What Animals Teach Us about Politics

by Brian Massumi

In What Animals Teach Us about Politics , Brian Massumi takes up the question of "the animal." By treating the human as animal, he develops a concept of an animal politics. His is not a human politics of the animal, but an integrally animal politics, freed from connotations of the "primitive" state of nature and the accompanying presuppositions about instinct permeating modern thought. Massumi integrates notions marginalized by the dominant currents in evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and philosophy—notions such as play, sympathy, and creativity—into the concept of nature. As he does so, his inquiry necessarily expands, encompassing not only animal behavior but also animal thought and its distance from, or proximity to, those capacities over which human animals claim a language and reflexive consciousness. For Massumi, humans and animals exist on a continuum. Understanding that continuum, while accounting for difference, requires a new logic of "mutual inclusion." Massumi finds the conceptual resources for this logic in the work of thinkers including Gregory Bateson, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, and Raymond Ruyer. This concise book intervenes in Deleuze studies, posthumanism, and animal studies, as well as areas of study as wide-ranging as affect theory, aesthetics, embodied cognition, political theory, process philosophy, the theory of play, and the thought of Alfred North Whitehead.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Animals, History, Cultural Studies

152 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Brian Massumi is Professor of Communication at the University of Montreal. He is the author of several books, including What Animals Teach Us about Politics and Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation.

Reviews

[Stacie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars instead of 5 because I am not quite smart enough to follow Massumi's thinking the whole time, but he is brilliant.

[Daniel Duarte · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rico em insights que põem na roda conceitos de etologia, linguística, ontologia, política etc: o que é um instinto? como linguagem e brincadeira se compõem a partir de um mesmo jogo meta-linguístico? Como um excesso de vitalidade é parte constituinte do que é o vivo, embora o próprio autor não canse de repetir que as fronteiras (entre vivo e não-vivo, animal e vegetal, animal-humano) são sempre arbitrárias. Como o zoológico é um arranjo trágico de uma inclusão (do animal no humano) excludente (estão desde sempre recortados em uma moldura que compõem seu fundo próprio nas jaulas). Como o devir-animal de um escritor ou de uma criança reabrem as vias para a lógica do terceiro incluído (um animal, o humano e a mínima diferença entre eles), correlata de processos supernormais, onde o que está dado pode ser superado.
Infelizmente, a prosa é bastante claudicante. Seu repertório de conceitos utiliza muito de suas próprias referências (Deleuze, Guattari, Whitehead, Bergson, Simondon, Ruyer etc.) e acrescenta variações a todo momento. Nem todas muito inspiradas. Exige um esforço de seguir de muito perto, para não perder o rastro dos argumentos.
Seria o caso de perguntar: o que Massumi nos ensina sobre o que pensa?
É um livro que se desenrola sob a constante ameaça de ruptura de qualquer apelo prático.
Mas vale nem que seja pelas cutucadas nos neodarwinistas, nos praticantes de éticas normativas e naqueles que insistem em colocar o humano à parte.

[Kris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Massumi na základě Bergsona, Deleuze, Guattariho a taky Tinbergena [viz komiks s dinosaury] nabídne určitý (nový?) přístup ke člověku.

Co zde najdete:
- tvrdé jádro eseje je až na konci (v prostoru knihy uprostřed), je to 16 stran manifestu (moje slovo) zvířecké (nikoli ve smyslu surové či barbarské) politiky (pochopila jsem i ve smyslu jednati) sepsaného v bodech
- mezi Zvířetem a Člověkem není kvalitativní rozdíl
- žádné podpůrné argumenty pro vegany
- podnětné rozšíření Bergsona
- aplikaci Guattariho eticko-estetického paradigmatu
- že instikt (intuice) je super

[Thomaz Amancio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esse livro é um tesão: breve; sintetiza e resolve com elegância todo um campo de problemas; aponta pra várias outras referências e caminhos; ensina um jeito radicalmente efetivo de pensamento. Maravilhoso, maravilhoso.

