• 1 Jean-François Mattéi, La Barbarie intérieure (Paris: PUF, 2004).
• 2 See the philosophical fortune of the concept of mimicry, from Descartes’ Discourse on the Method (1 (...)

1A topos of Western philosophy indexes animals’ irreducible alienation from the human condition on their lack of speech. In ancient times, their inarticulate cries provided the necessary analogy to designate non-Greeks as other, the adjective “Barbarian” assimilating foreign languages to incomprehensible birdcalls.1 To this day, the exclusion of animals from the sphere of logos remains one of the crucial questions addressed by philosophy and linguistics.2 In the work of some contemporary critics, however, the tenets of this relation to the animal “other” seem to have undergone a change in focus. With renewed insistence that difference is inextricably bound up in a sense of proximity, such writings have described animals not simply as “other,” but as our speechless others. This approach seems to find particularly fruitful ground where theory proposes to explore ways of seeing as constitutive of the discursive structures that we inhabit. Indeed, in shifting our attention from language to sight, we are reminded of the silent ways in which animals do relate to us: because, while they do not speak, they see like us, and look at us.

• 3 John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” in About Looking (1980, New York: Vintage International Editio (...)

2This visual encounter is at the heart of John Berger’s 1977 essay “Why look at animals?”3 Analysing our relationship to the animal, Berger reminds us of the almost uncanny recognition that arises when our gazes meet:

• 5 Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” 5.
• 6 “[A]voir des choses à dire n’est pas nécessairement parler et les animaux, c’est presque leur défin (...)
• 7 Bailly, Le Parti pris des animaux, 79.
• 8 Jacques Derrida, L’Animal que donc je suis (Paris: Galilée, 2006).
• 9 “L’animal nous regarde, et nous sommes nus devant lui. Et penser commence peut-être là.” Derrida, L (...)
• 10 The essay partly reframes the history of philosophy itself as an exercise in not acknowledging the (...)
• 11 This leads Derrida to coin the portmanteau “animot,” which homophonically stresses the intrinsic di (...)

3The animal’s gaze is unique in reminding humans of the distance that separates them from their surroundings, precisely because its compelling alterity cannot be compensated by verbal communication: “[b]etween two men the two abysses are, in principle, bridged by language.” Paradoxically, the animal’s silent gaze sets it apart from the rest of the natural world, as an entity that does have something to tell us: “The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas, are specifically addressed to man.”5 Jean-Christophe Bailly seems to reach a similar conclusion in Le Parti pris des animaux, when the very fact of animals’ speechlessness becomes a reason to listen to what is being said within their silence.6 The stakes of such an effort are not foreign to philosophy, quite the contrary. Like Berger, Bailly suggests that this silent message represents, not the opposite of logos, but a hidden side of it. Berger’s use of the word “secret” thus finds a resonance in the title of a chapter from Le Parti pris, “Les animaux sont des maîtres silencieux.”7 And in Derrida’s L’Animal que donc je suis,8 the experience of seeing oneself seen by an animal becomes the very locus from which a new form of thinking might emerge—a battleground on which contemporary philosophy is called upon to reinvent itself.9 Here again, the effort finally to acknowledge the animal gaze10 is bound up in the critical reappraisal of the way centuries of Western philosophy situated nonhuman living creatures with regard to logos. The essay explores the irreducible sense of otherness felt when caught in the stare of a cat, at the same time as it deconstructs the philosophical fallacy whereby “the Animal,” as a linguistic category in the singular, glosses over the multitudinous variety of animal existences the better to essentialise and unify, by contrast, its human other.11

• 12 See Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000); Donna J. Haraway, The Compan (...)
• 13 See Steve Baker, “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Animals, Representation, and Reality,” Animals & Soc (...)
• 14 Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, “The How and Why of Thinking with Animals,” in Daston and Mitman, (...)

4In exposing the intellectual subterfuge inherent in this naming of “the Animal” as other, Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction provided fertile theoretical ground for the academic approaches to nonhuman animals that were developing at the time, building on cross-contributions from humanities and natural sciences and in parallel to animal activism.12 Pushing back against the limitations that human exceptionalism imposes on our understanding of the world, critical animal studies take in their stride the unmaking of “the Animal” as a simplifying logocentric category, and aim to explore the epistemological potential of non-anthropocentric viewpoints.13 In questioning our use of logos in the face of animals they acknowledge the existence of nonhuman perspectives to be seen and thought with.14

• 15 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual Culture 1 no. (...)

