Tense Animals On Other Species of Pastoral Power

Tense Animals: On Other Species of Pastoral Power
Author(s): Nicole Shukin

Source: CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 11, No. 2, Animals . . . In Theory (fall 2011),
pp. 143-167
Published by: Michigan State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41949746
Accessed: 28-06-2016 05:20 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41949746?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Michigan State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
CR: The New Centennial Review
This content downloaded from 128.255.6.125 on Tue, 28 Jun 2016 05:20:14 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Tense Animals
On Other Species of Pastoral Power
Nicole Shukin
University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia
Sheep Followers
In Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy, the anthropologist Sarah Frank-

lin places the birth of the cloned sheep within a longer line of "biocultural"
practices at risk of being disconnected from the present by those who view the
transgenic event of Dolly as historically unprecedented (2007, 3). Just as strik-
ing as Franklins efforts to trace a genealogy for Dolly, however, is the rapidity
with which her language starts to replicate the subject of animal cloning, by
itself culturing a surplus of sheep metaphors. Listen to how Franklin describes
her anthropological method of "following sheep around" or "theory-on-the-
hoof " (9): "Like sheep, this book is keener on exploratory foraging, endless
rumination, and pushing over fence posts than it is on getting from the open
pasture to the shearing shed so that wool can go to sale" (16).
Alongside the ovine figures that begin to populate Franklins language-
"grazing," "open pasture," "shearing"- let me juxtapose an earlier entangle-
ment of technology, speech, and sheep that strangely enough lies buried
CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 1 1, No. 2, 2012, pp. 143-168, ISSN 1532-687x.
© Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.
• 143
144# Tense Animals
within the history of the telephone. The invention of one of the first appa-
ratuses of "electric speech" was intimately mixed up, as it happens, in sheep
breeding. As Avital Ronell relays in The Telephone Book: Technology, ; Schizo-
phrenia , Electric Speech , in 1889, Alexander Graham Bell bought a piece of
land complete with the flock of sheep grazing on it, and undertook a series
of amateur breeding experiments over the next thirty years (1989, 337). The
possibility of multiplying the number of nipples on a ewe obsessed Bell, who
fiddled with breeding litters of sheep graced with not merely two but four, six,
even eight nipples. Through his "pregenetic tampering," Ronell writes, "the
multi-nippled, twin-bearing sheep did ultimately appear" (339). Although
Franklin never references Bells experiments among the earlier technologies
of animal breeding that she argues conditioned the cloning of Dolly, they are
a startling confirmation of her contention that the biotechnological exploits
and anxieties fulminated by Dolly s appearance have an often unexpected
kinship with the past.
What do these two anecdotes featuring Dolly and Bell- and the intimacy
of metaphorical speech and biological sheep that both raise- possibly have
to do with the question David Clark raises in this issue of "animals ... in
theory"? For starters, they serve to introduce sheep as the thread that I will
follow through a body of theory devoted to studying technologies of bio-
power and, more specifically, through the genealogy of pastoral power traced
by Foucault. There can be a perverse enjoyment in taking Foucault s analysis
of pastoral power literally by invoking biological sheep; after all, pastoral
power is "politics seen as a matter of the sheep-fold" (2007, 130). My larger
aim, however, is to catalyze discussion of the ways biopolitical thought is
prone to generating concepts- pastoral power, "bare life," and so on- that
displace animals from the material stakes of the discussion even as they
metaphorically summon them. Matthew Calarco has argued this point in
relation to Giorgio Agambens theorization of the "anthropological machine"
of Western culture and of bare life (2007). Similarly, remarking on Foucaulťs
analysis of pastoral power, Anand Pandian notes that his "genealogical ac-
count excises practical relations with animals from its narrative economy,
reducing pasturage to nothing more than a political metaphor for most
of Western history" (2008, 90). Sheep are metaphorically omnipresent yet
Nicole Shukin • 145
materially missing from the study of a technology of power that, according

to Foucault, enfolds human individuals and populations who become sub-
ject to forms of pastoral care first institutionalized by the Christian Church
and subsequently secularized by the modern state. How the government of
human life might be biopolitically imbricated with that of other species is
potentially opened up- yet actually foreclosed- by Foucault.
Whereas "theory" consists of a multiplicity of intellectual pursuits re-
sistant to being lumped together under any unifying sign, there is virtually
unanimous agreement among its practitioners when it comes to the cardinal
stupidity ( bêtise ) of taking things literally. Yet might the taboo against literal-
ism that has been the signature of theory since Saussure- from belief in the
natural bond between signifier and signified, to scientific positivisms, reli-
gious fundamentalisms, and essentialist identity politics of any stripe- need
to be reconsidered when theory's object is biopower, that is, a form of power
invested in "the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species'
(Foucault 2007, 1)? Is the metaphoricity of animality and animals in many
contemporary theorizations of biopower a way of addressing biology without
breaking the taboo on speaking literally, thereby allowing theory to dwell in
figures on the biological life of the human while avoiding the embarrassment
of species talk that too referentially evokes the existence of other animals?
Derrida is one of the first to break rank with theory's unspoken solidarity
against the stupidity of talking about other animals even as he deconstructs
the empirical assumptions encoded in signifiers like "literal," "animal," or
"biological." For Derrida, what's troubling is not theory's interrogation of the
possibility of speaking literally (he would agree that's impossible), but rather
its practitioners' own bêtise habit of reciting variations of a philosophical
mantra on the animal's stupidity and lack. Derrida has notoriously declared
that discourses of philosophical modernity commit an asininity even in re-
ferring to "the animal" as a generic singular (2002, 399). Moreover, relaying
his experience of emerging from the shower one morning to find himself
caught naked by the gaze of his cat - a "real cat," he insists, not "the figure of
a cat"- Derrida scandalizes the philosophical assumption that animals are
the observed and humans the observers (374). As dramatized by his exposure
to the anteriority of his cat's gaze, Derrida asks what effect it might have on
146 • Tense Animals
Western philosophical thought to be placed in the vulnerable position of

