Becoming-Animal (Some Simple Ways)

Bruns, Gerald L.

doi:10.1353/nlh.2008.0003

Cited by 26 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…As Gerald L. Bruns has put it, becoming animal means "a deterritorialization in which the subject no longer occupies a realm of stability and identity but is instead folded imperceptibly into a movement or into an amorphous legion whose mode of existence is nomadic, or, alternatively, whose structure is rhizomatic rather than arborescent." Bruns (2007) 703.…”

Section: The Post Subjectmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Back to the Elements”? Postmodernity’s Collapse of Ontological Categories

Tupan

2022

Int. J. Res. Granthaalayah

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Although the posthumanist tag is applied to the society where men and machines compete for power, the mutation earning this name was the one that affected the perception of man’s identity through the collapse of ontological categories. Human nature changed as the historical self was replaced by deconstructionists with the instance saying “I”, man’s cognition was redefined as biological epistemology by Maturana and Varela (1972), quantum physics relegated relations of causation to invisible and unpredictable process at the subatomic level, phases of civilization made room for temporary plateaus generated by signifying particles within the eternal flow of things and energy Deleuze and Guattari (1980). What used to be perceived as reality has become an amorphous mixture of elements, in which bodies are no longer discrete entites but processes, emerging forms of life. If the Deleuzian “becoming animal” of 1980 stirred anxiety around the human body made into a site of various inscriptions and identities, The Shape of Water (2018), a novel written by Guillermo del Toro and Daniel Kraus, the homonymous movie (2017) directed by the former, or Robert Bolesto’s screenplay of the Polish movie The Lure (2015) have recently provided the companion pieces of elementary nature “becoming human” across the human/ animal divide The quantum picture of a world reduced to a flux of matter and energy in A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari had somehow prepared the ground for this posthuman reversal of the Renaissance worldpicture with man at the top of creation. The process, however, had already started some decades before. We are moving back in time locating its origin in the rise of object-oriented philosophy.

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Section: The Post Subjectmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Back to the Elements”? Postmodernity’s Collapse of Ontological Categories

Tupan

2022

Int. J. Res. Granthaalayah

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“…In a letter dated 1 Jan. 1931, Woolf tells Vita Sackville-West that the novelist Stella Benson's dressing style reminds her of that of Mansfield: "Anderson [Stella Benson] seems to me extremely good-puts a line round herself completely, as Katherine Mansfield used to wish to do, when she bought a tailor made coat" (Woolf, 1979, p. 271). Correspondingly, living in a time and space of estrangement, Mouse is 16 Quoted in Bruns (2007), p. 704. 17 "Mice make a variety of sounds, although to humans they simply sound like high-pitched squeaks".…”

Section: The Becoming-mousementioning

confidence: 99%

Katherine Mansfield’s Art of Changing Masks in “Je ne parle pas français”

Wen-Shan¹

2016

JLAS

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In a letter to Vita Sackville-West dated 8 August 1931, eight years after Katherine Mansfield's death, Virginia Woolf confides that she "gave up" reading her literary rival's stories "because of their cheap sharp sentimentality". Woolf's observation invites us to question: is Mansfield a mere sentimentalist or is her characterisation technique misunderstood? The first section of this paper demonstrates that attributing Mansfield' works as "sentimental" is erroneous since Mansfield's strategy is to change the masks of her characters within her stories, revealed in her letters and journal entries. Following the first section of this paper, I aim to explore how Mansfield extends this strategy of changing masks in daily life to her fictional characters in "Je ne parle pas français" (1918) by equipping them with different types of masks-speech and facial expressions, gender, and animality-to respond to changes in their situations and toward the characters around them. Particularly important to this exploration are Joan Rivière's insights into gender in her article, "Womanliness as Masquerade", Michael Goldman's theory of masks in acting in his The Actor's Freedom: Toward a Theory of Drama and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of "becoming-animal" in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature.

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“…. a kind of freedom’ (Bruns 2007, 716). Perhaps thinking through this kind of ‘species-shaping’/‘co-shaping’ would profitably transform – metamorphose – (zoo)archaeology into a discipline that can achieve its potential.…”

Section: Anthropocentrism and Zoontologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do the swans deceive us all?

Boyd¹

2013

Arch. Dial.

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Recent, non-anthropocentric explorations of the interaction between human and non-human animals have resulted in many groundbreaking studies. In this 'animal turn', zooarchaeology, which deals with and has access to the material traces of animals that existed alongside humans over the last 2.5 million years, could occupy a privileged and influential position. Despite some encouraging efforts, however, zooarchaeology's ability to contribute to these discussions is heavily limited by the subdiscipline's firm footing within anthropocentric ontologies and reductionist epistemologies. This paper outlines a framework for a new social zooarchaeology that moves beyond the paradigm and discourse of 'subsistence' and of representationist and dichotomous thinking, which have treated non-human animals merely and often exclusively as nutritional or symbolic resources for the benefit of humans. Building on alternative zoontologies which reinstate the position of non-human animals as sentient and autonomous agents, this framework foregrounds the intercorporeal, sensuous and affective engagements through which humans and non-human animals are mutually constituted. These ideas are illustrated with two case studies focusing on human-whooper swan interactions in the Danish Later Mesolithic, based on the faunal assemblage from the site of Aggersund in North Jutland, and the whooper swan remains found associated with the Grave 8 at Vedbaek.

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Becoming-Animal (Some Simple Ways)

Cited by 26 publications

References 16 publications

“Back to the Elements”? Postmodernity’s Collapse of Ontological Categories

“Back to the Elements”? Postmodernity’s Collapse of Ontological Categories

Katherine Mansfield’s Art of Changing Masks in “Je ne parle pas français”

Do the swans deceive us all?

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