Art, In Defense of Rats
Art, In Defense of Rats & Other Projected Pests (2024)
Abstract: Ultimately, this paper is an invitation to profoundly reconsider and reconfigure domineering anthropocentric relations between human and non-human animals, particularly with so-called pest animals. I focus on rats as quintessential exemplars of “the pest.” First, I discern disgust from related sentiments with which it is often conflated. Then, I problematize disgust insofar as it is used as a moral paradigm since it is not amendable to reason and thus becomes a sort of aesthetic. The problem thus becomes that we are reluctantly left with collective disgust-feelings toward rats that we may come to recognize as immoral; and yet cannot rationalize them away, nor could we relieve them by realizing the total purification they seek. Here, I offer subversive art as a potential alternative for absolution, given its capacities to radically reconstruct the perceptual horizon of that which is possible. I conclude with Disney-Pixar’s 2007 film Ratatouille as an ambivalent case study of such art where disgust-feelings are meaningfully confronted and subverted.
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selected excerpts
Art, In Defense of Rats, Introduction p. 1:As fall 2022 rolled around, it occurred to city dwellers across the United States that their rat populations had proliferated significantly since the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. It could be said that NYC Mayor Eric Adams, who coined the name for this eager “war on rats,” led the charge into battle; tactics ranged from New York’s reformed garbage collection regulations, to the installation of electrocution boxes in Peabody, Massachusetts, to the slew of press conferences with catchy anti-rodent slogans like “You feed ’em, you breed ’em!” Of course, the majority of Americans were hardly bothered. For decades, we have largely and lazily echoed since-discredited theories which accuse rats of spreading the plague; we deem them dirty and disgusting at best, vicious at worst; and we thus hold that our displeasure with them is sufficient reason to justify their extermination, even by way of cruel methods. The fact that rats are verifiably animate, living creatures does little, if anything to raise our collective moral consideration for them above that of a lifeless object. Evidently, the new war on rats was but the most recent drop in the bucket.
Those who attempt to justify their disgust feelings toward rats say that this disgust is caused by the fear of infection since wild rats in fact carry diseases; in other words, there is some extent to which we make this disgust into the fruit of reason. However, this view is disingenuous; no reasonable person would seriously argue that, for instance, the only way to prevent further infection by a disease spread amongst infected humans would be to simply eradicate or starve the sick patients. Clearly, then, there is already a presupposition that renders rats’ lives—like those of many other non-human animals—effectively fungible.
pgs. 3-4:Nussbaum adds that dangerous objects (or for our purpose, alternatively, dangerous bodies) are generally tolerated in the environment of the perceiving subject once the bodies’ potential to inflict danger is nullified; once-dangerous bodies may even be ingested after the danger-potential is removed. Nussbaum uses poisonous mushrooms as an example; not only are they tolrerated, say, along the path of a hiking trail insofar as their threat is contingent upon consumption, but it is also acceptable to ingest poisonous mushrooms once they are detoxified. Disgusting bodies, on the other hand, remain disgusting and unconsumable, even when any reasonable risk of danger is eye-squintingly minimal, or even virtually non-existent; widespread American disgust at the consumption of insects or certain animals, even by those who eat other animals, give us a beaming example. Although, as we know, there are instances where a given object of disgust overlaps with an object which elicits a sense of danger, this is revelatory because we can see that the cognitive process spun by each is decisively distinct. Not interested in reason, nor sense-perception, disgust ultimately concerns the borders of the human body; Nussbaum says that it “focuses on the prospect that a problematic substance may be incorporated into the self.” What is disgusting must further be seen as alien; we do not really experience our own bodily fluids as disgusting, for instance, until they are secreted. Thus we arrive at the conclusion that the ideational content of disgust is a profound anxiety the self will become “contaminated by ingestion of the substance that is viewed as offensive”; another way to conceive of disgust, then, is the anxiety of the possible perceived transgression of an embordered purity by an impure alien.
pg. 7: Additionally, the surreal dimension of this art is highly significant; it is here that Oliver Marchart enters. In his reading, a Marcusian perspective holds that “what is first and foremost activated in acts of liberation is not a particular alternative to the status quo—it is our very sense of possibility” (137). In other words, the role of surreal art is not to carve any specific path away from the “status quo” directly to liberation, but to show us that conceiving of an alternative pathway is possible. Indeed, Marchart continues, “In one fell swoop we become aware that alternatives to the seemingly alternative-free status quo do exist” and that “[i]n these moments, experiential freedom... immerses reality in the light of the surreal, for the reality principle that governs the [definitively unliberated] status quo is temporarily suspended” (137). Although Marcuse himself acknowledges that, in its subversivity, this surreality is not absolutely welcomed nor ushered in, those controversial songs and poems, for instance, of protest are in fact not of their time. The reality they portray toward likely does not share many features with the present one. Instead, Marcuse says that they “preserve their truth in their hope, in the refusal of the actual” (Marcuse 28). Marchart alleges that “Marcuse’s observations are valuable because they remind us of the surreal nature of freedom... Freedom exists only where compulsion is broken and reality—the bad reality principle of ostensibly alternativeless constraints—is transcended into a surreal realm of possibilities” (139).