being "seen seen" by the animal, a position that among other things upsets
a pastoral order of following ruled by the image of a shepherd leading his
flock (381). Who comes first? Who follows whom? Sometimes a literal view
can be instructive in this regard, as with the view of "early Christians such as
Chrysostom [who] challenged the image of Christ as pastor by contrasting
his style of leadership with that of living shepherds- Actually shepherds do
the opposite and follow their sheep from behind"' (Pandian 2008, 91).
The arc or "movement from electric speech to the nipples of a sheep"
inscribed by Bells cross-interests in phones and ewes is emblematic of the
unexpected histories of power that can be uncovered by "sheep followers"
(Ronell 1989, 340). By this, I mean anybody who sets out to examine how
species besides Homo sapiens are embroiled in histories of power, and more
particularly, how techniques of pastoral power that would seem specific to
the government of human life might also operate on the lives of other ani-
mals. By asking who is subject to pastoral power, sheep followers need to be
careful not to lose sight of the specificity of its techniques and objects, while
nonetheless interrogating how the thinking of this specificity has largely
elided the question of species.
Derridas work suggests that following sheep involves both stumbling
into and staging situations in which, as David Clark puts it, "philosophy is
subjected to the gaze of the other animal, to the other-than-human-animal,
'the gaze called animaT" (2003, 10). Foucault, like so many of the European
philosophers who Derrida contends assiduously avoid situations in which
they might be caught being "seen seen" by an animal, is also due to having
his thought exposed to those other animals, the ones more literally subject
to pastoral economies and pastoral power. To his credit, in the course of
lectures at the Collège de France where he elaborates on pastoral power,
Foucault himself invites the possibility of future exposure by insisting that
his thoughts are "a work in progress" amounting only to "possible tracks for
you . . . and maybe for myself, to follow" (2007, 136).
Such an encounter with Foucault perhaps best proceeds in stages. I
begin by briefly parsing his formulation of pastoral power to suggest that
he avoids examining how it functions as a discourse of species. Despite
his commitment to specificity, Foucault overlooks how this form of power

blatantly traffics in similarities and differences across the government of
humans and of animals. I then turn to Anand Pandian's "anthropology of
biopolitics" for a model of how Foucaulťs genealogy of pastoral power can
be pluralized through the development of alternate, postcolonial genealogies
involving actual practices of animal stewardship.
At this point, however, I take a perhaps unexpected swerve away from
anthropological modes of following sheep to follow a literary route into
pastoral power. Whereas an "anthropology of biopolitics" offers one means
of pluralizing Foucaulťs thought, what I call a "literature of biopolitics" offers
another. The work of J. M. Coetzee- and his postapartheid novel Disgrace ,
in particular- exemplifies the ability of a literary biopolitics to confront
Foucualťs analysis with postcolonial animals that, by virtue of both their
species difference and their distance from Europe, Foucault never counted
among the subjects of pastoral power. A literary biopolitics moves us past the
temptations of the literal reflex that initially kicks back against the political
metaphor of the sheep-fold with the materiality of animals in the field. To the
extent that Pandians anthropological excursion confirms that no literal ani-
mals can in fact be brought to bear on biopolitical thought- only historical,
discursively mediated animal-human relationships- it compels returning,
albeit with a difference, to theory's suspicion of the literal. At the same time,
far from valorizing the role of literature and the literary imagination, Coetzee
compels us to examine how it is at once complicit in the workings of power
and immanent to conditions of resistance.
Reading Disgrace as a complex refraction of pastoral power will cul-

minate in a theorization of "tense animals." Tense animals of any species,
including human, are unevenly subject to the afterlives of colonial, racial,
and sexual violence in postapartheid South Africa as well as to new orders
of pastoral care- a biopolitical brew, if there ever was one. They are also
inescapably subject to the ways power is discursively enacted within orders
of language, a micropolitical point driven home by the role of the perfective
tense in Disgrace (Coetzee is scrupulously poststructuralist in his insistence
that struggles to change history occur within language and discourse). That
a political economy of sheep farming operated alongside a literary tradition
of pastoral writing as linked technologies of settler-colonialism in South

Africa; that Coetzee is the son of a sheep farmer and represents himself as a
"lost sheep" in his fictional autobiography {Summertime 2010, 89); that two
sacrificial sheep figure prominently in Disgrace as a point of tension between
white and black patriarchs in the new South Africa; that Coetzee is himself
well versed in the work of Foucault - these are only a few of the connections
prompting what follows.
Pastoral Power as a Discourse
of Species
It is impossible to do justice to the density of Foucaulťs analysis of pastoral

power here. I can only parse a few key points en route to developing my
contention that he elides possibly the most obvious effect of pastoral power,
namely, the way it constitutes a discourse of species. By virtue of its species
blinkers, Foucaulťs analysis risks reiterating the "human exceptionalism"
that pastoral power itself utters. Such an exceptionalism consists, for Donna
Haraway, in bracketing humans off from the rest of the living according to the
precept "that humanity alone is not a spatial and temporal web of interspe-
cies dependencies" (2008, 11). Pastoral power is a particularly tricky discourse
of human exceptionalism, given that it traffics in apparently humbling meta-
phorical identifications between human and nonhuman "sheep," while actu-
ally segregating the living into the two camps of human and animal, of lives
worth saving versus lives not worth saving on the theological grounds that
humans alone possess souls. Its double invitation to humbly identify with
the least animal in a flock and to except human souls from a merely animal
existence simultaneously excites spiritual humility and "species chauvinism"
(of which Haraway, significantly, also accuses Foucault) (2008, 60). In this
sense, pastoral metaphors enable a humanist discourse of species that both
rationalizes the sacrifice of animals and abets "violence against the social
other of whatever species - or gender, or race, or class, or sexual difference"
(Wolfe 2003, 8).
Ironically, Foucault cuts animals out of his historical analysis in the
name of narrowing in on "the specificity of the form of pastoral power," on
what differentiates this species of power from others (a word that he himself
never uses) (2007, 156). Before tracing this excision in detail, let me provide a
thumbnail sketch of the genealogy Foucault initiates with his claim that . .
with the Christian pastorate we see the birth of an absolutely new form of
power" (183). Although pastoral themes can be traced back to pre-Christian
Eastern and Hebrew thought, it is only in the early Christian Church that the
figure of a shepherd-flock relationship becomes all-organizing:
[0] ver millennia Western man has learned to see himself as a sheep in a flock
. . . Over millennia he has learned to ask for his salvation from a shepherd
[pasteur ] who sacrifices for him. lhe strangest form of power, the form of
power that is most typical of the West, and that will also have the greatest
and most durable fortune, was not born in the steppe or in the towns. . . .
[It] was born, or at least took its model from the fold, from politics seen as a
matter of the sheep-fold. (130)
How does politics seen as a matter of the sheep-fold differ from sovereign
or disciplinary power? "Pastoral power," above all, "is a power of care" (127).
Writes Foucault: "All the dimensions of terror and of force or fearful violence
. . . disappear in the case of the shepherd" (128). Selfless service and even
willingness to sacrifice ones life for the flock is exemplified by Jesus as the
"first pastor" (152). Indeed, "entirely defined by its beneficence . . . the es-
sential objective of pastoral power is the salvation of the flock" (126).
Another feature of pastoral power is its double valence as a totalizing and
"an individualizing power" (Foucault 2007, 128).
The shepherd counts the sheep; he counts them in the morning when he
leads them to pasture, and he counts them in the evening to see that they
are all there, and he looks after each of them individually. He does everything
for the totality of his flock, but he does everything also for each sheep of the
flock
. . . But, on the other hand, since he must save each of the sheep, will he not
find himself in a situation in which he has to neglect the whole of the flock
in order to save a single sheep? (129)
150# Tense Animals
As Foucault notes, this "counting" of sheep is echoed in the machinery of

