Live and 'Make' Live: The (Re)animations of Topsy the Elephant

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‘Live and ‘Make’ Live: The (Re)animations of Topsy the Elephant’ antiTHESIS 23 (2013): pp. 37-53. *please cite from published version*

Topsy, a four-ton Indian elephant captured and brought to the United States where she lived

in captivity for twenty-eight years, was one of Coney Island’s popular attractions.1 Topsy

belonged to Coney Island’s Luna Park, a famous urban tourist destination in New York which

served as “the prototype for amusement parks across the United States.”2 After allegedly

killing three men – the last of which was a drunken trainer who fed her a lit cigarette – park

creators Fred Thompson and Skip Dundy decided she had to be killed.3 Upon opposition

from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), park officials decided

against a public hanging and instead “commissioned the Edison Manufacturing Company to

build an apparatus for the electrocution of the animal.”4 At the time, Thomas Edison was

involved in a campaign referred to as the ‘War of Currents’ against George Westinghouse’s

alternating current system, which delivered electricity at a higher voltage and across greater

distances than Edison’s own direct current systems. In his attempt to “discredit the AC

system” and prove that it was in fact “fatally dangerous,” Edison had staged a “series of

public events in which he and his associates electrocuted stray dogs and cats” with 1000

volts of AC current.5 According to The Economist, Edison and associates had been

experimenting with the electrocution of domestic and farm animals for years, and “the

opportunity to fry an elephant was a godsend.”6 Topsy’s public execution took place on a

“dreary January morning” in 1903 – the same year Luna Park opened - in the presence of an

estimated 1500 spectators.7 Topsy was fed carrots laced with cyanide, fitted with “copper-

lined sandals,” equipped with electrodes and electrocuted with 6000 volts of electricity.8 The

event was filmed. Edison entitled this one-minute ‘actuality’ film Electrocuting an Elephant,

which remains in circulation today. As Akira Lippit describes, the film shows Topsy being “led

in shackles to a clearing,” a scene which “suggests not so much the destruction of an animal

as the execution of a criminal.”9 In the film, Topsy suddenly stiffens and smoke can be seen

to erupt from her feet; she then “falls forward to her right” and “quivers on the ground as life

and movement” leave her body.”10

This paper discusses the possibility of interpreting this event through, or with, the

term ‘live.’ This highly charged polysemous term allows us to posit and maintain a

conceptually unified account of this historical event and its effects on visual culture, as well

as the political considerations that inevitably arise. The execution of the elephant and the

film reveal a curious circularity: there is a discernible continuity between power over life and

the power to put to death, but there is also the power to ‘make live,’ in a double sense.

Topsy was subject to a power of death continuous with the power over life to which she had

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been subjected, insofar as she was held in captivity and made to work and perform. She was

executed through being made ‘live’; that is, connected to a source of electric current, to a

technicity that also functions to preserve, prolong and even revive life beyond what is

deemed its so-called ‘natural’ span. This is the ‘first’ animation of the animal. Additionally,

the spectacle was made to ‘live’ on through the apparatus of film, a relatively recent

technology at the time – one that Thomas Edison also played a prominent role in developing.

That is, the term ‘live’ can also refer to or be used as an injunction, command, pardon or

plea that invokes a political structure – you shall live! – to live in the sense of survive. Insofar

as the film Electrocuting an Elephant constitutes a kind of ‘living on,’ it demonstrates the

possibility of inscription, of retaining and repeating the visual spectacle. It is a persistent and

interminable survival through the power or capacity for re-animation. As such, we could term

this ‘making live’ a second animation of the elephant. Finally, this paper concludes with a

brief discussion of biopolitics and biopower, contemporary analyses of which, in the work of

Giorgio Agamben specifically, tend to occlude non-human animal life. In light of these

discussions, however, it will be argued that animal life should indeed be conceptualized as

subject(ed) to biopower and biopolitics, as non-human animal life is also exposed to a power

over life, of death, and of survival.

CONEY ISLAND: WHERE “AMERICA LEARNED HOW TO PLAY”

Showman Paul Boyton opened America’s first modern amusement park in Chicago in 1894.

