See the previous installment of this essay series for an extended reading of that therblig’s form.
In this way, it forms an inversion of Gilbreths’ symbol, which signifies the threat—for the accumulation of capital—of a body brought to rest, no longer animated or working but still and immobile when set against the backdrop of the motions judged to be productive.
Oxana Timofeeva, The History of Animals: A Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2018), 156.
Andrei Platonov, “Among Animals and Plants” (1936), The New Yorker, October 15, 2007 →.
Aaron Schuster, The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (MIT Press, 2016), 39.
I’ve argued this in my book Shard Cinema (Repeater Books, 2017).
Platonov, “Among Animals and Plants.”
Alfred Hayes, “Into the Streets May First,” New Masses, May 1934 →.
Once Mickey Mouse loses control and tries to murder the broom when it does its job too well and refuses to quit, its splinters reform into a multitude, a raw display of animated inanimate proletarian power marching in lockstep, as if on parade themselves.
See Part 2 of this essay series →.
That is, as opposed to real property (land) or establishments associated with it (such as buildings).
This sense of the “inanimate” plays a key role in the history of the deodand: first, insofar as it allows the law to grant the specificity of a vessel that is “animated” by labor, and second, when the deodand runs into a material world increasingly full of decidedly animated nonanimal property (i.e., engines, trains, factory machinery) that sits uncomfortably in its nexus of blame and agency.
The victim must equally be cleared from express fault of having brought it upon themself, whether through willful action or undue carelessness, as seen in Edward Coke’s definition, paraphrased in William Nelson’s 1725 An Abridgment of the Common Law: the deodand “causeth the untimely death of a reasonable Creature, without the Will and Default of himself.” If so judged, the property in question must then be Deo dandum, or given over to God, as the term itself prescribes. And as God is notoriously difficult to locate, the king steps in as His earthly proxy to receive the forfeited object or creature. The owner, who cannot be proven to have intentionally authored the fatal chain of events, is still not considered guilty or personally liable for the death. Still, they are nevertheless required to “give over” the unruly property, whether physically surrendering the rogue item itself or, more commonly, paying to the crown the monetary value assessed in court.
In this way, even though exculpated of guilt or formal retribution, the owner nevertheless exits the situation socially worse than he entered it, no longer an owner, out the equivalent in cash, or newly indebted for a sum that cannot be paid to stand in for a tool that ruined itself in the process of its murderous accident.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ontology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010), 10.
The history of judgement against objects is fascinating, especially given that it should not be read purely as the evidence of an enchanted world now lost, as the 1976 case of United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls indicates.
William Pietz, “Death of the Deodand: Accursed Objects and the Money Value of Human Life,” Res, no. 31 (1997): 97.
E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (William Heinemann, 1906), 186.
J. J. Finkelstein, “The Ox that Gored,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 71, no. 2 (1981): 76.
Sir Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1898), 474.
See Finkelstein, who uses this phrase for the title of his extensive 1981 study, “The Ox That Gored.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law (Macmillan, 1882), 9.
Colin Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton University Press, 2011), 181.
Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog, 147.
Sylviane Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York University Press, 2014), 72–96.
The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Semiotext(e), 2009).
Spyros Papapetros, “Malicious Houses,” Grey Room, no. 20 (2005): 8.
Papapetros, “Malicious Houses,” 8. I would note here also that this sort of transfer and lethal mimicry isn’t unique to this moment: Papapetros identifies its precedence in moments of “parallels” earlier in the film, and, more generally, as one of the preoccupations of an entire orbit of thinking about forms of animacy.
Papapetros, “Malicious Houses,” 8.
My use of the word “articulation” here is guided by Stuart Hall’s conception of the term, which describes what can historically be bound together but is neither a natural unity nor a coherent whole. So in the framework I’ve sketched throughout, we might read the real epistemic promise of what can be detected during moments of paralysis as a slow recognition of just such “articulation,” and of the ability to detect the joints that reveal it to be a composite. It is in those intervals that one might detect how parts are, in Hall’s words, “connected to each other, but through a specific linkage, that can be broken” (Stuart Hall, “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall by Larry Grossberg and Others,” in Essential Essays, vol. 1, Foundations of Cultural Studies, Duke University, 2019, 235). It is here that the promise of de-paralysis begins, asking how to develop, foster, and defend what moments of paralysis generate: new circumstances and arrangements that prevent the parts from simply being restored into an articulated arrangement that always ends up hiding its links and treating the assemblage as normal and natural, as given and beyond the reach of intervention, as just the way things are.
Ann Larabee, “A Brief History of Terrorism in the United States,” Knowledge, Technology, & Policy 16, no. 1 (2003): 24.
For a study of this, see David O. Stowell, Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877 (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Pietz writes, “One was the civilization of such debt, in the original sense of the word ‘civilization’ the transfer of social controversies that became justiciable cases from the criminal law of the state to the civil law of private individuals. The other was the institutional production of a new kind of (legally) immortal person: the modern limited liability corporation.” Pietz, “Death of the Deodand,” 106.