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Introduction

This metaphorical and enigmatic quote, probably based on some anecdote, comes from Franz Kafka’s posthumously published book – The Blue Octavo Notebooks. It situates the human-animal relationship in an incidental way: we don’t know why the boy became a mayor of the city because of his cat, but what we know, what is suggested by Kafka, is that there is a real, material bond between the animal from the anecdote and the human self. It is about a dynamic condition, which is biologically and spatially driven. Going ‘through’ this mysterious human-animal link to find one’s ‘huge city’ reborders thinking about animals in any space. Paradoxically, even the metaphor of the urban most anthropocentric space for designating expectations of the revelatory, progressive future to be revealed, is based on the ontological, totemic relation between the human and animal.

From the perspective of the evolutionary theory, culture might be perceived as ‘inherited’ after nature and – as Kafka writes – it is mediated by the nonhuman animal in a process of (the individual’s) becoming. Perhaps, considering other Kafkian animals, the animal here allegorizes some different hidden meanings but for me, it dynamizes the process of becoming culture and leads beyond the world exclusively human. It is particularly fluctuating process when thinking about borders and any urban space, even the imaginary one like in this quote. Therefore, redirected by the animals’ presence, the Kafkian question ‘where does the huge city lie’ strengthens my desire to find a metropolis enchanted by animals, even if only imagined one, a ‘zoöpolis’.

The promising part in theorizing space, which involves a constitutive role of the nonhuman actor, is the animal that, in this space, can tame what we find strange inside and outside of ourselves; the animal, who can colonize the territory that has been identified as the anti-world, i.e. the space intentionally separated from the human in order to reinforce the construction of the human, his anthropocentric identity. Such theory is about reinvigorating the urban space borders by including participants other than humans, and those who can co-form or even reform the experience of space concerning the environment. Then, reflecting the city serves as a shortcut to reflecting culture or in an epistemological sense – it enables to find cracks in the anthropocentrically constructed perception of urban space.

Lewis Mumford in his classical book The City in History, notes that the development of the city, its crystallizing phase, turned into “the enlargements of the human ego” (1961, 32) and solidified “the maximum amount of protection with the greatest incentives to aggression” (46) of human species. What is more, the rise of the city is seen by him as a persistent and unstoppable process illustrated by such examples of ruined and almost ‘extinct’ cities during the

WW2 as Warsaw, Berlin or Tokyo, which were rapidly rebuilt just after the war (526). Against this historical background of the human city and its

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‘anthropocentric’ studies, where the “category ‘urban’ acquired a transcendentally humanist quality” – as Peter Atkins, the author of Animal Cities notes (2012, 2) – ‘zoöpolis’ would be an alternative concept of space-culture, expressed by an attempt to go beyond the anthropocentric border of urban studies or even further – to transgress human-centred perception and imagination of the city, normally representing non-porous human culture.

The problem of non-domesticated animals in urban space has been already recognized. Since the ground-breaking Animal Geographies have been published in 1998, transgressing borders of the anthropocentric city by animals has been widely discussed among geographers and animal studies’ scholars (Philo and Wilbert 2000; Wolch 2002, Whatmore 2002; Atkins 2012; Urbanik 2012; Nagy and Johnson 2013; Dean, Ingram and Sethna 2017). I will refer to some of them but particularly, I would like to focus on a more narrow concept of ‘zoöpolis’ offered by an American scholar from the University of California, Jennifer Wolch (1998), and ask about the future of the city – about its ecology and borders – in other words, to ask whether the metropolis can equally represent human and nonhuman animal space, or even become zoöpolis and how. The city-culture parallel allows thinking about the urban tissue as a paradigmatic space to explore human-animal relations, as well as the cityenvironment border.

