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Steinbrecher, Aline. "It’s Just an Act! Dogs as Actors in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Europe." Animal History in the Modern City: Exploring Liminality. By Clemens Wischermann, Aline Steinbrecher and Philip Howell. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 127–144. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 29 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350054066.0013>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 29 September 2021, 04:21 UTC. Copyright © Clemens Wischermann, Aline Steinbrecher, Philip Howell and Contributors, 2019 2019. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. Animal History in the Modern City It’s Just an Act! 8 It’s Just an Act! Dogs as Actors in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Europe Aline Steinbrecher Introduction The model of the liminal animal is a perfectly apt one for the city dogs of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, an inevitable result of the diversity of roles available in human–dog communities. Dogs were, alternatively, prestige objects and status symbols, draught animals, guardians and protectors, assistance animals, pedagogic examples and also companions, arguably substitutes for children, friends, family or nature itself. Dogs typically lived and moved in intermediate areas that could not easily be ascribed to either the human or the animal worlds, to culture or nature, wildness or domesticity, or to the public and private spheres. The figure of the liminal animal is not of course mobilized to reify these well-worn dichotomies; to the contrary, it is used to point to the many transitions and interfaces that exist, and which become particularly obvious in the mapping of human–dog relationships in the modern city. By its very nature an animal that ignores boundaries and crosses thresholds, the history of the urban dog contributes to a more accurate conceptualization of urban modernity. This chapter begins by laying out the many different if interrelated forms of liminality that dogs exemplified, focusing on the boundaries that they constantly crossed in the modern city, and the roles that they were expected to perform. This is not intended to give the impression that dogs had a single role; rather, it should be emphasized that dogs were constantly moving between various functions and characters. To continue the theatrical metaphor, dogs were versatile and accomplished actors – sometimes heroes, sometimes villains, sometimes comic stooges, sometimes reduced to bit-parts, mere stage and street furniture, but sometimes the leading players, as we shall see. In the modern city, these various roles were played out alongside and along with human beings, most obviously as family members and partners in working relationships. It is this relationship with human beings that is primarily responsible for turning humble dogs into iconic liminal animals. This relationship should not be understood as fixed, however; rather it should be seen as something that has been created and is constantly subject to change – Chris Pearson is right to argue that dogs are not ‘static’ but change within relationships, adapting to both their counterparts Animal History in the Modern City.indb 127 17-05-2018 17:20:27 128 Animal History in the Modern City and protagonists and their respective settings.1 The coupling of the actual canine and human worlds becomes particularly clear in practices such as the stage performances that are the substantive focus of this chapter. The presence of the dog on the theatrical stage exemplifies the liminality of all urban dogs, but this chapter is principally dedicated to the proposition that dogs as stage actors help illuminate a special aspect of canine liminality. Dogs as liminal animals in the modern city This chapter also follows the argument that history isco-created , here by human beings and dogs working together. This draws on the concept of relational agency attributed to Donna Haraway and others. The decisive argument here is that the partners in a relation never precede that relationship. Instead, everything that exists is the result of it (becoming with).2 The implications for the relations between humans and (other) animals are spelt out in Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto (2003), the story of evolution that she tells there deposing human beings of their privileged position, their singularity and the supposedly unique ability to take action.3 Dogs, not to mention other non-human companions, should be recognized as actively constructing the world they share with human beings, even to the extent that they contribute to and help constitute what we call ‘culture’. According to Haraway, human beings simply cannot be comprehended independent of the animal others with whom they have entered into a symbiotic relationship. Instead, human beings and animals are best seen as shaping each other in a complex state of togetherness.4 This reciprocal shaping has an influence on the theoretical conceptualization of the human–animal relationship, which Haraway describes as follows: ‘Living with animals, inhabiting their/our story, trying to tell the truth about relationship, co-habiting an active history: that is the work of companion species, for whom “the relation” is the smallest possible unit of analysis.’5 This last postulate will be pursued in this chapter, and, accordingly, it will speak of a history that has been co-created by human beings and animals, as partners in an interactive and reciprocal relationship,6 and indeed within networks of actors and actor environments.7 We can perhaps best illustrate this proposition, as Haraway does, by turning to the history of the dog and its relationship with humans and the modern city. If we accept the argument that animals such as dogs help create their world, it also follows that they depart from the roles that are allotted to them by human beings, and become liminal animals accordingly. In their manifold performances, both on stage and off, dogs did not always conform to the cultural scripts provided for them, which made them vulnerable to being represented as out of place. As famously liminal animals they continually cross from one state to another in the context of the modern city. We can think first of all of dogs traversing or transgressing the human–animal boundary and the one that separates, or attempts to separate, nature and culture.8 There is also the problematic boundary between public and private spheres.9 Canine city dwellers appeared alternatively as stray ownerless dogs and companion animals, public animals (as described by Bärbel Edel) in the first instance, and private animals Animal History in the Modern City.indb 128 17-05-2018 17:20:27 It’s Just an Act! 129 in the home in the second.10 In the public sphere of the city, dogs were increasingly subjected to rigid regulations, as potential troublemakers, and unaccompanied dogs were increasingly excluded from public space. But the ideal of the dog in the private space of the home was always just that, and dogs themselves typically disregarded the spatial and cultural distinction between inside/outside.11 Dogs that live inside the home – ‘pet’ dogs – have increasingly been subjected to very restrictive legislation, while it was often suggested that other dogs were ‘pests’ to be completely ‘eliminated’. Dogs were thus always caught on the threshold between useful/harmful, defined according to human norms and needs.12 Through their intrusion into and incorporation with human social and cultural environments, dogs become liminal through being both real and imaginary actors – images and representations of dogs clearly contribute to their treatment, but it should not be forgotten that the real dog lies behind the imaginary dog.13 Here too dogs like other animals help shape our worlds, including the cultural practices that we often take to be exclusively human achievements. This will become clear in the subsequent discussion of performing dog ‘acts’ and their reception in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe – along with the practices of dog training on which they depended. Performing dogs were exemplary liminal animals because the real or genuine animal was inextricably enmeshed in the production of meaning, being material-semiotic figures. Dogs like these, capable of performing trained stunts and tricks, were even called ‘artistic dogs’, that is, ‘artistes’ in their own right, especially where they could display convincing facsimiles of human cultural techniques such as reading or speaking or even solving mathematical problems. Here, especially, dogs became liminal animals because they entertainingly overstepped the boundary between the human and non-human. But they were not liminal animals because they were neither animal nor human: they were so because they were part of a human– animal ‘double act’, a professional working partnership between members of different species. The real ‘trick’ was not a dog (say) who could apparently speak or read, but the development of relationship between the human and the animal that allowed them to work together, a kind of ‘natural magic’, as one of the eighteenth century’s most famous dog trainers called it. Liminal animal actors Animal studies has not neglected the significance of performing animals, including those to be found on the stage – but the importance of cultural scripts and practices is the most emphatic theme. Esther Köring, for instance, has described those animals to be found in circuses and zoos, as ‘pragmatiere’ (‘pragmatic animals’), defining them in relation to (human) cultural practices (‘in bezug auf kulturelle praktiken’).14 But such ‘practices’ include slaughterhouses, laboratory animals and rituals, so that the concept, useful as it is, risks ignoring the massive differences between animal performances, and the ways that these have changed over time. The variations in animal acts, as well as the contexts in which, say, dogs performed as ‘pragmatic animals’, were extremely broad, as we shall see.
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