8 Fear of the Familiar By Mary Zdybel (04/25/10 23:56:16)
In the essay, “8 Fear of the Familiar,” author Steve Baker argues that postmodern artists and philosophers struggle with the concept of pets because they are contradictory to their thinking. He says that “this engagement with the animal is always a matter of bringing it into meaning. This runs counter, of course, to the way in which postmodernism tends to see itself: as the scourge of anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism and all other tendencies to reduce difference to sameness, the impure to the pure, the inhuman to the human, and the strange to the meaningful.” Although this text was extremely dense and hard for me to swallow, I gathered from it that we are not postmodern in our thinking about animals. Because we feel the need to categorize animals into types, (such as: self, pet, livestock, game, and wild animal) pets get left in an intermediary gray-area social category of man-animal. This connection between man and animal creates a tender subject and emotional relationships are developed. The author mentions that postmodern artists may not exactly have a fear of pets, but more of "what has been called 'anthropomorphobia,' a fear that they may be accused of uncritical sentimentality"As a child I could never even watch a movie that was based on animals because it made me too emotional. For some reason I have always struggles with the idea of animals suffering but watching a horror movie with humans—that doesn't phase me one bit. There is something about the sentimental quality embedded in animals that strikes me emotionally. I feel that this strong connection that I feel toward animals can be very useful in my understanding of other species and in future collaborations.
| The Postmodern Animal (Book) |
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