CAT AND MOUSE

Abstract

The popularity of digital cat photographs circulating through the Internet and across North American visual culture provides an occasion for a critical exploration of human–cat relations in contemporary culture. The representation of animals in traditional and digital photography is discussed in relation to the technologies of visual culture, human–animal relations, the companion animals debate, the social history of cats, and species interactions in urban culture. The highly ambiguous physical and symbolic status of cats and the proliferation of human–cat networks in urban and electronic space are part of an emergent ‘post-human’ landscape in which the mutual dependency of diverse animals is more important (if no less volatile) than the unique qualities of distinct species.

Keywords:

• animal photography
• companion animals
• nature/culture
• post-humanism
• iconography
• cats

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Phaedra Pezzullo for her adept editorial input on this project.

Notes

1. Notable examples of authors honouring cats include Michel de Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, Charles Beaudelaire, Pierre Loti, Rudyard Kipling, Edward Allen Poe, Mark Twain, T.S. Eliot, Edward Lear, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Tennessee Williams, Gary Snyder, Haruki Murakami, Jack Kerouac, and Timothy Findlay; in the visual arts, a short-list includes Leonardo da Vinci, William Hogarth, Gustave Courbet, Paul Gallico, Andy Warhol, and Walt Disney.

2. Popular websites currently available include: http://www.themoggy.com/olympics.htm; http://www.stuffonmycat.com/; http://www.petoffice.co.jp/catprin/honten/index.htm; http://www.i-love-cats.com/; http://cats.about.com/; http://catsinsinks.com/

3. While raising and killing animals such as chickens and pigs in contemporary agribusiness undoubtedly involves an element of torture, the ostensible aim is to produce food. In Western cultures, wherein cats are not served as food, the purpose of torturing a cat is intransitively the torture. Rogers (1998) notes that while many animals ‘suffered … in cold-blooded scientific investitations and … were unprotected by the moral teachings of the Church, [cats] were more liable to be victims of sadistic popular customs’. Before the eighteenth century, they were'an obvious object for random sadism’; even after cats were household pets, ‘tormenting cats was still seen as acceptable fun’ (pp. 153–154).

4. This obviously does not apply to male writers and philosophers (see note 1).

5. Levi-Strauss, Wood, Lyotard and Derrida all evoke the cat's special value to (and in) their writing. Cats stop, Lyotard suggests, ‘at thresholds that we do not see, where they sniff some “present beyond”’ (cited in Baker 2003, p. 184).

6. Similarly, pre-modern Roman Catholic churchmen frowned upon pet owning and on the practice of giving ‘Christian’ names to pets (Shell 1986, p. 135).

7. As Haraway (2003) emphasizes, ‘Dogs are not an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshly material-semiotic presences in the body of technoscience. Dogs are not surrogates for theory; they are not here just to think with. They are here to live with [and] partners in the crime of human evolution’ (p. 5).

8. For a directory of black cat superstitions and legends, see: http://www.austinlostpets.com/kidskorner/2October/InfoBlackCat.htm.

9. Michel Serres, Regis Debray, and Margaret Wertheim, all philosophers of science, have written about information flow in terms of cyber-angels and the messages they bear.