It is a Fur, Fur Better Thing that

I Do . . . : Transcending Paradigmatic

Anthropocentrism Through the

Digital Rhetoric of Furry Fandom

Kimberly MerendaENG 6903

Spring 2014The twenty-first century is when everything changes. And you’ve got to be ready.—Torchwood, opening narration

Anthropocentrism as a comprehensive and collective cognitive dissonance configures not only the preeminence of the human but also the critical estrangement of humankind from the earth and from nonhuman earthen entities.

Epistemologically supporting the conceptual severing of humankind from nonhuman entities is a dichotomous mode of discernment through which beings, things, conditions, and concepts are defined by their construed disparity. Difference within this epistemic framework is not neutral but instead conveys the rigid demarcation of superior/inferior.

This model is exemplified in polaristic pairings such as human/animal and human/nature wherein the human is construed as preeminent and presiding over contrastively subordinate and subjugated nonhuman beings and things.

Anthropocentrism—defined as the centering and privileging of humankind and the human agenda—is is theorized as a social paradigm not only crucially informing our human ways of knowing, acting, and being, but also as the common denominator of intersecting social, ecological, and planetary crises.

Arriving only on the seventh day, man stands apart, and above–his proximity to God measured by his distance from nature.—Evelyn Fox Keller

Anthropocentrism is not only a locus of unjust, annihilative human advantage, it also diminishes and destitutes the human through an elevation that is also separation.

Self-expatriated within anthropocentric paradigm, human epistemology and ontology are truncated—the human is reduced, restricted, a bonsai of a being cut off from communion, connection, and covenant with the nonhuman world.

Supremacy and Dominion, Exile and Isolation: It’s Lonely at the Center

Anthropocentric paradigm tells us that we are not human, that we are not part of the natural world, that animals and nature exist and have value only as various human consumables. This paradigm is personally cataclysmic to the human and potentially conclusively cataclysmic to the planet.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.—Genesis 1:25-27, King James Bible

We currently inhabit what is designated the age of the Anthropocene—a term literally meaning “age of man,” coined in the 1980s by biologist Eugene F. Stoermer, and used to delineate an epoch in which the present-day and prospective impact of humankind upon the earth portends catastrophic annihilation. As humans, we both cause and constitute the age of the Anthropocene, and the Anthropocene emerges directly from the confluence—the perfect storm—of anthropocentric principle and praxis.

The presumption of planetary entitlement sanctioned by anthropocentrism disaffiliates the human body and being from the nonhuman things and beings over which the human has assumed dominion. Anthropocentrically detached from the inhuman rabble, the human is denominated as self-evident and absolute; the human is conceived of not as part and participant in a planetary collective, but rather as a feudal lord reigning with devastating tyranny and yet somehow outside and independent of the fiefdom.

The ramifications of the fallacious conception of humankind as both planetary tyrant and exempt from planetwide consequence are not rhetorical but rather calamitous.

Paradigmatic Anthropocentrism: Change or Die

It’s the end of the world as we know it.It’s the end of the world as we know it.It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.—R.E.M.

The Internet both creates and constitutes a shift in human ways of knowing, being, and acting.

The Internet: Paradigm Game-Changer!

Stretching high,I inhale the metamorphosis of todayand exhale every yesterday that lingers.—Ruth Calder Murphy

I suppose the main argument goes like this: We are no longer subject to Darwinian natural selection. Exponentially powerful technologies are transforming our sphere of possibilities. What it means to be human is up for grabs. We have taken the reigns [sic] of natural selection to become the chief agents of the evolutionary process.—Jason Silva

Shifting Human Body and Being: TechnoEvo

Transanthropocentrism: A shift across, through, and beyond human exceptionalism that neither excludes nor marginalizes the human.

The Internet is both transanthropocentric conduit and catalyst—it is a force and facilitator of human transformation.

Serving as a sort of epistemological elastic, functioning in opening our ontologies and unboxing our ethics, the Internet is more than a realm of revised/revisable rhetoric; the Internet is rhetoric re-envisioned, and this rhetorical re-envisagement reflects and reiterates the shifting human paradigm.

If anthropocentrism is de facto conceptual censorship, the Internet is both revelator and revelation, providing new forum, new format for transition, for transcendence.

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.—William Shakespeare

By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks—language tool use, social behavior, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures. Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture.—Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”

Breaching the Human/Animal Binary

And then there were Furries. And Internet Furry Fandom . . .

We're just trying to change the world here, people!—Bill Nye 

Furries are humans who variously represent themselves as nonhuman animals. Furry fandom refers to a largely Internet-based community/culture of furry-identified human beings. Furry identity blurs the binary between not only human/nonhuman animal, but also between anthropomorphism (attaching construed human characteristics to nonhuman entities) and zoomorphism (attaching construed nonhuman animal characteristics to human-identified beings). Furry fandom can be conceptualized as challenging the supposed binaries of our present and fundamentally anthropocentric paradigm, deconstructing the constructed human/animal dichotomy, reconfiguring the supposed separation and superiority of the human, and postulating human-nonhuman communion, collectivity, and connection.

 Epitomizing digital rhetoric as a pivotal form and fuel of paradigmatic shift, the Internet propels and perpetuates the culture of furry fandom.

We didn’t stay in the caves, we haven’t stayed on the planet, and soon with the biotech revolution, we won’t stay within the limitations of biology. Technology is the embodiment of human imagination, it is the manifestation of our mental models.  It is our extended self, our silicon nervous system.—Jason Silva