matthew chrulew
I am
an interdisciplinary writer who combines the flaws of the Hedgehog and
the Fox, with the benefits of neither. My main research interests are
animal studies, Foucault, and Continental philosophy of religion, but
also include the history and philosophy of biology and ethology,
medievalism, science fiction, biblical studies, and critical theory
more broadly. I have also published over twenty short stories, mostly
speculative fiction.
I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion at Macquarie University, where I am writing on discourses of extinction and resurrection surrounding the mammoth. My PhD research, on Foucault’s genealogy of Christianity, was undertaken in the Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology at Monash University. Prior to that, I completed a Masters (with Distinction) at UWA in English and Cultural Studies, where I applied Foucault’s theory of power/knowledge to human-animal interactions, in the context of zoological gardens. I have since been exploring the usefulness of various poststructuralist approaches to understanding interspecies relations.
After living in both Perth and Melbourne, our family has recently moved interstate once more, this time to Sydney’s Hornsby region, where we are enjoying the chance to explore the bushland and crash the wild bird street parties.
Current Projects
Mammoth: Ecotopias of extinction and resurrection
The mammoth is an exemplary animal for the cultural mediation of human environmental guilt and redemption, both despite and because of its ‘extinct’ status. It has propelled scientific controversy, from the Victorians grappling with the very concept of extinction, to twentieth-century debates over the cause of Pleistocene extinctions (the famous overkill, overchill, and overill hypotheses). It has featured in colonial discourses, as a totemic figure both of the vigour of New World fauna and of the debility of native ‘vanishing races.’ And it is central to contemporary efforts to reverse anthropogenic ecological destruction, from hi-tech attempts to resurrect extinct animals, to sites of ‘re-wilding’ which attempt not only to preserve but actively to restore nature to a prehuman state. Crucial to all of these utopian and apocalyptic discourses is the anthropological question of the ‘human’ as it is formed within, and itself re- and de-forms, the nonhuman natural world. Working with the mammoth as familiar and guide, this research project will explore the discourses and practices of environmental harm and healing in popular culture, literature, art, technology and science.
I was selected to present on rewilding projects (such as Pleistocene Park in Siberia) at the German Historical Institute’s conference on Civilising Nature: National Parks in Transnational Historical Perspective, in Washington in 2008. Also arising out of this interest was my short story ‘The Gnomogist’s Tale,’ published in the experimental postapocalyptic SF anthology, Canterbury 2100.
Discipline and Exhibit: The life of the zoo
Critiques of zoological gardens regularly invoke Foucault’s work on prisons, but rarely follow through the full implications of this parallel. This project fleshes out Foucault’s work on power in the context of multispecies relationships. While his attempted erasure of man ironically remained anthropocentric, it opens up the potential for a materialist power/knowledge approach to human-animal relations that no longer privileges human discourse and perception at the expense of animal bodies. Some of this research is forthcoming as part of a volume exploring post-zoo sites of animal encounter. As well as a number of essays on animals in biopolitics, I am also working on a book-length genealogy of zoological gardens.
Experience Experiments: The history and philosophy of ethology
Following Spinoza, Deleuze views ethics as an ethology, the interaction of bodies understood according to their affective capacities. But if ethics is an ethology, what then is ethology, the science of animal behaviour? If the claim of ethology has traditionally been to demonstrate exactly what it is that certain animal bodies can do—their innate, species-specific behaviours, determined by their genetic makeup and released on certain environmental cues—what I propose is that this Spinozist and Deleuzian model of ethology as the counting of affects will help us to reconsider ethology as a more open, creative, experimental activity, modest, sober and ontologically inventive. Following from critiques of the anthropocentric tendencies of ethological science, examinations of the interaction between twentieth-century Continental philosophy and animal biology, and attempts to bring together ethology and ethnology, this project will explore the intersection of philosophy with the sciences of animal behaviour. Through classical, behaviourist, sociobiological and cognitive ethology, both laboratory- and field-based, I will trace the apparatuses by which animals are made to appear as objects of scientific truth, whether constrained and reduced, or elicited and encouraged.
