POST N5 : BIRTH OF THE KENNEL
Berlin, 3rd January 2016
Dear Jens;
it´s been a while since my last letter. More than a month actually. A lot has happend, and I don´t know where to begin, therefore I decided to introduce my lateraly - associative thinking, on different levels of my process, which actually suits me most, to be honest. So today I am offering a palette of some kind of Proustian croquis, strongly intertweened with emotions, wraped in titles that remind of different pop products, as if I was selling adds. Maybe I am selling adds. For what price?
HOE HOE HOE
December has been challenging to say the least. The collective psychosis of holiday atmosphere always reaches deep into my emotional landscape and hurts, even makes me cry every time I look into the cold eyes of the beast. The ones of consumerism and religious institutions holding hands, deviding people between more and less privileged.
Thinking blasphemic thoughts of colonial and imperial processes of appropriation of assets, about the slave trade, which manifestates particularly in the sex industry, which I am whitnessing every day and night I open the door of my temporary Buellowstrasse apartment taking Ada and Byron out.
Sharing physical spaces of consumption such as museums, parks, shopping malls and cafeterias, without having any actual social interaction, using credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession which I have been practicing for so manny years. All those spaces encourage action, not inter-action. Isolating.
REASONABLE DOUBT
29th November, I introduced Ada to our hybrid family, driving a car down to Schwarzwald and back for almost 20 hours because of road blocks and storms; stoping every three hours to install breast pumping equipment, putting a huge pulover over the whole plastic cyborg-like tool on my body, driving further for the next 20 minutes, feeling horny and depressed. Horny because while pumping, the oxytocine kicks all over my body big time, and depressed because I am feeeling like an ultimatelly woulnerable underdog. While experiencing short rushes of pleasure, I decide to make an experiment and economize my time by training perception into rationalizing the whole process, by thining on the theoretical backgrodunds and layers of K-9_topology. The noise of rational thought on intersections of my empirical and theoretical animal studies connected with philosophy have been actually increasing my instinct of the autobiographical animal (as Derrida would say), which manifests as its very document in a form of our blog-diary-dialogue. Compassion and empathy have been a welcoming side effect of the whole oxytocine molecular spree on my physiology and psychology.
A quite alarming panic attack woke me up just a night before I went to pick up Ada. I haven´t been feeling well on my way to Schwarzwald eather. While Byron was quite stoically accompanying his childless human on our oddisey filled with anxiety attacks … and pleasure … every three hours for twenty minutes. All the rest was just fear. Of failure. … To refocus my mind, I started thinking of Derrida´s dwellings on failure by saying everything that happens in the end, ….. a failure, a fault, a symptom (and symptom, as you know, also means "fall": case, unfortunate event, coincidence, what falls due [ichiance], mishap). It is as if, at that instant, I had said or were going to say the forbidden, something that shouldn't be said. As if I were to admit what cannot be admitted in a symptom and, as one says, wanted to bite my tongue. Just that I am not only saying. I am doing. I am embodying!
The root of my culturaly based anxiety connects with one of Rosi Braidotti´s thoughts you wrote in your first letter: ... motherhood has traditionally been considered as an automatic biological process, while fatherhood is seen as a social and cultural institution that rules over and governs biological relations. I am transforming into a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction by multidirectionaly exchanging the flow of bodies, fluids and values. With a dog! It´s scary while it´s poetic. Zoopoetic. Then, all the sudden, I find a temporary shelter in words of Carolee Schneemann: My advice to younger artists: give yourself permission. Indeed a great advice from a good mother! Still, it is hard to remain powerfull, dignified, … above all, in control.
UNDERDOG: THE BEGINNING
Anxiety aside, taking dog-human relationship seriously: relationality is crucial to this companion species, and ethics based on an onthology of co-evolution and co-emergence between humans and dogs, in which none of the partners pre-exist the relating, brings up hybrid ethics. But how did this hybrid ethics appear? What are the reasons for its emergence? And why?
The economy of the wolf´s existence is in its constant energy saving mode. That is why a wolf is such a good ecosystem regulator. It allways hunts only the week (ill and old). Never the leader. It would be too much effort to go after a leader. If we focus on interactions between nature (genotype) and nurture (phenotype); each wolf inherits genetic propensities (instinct; also called „neuroendocrine programming“) that lead it into situations in which it learns from its environment (Fentress 1983). Its genotype enables it to solve ancient problems predictably encountered in the history of the species. Communication during social interactions help fine tune these responses, enabling individuals to solve new problems and respond to the unpredictable nature of their environment. Several species, including wolves (and people) have evolved flexible problem solving behaviour as an adaptation to the variation in the anvironment. (Byrne 1995). One of those adaptations was to start acompanying humans some 32.000 years ago, since it would be less energy consuming for their survival. After dwelling into a human ecological niche, humans have been a vector for wolves to spread around the globe. Their metabolism adapted fast while they have been transforming into dogs, so they could digest starch (which wolves still are not able to) and therefore they could remain human companions during at the beginning of the agricultural revolution. Once humans had learned to live with wolf-dogs and adopt the pack algorithm (pastorality dynamics with other species, going beyond the close ties of kinship, learning to cooperate closely, and sharing risks) many alternative ways to make a living became available. Within this process of coevolution, technology transfer and diversification began to thrive. Humans became better gatherers, better hunters, more successful fishermen, gardeners, astronauts … Wolf-dogs became hunting companions, guards, sled pulls, beasts of burden, baby substitutes, toys, food, human substitutes in experiments, and the first astronauts to circle our planet. As one of the consequences of dwelling in the same biological niche, several genes in dogs and humans have been evolving in parallel as adaptation to similar environments. The gene that has consequently – as a process of taming – mutated in humans, into which I am particularly interested in, is the one that codes for the serotonin transporter slc6A4. Polymorphisms on this gene are one of the key molecular mechanisms for humans to be able to tolerate the presence of others. It has been proven that wolves/dogs have been the key slection pressure for that gene in humans to mutate. However – in case of the absence of a human, they still posses the sociological regulation pattern to form back into a pack. With other dogs. So I have been wondering (together with many evolutionary scientists): who has been tamed during this parallel evolution?
DOG LISTENER (NOT WHISPERER)
Radical animal rights ideas make me think on Nietzche´s meditations behind the Three Metamorphoses on domestication which sublimates rather than supersedes human brutality. The result is a culture of feigned gentleness whose actual ruthlessness is matched only by the degree of its self-deception. … In such a society, pity (and its public manifestations) is often the euphoric or ecstatic sublimation of cruelty.
I do think we should talk through a Morse with a horse, since domesticated animals as well as their humans are bilingual. Together we inter communicate using a language which is not human, nor is animal. It´s a hybrid one. A dog communicates very directly if she/he doesn´t agree with you. If she/he is in agony, fear, anxiety, willing or not willing to collaborate in any moment. Therefore I do ask Ada whether she agrees with me on this collaboration. After pumping some colostrum during the whole December, I finally got some drops of milk. The first one just a day before Christmas. What irony!!! After waiting patiently, sitting on the floor with Ada and Byron, she finally approached me, smelled the milk and licked those few drops as they ran down my belly. And so it goes. Our relationship is a hybrid one, therefore nor am I her mother and she is my baby, nor am I a canine bitch, breatsfeeding my puppy. This is when alinguistic unmeaning happens, so to say in Agamben terms an intimacy more internal than any closedness.
It is hard though. I (still) don´t get drops of milk every time I execute pumping, more and more though. Sometimes I don´t get it for few days. Beside that, I daily dwell into a complex process of empathy, evolving an intuition based on empirical and theoretical knowledge to ensure that the needs of my dogs are respected (yes – they are my dogs, as I am their human), and that the understanding of them develops from listening to them, from observing their bodies and behaviour. But nevertheless, in Harraway terms it is love that functions as an ethical bind between the companion species – love here names the ethical co-emergence and cohabitation between specific, historically situated dogs and humans. Love does not therefore mean a mere intensification of affect, or a more proprietarial form of possesion (as in the phrase, „I Love Animals“) but rather a preparedness to examine the interrelations between humans and other species. I enter this relationship in order to listen to Ada and Byron, not whisper to them. As Charles Darwin said yet in his 1838 M Notebook: He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.
