The Crooked Timber of Humanity

In the Sixth Proposition of his 1784 essay ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim’ Kant uses a famous metaphor: ‘out of such crooked wood as the human being is made, nothing entirely straight can be fabricated’. Here, Kant is analysing the problem of ‘a civil society universally administering right’, which in the Fifth Proposition he had defined as ‘the greatest problem for the human species’. This problem is ‘the greatest’ or, in the Sixth Proposition, ‘the most difficult of all’ precisely because the crooked timber of humanity cannot be entirely straightened, that is, the universal administering of right clashes with, and is hindered by, a ‘crooked’ human nature. Hence, for this problem a ‘perfect solution is even impossible’ and ‘[o]nly the approximation to this idea is laid upon us by nature’. This metaphor will return nine years later in the third part of Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, where the idea of an ethical community is deemed as ‘never fully attainable’ and ‘greatly restricted under the conditions of sensuous human nature’: ‘how could one expect to construct something completely straight from such crooked wood?’

The metaphor might have a biblical origin, since two passages of Ecclesiastes read: ‘What is crooked cannot be straightened, and what is lacking cannot be counted’ (1:15) and ‘Consider what God has done: Who can straighten what he has made crooked?’ (7:13).

An awareness of fashion and clothing pervades Thomas Middleton's dramatic writing, and is nowhere more apparent than in the wording of his preface to The Roaring Girl (1611). Here the playwright underlines that the ‘fashion of play-making can be properly compared to nothing so naturally as the alteration in apparel’ (Middleton 2007, 726). The passage has become a classic example of sartorial conceit, each feature of playwriting and playgoing paralleled with a particular item of fashion and its changes over time. Middleton contends that the play's fitness for the summer requires light fabric and many colours: ‘Such a kind of light-colour summer stuff, mingled with diverse colours, you shall find this published comedy’ (ibid.), thereby linking his literary and sartorial choices to environmental factors. Moreover, this matching of clothing, both in concrete and metaphorical terms, with the environment within which it operates can be identified in Middleton's city comedies as well as in some of his other dramatic works (tragedies and pageants), shedding light on the ambivalence in moral discourse or social values that he seeks to uncover.

Ambivalence is conveyed in the very words used to designate certain items of clothing as much as in the ways characters are dressed. The Roaring Girl centres on a cross-dressing female character who sports a doublet (along with its customary hose), and whose first appearance in the play sees her wearing both a male top, ‘a frieze jerkin’, and a female skirt, ‘a black safeguard’ (The Roaring Girl, scene 3, 180 s.d.).

The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us.

Somato-Power and Life

What kind of animal is a biopolitical animal? First, it is important to make explicit what is meant by ‘biopolitics’ in this chapter. According to Foucault, biopolitics is

the attempt, starting from the eighteenth century, to rationalize the prob¬lems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population: health, hygiene, birthrate, life expectancy, race [… .] We know the increasing importance of these problems since the nineteenth century, and the political and economic issues they have raised up to the present.

This attempt to rationalise problems has characterised the response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The power and pervasiveness of the pandemic and the rationalising forces mobilised to manage it are undeniable: actually, there is no aspect of human life that does not fall under the direct or indirect control of medical and political authorities. What is even more important is that in the existing biopolitical ‘governmental practice’ it is more and more difficult to distinguish between what pertains to medicine and science and what pertains to politics. That is, politics blends with biology and medicine: political life – for example the question of civil rights – is indistinguishable from simple biological life, as in the case of the restrictive measures that have been imposed to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, which severely limit freedom of move¬ment and have effectively blocked unvaccinated people from engaging in public life. In a situation like this, political decisions are wholly indistinguishable from medical ones.

