Also available as paper for Consciousness Reframed '03 animals.pdf (360k)
[The title is a reference to John Berger's 'Why Look at Animals?' published in About Looking, 1980]
'Animals are not machines... Actually only machines are machines. Nothing
else is made by human beings from parts and for purposes entirely supplied
by themselves. Nothing else therefore can be understood simply by reading
off those parts and purposes from the specifications.'
(Midgley, 1979: xvi)
'But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous...
Now we are not so sure... Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we
ourselves frighteningly inert.'
(Haraway, 1991: 194).
Animals are both like and unlike humans. If this was partly reinforced by human isolation from the wider world of nature under the culture of capitalism, under late techno-capitalism, animals can be said to be increasingly both like and unlike machines - or to put it another way, machines are increasingly being classified according to the model of the animal. The inter-relationships are enduring ones, reactivated by changes in social and technological production, making the former distinction further complicated by the addition of artificial life-forms and biotechnologies (the merging of biological and computational forms). The task of classifying and differentiating between animals, humans and machines is one performed with increasing amounts of difficulty, born out of complexity, to use an operative term.
In his essay 'Why Look at Animals?' (1980), John Berger states: 'They belonged there and here. Likewise they were mortal and immortal. They were subjected and worshipped, bred and sacrificed.' (1980: 5) Pointing to the use of the connective and, when but might be more easily anticipated, he reveals the inherent dualism in our historical relationship with them. Furthermore, rather than language traditionally reinforcing a natural superiority over animals, it both reinforces a hierarchy based on literacy levels as well as impeding communication with animals who clearly articulate differently. Furthermore, language is treated quite literally as code on a computer evidently not natural but constructed and evolving through social interactions. The contradictory image of talking animals springs to mind from Johnny Morris's 'Animal Magic' where he speaks on behalf on animals to Walt Disney's anthropomorphic cartoons where animals talk via technological apparatuses - through animation, or animated motion [for more on this, Esther Leslie's essay 'Wallace and Gromit: an animating love' (1997); she also employs Berger's essay, by the way]. Humans remain both like and unlike animals, and the distinction is a social one reinforced by the role of language and representation expressing symbolic thinking, something that animals allegedly do not do (but humans have a vested interest in taking this position). In the broadest sense, the origins of language are there to be uncovered in endless myths that employ animals analogously. Kafka's Metamorphosis comes to mind: 'As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.'
For behaviourists and Lacanian psychoanalysts alike, human socialisation is necessarily likened to an entry into language and the symbolic order. Berger makes the crucial distinction that humans have developed a language of symbols that expresses something other than itself, even though the first symbols were undoubtedly animal in origin (eg. early cave paintings depicted animals and probably used animal blood as raw material). Hence the distinction expresses a contradictory (even dialectical) impulse bound up with human evolution - from lowly four-legged beasts used as metaphor to two-legged ones with the ability to use metaphor: 'If the first metaphor was animal, it was because the essential relationship between man and animal was metaphoric. Within that relation what the two terms - man and animal - shared in common revealed what differentiated them. And vice versa.' (Berger, 1980: 5) It seems that our symbolic language has presently become so advanced that we have adopted animal metaphors for machines.
Part of the enduring fascination of looking at animals is to attempt to be at one with nature, and to reinforce the power to transcend our animal heritage. Pierre Boulle's novel and in turn Smith & Schaffner's film The Planet of the Apes simply makes this a quirk of fate, in a parallel world where the human-animal power relations are reversed. This partly suggests that artificial constructions like racism might be accounted for in much the same way? To reinforce our superiority, animals have been seen to be machines without soul (at least to carnivores), bound up in dualistic thinking that separated the soul from the body-machine, extended to the Hegelian master-slave dialectic. Descartes, who is partly responsible for this kind of thinking, allegedly nailed his wife's dog to a wall by its paws and dissected it alive to prove his hypothesis (thus, he also contributed to the precedent for animal experiments in the name of science). The dispassionate manner in which this was performed was like taking apart any working mechanism (quoted in Leslie, 1997: 150). Interestingly, according to Cartesian rationalism, the opposition of reason and passion was perceived rather differently from now. Whereas we tend to think of the emotive side as hard to replicate on a computer (affective computing is a key research area as a result of this problem), Descartes thought the opposite in that the passions could be replicated but reason not - and this is what distinguished the superior human mind. In much the same way, animals were classified according to the model of the machine, and employed as machines - increasingly replaced by the internal combustion engine under mechanisation (horse-power, etc.). Like Vaucanson's Duck in the 18th century, automata merely simulate living things but are not living things in themselves (clearly, there is a further connection to be made here between Vaucanson's and Disney's Duck). Perversely, under the conditions of consumer capitalism, animals came to be treated as raw materials, processed in gigantic factory farms without the freedom to roam (or even freedom to act like a machine) and deprived of their symbolic function other than as a readymade meal. Ronald McDonald, believing cows to be simply hamburger machines, would no doubt disagree with Karl Marx and attempt to throw emphasis on consumption rather than production wherein the animal spirits of humans are metamorphosised into a mechanical monster. If the metaphor appears indigestible, it simply lends itself to other kinds of parallel human suffrage on behaviourist principles. Under capitalism, first animals and then humans have been reduced to the role of machine, far from their natural habitat or condition.