[Brian Henderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Massumi’s brief What Animals Teach Us About Politics is composed of a short essay (the last 17 pages of which are comprised of numbered propositions) with a series of even shorter essay spinoff addendas, the last of which, “Six Theses on the Animal to Be Avoided,” works as a kind of summary. In the primary piece he unfolds the idea that instinct is a ludic and improvisatorially creative act (rather than a rigid and mechanistic one) and as such participates in a lived immediate way (at an infraindividual level) in the spectrum of consciousness by “mobilizing the possible”. This is to be understood as an embodied “primary consciousness” -- “thinking-doings” without a subject.

He slides slightly sideways to come at this from another angle by exploring the Deleuzian notion of writing as the becoming-animal of the human. Instinct not only participates in consciousness but has “an esthetic yield”. “Life itself is inseparable from the esthetic yield it continuously enjoys,” he states. And if this expressive value is not strong enough, the act retreats to “mere designation”. But each of these probes, writing (“To Write Like a Rat Flicks its Tail”) and instinct, opens up the “capacity to surpass the given” through deformations because there is no doer, only doing.

In keeping with this notion, the structure of the work itself feels collaged, ad hoc and improvised, though it remains rigorous.

The weakest aspect of the book it seems to me is the attempted link from these compelling analyses of primary consciousness to the political. He’s nearly at the point of endorsing an instinctual politics and so has to fight off mass movements such as Nazism. How can political action be embodied, primary and doing-as-thinking? It must start with sympathy (but sympathy is not identificatory) and a mutual inclusion that “interpenetrates without losing distinction”. Massumi relies here (as elsewhere) on Bergson and Whitehead which does help. Perhaps, as in evolution, a mutation appears that surprises and surpasses the given which we must feel the potential of, grasp and with “improvisational prowess” move “toward as-yet-unknown existential territories” which might “house that heralded people to come.”

[Duke Press]

“For those ready and willing to navigate the complexity of What Animals Teach Us about Politics, Massumi is a brilliant thinker who has produced another incisive critique that is likely to elicit interesting scholarship and responses, both from his immediate interlocutors and anyone else looking for a way out of humanity.” — Liam Mayes Montreal Review of Books

"[C]omplex, dazzling, and sometimes elusive central essay bolstered by various addenda (propositions, supplements, and lavishly intricate endnotes) — presents an intensely ratiocinative meditation on how animals play and what that might mean for people." — Randy Malamud Common Knowledge

“Brian Massumi, in What Animals Teach Us About Politics, makes a case for us to claim our essential animality in order to ascend to an ethic that is still truly (which is not to say, exclusively) human: vital, creative, and expansive. He builds his argument as if laying a very elaborate trap. (I want to say that it is a harmless, non violent trap, but that would be a lie. The price of being snared is having to rethink everything.)” — Naisargi Dave Somatosphere

[Margaryta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Going to return to this one in the future. Massumi's "Propositions" were especially provocative, as was his reading of what it means to have a voice/body, of "bodying", and of the way he talked about play. The latter especially reminded me of what Braidotti says is the future of the academy in implementing posthuman principles. Massumi also has something to say about posthumanism at the end, an idea I found very striking that will stay with me: "Even if the human is understood to be in a reciprocal presupposition with the animal, transcending the human is also to transcend the animal. To invoke the posthuman is to invoke the postanimal."

[twelfth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me falta instruirme más con Deleuze para entenderlo con mayor profundidad, pero reconfiguró la manera de como entiendo el instinto, el juego e incluso la vida misma.

[Hasan · Rating 5 out of 5]

okuması zorlayıcı ama keyifli bir metin

[Joel Gn · Rating 2 out of 5]

In his usual Deleuzian fashion, Massumi introduces us to some fascinating insights concerning animality, while re-working some of his earlier reflections on affect and emergence. His differentiation of categorical/vital affect and the reading of a child's animal imitation as a ludic expression taking animality into varying 'human' contexts were relatively lucid, but his prose as a whole was rather verbose and lacked the accessbility of his earlier work, Parables for the Virtual.