On Berger, Animals and (Not) Looking

Monika Szuba, University of Gdańsk

In this talk, I wish to revisit John Berger’s essay ‘Why Look at Animals’, examining the ways in which the questions it raises resonate in the environmental humanities. Published in 1980, the text has contributed to the rise of analyses of animal imagery in contemporary culture from various critical angles, particularly film and media studies. Forty-five years after its publication, Berger’s critique of animal visual images proves particularly pertinent in interrogating modern scopic regimes which involve the animal object, integrating complex layers of meaning. First entering the imagination as ‘messengers and promises’, animals have been rendered marginal, argues Berger. The marginalisation of animals and their reduction to objects of the gaze marks the era of industrial capitalism with its paradoxical mechanism based on the erasure of animals while simultaneously proliferating their images. If in the society of the spectacle authentic social life has been replaced with its representation and simulacra, similarly, animal lives are governed by the rule of the eye, transforming them through multiplied and multiplying images. The ubiquity of vision characterising the age of digital surveillance marks the way humans engage with wildlife.

Looking at the critical engagement with Berger’s essay of critics such as Jonathan Burt and Anat Pick, I will discuss the increasing enmeshment of animals, humans and technology based on examples from recent literary texts and visual art. By focusing on textual and visual works, I will examine how the ‘parallel lives ’of animals are recorded in the early Anthropocene. Finally, employing Berger’s essay as a point of departure, I will inquire into the ethics of animal-human collaboration in art.

Monika Szuba is a professor of literature at the Institute of English and American studies at the University of Gdańsk. Her research is concerned with twentieth-century and contemporary literature informed by environmental humanities, with particular interest in phenomenology. Her previous book titled Contemporary Scottish Poetry and the Natural World takes a theoretically informed approach to the reading of the nonhuman world in the work of four poets that merges phenomenology and literary criticism. Her current book project, Landscape Poetics: Scottish Textual Practice, 1928–Present is an interdisciplinary study that seeks to situate Scottish authors in relation to their landscapes by investigating how the self is entwined in place.