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My father: a Labradors breeder is a paper that was presented in April 2022 during the international Human-Animal Conference held in Turku University https://ykes.org/elaintutkimuspaivat/. (This is an extended version with a brief introduction to the concept of "becoming-animal".).
Becoming-Animal Becoming-Owl
The starting point of becoming-animal
The surrealist Hegelian-Marxist Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève is the first to introduce the concept of "becoming-animal" in the intellectual milieu of Paris. According to Kojève,’s prediction the globe is entering, or is already entered, in a post-historical period where there is no more need of war and revolutions; there is no need of History.
The negative action is the conflictual movement that makes History. It is a movement triggered by an excluded individual or collective subject that needs an objective recognition through opposition. For example, the recognition of minorities' rights by the State. Because the Last Man (which comes after History) does not need to be recognised anymore he or she loses what was making him a “human”, that is the subject's capacity to negate. Because animals do not have the need and the capacity to negate, they live according to the necessity of Nature. The “human instead”, even if it has an animal body, is moved by the Spirit of History. Because the Last Man lives at the End of History he is destined to become an animal again.
Kojeve has 3 different visions (serious or ironic?) of the "becoming animal" of the Last Man. Kojeve's point of view changes in time, according to his new experiences abroad.
In 1938 he had a positive post-human vision yet to come: “The disappearance of Man is not a catastrophe: the natural World remains what it has been from all eternity. It is not even a biological catastrophe either: Man remains alive as an animal in harmony with Nature or given Being.” The war disappears but “play, art and love” are preserved; in short, everything that makes Man happy stays.
Few years later he will be less positive about the post-human condition: "If Man becomes an animal again, his arts, his loves, and his play must also become purely “natural” again. Hence it would have to be admitted that after the end of History, men would construct their edifices and works of art as birds build their nests and spiders spin their webs, would perform musical concerts after the fashion of frogs and cicadas, would play as young animals play, and would indulge in love like adult beasts. But one cannot then say that all this “makes Man happy.” One would have to say that post-historical animals of the species Homo Sapiens (which will live amidst abundance and complete security) will be content as a result of their artistic, erotic, and playful behaviour, inasmuch as, by definition, they will be contented with it.
During the decades 1948-1958, after his travels in the US, his vision became bleaker, similar to the marxist Frankfurt School. He sees the post-historical animality in the fetishism of the commodity shown by the American Way of life. He thinks that the post-historical Man has already been realised in the US. In the American Way of Life the conformist masses have reached a state of animality and live in an “eternal present”.
In 1959, after a trip to Japan, he changed his ideas. Now Kojeve sees in Japanese snobbish rituals the realisation of the Last Man that saves “humans” from becoming animals after the End of History. The empty subjectivity of the Japanese snob becomes the model for the West too. This vision opens to the concept of living like performing simulacra that is still a relevant contemporary issue that has been well expanded by French post-structuralist and post-modern like Lacan, Baudrillard, Deleuze etc.
On the Internet one can Google Kojeve’s original texts. Even the first 25 pages of Agamben’s “The Open” are a good source.
A brief philosophical history of Becoming-animal
The concept of "becoming-animal", introduced in the French intellectual circles by Kojeve, is present in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and is well analysed in "A Thousand Plateaus". This idea of “becoming” is certainly influenced by an interpretation of Nietzsche's "ubermensch" (more-than-human) and also by Foucault's critique of the essentialist, rationalist and Enlightenment vision of the "human" as a well-defined pedestal detached from the “non-human”. In particular, in hist last lectures, Foucault has focused his thought on technical rationality of the State apparatuses and “governmentality”. According Foucault, biopolitical practices have subsumed “life” under the care, control and management of these technical apparatuses. Scholars have noticed that biopolitical practices does not apply only to human population through statistical control, classifications, surveys, public hygiene, social security etc but also to animals. In particular life and death of animals are entangled with life and death of humans. For example, in scientific laboratories, new pharmacological cures are experimented on animals to save the life of humans. Biopolitics is extended to the management of all “life”, not only humans but also animal and plants. Derrida has also noticed that western philosophy tradition, starting from Descartes and Kant, has removed the presence of the animal from thinking. For Derrida our modern techno-capitalist civilisation has waged a war of total extermination against the animal. See for example the industrial apparatus of production and distribution of food. Haraway, who is still a PhD in biology and a cyber-feminist, has talked about Derrida’s concern with the the techno-scientific apparatus as a regressive view that resonates with Heidegger’s negative stance with technology and science. Undoubtedly Heidegger has influenced Derrida , Foucault and Agamben in their critique to technical apparatuses. Even if these authors have also been critical with Heidegger (also with his ontological view of the animal as “poor in the world”) and have re-read critically his texts carrying is thinking elsewhere. In particular, Agamben’s critique is directed to "anthropological machine”.
