Anxious Anatomy; Inter-species Relations

This post is organized around two sets of separate yet interrelated concerns; replication and reading practices framed as acts of consumption. This week raised a series of questions for me most of which I am still processing, so this rending might come across as tangential……….

I am slowly chewing and digesting, Shukin’s work, “Animal Capital; Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times”. In comparison to last week’s reading of Melinda Cooper’s work, I find myself moving at a much slower pace, partially because I don’t want to miss a beat of her work and it for me personally is also a required pace. I slow down because she ask me as a reader to chew on stringing sinews of the works of Foucault, Deluze, Marx and Hardt and Negri- to name a few- that stretch and sometimes break across the surface of her work. I was particularly compelled with how this piece works to stand with, although not always alongside of, writings that have addressed the question of inter-species relations. Her work pushes off of contemporary thought, to trace delicate and often tense intersections of materiality, corporeality and capitalism. Rubbing metaphor against material her work refuses to displace the concept of the real, a trend which organizes so many contemporary works.

For me her work offers a new vivisection into the question of how living beings (re)produce themselves and are themselves (re)produced by others.

Here, I the use of the term vivisection not to invoke a kind of autopsy or forensic violence but rather to position her work in conversation with Karen Barrd’s notion of agential cut. There work is congruous in that Shukin too acknowledges the agential capacity of matter, and by doing so cuts agency away from humanism. Additionally I bracket the term (re)production as a way to signal that I am still working through the different stakes operating through the terms production, reproduction and renderings and their associated concepts, all of which have very different, yet sometimes overlapping trajectories and are used to articulate divergent sets of political concerns. I have yet and perhaps never will find a comfortable way of locating, and qualifying my use of these terms.

But back to the question of living beings and reproduction, this question has not only shaped a series of pressing concerns in eighteenth and nineteenth natural philosophy but seems to have captivated ‘Western’ philosophy and culture at large. This fascination is evident from the development of such technologies as the microscope which fulfilled and fueled the desire to observe the replication of ‘life’ at the molecular and cellular level, to the proliferation of taxonomies of species that drew organisms in relation to each other but almost always maintained a distinction between species organized and centered on reproduction habits. At last but not least, theories of heredity to scientific approaches that adhere to the notion that valid results are directly synonymous with reproducible results.

Shukin carefully builds upon and extends the notion of replication in her examination of how human beings as animals replicate in multiple and interrelated ways –physiologically, artistically, linguistically, systems of organization- to examine what is tangibly at stake in modes of productions and reproduction. In her chapter, Rendering’s Modern Logic, she re-centers the concept of reality inside of mimesis as a way to take seriously the power dynamics inside mimetic practices, while unhinging history from the metaphysics of progress, a move that calls both the work of Aristotle and Kant into question. Rather than produce an account of mimicry that is underlined with an emancipator capacity or a way out of the system she reaches for a rendering of repetition that does not mock the real but instead is a self conscious and ethical way of showing and making bodies that have never been depicted as real, really count.

I thought the juxtaposition offered by these two renderings and those of the traditional subject matter of anatomists drawings, offer some interesting “food for thought”. Both renderings posted below were inspired by, and clearly in conversation with the tradition of rendering anatomies visible inside the logic of medical visual rhetoric.