By now, any regular synergy of animals inhabiting or trespassing the city with the primary city residents (people) is an incipient vision. However, because of the accelerated development of the cities and rapid shrinkage of animal habitats, undomesticated animals are the more and more common image in the urban settlements, raising very concrete problems. The role of the category of zoöpolis, introduced by Wolch, was to ecologize the dominant stream of urban studies, so deeply rooted in the very notion of hygienic, hermetic human culture. It gave some possibilities to change the epistemological framework of thinking about the urban space from the animal perspective not only as an experiment but as a practical issue. What has not been sufficiently posed in Wolch’s study – also because the discussion over a deep, hazardous and rapid environmental change has just started – concerns the more complex and tricky proliferation of the urban space, to such extent that it is difficult to say where does the city end and where does it begin. Conventional borders of the urban-rural and so-called undeveloped territories do not function anymore in the spatial and geographical terms, since all of them are affected by the human factor, which differentiates the Anthropocene, also called the Era of Man and the Great Acceleration period1. However, what Wolch’s theory of zoöpolis did was to place in the centre of any urban development a question: how to enable the

1 The origin of this stratigraphic term, and how its popularity began in humanities, has been discussed in many ecocritical and environmental history publications since 2013 (e.g. Morton 2013). Perhaps the most compact version of conceptualizing the Anthropocene is provided by Greg Garrard, Gary Handwerk, and Sabine Wilke (2014).

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nonhuman animals cohabitance and coexistence in the hazardous space of the anthropocentric city? And in result, how she answered this question proved how the city-culture concept can be profoundly transformed.

Wolch’s concept brings a critical revision of accepted and practised activities of people towards the animals, which stretch between love and hate. The city in Wolch’s study functions as a common and exemplificatory space where this imbalance in human-animal relations is particularly visible, resulting in destroying the remnants of wildness and treating animals as mere commodities or just contrary – as beloved members of the family. Therefore, on the one hand, Wolch refers to the excessively practised domestication of animals, and on the other – to the city dwellers who distance themselves from the industrial production of meat1, which paradoxically ends up with their lack of criticism of the unlimited consumption of meat. In fact, in animal urban studies, such extended and imbalanced classification of urban animals, based on the extreme attitudes towards them, can be grouped in four: “useful animals, for traction of meat; those which can be enjoyed, such as wild garden songbirds; those which are desirable, for example companion animals; and species which have transgressed, such as rats, cockroaches and pigeons, and are judged to be vermin because they are ‘out of place’ in the city” (Atkins 2012, 2-3). Or, as Randy Malamud wraps it up: “an animal is a pet or meat or a charismatic megafauna or a cartoon” (2013, XI).

The case of the non-farm and non-domestic animals, only wild or feral, is especially interesting. The human relation to them is much more complicated

(apart from hunters), because they are either perceived as intruders (‘out of place’) (the case of those that come to feed on the trash, nearby the human settlements, who evoke disgust etc.), or as pleasant representation of wild nature in the human city (the popular practice that proves it are birds feeders). They are also noticed as accidental victims (because of more and more extensive communication infrastructure, including road traffic). In fact, people are inconsistent with their attitudes toward untamed animals because they are perceived as unpredictable, as outside creatures who cannot be controlled and managed, and who don't know how to move around the space of the city. These animals are both vulnerable and resilient toward the organization of city life. Wolch sees this situation as paradigmatic since for her it involves thinking about planning the urban space, which not only belongs to humans but also animals.

All in all, the idea of zoöpolis adds the ‘animal side’ when the animals cross the human city border or already dwell within such anthropocentrically defined urban space. As such, animals in Wolch’s theory are recognized as actors (or agents, actants), what she offers to name “a trans-species urban theory” (Wolch

1998, 120).

1 The problem of invisible farms and slaughterhouses in the urban space was loudly and dramatically raised in such ground-breaking texts in animal studies as Elizabeth Costello by

John Maxwell Coetzee or in Carol J. Adams’ books.

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Introducing the category of zoöpolis into the borderology studies might shed some light on conflicting borders between what we differentiate as the city and the environment. These borders necessarily connect, divide and intertwine: the urban space is part of the environment thanks to which it exists but also it transforms this environmental space into some kind of hybrid area of natural and non-natural elements, which is often forgotten by the anthropocentric urban planners. The animals, therefore, appear in this hybrid space in a totally new ontological situation, which also goes beyond what Wolch was describing as ‘a trans-species urban theory’.

