Paul McCarthy's Mechanical Pig (2005)

Preface to the A Edition

About a week ago I fell down some concrete steps whilst attempting to catch a train. Despite my ample 'post-rationing' backside, I somehow managed to land instead on my vestigial pig-tail, crushing it rather horribly, and doing some damage that may apparently take months (months!) and some (decidedly unfree) physiotherapy to sort out. It even has a name – coccydynia - though not one that the Biblical Adam would have given it, most likely not being a strong supporter of the theory of evolution (ahem, if I convert to Christianity will God remove all trace of my painful primate-tail?) Incidentally, the word coccyx comes from the Greek for cuckoo (because it looks like a cuckoo's beak, apparently, not because it lays eggs in other nests ... oh my God, that's horrible! Wait…terrible inseminating-migrating-tail sf stories fading, fading...). Pigs, pigs!

Preface to the B Edition

Anyway, a few days later, whilst returning home after, erm, 'some drinks', I somehow miscalculated the status of the moving walkway, not noticing that it wasn't in fact a moving walkway at all, but rather a stationary strip of potentially highly unkind metal. Falling forward, I incurred the imprint of the thing, so now my right knee resembles a popular snack product, namely a bacon fry (that is, the singular of 'bacon fries'). With such amusing porcine-related injuries in mind (and body), I felt it was as good a time as any for a long-overdue 'picture-thinking special' for the xmas period, and to introduce a key philosophical concept into the grand speculative system of Infinite Thought, namely 'the Transcendental Pig'.

Introduction

Who or what is the transcendental pig, I hear you squeal before being gently led off to the conceptual abattoir? As this is a properly Kantian endeavour, we must first establish the conditions for any possible experience of the pig. I have deduced that these fall into three main areas: economic, social and psychoanalytic. These three concepts comprise, and indeed, exhaust the pig architectonic. There can be no appeal to the 'transcendent pig', of course, though we can postulate porcine intuition as part of a limiting exercise in the comprehension of our own intuition, which is of course sensible and longpigish. Furthermore, it should be added that Reason pushes us to go beyond its use in experience and imagine three things: the freedom of the pig-will; the immortality of the pig-soul; and the existence of the pig-God. With this empty, though necessary, structure in place, we can plough every thought-field with the cognitive assurance that once we have completed our critical task, porcine metaphysics can once again reclaim its rightful place as Queen of the sciences, and reclaim all talk of pigs from the filthy paws of vegan barbarians, dogmatic pub-snack manufacturers, pig-sceptics, hippie-nomads who think that pigs are straightforwardly in harmony with us, pig-indifferent fatalists, pork-unbelievers, and uncritical enthusiasts of the pig.

The Economic Pig (in Pig Latin: porcus economicus)

Engels was famously not a friend of pigs, mistaking them as he did for Irish people. This is taken from The Condition of the Working Class in England:

'It often happens that a whole Irish family is crowded into one bed: often a heap of filthy straw or quilts of old sacking cover all in a indiscriminate heap, where all alike are degraded by want, apathy, and wretchedness ... To these and other sources of disease must be added that pigs were kept, and other disgusting things of the most revolting kind were found' (pp. 101-102, Penguin edition).

Further:

'the Englishman who is still somewhat civilised needs more than the Irishman who goes in rags, eats potatoes, and sleeps in a pig-sty' (p. 112).

The Irish just are pigs. Furthermore, they are grotesque, demanding brutes with ideas far above their lowly, muck-ridden, station: 'What does such a race want with high wages?' (Engels genuinely asks this question, like some kind of proto-Nazi – it's on p. 124). They might as well sleep with pigs, the horrible dirty things!

As, in fact, they do:

'[The Irishman] builds a pig-sty against the house wall as he did at home, and if he is prevented from doing this, he lets the pig sleep in the room with himself.'



But the flip-side of Engels' transcendental horror at the Irish-pig assemblage is not simply the realisation that the Irish are pigs, but also that they are fuck-pigs. This is evidenced by the ménage-a-trois he had in the 1840s and 1850s with Mary and Lydia Burns, Proletarian Irish sisters, with whom Engels no doubt ate potatoes, rutted like beasts, all the while coated with copious amounts of the 'filth and drunkenness that [the Irish] have brought with them'. Is not the 24-year-old Engels' fascinated disgust with the pig-related 'other disgusting things' a displacement not merely of his prejudice against the Irish, but of all his residual bourgeois shame? Doubled is his conflation of pigs with Irish immigrants, but also in the doubling of his relation with the red-headed, illiterate Irish sisters who no doubt taught the judgemental lad a thing or two, as well as any pig could have.

This excursus may in fact legitimately be placed under the psychoanalytic pig wing of this critical enterprise, but the key point here is that Engels is not primarily libidinally-confused, but also economically, as pigs are actually the most proletarian of animals. 'Every peasant has his pig' writes W H Pyne in his Microcosm: Or A Picturesque Delineation of the Arts, Agriculture, Manufactures, etc. of Great Britain (1806-8).



Not only do pigs eat all the stuff no other animal would touch, but they manage through the wonders of their genetic makeup to make things like pork pies and scotch eggs taste great, even if technically they are constituted of transmuted saw-dust and curds. It is this fear of the magically ability of the pig to make itself taste nice even though its diet is a pile of jetsam, that lies at the heart of all religious prohibitions against the animal. 'Consumption of swine-flesh reduces the feeling of shame and as such the standard of modesty' says one Islamic website. Well, it certainly worked for Engels! 'Carrion, running blood and the flesh of swine' are 'unclean' according to the Koran (6:142), and all those mad books of the Old Testament that tell you to stone everything also go on about which cloven-hooved beasts you can ingest: 'And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you' The shared religious prohibition nevertheless tends towards a potentially useful definition of the political pig: Couldn’t we all get along in a shared hatred of the pig?