the modern state, for instance, in the development of statistics that track
birth and death rates of human populations. In short, he contends that the
decline of the Christian pastorate signals not the disappearance of pastoral
power but its migration into the secular reason of the early modern state
and into techniques of governmentality. Among the remarkable statements
to emerge from his lectures at the Collège de France is Foucaults claim that
the shepherd-flock relationship is the "prelude" to governmentality, that is,
to "the art by which some people were taught the government of others, and
others were taught to let themselves be governed by certain people" (151).
The reasons given by Foucault for cutting other animals out of his geneal-
ogy recalls the methodological ruminations of Sarah Franklin with which
this essay opened, although the question of whether or not to "follow sheep
around" marks precisely their point of divergence, lhe critical passage from
his lectures in fact concerns the methodological question of how to unlock
the specificity of pastoral power. The first approach Foucault tests is one that
would try to get more specific about the "flock of living beings" subject to
pastoral power by differentiating, for a start, between humans and animals
(2007, 141). Yet as Foucault rhetorically interjects: "straightaway there is an
objection. What does it mean to oppose all the animals of whatever kind, on
the one hand, to men, on the other? This is a bad division, Plato says, refer-
ring to the problem of method. We cannot put all animals on one side and
all men on the other" (142). However, pursuing finer species differentiations
to rectify this bad division only makes matters worse, in Foucault s view. It
leads to endless "subdivisions" of the living into those "who live on the land"
versus those who live in water, "those that fly and those that walk, those with
or without horns, those with or without cloven hooves," and so on (142). In
following this method, says Foucault, "we will have a typology of animals, but
we will make no advance at all in the fundamental question" (144).
Therefore he tests another approach. What if, rather than endlessly
differentiating species, we track all of the possible types of shepherds? For
similar reasons, this also signals a dead-end for Foucault: "on the one hand,
there is the series of all the possible divisions in animal species and, on the
other, the typology of all the possible activities that may be related to the
shepherd's activity. . . . Politics has disappeared" (2007, 144). To get at the

workings of modern government, Foucault will, finally, reject an approach
that would search for its model in the domain of political power and instead
look to the pastoral order of the Church: "pastoral power, its form, type of
functioning, and internal technology, remains absolutely specific and differ-
ent from political power" (154).
As Arnold Davidson writes in his introduction to Foucaulťs 1977-78
lectures, "it is Foucaulťs analysis of the notions of conduct and counter-
conduct . . . that seems to me to constitute one of the richest and most bril-
liant moments in the entire course" (Foucault 2007, xix). The specificity of
government will, indeed, be unlocked by the double sense of "conduct":
. . . the word "conduct" refers to two things. Conduct is the activity of conduct-
ing ( conduire ), of conduction (la conduction) if you like, but it is equally the
way in which one conducts oneself (se conduit ), lets oneself be conducted {se
laisse conduire ), is conducted {est conduit ), and finally, in which one behaves
(se comporter) as an effect of a form of conduct (une conduite) as the action
of conducting or of conduction (conduction). (193)
This is the approach that leads to the Foucauldian definition of governmen-

tality as the "conduct of conduct." And crucially, for Foucault, along with
the type of power encapsulated by "conduct" there exist immanent types of
counter-conduct: "Just as there have been forms of resistance to power as
the exercise of political sovereignty, and just as there have been other, equally
intentional forms of resistance or refusal that were directed at power in the
form of economic exploitation, have there not been forms of resistance to
power as conducting?" (195).
By the time Foucault specifies pastoral power as the "conduct of souls,"
however, he has effectively obviated the initial question of species (2007,
193). At least, the sense of conduct he arrives at would seem to disqualify
other animals automatically; for while it is possible to conceive of animals
being subject to literal practices of shepherding, mustn't we assume human-
ity when discussing the conduct of souls and all of the moral and ethical
intricacies associated with technologies of the self (184)? Yet it is precisely
Foucaulťs assumption concerning the "souls" that qualify as subjects of

pastoral power that can be questioned (and that is questioned, indirectly,
in Coetzees novel [1999]). For not only is it impossible to safely say that all
humans homogenously or equally qualify as souls on whom this technology
of power operates (contrasted with the homogenous bloc of all other sentient
beings, which ostensibly represents soulless material on which governmen-
tality would have no purchase), but the suggestion that one prequalifies as
a soul on the basis of ones species marks the site where Foucault s analysis
risks reproducing the pastoral partitioning of "species" and "souls."
What if the species of the pastoral subject isn't taken as a given? Is it nec-
essary to reserve a separate vocabulary for the techniques that positively so-
licit states of obedience in other animals, versus those that conduct human
conduct? Or is it possible, on the contrary, to explore how the government

of "men" and the government of animals might turn on the relationships
of species likeness and difference pronounced by the metaphor of the
sheep-fold? To do so would open what Foucault forecloses: the possibility
that technologies of human and animal conduct partake in material and
metaphorical exchanges, borrow or diverge from one another, traffic in spe-
cies identifications and equivalences as well as in species exceptions and
disavowals. In short, to assume the species of the individual or population
that is subject to pastoral power, is to underestimate just how contingent
governmentality may be on the production and ordering of "species" as a
play of similarity and difference.
The Grazing of Animals and "Men"
Anand Pandian similarly identifies a species blindspot in Foucault s analysis