A sad history of urbanization

It is a story of progressive human reason that conquers and exploits nonhuman nature that lasts until today – says Wolch – and “proceeds without regard to nonhuman animal life” (1998, 119). Moreover, the language of urbanization is tricky when it “transforms ‘empty’ land through a process called ‘development’ to produce ‘improved land’” (119). There is no empty land because the non-urbanized lands are always full of life – she adds. However, the urban studies are in majority anthropocentric, and still the development and progress of people, in the way how fast the cities grow, show that in general there is no secured place for undomesticated or feral animals and the city as such is not considered as part of this bigger whole we call ‘the environment’.

The way how Wolch rhetorically starts her famous text saying that

“development may be slowed down by laws protecting endangered species, but you will rarely see the bulldozers stopping to gently place rabbits or reptiles out of harm’s way” (119), reminds me of one of the episodes of a famous Czech cartoon made by Zdeněk Miler and screened in many Soviet communist countries, as well as outside the Soviet Bloc. In this episode, titled The Mole in the city (Krtek ve městě, 1982), the animals cannot get over that suddenly a giant bulldozer tries to destroy their forest, therefore they start a fight with the machine but they lose. In return, the city authorities offer them an artificial forest, but they quickly sense that it is not the same forest, which was their home. Similarly, today, expanding the urban space precludes maintaining the natural ecosystem that once surrounded it, or instead, results in creating decorative places that resemble the aesthetics of nature, but without thinking seriously about the cooperation and coexistence between humans and nonhumans. Another flag animal of Western popular culture, King Kong, has become a vulnerable figure of victimizing human civilization, which invades and colonizes even the most virgin and impenetrable places on earth, destroying everything that should remain inaccessible because it can turn against people (Creed 2007, 59-78). This environmental trace of the story about the giant gorilla is especially accentuated in the adaptation – Kong: Skull Island directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts in 2017. The city is hermetically anthropocentric and it

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grows to a monstrous size, not only symbolizing nature subordination but really subordinating it. As the authors of The Great Acceleration announce: “we live on an urban planet” (McNeill and Engelke 2014, 103) because the majority of the human population live now in the urbanized areas. After World War II, “our species had become, in effect, an urban animal” (112), a giant homo urbans.

In compliance with the anthropocentric urban theory, the development of cities would be impossible without denaturalization of environment, which resulted in closing the city borders – at least in theory – against the wild, feral animals. According to Wolch, it paradoxically brought the increased number of animals kept in captivity, such as companion species (socalled pets) or livestock but did not minimize the risk for freely living animals, who still enter the city of “suffering, death, or extinction” for all animal kinds

(1998, 120). Wolch pays special attention to the environmental cost of such dominant version of urbanization, which excludes nonhuman animal beings and redefines the presence of wildlife in the cities.

The answer to the question why do wild, undomesticated animals more and more approach human habitats is not only addressed to environmentalists but primarily to urban planners, because it presupposes a certain concept of space, with which we must face in culture. This question reveals also the lack of self-sufficiency of human culture, the inevitability of nonhuman elements, since the city-culture has taken over the whole ecosystem of other species, and those that approach the human space are usually lost individuals of some herd, risking entering the city in searching for food and water, or already being tamed by people who feed them. Therefore, Wolch’s theory of zoöpolis aims at including nonhuman animals by asking four questions:

1.“how urbanization of the natural environment impacts animals, and what global, national, and locality-specific political-economic and cultural forces drive modes of urbanization that are most threatening to animals;

2.How and why city residents react to the presence of animals in their midst, why attitudes may shift with new forms of urbanization, and what this means for animals;

3.How both city-building practices and human attitudes and behaviors together define the capacity of urban ecologies, to support nonhuman life;

4.And how the planning/policy-making activities of the state, environmental design practices, and political struggles have emerged to slow the rate of violence toward animals (...)” (120).