While “amusement areas” existed throughout the United States by the late 19th century,

these “centered on natural features such as beaches and picnic groves to attract

customers.”11 Boyton’s park was the first to “rely solely on mechanical attractions.”12

However, the modern amusement park would retain elements of both ‘natural’ and man-

made attractions, and in fact relies on this conjunction. After his initial success, Boyton

opened Sea Lion Park on Coney Island in New York the next year. Sea Lion Park was

fenced and enclosed, involved multiple rides on top of his sea lion “aquatic road show,”13

and was the first park to charge a single admission fee. By 1902, however, Boyton was

undergoing substantial financial strain and the park was leased to Fred Thompson and Skip

Dundy, who re-opened it as Luna Park.14 Topsy was one of Coney Island’s live animal

performers and labourers, a menagerie that also included camels, ostriches, alligators,

monkeys, pigs and goats.15 As Eliza Darling writes, Coney Island was known for its ability to

“make a profit by turning the artefact of wild, weird and dangerous nature into the

penultimate urban spectacle.”16 According to historian Edo McCullough, Coney Island was

where “America learned how to play.”17 From its inception, the modern amusement park

incorporated elements of the dangerous, fantastical and mystical, which could be said to

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pertain to both technological advancements – the mechanical water rides and America’s first

looped roller coaster- and exoticized animal performers on display. As such, it is perhaps

unsurprising that the electrocution of Topsy the elephant occurred at Coney Island. As one

of America’s first modern amusement parks, it was an ideal location for producing the public

spectacle of an elephant electrocution, as it offered an experience of wild, ungovernable

nature from a safe and distanced vantage point. This ‘ungovernable nature,’ however,

pertains not only to the condemned elephant but also to electricity itself.

ANIMATION I: DEATH THROUGH MAKING ‘LIVE’

As Charles Combs writes, by the 1880s investigators were experimenting with “increasingly

high voltages of electrical charge to close the gap between dying and deadness,” and the

electrocution of animals had already become a public attraction.18 The SPCA was founded in

the mid-1860’s and conducted their own tests on stray dogs and unwanted animals in the

effort to discover a more humane method of killing. At the time of Topsy’s execution in 1903,

the “new moment of death was defined and under operation at 300 AC volts” for small

dogs.19 From the onset, concerns for cruelty prevention were linked to discourses of

regulation and management, and scientific animal experimentation did not contradict the

idea or pursuit of animal welfare. Moreover, the eventual adoption of electrocution as

preferred form of criminal execution owes its development, in part, to a history of scientific

experimentation on non-human life. As Maury Klein contends, the evolving attitudes toward

animal pain and suffering, embodied institutionally in the SPCA, fed “a growing desire to find

more humane ways of killing both doomed criminals and unwanted animals.”20

In 1886, responding to a botched hanging, New York governor David Bennett Hill

commissioned a group to examine the most humane means to execute condemned

criminals. The ‘Death Commission’ included attorney Elbridge Gerry (who served as counsel

for the SPCA), lawyer Matthew Hale, and Dr. Alfred Southwick, a dentist who experimented

on animals “to determine how much current was needed to kill them.”21 The commissioners

recommended electrocution as preferred mode of execution, and cited at length reports by

Dr. George Fell, a SPCA member who conducted a series of animal experimental

electrocutions.22 By mid-1888, death by electrocution replaced hanging in the state of New

York. However, legislature was passed without any specification as to the type, quantity and

duration of current that would be sufficient for execution.23 Drawing on a series of

experiments (the scientific validity of which is disputed) on dogs, calves and horses which

claimed to demonstrate that “alternating current was superior to direct current in its life-

destroying properties,” New York State finally endorsed alternating current as “the best

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means of electrocuting criminals.”24 However, as Metzger explains, the Death Commission’s

recommendation was also driven by the desire to find a distinctly American mode of

execution; the commission wanted to “uphold New York’s reputation for progressiveness”

and to “separate the United States from its medieval, autocratic, cousin-states in Europe.”25

Electricity was seen to provide the possibility of a new method of execution “that drew on

America’s strengths: technological prowess, innovation, willingness to discard old ways.”26

Indeed, prior methods of execution were deemed antithetical to America’s “self-image of a

civilized and technologically advanced society” – rather, they were “an obstacle to cultural

perfection.”27 Of course, as is well known, New York’s first execution by electric chair in 1890

was a complete failure despite the widespread expectation that electrocution would “triumph”

and “the vision of a clean use of violence in the name of the people”28 would come to fruition.

A response to both humanitarian concerns and the desire for public order and a more

predictable, clean and enlightened form of capital punishment, the history of the

development of the electric chair thus involves animal figures and the societal solutions to

these marginal bodies: unwanted or stray animals, animals subject to experimental

electrocution and public demonstrations. As Metzger writes, “hundreds of animals were

sacrificed on the ‘altar of science,” and the animals used were of increasingly “higher order”;

according to secondary sources, “even though calves and large dogs approximated the

weight of a man, what was needed was a creature almost human”29 - and so primates were

used in final testing. Criminality and marginalized animality share a common history of

subjection to the power of death.

