Deleuze on Anthro-Ornithology
From The Logic of Sense (1969):
In the series on Duality Deleuze introduces a division of orality, “to eat or to speak” (23). This division is a matter of anthropology figured through zoology insofar as “One is composed of animals, of beings or objects which either consume or are consumed” and “the other is composed of objects or of eminently symbolic characters” (emphasis added 26, 26-27). As elsewhere in psychoanalytic anthropologies, animal language seems to be merely imitative, whereas human language is symbolic.
This illuminates Deleuze’s citation of a three-stanza poem in which three respective figures appear as something “He thought he saw,” an “Elephant,” an “Albatross,” and an “Argument” (27). The albatross - a bird - sits between the grounded beast - elephant - and the Order “defined by logical attributes,” so the bird operates as a special animal figure, between animal and human (27).
The series on Orality continues this anthropological/zoological construction through ornithology. Drawing from Klein’s studies of infants, Deleuze constructs an anthropology around a certain idealizing, a “good object” which “is by nature a lost object,” naturally irrecoverable (191). The infant’s humanity is settled through a division of animal ideals, “The body of the infant is like a den full of introjected savage beasts which endeavor to snap up the good object; the good object, in turn, behaves in their presence like a pitiless bird of prey” (emphasis added 190). The height of an ideal or the force of idealization is related to a bird’s eye view, “Height, in fact, has a strange power of relation to depth. It seems, from the point of view of height, that depth turns, orients itself in a new manner, and spreads itself out: from a bird’s eye view, it is... a local orifice surrounded or hemmed in at the surface” (198).
From Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983):
For Deleuze the film The Birds by Hitchcock exemplifies the ornithological limiting/principling of the anthropology/zoology binary: “Take, for example, the movement of water, that of a bird in the distance, and that of a person on a boat: they are blended into a single perception, a peaceful whole of humanized Nature. But then the bird, an ordinary seagull, swoops down and wounds the person: the three fluxes are divided and become external to each other. The whole will be reformed, but it will have changed: it will have become the single consciousness or the perception of a whole of birds, testifying to an entirely bird-centered Nature: turned against Man in infinite anticipation. It will be redivided again when the birds attack, depending on the modes, places and victims of their attack. It will be reformed again to bring about a truce, when the human and the inhuman enter into an uncertain relationship” (20).
Again Hitchcock’s ornithology is invoked by Deleuze to emphasis a kind of crises of the anthropology/zoology binary: “In The Birds, the first gull which strikes the heroine is a demark, since it violently leaves the customary series which unites it to its species, to man and to Nature, But [sic] the thousands of birds, all species brought together, grasped in their preparations, in their attacks, in their moments of rest, are a symbol: these are not abstractions or metaphors, they are real birds, literally, but which present the inverted image of men’s relationships with Nature, and the naturalized image of men’s relationships between themselves” (204).
In the series on Duality Deleuze introduces a division of orality, “to eat or to speak” (23). This division is a matter of anthropology figured through zoology insofar as “One is composed of animals, of beings or objects which either consume or are consumed” and “the other is composed of objects or of eminently symbolic characters” (emphasis added 26, 26-27). As elsewhere in psychoanalytic anthropologies, animal language seems to be merely imitative, whereas human language is symbolic.
This illuminates Deleuze’s citation of a three-stanza poem in which three respective figures appear as something “He thought he saw,” an “Elephant,” an “Albatross,” and an “Argument” (27). The albatross - a bird - sits between the grounded beast - elephant - and the Order “defined by logical attributes,” so the bird operates as a special animal figure, between animal and human (27).
The series on Orality continues this anthropological/zoological construction through ornithology. Drawing from Klein’s studies of infants, Deleuze constructs an anthropology around a certain idealizing, a “good object” which “is by nature a lost object,” naturally irrecoverable (191). The infant’s humanity is settled through a division of animal ideals, “The body of the infant is like a den full of introjected savage beasts which endeavor to snap up the good object; the good object, in turn, behaves in their presence like a pitiless bird of prey” (emphasis added 190). The height of an ideal or the force of idealization is related to a bird’s eye view, “Height, in fact, has a strange power of relation to depth. It seems, from the point of view of height, that depth turns, orients itself in a new manner, and spreads itself out: from a bird’s eye view, it is... a local orifice surrounded or hemmed in at the surface” (198).
From Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983):
For Deleuze the film The Birds by Hitchcock exemplifies the ornithological limiting/principling of the anthropology/zoology binary: “Take, for example, the movement of water, that of a bird in the distance, and that of a person on a boat: they are blended into a single perception, a peaceful whole of humanized Nature. But then the bird, an ordinary seagull, swoops down and wounds the person: the three fluxes are divided and become external to each other. The whole will be reformed, but it will have changed: it will have become the single consciousness or the perception of a whole of birds, testifying to an entirely bird-centered Nature: turned against Man in infinite anticipation. It will be redivided again when the birds attack, depending on the modes, places and victims of their attack. It will be reformed again to bring about a truce, when the human and the inhuman enter into an uncertain relationship” (20).
Again Hitchcock’s ornithology is invoked by Deleuze to emphasis a kind of crises of the anthropology/zoology binary: “In The Birds, the first gull which strikes the heroine is a demark, since it violently leaves the customary series which unites it to its species, to man and to Nature, But [sic] the thousands of birds, all species brought together, grasped in their preparations, in their attacks, in their moments of rest, are a symbol: these are not abstractions or metaphors, they are real birds, literally, but which present the inverted image of men’s relationships with Nature, and the naturalized image of men’s relationships between themselves” (204).