Het raakt me hoe vatbaar wij met z’n allen zijn voor bullshitverhalen, marketingtrucs, schone schijn, leugens, halve waarheden en wilde verhalen.
Doet me denken aan alle complot theorien. Het is interessant omdat de waarheid minder spannend lijkt te zijn. Dit is belangrijk omdat de waarheid subjectiveert, terwijl daarin ook weer een autoritair trekje is
Foucault’s writings on biopolitics arefocused squarely on the management of human populations, including howracism segments them into sub-populations or “sub-species,” some of whichare made killable purportedly in order to ensure the survival and health ofothers. Some of his followers, meanwhile, have explored how biopolitics canhelp us think about the control of animal populations as well.
charac-terizations of humans as vermin can be turned back against those who wieldthe metaphor
Wright makes the rat an emblemof “black suffering as well as black persistence” because of “its hunger andspirited refusal to be captured.”
colonial Rhodesia guer-rilla fighters for independence were construed and fought as pests in needof eradication
vermin “reproduceso rapidly and in such numbers they threaten to overwhelm their biological,environmental and—from a human perspective—sociological contexts.
more context
“[T]he guerrilla thrived onbeing a pest: hindering, distracting, dispersing, and destroying massedRSF formations; prolonging the war where the state planned for a shortone, thereby draining its resources; and infiltrating instead of advancing enmasse—always playing cat and mouse until the moment was right to standand fight. The guerrilla did not just move like a pest; he was a vermin being.”3
That is, vermin become vermin when they intrude on spacesthat have been designated for human use only.
Like the trickster tales discussed above, the films we are lookingat here do not make animals the focal point, but use them as a means of“thinking with” humans.
The trickster is an animal low on the peckingorder (like a rabbit) who finds himself in a jam and must use his wits, charms,and other skill sets to outfox his more powerful enemies. He is an animalsurrogate that speaks softly of strategies for resistance
pecies that are considered “out of place,”
qualities of vermin also make thema ripe symbol for resistance. To be like vermin is to be tenacious and to refusethe spatial exclusions that people like Dean would enforce
too many (“like rats”), they are out of place, and they are therefore killablewithout ethical qualm
While critics write for writers and other critics, they also write-in this instance-for "little" men and women who dwell at the crossroads.
This must be a difficult double-audience to please. To what extent could we say any of the authors we have read previously have had to contend with this double-audience?
Frederick Douglass, a masterful Signifier him-self, discusses this use of troping in his Narrative of I 845. Douglass, writing some seventy years after Cresswell, was an even more acute ob-server. Writing about the genesis of the lyrics of black song,
Although this is Douglass talking about black song, it seems to answer my earlier question about double-audiences.