According to Berger's thesis, animals begin to disappear during the process of urban industrialisation in the nineteenth century. In parallel, domestic pets multiplied, and adhered to the truism of resembling their masters in that they were separated from their natural way of life, and made to lead artificial lives alongside pot plants in domestic interiors. These pet artificial animals reflect the alienated conditions of late capitalism, expressing sentimental attachment and preferred property relations - but not the parallel autonomy of previous times. The pet and owner both lack agency (the power to act independently), as one pulls the other by its lead or responds to stimulus like Pavlov's dog. As part of the bourgeois home, the symbolic virtual animal also follows this sad trajectory reduced to appearances in the spectacle, encapsulated in the over-production of anthropomorphic materials designed for family viewing and cuddly consumption (there are far too many examples to mention, of endless books, films, games and toys. Berger cites the work of Beatrix Potter and quotes Disney's Donald Duck). Children are the key players here of course, as they are both seen to not only like animals, but also to be like animals, and hence required to engage with them as part of a process of socialisation through reflexive play (feed them, train them, take them to bed, bury them, and so on). This phenomenon is ever-developing, ranging from the adoption of real and toy animals to the more recent realistic animal toy robots - the Sony Cyberdog AIBO and Tamogotchi come to mind. Slavoj Zizek's essay 'Is It Possible to Traverse the Fantasy in Cyberspace?' describes these virtual pets as instruments of 'interpassivity' turning children into virtual murderers. Clearly, ideology is at work in the ways we observe animals and choose to characterise our relation to them in the home and in more public arenas.
The public zoo (shorthand for zoological garden, like the botanical garden) came into existence when animals disappeared from daily life in the nineteenth century (London Zoo was established in 1823). Rather like the museum or the heritage industry, there exists a central paradox at work in the destruction of the natural world with its simultaneous preservation. In the case of zoos, Berger is saying that freedom as well as visibility is made artificial. We observe living objects as if they were dead. The animal inhabits an artificial natural world, a simulated or virtual world of rocks and trees as fake as theatrical props. The animals are isolated and do not interact with other species, and they become as dependent as pets on their keepers for food and social arrangements and interactions, including the supply of mates for reproduction (Zizek's use of the term interpassivity sums up the state of this). In other words, zoos are mausoleums to life and survival and monuments to historic loss.
Berger says: 'The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters.' (1980: 19) At the same time, it was thought possible to study the natural life of animals in artificial conditions, and accordingly make assumptions about human behaviours. This is dubious to say the least. Donna Haraway describes how you can trace the scientific study of primates against the backdrop of anxieties around the bourgeois family (in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the reinvention of nature), demonstrating the ideological nature of scientific fact. However unreliable the motives or scientific method, wild and out of control behaviours can be made captive, observable, and thought understandable (Foucault would add detail on this panoptic desire to taxonomise and order through the use of technologies of vision and the construction of truth). This flawed logic is rooted in scientific positivism, of isolating and caging the subject for study. In the zoo, captive animals perform a symbolic but passive function to endorse scientific, economic and colonial power. Performance artists' Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Two Undiscovered Amerindians, (1992-94), played with these ideas, spending days in a labelled cage placed in an urban public space, watching television and working on a laptop. They refer partly to the fact that it was commonplace during the Victorian period to offer all kinds of exotica for public consumption.
In much the same way, Berger draws the comparison with art: 'In principle, each cage is a frame round the animal inside it. Visitors visit the zoo to look at animals. They proceed from cage to cage, not unlike visitors in an art gallery who stop in front of one painting, and then move on to the next or the one after next. Yet in the zoo the view is always wrong.' (1980: 21)
Furthermore, the Victorian Zoo, according to Bill Nichols (in 'The Work of Art in the Age of Cybernetic Systems'), exhibits the logic of a self-regulating system and simulated animal-nature and natural environment (1988: 34) - much like the idea of virtual worlds presumes the (real) world as we perceive it to be real. Nichols captures the debate about artificial life through Benjamin's artwork essay on reproduction: 'Casting the issue in terms of whether existence within the limits of an artificial life-support system should be considered life obscures the issue in the same way that asking whether film and photography are art does. In each case a presumption is made about a fixed, or ontologically given nature to life or art, rather than recognising how that very presumption has been radically overturned. And from preserving life artificially it is a small step to creating life by the same means.' (1988: 37).