On the other hand, you don't have to be a believer to hate the pig...

Seasoned snobs like Edmund Burke, who condemned the 'swinish multitude' in his 1790 stuffed-shirt reactionary tract Reflections on the Revolution in France (the source of all depictions of the French as crazy anarchoid revolutionaries, incidentally) found himself the target of various pro-democratic pamphlets critical of oligarchies with titles like 'Rights of Swine'. Indeed – it is perhaps only when we accept that we are indeed to live and think like pigs, as Gilles Châtelet once argued (albeit critically), then we can truly accept that the pig is the most generic of animals, and as such, the very paradigm of a militant engagement with the swill-trough that is the world...Think, pig!

The Social Pig (in Pig Latin: porcus sensus communis)

At some point in the 1960s and 1970s, Men with beards launched a kind of pocine anti-jihad against the encroachment into the English countryside of massive quantities of Islamisation, the belief being that through a combination of scrumpy and pigs the Islamic threat could be eliminated. This led to the creation of the 'prog pig', most famously incorporated into Pink Floyd's image of the pig floating over Battersea Power Station (and resurrected in the recent great film, Children of Men). Flights were cancelled in 1976 (well, some of them) as the pig flew free of its moorings during the photoshoot. Who needs fog?



The pig is not merely a cottage animal. Equally at home in the slurry of Wiltshire (and how the stench of pig farms remind me of my childhood) or the scraps of the city, the pig is a rural-urban force of untold proportion. Nevertheless, if the pig belongs in the collective imagination, it is in the countryside, amongst buttercups and the casual ingestion of magic mushrooms, that we visualise it most clearly.

The prog pig is a key symbol in the attempt to preserve something of the domestic surrealism of the British countryside. It is the bestial cornerstone of the rural reconstruction of an age in which men belonged to Pig Clubs (set up in order to provide for those who lost their animal to sickness or accident, but also the site of male bonding, drinking and celebration, as in the famous annual Pig Club banquets), where the most fun to be had on a Sunday afternoon was petting your neighbour’s pig. Our very own Roger Scruton, a modern-day Burke, excels in his extolling of the virtues of the animal:

'The pig was created for the table ... he has translucent sensitive skin which bears witness to the abundant sweet flesh beneath it. His eyes are half-closed, emitting no doe-eyed glances with which to stay the hand of his executioner ... He also looks like food: a round, plump offering on sticks, ready at any moment to lose his individuality and slide down the metaphysical ladder from thing to stuff' (News from Somewhere, p. 84).

Scruton also appreciates the social elements of man-pig interaction: 'Although their conversation is limited, it compares favourably with today’s school-leavers, and their simple pleasure in being scratched being the ears is an equal pleasure in the one who causes it.'

Like some grand elbow-patched jocular uncle with a big book collection, Scruton in his transmigration to the wilds of Wiltshire mimics with great delicacy the movement of Sus scrofa domesticus across this great and silly land. Let us join with Scruton in the grand scratching of pigs' ears.

The Psychoanalytic Pig (in Pig Latin: piggus split-subjectivus)

The pig is a clever beast. Unfortunately we usually kill them off before they get smart. As Erasmus Darwin put it: 'I have observed great sagacity in swine; but the short lives we allow them, and their general confinement, prevents their improvement, which might probably be otherwise greater than that of dogs.' (quoted in The English Pig, p. 14). And Dr Johnson, who nevertheless spent bloody ages being written about by a man, said the following: 'the pigs are a race unjustly calumniated. Pig has, it seems, not been wanting to man, but man to pig.'



We kill and eat them young because Pigs disturb us, intellectually and sexually (er, probably). The very pinkness of the classical pig reminds us far more of our proximity to animals than hirsute primates. And if women are supposed to be more hairless than men, then the faint bristles of the overwhelmingly rose-coloured beast (not to mention the lack of pubic hair) mean that female pigs might even make better women than women themselves (dates aside, the coupling of John Ruskin and a lady-pig might have made a nice topic for a Joshua Reynolds painting). Their internal organs also resemble ours and we can use their cells for making insulin. They are also far less likely to crush us to death, not like those great hulking ejits, cows. They are also not so manifestly stupid and evil as ducks, geese, chickens, goats and sheep. Is it a coincidence that the Cary Grant of our times, George Clooney, cries more for Max, his pot-bellied pig ('the longest relationship of my life'), as he will ever do over any two-bit Hollywood starlet? Somehow, I think not...



The overt perverse sexuality of Miss Piggy (the Princess that turns her prince into a neurotic frog) testifies to the grotesque charm of the Female Pig, a theme explored in great detail in Marie Darrieussecq's Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformations which attempts to detail the sexual allure and horror of the femme-pig (it’s one of the best novels of the 1990s for this reason, whatever the New York Times says. Incidentally, I once recommended it to a friend who got so angry with me for doing so, she spent an evening screaming at me before she drank herself into unconsciousness. Truly the mark of a worthy novel!). The gradual transformation of the heroine into a snuffling porcine object, desirable precisely because she is a dumb pig with a big arse, tells you everything you need to know about what capitalism and proto-fascism would like women to be (Le Pen eventually uses the beauty-counter-salesgirl-turned-pig-woman as a poster girl).

Until we understand the transcendental pig, we will go on uncritically eating ham sandwiches and blithely comparing pigs to capitalists. What we have to understand, as a matter of some urgency, is that the transcendental pig is our friend, just as the empirical pig is our lunch.