Animal Life at the Threshold

On Scales Political, Temporal, Planetary, and Individual

Abstract

From Aristotle’s scala naturae to the vast scales of animal agriculture, from cognitive scales to moral scales to deathly scales of devaluation, from the world-historical scale of what modernity called “progress” to the “permanent present” to which evolutionary scales condemn animals — in these and countless other ways, animal lives have been and continue to be shaped by different kinds of scales and their positions on them. Yet it is difficult to think about scales without the thresholds they skirt and implicate. In this opening essay, we approach the multiple scales through which animal lives are traversed by probing something of what may be involved in thinking animal life at the threshold. What does it take to cross — or be crossed by — a threshold? What does it mean to create and inhabit a scale? And what is at stake in becoming out-scaled? Articulating pathways through the interventions and conversations that make up this collection on animal scales, and at the same time complicating what we think we know of the politics of scaling, this essay explores how animal lives are made and unmade at the threshold between human mastery of the earth and the planetary upheaval of human ends; at the threshold between human and animal translation and unbridgeability of scale; and at the threshold where scale and perspective connect and disaggregate, giving way to the paradox of “an animal Anthropocene” as a riotous scrambling of scales.