In a sense, Topsy embodied both. Individualized and given a proper name as

entertainer and park attraction, the subsequent criminalization of Topsy was an integral

component in the spectacle of her public death. Unsurprisingly, the primary objection of the

SPCA to Luna Park’s original plan to hang Topsy was the mode of execution and not the

execution itself. The criminalization of Topsy, made possible in part by her individualization,

was an anthropomorphic attempt at justifying a death that did not require justification. That

is, the attempt was made to hold accountable, liable, make guilty and thus punishable – a

being already excluded from rights and recognition. However, attributing criminality and

deviance to the elephant produced a spectacle that proved to be “almost more popular, and

undoubtedly more dramatic, than the display of the living animal had been.”30 In the figure of

Topsy, criminalization and bestialization converge. Moreover, Akira Lippit argues that the

“projection of guilt” onto the condemned animal “made the progression from animal to

human electrocution possible.”31 In other words, for Lippit an “ethical phantasm [lies] at the

base of animal and human murder” which “binds the two modes of electric killing.”32 The

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criminalization of the animal and the animalization of the criminal are related processes in

making life guilty and exposed to a power of death.

Lisa Cartwright writes that “an uncontrollable, man-killing beast was a much more

exciting attraction than a docile animal.”33 That is, the elephant, whose “popularity increased

dramatically” after killing three men34, embodied less domesticated nature, artificially framed

and rendered simply a sanitized visual object, and came to signify instead an ungovernable,

untamed, wild nature, dangerous and unpredictable. Embodying this unruly and incalculable

nature, criminalization produced a natural being that could be both objectified and

subjectified, a being over which man has the right and power to let live or kill. In her study of

Coney Island’s ecology and economies of pleasure, Darling argues that “external nature,

whether in effigy or in the flesh, blends so seamlessly into the fabric of the carnival because

it constitutes its own heterotopia,” and which belongs at the carnival because it stimulates

“the complex sense of pleasure that flows uneasily from the juxtaposition of…order and

chaos.”35 To extend Darling’s analyses, we could argue that the execution of Topsy rendered

visible the ambiguous place of nature during a period of urbanization. The event exposed the

continuity between the powers of regulation, management and death, and the ambiguity of

the natural object subjected to these processes. The amusement park was the ideal space in

which to enact this spectacle, being a place in which the norms of society could be ‘played’

with, where participants could “indulge in a brief moment of irrational madness” and fleetingly

inhabit a frivolous, fantastical world which, as Darling argues, is “outside of, yet vital to, the

realm of normative human experience.”36

The inscrutable nature of electricity has enthralled the American public from as far

back as 1745, with the invention of the Leyden Jar.37 According to Metzger, electricity had an

“erotic quality” and was “conceived of as an elixir- mysterious, powerful, unpredictable.”38 In

the eighteenth century, John Wesley “referred to electricity as ‘the soul of the universe’

because it had a mysterious strength.”39 Electricity was perceived to contain an enigmatic

life-giving force and was sometimes seen as proximate to the life-force of living organisms.

In 1891 The North American Review wrote that in the use of electricity in plant growth

experimentation, “electricity itself appears to be converted to vitality.”40The author concludes:

“of all forms of natural force electricity bears the closest relation to that mysterious form of it

which we call life.”41 The possibility for understanding and taming electricity was tantamount

to the possibility of understanding the force of life itself. Connected to a source of electrical

current, Topsy was put to death by being made ‘live’ - her criminalized, ungovernable nature

subdued by the man-made, yet furtive forces of electricity. While electricity retained its

mystique and had “the aura of the supernatural”, it also “signified the boundless genius of

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man.”42 The ability to put to death through electrocution seemed to signal the human

capacity “to understand apparently supernatural forces, to conquer them, and to use them

for positive, culturally beneficial effects.”43 Topsy, embodying untameable wild nature and

completely subject to the whims of her owners and their desire to turn a profit, was thus put

to death by a force that professed to demonstrate man’s technological mastery over the

mysteries of life but which nonetheless continued to resist total domestication.44 As

mentioned above, it is this convergence of intrigue and technical prowess, unruliness and

order, which provided the basis for the success and allure of Coney Island’s parks.

According to Cartwright, the electrocution of Topsy and Edison’s film documents

“public fascination with scientific technology and its capacity to determine the course of life

and death in living beings.”45 As noted above, the experimentation with the effects of

electricity on non-human animal bodies was discernible in the public sphere by the 1880s.

