De-scribing the Human with Sean Cubitt

In his chapter “Drawing Animals,” Sean Cubbit discusses the constitutive function that drawing serves in delineating the human/animal binary. Cubitt first differentiates human and animal drawing by arguing that although an animal marking its territory could be described as “drawing a boundary or a map,” this is not the same as human mapping, which creates a drawing that “can be lifted, either mentally or physically, from its environment…it occupies a space other than the surface on which it is marked” (29). He says that human drawing “marks a moment of becoming,” instilling our creations with a space and time separated from its worldly correlate. Cubbit considers this unique abstractive (and extractive) aspect of human drawing to be significant in revealing our ability to grant dimensionality to our drawings, thus affecting our perceptions of what is rendered and, implicitly, our ability to alter it.

Because he limits himself to a rather reductive notion of “drawing” rather than human inscriptions in general, Cubitt fails to account for the degree to which alternate forms of human communication, such as orality and phonetic writing, have drastically altered notions of the human/animal binary in ways that cannot be bracketed through his narrow analysis of visual representations. His focus on drawing seems to neglect the kind of ecological thinking that he champions.

Early humans’ initial abstractions of other animals undoubtedly occurred in a multi-sensory manner. Spotting a far off wooly mammoth for the first time, a Paleolthic hominid may have re-presented this encounter in a variety of ways (verbal, tactile, visual, or combination) but it would be difficult to grant primary causation to any one of these signs in determining the degree to which it exclusively altered conceptions of the thing (Wooly Mammoth) to which it referred. While I agree with Cubitt that these representations of the world necessarily exclude its “unruly and unthinkable complexity of detail” and create “an object of knowledge, and…control” in its place, I do not think that we can grant exclusive significance to visual gesture in initiating and reinforcing this process. A prehistoric grunt seems just as capable of circumscribing something as “distinct from its activities and its environments” as a picture.

            Bridging off of this narrow view of human representations of animals, Cubitt argues that recent trends in digital cinema (“the mechanization of drawing”) have resulted in an increased distance of the abstracted image (CGI) from the animal it portrays.  Due to what Cubitt describes as the loss of the “auratic trace that marks the presence of a making hand,” we have extracted gesture from our ability to make meaning, an inseparable pair for animal drawing (33).

In this case, Cubitt is describing a correlated shift in technology and culture that does not actually exist. His essential claim that “the mechanization of drawing works by fragmenting movement into discrete cells,” neglects the mechanizations that occur in other forms of inscription. In shifting from orality to phonetic writing, a similar fragmentation of movement occurred in the way that previously complete morphemes were broken up into meaningless phonemes, or “discrete cells.” With drawing, Cubitt believes that there is some kind of natural, human form of inscription that is somehow corrupted by the technology of CGI. What he fails to realize is that previous drawing techniques (new shading techniques, complex geometries, etc.) are technologies as well.

In Paper Machine, Jacques Derrida notes the fallacy of privileging the presence of physicality within an inscription because (as is usually the case with Derrida) we are “always already” instantiated within a system of segmented units of communication that has preceded us. Discussing the differences between computer and pen mediated writing, Derrida writes that “[h]aving recourse to the typewriter or computer doesn’t bypass the hand” because “hands are not only in hands” (21). By claiming that the separation of the physical body from the act of inscribing diminishes human agency, Cubitt fails to account for the ways in which other technologies delimit what constitutes an act of inscription (meaningful gesture) in the first place.

Overall, Cubitt seems to be offering little more than a general analysis of the function of language within human thought and perception, writing that the image “creates an image not of the phenomenon but of the idea of the phenomenon” (36). Thus, it is quite ironic when he writes that “the economy” is “not visible, but can be visualized,” yet he fails to mention that the phrase itself (“the economy”) has already allowed us to abstract it from its various manifestations in reality.