Carnivals of the Animal: (In)civility and the More-than-human

“Carnival is the… theatre in which… animal-like beings take over the power and become the masters” (Eco 1984: 3). From corporate zombies and angry Trump babies to dead bees, political protests and events have frequently featured comic, ironic, grotesque, absurd, profane and uncivil moments of the carnivalesque. Carnivalesque activities are said to open heterotopic spaces in which dominant values are subverted, conventions are transgressed, civil disobedience is catalysed and alternative identifications flourish (Lewis and Pile 1996; Godet 2020; Hammond 2020; Tancons 2014). For Bakhtin, carnival suspends established hierarchies and “builds its own world in opposition to the official world” (1984: 88). The carnivalesque is interesting for scholars of civility, because of its potential to disturb the boundaries of “the civil” and to demonstrate the possibilities of “the uncivil”. If bad behaviour and rudeness can be a force for political change, and if good citizenship sometimes demands incivility (Edyvane 2020), then occasions of carnivalesque can be both a measure and a mechanism of a healthy democratic politics. Carnivalesque performances and protests can facilitate the experimental, cathartic, disruptive and potent expressions of difference and help to enlarge the public sphere (Zerilli 2010). A focus on the carnivalesque brings to attention the boundaries between the civil and the uncivil as well as the role of the uncivil in politics. This focus is also, I believe, helpful for exploring, and troubling, the relation between the civil and the human. Civility is often referred to in anthropocentric terms, as “a moral obligation borne out of an appreciation of human equality” (Boyd 2006). The uncivil is then easily understood in terms of the less-than-human and excluded on that basis. My question I ask in this paper is whether by invoking the non-human other, carnivalesque protests might carve out space for demonstrating against the delimitations of the public sphere. By dressing up as insects, fish, trees, zombies, mermaids and extinct species activists ostensibly perform the more-than-human. To participate in the carnivalesque is not only to witness otherness but to become other; to play with hybridity and break the rules that dictate how we live, how we speak, how we look and who ‘we’ are. The carnival, we might say, acts as a political reminder of the democratic remainder; it alerts us to the voices that Rancière points out are dismissed as animal ‘noises’. And yet, since carnivals are restricted to certain times and places, they might not constitute real transgression but, on the contrary, remind us of the rules, and reinforce the existing order (Eco 1984: 6). Carnivals are not innocent spaces, they are “riddled with multiple power relations” (Lewis and Pile 1996: 24). Does the carnivalesque provide an opening for resistance against exclusions from civil society or does it simply fortify them? Can it decentre the human in the public sphere, or ultimately reaffirm the dualism that it mocks? I point to the dangers of both dismissing and romanticizing incivility while also noticing the potential of the more-than-human uncivil.