For Deleuze and Guattari the concept of "becoming-animal" is grafted into the influence of the thought of the multitude of “modes” in a natural continuum defined by Spinoza as "Deus sive Natura". Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective is an anarchist interpretation of Spinoza, grafted with the "Chaos Theory", so much so that Deleuze speaks of "Chaos sive Natura". For Deleuze and Guattari, human existence takes place in the chaosmotic becoming of Nature which is a rhizome of contagious processes and assemblages that are intensely and unpredictably intertwining and forking. For this reason, in addition to stable molar identities (for example human species and dog species), that are part of the actual “res extensa”, there are transversal becoming (molecular) that are part of the "res intensa". An affective intensification due to an encounter with a difference can produce a de-actualization of the defined identity of a human being that opens up to the strange attraction of a multiple becoming-other; which can also be a becoming-animal. In my opinion this becoming- animal is seen in singular personalities such as "shamans'', "artists'', "kung fu" warriors, “vampires”, wolverines” but as I have also noticed in ordinary people who are in chaosmotic contact with animals such as "dog breeders’'.
Another relevant name for what has now become a varied field of study on the encounter with the inhuman is Donna Haraway: for example her books Companion Species Manifesto (2003) and When Species Meet (2008) describe the “becoming-with” of an interspecies choreographic ontology. Donna Haraway has given also a feminist turn to the concept of becoming-animal turning it in becoming-with. She has criticized Deleuze for having an “alpha male “tendency to give a Romantic/sublime spin to his concepts and examples (exotic animals and exceptional individuals as great artists); she, as self-defined fragile aged woman, prefers to adapt the concept of becoming-animal to more feminine everyday habitudes and everyday animals like her small dog. Furthermore, Deleuze usually dislike “domestic animals” (even if one could have relation with a dog as a demonic animal) and for him the relation with the animal should be “molecular”, for example a virtual becoming-dog and not a becoming-with an actual "molar" dog. In Deleuze’s becomings there are no identities based on resemblance but only strange resonances and unnatural participations. For Deleuze the becoming-animal is a becoming-intense in a bloc of becomings until one lose its everyday subjectivity. The human flesh becomes animal meat as it happens in Beacon's painting and his art practice. In Haraway the concept is less abstract. She has an actual relation of companionship, collaboration for competition and care with her dog. For Deleuze this attitude would mark an anthropomorphization of the animal that he tries to escape Here we come back to the problem raised by Agamben of an "anthropological machine" which animalizes the human that is seen as an ape and makes anthropomorphic the animal. A trap that is not easy to escape.
The above image of the "rhizome" is taken by Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus and it is inspired to the musician Silvano Bussotti. It was initially conceived as a drawing in 1942 and became a musical partiture in 1956, but because it is impossible to read according musical criteria the musician must interpret in a creative way what he is given to read.