5The critical relevance of animal gazes, and their capacity for challenging our logocentric dominion over all species, explain why scholars working in critical animal studies have been in a position to make more and more significant contributions to academic fields dedicated to theories of visuality and practices of seeing—from cultural and media studies to film. If those silently staring “animots” have something to teach us, it is reasonable to assume that their gaze will be critical to analysts of visual culture. And indeed, the attempt to apprehend animals’ ways of seeing is identified by W. J. T. Mitchell as one of the missions of visual culture studies. Delineating the ambitions of the field, the critic states: “Visual culture is the visual construction of the social, not just the social construction of vision. The question of visual nature is therefore a central and unavoidable issue, along with the role of animals as images and spectators.”15

• 16 Mitchell, “Showing Seeing,” 171.

6Animal vision is a crucial object of study in our efforts to understand visual culture, in that it points to areas of exploration beyond the rejection of the “naturalistic fallacy,” and the uncovering of the social and technological determinisms at play in vision. Far from resting with the assurance that vision is a cultural phenomenon, we must consider “the seeming naturalness of vision and visual imagery as a problem to be explored.” Questioning visual practices as they unfold within culture, we must conduct “an investigation of [vision in its] non-cultural dimensions, its pervasiveness as a sensory mechanism that operates in animal organisms all the way from the flea to the elephant.”16 Any account of visual culture will open up a dialogue with explorations of “visual nature.” In deconstructing the seeming self-evidence of our ways of seeing, we should not just use the tools afforded by the technological and political structuring of vision but recognise the critical potential that lies in the existence of other visual animals, phenomenologies of seeing, and visual habitats.

• 17 In that sense the word “nature” is not banned from our critical vocabulary altogether, but brought (...)
• 18 On the politics inherent in the distribution of the sensible, see Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du s (...)
• 19 Critical animal studies teach us this through their choices of subjects, which run as a continuum t (...)

7Most crucially perhaps, a renewed understanding of visual nature provides other means of apprehending visuality as a collective frame of experience. This might not be intuitive in a theoretical context that tends to associate real concern for the politics of visuality with the acknowledgement of the visual field as a cultural field. To reclaim nature for critical thinking, we must stop rejecting it as a conceptual scarecrow.17 The visual nature which Mitchell commends to our attention is not a convenient metaphor that legitimises a certain distribution of the visible18 in the name of biology. It does not step back from political and ethical analyses of visuality, the better to focus on the singularity of sensation and cognition. The animal gaze sheds light on “the visual construction of the social,” because animal life is intrinsically social, and because the shared visual worlds that it produces coexist and tangle with ours.19 Visual nature must therefore be envisaged in its commonality: in examining it we explore variants in visual apparatuses across species, and modes of visually being as species.

• 20 Stephen Rust: “from the beginning of filmmaking, nonhuman animals have played an integral and (unti (...)
• 21 In 2006 Derek Bousé commented on the “systematic exclusion” of the wildlife genre from academic inq (...)
• 22 Both John Corner and Brett Mills point out that analysts of the documentary genre have excluded nat (...)
• 23 Mills’s intervention in the Screen “Animals Dossier” intends to “point to the ways in which attenti (...)

8Mitchell’s complex understanding of visual nature as a range of phenomena entwined with cultures and societies, with techniques of representation, and the experience of encountering otherness, indicates that animals’ ways of seeing speak to the audio-visual world we have been building as a species. It points to their relevance with regard to a long and often debated practice of audio-visual representation—that which consists in “documenting” events and our fellow creatures, capturing images and sounds of the reality that surrounds us and editing them into footage that might help us make sense and retain something of it. “Visual nature” constitutes a particularly fruitful ground from which to look at the documentary mode, in part because of its embattled status within the critical tradition devoted to the genre. Though the production of factual footage of nonhuman animals dates back to the very beginning of film,20 such images and subjects were long excluded from any critical discourse on the documentary—a fact which contemporary critics have attempted to bring to light and explain.21 While the specific qualities of wildlife films have led some to contrast them with human-centred strands of the genre, and to challenge their generic status altogether,22 others have pointed to the ways in which such productions do open up avenues of reflection for documentary studies more generally.23

• 24 “The British tradition of natural history film has come closer to fulfilling Marey’s dream of ‘anim (...)
• 25 John Ellis, “Documentary and Truth on Television: The Crisis of 1999,” in New Challenges for Docume (...)
• 26 See Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991), and “The Voice of Documenta (...)
• 27 See Mills, “Television Wildlife Documentaries and Animals’ Right to Privacy,” Continuum 24, no. 2 ( (...)