This line of thinking serves to suggest that we now look at animals wrongly in new ways. Drawing upon some of these ideas, it has become commonplace for artists to use biological metaphors and examine creativity in the light of scientific investigations in artificial life, simulating the characteristic processes of living things (the work of Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau are prime examples, for instance in their work A-volve). Sherry Turkle defines artificial life via Minsky's definition as 'the practice of building organisms and systems that would be considered alive if found in nature' (1997: 151), and cites a number of key examples of artificial organisms: Richard Dawkin's The Blind Watchmaker in which the user can evolve biomorph organisms; Thomas Ray's Tierra in which digital chromosomes mate, mutate, and evolve; and SimLife's genetic playground where users are asked to evolve creatures. It is now obvious that animal and machine (or organic and technical) processes are analogous and similarly contain self-organising functions (for instance, see Kevin Kelly's Out of Control) but there are corresponding over-simplifications and an affirmative uncritical tendency at work. Self-organising systems have become complex and are irreversibly arranged in multiple networks - take for instance, the application of biological logic to so-called autonomous systems, the development of neural networks and genetic algorithms. Evolution can be seen to happen at speeds that would otherwise make research untenable, leading in turn to findings at odds with biological orthodoxies. The implications go beyond the idea of an online virtual zoo where observation of the behaviours might allow visitors to better understand life, but to create life and even to make better life (this is the argument of much research into DNA). Undoubtedly former firm distinctions between animals, machines and humans are now unreliable - though of course the idea of the zoo was partly to reinforce the distinction in the light of Darwinism. On the contrary, life can now be generated by what Turkle calls 'unnatural selection' (1997: 149) which seems even more unsettling than the former dictum. But rather than undermine established relationships, does this reinforce the distinction too? Moreover, what would an artificial zoo look like designed for artificial species? Berger says: 'Everywhere animals disappear. In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.' (1980:24). Can the same be simply said of artificial life? 'The moral, social and political significance of beginning to think about the rights of a living process to exist whatever the medium in which it occurs is clear.' (Turkle quoting Langton, 1997:151) How would one begin to establish whether life has been demonstrated or produce some kind of taxonomy based on this?
In 1987, at the Los Alamos conference on A-life, it was agreed that artificial organisms needed to demonstrate four qualities to qualify as life: '(1) they must exhibit evolution by natural selection, the Darwinian aspect; (2) they must possess a genetic programme, the rules for their operation and reproduction, the DNA factor; (3) they must demonstrate complexity; with emergent and unpredictable outcomes; (4) the complex organism must self-organise' (Turkle, 1997: 152). You can trace the lineage here from artificial intelligence, as well as the influence of chaos theory in believing that mathematical structure lay beneath apparent randomness, and that randomness could generate mathematical structures. However, unlike traditional A.I. thinking, A-life (what some call 'nouvelle A.I.') relies on its fundamental equivalence to real life. Hence it is deeply controversial and ideologically-charged. However, when looking at artificial life, it appears tamed by the computer screen in much the same way as watching wild animals in a zoo, you are separated by the cage bars or glass. Furthermore, if once watching animals allowed humans to imagine being at one with nature, how does the human respond to the discovery that nature itself is programmable? In the culture of simulation, there is nothing natural about the way we look at these animals, artificial or not - we look at them artificially in new ways. Is the distinction between humans, animals and machines undermined or reinforced? It is brought closer on the one hand, but how would Berger view such developments?
