I suppose the obvious thing to say is that Bunnie was bonding with his/her
box-to-be, forming a sort of trans-organismic supersystem, networking ala
ANT with the box-actant, and this is another take on what is usually called
territorialization, I suppose. Remembering the famous example of the blind
person with the cane as self-extension (and the cane with blind-person as
self-extension? or should we just remember that the blind person is as
behaviorally different with the cane as the cane is with vs. without a
handler), the box seems to be getting integrated as bunnie-extension, and
the bunnie transformed into bunnie-with-box, or perhaps Housed bunnie. The
pre-domesticated variety, I assume, like to peer out from their burrows
with an eye to either side, and stare down predators, or more exposed
bunnies, who are also then networked into the action as un-Housed actants ...
Do bunnies run circles round their burrows before entering them? or as part
of a ritual of taking possession of them initially? perhaps to see if some
current occupant will pop out and stake a claim? or to orient themselves in
burrow/box-centered space? or ...
Bill Barowy, who claims to "own" this rabbit (if one wants to think about
our paradigms for objecthood, this is the claim I'd start by examining),
seems to have felt he was a central participant in the events, but I wonder
if from the bunnie's viewpoint, he may not have been rather more peripheral
... bunnie playing with the box, rather than the Bill? but surely there is
some relevant scale of the system that extends out to encompass Bill, and
perhaps it is not easily possible to define an "object" of activity at
every scale, or across all the scales, much less a top-down one that
organizes the lesser scales ... I suppose this has always been one of my
concerns about the basic AT model, that it is rather humanistic and so not
easily extended to systems and networks in which activities take place but
where human construal of goal-orientedness is a rather minor part of the
whole. Most (all?) human actions are part of activities that include
non-human participants in essential (i.e. without them, no activity) roles,
and if we take one of those viewpoints (bunnie's, box's, ...) we seem to
need something more like a view in which the regularity of system or
network activity is an emergent property of the whole, rather than a
quasi-causal product of human intentionality. From there it is of course a
small, but unpopular, step to make the same analysis also from the human
viewpoint.
I suppose we could say that the box was mediating Bill's play with the
bunnie. But while that may be an adequate first approximation of how things
looked from Bill' s point of view, I don't think it works as well from the
bunnie's ... and what about from the box's? Was Bill mediating the bunnie's
assimilation with the box? suppose Bill had been another bunnie, and the
box a burrow he had dug? suppose bunnies are just burrows' way to get
themselves dug out and constantly maintained? or Bill the box's means of
getting itself a nice bunnie by means of which to realize its telos as
potential-burrow?
So, why are bunnies cute? JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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