of pastoral power when it comes to actual- not merely metaphorical- in-
tersections of the government of men and the government of animals. For
Pandian, bringing specificity to the study of pastoral power entails reckoning
with the historical management of colonial subjects as animals through vari-
ous ratios of care and control. At the same time, it entails reckoning with
rural contexts of pastoral power in which pasturage is not only a political
metaphor, but a practical relationship that materially binds human and
animal conduct together: "these intersections between pastoral image and

pastoral practice suggest that material engagements with nonhuman beings
in rural settings may constitute an important domain of the 'unthoughť
within Foucault's own conceptualization of pastoral power" (2008, 92). To-
ward his aim of "pluralizing our understanding of what is at stake in the
modern government of life," Pandian contends that "a close examination of
the government of animals by humans is vital for an anthropology of bio-
politics: for an understanding, that is, of the many ways in which humans
themselves have been governed as animals in modern times" (86).
To this end Pandian traces pastoral power as it is exercised in the "ver-
nacular," which in this instance refers to the Cumbum Valley in South India
where he finds human and animal lives entangled in (post)colonial histories
of moral and physical conduct. Pandian is particularly struck by the regularity
with which two local idioms related to matters of moral conduct- "thievish"
and "grazing"- are applied to both humans and animals in the region; these
idioms inspire him to trace alternative genealogies of pastoral power beyond
the time-space of European modernity privileged by Foucault. Pandian no-
tices, for instance, that a young herdsman describing the thievish behavior of
one of the water buffalos in his care deploys a term formerly used by colonial
administrators on disobedient members of the Kallar caste in the region,
criminalized as "thieves" by the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act. The herdsman's
remark prompts Pandian to examine this "image of criminal oxen" for how
it "depicted animal misconduct in moral terms as a problem of government,
one that identified bovine indiscipline with the mode of conduct at issue in
the regions most distinctive colonial history: thievery" (2008, 102).
The idiom of "grazing" similarly marks an intersection between the
government of animals and humans, referring to techniques used to cul-
tivate right conduct in unruly natures "deemed incapable of controlling
themselves," human and nonhuman alike (Pandian 2008, 88). Like "thiev-
ish," "grazing" possesses a genealogy that Pandian follows back to an era
of colonial policing, and even earlier, to representations in Tamil culture of
the effective rule of humans and other animals. In the postcolonial present,
"grazing" remains a common prescription for curing disobedience whether
it crops up in defiant schoolchildren or in oxen; as with the image of the
thieving bull, Pandian emphasizes that the idiom of grazing "is far more than
an analogy, or turn of phrase, or purely symbolic likeness between man and
beast. It conveys instead the common defiance of a form of power to which
humans and animals alike have been submitted" (104).
Pandian shows that beyond physical docility, the moral conduct and
character of animals is at stake. The idiom of grazing reveals that governmen-
tality works to inculcate a "need even among animals for a faculty capable of
controlling desire" (2008, 103). Those qualities ostensibly exclusive to human
"souls"- control of desire, virtue, self-conduct- come into view as effects of
techniques of pastoral care and coercion that can be cultivated in other spe-
cies as well. "One could punish these oxen for behaving in particular ways,
but they would ultimately do only what they were accustomed to doing,"
writes Pandian. "Most effective in conducting' their conduct was the careful
cultivation of particular inclinations and dispositions" (103).
Perhaps most surprising is Pandians suggestion that, along with being
subject to conduct, other animals are granted a part in the immanent
resistance to pastoral power that Foucault terms "counter-conduct." The
vernacular expression of this resistance is described by Pandian as a "quality
of defiance that may be shared by men and bulls alike," underscoring his sug-
gestion that neither techniques of conduct nor practices of counter-conduct
can be confined to the human (2008, 104).
Tense Animals: Reforming Land,

Character, and Language
This final section departs from the anthropological attractions of "sheep fol-
lowing" and turns to a literary biopolitics to open the study of pastoral power
to questions of language and land as well as species. A literary biopolitics
is able to tense the study of pastoral power through fictional exercises not
available to anthropological or theoretical discourse, with "tense" connoting
two things. The first is the tension and complexity created for all species
when postcolonial acts of violence and postcolonial forms of pastoral power
are shown to overlap and compete over land, language and life. The second is
verb conjugation as the means through which relationships to time, history,
and power- past, present, or future actions and states- are reproduced or
resisted in language.
Coetzee is notorious for his postmodernist deployment of metafictional
devices that draw attention to how the truth of history is constituted in lan-
guage by those with the most power to make authoritative claims to repre-
sentation. In Disgrace , the metafictional appearances of the perfective tense
arguably best exemplify Coetzee's literary biopolitics, by which I mean his
literary engagement with the technology of pastoral power analyzed by Fou-
cault. Yet I want neither to suggest some intention on Coetzee s part to write
a novel that dramatizes Foucauldian concepts, nor to subsume Coetzee's
literary imagination into Foucault's historical-political analysis by suggest-
ing that Disgrace illustrates his theory. Following Pandian, my contention is
rather that the novel helps to pluralize our understanding of biopolitics by
moving it away from a single origin in Foucault.
That said, raising the names of Foucault and Coetzee in the same breath
instantly sparks an encounter between two senses of pastoral: the (bio)politi-
cal and the literary. On the occasions when Coetzee has explicitly engaged
with pastoral, it hasrí t been with the Foucauldian analysis of power but with
a tradition of "white writing" in South Africa, a literary imagination of the
land and its settlement. Coetzee implicates white writing in a longer colo-
nial "Discourse of the Cape" that pivots on ethnographic observations of the
idleness of the Hottentots (a colonial misnomer for the Khoi people) as a
problem of conduct (1998). Indeed, Disgrace can be read as an exploration of
the intimate interface between a literary imagination of land and a history of
pastoral power, an interface that ultimately suggests postcolonial struggles
for land reform are enmeshed in technologies of moral conduct.
If a key economic means of European settler-colonialism in South Africa
was sheep farming (a gift of Spanish Merino sheep to the colony in 1789 led
to the rise of a powerful wool industry), one of its key cultural means was
the pastoral imagination of land advanced by the Afrikaner plaasroman , or
farm novel. Representing farm life as a pastoral idyll was complicated by the
problem of labor, however, given that one of the ways "expansive imperial-
ism justified itself" was by a logic of the land's improvement or perfectibility
which held that "those deserve to inherit the earth who make best use of it"
156# Tense Animals
(Coetzee 1998, 3). The Khoi and San people were dispossessed of their terri-
tory by this reason, and white writings literary conventions protected it in
the realm of representation by erasing the generations of African labor that
materially supported white farm life: "If the work of hands on a particular
patch of earth, digging, ploughing, planting, building, is what inscribes it as
the property of its occupiers by right, then the hands of black serfs doing the
work had better not be seen," writes Coetzee (5).
"The Discourse of the Cape" fixated not only on the indolence of the na-
tives, but also on the conduct of the Dutch settlers whose descendents would
develop the tradition of white writing studied by Coetzee. These settlers were
viewed as dangerously prone to "regressing" into a state of native idleness
and betraying the image of human perfectibility and progress that Europeans
were expected to embody: "The spokesmen of colonialism are dismayed by
the squalor and sloth of Boer life because it affords sinister evidence of how
European stock can regress after a few generations in Africar writes Coetzee.
"In being content to scratch no more than a bare living from the soil, the Boer
seems further to betray the colonizing mission, since in order to justify its
conquests colonialism has to demonstrate that the colonist is a better stew-
ard of the earth than the native" (1998, 30-31). Coetzee references Foucault's
study in Madness and Civilization (1964) of seventeenth-century reform
movements in Europe that strove to stamp out "vagrancy and begging as
a way of life," and suggests that a work ethic first inculcated in Europeans
would be the model of conduct subsequently exported to South Africa: "In
the first hundred years or so of settlement, the idleness of the Hottentots is
denounced in much the same spirit as the idleness of beggars and wastrels
is denounced in Europe" (20, 21).
The literary and political senses of "pastoral" thus converge in the ten-
sion over work and idleness in South Africa, in the relationship between
white ownership of the land and the moral conduct that qualified one for
ownership. This would seem to go against Foucaulťs statement that "[t]he
shepherd s power is not exercised over a territory but, by definition, over a
flock ... a multiplicity in movement" (2007, 125). That is, it would seem to
confuse the telos of pastoral power, perfectibility, and the salvation of souls,
with the telos of sovereign power, control of land, and territory. Yet what the
entanglement of land and conduct reveals is that in the (post)colonial con-

