- animal character's stereotypes and philosophy -

In order to make any kind of sense of the “great, blooming, buzzing confusion” of reality, in order to get a hold on the “mass of complex data that we receive from the world,” it is necessary, inescapable even, that we employ generalities, patternings, typifications. Stereotypes are simply a form of this “ordering” and in themselves need not be considered a force for evil: the stereotype sleeps within each sign after all. It is the unreflective iteration of signs that lends them their stereotypic character, and which results in increasingly rigid, sharply defined categories. The danger with stereotypes lies in allowing them to hide their limitations and partiality, in failing to appreciate that it is an incomplete picture that they paint.

Saussure’s horse and ox

There are two particular uses to which animals have been put by philosophy and critical theory that complicate the question of the stereotyped or stereotypic animal. On the one hand, writers who have clearly had no interest in animals per se have not been able to resist employing them as ciphers. A cipher is any person or thing which “fills a place, but is of no importance or worth” in its own right. The real power lying elsewhere, the cipher remains “a nonentity, a ‘mere nothing’” employed for the benefit of others (Oxford English Dictionary). Though all manner of entities are fair game, so to speak, for cipherous appropriation, literary and cultural theorists like Barthes, as well as a long history of philosophers, have been especially keen on animals. Saussure’s horse and ox are a case in point. In order to investigate language, Saussure begins his Course in General Linguistics, famously, by examining the nature of its basic unit, the linguistic sign. The sign is composed, he asserts, of two distinct but mutually dependent elements: the concept or signified (signifié) and the sound-image or signifier (signifiant). Thus, the sign for a horse, Saussure’s first cipherous animal, will comprise, on the one hand, the mental concept of a horse (“a solidhoofed perissodactyl quadruped, having a flowing mane and tail,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary), and on the other, the word “horse” (h-ō-s). Both elements, Saussure stresses, are “psychological”: the signified is not an actual horse, but the mental concept of one, and the signifier is not a physical or material sound but a “sound-image,” an “inner image” that we can recite to ourselves without actually vocalising.

The use of animals as ciphers by literary and critical theory is a particular example of the casual anthropocentrism that so often pervades these disciplines. Theorists have frequently conversed using animals, but less often do these discussions prove to be about animals. They remain invisible, metaphorical phantoms, employed merely as examples of epistemological problems, metaphysical speculations, or linguistic analyses. With the cipher, the reader disregards the animal and concentrates instead on the argument, the example, the heart of the matter. The animal used as a cipher is employed to make a point for which there is no obvious or necessary reason that this animal was chosen. On the other hand, there is a use to which animals have been widely put which entirely depends on their distinctive, characteristic presence. An index points out a particular quality or behaviour that is peculiar to the animal, and therefore intrinsic or necessary to the philosophical argument.

As George Fyler Townsend, the best known translator of Aesop into English, says of the fables: “The introduction of the animals or fictitious characters should be marked with an unexceptionable care and attention to their natural attributes, and to the qualities attributed to them by universal popular consent. The Fox should be always cunning, the Hare timid, the Lion bold, the Wolf cruel, the Bull strong, the Horse proud, and the Ass patient” 

On the other hand, however, we know that the animals in the fables are present only as impersonal instantiations of various diverse qualities. They are, as G. K. Chesterton puts it in his own introduction to the fables, “like abstractions in algebra, or like pieces in chess,” chosen over human protagonists the better to communicate the truths, or moral truisms, of the tales. Chesterton argues that it is only by stripping the tales’ protagonists of any individual personal traits that the virtues or vices that they exemplify can be made incontestably clear. A human person will therefore not do, and the animal that takes their place must be of an emblematic, even heraldic type. 

Aesop’s animal alphabet operates, then, with both indices and ciphers. The creatures may or may not be chosen for their peculiar characteristics, but they always serve as media for the time-honoured and much more important moral at the heart of the tale. In the fables, as with philosophical and theoretical texts, animals are neither ciphers nor indices. Aesop’s fox is not intrinsically one or the other, but rather functions as a cipher or as an index. The use of any given animal will tend at one time toward the cipherous, at another toward the indexical, and will many times exhibit elements of both. The more indexical the use, though, the closer we come to eliminating that rather lifeless creation, the animal in the “general singular.” It is the particularity of the animal index, or rather, the particularities of a host of indices, that serve to reanimate the lifeless ciphers and thereby help to bring about the death of “the animal.”

The potential problem for any animal that functions indexically, however, is that she or he is likely to ossify into a mere stereotype. In short, though carefully selected for some distinctive quality, indeed because this is the case, the index is still a sign, and as Barthes pointed out, “in each sign sleeps that monster: the stereotype” 

Derrida's cat

Derrida has insisted on the importance of the singular, concrete, individual animal in his own work. In “This Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” he talks about a particular, individual cat. He does not want here to concern himself with any cat that is a figure or allegory, that appears as an ambassador or representative of the “immense symbolic responsibility” with which cats have always been charged. He wants to discuss a real, actual cat, the “unsubstitutable singularity” of a particular cat, sitting now, gazing at him.

The animal in the “general singular,” says Derrida, is “a sin against rigorous thinking, vigilance, lucidity, or empirical authority”. We must look closely at faceless animal ciphers, then, and see whether they might in fact be highly individual indices. 

Derrida never tells us the name of his cat. Does the cat’s name matter? Derrida thinks so: in the very paragraph in which he marks the difference between his real cat and the symbolic cats of literature, he says “Nothing can ever take away from me the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualised. And a mortal existence, for from the moment that it has a name, its name survives it.”. This feline is not named, though, either actively (elle s’appelle) or passively (nominatur).

Derrida does not actually say that “it has a name,” of course: the reifying pronoun is an unfortunate consequence of the English translation. Derrida has pointed out to us, indeed it is relevant to the embarrassment that he feels, that his cat is a female cat, “une chatte”. But having made this specification, having drawn our attention to her gender, Derrida persists in using the “generic masculine” (un chat) that he had formerly confined to the cats of figure and allegory: he says “il a un nom.” Derrida’s cat, who has a name, though she remains unnamed, is both une chatte and un chat . Her existence both as a female cat and as an individual cat seems, by this curious conflation, temporarily to be overlooked.These oversights, if such they are, do not take anything from Derrida’s important argument that it is individual animals who demand fresh thought about animals. They point, rather, to the persistence with which forms of discourse, philosophical and otherwise, can work against the attempt to use words that are genuinely naked.

(excerpts from Tom Tyler's "Quia Ego Nominor Leo: Barthes, Stereotypes and Aesop’s Animals")