Post 1500: Reflections on the Extinct British Wolf and the Triumph of the Sheep

Illustration of a wolf in George Shaw's  
Musei Leveriani (1729)

I.

This is post 1500: a number which means nothing to me, but which many 16th-century Christians thought significant; having failed to kick off at the millennium, they figured that the end of the world might commence half-time after the time (an obscure phrase found in the Book of Revelation).

Sadly for them - but happily for the rest of us - 1500 merely marked (somewhat arbitrarily) the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Early Modern Era (though don't suggest this to Bruno (nous n'avons jamais été modernes) Latour, or he'll kick off).  

I'm not, however, going to write here of apocalyptic Christian eschatology; nor do I intend to discuss the concept of modernity. Rather, I would like to say something about the extinction of a magnificent mammal species from these islands: for 1500 is also thought to be the year in which the last wolf in England was killed ...[1]


II.

Not only were wolves once present throughout the British Isles, they were present in large numbers. And, unlike other British animals, skeletal remains suggest they were not subject to insular dwarfism (i.e., the phenomenon whereby large animals evolve a smaller body size when their range is limited due to living in restricted circumstances, such as on an island for example).

Despite being large in number and big in size, wolves were exterminated from Britain thanks to a combination of deforestation and ruthless, unrestricted hunting and trapping (for skins and for the sadistic pleasure human beings take in killing animals, including defenceless cubs). 

King Edward I (1272-1307) was not only the Hammer of the Scots, he was also the monarch who ordered the total extermination of the wolf and personally employed a wolf-hunter with instructions to begin by killing them in the counties close to the Welsh border where they were particularly numerous thanks to the density of forest [2]. 

Later kings were just as merciless when it came to the wolf question and one wonders at the reason for this lycophobia ...

That is to say, why were wolves - more than any other wild beast - so widely feared and hated (not just in Britain, but across Europe). It can't just have an economic cause, although it's true that wolves kill livestock and compete with humans for game; there's surely something else going on here to explain this murderous animosity.

Maybe, as highly intelligent and social animals who live in extended family groups, they are rather too much like us - only stronger, faster, and with bigger teeth. Maybe, as we became ever-more civilised and ovine, bleating about our righteousness and exceptionalism, we grew to resent their wild nature. Maybe we secretly desire to be a bit more ferocious - thus the centrality of the werewolf myth in European folklore. Who knows? 

III.

As readers of Pagan Magazine will recall, I've always loved wolves [3], and so naturally support their proposed reintroduction into parts of the UK.

In fact, I think we should bring back the lynx too - and maybe even release a family of brown bears into the mix; the more large carnivores prowling around the better in my view, and not simply to help control the ever-expanding numbers of deer and wild boar.

For mostly I want wolves back in the hope that they might devour a few fat sheep who understand nothing of life or death, but exist in swollen nullity. To paraphrase D. H. Lawrence, it's not the howl of the wolf that we have to fear today, but the masses of rank sheep and what he terms the egoism of the flock [4] ...


Notes

[1] Reports of wolves sighted in more rural areas of England continued until the 18th-century and they certainly hung on for an extended period in the Scottish Highlands (officially, the last wolf was shot in Perthshire, in 1680).   

[2] For those, like me, whose geography isn't great, that's the counties of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Shropshire, and Staffordshire.

[3] See issue XI: 'Ragnarok: Twilight of the Gods and the Coming of the Wolf', (1986).

[4] See D. H. Lawrence. 'The Reality of Peace', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 25-52. The lines I paraphrase and refer to here are on p. 43.

ANT/Music: Cut off the Head, Legs Coming Looking for You

I. ANT

Actor-network theory (ANT) is based on the idea that everything in the social and natural world exists in a constantly changing network of relationships, outside of which nothing can be said to exist independently (not even external forces). Because this network unfolds upon a flat ontological field, all objects, ideas, processes etc., are equally important in any given situation or relationship.

Problematically, for those who cling to the belief in human exceptionalism, ANT anticipates OOO (object-oriented ontology) in that it considers nonhuman actants on a par with human subjects within a network and should therefore be described in the same terms; this is called the principle of generalised symmetry. There are differences, for example, between people and inanimate objects, but the differences are generated within the system of relations and are nothing fundamental.

Whether this makes ANT a posthuman or an inhuman theory depends, I suppose, on one's perspective. But the key thing is that agency is located neither in human subjects nor in nonhuman objects, but, rather, in heterogeneous associations between them (and doesn't imply intentionality). Again, some critics find this objectionable on moral and/or political grounds.    

