Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.53.0304131213550.14650@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: On the Mysteriousness of Cats
Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2003 12:14:07 -0400 (EDT)
On the Mysteriousness of Cats The intermediary phenomenology of the cat. Consider the vector rabbit <--> cat <--> dog . There are three positions; rabbit/dog link by totality - the impervious rabbit, and salivating dog. The dog responds more or less fully to human communication; the rabbit, almost not at all. The rabbit exists in a world dominated by muteness, inexpressivity; the dog, in a world of excessive emotion. A 'happy' dog is almost always recognized as such. The dog is cultivated by the male - "a dog is man's best friend." A dog accompanies the man on the hunt for the rabbit. The man-dog is preyer; the rabbit is prey. The dog eats; the rabbit is eaten. The rabbit is read as 0; the dog as 1. The rabbit is fodder; the man-dog a double-prosthesis. The rabbit is an idea; the dog, a psychology. The dog is an accompaniment within the aegis of instrumental reason; the rabbit, consigned to both the natural and inert. The rabbit is used by man; the man-dog, a function of totality. The cat is intermediary. The cat is mute, but expressive; its expressivity is by and large instinctual. The dog and rabbit are understood; the cat is the locus of projections and introjections - the locus of jectivity. The cat is feminine/feline; the rabbit pays no attention, the dog full, and the cat partial. If the man-dog is an object for itself, and rabbit, an object in-itself, the cat is a part-object, partial-object, recognizing neither object nor others, rather recognizing in part objects and others. A cat is the site of dreamwork, fantasm; it is necessarily incomprehensib- le. The cat is feared as neither tool/function or food; it problematizes human communication. A cat appears contented, but its purr is still not understood; machines reproduce what might be considered the language of dogs translated into human speech, and a rabbit is of limited vocality. The cat, in the intermediary or problematic position of women in relation to male ration/phallocracy, refuses interpretation, and worse, refuses through its ignoring of human labors at translation. The cat is the source of a continuous production of interpretive books; the truth is that there is nothing to interpret, only a phenomenology in relation to other mammals, within a field of trans-species communication. It is the wavering position of the animal, its flux or fluid mechanics near the point of turbulence, that breaks through the surface of classical logic and negation (not-x = y, not-y = x), instead tending towards fuzzy and dissipative negations, loopings without return, the sheffer stroke dual of neither x nor y. (I've written at length on this in other contexts.) In short, the cat (in relation as well to transitional objects) cannot be classified, classically-described, through no fault or characteristic of its own - instead, it is our cultural field that fails to accommodate what we perceive as murkiness, in relationship to what we also tacitly accept as our own clarity and rationality. ---