Animal capital: The material politics of rendering, mimesis, and mobility in North American culture.

摘要

At stake in what follows is the animal nature of capital---not only the animal signs and substances in which market cultures traffic, but also capital's biopolitical articulations of an immanent existence whose model is animal. Engaging with the heterogeneous field of cultural studies, and committed to a materialist post-Marxist critique, I develop the double entendre of "rendering" to theorize animal capital. Rendering connotes an act of aesthetic reproduction and an industrial traffic in animal remains. As such, it enables me to begin elaborating the violence and complicity of capital's contradictory representational and carnal economies, toward ultimately theorizing rendering as a double logic of mimesis.;I glance, in the Postscript, at two crises symptomatic of the double logic of rendering: the crisis of simulacra, and the crisis of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease. They raise the challenge of articulating forms of political protest from within the double binds of rendering.;I develop a material politics of rendering via three historical case studies. "Automobility" traces traffics in animal signs and substances across three early time-motion economies pivotal to mass modernity: the dis-assembly of animals in the Chicago stockyards, Eastman Kodak's manufacture of celluloid film stock, and Ford's assembly of automobiles. "Industrial Mobility" shifts to the neo-colonial time and space of oil sands development in the Canadian north, where I critically "take" the industrial tour offered by Syncrude Canada Ltd. I read the wood bison featured on Syncrude's tour as animal mascots mimetically managing the relation of transnational resource capitals to Aboriginal lands and labour. "Telemobility," lastly, tracks tropes of animal electricity through three telecommunications discourses: Luigi Galvani's early experiments on frog legs, Thomas Edison's filmed electrocution of an elephant, and the Telus corporation's deployment of simian signs in contemporary ad campaigns. To confront telecommunications capital with its pathological conditions and effects, I implicate Telus's market discourse in the geopolitics of coltan mining in the eastern Congo.