The Animal On and Offline

	The Animal On/Off (Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the LOL cat)
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	By Ana Teixeira Pinto

	In a widely circulated video shot at the Welsh Mountain Zoo, one can see a chimpanzee asking visitors to free him. He points at the window bolt and mimics the movement required to open it, Since the visitors do not respond, he taps the glass tot heir attention, and then repeats his plea, again pointing at the bolt and explaining how to turn it in order to lift the window up. The visitors laugh and wonder whether he wants to be
	The animal offline
		When, in 1949, Martin Heidegger wrote that agriculture, as “a motorized food industry’’ is in essence the same thing as “the in the gas chambers and the exterminations camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs," his words caused great scandal. Jacques Derride, however, did not shy away from this analogy. For him, too, the subjection of the animal was unprecedented proportions, and only the words holocaust and genocide could describe the violence of industrial farming. But in the Animal That Therefore I am is a text about the cat’s gaze rather than about the meat industry, or more accurately about Logos, the tabby whose stare makes the philosopher feel self-conscious while sitting bare-assed in the toilette. But what does it mean to feel ashamed in front of a cat? Clearly, the cat has no concept of nudity or of modesty. This inescapable feeling of being both ashamed and ashamed of shame leads Derride to affirm that the self is and that this "Other"; is not necessarily human.	Half a century later, these two texts still function as the conceptual frame for all questions concerning the animal. On the one hand, there is the question of animal rights, and whether it is ethical to use animal products; on the other, the questions of the human, which is always defined negatively, by mean of alterity, contrasted with a radical nonhuman other, at times animal, at times machine. The animal, or the machine, is in this sense not a thing but a limit, the outermost edge of the human. But neither the animal-as-ontological-limit nor the animal-as-resource tell us much about the animal which is trying to coach you to open his enclosure. The first agues that an animal is, by definition, nonhuman, and the second that animals can have right, if and only if they can be said to

Almost half a century to the present day, French philosopher Alexander Kojeve claimed that ‘’man’’ had already disappeared, replaced by a creature that, though like exactly like him, shares nothing of the human. The human, he argued, is predicated on the historical; a man who lives in a ‘’eternal present’’ is a man devoid of humanity, a man returned to the animal state, albeit retaining his civilized mores. Americans, he said, live in this state of animality, but so do the Russian and the Chinese, who are, according to Kojeve are just like Americans, only poorer. What emerges out of Kojeve’s critique, rather tan a grim outlook on humanity, I the per formative dimension of the human, which can be either coupled or decoupled from mankind. In this sense, an analogy could be drawn with what Judith Butler calls the socially constructed aspect of gender. Or as Simone de Beauvoir put it in The Second Sex: ‘’One I not born, but rather becomes woman.’’ Gender is a cultural category whilst sex is biologically given, and the two do not necessarily overlap. Woman are not born ‘’feminine’’; they learn how to act this way. Likewise, one could argue, humanity does not necessary overlap with mankind. Men are not born human; they simply learn how to, in a per formative manner, sustain ‘’humanity’’ as a collective narrative. And if one sees humanity as the effect of reiterated acting, a per formative condition, then anyone – or anything – can, in principle, act human. On the Internet,

is everywhere: the tiger who befriends his food and plays with the chicken he was meant to shred; the crows who began harass researchers after they tried to grab them for research, whenever they would step out of their offices, just because they held a grudge; the albatrosses who engage in same-sex relationships and remain together for life; the wolves who lower their heads and tails in mourning a loved one; the gorillas who disable snares set by poachers, or the dolphin who asks a diver to free him from a fishing net.

To complicate matters further, we are at the verge of a new (the second) industrial revolution, yet one which will collapse the affective hierarchy between organisms and mechanism introduced by the first industrial revolution. The Inernet of Things (IoT) will equip daily objects and household appliances with virtual representations linked together in an Internet-like structure. By 2020 there will be nearly twenty-six billion devices on the Internet of Things, that is, twenty-six-billion talking toasters, probably equipped with endearing interfaces – collapsing the affective distinction between tablets and iPads and the adorable kittens people like to watch on tablets and iPads. Thus, while the animal performs the human, the machine is made to preform the animal, learning how to become ever more lively and cuddly. In a sense one could see object-oriented philosophy and speculative realism as unwittingly announcing this new ontology, but as Adorno put it, ‘’the thingness of the world is illusory, it tempts the subject to ascribe to the things themselves the social conditions of their production. Objects are not univocal; they are cultural constructs rather than natural phenomena, creating and frustrating expectations by coupling and decoupling speech and affections. Animated objects make for a further ontological complication, but all commodities are in a way objects animated by affects – and a transfer of life and liveliness from increasingly inert human bodies to increasingly energetic and inventive things. In a way, we could say that the convergence of computing with bioengineering leads not to the future but to the past, to a return to a Victorian theme park of sorts, a phantasmagoria of consumer gadgetry and semiotic fetishism – as Frederic Jameson has noted, ‘’it is now easier to imagine the death of the human specials than the end of capitalism. Additionally, the fusion of the human, the animal, and the technological carries immense potential for abuse. Technology can not solve the world’s social problems because technology itself engenders them. Technology is not self-sustaining and its high-energy consumption degrades both the social and the natural environment; it produces material, animal and human waste. But whilst the increasing consolidation of global markets fuels ecocide everywhere, amidst the crevices of society and representation, the animal – who still somehow manages to survive – is in the process of becoming the subject of technology, rather than its mere objects.