Speculative Taxidermy

172FOLLOWING MATERIALITY

of image production and consumption, running very popular abattoir
tours.
Interestingly, both processes, the photographic and the industrial, en-
gage in unprecedented animal renderings intrinsic to the politics of the
mechanized visualities of animal capital in the early modern age. Render-
ing is here used in two ways: the first entails an act of mimesis intended as
the copying of an object through manual or mechanical reproduction; the
second refers to a process of industrial recycling of animal materials^23 —a
technologically operated form of transubstantiation. This double enten-
dre of rendering well serves Shukin’s ontologization of animal matter and
representation, one in which the materiality of animal bodies ceases to
disappear in the depths of discourses and instead functions as an irreduc-
ible agent in the problematization of representation itself.^24
In reference to the object of film stock more specifically, Shukin con-
vincingly argues that “in its celluloid base and its see-through gelatin
coating—it is possible to discern the ‘two-layered mimesis’ through which
modern film simultaneously encrypted a sympathetic and a pathological
relationship to animal life.”^25 Thus, in the workings of rendering, we can
identify the essentialist, capitalist complicity that objectifies animals, not
simply through representational tropes but through an undeniable incor-
poration of animal materiality intrinsic to the mechanized technologies
of the early modern age. Modern rendering thus emerges as a precursor
of later anthropogenic conditions in which causality and the aesthetic di-
mension cooperate in indissoluble entanglements. This results in a weird
loop in which the politics of coexistence inevitably appear contingent and
contradictory.^26
This aesthetic and material contingency lies at the core of the charged
instability that underlines speculative taxidermy objects, in which the re-
calcitrant material indexicality of animal skin challenges the viewer on
the grounds that that which is being presented is no longer an animal in
the classical/objective sense of the term, and neither is it simply the en-
counter between artist and animal, but the result of human/animal rela-
tions defined by technocapitalist economies of the Anthropocene. This
will become central to the elaboration of a biopolitical theory of mimesis
in which symbolic and physical technologies of reproduction are indis-
solubly intertwined in taxidermy.^27 Thus, speculative taxidermy is
charged on the representational and material level—or carnal level—