170FOLLOWING MATERIALITYstructures could be imposed.^18 Both media provided parameters through
which the human could self-construct, self-observe, and simultaneously
be observed, allowing to study and be studied, seemingly, in the most
specularly and objectifying of ways.^19
Rather than a transition from material world to the representational
register of film and photography, it was a migration from painting to
photography and film that characterized the new modalities of animal
representation in the modern age. This representational animal migra-
tion was forced upon animal visibility by the persistence of classical sov-
ereignty; the new sovereignty was enabled by the flickering beam of light
shining through the mechanical objectivity of the projector. Filmic
images of animals appeared new and fresh in comparison to those pro-
duced by classical painting, yet they structurally reenacted and rein-
forced old panoptic relations. What is amiss in Berger’s and Lippit’s view
that animals disappeared from everyday life and simultaneously ap-
peared in film and photography is the all-important emergence of a pre-
anthropogenic loop involving materiality and aesthetics.
THE ANIMAL AUTOMATON: ASSEMBLY,
DISASSEMBLY, AND FILMDuring the nineteenth century, predominant modalities governing
human/animal relations were structured by technocapitalist economies
of visibility. Nicole Shukin’s cultural materialist engagement with repre-
sentation in Animal Capital enables a further problematization of sover-
eignty and filmic image consumption to emerge in this context. Shukin
identifies intrinsic, structural parallelisms and overlays between the
mechanized development of the slaughterhouse, the birth of the automo-
bile industry, and the rise in popularity of the cinematic apparatus at the
end of the Victorian period.^20 The author configures Henry Ford’s assem-
bly lines as a reversal of the dynamics at play in the abattoirs’ disassembly
lines—both, she argues, structurally resembled the sequential running
of celluloid frames (gelatin produced from the synthesis of animal tissue)
in front of the projector’s lamp. The latter appears “mimetically premised”