text of South Africa, the forms and objects of sovereign and pastoral power
aren t as distinguishable as Foucault's taxonomy of power might suggest.
One last comment on the imbrication of land and conduct is needed
before turning to Disgrace . The indolence of settlers who abandoned colonial

reason and lapsed into sloth gives glimpse into a historical seed of pastoral
counter-conduct that is crucial to Coetzee's literary biopolitics. In settler
idleness lies the possibility of a relationship to a peopled African landscape
that refuses to impose the logic of ownership-through-work. In fact, idle-
ness is suggestive of an anticolonial surrender or "return' of the land in the
sense relayed by Jennifer Wenzel, who writes: "The cycles of anti-apartheid
protest and state repression that began in the 1940s and climaxed in the
1980s challenged the logic of the plaasroman: the pastoral promise of the
return to the land was countered by the political imperative of the return of
the land" (2000, 95). Moreover, whereas settler idleness threatened to under-
mine colonial claims to land founded on strenuous stewardship, the idleness
of the Hottentots represented even more of an "anthropological scandal,"
as Coetzee puts it (1998, 22). Beyond an affront to Europeans who, through
Protestantism, had come to equate salvation with work, Coetzee proposes
that native idleness posed a particular obstacle to early travel writers seek-
ing subject matter for their ethnographic observations. The deeper scandal
of Hottentot idleness involved the way it obstructed a European project of
knowledge- the human sciences- in need of "materials to fill out its dis-
course" (23). The scandals posed by the idleness of the natives and Dutch set-
tlers form the seed of pastoral counter-conduct that Coetzee, a white writer
who continuously implicates himself in the colonial "Discourse of the Cape"
and the tradition of the plaasroman , will try to salvage for the postcolonial
present. It can be discerned in the character of Lucy in Disgrace , a boervrou
or countrywoman who "regresses" into a form of bare living that undermines
the ongoing colonial and humanist projects of perfectibility (1999, 60).
Disgrace implicates several literary traditions in the workings of power-
not only the plaasroman but also European Romanticism. The novels protag-
onist, David Lurie, is a professor at Cape Technical University, an institution
recently overhauled by "the great rationalization," a sinister-sounding project
vaguely connected to the historical task of bringing a new postapartheid

state into being (Coetzee 1999, 3). "Once a professor of modern languages,"
Lurie is now an adjunct professor of communications who is nonetheless
allowed to teach one literature course on the old Romantic "masters": the
poets Wordsworth and Byron (13).

Behind Coetzee's fictional reference to the great rationalization lies an
actual project of nation-building: the 1995 South African Truth and Reconcili-
ation Commission. The commission, which granted amnesty to individuals
who publicly confessed to committing politically motivated crimes under
apartheid, is a clear postcolonial expression of pastoral power. With Arch-
biship Desmond Tutu as its spiritual figurehead, the TRC sought to unifiy
the racially segregated South African flock through the Christian virtues
of reconciliation, forgiveness, and confession of the truth, therapeutic
prescriptions designed to help the country overcome its historical trama.
Under Tutu, Judeo-Christian values were indigenized in and through their
integration with the African philosophy of Ubuntu (humane sociality, or
community interdependence), fused into an art of brokering peace. The
TRC s pastoral mandate of restorative justice did not extend, however, to
material questions of land reform and economic redistribution of wealth,
a serious limit of its healing vision. Furthermore, the TRC elevated forgive-
ness to a moral ideal expected equally of all citizens despite the structural
inequalities of apartheid and the incommensurable conditions under which
whites and blacks fell victim to or perpetrated violence. For instance, the
incommensurability between violence perpetrated by individuals engaged in
a struggle for freedom and by those in the enforcement of apartheid rule was
not recognized under TRC s equalizing logic. The TRC was limited in three
further respects that are significant when reading Coetzees novel. First, the
university (the seat of knowledge and power) was largely exempted from the
social institutions called to account by the commission. Second, rape was
rendered "unspeakable" by virtue of the commissions decision that it didn t
constitute a form of political violence (Graham 2003). And third, the lives and
deaths of other animals didn t register at all in the new pastoral dispensa-
tion of South Africa. As Lucy puts it in the novel, "on the list of the nations
priorities, animals come nowhere" (Coetzee 1999, 73). Coetzee's novel picks
up the burden of historical responsibility where the commission dropped it