Electricity brings to the self-movement and activity of ‘natural’ life an external kinetic force,

pulsation or charge, in short an animation. Insofar as it acts upon an animate organism,

however, this animation is always already a reanimation. It imposes involuntary movement

based on an understanding of flesh or body as a scientific object of knowledge: body as

conductive substance, and the possibilities or thresholds of such bodies. Not only do the

conductive capacities of the body become subject to experimentation, but this ‘flesh’ does

not reside solely in a certain animal or living being. That is, the life of both human and animal

becomes subject to a technicity that can prolong, augment, or revive life and destroy it. Flesh

or body as conductivity is thus common. Death by electrocution thus (re)animates the living

body to the point of inactivity or the impossibility of self-movement. As Lippit writes, “Edison’s

current, his electrical charge, destroys and reanimates the elephant.”46 Movement is forced

out of the condemned body in order to see the opposite: immobilization, still life or the

presence of death. Combs contends that electricity “produced a new body for visual culture –

a kind of convulsive and lively body whose return to stillness could signify cessation.”47

Electricity as invisible force of movement allows for the visualization of death as the

cessation of movement. Thus it can be said to bring the invisible to visibility, to illuminate the

enigmatic forces of life and death and render them visually perceptible. This putting to death

through ‘making live’ as such consists in driving movement to its limit: to destroy by

(re)animation, to empty the body of dynamism and locomotion through the intensification of

animation itself. However, the extent to which this cessation of movement in fact signifies

‘real’ death poses a problem in the case of electrocution and, as we shall see, in film.

Furthermore, Thomas Edison’s film, as the capture of movement, constitutes a second

animation or re-animation of the condemned elephant. What we have thus far termed the

‘first’ and ‘second’ animations, however, are indeed re-animations themselves; in the case of

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Topsy’s execution and film, it becomes increasingly clear that once put in motion, these

(re)animations form a persistent circularity in which ‘first’ and ‘second’ are no longer

discernible.

ANIMATION II: DEATH AND MAKING ‘LIVE’

Edison’s 1903 Electrocuting an Elephant was one of the earliest moving films. According to

Jonathan Burt, animals were in fact “an important motive force in driving the new technology

of moving film,” the novelty of which was reinforced by the “novelty value of animals.”48 As

Sheehan writes, “cinema is born with the movement of animals.”49 Most notably, Eadward

Muybridge’s scientific ‘films’ or moving images of animals in the 1870s – most famously the

capture of the movement of a galloping horse – contributed to the development of early

moving film.50 The one-minute film of Topsy’s execution was an ‘actuality’ film that purported

to document a real, live and unstaged event. After all, animals are said to be capable of

performing but cannot act or deceive; they are the ideal locomotive objects for early film,

insofar as the latter aims to record brute facticity, the natural movements of life. To the

extent that this implies a simple non-interventionist documentation or capture of life,

Cartwright argues that it “demonstrates the place of ‘scientific’ looking in public culture.”51

Such a film implies the possibility of a prosthetic seeing eye, akin to a scientific spectator, an

objective and disembodied vision. Incidentally, Edison’s first cinematic device, the

Kinetoscope, was purported “to be to the eye what Edison’s phonograph is to the ear.”52

Composed of the Greek terms ‘kineto-’ and ‘scope’ (meaning ‘motion’ and ‘examine’),53 it

assumes, in a rudimentary form, an objective viewpoint from which to observe the movement

of life. Indeed, the title of the film itself suggests a valueless documentation or mere capture

of the self-evident - a simple or plain description of an event. However, the film also

produces or creates a corresponding viewer: an anonymous onlooker who does not witness

but simply sees. Kelly Oliver argues that “the birth of cinema makes manifest the intimate

connection between film and the autopsic model of sovereignty and power, most especially

man’s dominion over animals and our own animal bodies.”54 The spectator does not make a

mark; the viewer recedes into invisibility, having retreated from the optical regime, distanced

or removed from the scene. The scopic power of the viewer is multiplied by virtue of its very

invisibility. Additionally, due to archival technology, the viewer is transhistorical – one can

easily find Edison’s film online today. In fact, both electricity and film spatio-temporally

extend the reach of human control or influence.

