What is the Animal Revolution ... notes on revolution

Animality is not a revolution in a commonly held political sense of the term—with its markers of social contract and that which is held in common. It is not a revolution as a reasoned and enlightened consciousness of the masses. Animal resistance is through their comportment and bodily being in the world. In the long now of evolutionary time, animals are fitted to their environments. However, the speed and invasiveness of human dwelling is ill aligned to nonhuman ecological temporality. These two temporalities and ways of being jam in contention. Perhaps the word revolution is only a poor anthropomorphic metaphor and approximation for this event and rupture to human expectations and human progress of civilization by non-teleological animal activity. It is not enough to say animals resist—as if they were a minor resistance movement to the major force of humanity. Rather, great and small, microbial to megafauna, animals overturn the architecture of civilization. Such an overturning which reframes the world according to a differend and knocks down the structures and habits of human dwelling is a revolution. Incidents of such activity are rampant as we shall see. While many animals and species may die, in a much longer temporality the animals will live on beyond the human.