The musical rhizome is a D&G radicalisation of von Uexküll’s musical view of Nature. Nature unfolds a complex network of points and counter-point between a multiplicity of specific Umwelts that are separated and unknown to each other animals. As the spider and the fly. There is an anticipation already inscribed in the spider that puts it in a non-comunicative super-communication with the fly. As if the spider had the specific feature to capture and express mysterious musical resonances coming from beyond; as if the spider were participating in a “out-istic “ field orchestrated by Nature. The same for the orchid and the wasp. Deleuze and Guattari, even if they admit to be inspired by von Uexküll musical biosemiotic, see Nature less as a harmonic composition than a vanguard composition where harmony is on the edge of noise because there are rhizomatic becomings that intertwine all the movement of the rhizome. A territorial refrain is always deterritorializaed and reterritorialized at the infinite. Each refrain is always under the virtual spell of the outside and it is always becoming something-else as if Nature were a nomadic composition "in-fuga" (see Bach's "fuga") nested into a multiplicity of compositions "in-fuga". The "line of flight" (linea di fuga) is given by the affective power of the virtual that is real as the actual. This idea of a resonant continuum opens to a vast unknown territory as animism, panpsychism, telepathy. See for example the telepathic skills of dogs shown in the experiments of the controverted biologist Rupert Sheldrake for example: http://www.sheldrake.org/videos/jaytee-a-dog-who-knew-when-his-owner-was-coming-home-the-orf-experiment."
SMOOTH SPACES OF CHAOSMOSIS
My father is a Labrador breeder who has won many international trophies. I happen to visit him every year in his isolated home in Tuscany where he lives with his family. His best friends are the Labradors whom he has seen born, to whom he has given a name and whom he carefully raises as members of his enlarged family: as children, friends, life companions. My father and his family live in "chaosmosis" with the labradors. When I visit my father I realize that he, his daughter and his wife live in a becoming-Labrador. There is a constant rubbing and calling between humans and Labradors who have access to the house and lie down everywhere ... even on leather sofas, in front of the TV or in the pool. My father's “breeding” is very large: a kind of ex-ranch for horses with differentiated spaces starting from the central house; but the spaces are very osmotic and there are always dogs locked in large fenced spaces but also dogs that run around in the garden of the house, dogs that are on the ground floor of the house ... others who are on the second floor, some of them doze on the sofa in front of the TV, some who bathe in their specific pool (labradors love water) and others who swim in the pool intended for humans. The situation is chaosmotic and this produces a becoming-labradors of humans but also a becoming-human of labradors. It is something similar to the orchid-wasp relation described by Deleuze and Guattari that produces an in-between chaosmotic situation: a “smooth space” that exceeds the “striated space” of fences and defined hierarchies. There is a cheerful affection that pervades the whole wagging atmosphere and in fact many customers who have bought a dog often return and are hosted to experience the hectic of that “atmosphere”. However, the becoming-Labrador cannot be one-way and without a return to the human or the atmosphere would end up in an entropic chaos (that does not have the fluidity of a chaosmosis). To maintain a productive “chaosmosis”, an emerging order-flow, my father must also go back to being a Western human mind with his Cartesian faculties for programming, dividing, enclosing, numbering, naming, calculating, etc. He cannot be completely “Posthuman”. My father is always in a double-current of becoming and withdrawing, of animal haptic immanence and human transcendence of the organising signifier. He is in the “chasm” described by Merleau-Ponty. He is always translating two modes of being and becoming in his sensibility. In this humanimal hybrid situation there are interesting anecdotes that make a singular mode of living.
THE BECOMING LABRADOR OF MY FATHER.
Ethnographic anecdotes.