9This makes particular sense in the case of wildlife programmes which, through changes brought in by technology and the media industry, tend to remain faithful to a British24 documentary tradition of bringing “natural history” to the small screen. This focus on “nature” as apprehended through a scientific lens means that wildlife documentaries present under a different light the sort of issues explored by academics and filmmakers as to the status of the documentary genre. Among other things, they resonate with the “logical impossibility” of documentaries as audio-visual constructs that “seek to reveal the real without mediation”.25 Their preoccupation with nonspeaking animals provides a perspective on the articulation and tension of documentary image and voice.26 Their representation of “nature” echoes documentary’s constant reappraisal and redefinition of what is undeniably “there,” the “real” to be caught on screen. Their status as popular TV formats provides insights into recent forays that other documentaries have needed to make in the context of a more entertainment-oriented, ratings-driven production culture, bringing up issues of the genre’s social function and future. And finally the status of wild animals as documentary subjects, the issue of their awareness or agency in front of our cameras,27 and our ability truly to document their lives all resonate with the ethics of the documentary as an exercise that brings together subjects behind and in front of the camera.

• 28 This represents a preoccupation for the documentary genre in general, and for wildlife films in par (...)
• 29 Bailly explicitly refers to the Sixth or Anthropocene extinction—the ongoing anthropogenic extincti (...)
• 30 For a reminder on critical reassessments of scientific distancing, which disqualifies other discurs (...)
• 31 This shared condition, which encompasses our capacity to suffer and die, constitutes the basis on w (...)
• 32 This shared organic condition is also the basis on which Donna Haraway defends the development of “ (...)

10Mitchell’s thesis states the intellectual risk involved in failing to also consider the animal as spectator. To Bailly and Berger, our obfuscation of its gaze raises doubts as to our ability to be with the other at all. In their essays, the lack of a visual encounter with the animal resonates with the disappearance of wildlife on a larger scale.28 Bailly’s book opens with a reminder of the quick extinction of species,29 while Berger’s analysis exposes the development of a rational, capitalised relationship to animals which ultimately absentified them. Zoos are an emblem of this disaster: zoo animals do not look back, because their gaze has lost all pragmatic import. The question, if we are to envisage the dialectical complexity of “visual nature,” is this: what do we make of our visual bond with animals beyond our species? How do we deal with the incompressible alterity that they bring into our visual experience? If we content ourselves with turning them into disciplined objects of scientific observation, we break down the back and forth movement of the gaze. By treating animals as natural objects, and remaining ourselves as impregnable, cultural subjects of the gaze, we miss the secret they keep for us.30 Mitchell’s insistence that we recognise the entanglement of “visual nature” with visual culture resonates with such concerns, partly because the threat of disappearance itself reminds us of the kinship that ties us to other animal species, sharing in the same organic condition,31 and depending on finite ecological milieux. In their strange familiarity, animals’ eyes remind us of the ultimate process of alteration that awaits all living things.32 The visual entanglement of their fates in ours gives another dimension to our own mortality. It turns our human narratives of irreducible singularity in the face of life and death, into explorations of the intricate patterns that bind all individual lives together.

• 33 Nigel Paterson and John Hurt, Planet Dinosaur (London: BBC Worldwide, 2011).
• 34 John Downer, Spy in the Wild (London: John Downer Productions and BBC Worldwide, 2016).
• 35 This is also a feature of animals’ presence in cinema, though series apprehend the issue from the a (...)
• 36 “‘[N]atural history film,’ the term still preferred in Britain today, was already commonly in use b (...)
• 37 Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo, “Biological Annihilation Via the Ongoing Sixth (...)

