Consider this the final “book dropping,” the one I am most pleased with. The question behind it is simple: why, in the world of theory, is “domestication” a slur? Why is it dickish to say someone “domesticates” Marx, Wynter, or whoever else? Those who know me will not be shocked that I focus on the domestic animal. I really am that twee, both on paper and in real life.
In Empire of the Senseless we read “There were no animals. That is, no wild animals. Oh there were cats and dogs who are somewhere between humans and real animals.”[1] Cats and dogs are, according to the narrator and a vast swath of critical and literary theorists, halfway between humans and animals not because they have taken on positive human characteristics, but because they have been enervated by the domestic. The domestic animal is not really an animal in much the same way a domestic woman is not really a person: they are castrated and uncurious. To be domesticated is to be weakened, to have your wildness taken from you. In the language of theory, to domesticate an idea, a type of politics, or a form of art, is to do it harm.
Why? Because the polis and the wilderness, spaces of conflicting interests, are the space of the real—real animals, real humans—while the house, unified in its interests, is artificial: created only by an act of political violence which severs it from the conflicts which go on outside. But this is only so much nonsense.
Humans are an auto-domesticating animal and yet we hold domestication in contempt—it is the rare moment where humanness is negative. Contempt for domestic space (as feminine privation, a shell for a man to rest in) is paralleled by the dismissal of domestic animals as unreal, weak, or damaged. This takes at least two forms: from the right, a contempt for weakness, from the left, a belief that pets are no more than commodities owned in bad faith.
Nietzsche, Deleuze, and the Manly Swarm
Nietzsche and Deleuze exemplify the belief that the domestic animal is a weakened animal. For Nietzsche, the human’s self-domesticating is a shame, and the barbs launched at domestication are intended for the flesh of social reformers:
People have always wanted to ‘improve’ human beings… The project of domesticating the human beast as well as the project of breeding a certain species of human have both been called ‘improvements’: . . . [But] to call the domestication of an animal an ‘improvement’ almost sounds like a joke to us. Anyone who knows what goes on in a zoo will have doubts whether beasts are ‘improved’ there.[2]
Here we see an intensification of the Kantian position that domestic animals are only useful to us because they have been weakened: the human is made useful, or moral, by weakening it.
For a Spinozist like Nietzsche, this is a sin against body and spirit: “Boiling this down to a formula, you could say: all the methods that have been used so far to try make humanity moral have been thoroughly immoral.”[3] The wild animal is the true animal, as once was the wild human. Nietzsche’s contempt for domesticity is as predictable as it is boring, always with another target in the background (socialists and pastors).
With Deleuze and Guattari, the Nietzschean impulse is refined, leading to the notorious comment in 1000 Plateaus that “anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool”.[4] 1000 Plateaus claims there are three relationships to animals, the first is familial or Oedipal, and this one is very naughty. Then there is the somewhat acceptable, Jungian, relationship where we treat an animal as a mythic figure. Then there is the “demonic” pack animal. This is the relationship we are to aspire to: “it is also possible for any animal to be treated in the mode of the pack or swarm; that is our way, fellow sorcerers. Even the cat, even the dog.”[5] As part of the 70s and 80s obsession with self-actualization, the domestic is to be abandoned when it interferes with realization of potential. It is only allowed begrudgingly as long as it does not interfere with our desire to be wizards.
Freud is a thinker of the home, but the home is for fools. We are to prefer the state’s eagle to the house’s dog, the lion to the cat: sooner Jung than Freud. Deleuze is hostile to the familial as such, so the domestic animal is nothing more than a marker of this terrible machine which inhibits our becoming.
What to make of this?[6] It is clarified 8 years later in L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze. Here his concerns are closer to ours: “The way people talk to their animals is absolutely frightening.”[7] He doesn’t like it when we have a “human” relationships to animals, he wants us to have an animal relationships to animals. His example is telling: the hunter. The hunter, while a killer, has a properly animal relationship to animals.
I appreciate hunting and am aware many hunters are more ecologically minded than your average urbane recycling fanatic, but why is hunting an animal relationship while cuddling a human one? Because the hunter has a non-individual relationship with the animal. The wrong relation is where the “animal is individualized and sentimentalized. In other words, this type of animal has a unique history and name that arises from its emotional alliance with a human.”[8] The proper animal is of a swarm: it has no name, no history, and certainly no home.