HOME ALONE
On some levels, my durational performance, which begun yet in mid October 2015 in an apartment - gallery space is similar to the one of Joseph Beuys and a Coyote with whom the artist shared a gallery space. Neither human nor the animal was at home in this space but by using the various props at hand, the two participants cobbled a tentative sense of a shared world; the performance of fashioning this shared space between the human and non-human agent was itself the artwork. In order to think outside the limits of thought - limits set by experts – one must break rules, transgress boundaries, and break implicit contracts. Stability and order as we percept and know it only lead us back to the human. My temporary home - performance space exsists between inclusion and exclusion, for it has a status of Agamben´s exception (like a camp). The camps are independent from any judicial control. Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West. And therefore every reproduction strategy, within this camp, is at the same time a legitimation strategy aimed at consecrating both an exclusive appropriation and its reproduction. (Pierre Bourdieu / The forms of capital.)
THE GREATEST LOVE OF ALL
Byron has been helping me a great deal with raising up Ada. One of his most overwhelming actions (by my oppinion) is; whenever Ada does something she should not, and I say: „Ada fuj!“ (kinda acronym for a „bad dog“, though it sounds much different in Slovenian), he arrives imediately, no matter where he´s been or what he´s been doing in that moment, and growls at her until she stops and refocuses onto something else. He has been playing with her a lot as well. They play the prey game with each other. Somethimes I join them. Same as the wolfpack where the older sisters and brothers teach puppies to hunt prey through the same game. When Byron needs his space andp/or time for himself, and especially when he eats, he growls at Ada quite hard and with a huge effect in case she is bugging him. He is helping me setting boundaries for her. So we are parenting - domestificying Ada together. Byron is such a great dog! Very neurotic and therefore sometimes quite a heavy maintenance, but nevertheless, Byron is a dog with a huge heart and I love him beyond words. A great dog! The three of us hug and kiss a lot, lie in bed, crowl on the floor and jump on and of the furniture, but also scream and growl within our process of getting to know each other, (re)setting boundaries now that Ada´s joined the family. It is interesting since there is three of us, as there were in my biological family. However – our dynamics is much different. We are a pack in which I am the alpha, then it is Byron, and then Ada. This is our pyramid since I am the food and shelter provider. However Byron and Ada are teaching me how to set boundaries as straight as possible, an experience I use also in the human world. An experience my parents failed to teach me.
ANOTHER DAY IN THE LIFE OF A CHILDLESS (m)OTHER
Dwelling on the physiological levels of my process through the discourse of molecular performance and hormonal biopolitics through a collaboration process with Ada, by constantly repeating the act of pumping my breasts, and hence training my pituitary glance in almost Foucaultian terms, I am doing the very same training procedure with my body as dogs are being trained. Here I am transforming into a kind of a performer by being very much inspired by thoughts of a very interesting performance artist Kroot Jurak, who has been executing performances for pets. She developed a theory by analogizing a performance artist with a pet: Based on the lecture “Artists’ Responsibility” — “Autodomestication” focuses specifically on (self)education and pet training: A new kind of training NOW increasingly popular among many pet owners: clicker training. This method differs from traditional learning methods in the most fundamental way, namely instead of getting the pet obey certain rules, the owner makes their pet believe they are in fact training their owner, to click. This new method has proven to forster new creativity and better communication with pets. Now in power they act more responsible and selfassured but also becoming better communicable and selforganized in order to attain their goals. Punishmnet and fear have been replaced with creativity, proactivenss and freedom to think…
I have been executing the same procedure with my amygdala. Or is my amygdala training me, by letting me know it is time to start experiencing these somatic sensations? Clearly the whole process in this project has to do something with my so called molecular, biological clock. By being almost 38, I am facing few more years towards having a chance to have a biological baby. I still do not feel prepared to have my own baby, but most of all – I do not have the conditions to have one. In order to survive, I do not have the biggest capital within the zeitgeist: time. Not even close. Nevertheless, I feel the need to have the experience of breastfeeding, since I can´t have it all. I feel the need to inseminate my egg with a dog sperm. Because I so much want to have it all! What a blasfemic neoliberalistic wish! Allthough hurtfull, writinh this is at the same time very much liberating. To finally express also this level of my many intentions within K-9_topology, while living my life full of paradoxes. I have also been wondering, is your perspective towards the institution of family and/or having children within the contemporary zeitgeist, Jens? I guess my humanless solitude and canine non verbal communication are starting to kick in and hence the thick walls which have been cariing the sense of culture are finally falling down. This is a part of becoming … which reminds me of T. S. Eliot poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock´s ending:
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
A big hug;
Maja