11The objects of visibility I propose to examine are two series produced by the BBC’s Natural History Unit: Planet Dinosaur33 and Spy in the Wild.34 Such nature documentaries offer a privileged point of entry to consider our visual encounter with animals. Investing spaces that are complementary to loci such as zoos and reserves, they embody the entanglements of technology, scientific knowledge, and raw sensory experience, that make up the visuality we live in. They constitute a point of focus, within our visual landscape, for the dialectics between visual culture and visual nature—and the ways this has been affected by technological innovation, most recently in the digital era.35 And like the long tradition of wildlife programmes they continue,36 they represent a specific apprehension of the epistemological interrogations, technological practices and ethical issues involved in documenting part of the world. While evidencing our interest in animals as natural “objects” of study, they take the encounter with them as an opportunity to question our status as visual subjects, both singular and collective. This we can infer from their efforts to immerse us within a natural world: Spy in the Wild, by placing us in the eye of animatronic creatures, and Planet Dinosaur, by building around us a lost world that speaks to the extinction event we are going through.37

• 38 The interface between critical animal studies and media or film studies has shown the extent to whi (...)
• 39 Since its creation in 1958, the BBC’s NHU has played a role in this by commissioning documentaries (...)
• 40 Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” 16. Similarly, Gregg Mitman’s analysis that motion picture technolo (...)
• 41 This feature of wildlife productions is also brought forth by commentators when it comes to situati (...)

13Nature documentaries of the kind produced by the Natural History Unit emblematise the increasingly privileged status of visual technologies in fulfilling our epistemological ambition to account for the natural realm.38 From such series to other loci of visual culture that make the findings of natural history accessible to the public—such as natural history museums and books on wildlife—technological innovation has become so central that it is often presented as the driving force behind attempts at representing nature.39 Commenting on Frédéric Rossif’s La Fête sauvage (1976), Berger reminds the reader that “each of these pictures lasted in real time less than three hundredths of a second, they are far beyond the capacity of the human eye.” To him this evidences a concern for animals as objects of interest within the field of “our ever-extending knowledge.”40 In exploring how we document animal life, we are not so much asking how we look at animals, but how ever-more sophisticated cameras look at them for us.41

• 42 This is central to the ambition of John Downer Productions, as their website states: “If you see an (...)

14Both Spy in the Wild and Planet Dinosaur make this interface a crucial point of their pitch, and present immersion as the visual frontier they intend to engage with. Spy in the Wild embraces the double demand of the closest possible intimacy with nature and the use of state-of-the-art technology by mounting some of its cameras onto animatronic creatures, to be sent as spies amongst animal populations. The trailer for BBC One exclusively focuses on this feature, by combining images of the “spy” creatures interacting with animals with a voiceover comment: “A team of spy creatures is on a mission to uncover the secret lives of wild animals. Their hidden cameras capture extraordinary behaviour. […] Maybe they’re more like us than we ever thought possible.” Playing in the background, The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” (1983) is instantly recognisable: the viewer anticipates the lyrics “I’ll be watching you.” The series’ commitment to working with the latest in tech and science42 is clearly embedded in the ambition to produce the most authentic form of immersion. This explains the effort to camouflage the cameras. Much emphasis is put on the challenge of having the creatures adopted by wildlife. In the first episode a pup has been designed so that he will be welcomed by a pack of wild dogs:

• 43 In highlighting this immersive use of technology the series seems to depart from the usual practice (...)

20In those passages, the play of shot-reverse shot between images of and from the spy creatures serves as a visual corollary for the interaction the series is seeking to elicit between wildlife and the machines. The crucial role this visual exchange is meant to play in enabling our feeling of immersion is made clear by the positioning of the cameras within the creatures’ eyes. The intention is not simply to capture images the sort of which we would not have seen, but to put us in a position visually to interact with the animals as their robotic homologues.43

• 44 For an analysis for the role played by the “Walking With subgenre” in renewing the conventions of n (...)
• 45 The list of recognisable features espoused by Planet Dinosaur actually includes some of the more pr (...)
• 46 W.J.T. Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998).
• 47 See Mills: “[W]hile factual television’s claims to the ‘truth’ have been repeatedly problematized a (...)
• 48 “[L]et us squarely face the dinosaurness of birds […]. When the Canada geese honk their way northwa (...)