In the hybrid situation of human-animal community of my father’s Labrador breeding there are interesting anecdotes that make a singular mode of living. For example my father happened to take the more or less unconscious drift of selecting characteristics of the labradors that more resembled himself in the body aspects (a bit molossian with a bigger head and shorter legs and neck) …This move for a long while also had a great success in international contests and in commercial outcomes. It was a break-through innovation that projected at National and European level my father’s blazon as a Labrador’s breeder. This innovation was not elicited by a rational plan but by my father’s instinctive desire to become-Labrador and to make the Labradors becoming as himself. In part this impulse came from my father’s demiurgic narcissism to perpetuate himself in a new “interspecies phylogenetic”…Actually, it was the monstrous intertwining of rhizomatic involution with Labradors DNA but propagated by selection into a phylogenetic evolution of my father’s DNA expressed by his human body’s features and his “proper name”…Indeed, my father’s champion is a black Labrador named “Robertino” (translated as Roberto Junior or Little Roberto) that derives from my father’s “proper name” which is “Roberto”. So, my father is Roberto Senior and his dog is Roberto Junior. This heterogeneous phylogenetic series had given birth to an “unnatural Oedipus”; a weird kind of interspecies “clone” or strange kind of interspecies “son”. Deleuze says that in becomings the relations are weird, in flux, molecular, unnatural participation. I guess my father’s anomalous episode is an example of becoming-Labrador of the human and a becoming-human of the Labrador beyond any kind of binaries... Probably it was an acute form of “anthropomorphism” but also an anomalous “deterritorialization” of the human species in the “theriomorphus”. As if my father were caught in a vortex of becoming-animal aimed at canceling distances and reproducing himself in the Labrador dog species. My father Roberto still loves his interspecies son Robertino more than any other dog (and maybe also human sons). My father considers Robertino his masterpiece among all his living sculptures. But this relation must not be considered coldly “utilitarian” or only “egocentric”. The pure artist cannot feel a separation between himself and his artwork, especially if it is a “living being” that resembles the artist and carry his name. For sure a creative becoming-animal is also a becoming-child; Roberto and Robertino touch and play with each other all the time as a single melody made of points and counter-points. In the photo above my father Roberto is grabbing his “natureculture” son Robertino as if looking into a mirror of himself. The becoming-animal is also a mutual “becoming-with”, to put it with Haraway, that goes beyond the subjective pride of the artist and its creature. They are tied in a field of mute but expressive “feeling”. In a way one is the creature of the other as if in a new living “concretion” (a weird assemblage); they compose a field of feeling in mutual becoming-with with no subjects and no language to signify and disturb this immanent continuity of the living. In Deleuze’s terminology their assemblage is a new singular species composed by a monstrous virtual coupling. In the photo above you also see the human face of my father that is becoming more and more like the snout of a Labrador. In his first posthuman and post-historical prophecy Kojeve writes that from “the face of the wise will emerge the snout of the animal”. This idea has been invigorated by Deleuze and Guattari who openly criticise the human “face”. In the “Logic of Sensation” Deleuze writes that the “intense other” develops a snout and turns his human flesh into animal meat.
Lately, however, my father has been forced to select two bifurcating lines of Labradors: one with characteristics that resemble him and Robertino and another with new standard features for Labrador’s beauty; a much more Kantian “levigated style” of beauty that the new discursive consensus of the Labrador community now appreciates”. Beauty tournaments and their dominant discourse and conventions have limited my father’s instinctive drive to reproduce in another species. My father’s line of flight into the inhuman has been reterritorialized into a “becoming-human” by the circumstances of the power-discourse and its consensus. The situation is similar to the relationship between the artist’s phenomenological, tacit, sacred, intimate “Umwelt” (and quasi-autistic but also out-istic immediate needs of expressing it) and the necessary compromises with the profane and abstract inter-subjective institutions, as the market but also the judging institutions in the beauty contests. Human institutions are biopolitical moulds of separation that require compromises, networking, negotiations of identities and interrupt the humanimal panic “communication” (in the sense of Bataille, Nancy etc.). The humanimal continuum is segmented and organised by the human institutions that have re-territorialized the inhuman “line of flight” of my father into a conventional shared signifier.
My father cannot escape the institutional game if he wants to thrive with his activity of Labradors’ breeder. He must deal with the whole human society enfolding his activity and specifically with the “Labrador Circus” that is the institutional frame that gives shared sense to any activity carried out inside its context. My father must follow its norms and its reproductive logic.The social game institutes shared transcendental values .A utilitarian model subjugates an “economy of gift” based on the passion of living beings for other living beings. However the consensus of the “Labrador Circus” does not remain unchallenged. There is always a political agon that contests the metastatic equilibrium. Even because the Labrador breeders are very passional men and women with artistic temperament and also very tied to their dogs. When your dog is judged with low score is like a personal offence. Of course this passion produces also a strong competition among Labrador’s breeders. Nevertheless the meshwork structure of the business, that essentially requires also cross-couplings between different Labrador’s breeding houses , obliges the passional competitors also to cooperation. In this context a politics of alliances is as much as important as the capacity to create a very stylish lines of dog with its capacity to seduce the ones who desires to become a Labrador’s owner. Seduction is a key word because a line must seduce the judges to keep the blazon at the top but also the common buyers that often do not have the same taste of the judges.
