In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • (Im)mobilities
  • Cary Wolfe (bio) and Maria Whiteman (bio)

Let's begin with the distinction between "wild" and "domesticated," a distinction that seems, in these images, already problematic if not indeed under erasure, but only to make possible its crossing with another distinction that follows a similar logic, on political rather than ecological terrain: namely, the distinction in biopolitical thought (reaching back to Aristotle) between bios (or the form of life proper to membership in a community) and zoe (often translated as "bare life," life excluded from the community and exposed to sovereign violence, the vagaries of natural existence, or both).1 In this light, the fundamental issue, under conditions of what is called globalization, is not membership in a species but, rather, inclusion and exclusion from membership in a community of those who are protected from violence and receive care. The point, in other words, is not "wild" versus "domesticated" nor even "animal" versus "human" but, rather, to use Judith Butler's words, "whose lives count as lives" (26). After all, many non-human animals (namely, companion animals) in what Richard Rorty unabashedly calls "the rich North Atlantic democracies" receive an [End Page 87] historically unprecedented level of care in food quality, medical treatment, and even pharmacological enhancement and health insurance unavailable to many millions of the world's human population—not in spite of the fact that they are "animals" but indeed because they are animals (198). Or, more precisely, because they are felt to be members of a community composed of different species, lives that count as lives.

Along similar lines, although not precisely biopolitical, we would have to redraw the distinctions that obtain between, say, populations of elk or bighorn sheep or elephants or migratory birds that are monitored, tracked, genetically profiled, and so on, and those creatures—perhaps of the same species but under different geopolitical conditions, or perhaps, and in the same political space, thrust into a different role in the management of animal populations—left to their own exposure to violence, starvation, the perils of climate change and habitat destruction, not to mention those animals who in our society are living only to be killed, whether that refers to the billions of animals involved in factory farming and aquaculture or those animals (exotic or otherwise) whose role it is to service what are increasingly canned (that is to say, managed) hunting operations (and nowhere more egregiously than in my state of residence, Texas). In different ways, these animals are managed via increasingly sophisticated and exact regimes of biopower to "make live," as Foucault puts it, if only for the purposes of maximizing the extraction of value from their deaths.2

What becomes of the wild/domestic distinction when it is entirely plausible to say (and for these very same reasons) that the squirrels who live in your backyard, along with other urban wildlife such as pigeons or rats or nutria, might well be more wild than animal populations who are heavily monitored by the same satellite technologies used by the military? Wild animals are named (a practice pioneered by primatologist Jane Goodall) and heavily individuated in their behaviour (and not just their reproductive behaviour), their comings and goings plumbed and studied in unprecedented fashion by these new management regimes of power/ knowledge: all, of course, in the name of a model of conservation that is conceived more and more in terms of genomics and genetic flows.3 This is indeed part (but only part) of what Roberto Esposito means in Immunitas when he observes that biopower operates not on "subjects," nor even on [End Page 88] "the body," but rather at the level of "flesh" or, more precisely, at the level at which we fantasize that the unruliness of flesh can be mathematized and quantified. Flesh, Esposito writes, is "nothing but the unitary weave of the difference between bodies. It is the non-belonging, or rather the intra-belonging, which allows what is different to not hermetically seal itself up within itself, but rather, to remain in contact with its outside" (121).

And yet, for all that, those animals we habitually call wildlife are different. That moose or elk you stumble upon in...

pdf

Share