FOLLOWING MATERIALITY171on the reversal of the logistics of animal disassembly through the work-
ing of endless cycles of visuality of technological replication.^21 These
two seemingly unrelated moving lines, one disassembling animal bodies
and the other assembling car parts, appear aligned in a complex mimetic
relation specific to the technological/visual interfacing of the turn of the
nineteenth century.
The structural parallelism between the slaughterhouse disassembly
lines and automobile part assembly is also aligned to the technological
cinematic image by time-motion economies—as the photographic frame,
spliced and repeated in the filmic reel, first disassembles the animal body
into a multitude of minutely different replicas of itself and then reassembles
them in the production of the moving, realistic illusion. As Shukin notes,
animals hoisted onto overhead tracks were put into motion like the pho-
tographic frames of cinematic technology.^22 And just like in Muybridge’s
zoopraxiscope, which was developed at around the same time, the abat-
toirs capitalized on intermingling and increasingly popular new modes
FIGURE 5.3 Eadweard Muybridge, 1887, Animal Locomotion: An Electro-photographic
Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott),
plate 704.