The situation in its whole is very complex and requires decades of knowledge and know-how (from genetic to social-skills) to be a top Labrador Breeder. As I have hinted before, there is always a complex inter-subjective political, philological and philosophical dispute on how the “model” of the “perfect” Labrador should be. An ongoing discoursive dispute which has consequences on many levels (not only economic). This dispute fiercely engages my father’s agonism with the point of view of judges, experts of various kinds, Labrador federations, media and competitors. My father, like an artist, is caught in this tension between a tacit unifying field with dogs (his loved creatures that also trigger his becoming-animal) and the necessity of becoming-human that requires all other kinds of skills. Should he compete in the beauty tournament by affirming its own “shape” of Labrador as he feels it or to compromise with the intersubjective “model” required by the convention of the “community of Labrador’s insiders”?. He has chosen to follow a bifurcating strategy of producing two kinds of “styles”: one line as “Robertino”, his interspecies son, and one line like the more levigated “Louis XIV” (in the photo with Robertino) that is now the champion who wins every beauty tournament. Louis XIV is the new shared model of what a perfect Labrador should look like. This disagreement around the “perfect model” is political, cultural, philosophical, aesthetic and resonates with the ancient dispute around Plato and the simulacra. A dispute that has been also carried on by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition. Does an original innate idea of Labrador exist eternally? Or is there only an immanent becoming and differential gradients of simulacra as Deleuze puts it? My father is a partisan of the Platonic side and he thinks that the innate idea of Labrador is the same he has in his mind ( I mean “Robertino”). An artist must be also stubborn to affirm his idea. To corroborate polemically his idea he also brings philological evidences from the book he searches in the tradition that describes how a Labrador should look like (big head, short legs etc.). (PHOTO) He tries to give authority to his discourse by referring to these traditional texts. Other insiders of the Labrador’s professional milieu that shares his view exchange information on website and social-media and cement political alliances and counter-narratives. Actually my father is slightly frustrated because his becoming-animal, has been slowed down by the Labrador Circus and he must negotiate with the new shared stereotypes of beauty. This tension between a centripetal and centrifugal force is typical of any artist. For Deleuze every artist is expressing a becoming-animal refrain that is caught in a logic of territorialization, deterritorialisation and re-territorialization. Even if Deleuze and Guattari privilege “becomings”, “deterritorialization” and “lines of flight” they are aware that a rhizome has also a logic of capture, coding, segmentation, abolition, and stratification. As Nietzsche writes “we always dance in chains”. The bloc of becomings are libidinal surplus-code of an anomalous desiring machine always in excess to the organising code of the institutional consensus; when these anomalies are captured and segmented they risk to start spinning in black holes of sad passion. Luckily this is not the case of my father that by bifurcating the two lines, Robertino on one side and Louis XIV on the other has found a temporary solution to the institutional block. My father is still becoming-animal…and is now trying new lines of flight in-between. As Deleuze says: “escape and find a new weapon”.