Trans-species history of the city, or speaking differently about animal neighbours

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It seems that Wolch’s theoretical position was in avant-garde of the recent development of alternative, green, and multispecies (or biodiversified) practices of coexistence of people and animals in the city, but de facto it brought a much deeper reformulation concerning the insufficiency of current cultural patterns regarding the relations described here, for which the city is extremely insensitive. Wolch’s calling for animal inclusion in the urban studies is grounded in the wider critical discussion of posthumanism and environmental humanities, and generally – in questioning the schemata of bordering the human space.

It would seem that the city’s problems, considering their environmental aspect, concern mainly the level of air pollution and water contamination from the perspective of human interests, not animal habitat, which according to the author should change as soon as possible (121). One of the strongest arguments of why should animals in the urban space mater is the history of human and animal relations, fundamentally impossible to think separately, as evidenced by archaeological, paleoanthropological or sociopsychological sources. The development of human culture in many respects shows dependence on animals: from food to emotional.

While in animal studies it has been widely discussed that animals represent their epistemological perspective, Wolch’s postulate to introduce an animal worldview into the urban theory and practice was definitely original and extended urban environmentalism to go further with rebordering the city for wandering, traversing or even dwelling there undomesticated and feral animals, but it did not develop any of these animals perspective as a subjective, individual way of being. Thanks to ethologists such as pioneering Jakob von

Uexküll, but also such philosophers as Jacques Derrida or Jean-Christophe Bailly, and historians – Sandra Swart, Erica Fudge and Eric Baratay, to name just a few, who are seriously guided in their research by the questions about how do animals perceive reality, how do they sense and react or even relate to humans, other disciplines, as the urban planning, can build on this zoocritical approach.

In this context, Wolch recalls the analytical philosopher’s question, Thomas Nagel’s “what is it like to be a bat?” Nagel was sceptic about answering it. Because of a specific bat’s sonar, humans cannot enter the experience of this bizarre mammal, and thus cannot translate the cognitive contents of the bat's mind into their categories. Wolch, however, contradicts his position, claiming that it is possible to think like a bat but she does not formulate any epistemological arguments, which could reinforce her approach by emphasizing the cognitive diversity of the city’s inhabitants, both people and nonhumans. She rather tends to place the animal question within a wider network of humananimal dependency as “a matrix of animals who vary with respect to the extent of physical or behavioral modification due to human intervention, and types of interaction with people” (123) in the city.

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However, when we look at contemporary cities, we find some

examples of

facilities for animals designed in cooperation with environmentalists, zoologists and architects to minimalize the roadkill by fauna-friendly constructions and structures, such as special screens equipped with invisible light-reflecting nets that repel birds, so that they do not fall into them; wildlife corridors that enable moving in the case of such barriers as motorways or other city development sites that cause danger; or attempts to construct wild ecosystems within some limited territories such as parks, for example by settling animals within such spaces (compare Beatley 2011, i.e. 88-89). Especially all the practices connected with reinstalling the wildlife Wolch would like very much because of her postulate to renaturalize the city, which could contribute to the renewal of the relationship between people and animals, primarily in the ethical sense. To renaturalize the city means to “invite the animals back in, and in the process re-enchant the city” (124). This renaturalized and reenchanted by animals city Wolch proposes to name zoöpolis.

On the one hand, it seems like the concept of zoöpolis is based on a premise that the animals are also carriers of aesthetic values, they act on the imagination and can in a different sense – if they are not treated instrumentally - enrich the space in which, in any case, they belong, naturally. On the other – this re-enchanting can bring a very concrete social programme of reintegrating people with animals and nature, since “our alienation from animals results from specific political-economic structures, social relations, and institutions” (124).

To change those relations can be started with changing the design of the cities, make them more animal-friendly and environmentally protected, make animals exist as insiders, not outsiders.