In her essay 'Artificial life as the New Frontier', Sherry Turkle (1997) cites a classic example from the late 1960s is John Conway's 'The Game of Life'. In this, a simple rule-based structure generates complex patterns, and so what might be seen as whole colonies emerge, reproduce and die. These are emergent objects that act as if alive, in an unpredictable manner quite unlike machine-like automation. Similarly, Douglas Hofstadter's 'A Coffee House Conversation on the Turing Test' (1985) challenges outmoded notions of thinking what a machine is. Machines are clearly behaving more and more like animals, and humans of course. There is positive allegorical potential here, in that bottom-up change is made evident in biological, technological and economic systems - leading to a recognition that both people and machines might be seen to throw off their chains (to evoke a sentiment from the industrial epoch). However, there is a contradiction inherent in these political processes much like decentralisation is a ruse for more centralised control - as bottom-up evolution is conditional on top-down centralised control in autonomous systems. Even Turkle appears to conceive of this dialectically: 'we are making boundaries and relaxing them in a complex double movement.' (1997: 170)
Rather than the proliferation of animal representations being compensatory to historic loss, they have added to the disappearance according to Berger, rendered almost entirely distant by close inspection at a zoo or laboratory (evoking Benjamin's dialectical relation of closeness and distance: that things might remain distant however close they may be). If animals become ever more exotic and remote (1980: 24), what about the potential attraction of artificial life? What are the implications of the obvious proposal to include artificial life as part of the collection of a zoo (or museum for that matter)? Furthermore, this might be more in keeping with the agendas of contemporary zoos, that in general now tend towards conservation rather than observation; and what in the context of techno-capitalism, might be better called the generative possibilities reflected in self-regulating systems. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of 'cultural reproduction', to describe how the dominant culture manages to reproduce itself, is enlivened quite literally by the techno-biological metaphor. Now, those in power really can self-replicate in their own image (like DNA). Berger thought the dualism between animals and humans has been lost, and goes further to suggest this as a link to totalitarianism. He continues bleakly: 'This historic loss, to which zoos are a monument, is now irredeemable for the culture of capitalism.' (1980:26) Is this even more pronounced under present technological and cultural conditions? In looking, the imperative must be to shift from a politics of representation (the critical orthodoxy at the time of Bergers essay) to a politics that takes account of generative processes, and the question of autonomy. It would appear that under the conditions of techno-capitalism, humans are both like and unlike artificial animals.
Finally, in answer to the question, 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' 'He thought about his need for a real animal; within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived. The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesnt know I exist. Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another. He had never thought of this before, the similarity between an electric animal and an android. The electric animal, he pondered, could be considered a sub-form of the other, a kind of vastly inferior robot. Or, conversely, the android could be regarded as a highly developed evolved version of the ersatz animal. Both viewpoints repelled him.' (Dick, 1968: 36-7)
References:
Brian Aldiss (2001) 'Introduction', in, Pierre Boulle, Planet of the Apes,
London: Penguin.
Steve Baker (2000), The Postmodern Animal, London: Reaktion Books.
John Berger (1980), 'Why Look at Animals?' in About Looking, London: Writers
& Readers.
Pierre Boulle (2001) Planet of the Apes (Plenete des Singes,1963), trans.
Xan Fielding, London: Penguin.
Phillip K. Dick (1993), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), London:
Harper Collins.
Donna Haraway (1991), Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the reinvention of nature,
London: Free Association.
Douglas Hofstadter (1985) 'A Coffee House Conversation on the Turing Test',
in Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, New
York: Basic Books, pp. 492-525.
Franz Kafka (1975), Metamorphosis (Die Verwendlung,1916), London: Penguin.
Sarah Kember (2003), Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life, London: Routledge.
Esther Leslie (1997), 'Wallace and Gromit: an animating love', in Soundings,
issue 5, Spring, pp.149-156.
Mary Midgley (1979), Beast & Man, The Roots of Human Nature, London:
Methuen.
Bill Nichols (1988), 'The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems',
in Screen vol.29, no.2 Winter, pp. 22-46.
Sherry Turkle (1997), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the
Internet, London: Phoenix.
Norbert Wiener (1962), Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the
Animal and the Machine (1948), Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Slavoj Zizek (1999), 'Is It Possible to Traverse the Fantasy in
Cyberspace?', in Elizabeth Wright & Edmond Wright, The Zizek Reader, Oxford:
Blackwell, pp. 102-124.
URLs:
A-life, http://www.a-life.com
Virtual zoo, http://artforum.tv/zoo/index.html
Conway's Game of Life, http://www.reed.edu/~jwalton/gameoflife.html
Alan Dorin, Animaland: Aesthetics, Algorithms & Artificial Life,
http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/~aland
Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena,
http://www.artswire.org/cocofusco/yearofthewhitebear.html
Leah Gilliam, Split (based on her research into primatology and science
fiction, exploits footage from an obscure 8mm trailer for The Planet of the
Apes to highlight the unstable relationship between the real historical
past and the distant imaginary future), http://www.creative-capital.org/artists/emerging/gilliam_leah/gilliam_leah.html
Steve Grand, Cyberlife Research, http://www.cyberlife-research.com
Luigi Pagliarini, Alive Art http://www.artificialia.com/luigi
Organism: making art with living systems, http://music.columbia.edu/organism/
Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, A-Volve, http://www.mic.atr.co.jp/~christa/WORKS/A-VolveLinks.html
Pierre de Vaucanson's Duck automata, http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/pschmid1/essays/pynchon/vaucanson.html