The figure of the animal lies at the heart of analysis of biopolitical governance, and yet this image generally remains precisely that: an abstract figuration in which ‘the animal’ is only that animal capacity within humanity. The animal predominantly figures the element of life that is at risk for the thanatopolitical side of the operation of power on life, the quality of being included only by the exclusion from community in Giorgio Agamben's theorisation of the distinction between bios and zoē, or the ‘biological-type caesura within a population’ that Foucault argues ‘will allow power to treat that population as a mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the species it con¬trols, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races’. Biopolitical thinking about animals, then, is always shadowed by the spectre of racialisation and colonial extraction, as scholars such as Achille Mbembe and Zakkiyah Iman Jackson have explored in detail. Cary Wolfe argues that ‘to live under biopolitics is to live in a situation in which we are all always already (potential) “animals” before the law’, contending that the human/animal binary is not a ‘zoological classifi-cation’ but a ‘discursive resource’ that is the central tactic of biopolitical power.

Wolfe's contention that we are ‘all always already’ in this category of risk ignores material histories of racial capitalism that sediment into differenti¬ated structures of thanatopolitical risk. As Esposito puts this, ‘the animal thus became a point of division within humanity, between species of people who were separated by their relation to life—and thus to death, since the easy life of some turned out to be directly proportional to the forced death of others’.

The biopolitical turn in animal studies has enriched and deepened the analysis of animal exploitation in several significant ways. Building on the biopolitical framework introduced by Michel Foucault, and later developed and transformed by Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito and Achille Mbembe, among others, scholars of biopolitics reveal how modern politics is primarily concerned with the administration and regulation of biological life (and death), a relentlessly invasive process of bodily manipulation and surveillance of which other animals are the most abject victims. Unlike liberal political theories which tend to down¬play or ignore the role of capitalism in perpetuating violence against animals, biopolitical analyses lay bare the relationship between capitalism, biopower and systemic violence. Biopolitical approaches also uncover the ‘exclusionary’ logic of modern politics and, relatedly, how animals are relegated to a permanent state of exception in factory farms and laboratories and other sites of organised violence.

No account of the biopolitical nightmare to which tens of billions of other animals are condemned every year is as powerful and impactful as Dinesh Wadiwel's The War against Animals. Published almost a decade ago in 2015, The War against Animals is as relevant and timely as ever, not least because the mass production and destruction of animal life has only increased ten-fold in the intervening years. Unlike some scholars of biopolitics who are unduly preoc¬cupied with abstruse philosophical concepts, Wadiwel remains sharply focused on the issues at hand. In a relentlessly honest analysis, he confronts the problem of domination head on, without diluting his analysis or critique.

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture may, as a series title, provoke some surprise. On the one hand, the choice of the word ‘culture’ (rather than, say, ‘literature’) suggests that writers in this series subscribe to the now widespread assumption that the ‘literary’ is not isolable, as a mode of signifying, from other signifying practices that make up what we call ‘culture’. On the other hand, most of the critical work in English literary studies of the period 1500–1700 which endorses this idea has rejected the older identification of the period as ‘the Renaissance’, with its implicit homage to the myth of essential and universal Man coming to stand (in all his sovereign individuality) at the centre of a new world picture. In other words, the term ‘culture’ in the place of ‘literature’ leads us to expect the words ‘early modern’ in the place of ‘Renaissance’. Why, then, ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture’?

The answer to that question lies at the heart of what distinguishes this critical series and defines its parameters. As Terence Cave has argued, the term ‘early modern’, though admirably egalitarian in conception, has had the unfortunate effect of essentialising the modern, that is, of positing ‘the advent of a once-and-for-all modernity’ which is the deictic ‘here and now’ from which we look back. The phrase ‘early modern’, that is to say, forecloses the possibility of other modernities, other futures that might have arisen, narrowing the scope of what we may learn from the past by construing it as a narrative leading inevitably to Western modernity, to ‘us’.