Individualized and criminalized, Topsy now appears as image, as mere content of a

film - the ‘elephant’ in the dispassionately titled film Electrocuting an Elephant. Destined to

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survive in and through the film, Topsy is simply an elephant, one of many – her individualism

subsumed under species-membership. The film thus retains a scientific and almost

taxonomic quality. As Donna Haraway reminds us, the term ‘species’ derives from the Latin

specere, ‘to look’ - which thus carries with it connotations of the visual.55 According to the

Oxford English Dictionary, the term not only means ‘appearance’ or ‘outside form’ but can

also denote ‘a thing seen; a spectacle,’ ‘a phantom or illusion.’56 To see the elephant as

species would then occur within a visual and optical regime that implicates both spectator

and spectacle, that which looks and that which is seen. Here, the power to make ‘live’ entails

the effacement of singularity and the generalization of an event: the elephant thus passes

from individualization to generalization, proper name to species-membership, living being to

spectral phantasm, exoticized park performer to a mere ‘thing seen.’

Akira Lippit contends that “cinema provides artificial life, anima, animation, and the

possibility of reanimation.”57 The elephant is thus re-animated and made to ‘live’ on. As such,

her death is itself rendered repetitive, made to persistently return. Topsy’s execution and film

thus demonstrates not only the putting to death and the documentation of death, the power

over life and the possibility of inscription, but the survival of death as textual: it becomes

repeatable and begets a spectral life. That is, the power over life and the power to put to

death is now supplemented by the power to prolong life or animate, to re-animate, repeat

and preserve, the elephant condemned both to die and to survive. For Lippit, the film

“transfers the anima of the animal, its life, into a phantom archive, preserving the movement

that leaves the elephant in the technology of animation.”58 In this sense, the animation of the

animal never ceases; in other words we could say that the animal does not die. Yet this

persistent and interminable survival, the relentless return of Topsy through the ability to re-

animate and re-watch, is not survival in the sole sense of prolongation of life or the

deferment of death. Rather, this ‘making live’ is double: Topsy is both made to survive or

‘live on’ and to be resurrected, re-animated, or ‘live’ again. The film engenders the possibility

of repetitive resurrection, of seeing, and seeing again – the elephant alive, before being

made ‘live,’ before death. André Bazin writes in his 1958 essay “Death Every Afternoon,”

that the “quality of the original movement” – that is, the animal being put to death – is in fact

amplified and underscored “through the contrast of its repetition”.59 For Bazin, it is cinema’s

specific capacity to both represent and repeat the event of death; cinema is the “art of time,”

based on “lived time” (Bergson’s durée) - heterogeneous, qualitative multiplicity, as opposed

to objective, extensive, quantitative time.60 Bazin argues that “for every creature, death is the

unique moment par excellence,” marking the limit between lived and spatialized, quantitative

time.61 Death is thus the “absolute negation of objective time,” and is therefore fundamentally

non-representable; the representation of real death is thus ‘obscene,’ as it shows or renders

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visible the singular or unique moment of negation.62 The monstration of Topsy’s death, and

the potentiality of interminable repetition of this ‘showing,’ thus constitutes an instance of

what Bazin termed “the eternal dead-again of the cinema.”63

Finally, the film captures the dying of the elephant, through the animation of her

body, and the ‘presence’ of death in the subsequent stillness or inertia of her body. Yet, it is

difficult to pinpoint exactly when ‘natural movement’ ceases. As Lippit describes, after the

elephant falls to the ground there is a slight “jump cut”, creating what “appears to be a

temporal lapse.”64 A human figure suddenly inhabits the frame, “as if to confirm the

elephant’s death and the authenticity of the spectacle.”65 Thus it is unclear whether or not

the desire to locate the specific presence of ‘death’ as such, to ‘see’ death itself as opposed

to the process of dying, is fulfilled at the conclusion of the film. As the presence of the human

figure at the end of the film suggests, this ambiguity is both troubling and irresolvable;

viewers must still rely on a human authority to attest to the absence of life in order to make

death ‘real.’ Accordingly, Oliver writes that “death is always beyond sovereignty…beyond the

visual realm upon which we rely to confirm its existence.”66 Thus the medium of film

redoubles the difficulty inherent in the attempts to determine – indeed to see - the absence

of life discussed above with regard to electricity.67 The iterability of the film, its own spectral

life, thus allows one to watch and re-watch, over and over again, the event of dying in an

attempt to locate and bring to visibility the presence and moment of death itself.