by attending to these three areas.
The professors seduction of one of his students sets both the pastoral
and Romantic machinery in the novel in motion. The flame of Lurie's desire
for Melanie, whom he privately thinks of as Meláni- "Shift the accent. Me-
láni: the dark one," an inflection that exoticizes - implicates him in an old
imperialist romance that he recklessly pursues past its official expiration
date in 1994 with the overturning of apartheid rule (Coetzee 1999, 18). His
desire for Melanie conforms to sexualized imaginaries of colonial conquest
revolving around tropes of a white patriarchs possession of the feminized
body of the dark continent. Lurie declares that he was "enriched" by his
affair with Melanie, a word perhaps best read alongside Anne McClintock's
analysis of the economics of mining capital in South Africa and the literal
extraction of wealth through penetration of the land (1995» 56). Lurie's se-
duction of Melanie is oiled with smooth doses of Romantic reason, as when
he first urges her to stay the night by declaring that "a woman's beauty does
not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world.
She has a duty to share it" (Coetzee 1999, 16). Significantly, these words are
echoed in the second half of the novel by a romantic who, despite himself,
is changed by an attack on Lucy s farm. This time, however, Lurie is rumi-
nating on the fate of two Persian sheep who are tied up and waiting to be
slaughtered for a party hosted by Lucy's black neighbor, Petrus. "Sheep do
not own themselves," Lurie thinks, "do not own their lives. They exist to be
used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be
crushed and fed to poultry" (123). The imperious ownership of the bodies
of women and animals by men and humans, respectively, is bound up with
ownership of the land by colonial settlers who improve it. Coetzee thus
interimplicates various exercises of biopower, such as the imperial desire
that treats land and women as bodies made for (sexual) conquest and the
discourse of species that allows for the sacrifice of animals. But by hav-
ing this concern for animal sacrifice voiced by an intransigent figure who
continues to resist an ubuntu philosophy of social togetherness, Coetzee
also hints that in Lurie's emergent sympathy for animals there lurks the new
grounds of a self-righteous ethnocentrism.
160# Tense Animals
Melanie is young enough to be Luries daughter, and their brief affair

represents Luries simultaneous transgression of two pastoral functions:
the professor-shepherd entrusted with guiding the members of his student-
flock, and the father-shepherd entrusted with the protection of his child.
Indeed, the specter of incest hangs darkly over the novel. In Lurie, the shep-
herd has turned into a wolf that preys on the sheep he has been entrusted
to protect, taking pleasure even in a sexual act that he admits is "not quite,' *
but almost, rape (Coetzee 1999, 25). Although rape and violence against
animals arent presented as neat homologies in the novel, there is a sug-
gestion that they are linked by virtue of their exemption from the incipient
discourses of biopower; neither, after all, was recognized by the TRC as
an act of political violence that needed redressing, something that helped
grant a kind of license or impunity to violence perpetrated on the bodies
of women and animals.
When Melanie lodges a complaint of sexual misconduct, Lurie is called

before a university tribunal, one that functions like a miniature version of the
TRC in its pastoral assurance to Lurie that in exchange for a public confes-
sion he'll receive amnesty (that is, keep his job). Lurie is defiant, however,
a deeply ambivalent stance that represents an unrepentant defense of the
Romantic "rights of desire" as well as resistance to the new pastoral mo-
tions of moral conduct that he is asked to play along with (Coetzee 1999, 89).
Unwilling to perform the "spirit of repentance" expected of him, Lurie leaves
for Lucy s farm in the Eastern Cape (58).
From this point on in the novel, pastoral conduct and counter-conduct
increasingly come into view as practices that turn on relationships of species
likeness and difference. Upon arriving at Lucys, Lurie explains his situation
to her by likening it to a dog s. It is the reformation of his character that Lurie
resists in the face of tribunal members who ask not only for a public apology,
but for signs of genuine remorse to demonstrate that his apology "comes
from his heart" and is "sincere" (Coetzee 1999, 54). More than the disciplin-
ing of his sexual behavior is at stake; the tribunal is invested in the moral
conduct of feeling and production of the truth of feeling. Yet in explaining
this to Lucy, Lurie resorts to a disciplinary analogy between himself and a
dog that lived in Kenilworth when he was a child, a dog beaten by its owners
every time it got excited by a bitch in the vicinity. Soon enough "the poor dog
had begun to hate its own nature," Lurie tells Lucy. "It no longer needed to
be beaten. It was ready to punish itself" (89).
In this complex passage, Lurie's canine analogy for sexual discipline and
punishment hints, firstly, that biopower operates on nonhuman animals
as well as human. But more dangerously, the anecdote supplies Lurie with
an animal alibi that he uses to rationalize (and naturalize) his own sexual
impulses. Adding to the complexity, Lurie evokes an image of disciplinary
power at the moment in the novel when, finding refuge on a rural small-
holding that is half dog kennel, half garden, the disciplining of animal na-
ture exists in increasing tension with its pastoral care across species lines.
Lurie's identification with the Kenilworth dog will soon be replaced by his
identification with an abandoned welfare mutt, and along with the disciplin-
ing of the body, it will be the conduct of the soul that connects the two. In
and through shifts in his animal identifications, Coetzee shows David being
reconstituted, albeit imperfectly, as a subject of pastoral power.
If the question of whether other animals are subject to pastoral power was
posed to Coetzee s novel, the text might also answer with the scene in which
Lurie agrees to make himself useful while staying with Lucy by volunteering
at the Animal Welfare Clinic. At the clinic he meets Bev Shaw, one of the 4 ani-
mal lovers" responsible for medically treating or mercifully dispensing death

