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  • Playful Paws
  • Lisa Poggiali (bio)
Brian Massumi’s What Animals Teach Us about Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014

What do animals teach us about politics? This is the central question of Brian Massumi’s brief, though complex meditation on animality, humanity, and the relational dance through which they each become themselves. Frequently opaque, though occasionally beautiful—“The story of evolution is a mad proliferation of forms so fertile as to defy the human imagination” (21), Massumi remarks in a particularly lucid moment—his text invites the reader along on an idea-journey rather than providing a straightforward analysis of what animal politics are or could be—this despite the fact that the text is formally polemical, the main essay closing, for example, with fourteen “propositions” that outline “what animals teach us about politics.”

The central thesis that coils through the book, boa constrictor-like, is that the point of departure for thinking politics should not be humanity, but animality. Thus, Massumi writes against the liberalism foundational to most animal studies scholarship, the proponents of which argue that human rights should be extended to animals. The crux of Massumi’s argument is radically different; namely, that to start from the perspective of “human rights” means to deny the animality that is immanent to humanity—and the humanity immanent to animality—and thus to misrecognize both. This is no space, he intuits, from which to begin political analysis or to articulate political claims. Epistemologically, Massumi decenters the human and (re)places her “on the animal continuum” (3). Contrary to what he sees as the anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism implicit in more conventional theories of animality, for Massumi, the paw engulfs the hand without replacing it; the human/animal dialectic implodes. [End Page 331]

In order to effect this implosion rhetorically, Massumi divides his text into one main essay, “What Animals Teach Us About Politics,” and three supplements: “To Write Like a Rat Flicks Its Tail” (a discussion of writing as an act through which the human becomes animal, rather than a mechanism for dividing humans from animals); “The Zoo-ology of Play” (a commentary on Gregory Bateson’s work on animal play, inspired by a trip to the San Francisco zoo); and “Six Theses on the Animal to Be Avoided” (cautionary statements warning the reader against analytically disaggregating human from animal). Philosophically, Massumi merges critical theory and evolutionary biology, drawing on such thinkers as Deleuze and Guattari, Gregory Bateson, Raymond Ruyer, and Alfred North Whitehead. “Play” is his way in. It is the central concept that anchors his text, and thus the concept from which his understanding of politics unfolds. For Massumi, Bateson’s notion of play as a theory of difference is instructive. A wolf cub communicates whether it is biting (engaging in combat) or nipping (engaging in play) through the style in which it performs—and enacts—the gesture. “A ludic gesture in a play fight … is not so much ‘like’ a combat move as it is combatesque: like in combat, but with something different, a little something more. With a surplus: an excess of energy or spirit” (9). The crucial point for Massumi—and what sets him apart from some other thinkers of animality, such as Giorgio Agamben—is that play and combat are neither distinct zones in an absolute sense, nor do they meld completely with one another, i.e., they do not produce either an “excluded middle” or a zone of undifferentiation. Rather, they operate according to the logic of the “included middle.” Combat modulates the game, and play stylistically deforms combat, nudging each into a “zone of indiscernibility” where their differences are nevertheless maintained. The logic of play, for Massumi, is one of “mutual inclusion.”

Mutual inclusion governs the process through which the animal continuum differentiates and reproduces itself, which is to say, the process through which humans become themselves. It is in the creativity implicit in animal play that one can be able to think (and do) human creativity. This “zone of indiscernibility” therefore “does not observe the sanctity of the separation of categories, nor respect the rigid segregation of arenas of activity” (6). While Massumi is clear that there is no foundational or...

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