ANIMALITY AND BIOPOLITICS

In Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault famously claims that while traditional

sovereign power over life was characterized by the “right to kill” or “the right of the sword,”

during the nineteenth century a new technology of power emerges, what Foucault terms

“biopower.”68 That is, the old right of sovereignty “took life and let live,” while this new power

and right “consists in making live and letting die.”69 Philosopher Giorgio Agamben has

extended the Foucauldian formula: “no longer either to make die or to make live, but to make

survive” is the “most specific trait” 70 of biopolitics. In such discussions of biopolitics,

however, animals are distinctly excluded from mention. Agamben’s figure of bare life or

homo sacer is a decidedly humanist one. As Paola Cavalieri writes, “no connections are

made: it never occurs to Agamben that the notion of “bare life” as life deprived of any rights

and prerogatives and exposed to death paradigmatically fits the condition of animals in our

societies.”71 Indeed, animals remain outside the frame of reference, yet they inhabit the

margins of the political and the ontological. It seems self-evident that animals cannot be

political subjects insofar as they are barred from subjectivity, individualism, personhood and

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historicity. Yet the turn to political discussions of ‘life itself’ as an increasingly politicized

category in modern biopolitics necessitates a rethinking of the ‘life’ of biopolitics itself – one

that cannot be solely attributable to the human.

For Foucault, biopower emerges when the population is taken as a “political problem,

as a problem that is at once scientific and political”; biopower applies to “man-as-living-

being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species.”72 While Foucault maintains a separation

between the ‘old’ sovereign right of the sword and the new technology of biopower, for

Agamben it is the point of convergence of biopower in the modern epoch and State

sovereign power that must be thought. Indeed for him “the inclusion of bare life in the

political realm constitutes the original – if concealed – nucleus of sovereign power.”73

Modern biopolitics is characterized by the gradual, total inclusion or capture of all life within

this original sovereign logic: bare life “now dwells in the biological body of every living

being.”74 However, this inclusion of life in the political realm is not one of normative

application, rather, “the originary relation of law to life is not application but Abandonment.”75

The exemplar or privileged figure of this principle is homo sacer, or ‘bare life’ in archaic

Roman law, who was “included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion.”76 The

ambiguous nature of bare life consisted in its being exposed to thanatopolitics; homo sacer

could be killed with impunity and yet could not be ‘offered’ – its death constituted neither

homicide nor sacrifice.

The figure of bare life is the originary, universal subject of the modern era. Agamben

describes bare or sacred life as “the mute carrier of sovereignty, the real sovereign

subject.”77 This figure both bears the mark and “preserves the memory” of the foundation of

the political and is thus the true universal political subject – albeit one who inhabits a zone of

indistinction. Through his engagement with Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty and

decisionism, Agamben convincingly argues against the liberal conception of man as the “free

and conscious political subject”78 who underlies and composes the modern state. However,

in displacing this subject with bare life, “the simple birth that as such is, in the passage from

subject to citizen, invested with the principle of sovereignty,”79 there is a residual humanism

that remains unaddressed. Precisely because the animal cannot become an individual

subject, political existence cannot already be at stake for it. Animal beings cannot be political

subjects because they cannot be subject to the political; they cannot be recognized as

subject to sovereign power precisely because they themselves are not capable of being

sovereign.

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However, is it not possible to detect a certain proximity between the figure of the

animal and bare life, insofar as animals are systematically exposed to death and consigned

to a power that decides on and regulates both survival and life itself? As Cary Wolfe rightly

argues, modern factory farming exhibits biopolitical practices that are “part of a matrix that

takes as its political object planetary life itself.”80 These practices of “maximizing life, of

‘making live,’ in Foucault’s words, through eugenics, artificial insemination and selective

breeding”81 clearly function in factory farming and should be understood biopolitically. In fact,

the paradox or logic of sovereignty is perhaps at its clearest upon encountering the animal

figure: included via exclusion, politicized through depoliticization (or never ascending to the

realm of the political to begin with), and entering the realm of politically qualified life only as a

spectre and encountered there as a defaced being. The animal is forced to survive in a

spectral state, a survival ontologically distinct from that of homo sacer. The ‘question’ of

animality must be posed politically, which does not necessarily entail that animals be taken

as political subjects, modelled on the concept of human rights, but rather that animal life be

recognized as subject(ed) to biopolitics, violence and domination. To pose this problem as a

question also means to stake oneself politically in the ways in which animal life is conceived,

a questioning that necessarily turns back on and interrogates the questioning subject.

However, this questioning must be grounded on a notion of commonality between human

and non-human life. The realm of ‘life’ at stake in modern biopolitics must be extended to

include considerations of living beings beyond that of ‘man’; the concept of the ‘political’

must not be bound solely to a notion of human subjectivity.

