There's a scene in David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly, in which
mad scientist-cum-insect Seth Brundle ponders his monstrous, half-human
half-insect existence. He asks, rhetorically, "Have you ever heard
of insect politics?" Of course not, he answers. There is none.
"Maybe I'll be the first insect politician"…
"Now, that man is more of a political animal than bees or any
other gregarious animals is evident," says Aristotle (Politics
I.2). The famous formulation of humans as a "political animal"
takes on new meanings in light of contemporary studies of biological
self-organization: swarms, flocks, packs, and so on. For Aristotle,
the human being was first a living being, with the additional
capacity for political being. In this sense, biology becomes the
presupposition for politics, just as the human being's animal
being serves as the basis for its political being. But not all
animals are alike. Gilles Deleuze distinguishes three types of
animals: domestic pets (Freudian, anthropomorphized Wolf-Man),
scientific animals (the isolated, taxonomics species), and packs
(group-animals, multiplicities). Maybe Aristotle just chose the
wrong kind of animals to study. "You can't be one wolf, you're
always eight or nine, six or seven" (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, p. 29). Or rather, perhaps Aristotle's bias is one that
colors nearly all subsequent philosophical thinking on animals,
the presupposition of individuation as a starting point. What
happens to the human in such aggregate forms? Does the human become
extrinsic to itself?
Exhibit A - Animals Without Heads. It is not hard to look around
and notice that computer-generated imaging (CGI) has become a
staple of genre science fiction, horror, and action film. More
than that, the predominant use of CGI is in the imaging and animation
of aggregate forms: innumerable soldiers on a battlefield (Lord
of the Rings trilogy), the attack of enemy insects (Starship Troopers),
herds of dinosaurs (Jurassic Park), the flocking of bats (LXG),
the swarming of AI (Matrix Revolutions) and of robots (I, Robot),
and of course the chaos of an all-out starship battle (Star Wars
Episode II). The software algorithms for many of these films is
derived, in part, from fields such as "swarm intelligence," in
which computer science models itself on ethological studies of
army ant foraging, wasp nest building, cooperative transport in
ants, and coordinated firefly flashing (the work of Eric Bonabeau,
James Kennedy, Guy Théraulaz). These examples of aggregate insect
phenomena have been transformed into abstract algorithms for problems
of network optimization (ant foraging algorithms have been used
in routers for telecommunications networks). The lesson that these
and other fields put forth is that complex, "global" behaviors
can and indeed do arise from simple, "local" actions. It is interesting,
then, that its cultural expression in CGI films is always represented
as a threat to human modes of organization.
Exhibit B - Pass It On. or all the hype about networks and staying
connected, there is one class of networks most people avoid at
all costs: epidemics. The CDC has recently adopted the phrase
"emerging infectious disease" to describe a new set of contagious
diseases that have, in recent years, made headlines: Mad Cow,
West Nile, monkey pox, bird flu, and SARS, to name a few. Popular
science books warn us of the "coming plague" which would not be
a single disease, but a combination of emerging infectious diseases,
a new kind of epidemic terrorism. Epidemics are, of course, networks.
But they are not just networks. In many cases they are networks
abetted by animality: human-cow, human-rat, human-monkey…human-virus?
The insight of US biodefense policy is to have understood that
it takes networks to fight networks (e.g. the US Biosurveillance
Program). In a sense, modern epidemiology can be understood not
just as a network practice, but as a network practice that always
assumes the immanent permeability of species boundaries. As humans,
we are, in a disturbing way, never closer to animals than in the
event of "communicable disease."
Exhibit C - Undead. Vampires and zombies are often carriers of
disease ("a virus," says David Crongenberg,"is only doing its
job"). While Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (1897) made little explicit
reference to disease, it was bathed in a social context in which
the erotic and the diseased coalesced in the blood. By the 1920s,
however, when F.W. Murnau brought German expressionist film to
the myth in Nosferatu, a different kind of association was introduced:
plague. Nosferatu is replete with hordes of rats; rats as an aggregate
phenomenon become the privileged emblem of the vampire, resulting
in panic, fear, and quarantine (this theme is echoed in Werner
Herzog's remake). Rats, of course, were the main carriers (via
fleas) of Yersinia pestis during the Black Death. The vampire,
according to the standard account given by Montague Summers, exists
in a netherworld of perpetual hunger, neither living nor dead,
seemingly immortal and yet totally dependent on and driven by
the need for blood (or perhaps a "symbolics of blood"). Aristotle
would have a tough time with the vampire, as would natural historians
such as the Comte de Buffon. The figure of the undead is, in a
sense, the embodiment of disease itself, the disease minus the
human subject, a disease-without-host.
Exhibit D - Living Dead. While the anthropological figure of
the zombie derives from Haitian voodoo myths, it was modernized
(and Americanized) in George Romero's living dead trilogy. Night
of the Living Dead portrays many of the stock characteristics
of the modern zombie: corpse-like, slow-moving, unspeaking, almost
beast-like in its behaviors, and driven by a need to consume human
flesh (brains, if possible). Like certain versions of the vampire
myth, the zombie is also tied to disease. Romero's films make
oblique references to either nuclear or biological causes of zombies,
and his film The Crazies couches the zombie within the context
of biological warfare (repeated in Lucio Fulci's Zombie and 28
Days Later). The figure of the living dead is not the same as
the figure of the undead. Vampires are often intelligent, cultured,
and well-dressed. Zombies are dumb brutes, without language, and
always wearing the tattered clothes they died in. One is tempted
to see a class division at work in the vampire-zombie relation,
but what is also important is the way that both are connected
to epidemic disease. They are contagious, and, in the more scientific
or medicalized versions, that contagion is a microbial contagion,
another instance of the crossing of species borders. But, whereas
the fear of the undead is a fear of being a disease-without-host,
the fear of the zombie is almost the inverse: the fear of becoming
nothing but a body, nothing but "bare life."
A tentative statement - the basis of any possible comparison
between human and animal is conditioned by these four principles:
(i) that the basis of comparison is an individuated being, (ii)
that the individual precedes the group, (iii) that the individual
constitutes the group, (iv) and, most importantly, if the group
has a "life" of its own, it will be that of a super-individual.
In a sense, groups can never be alive; or, the "life" of a group
is always proper to the individual that is the group. Aggregates
are only "living" at the cost of being aggregates. Perhaps, then,
the obsession with the boundary between human and animal is only
a stop-over leading to a more fundamental boundary: that between
individuated and aggregated forms, be it in human, animal, plant,
or machines.
Animals ceaselessly transgress the boundaries we demarcate for
them. More importantly, "animality" may be the name for the threshold
of our ability to understand aggregate forms as living aggregates,
in all their ambivalence: bats, rats, packs.