This chapter addresses the relation between language and anthropogenesis in Agamben's work. From his writings of the early 1980s onwards Agamben has posited the process of entering language as unique to human beings. While animals always already find themselves within their natural languages, human beings must enter language, begin to speak, say ‘I’. This experience is not merely linguistic but also ethico-political, insofar as it initiates the process of subjectivation, in which the speaking subject assumes responsibility for its own enunciations. In Agamben's diagnosis of the late-modern condition, this process of subjectivation now appears to be running on empty, as dis¬course becomes devoid of both truth and meaning. Yet, if this diagnosis is accepted, it must imply that the process of anthropogenesis is also rendered inoperative and there is no longer any difference between the human experience of language and the animal dwelling in language, the chirping of the cricket or the braying of the donkey. The chapter addresses these implica¬tions, posing the question of what kind of being emerges from this reversal of anthropogenesis.

Introduction

The relationship between language and humanity is a key focus of Agamben's philosophy. In the preface to his Infancy and History, Agamben speaks of an unwritten work to which that book serves as a kind of a prologue, entitled The Human Voice. This work would address the specificity of the human experience of language, posing the question of whether there is such a thing as ‘a human voice, a voice that is the voice of man as the chirp is the voice of the cricket or the bray is the voice of the donkey? And, if it exists, is this voice language?’

In the Spring of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic swung into full force in the United States, several animal processing plants had to close. Nearly 90% of meat processing plants in the US were sites of Covid transmission in its first year, which led to the deaths of 269 workers. This is another example of the routine way that workers at factory farms and meat processing plants are forced to work in terrible conditions. But another, almost paradoxical, event occurred as well. Because of how sick the workers were, at one point roughly 40% of the American meat packing and processing capacity was shut down. One would suppose that this decreased capacity would cause there to be less farmed animals being slaughtered. However, that turned out to not be the case. JBS and Smithfield, two hog producing companies, ‘euthanised’ over 160,000 pigs, dumping their bodies into landfills. A single chicken producer, Allen Harim, had to euthanise over two million chickens. Why did lowering the capacity of the processing plants not decrease the number of animals slaughtered? As agricultural economist Jayson Lusk has explained, most animal ‘production operates on a just-in-time basis’. That means if a ‘finished’ pig does not go to the processing plant, it sets off a chain reaction affecting every part of the life-cycle of an industrial pig, beginning with the new piglets being bred. Animals in the factory farm are segmented throughout their short lives. There is the place they are born, the nursery where they are kept right afterwards, the finishing unit where they are quickly forced to put on weight, and then to the slaughterhouse. If one doesn't slaughter the pigs, then there would be buildup in the place for ‘finishing’ the pig. If that built up, there would be overcrowding in the nursey.

What Was the Political Animal?

The ‘primal scene’ of Western political theory, Aristotle's famous definition of ‘man’ as a politikon zōon, a ‘political animal’, set the coordinates of the frame that would determine and organise Western politics and subjectivity for two and a half millennia. It already displayed all the problems that would plague this frame from the very beginning and that would come to a head in late modernity, when its too fragile pillars would collapse, opening the gates to other possible forms of politics and subjectivity. A revisiting of this primal scene, even if brief and cursory, therefore seems to be a good starting point to lay out the terms and stakes of the question about politics and animality.

In book I of his Politics, Aristotle purports to demonstrate that the polis is a ‘natural’ institution, and he begins by tracing its origins in other ‘natural’ forms of community such as the household and the village. Aristotle scholars have pointed out, however, that the ‘naturality’ of the political is not limited to human beings, and in fact the definition ‘political animal’ occurs already in book I of The History of Animals (though many translations render here politikon as ‘social’ rather than properly ‘political’), probably the first of Aristotle's zoological works, where it designates a sub-group of the gregarious animals that includes ‘man, the bee, the wasp, the ant, and the crane’ (I.1, 488a, 8–13). The defining char¬acteristic of this group is cooperation in some common enterprise (ergon).