CONCLUSION

As the Coney Island Museum’s proprietor noted during the centennial commemoration of the

Topsy’s death, Coney Island “brought together electricity and film and entertainment and

cruelty to animals.”82 The ungovernable nature of the criminalized elephant was ‘punished’ –

and yet it constituted a crucial component in the exoticized environment from which Coney

Island derived its entertainment and financial value. The modern amusement park, bringing

together both man-made and ‘natural’ attractions, relied on this juxtaposition of wild, unruly

nature, and order. As such, it is perhaps unsurprising that Topsy’s execution took place at

Luna Park, “a place that was about to incorporate electric lighting in its architecture at a time

[when] most of the country was not yet electrified.”83 As this paper has attempted to

demonstrate, animals have figured prominently in America’s history of experimentation with

electricity, the adoption of electrocution as mode of execution, and the development of

moving films and cinema. The SPCA’s concerns for finding more humane ways of killing

unwanted animals played a role in the re-evaluation of New York State’s execution methods.

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Electrical experimentations on animals, the results of which were deemed applicable to

human flesh, were conducted publicly and regularly cited in the numerous reports and

inquiries that led to the eventual adoption of the electric chair. This paper has explored the

electrocution of Topsy and Edison’s film through term ‘live.’ The term is productive to think

‘with,’ allowing one to develop an integrated analysis of the multifarious dimensions of this

event within the specific period in American history in which it took place. In the execution of

the elephant and the film, we discerned a series of animations, re-animations and the

continuity between or circularity of the power of death, over life, and of survival. Indeed, it is

only through Topsy’s individualization or criminalization and her capture in the apparatus of

film – it is only through these (re)animations - that we come to encounter this event.

Inevitably, our encounter is mediated and implicated in this circularity. Perhaps then, the

issue becomes how to see. In fact, the inability or resistance to posing the question of

animality politically in contemporary discussions of biopolitics renders the power of death

and interminable survival that circulates in the case of Topsy’s (re)animations, invisible.

Notes

1 Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (London and Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1995), 17. 2 Eliza Darling, “Nature’s Carnival: The Ecology of Pleasure at Coney Island,” in In the Nature of Cities: Urban

Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, ed. Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika & Erik Swyngedouw (Oxford: Routledge, 2006), 77. 3 “New York Honours Electrocuted Elephant,” BBC News, July 21, 2003, accessed August 9, 2012,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3083029.stm. 4 Eliza Darling, “Nature’s Carnival,” 75, and Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body, 17.

5 Akira Lippit, “The Death of an Animal,” Film Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2002): 12.

6 “America’s Debt to Topsy,” The Economist, July 24, 2003, accessed August 9, 2012,

http://www.economist.com/node/1944538. 7 Tom Vanderbilt, “City Lore; They Didn’t Forget,” New York Times, July 13, 2003, accessed August 9, 2012,

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/13/nyregion/city-lore-they-didn-t-forget.html. 8 “America’s Debt to Topsy” and “New York Honours Electrocuted Elephant.”

9 Lippit, “The Death of an Animal,” 13.

10 Lippit, “The Death of an Animal,” 13.

11 Stan Barker, “Amusement Parks,” The Electronic Encyclopaedia of Chicago (2005),

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/48.html. 12

“Paul Boyton’s Sea Lion Park: North America’s First Amusement Park,” Entertainment Designer, October 27, 2011, accessed November 1, 2012, http://entertainmentdesigner.com/history-of-theme-parks/paul-boytons-sea-lion-park-north-americas-first-amusement-park. & Barker, “Amusement Parks.” 13

“Paul Boyton’s Sea Lion Park.” 14

“Paul Boyton’s Sea Lion Park.” 15

Darling, “Nature’s Carnival,” 80. 16



Charles Combs, “Final Touches: Registering Death in American Cinema” (PhD diss., University of Berkeley, 2006), 18. 19

Combs, “Final Touches,” 43.

SGustafsson 13

20

Maury Klein, The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 259, italics mine. 21

Th Metzger, Blood and Volts: Edison, Tesla, and the Electric Chair (New York: Autonomedia, 1996), 18. 22

Richard Moran, Executioner’s Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 80. 23

Moran, Executioner’s Current, 103. 24

Moran, Executioner’s Current, 103, 105. 25

Metzger, Blood and Volts, 35. 26


Jurgan Martschukat, “The Art of Killing by Electricity’: The Sublime and the Electric Chair,” The Journal of American History (Dec., 2002), 911. 28

Martschukat, “The Art of Killing By Electricity,” 918. 29


Cartwright, Screening the Body, 17. 31

Lippit, “The Death of an Animal,” 12. 32









Edward P Jackson, “Electricity and Life,” The North American Review 153, no. 418 (Sep., 1891), 378. 41