21In its exploration of immersion, Planet Dinosaur brings the dialectics of nature and technology to a head. After the inaugural Walking With Dinosaurs (1999),44 it is one of the few programmes dedicated to dinosaurs as animals since the development of animatronics and computer-generated imagery (CGI) made it possible to present them along the generic lines of wildlife documentaries. The animated sequences focusing on predation, confrontation or offspring care, the voiceover commentary, and the alternation of narrative passages and summaries of the state of scientific research, all signal to the viewers that this is just another nature documentary series.45 By contrast, the use of the familiar syntax and iconography reminds an audience of non-paleontological experts and fans of Jurassic Park of enduring perceptions of dinosaurs as semi-mythical monsters, “terrible lizards,” according to the name Richard Owen gave them in 1842. In this, Planet Dinosaur works to counteract what Mitchell’s Last Dinosaur Book46 identified as a collective, unconscious resistance to the scientific findings accumulated since the “Dinosaur Renaissance” of the 1960s. In this it seeks to embrace the scientific outlook which has ensured the flagship status and enduring popularity of many natural documentary productions from the Natural History Unit.47 Focusing on palaeontological evidence indicating a close parentage between dinosaurs and birds, Mitchell quoted Bakker’s suggestion in The Dinosaur Heresies that we describe Canada geese as “migrating dinosaurs.”48 The graphics of Planet Dinosaur on the contrary intend to usher dinosaurs into a more familiar animal kingdom. The intro to the episodes indicates that “with the most extraordinary fossils […] and using the latest imaging technology, cutting edge research has allowed us to probe deeper and reveal more than ever before.” The statement accompanies a sampling of the series’ science-inspired images, complete with CT scans and molecular analyses of specimens.

• 49 The phenomenon that marked the end of the dinosaurs’ dominance among terrestrial vertebrates is kno (...)

22In that context, the immersive strategies made available by CGI animation—from close-ups on dinosaurs’ eyes to the production of a sense of scale—have a less sensationalist function than they might in fiction features. If technology was bound to play a major role in fleshing out extinct animals,49 its most explicit function here is to give life to what palaeontological research and imaging have to offer—and to immerse us in the ecosystems they depict.

• 50 Historians of the documentary genre differentiate between the classic “expositional” and “observati (...)
• 51 See especially Mills, “Television Wildlife Documentaries and Animals’ Right to Privacy.”

24By gearing the dialectics of nature and the machine towards immersion, both series overtly index their documentary ambition on the possibility of a visual encounter with the animal realm. In doing so they seem to look for a compromise between the sort of close, singular interactions sought out by “observational” documentary filmmaking50 and the call for non-interference more typical of natural history productions.51 Yet our ability to meet the other’s gaze depends on more than the generation of a visual world that will surround us in the viewing experience. It hinges on our posture as spectators, on the way we are invited visually to apprehend those surroundings. Yet, by immersing their viewers as spies, as would-be zoologists or palaeontologists, as admirers of technological prowess, both programmes risk missing the animal as subject, rather than object, of the gaze.

• 52 Such “behind the scenes” moments have actually become a regular feature of the Natural History Unit (...)
• 53 For illuminating critical analyses of such representational tropes of wildlife documentaries, and t (...)

26In Spy in the Wild, the encounter mostly falls through when the series’ obvious fascination with machines overrides the concern for animals. Rather than a medium through which the other might be reached, the animatronic creatures turn out to be the main focus of the series. This is confirmed by the progression of the series, the finale of which is dedicated to the animatronics designed for the production.52 Other episodes use a smaller proportion of footage from the creatures than of the creatures themselves. While viewers were promised a companionship with the machine that would immerse us in nature, the sequence of episodes ultimately invites them to focus on the robots that humans built instead. In the process, the possibility of any visual reciprocity is lost. The visual setup of the whole series was intended to rely on non-interference and actual interaction between animals and animatronics. In fact, the footage used is overwhelmingly produced by non-animatronic, human-operated cameras. And the creatures’ very status as “spies,” though presented in playful fashion, points to the aggression and power-play implied by their presence within the pack. What Spy in the Wild achieves is anything but a technological actualisation of a “fly on the wall” documentary approach. Another sign of this would be that, while the observational approach would normally aim to capture something of the documentary subject’s individuality, such a sense of individuality is extended much more clearly to the animatronic creatures themselves than to the animals on film. Viewers are meant to become invested in the adventures of each “spy.” But the animal subjects themselves are presented in the manner classically derived from natural history’s taxonomic approach, whereby species are examined one at a time and each animal filmed for its representative status – to the extent that footage of different individuals might routinely be edited together as if it were showing only one. 53The viewer is not truly introduced to what could be an animal viewpoint; indeed, she is rather invited to marvel at how convincing our decoys look and thus fail to acknowledge the violence inherent in our voyeurism.