Following on from a successful panel on ‘Ethology and Continental philosophy’ convened at the Minding Animals conference in Newcastle, I am exploring options for an edited volume. I am also developing a manuscript on the history and philosophy of ethology titled Experience Experiments.
Fiction
I write across a variety of speculative fiction genres, from mundane SF and suburban fantasy, to horror and apocalypse. The first of my ‘animal-spirit-word’ fables, ‘The Beast-Machine Fableaux’, appeared in the ‘Mechanical Animals’ issue of Antennae.
Recent Selected Publications
Refereed Articles, Book Chapters & Review Essays
Fiction
I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion at Macquarie University, where I am writing on discourses of extinction and resurrection surrounding the mammoth. My PhD research, on Foucault’s genealogy of Christianity, was undertaken in the Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology at Monash University. Prior to that, I completed a Masters (with Distinction) at UWA in English and Cultural Studies, where I applied Foucault’s theory of power/knowledge to human-animal interactions, in the context of zoological gardens. I have since been exploring the usefulness of various poststructuralist approaches to understanding interspecies relations.
After living in both Perth and Melbourne, our family has recently moved interstate once more, this time to Sydney’s Hornsby region, where we are enjoying the chance to explore the bushland and crash the wild bird street parties.
Current Projects
Mammoth: Ecotopias of extinction and resurrection
The mammoth is an exemplary animal for the cultural mediation of human environmental guilt and redemption, both despite and because of its ‘extinct’ status. It has propelled scientific controversy, from the Victorians grappling with the very concept of extinction, to twentieth-century debates over the cause of Pleistocene extinctions (the famous overkill, overchill, and overill hypotheses). It has featured in colonial discourses, as a totemic figure both of the vigour of New World fauna and of the debility of native ‘vanishing races.’ And it is central to contemporary efforts to reverse anthropogenic ecological destruction, from hi-tech attempts to resurrect extinct animals, to sites of ‘re-wilding’ which attempt not only to preserve but actively to restore nature to a prehuman state. Crucial to all of these utopian and apocalyptic discourses is the anthropological question of the ‘human’ as it is formed within, and itself re- and de-forms, the nonhuman natural world. Working with the mammoth as familiar and guide, this research project will explore the discourses and practices of environmental harm and healing in popular culture, literature, art, technology and science.
I was selected to present on rewilding projects (such as Pleistocene Park in Siberia) at the German Historical Institute’s conference on Civilising Nature: National Parks in Transnational Historical Perspective, in Washington in 2008. Also arising out of this interest was my short story ‘The Gnomogist’s Tale,’ published in the experimental postapocalyptic SF anthology, Canterbury 2100.
Discipline and Exhibit: The life of the zoo
Critiques of zoological gardens regularly invoke Foucault’s work on prisons, but rarely follow through the full implications of this parallel. This project fleshes out Foucault’s work on power in the context of multispecies relationships. While his attempted erasure of man ironically remained anthropocentric, it opens up the potential for a materialist power/knowledge approach to human-animal relations that no longer privileges human discourse and perception at the expense of animal bodies. Some of this research is forthcoming as part of a volume exploring post-zoo sites of animal encounter. As well as a number of essays on animals in biopolitics, I am also working on a book-length genealogy of zoological gardens.
Experience Experiments: The history and philosophy of ethology
Following Spinoza, Deleuze views ethics as an ethology, the interaction of bodies understood according to their affective capacities. But if ethics is an ethology, what then is ethology, the science of animal behaviour? If the claim of ethology has traditionally been to demonstrate exactly what it is that certain animal bodies can do—their innate, species-specific behaviours, determined by their genetic makeup and released on certain environmental cues—what I propose is that this Spinozist and Deleuzian model of ethology as the counting of affects will help us to reconsider ethology as a more open, creative, experimental activity, modest, sober and ontologically inventive. Following from critiques of the anthropocentric tendencies of ethological science, examinations of the interaction between twentieth-century Continental philosophy and animal biology, and attempts to bring together ethology and ethnology, this project will explore the intersection of philosophy with the sciences of animal behaviour. Through classical, behaviourist, sociobiological and cognitive ethology, both laboratory- and field-based, I will trace the apparatuses by which animals are made to appear as objects of scientific truth, whether constrained and reduced, or elicited and encouraged.