Of course, some animals are extremely well adapted to the hazardous urban life – so-called ‘trash animals’ (Nagy and Johnson 2013) - and whose existence and reproduction are raised to the rank of social problems in the neoliberal public space. They are pests and invaders who are uncomfortable for the human city dwellers. At the same time, the perspective of zoopolis is rarely mentioned in the public discourse, which clearly says that the urban space is the exclusive property of man. At the end of the nineteenth century, such hated city animal was the sparrow, and the rat always reigned, and today it is a pigeon called a flying rat. Considering only the anthropocentric point of view, it is difficult not to notice that this evolution of hated species was also influenced by people and the general building insulation regardless of birds breeding – that is why the population of sparrows in the cities dramatically dropped.

But the biggest problem, which Wolch’s theory does not cover, is the wildlife habitats fragmentation, patchy landscapes, human proximity, and the accelerated urbanization processes (127). Even more, it is a situation that does not only affect the urban space but more and more the whole wildlife conservation:

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“For conservationists, protecting biodiversity has in recent years become much less about securing new protected areas in pristine habitat and more about making room for wildlife on the margins of our own urbanized existence. Conservation now often means modifying human landscapes to do double-duty as wildlife habitat — or, more accurately, to continue functioning for wildlife even as humans colonize them for their homes, highways, and farms. There is simply no place else for animals to live.” (Conniff 2018)

Perhaps we should rather ask, what has survived from the wild that the city is so disgusted about or afraid of, and change our rational categories, such as designing smart cities, into recognizing that the city became the space of monstrosity? The Kafkian question ‘where does the huge city lie’ turns into ‘where does the huge city end? if it ends at all?’

Bibliography

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УДК 32.019.51 ББК 87.216

C. Beyer

Torghatten Buss UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Tromsø, Norway

ON THE MANUFACTURE OF KNOWLEDGE AND MONSTROUS INFORMATION OVERLOAD: MANUFACTURING MONSTERS IN FOCUS

Abstract. ‘Venezuela Blitz!’—These days, the Bolivarian Republic is all over the news.

And yet again, a monster is being manufactured: the ‘cynic of Caracas’ who ‘blocks bridges and aid, just to let his population starve’. Calls for a ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the emotional condemnation of a ‘dictator’ who ‘kills his own people’ seem to echo most-recent outcries against numerous other personified villains such as the ‘tyrant of Tripoli’ or the ‘devil of Damascus’. Will the mass-media spectator’s empathy yet again be channeled into a ‘responsibility to protect’, ‘calls for action’—and ultimately the demand of some sort of military intervention?

Around thirty years ago, in 1988, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky borrowed

Walter Lippmann’s catch phrase ‘manufacture of consent’ and published their seminal work Manufacturing Consent. Their ‘propaganda model’ soon developed into a classic of political economy and media theory. Ten years after, within the field of international relations, the

Copenhagen School got prominent for their concept of ‘securitization’, a speech-act model that aimed at analyzing the persuasiveness of ‘securitizing actors’ who convince their audiences to legitimize ‘extraordinary measures’. Most recently, in the end of 2018, David

Edwards and David Cromwell published Propaganda Blitz, in which they portray the

‘anatomy of a propaganda blitz’ as a corporate media’s consensus-based catalyst of demonization.

As we will see, all these three theoretical frames have one crucial element in common: they contain some sort of a ‘monster’ variable. Further, they can all be discussed in the wider context of ‘the manufacture of knowledge’ as such. Beyond the sheer expression ‘the fog of war’, any deeper investigation of these models’ synergy allows us to ask for the fog of information glut that potentially leads to war. One hundred years after Hiram Johnson’s ‘the first casualty when war comes is truth’, our ‘1988–2018 tour de théorie’ may let us reflect on the following: truth, if ever born, must have been dead for a while for any war to occur. And, most of all: the handling with ‘facts’ needs close scrutiny and meticulous investigation.

The paper in hand will present the theoretical outcome of a selection-and-negotiation process that aimed at putting three models ‘into one holistic framework’ in the light of the establishment of a master’s course in documentation studies at the University of Tromsø:

Manufacturing Monsters—or shortly, MaMo.

Key words: the manufacture of knowledge; the manufacture of consent; Manufacturing Consent; Manufacturing Monsters; weapons of mass distraction; information overload; the ideology of non-ideology; too much; too little.

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