Weisman’s book The World Without Us offers a vision of what would happen if humanity (and only humanity) were suddenly to disappear from the earth—natural diversity would bloom again, with nature gradually colonizing human artefacts. We, the humans, are here reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing our own absence. As Lacan pointed out, this is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to be reduced to a gaze observing the world in the condition of the subject’s non-existence—like the fantasy of witnessing the act of one’s own conception, parental copulation, or the act of witnessing one’s own burial, like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. “The world without us” is thus fantasy at its purest: witnessing the Earth itself regaining its pre-castrated state of innocence, before we humans spoiled it in our hubris. The irony is that the most obvious example is the catastrophe at Chernobyl: flourishing nature has taken over the disintegrating debris of the nearby city of Pripyat, which had to be abandoned. A good counterpoint to such fantasizing, which relies on the notion of Nature as a balanced and harmonious cycle derailed by human intervention, is the thesis of an environmental scientist that, while one cannot be sure of the ultimate result of humanity’s interventions in the geosphere, one thing is certain: if humanity were to stop its immense industrial activity abruptly and let nature retake its balanced course, the result would be total breakdown, an unimaginable catastrophe. “Nature” on Earth is already “adapted” to human intervention to such an extent—human “pollution” being already deeply implicated in the shaky and fragile equilibrium of “natural” reproduction on Earth—that its cessation would cause a cataclysmic imbalance.
We find exactly the same structure at the very heart of utopia. In “Frenzy,” the aforementioned novella from Her Body Knows, David Grossman does for jealousy in literature what Luis Buñuel did for it in cinema with his El—he produces a masterpiece displaying the basic fantasmatic coordinates of the notion. In jealousy, the subject creates/imagines a paradise (a utopia of full jouissance) from which he is excluded. The same definition applies to what one can call political jealousy, from anti-Semitic fantasies about the excessive enjoyment of the Jews to Christian fundamentalists’ fantasies about the weird sexual practices of gays and lesbians. As Klaus Theweleit has pointed out, it is all too easy to read such phenomena as mere “projections”: jealousy can be quite real and well-founded, other people can and often do have a much more intense sexual life than the jealous subject—a fact which, as Lacan remarked, does not make jealousy any less pathological. And does this also not tell us something about the position of the spectator in cinema? Is she not, by definition, a jealous subject, excluding herself from the utopia observed on screen? We find this stance even where we would never expect it. Gérard Wajcman begins his memorable essay on “the animals that treat us badly” by recounting his experience of a trip to an African wilderness park:
A whole team of tourists traverses the savannah back and forth, arrives on the scene with an engine backfiring and a dust cloud looming to plant themselves twenty meters from three big bad lions . . . and nothing. As if we didn’t exist. Such was my definitive experience with the animal world. A thorough disenchantment. An encounter of the zero type. We do not share animal space. We invade their territory or we cross over it, but we never meet them. The zoo, the circus (less and less), state parks (more and more), hunting grounds, television channels consecrated to animals, protection societies, nature museums, animal houses of every kind, we multiply the places, the occasions, and the modes of encounter. Humanity passes its time watching the animals. We’ve invented all kinds of devices expressly for the purpose. We never grow tired of it. No doubt they represent for us a perfect world. Something strange, different from our own, from our uncertain screwed up chaotic mess of a world. All of which makes the animal world look that much better. Sometimes it seems so foreign that we stand before their perfection and we are stupefied and stricken mute, and despite our sincere wishes, we wonder whether we could ever be like them, ever become so marvelous a society as have the ants and the penguins, where everyone has his place, where everyone is in his place, and where everyone knows and does exactly as he must so that everything can keep on in its proper place, so that society can perpetuate itself, unchanged, indefinitely the same and infinitely perfect. We’ve had a hard time of it, finding our places. After the disasters of the 20th century the animal societies seem to have become the ideal.1
The fact that the animals ignore the intruding tourists is crucial—it points towards a double movement of de-realization that characterizes utopian fantasies: the scene presented is a fantasy (even if it “really happened,” as is the case here—what makes it into a fantasy is the libidinal investment that determines its meaning); we (the participants) de-realize ourselves, reducing ourselves to a pure de-substantialized gaze ignored by the objects of the gaze—as if we are not part of the reality we observe (despite disturbing the wildlife park’s rhythm with our vehicles), but rather a spectral presence unseen by living beings—we are reduced to spectral entities observing “the world without us.” As external observers of the paradise barred to us, we assume the same position as the unfortunate Stella Dallas in the final scene of the Hollywood melodrama of the same name: from outside the big house where the ceremony is in progress, Stella watches through the window the marriage of her daughter to her rich suitor—the paradise of a happy rich family from which she is excluded.
This utopia accounts for two further phenomena of contemporary culture: first, the popularity of Darwinist reductions of human societies to animal ones, with their explanations of human achievements in terms of evolutionary adaptation. Pop-scientific texts abound in journals and reviews reporting on how scientists have succeeded in explaining apparently crazy or useless human behavior as grounded in adaptive strategies. (Why such useless luxury? To impress the potential sexual partner with our ability to afford such excess, and so on and so forth.) In this way, the scientists suggest that
we might yet have a chance to orient ourselves, to be led over and above our animality. If the subject has a nasty habit of fooling himself all the time, we must bear in mind that nature is never mistaken. Salvation will come in our being animal—body, genes, neurons, and all the rest of it. So whispers the cognitivist in the politicians’ ears to help them find their way. Follow the body, more monkey business!2
Such “reports” thus represent dreams of how we might counteract the growing dysfunctionalization and reflexivity of our “postmodern”n societies, in which relying on inherited traditions to provide models for behavior becomes increasingly untenable: animals, by contrast, do not need any coaching, they just do it . . .
Second, we can also explain why we obviously find it so pleasurable to watch endless animal documentaries on specialized channels (Nature, Animal Kingdom, National Geographic): they provide a glimpse into a utopian world where no language or training are needed, in other words, into a “harmonious society” (as they put it today in China) in which everyone spontaneously knows his or her role:
Man is a denatured animal. We are animals sick with language. And how sometimes we long for a cure. But just shutting up won’t do it. You can’t just wish your way into animality. So it is then, as a matter of consolation, that we watch the animal channels and marvel at a world untamed by language. The animals get us to hear a voice of pure silence. Nostalgia for the fish life. Humanity seems to have been hit by the [Jacques] Cousteau syndrome.3
This is why the case of National Geographic (the journal even more than the TV channel) is so interesting: although it combines reports on both nature and human societies, its trick essentially is to treat a human society (whether a tribe in the middle of the Sahara or a small town in the USA) as an animal community in which things somehow work, where “everyone has his place, where everyone is in his place, and where everyone knows and does exactly as he must so that everything can keep on in its proper place.” And, since the basic inconsistency constitutive of human being as such is the discord (the “impossibility”) of the sexual relationship, no wonder that one of the key elements in our fascination with the animal kingdom is represented by its perfectly regulated mating rituals—animals do not need to worry themselves with all the complex
