kvarterakademisk - Akademisk kvarter - Aalborg Universitet

akademiskacademic quarterkvarterDolphins Who Blow BubblesCatherine Lord“Oikonomia” is what Aristotle referred to as those aspects of economicswhich structure people and resources, not the khrematisikeof money begetting money. In the world of global markets, oikonomiaand khrematisike do conflate. So what Agamben tracks asthe machine turning humans into animals is the turning of animalsinto humans, ones either trafficked or protected (2004, p.77). And like trafficked humans, bartered animals fall into the zoneof “filthy” profits.The Cove dedicates its visual and voice-over rhetoric to the task ofrepresenting trafficked dolphins as smiling slaves. The demands tojump hoops, be cuddled and be kissed by aquarium visitors leavethe dolphins with calloused mouths in constant need of medication.For O’Barry, these animals discover neither joy nor play. They areturned into sweat-shop fodder. Their native environment is opensea. Dolphins are sonic creatures and especially sensitive to incarceratingsounds. The screaming and cheering of crowds adds yetmore stress. Here, the anthropological machine can be read as poweredby a global, capitalist system with no care for the welfare of its“workers.” The film enables the spectator to make an inevitable associationbetween the dolphins and the plight of other humans sufferingtrafficking and slave labour. Psihoyos’ anthropological machineenmeshes the human with the dolphin so as to reveal howhuman biopolitics controls dolphins within an aggressively chrematisticcontext. Even hoops and bubbles are about dirty money.To do the work of postcolonial critique would mean exposinghow biopolitics would remove the distinction between animals andhumans, a systemic removal that permits “lesser” humans to bepositioned as abused animals. In this regard, the degraded humanand the exploited human can meet around the concept of the nativeinformant. To shed light on this ‘reading otherwise’, Spivak tracesthe bestial representation of the human in Jane Eyre (2011/1847) andthe figurations between mythical beasts and oppressed humans inMahasweta Devi’s “Pterodactyl, Pirtha, and Puran Sahay” (1995).Spivak is thorough in connecting the novel’s figuration of BerthaMason as the repressed and colonised female subject, with thetropes of animality. When Agamben (2004, pp. 37-38) refers to theindeterminacies between human and animal life, that is, the overlapsand separations which make “neither” one nor the other, heargues that the “bare” life is precisely this too. Spivak’s reading ofVolume03 112