• 54 See interventions such as biologist and filmmaker Jeff Corwin’s, in the LA Times: “The fifth extinc (...)
• 55 See Mills, “Television Wildlife Documentaries and Animals’ Right to Privacy,” and “Towards a Theory (...)

27The incapacity for the other to look back is immediately evident in the case of dinosaurs, which have been extinct for 66 million years. This choice of subject ties in with the visual treatment of contemporary wildlife: in a context when the 6^th massive extinction event has become a matter of public awareness, the reference to dinosaurs has taken a new meaning, for their fate was sealed by the 5^th.54 This is all the more relevant to filmmakers working on such wildlife documentary programmes as Planet Dinosaur, as the productions of the Natural History Unit normally combine educational and civic ambitions by developing a conservationist or preservationist message.55 Of course the makers of a series on dinosaurs would be hard pressed to advocate for the preservation of their subjects. Yet the overall episodic structure and the narrative arc completed in the last minutes of the finale do foreground the idea of extinction. Though the title “The Great Survivors” might seem deceptive at first, it antiphrastically brings to mind the notion of the dinosaurs’ final demise, to which the closing minutes of this last episode are indeed devoted. The voiceover narrates:

• 56 Donna J. Haraway, Staying With The Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham [NC]: Duke UP, 20 (...)

29Yet the memento mori with which we are presented here makes for far more comfortable viewing than a true confrontation with our contemporaries, and what their fragile presence might tell us. The focus on animals long extinct sets on a metaphysical plane what could or should be a matter of pragmatics and ethics: encouraged to make “kin”56 across millennia, it is as if we can disregard the creatures that are dying out around us. Using a similar documentary framework, and thereby putting on a par creatures that never shared ecosystems with us and contemporary animals, suggests that our position with regard to both is the same. The military and colonial rhetoric both fosters a sense of proximity with a previous animal “Empire,” and retrospectively naturalises human will-to-power and its terrifyingly destructive potential by comparing its effects to those of “an unprecedented extraterrestrial impact” (“The Great Survivors,” 28’08). But the Cretaceous is not the Anthropocene: we know that while dinosaurs never wielded weapons of mass destruction, today’s process of extinction does lay responsibility at our door.

• 57 On the use of science in wildlife documentaries, and its compatibility or incompatibility with pres (...)

30The focus on animals for whose extinction no one can be held accountable resonates in a disturbing fashion with the manner in which Spy in the Wild plays with its running metaphor of information warfare, glossing over vanishing ecosystems, the human species’ aggressive takeover of the Earth, and its utter disregard for most forms of life. When it comes to filming animals, treating science as detached from any pragmatic or ethical stakes seems to turn it into an instrument of destruction by omission.57 By looking at animals as our ontological other, as reminders that we too are finite, we miss our encounter with them as ethical others, kin towards which we have a responsibility.

• 58 On the correlation of the scientific and the disciplinary gaze, see Michel Foucault, Surveiller et (...)
• 59 Horak convincingly argues that contemporary impulses to document nature seem to transfer any preser (...)
• 60 On the ideological underpinnings of natural history, and taxonomy as a disciplinary gesture, see Ti (...)
• 61 Hence Mills’ critique of the unquestioned influence exerted by natural history and its taxonomic ap (...)