to the unwanted or unsaveable animals of South Africa (Coetzee 1999, 72).
The name of the clinic itself encrypts a relationship between pastoral power
and other species tracing back to animal welfare movements in Europe and
to the figure of Jeremy Bentham. Surprisingly, Foucault never explored how
disciplinary and pastoral power converge in Bentham, a social reformer
who not only designed the prison Panopticon but spearheaded movements
devoted to the ethical treatment of animals. Bentham shifted the question of
other animals away from a Cartesian framework by proposing, "The question
is not, Can they reason? Nor Can they talk? But Can they suffer?" (1996, 7).
As Derrida notes, Bentham opened "the immense question of pathos and
the pathological, precisely, that is, of suffering, pity, and compassion," a ques-
tion evocative of the affective order of pastoral power with its emphasis on
compassionate fellow-feeling (2002, 395). The pastoral question of pathos is
162# Tense Animals
one that Coetzee shows intersecting tensely with the imperial desires repre-
sented by European Romanticism.
The discourse of species encoded in the pastoral metaphor of the sheep-
fold is dramatized in a conversation between Lurie and Lucy. "'The Church
Fathers had a long debate about them, and decided they don t have proper
souls,' he observes. 'Their souls are tied to their bodies and die with them.'
Lucy shrugs. Tm not sure that I have a soul. I wouldn't know a soul if I
saw one" (Coetzee 1999, 78-79). Lurie's implied agreement with the early
Church's theological verdict on animals is followed by his visceral reaction
to those who would expand the pastoral fold to include animals: "to me
animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone
is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and
do some raping and pillaging" (73). His words foreshadow, with tragic irony,
the raping that his daughter will in fact shortly suffer. Her sexual assault
by three black men, during which he is knocked unconscious, doused with
fuel and lit on fire, will shock Lurie out of his intractable Romanticism. But
as with Lucy s pastoralism- one that attempts to change a settler-colonial

relationship to Africa from inside its historical overdeterminations- Lurie s
Romanticism is not a tradition that Coetzee will allow to be abandoned like
the dogs deposited at Bev Shaw s clinic. The legacy of Romanticism is one of
the "monsters" in the novel that Coetzee suggests has to be lived with and
through to be immanently transformed (34).
Lucy s refusal to report her rape by three black men to the police and her
decision to keep the child violently seeded in her is scandalous from a West-
ern liberal humanist (and feminist) perspective. Yet it exemplifies the radical
promise of pastoral counter-conduct that Coetzee keeps imaginatively alive.
Its worth recalling that Foucault identified the police as pivotal agents of
the pastoral power excercised by the modern state. But it's also important
to mark the specificity of policing in South Africa under apartheid, since
the shepherds of the state also operated as secret police who perpetrated
many of the worst atrocities upon blacks struggling for freedom. The police
in South Africa represent an amalgam of the sovereign force that Foucault
aligns with the power to put to death, and the pastoral care that he aligns
with the work of keeping peace and good order.
Lucy s refusal to report her rape is suggestive of more than resistance to

the double bind of the police, however. Recalling Coetzee's claim that the
idleness of the Hottentots obstructed European travel writers hunting for
ethnographic "content" for the human sciences, the silence that Lucy keeps
can likewise be read as a practice of counter-conduct that refuses to supply
material for a dominant mentality, particularly when rape of a white woman
by black men risks fueling both white moral panic and paternalistic senti-
ments around saving women. Both would undercut Lucy's micropolitical
commitment to a decolonizing relationship to the land and to her black
neighbors. Profoundly practical, she knows that ongoing power struggles
in South Africa are a guarantee that living on the land will never be idyllic
or without cost, yet she speaks in a pastoral idiom when she says, "I am
prepared to do anything, make any sacrifice, for the sake of peace" (Coetzee
1999, 208). Her father's suggestion that she is seeking "some form of private
salvation" or hoping to "expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the
present" is rejected by Lucy. "You keep misreading me. Guilt and salvation
are abstractions. I don't act in terms of abstractions" (112). Her resolute
practicality is a clue to the difference Lucy embodies between a practice of
counter-conduct that seeks to broker peace through a relinquishment of
power, and the pastoral ideologies of the Church, State, or family.
Gradually Lucy cedes ownership of her farm to her black neighbor Pe-
trus and agrees to become "a tenant on his land," even accepting his offer of
marriage in return for pastoral protection from future attacks (Coetzee 1999,
204). In what Lurie declaims as her abject reduction to living "like a dog,"
Lucy will negotiate a life. Refusing the negative inflection that Lurie gives it,
Lucy turns the species likeness into the grounds of a positive biopolitics and
affirms: "Like a dog" (199). Her acceptance rejects the human exceptionalism
still insinuated in Lurie's words and the cultural goal of a "higher life" or
human perfectibility (74).
This brings me, finally, to the perfective tense, the metafictional device
with which Coetzee foregrounds and troubles the desire for perfectibility
that underlies both white pastoral relationships to the land and European
humanism. It first appears in one of the lectures delivered by Lurie to his
Romantics class: "Usurp," he says, unpacking Wordsworth's meditation on
164# Tense Animals
Mont Blanc, "to take over entirely, is the perfective of usurp upon ; usurping
completes the act of usurping upon" (Coetzee 1999, 21). Later he expounds,
"The perfective, signifying an action carried through to its conclusion'
(71). The perfective evokes the usurpation of Africa by Europeans, and the
admixture of sovereign force and loving reason that rationalizes European
rights to the land, black labor, and the bodies of women and animals. Lurie's
desire for Melanie s "perfect" body is a condensed expression of the discourse
of human perfectibility underpinning empire (19). But the pivotal question
Coetzee arguably raises with the perfective tense is this: how to change the
imperial cultures and subjectivities that have been violently implanted in
South Africa, how to reroute their driving logics and introduce the "new"
into history on a biopolitical level?
In relation to two of the European cultures implanted in Africa, pastoral
and Romantic, consider Luries Romantic ideology, drawn from Blake, that
the disgraced father tells his daughter he has lived by: "Sooner murder an
infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires" (Coetzee 1999, 69). What
might Lurie s Romantic ideology look like in the perfective, followed through
to its ultimate conclusion? Coetzee supplies one answer with the allusions to
incest that litter his novel: even daughters, by this logic, would be sexual fair
game for their fathers. Lurie himself, stroking Lucy s foot while he reflects
on the fathers love he has felt for her, strangely queries "Has it been too
much, that love? . . . Has it pressed down on her? Has she given it a darker
reading?" (76). And if one reads Coetzee s allusions to incest allegorically, one
is given an image of the imperialist past screwing the future of South Africa,
preventing the emergence of the new.
To conjugate or tense romantic love differently, to write the conditions of
possibility of a future that doesn't simply reproduce the sins of the imperial
fathers, is arguably to torque it in the direction of the pastoral love exemplified
by Lucy in her surrender of white ownership of the land and of human perfect-
ibility. Romantic passion and pastoral compassion share the etymological root
of "pathos," after all, a capacity for feeling that, depending on how it is or isn't
realized, underpins sexual conquest, suffering, the possibility of sympathy,
the pathological or apathetic. (Jacqueline Rose examines an extraordinary
application brought before the South African TRC by a South Asian woman
confessing to apathy, one of the many "sins of omission" that was not rec-
ognized within the framework of the commission [2003].) Indeed as Lurie
composes an opera on Byrons life, his defense of romantic desire begins to
be overtaken by pastoral compassion as he hears the plaintive voices of those
lives marginalized or abandoned by a poet who was himself accused of incest:
his aging lover Teresa, his abandoned daughter. And in the coup de grâce
of the novels critique of Romanticism as European high culture, the opera
is opened to the "lament" of a dog and the lowly "plink-plonk" of a country
banjo (Coetzee 1999, 215, 184). Not only does Coetzee s novel in this way thema-
tize the potential hospitality of Romanticism, it unexpectedly protects what
David Clark describes in a different context as a "hospitality to romanticism"
by paradoxically privileging feeling over reason in the events that challenge
Luries Romantic ideology (2007, 163). The novel even hints that the culture of
Europe personified by Lurie is culpable not by virtue of being overly Romantic,
but for not being Romantic enough. By now Lurie s work at the Animal Welfare
Clinic has taken on an irrational, heartfelt tone: he shepherds the dead bodies
of dogs put down by Bev Shaw to the local incinerator, and "saves the honour
of corpses because there is no one else stupid enough to do it" (Coetzee 1999,
146). Lest readers get lulled into thinking that the imperial legacies personified
by Lurie can be redeemed in such short order, however, Coetzee shows him
continuing to indulge the old "rights of desire" when, on a return to the city, he
picks up a prostitute who is "younger even than Melanie" (194). His compas-
sion for dogs is never perfectly paralleled by a historical overcoming of the
white patriarchs incestuous desire to reproduce the same.
As for Lucy, she diverts the perfective force of rape away from the "conclu-
sions" that would seem to inevitably follow from it (interracial hatred, aban-
donment of farm life, abortion) and into a literal practice of pastoral care by
deciding to tend the seed violently planted in her. When Lucy tells Lurie she
is pregnant, he exclaims "I thought you took care of it" (Coetzee 1999, 197).
Lucy s retort: "I have taken care" (198). Again, their different inflections of
the word "care" gives glimpse into the species of pastoral counter-conduct
characterized by Lucy, one which turns the tense legacies of colonialism and
apartheid into the future imperfect conditions of possibility of living together
on the land.
REFERENCES
Bentham, Jeremy. 1996 [1789]. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. J.
H. Burns. New York: Oxford University Press.
Calarco, Matthew. 2007. Jamming the Anthropological Machine. In Giorgio Agamben :
Sovereignty and Life, eds. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli, 163-79. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Cavalieri, Paola. 2009. The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue on Perfectionism. In The Death of
the Animal: A Dialogue, 1-44. New York: Columbia University Press.
Clark, David. 2010. Towards a Prehistory of the Postanimal: Kant, Lévinas, and the Regard of
Brutes. Seminar paper, www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~dclark/documents/courses/767/
PrehistoryofthePostanimal%2ooberlin.pdf {accessed June 2011).
Derrida. Studies in Romanticism 46, no. 2: 161-83.

