “tigritude” takes flight differently for different children through different temporal, spatial, aesthetic, and even affective assemblages. Asking for specificity of this sort in Massumi’s writing is not meant to ramify an all-too-human politics of tigers (in the way that the author skewers the all-too-human politics of the zoo as an apparatus of identification and sentiment). But it does draw attention to how animal politics might reside more or less exclusively in an idealized state of childhood, immune from the contemporary killjoys of, say, attention deficits, time outs, hunger, anxiety, boredom, the Disney influence, or organized play dates.
 
And what of the state of tigerhood? Can the tiger’s force be anything more than an “esque” for the child? Do earthly tigers ever play human, or worm? Are there meaningful differences for an animal politics between Bateson’s carefully observed cubs who played in their own orbits and a child-tiger extending itself beyond his (Massumi’s pronoun of choice for a child, in addition to “it”)? These questions bring out the curious instability of animals in this book, which serves a theory of lively indeterminacy well, until it does not. Mid-book, Massumi takes a moment to acknowledge some randomness and justify his key term. After recognizing that “[c]alling nature’s continuum of mutual inclusion ‘animal’ is. . . somewhat arbitrary,” he argues for it as a way of starting “smack in the middle of the glorious mess that is the actual world” and for allowing “the real stakes to revolve around play” (52). These seem like plausible explanations, though at the cost of rendering the title of the book somewhat disingenuous. Animals might not teach us anything per se if their ontological status is so fluid.
 
A final concern is how animal politics plays in relation to politicized activity that continues to find strategic currency in the human/nonhuman distinction, even at the radical end of the spectrum. What, for example, might Massumi’s rendition of becoming animal mean, if anything, for African Americans mobilizing under #BlackLivesMatter? For people enduring state-sponsored violence that too often places them on an animal continuum of a different order, Massumi’s notion of animality and its instinctive mannerisms will probably not appeal as conceptual resources, despite its possible affinities with the more-than-human(ist) currents of, for example, Afrofuturism. This is to say that there is something disappointing about a philosophy espousing creative connectivity to others when it fails to connect with the human communities that stand to gain the most from rethinking the political. The extent to which that connection can be made at all will test the humble utopianism of politics as animal play and help clarify the future of animal studies.