31Part of the implication in this is that we would rather discipline58 animals as visual objects—including when it comes to collecting images of dying species59—than truly expose ourselves to them as visual subjects. The subjugation of fauna to the scientific gaze precludes any visual interaction: it becomes an object of study, and we the agency by whom the visual field will be organised. This reproduces within visuality the asymmetry whereby only we have access to logos: the aim of the disciplinary gaze is to capture animals into fields of discourse in which they have no part. One such field is natural history, built on the practice of observing, naming, and classifying organisms in their living environment.60 By popularising natural history, both series contribute to ordering the world in anthropocentric fashion.61 Another form of discourse, though not similarly scientific in its ambition, equally appropriates its objects to anthropocentric modes of making sense. It ties in with the series’ production of narratives that always circle back to the human species. This is what transpires from the pitch of Spy in the Wild. The last sentence of the trailer, “Maybe they’re more like us than we ever thought possible,” subsumes all curiosity for other ways of being under the overriding need for anthropocentric or anthropomorphic assimilation. The series as a whole makes good on that promise: before the finale, each episode centres on a “human” trait discovered in wildlife: “Love,” “Intelligence,” “Friendship,” “Mischief.” In this process of appropriation, the potential of the animal’s gaze qua other is eroded. It seems that what we were looking for in seeking them out was little more than a lifeless reflective surface, a mirror in which to catch a reflection of ourselves.

• 62 On the constant companionship of paleoartistry and illustration with paleontological research, see (...)

33The most immediate way in which wildlife documentary series might contribute to altering anthropocentric vision precisely has to do with their interest in the disciplinary eye of natural history. In both cases, the intention seems to have been that technological sophistication serve the purposes of science in expanding viewers’ knowledge of the natural world. Each in their own way, however, the series confirm that visual discipline can never be enforced in a way that will entirely account for visual practices within a certain field. In this instance, the reliance on an “objective” eye—that of the camera—fails to rationalise the objects under study. Rather, it points to what any lens leaves to the imagination. This is especially the case in Planet Dinosaur, the graphics of which point to a sea-change in our representation of prehistoric creatures. This contrast, though based on empirical data, emphasizes the degree to which our scientific understanding of dinosaurs interacts with forms of visual creativity beyond the photographing of fossils.62 The episode entitled “Feathered dragons” focuses on the confirmation by recent research that a number of dinosaur species were covered in feathers. But while the adjective of the title deconstructs an outdated image of reptile-like giants, the noun keeps the viewer firmly rooted in the realm of fantasy from which that image emerged, in the absence of more empirical information. In the same episode, the relative distance between images and commentary reminds the viewer of that same interplay of scientific observation and visual licence. At one point she is told that a similarity in pigment structures gave a key to one of the great mysteries of palaeontological research: that of colour, and indeed the Sinornithosaurus on screen is brownish-red, as the science indicates (“Feathered dragons,” 23’25-24’10). Earlier, while the commentary stated “We don’t know for sure if such a huge dinosaur like Gigantoraptor would have or need feathers,” (“Feathered dragons,” 14’04-14’10), the production team seems to have made an imaginative judgement call, providing the giants with wings. Throughout the series, reminders of what palaeontologists do not know indicate that the eye cannot just be disciplined: that imagination is vital to knowledge, and that the very organicity of research and technology hinges on this interplay between observation and speculation.

• 63 Mitchell, “Showing Seeing,” 171.

34What this fictionalisation of the objective eye suggests is that nature documentaries are perfectly poised to show how the “seeming naturalness”63 of the visual questions some assumptions about visual culture. Spy in the Wild and Planet Dinosaur point to the existence of other phenomenologies of seeing and produce the possibility of an “altered” vision, mainly by redefining the companionship between our eyes and the camera. This first depends on the decentering of the anthropomorphic eye, whose centrality and command over the visual field heavily relies on the uniqueness and mechanical sophistication of the camera lens to embody its own supposed independence from the limitations of physiology. The use that both series make of visual technologies challenges the notion that such mechanical extensions of ourselves only serve to bolster the powers of human vision or secure our position as visual subjects. In this dialectic of visual culture and nature the human experience of vision is troubled: we find ourselves altered, obliged to imagine other ways of seeing.

• 64 On a similarly interesting failure to produce and appropriate a chimpanzee’s view of the world, see (...)