Coetzee, J. M. 1998. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2002. The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow), trans. David Wills.
Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2: 369-419.
Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1977-1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell, intro. Arnold Davidson. New
York: Picador.
Franklin, Sarah. 2007. Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Graham, Lucy Valerie. 2003. Reading the Unspeakable: Rape in J.M. Coetzee s Disgrace. Journal
of South African Studies 29, no. 2: 433-44.
Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet Posthumanities Series, no. 3. Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press.
McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest.
New York: Routledge.
Pandian, Anand. 2008. Pastoral Power in the Postcolony: On the Biopolitics of the Criminal
Animal in South India. Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 1: 85-117.
Ronell, Avital. 1989. The Telephone Booh Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
Rose, Jacqueline. 2003. Apathy and Accountability: The Challenge of South Africa's Truth and
Reconciliation Commission to the Intellectual in the Modern World. In On Not Being
Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World, 216-38. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Wenzell, Jennifer. 2000. lhe Pastoral Promise and the Political Imperative: The Plaasroman
Tradition in an Era of Land Reform. Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 1: 90-113.
Wolfe, Cary. 2003. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species and Posthumanist
Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Tense Animals On Other Species of Pastoral Power

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Tense Animals On Other Species of Pastoral Power

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Tense Animals: On Other Species of Pastoral Power

Author(s): Nicole Shukin

University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia

In Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy, the anthropologist Sarah Frank-

materially missing from the study of a technology of power that, according

Western philosophical thought to be placed in the vulnerable position of

his commitment to specificity, Foucault overlooks how this form of power

Reading Disgrace as a complex refraction of pastoral power will cul-

of pastoral writing as linked technologies of settler-colonialism in South

Pastoral Power as a Discourse

It is impossible to do justice to the density of Foucaulťs analysis of pastoral

matter of the sheep-fold. (130)

in order to save a single sheep? (129)

As Foucault notes, this "counting" of sheep is echoed in the machinery of

shepherd's activity. . . . Politics has disappeared" (2007, 144). To get at the

(se comporter) as an effect of a form of conduct (une conduite) as the action

of conducting or of conduction (conduction). (193)

This is the approach that leads to the Foucauldian definition of governmen-

Foucaulťs assumption concerning the "souls" that qualify as subjects of

conduct? Or is it possible, on the contrary, to explore how the government

The Grazing of Animals and "Men"

Anand Pandian similarly identifies a species blindspot in Foucault s analysis

animal conduct together: "these intersections between pastoral image and

Tense Animals: Reforming Land,

entanglement of land and conduct reveals is that in the (post)colonial con-

before turning to Disgrace . The indolence of settlers who abandoned colonial

vaguely connected to the historical task of bringing a new postapartheid

poets Wordsworth and Byron (13).

up the burden of historical responsibility where the commission dropped it

Melanie is young enough to be Luries daughter, and their brief affair

When Melanie lodges a complaint of sexual misconduct, Lurie is called

mal lovers" responsible for medically treating or mercifully dispensing death

as with Lucy s pastoralism- one that attempts to change a settler-colonial

Lucy s refusal to report her rape is suggestive of more than resistance to

Derrida. Studies in Romanticism 46, no. 2: 161-83.

You might also like