This hews close to the valorization of exposure, the unprotected life of the adventurer, the travelling sorcerer. And this is unfortunate because Deleuze could be useful for thinking about domestic enclosures (protecting your becoming, the creative role of territory) but his insistence on the pre-individual and nameless is hostile to the familial-domestic, which is (among other things) a space where the pre-individual becomes individual, and the nameless are named. The domestic animal does not name itself, but neither did I. So with Deleuze, as with Nietzsche, the domestic is a form of feminization, castration, or weakening. And for both, if you pull on the thread for more than a few moments, contempt for domestic animals is a symptom of a metaphysics of power and creativity, one interrupted by the (soft, castrating) family and its home. The wild is freedom, the domestic is servitude.[9]
Berger and the Marxists (they eat cats, don’t they?)
From the left you have a critique of alienation.[10] Here domestication’s problem is not that it feminizes and enervates animals (although I suspect this remains in the background) but that domestication turns animals into commodities. This is closely related to one of the fundamental problems of dialogue: projection—how do you know you’re not imposing yourself on the dialogue? How do you know you aren’t just “speaking” for the animal, and the entire dialogue is in your head? This problem is wide-sweeping and the commodification critique hits it directly: can you have a relationship, especially a relationship that is in part unmediated, with a commodity? I would suggest you can dialogue with anything that is not exclusively a commodity, but the more commodified a relationship is, the harder it is to step out of your alienated relationship and into the spontaneous and intimate space dialogue requires. If there is a “political” dialogue it is this: commodification destroys dialogue and should therefore be resisted. But we need not wait for the end of commodification before we begin dialogue: a commodity-cat will be hard to dialogue with, but the same goes for a commodity-child, or a commodity-husband, and these are hardly in short supply.
That dialogue is possible without first ridding the world of commodification presupposes two things: not all relationships are; that dialogue is possible for the materially and aesthetically impoverished, for those who are unfree, overly mediated, and live during a time where interiority is largely replaced by censorious collective surveillance. As Kavka writes: “The existence of those who are committed to the building of relation is grounded in the real possibility of something other than ideology and its objectifications.” Note, I am not a complete fool: I do not believe relationships occur entirely outside of history and ideology; I know we are shaped by them. But some relations are not entirely reducible to these two forces. Put more dialectically: the claim “one cannot step outside of history” is (somewhat ironically) made when we step outside of history. We step in and out of history all the time; this is what history is “made” of.
The domestic takes full advantage of this dialectic: there is no place I know of where the back and forth between the historical and the immediate is played out, than the domestic. Some relationships happen only when we’ve stepped out of history, even if that means stepping into a much smaller reality,. Sure, my desire to talk to a cat is historically conditioned, but if the entire relationship is reducible to history and its forces, then there is no real relation to speak of: it’s just an epiphenomenon.
Let’s take the example of John Berger. A sensitive reader, he is attentive to the relationship between animals, property, and philosophy. He tells a story about the disappearance of animals from day-to-day life and their replacement with animal figures: now that we no longer live among animals, we have cartoons, zoos, and pets.
Thus he writes:
In the past, families of all classes kept domestic animals because they served a useful purpose …. The practice of keeping animals regardless of their usefulness, the keeping, exactly, of pets (in the 16th century the word usually referred to a lamb raised by hand) is a modern innovation, and, on the social scale on which it exists today, is unique. It is part of that universal but personal withdrawal into the private small family unit… This is the material process which lies behind the truism that pets come to resemble their masters or mistresses. They are creatures of their owner’s way of life.[11]
Let us first note this is not exactly true: the assumption that pets were kept because they are useful is probably false, and certainly does not hold for cats, who are useless.[12] Also, as the archaeological record demonstrates, small family dwellings that contain a few animals are hardly a new thing.[13] But this error is not incidental: for Berger the story goes from instrumental animal to ornamental animal because he assumes all animal relationships are exploitative. The pet is conflated with “livestock,” much as Nietzsche and Deleuze conflate the pet with the zoo.[14]
The commodification of the pet leads to a particular form of projection onto the animal, which Berger describes as such:
Equally important is the way the average owner regards his pet. (Children are, briefly, somewhat different.) The pet completes him, offering responses to aspects of his character which would otherwise remain unconfirmed. He can be to his pet what he is not to anybody or anything else. Furthermore, the pet can be conditioned to react as though it, too, recognises this. The pet offers its owner a mirror to a part that is otherwise never reflected.[15]
In other words, the domestic animal is a mirror designed to affirm the animal in the owner, which is doomed to fail because it can only do this at the cost of the pet’s own animality. This sounds clever, but is it true? Yes, the mass domestication of animals accompanies mass culture and the retreat of animals from urban spaces. But an easier way to explain this is that people like being around animals, and if you take away their horses, they will move to dogs.
