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Camera Obscura 17.1 (2002) 149-187



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Bringing Up Babe

Susan McHugh

[Figures]

Can or should we understand the "anthropological" model of aesthetic practices as separate from Babe? And what methodologies will address these concerns?

—Sylvia Kolbowski, "Questions for Feminism"

The 1995 film Babe (dir. Chris Noonan, US) culminates with the consolidation of a community in which social boundaries separating animals, machines, and humans are not erased but significantly reconfigured. The barnyard society shifts from an anthropological system, organized around the singular human, to a nonanthropocentric network, from which the human farmer becomes no less inseparable than the farm animals and machines. Moreover, Babe suggests that the formation of this network depends on the engagement of humans and other animals with a specific visual technology—television—for the purpose of cross-species communication.

In this respect, Babe's barnyard network approximates Donna Haraway's ideal "cyborg community" while at the same time offering an important corrective to thinking about such machine-organism integration from a human standpoint. 1 Through [End Page 149] the film's multiple and fragmentary narratives, anthropocentric cyborg systems become broken down into component parts, shattering the illusion of individuated agency whereby an organism becomes a "self" only on the model of a singular human being. Rather than positioning Babe as simply imaging cyborgs, I want to invoke the way in which cyborg theory suspends the value of the human in relation to technology in order to trace a similar displacement enacted along the boundaries of technology and animals. By looking at the key role of television in the reconsolidation of these component parts into a singular system that emphasizes interdependence, this essay explores how Babe's social construction of agency frames larger questions about the role of visual media in constructing nonhumans as historical subjects.

Tracing the disjointed development of both narrative and character within Babe, I examine in this essay how the barnyard animal on television becomes a crucial site for investigating more than how cross-species relations become galvanized through shared experiences with technologies. Because the film postulates that specifically visual technologies shape reading practices that are necessary to nonanthropocentric conceptions of nonhuman agency, I argue that Babe positions television as intensifying rather than resolving conflicts between biological narratives (particularly those of gender) and stories of machine-mediated group belonging. In this respect, Babe uses television to historicize human-centered concepts of hybrid machine-organism agency (like Donna Haraway's cyborg) and to produce in their stead a collective of simulacral animals, or what I term animalacra. 2 As my reading of the film will show, animalacra emerge not as humans pretending to be animals, machines pretending to be animals (or humans), or animals pretending to be humans (or machines), but as animals pretending to be other animals in such a way that humans and machines are implicated.

Framing this film about how a pig learns to be sheepdog (or "sheep-pig"), the film's broad range of barnyard animalacra often overtly puts species boundaries under erasure. Some animal characters thrust different species' identifications on other [End Page 150] animals, such as the sheep who protest their harassment by dogs they term "wolves." But more systematic challenges to biological schemas come from animals who clearly cultivate their own alternate identifications, notably the duck who pretends to be an alarm clock, which to him is a "mechanical rooster," or a machine that pretends to be an animal. Instead of a Darwinian, ever receding "origin" of species, these active border crossings involve machines in ways that foreground a range of connections between animal identities and human uses for animals. Within this spectrum, television emerges as the key technology by which barnyard animals gain power since it serves as the mediating ground between highly localized, individuated house pets and interchangeable, nomadic rodents, profoundly undermining the originary authority of the human.

In this way, Babe's complicated approach to technology—as both an economic factor (as it is represented in the film) and as visual media (as they are represented both in and by the film)—points the way to a particular postmodern path, the...

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