ANT is sometimes described as a material-semiotic method, in that it maps relations that are both material (i.e., constructed between things) and semiotic (i.e., constructed between concepts). Anti-essentialist, ANT is more concerned with how things work, rather than with what things are, or why they exist (some might argue that ANT is so concerned merely to describe rather than explain, that it hardly even qualifies as a theory).

It was first developed in the early 1980s by French thinkers Michel Callon and Bruno Latour and drew on a wide range of intellectual resources from within philosophy, sociology, and science and technology studies. If it reflected many of the concerns found within poststructuralism, it was, at the same time, committed to a certain English model of empiricism.      

As is often the way with fashionable new theories, ANT soon became popular as an analytic tool with scholars across a wide range of disciplines - cultural studies and literary criticism included - who developed it in their own manner to best suit their needs. This range of alternative approaches - some of which are incompatible - means that ANT is now difficult to define and often confused with other forms of situational analysis and process philosophy.

Indeed, I'm not sure it's very helpful (or even meaningful) to still talk about ANT and some early proponents are now critical of the term itself: network, for example, is perhaps almost as problematic as the term theory and has a number of undesirable connotations. Latour has jokingly suggested that it might have been more accurate to call ANT actant-rhizome ontology, though, as he points out, this isn't a name that trips off the tongue and lacks the sexy acronym.      

II. Music

I have to admit, that whenever I hear the word ant, I think of Adam and Antmusic, rather than of Bruno Latour and actor-network theory: indeed, that's why I find the acronym ANT sexy, not because I'm a formicophile.  

'Antmusic' was the third single released by Adam and the Ants from the LP Kings of the Wild Frontier (1980); an album that brilliantly captured the post-punk spirit of the times and which, as one critic says, uniquely walked a line "between campiness and art-house chutzpah" with bravado, swagger, and "gleeful self-aggrandizement".* 

Although not as strong as the previous two singles - 'Kings of the Wild Frontier' and 'Dog Eat Dog' - 'Antmusic' should have been number one at the beginning of 1981 and the fact that it was held off the top spot by a re-release of John Lennon's 'Imagine' (after his murder in NYC) tells us something about the maudlin and mournful sentimentality of the record buying British public, that always prefers to look back, nostalgically, rather than try another flavour.   

Notes

* Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Kings of the Wild Frontier, review on the music database Allmusic: click here.

Play: Adam and the Ants, Antmusic (Ant/Pirroni) single release from the album Kings of the Wild Frontier (CBS Records, 1980): click here. The music video was directed by Steve Barron.

Vibrant Matter

Jane Bennett is a Professor of Political Theory at John Hopkins University. She is the author of several books on nature, ethics, and modernity, but it's her most recent study, Vibrant Matter (2010), that most interests as she shifts her focus from people to the role played by nonhuman forces in events (what she likes to term after Bruno Latour actants). 

In a nutshell, her book is a call for a form of material vitalism (or vital materiality) that moves beyond the work of Hans Driesch and Henri Bergson, whilst nevertheless utilizing their insights in a somewhat Deleuzean manner. Bennett attempts, in other words, to affect a re-enchantment of the world and to give to things a degree of agency and spontaneity (an uncanny combination of "delight and disturbance").

As an object-oriented philosopher, her project obviously attracts me; whether it also convinces me is another question.

For one thing, I remain profoundly hostile to and suspicious of any form of vitalism. Secondly, I don't really endorse Bennett's eco-ethical goal which is to mend the shattered concord between man and world thereby not only ensuring our survival as a species, but increasing human happiness. I can't help recalling Ray Brassier's devastating response to such soppy idealism: Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of life - and particularly not human life!

Why highlight "what is typically cast in shadow"; why advocate "the vitality of matter"; why promote "more attentive encounters between people-materialities and thing-materialities", if all you're really concerned about is reviving the humanities and saving mankind? It hardly seems worth the effort and risks falling back into the anthropocentric conceit or hubris which Bennett wants so desperately to escape. 

That said, she writes in a lucid and appealing manner and I fully support her aim of having done with judgement by reconfiguring notions of agency. And, like Bennett, I also wish to "dissipate the onto-theological binaries" that have constrained thinking for so long.

Clearly, hers is not a vitalism in the traditional sense - there's no notion of an independent life force or spiritual supplement that mysteriously animates matter - but, even so, there's a wilful element of romantic naivety in this book and a determined optimism that I simply cannot share. Her positive formulations ultimately betray her own attempt to think philosophically; i.e. in a relentlessly inhuman manner. 


See: Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, (Duke University Press, 2010). All lines quoted are taken from the Preface to this text.