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Rhiannon Galla, PhD Candidate, School of Sociology, The Australian National University

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Larry Saha Seminar Room 2175, Level 2, Haydon-Allen Building, The Australian National University

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The field of animal studies in the social sciences and humanities places a focus on our relations with the nonhuman world and current understandings of the ‘animal’ and the ‘human.’ For poststructuralist researchers, it has been important to question the implicit workings of a humanist model of identity that may be seen in research both within and outside animal studies in the form of assumptions about personhood, consciousness and agency. In this paper, I look at what taking the poststructuralist critique seriously might offer in the way of new modes of inquiry into human-animal relations. I am concerned with this issue in the context of contemporary art, a prime site through which the nonhuman world is engaged with in social life and which has been the focus of animal studies scholars such as Giovanni Aloi and Steve Baker. In taking a new materialist approach, I examine how art might be explored in terms of its material and affective interaction with the nonhuman world. How are we to engage with this phenomenon in ways that will not reaffirm a problematic model of the subject, and instead open inquiry to the nonhuman forces of life – including our own nonhumanness? I suggest that inquiring into the productivity of matter rather than the agency of subjects allows us to reconceptualise the human-nonhuman binary and the nature of human relations with nonhuman animals. This does not necessarily render obsolete the humanist model of the subject, but invites us to rethink this model and its relation to the nonhuman.