The “left” critique of the domestic does not hold up in its particulars. Indeed, its basic assumption—the initial domestication of animals was instrumental—is almost certainly wrong. It is highly implausible that the humans who began the process of domesticating dogs (which precedes even agriculture) had any clue what the result would be: the “framework that regards domestication as a process of intentional shaping and oppression” is basically untenable.[16]
The ethical dismissal of the domestic animal claims the pet is an immoral object, and the very fact that we do not conflate the pet with other animals, that we draw a distinction between our pets and livestock, is a sign of our hypocrisy and fear. Why fear? Because the “otherness” of the animal is supposedly terrifying.[17] Why hypocrisy? Because our pet relationships are asymmetrical and compartmentalized.
That the relation between us and a pet is asymmetrical is obvious, especially with dogs.[18] But as thinkers as diverse as Hans Jonas and Mara Benjamin have argued, symmetry is inapplicable to many of our most important relationships, especially familial and domestic ones: ethical abstraction favours egalitarian interactions between placeless subjects, but this really only works for adults. If we wish to expand our ethics beyond interchanges between Men of Good Intention and Similar Incomes, then we will have to think about relationships that not only are, but even should be asymmetrical. As for compartmentalization: it is not clear this is in fact a problem. The abstract space that has no compartments is not more moral or authentic than the home, which literally compartmentalizes, giving us rooms in which to sleep and eat .
From all political and ethical positions there is a general hostility towards the domestic: the real is the political-economic, the domestic an epiphenomenon. The underlying issue seems to be that the domestic is both bad and unreal. From the right, that it enervates; from the left, that it is compensatory. And so we have travelled around the world and ended up in Aristotle’s back-yard: the private space is a privation, the people found there are castrated, and the animals are unreal.
[1] ACKER
[2] Nietzsche. There is no need to dwell here, but it is worth noting Nietzsche makes a mistake here that is repeated by many: the domestic animal is conflated with zoo animals. Such creatures are captured and perhaps tamed, but they are not domestic.
[3] CITE Nietzsche
[4] 1000 plataueus
[5] 1000 Ps, 240-241
[6] In the L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, Deleuze admits the “stupidity” of this position
[7] CITE THAT VIDEO
[8] 1000 plateaus
[9] Tomkins too, despite being rejuvenated by queer studies and women’s studies, presents just another repetition of this tedious refrain. Dogs are fearful, and so easier to domesticate. “Overly” domesticated cats are lazy and incurious. The domestic is for the querulous and the weak.
Tomkins: “If a life was restricted to a series of transient scenes, punctuated by habitual scenes, such a life would be fatally impoverished by virtue of insufficient psychological magnification. It would resemble the actual life of an overly domesticated cat who never ventures outdoors and by virtue of having totally explored its restricted environment spends much of its adult life in a series of catnaps.
Tomkins: “Despite the fact that the dog can also develop fear of man, it is clear that he is more easily domesticated than many other animals, even after the optimal critical period has passed. It is my belief that this is due to the relatively more graded fear and aggression response which the dog is capable of emitting as well as the more sustained positive affects which the dog is capable of emitting. In comparison, the cat (and perhaps the bird) is much less capable of emitting sufficiently graded intensities of fear or aggression to make domestication easy or even always possible.
[10] Weil 55
[11] CITE BERGER (emphasis added
[12] It seems the “cat as pest controller” story is questionable. SEE BELOW (MENTION FN HERE)
[13] CITE LEVANT FAMILY BOOK
[14] CITE BERGER: “Public zoos came into existence at the beginning of the period which was to see the disappearance of animals from daily life. 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. Modern zoos are an epitaph to a relationship which was as old as man.”
[15] CITE BERGER
[16] Weil 57
[17] I employ Wolfe here not as a strawman, but rather the opposite: his writing is exemplary, and he presents the most sophisticated case for the ethical anti-pet position I could find. [page 4]
[18] WOLFE 51
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