Following on from a successful panel on ‘Ethology and Continental philosophy’ convened at the Minding Animals conference in Newcastle, I am exploring options for an edited volume. I am also developing a manuscript on the history and philosophy of ethology titled Experience Experiments.
Fiction
I write across a variety of speculative fiction genres, from mundane SF and suburban fantasy, to horror and apocalypse. The first of my ‘animal-spirit-word’ fables, ‘The Beast-Machine Fableaux’, appeared in the ‘Mechanical Animals’ issue of Antennae.
Recent Selected Publications
Refereed Articles, Book Chapters & Review Essays
- Forthcoming 2010. ‘From Zoo to Zoöpolis: Effectively Enacting Eden,’ Zootopian Visions of Animal Encounter: Farewell to Noah, ed. Ralph R. Acampora (Lexington Books; Toposophia).
- Forthcoming 2010. ‘Unreal Zoos: Review of Stephen Spotte, Zoos in Postmodernism: Signs and Simulation’, Society & Animals.
- Forthcoming 2010. ‘Beyond Confession: The Spirit of Paul in Žižek vs Foucault’, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, special issue: ‘Michel Foucault and Saint Paul’.
- 2006. ‘Feline Divinanimality: Derrida and the Discourse of Species in Genesis,’ The Bible and Critical Theory 2(2): pp. 18.1-18.23.
- 2006. ‘“Masters of the Wild”: Animals and the Environment in Dungeons & Dragons,’ Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 32(1): pp. 135-168.
- 2005. ‘“The only limitation is your imagination”: Quantifying the Medieval and Other Fantasies in Dungeons & Dragons,’ Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture, ed. Stephanie Trigg (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols and Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press; Making the Middle Ages, 8), pp. 223-40.
- 2005. ‘Review Essay: “On Animals”: Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal; Matthew Calarco & Peter Atterton (eds.), Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought’, The Bible and Critical Theory 1(2), pp. 07.1-07.8.
- 2005. ‘A Real Animal Right(s)? Discourse Bias in Animal Discourse,’ PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 3: pp. 1-11.
- 2005. ‘Review Essay: Eric Baratay & Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo; Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo’, Limina 11.
- 2003. ‘On Animal Resistance,’ Liveable Communities, ed. J. Haswell and D. MacCallum (Perth: Black Swan Press,), pp. 85-96.
- 2003. ‘Review Essay: Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal; Erica Fudge, Animal’, Limina 9.
Fiction
- Forthcoming 2009. ‘Schubert by Candlelight,’ Macabre: A Journey Through Australia’s Darkest Fears, ed. Angela Challis & Marty Young (Brimstone Press).
- 2009. ‘The Beast-Machine Fableaux,’ Antennae 9 (‘Mechanical Animals’).
- 2008. ‘Between the Memories,’ Australian Dark Fantasy & Horror, Volume 3, ed. Angela Challis (Brimstone Press); previously in Aurealis 38/39, 2007.
- 2008. ‘The Gnomogist’s Tale,’ Canterbury 2100, ed. Dirk Flinthart (Agog! Press).
- 2008. ‘Smoke,’ Midnight Echo 1.
- 2008. ‘Head,’ Dog vs Sandwich February.
- 2007. ‘Rapturama,’ (with Roland Boer) The Worker’s Paradise, ed. Russell B. Farr and Nick Evans (Ticonderoga Press).
- 2007. ‘How I Learned to Keep Tidy,’ Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine 31.
- 2004. ‘Where Warriors Wait,’ Aurealis 33/34/35.
- 2003. ‘The Destination of the Dimension Differentiator,’ Fables and Reflections 5.
- 2003. ‘Roach Theory,’ Fables and Reflections 5.
- 2001. ‘The Gap in Space at Read and Walcott Streets,’ Fables and Reflections 1.
- 2001. ‘Well 51,’ The Rhizome Factor 6.