Introduction

The global governance of the Covid-19 pandemic, despite widely divergent approaches and heavily parasitic on extant socio-economic conditions and inequalities, generally led to a proliferation of new controls on human and nonhuman mobility, and the erection of new borders (international, national, subnational, local and even at the individual level). The government policies of lockdowns, with heightened surveillance and controls, were often justified by appealing to the ‘right to health’ of citizens that trumped, in this case, their ‘right to freedom of movement’. What threatened the ‘right to health’ of citizens was the superior motility of a virus whose immediate or mediate origins – as seems likely, although the matter remains contested – were zoonotic. The very possibility of zoonosis, that is, of a viral strain that jumps across animal species in mutations that are highly contagious and damaging for our species, signals the need to reconceive the divide between veterinary and human medicine. Indeed, the Covid-19 pandemic signalled a shift from global to planetary health approaches, in which the health of the environment, of other-than-human life and of human beings are inextricably interconnected. Essential to the govern¬mental responses to containing the epidemic was a complex deployment of spatial logics that reflect a deep imbrication between ecosphere and technosphere in our globalised societies, what has recently been termed the ‘environmentality’ of biopower.

In this chapter, I propose to consider some aspects of the biopolitics of Covid-19 through the perspective of an emerging discourse on spheres, or spherology, that is deeply tied up with the biological conception of space as milieu or habitat. This spherology can be employed to establish the possibility of a right-less control of our free movements, but it can also open towards a new discourse on rights established on the basis of the internal normativity of all life. In what follows, I rehearse how the spatiality of biological life has been employed in order to develop new forms of governmentality, and suggest some paths forward through which these developments can be contested.

Prologue: The Ecology of Dress and the ‘clad in rags’ Representations

Generally speaking, ecology is the study of the biosphere and the networks of the ecosystem. It includes the interaction and links between human and non-human living creatures, and their environments and habitats. What they need to survive and how they evolve in their (natural) surroundings compose the key items in these domains. Ecopsychology applies ecological and psychological theories, as well as research methodology, to study the relationship between people and the natural world. Sartoriology, and more particularly anthropological sartoriology, shows how, through time, people had to adapt to weather conditions and other circumstances of life, and how they used clothing for warmth and protection, then for sexual and rank differentiation, for modesty and power – all concerning human characteristics and activities. Nakedness and clothing are closely related topics: from time immemorial, man's progression has gone from bare skin to status symbols. These meaningful conceptual and figurative markers of social condition and identity embody characteristics and, as such, they impact people's lives. The expression ‘clad in rags’ conveys a rather depreciative representation of both the waste piece of cloth used as a garment, and of the person wearing clothes in poor or ragged condition, indicating poverty and necessity. As the saying goes, ‘the cowl makes the monk’ and, whether on or off stage, the representational processes and their correlated symbolisms are similar.

In 1644, the two eldest daughters of the Marquess of Newcastle, Lady Jane Cavendish and Lady Elizabeth Brackley, wrote a play called The Concealed Fancies in which one character asks another, ‘But what say’st thou to that quiff and pinner that hath the gillyflower, and my best smock-band – will they not agree well together?’ (1.2.17). This is a surprising question for a character in a Civil War play, for Lanto Synge observes that the passion for embroidering flowers on women's clothes was largely passé by then: ‘Such decoration was highly fashionable until the middle of the seventeenth century when Caroline ladies turned to the colours, sheen, textures and rustle of plain silks’ (1982, 34–5). There is certainly no sign of floral embroidery in the portraits of the two authors themselves (Figures 9 and 10); it is true that we do not see much of them below the chest, but that is suggestive in itself, since it makes for a marked contrast with a late sixteenth-century painting such as that of Mary Cornwallis, Countess of Bath, in the Manchester City Art Gallery, or an early seventeenthcentury one such as that of Margaret Layton in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In the portraits of both Jane and Elizabeth Brackley, the fabric of their dresses provides a backdrop for the pearls which decorate their bodices rather than a vehicle for embroidery.