Jackson, “Electricity and Life,” 379. 42

Martschukat, “The Art of Killing By Electricity,” 920. This aura of mystique, paired with the popular belief in an almost infinite human ingenuity, is discernible in the intense public fascination with not only Edison’s inventions but with his very person. For instance, Metzger writes that Edison was portrayed in the popular press as a “superman figure, a scientific Übermensch. He was called a necromancer, warlock, alchemist, immortal, king of the intellectual republic” (Blood and Volts, 52). 43


The inability to completely predict or master the effects of electricity must also be stressed; however, this is beyond the scope of the present paper. See Moran (2002) for an account of William Kemmler’s defense hearing, which cites cases of immobile and apparently dead dogs being revived hours later. Metzger (1996) also describes the evidentiary hearings, in which Kemmler’s defense demonstrated that “electric shock, no matter how painful, did not always cause death (127) and Dr. Frederick Peterson concedes that the cause of death from electricity “is not known to science” (127). 45



Combs, “Final Touches,” 44. 48

Jonathan Burt, “The Illumination of the Animal Kingdom: The Role of Light and Electricity in Animal Representation,” Society and Animals 9, no. 3 (2001), 210. 49

Paul Sheehan, “Against the Image: Herzog and the Troubling Politics of the Screen Animal,” SubStance #117, vol. 37, no.3 (2008), 119. 50

Burt, “The Illumination of the Animal Kingdom,” 210, & Sheehan, “Against the Image,” 119. 51


“Mr Edison’s Kinetoscope,” Image 1, no. 3 (1952), 2. 53

Gina De Angelis, “W.K.L. Dickson and the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope,” Motion Pictures: Making Cinema Magic (2004), 23. 54

Kelly Oliver, “See Topsy ‘Ride the Lightning’: The Scopic Machinery of Death,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 50 (2012), 84. 55

Donna Haraway, “Species Matters, Humane Advocacy: In the Promising Grip of Earthly Oxymorons,” in Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory, ed. Marianne DeKoven & Michael Lundblad (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), Ch. 1, 23. 56

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “species.” 57

Lippit, “The Death of an Animal,” 12.

SGustafsson 14

58


André Bazin, “Death Every Afternoon,” in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2003): 31. 60

Bazin, “Death Every Afternoon,” 30. 61



Bazin, “Deat Every Afternoon,” 31. 64


Oliver, “See Topsy ‘Ride the Lightning’,” 89. 66

Oliver, “See Topsy ‘Ride the Lightning’,” 88. 67

The difficulty of determining death or even unconsciousness in the cases of electrocution continues in modern factory farming practices, most notably in the electrical stunning of chickens. Seen as a humane method of minimizing the pain and suffering of animals prior to slaughter, the assessment of its effectiveness (as leading to unconsciousness) in actual practice is problematic. For instance, the European Food Safety Authority’s Scientific Panel writes that vocalization post-stunning is generally indicative of pain or suffering, and yet its absence also “does not guarantee absence of pain,” and that “under practical conditions, eye reflexes and reactions to painful stimuli should always be investigated and evaluated…to assess stunning effectiveness” (“Opinion of the Scientific Committee/Scientific Panel,” EFSA Journal, October 11, 2004, accessed November 1, 2012. http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/45.htm). See also Ari Zivotofsky and Rael Strous, “A perspective on the electrical stunning of animals: Are there lessons to be learned from human electro-convulsive therapy 9ECT)?” Meat Science, November 28, 2011, A.B.M. Raj, “A Critical Appraisal of Electrical Stunning in Chickens,” World’s Poultry Science Journal 59 (Mar., 2003), 89-98, and A.B.M. Raj, “Recent Developments in Stunning and Slaughter of Poultry,” World’s Poultry Science Journal 62 (Sep., 2006), 467-484. 68

Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 1997), 240-241. 69

Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 247. 70

Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 155. 71

Paola Cavalieri, “Consequences of Humanism, or, Advocating What?,” in Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory, ed. Marianne DeKoven & Michael Lundblad (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), Ch. 3, 57. 72

Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 245, 242. 73

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Rozen (California: Stanford University Press, 1998), 6. 74

Agamben, Homo Sacer, 140. 75



Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 113. 78



Cary Wolfe, “Before the Law: Animals in a Biopolitical Context,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 6, no. 1 (2010), 22-23. 81

Wolfe, “Before the Law,” 22-23. 82

Vanderbilt, “City Lore; They Didn’t Forget.” 83

Vanderbilt, “City Lore; They Didn’t Forget.”

Live and 'Make' Live: The (Re)animations of Topsy the Elephant

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