Urban Animal

‘Art is continually haunted by the animal’

Deleuze and Guattari

An urban animal is any creature living in close proximity to human beings in an urban environment. However the constituency of urban animals has changed dramatically over the past two centuries. Prior to the nineteenth century relations between human beings and animals were integrally linked to social, economic and cultural factors, thereby forming what John Berger termed ‘the first circle of what surrounded man’ 1 He believed early forms of industrialisation led to animals being regarded as machines, whereas today post–industrial societies treat them as raw materials. This reduction of the animal to a commodity and invisible social presence, has both philosophical and econo-historical roots.

More recent writers have re-assessed and expanded on Berger’s ‘cultural marginalisation’ 2 of the animal. Derrida proposed that by generically naming non-human creatures animals we created the animetaphor: anti-metaphor and animal metaphor. This term signifies the limits of our understanding of animals and foregrounds

the complex ways in which animal representation is always haunted, vexed, reworked and enfolded by the ‘real animal’. 3 Animal theory is also concerned with the animal gaze and what Michel de Montaigne had already identified in the sixteenth century, as the animal’s right to communication and signification based on its ‘capacity to respond’. 4 This relationship is further explored in Derrida’s ecce animot. 5

Urban animals are drawn from a wide range of categories: pets, vermin, insects, zoo animals, wild and feral animals, animals as food and commodity and simulated animals. Human beings often have ambivalent relations with urban animals; some pets are revered and respected, whereas others are abused and abandoned. Post-colonial zoos claim to protect species for future generations by preserving potentially extinct species and end up creating sanctuaries for the ‘living dead’.6 Animals to be consumed are taken to abattoirs and hidden from view, while advertisers represent them as ‘animals of the mind’7 that are happy as means of food production and apparently close to ‘nature’.

Notes

1 Berger, 1980:3

2 ibid, 15

3 Lippit 1998: 1111-1125

4 Montaigne cited in Derrida 2002:375

5 ‘The animal that therefore I am.’

6 Glavin 2007:35-37

7 Berger 1980: