Abstract
Grappling with the question of animal presence on the Internet Jody Berland’s Virtual Menageries offers an exploration of the roles animals take up in digital spaces. The book begins with an innocuous driving question: “Why are there so many cats on the Internet?” which Berland spins out to investigate “what is it that these virtual animals do?” By beginning with a theoretical genealogy of Marcel Mauss’ configuration of the material human body as a technology, Virtual Menageries offers an extension of Mauss’ thesis to include animal bodies and animal likenesses. If animals are mediators, Berland stipulates, then who and what they are mediating is important.
The material bone and blood of the animals is not forgotten in her analysis. Berland takes great care to lay out her theoretical build up to the concept of a Virtual Menagerie. Berland complicates Marshall McLuhan’s now axiomatic statement that “the medium is the message” by interpolating the non-human animal as a medium. Her assessment of how animals have been used as mediators to foster human connection historically and presently in a non-digital world is how she sets up her introduction of animal images and technology. The rise of animal images and memes on the Internet is only the latest iteration of animal likeness as a way to mediate the technological. As such, the book is as much an investigation into how animals’ bodies work to connect through their organic presence as well as their digital.
In viewing animals as mediators and the human connections that form from them, the image of the animal reciprocally shares the meaning humans ascribe to the animal’s body: a new technology becomes curious and mysterious as a lion, the Internet becomes both as domesticated and rebellious as a house cat. Underlying it all, an anxiety about the fragile role animals have in a precarious present all grapple with the uncertain futures their material incarnations have at stake.
Chapter 1 teases out the contextual history of the Menagerie, from its roots in ancient Rome through its presence as a display of imperial wealth and power, finally touching on the contested and conflicting roles of the contemporary Zoo. This chapter presents a critical genealogy to the ways in which the animal body has done labor for human connections in the past and how closely it is tied to questions of power.
Chapters 2 and 3 offer animal specific explorations of how animals and animal bodies come to constitute more than themselves. She introduces the charismatic giraffe as a political body of “first contact.” Inscribed on the giraffe, Berland argues, are hopes of future political connection. Today, the body of the giraffe also connects us to the future as we desperately watch and celebrate giraffe births as a way to ensure the species endures while extinction anxieties loom. In chapter 3, Berland complicates the beaver by examining its material conditions and symbolic conditions in Canadian history. Disentangling the figurations of the beaver in contemporary Canada is the product of extensive shared history between situated animals and humans. Berland complicates the “dematerialization” of symbolic animals by incorporating the material histories of the fur trade and the nation back into how the beaver mediates.
From chapters 4 through 6, Virtual Menageries turns its attention from the historical and material embodied animals to the virtual. It is in chapter 4 that Berland introduces her virtual Menagerie, a collection she curates beginning in the 1960s showcasing animal likenesses in spaces of technological branding, and visualization. The function of the virtual menagerie, that is, the animals adopted by technologies and digital materials as identifiers, carries the connective power material animals have had through history. The heterotopias from history, replete with its layers of meanings, are replicated and find new life in its digitization. Chapter 5 continues building the virtual menagerie but importantly complicates our digital collections of animals by contextualizing how digital animals function amid a landscape of environmental anxiety, global precarity, and accelerating technological development. We return to Berland’s core charismatic question of cat presence on the Internet in chapter 6. Cats dominate the digital environment as they bring with their presence associations of connection with a familiar domesticity of the cat which has a long history as companion species.
Chapter 7 pulls together the hints of environmental anxiety and biodiversity loss that haunt earlier chapters. Using sound recordings of birds as her primary object to focus the chapter, Berland begins to unravel the entanglements of what animality means in an aural space. Is bird song still bird song though removed from its embodiment? If animal life and connection exist in sound, then how is silence theorized among a time of mass extinction. This is an emotional provocation, evinced by a dive into affect theory. While Berland spends her last chapter and conclusion grappling with life and animals in a time of death and monsters, the stakes introduced in these areas could easily be turned into a book of their own.
Although leaving you wanting more from the books final chapters, Jody Berland’s Virtual Menageries offers a buffet of analytical objects to fill her exploration of multispecies relationships in a digitized world. From historical engravings to 1960s marketing to Florence + the Machine Lyrics, there is an object to catch any reader’s attention. Virtual Menageries is an important contribution to the fields of animal studies, media studies, and environmental humanities, though her thesis and objects would be comfortable in a variety of other fields.
Berland’s attention to the affective dimension of how animals mediate, the book adds to conversations on the cultural dimensions of extinction which has been gaining attention in the last few years. In the technology, we own/develop/engage with we place our hopes and connections with the animal other, with the future, and with the natural world.