HUMANIMAL COMMUNITIES AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL MACHINES
At first glance, what binds the "community" between humans and Labradors is the “play”. In fact, Labradors love to play with each other and with humans, also simulating conflicts, escapes, attitudes and histrionic expressions which want to win the sympathy of the human and push him/her to play and transmit affection. I would say that labradors are masters of empathy in knowing how to immediately tune into body and facial morphing contact and play by responding and adapting to the human body language. The Labrador is a "ludens dog" that arouses a “ludens atmosphere” in its relationship with humans. My research intends to study this interspecies intercommunication but falling into a context of specific observation and data collection without drawing generalizations. In fact, I don't know if we can speak of interspecies inter-communication in general. In fact, even the specific climate, places, spaces, architecture, ways of approaching coexistence and the character of the individuals involved can determine the atmosphere of the inter-species community as a singularity. There are probably people more predisposed to becoming-animal in inter-species communication and there are probably also dogs, both as a breed and aare more predisposed. My hypothesis is that my father's breeding community produces a singular and contingent expressiveness: an interesting Event. From a certain point of view, my father, with his “ludens energy”, is the main leader of the community: more Labrador than Labradors. But also leader-influencer of the human followers of the social community that revolves around his business and becoming-Labrador. The whole of this heterogeneous assemblage that in large part express itself on social-media can be defined as an inter-species inter-technology community. A community of human, animal and technology that territorializes, deterritorializes and reterritorializes its inter-species dynamics as a "humanimal pack”. However, the Labrador-Human play that activates and sustains the “community” is intertwined, superposed and intersected with the Human social game at large: cultural, political, economical, technological. There is always an “anthropological machine” that is working at social level that cannot be made “inoperative”. Even the most pure “block of becomings" or “becomings-with” are enfolded in a complex logic of apparatus, biopolitics and commodification. It could not be different in a social context where triggering emotions and feelings can be transduced into an economic asset. The play becomes also a form of collective exhibitionism and spectacle where dogs are unaware protagonists by means of their companion species’ click on the computer. There is a spectacularization of the dog and its beauty as if they were fashion-models. Furthermore, a good deal of people buys dogs to be the owner of a potential champion who can win beauty tournaments; they invest their money and desire in this goal as a vital personal achievement. These are situations very near to the stories that concern Haraway and her now famous dog Cheyenne. When I read Haraway's stories of dogs’ competitions I always feel a sense of uneasiness. For sure Deleuze would reject these situations as bourgeois domestication and as acts of anthropomorphic reductionism of the animal. The pragmatic Haraway would replay that Deleuze has a too romantic and purist vision of the otherness, complicated by elitist misogynistic prejudices toward ageing women with dogs. However, to side a little with Deleuze, a woman, and I also refer to Haraway, risks becoming too indulgent with her substitutive maternal drives. We know by scientific studies that women and dogs’ puppets have a special relationship rooted in an anthropomorphic and maternal desire to give care on part of the woman. This desire meets the strategic adaptation of the dog but also of the breeders’ selection that follow the market (as composition of needs to satisfy). Dogs since the beginning has manipulated human needs and desires. Even dog breeders knows it and lines of dog that resemble small puppets has been created. This trend is parallel to the "urbanisation of the dogs", that now live in apartments.The co-evolutive symbiosis between humans and dogs keeps being complicated and ethically problematic. As Agamben’s puts it the “anthropological machine” is a cesura that articulates always two effects: the animalisation of the human (the human as ape) or the anthropomorphic reduction of the animal to the human. Furthermore, according the Italian philosopher Esposito the logic of “community” cannot be disentangled by a parallel logic of “immunity”. In the social-media, that form technological communities of people and dogs, this logic of simultaneous proximity and distancing between humans and dogs and humans and humans is clearly at work. But this happens in all the layers of activity of a society; a pure immanence, given by a natural continuum, is always intertwined and superposed with a transcendent signifier. The ambiguous instrumentality between human and dogs could be also the result of the hallucinatory effects of the "anthropological machine" that is ingrained in western culture if not in human nature. One should also consider the effects of bio-capitalism and the fetishism of the dog as product if we consider a Marxist perspective. Nevertheless, Haraway will oppose his immanent "encounter value" to a transcendent "exchange" or "use" value. She will argue that reality is "impure" and every act of distancing and "purification" of the point of view is a male patriarchal attitude ingrained in the Greek tradition. In my opinion we should push the idea of impurity to the extreme including also purity in the impurity to skip the risk of an "impure puritanism". I "stay with the trouble" as Haraway's would put it but in my extreme way. My attitude, that I think comes from intellectual honesty, does not allow me to disentangle the "knot of the problem". My discourse, torn by tensions, loses the analytic clarity and efficiency of the argumentation and from this illegitimate peninsula of sense I am forced to proceed as an artist who is affected by many contradictory and simultaneous planes of discourse. Concepts lose their clarity and become percepts.
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