39In their reluctance simply to act as visual tools, and their tendency to take on a life of their own as eyes, cameras trouble the spectator’s vision: they decentre her gaze from without by creating a visual world in which others become subjects. This effect is compounded by a process of decentering from within. The viewer’s companionship with the camera eye denies the assumption that her eyes must be perfected by their technological extensions, that by assimilating to that more sophisticated visual apparatus, we can hope to command a better view of the world. This deconstructs the sovereignty of the anthropomorphic eye by challenging its cultural perfectibility through technology. In the same way that animatronic creatures uncannily blur the ontological frontier between biological and artificial life forms, the immersive viewpoints that cameras offer us alter our vision rather than simply enhance it. The clearest sign of this, in Spy in the Wild, lies in the footage that is least used: the one the creatures shot. The few snippets that can be seen suggest why little of it might have been usable: as soon as the creatures come “alive,” the interaction with their animal peers makes for rapid, unpredictable movements that make the images hard to process. This is the case, for instance, when spy baby alligator is carried in its “mother’s” mouth to the nearest river, or when a chimpanzee licks the camera of spy bush baby.64

• 65 On the unassimilable phenomenology of animal vision, see Simon Ings, A Natural History of Seeing (L (...)

40In many ways therefore, the creatures do not provide us with an insider’s look, but with footage that is blurred, imperfectly framed at best, a challenge to our visual system. Such footage deconstructs the human ambition of achieving technological and epistemological mastery over images, and over the other via images. Animal viewpoints represent a phenomenological other: we will never experience what it is to see “like” that.65 In this the technological eye conspires with “visual nature” to alter us: our gaze is troubled, not by a questioning of its seeming self-evidence, but by the haunting presence of other unique, similarly evident and effortless ways of seeing.

• 66 “[A]t the heart of the documentary project is the necessity for animals to be seen.” Mills, “Televi (...)

44By focusing on natural history programmes we can therefore hope to learn from the deployment of nonhuman gazes at the crossroads of different cultural phenomena and fields of study. In bringing together the “necessity for the animal to be seen”66 and the possibility for them to look back, this paper looked to critical animal studies to understand how the representation of nonhuman animals may tell something about the ways in which human animals relate to the world and represent it to themselves. In this instance, the examination of two wildlife series suggested that critical animal studies can shed light on some of the contemporary issues facing the documentary genre.

• 67 On the social function of the documentary genre see Corner, The Art of Record; Nichols, Introductio (...)
• 68 “In crass contrast to the insatiable fascination that viewers bring to the experience of viewing wi (...)

45Despite their idiosyncrasy among factual audio-visual productions—or maybe because of it—natural history programmes do resonate with some of the questions raised throughout the history of the documentary genre. This is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the ethical conundrum they raise through their treatment of animals’ gazes. The ability for documentary subjects to be shown as subjects, to appear as willing agents in the process of representation, partly hinges on their ability to look back: to see that they are being seen, and consent to it. This in turn ties in with a political and pragmatic question at the heart of documentary filmmaking: that of how viewers might respond to the reality represented to them, and what they might be called to do in light of what they have seen.67 In the cases of Spy in the Wild and Planet Dinosaur, the choice of subject puts these ethical and pragmatic challenges under a different light. Ethically, the fact that animals can look at their human counterparts is both undeniable, as Derrida and Berger would remind us, and difficult to truly acknowledge on film. After centuries of philosophical and epistemological unwillingness to consider what animals’ gazes might mean, it is not surprising to see that our use of technology and media legitimises erasing them—for instance, when “non-invasive” filming methods are backed up by military rhetoric, and supposed respect for the other’s space and privacy made subservient to a colonial need to appropriate their image. Politically and pragmatically, the focus on wildlife raises the matter of extinction,68 and how documentary material might communicate its urgency to audiences: there again, the issue could hardly be more pressing, or vital to those involved.

• 69 In that sense natural history productions deviate from the model envisaged by documentary scholars (...)

46As objects that are factual, science-oriented, expositional in tone and ecologically aware, but also meant for popular consumption, commercial in nature, and ratings-driven, natural history programmes do speak to the issues raised by documentaries and provide some insights as to the future of the genre. They offer a window into the world of television, and the manner in which the pervasive mode of entertainment affects the representation of factual material, including in the face of the direst, most threatening issues. Their approach also points to the persistence of privileged discourses of knowledge in the way we relate to companion species and leads us to consider different avenues for approaching nonhuman creatures as subjects. In the end it may be that such programmes do bring their viewers into contact with alterity—albeit accidentally—and encourage them to see and feel beyond themselves: by presenting them with bodies that are not only and familiarly cultural, social, and human,69 but whose troubling, stubborn visual presence and perception signal human animals’ connection with creatures beyond their own species.