48RECONFIGURING ANIMAL SKINStask is to remove the sedimented strata of knowledge for the purpose
of revealing the hidden connections between individuals, groups, texts,
discourses, and institutions. This defining phase is known as negative
work. In the task of dismantling the metanarrativization of taxidermy,
negative work constitutes the first and essential step toward a substantial
reconsideration of the newly acquired visibility gained by the emergence
of the practice in contemporary art. This undoing enables the recovery of
statements, underlining discursive formations, and systems of disper-
sions.^22 At stake in these recoveries is the possibility to unveil human/
animal relations that may otherwise be forever lost and that, in some
ways, could help us to better understand our contemporary relationships
with taxidermy and, most importantly, with living animals.
Departing from the hermeneutics of classical historiography and its
structuralist linage, archaeology is concerned with the possibility of de-
scribing discontinuous surfaces of discourses for the purpose of denying
any absolute truth or meaning; it rejects conceptions of continuous evo-
lution of thought and accumulation of knowledge driven by progress.^23
However, archaeology simultaneously acknowledges the existence of and
capitalizes upon the traceability of regularities, relations, continuities,
and totalities.^24 The archaeological level of inquiry is therefore essentially
concerned with the point of historical possibility for something to hap-
pen or emerge—the cultural and material conditions that enable practices
and discourses to form and intermingle.^25 Its ultimate scope, therefore, is
to describe epistemic systems of dispersions that essentially exist in op-
position to the totalizing approaches of traditional historiographical
methodologies.^26
Adopting elements of archaeological analysis,^27 we can see the impor-
tance of the emergence of the French term taxidermie as an essentially
defining moment in the histories of modern taxidermy. It is not therefore
a matter of identifying a first example of taxidermy, but one of situating a
moment of agential rupture. The word taxidermie essentially emerged as
an interface between the natural world and the institutional bodies that
seek to organize it, and in so doing it influenced both. Ta x i d e r m i e can be
thus considered as what Foucault called a statement, or a term which
opens up to itself a residual existence in the field of memory, or in the
materiality of manuscripts, books, or any other form of recording;... like