"Brute Willfulness": History, Agency, and Human Sovereignty's Wayward Animals

This article situates itself in longstanding debates about forms and possibilities of animal agency under conditions of human control by mobilizing a concept that has received little theoretical attention from animal studies scholars. “Willfulness” – together with its close semantic cousins “obstinacy” and “self-will” – is defined by an insistence on autonomy (bodily, spatial, temporal) and self-direction in the face of heteronomous impositions. At its core, it can be understood as an embodied subject’s response to the experiential rift created between the capacity to perceive one’s environment and the freedom to engage with it in ways that align with one’s interests, needs, or desires. This article explores the utility of this concept for (historical) animal studies, specifically with respect to the relations between animal agency and the routines of human sovereignty at work in the exploitation of animal labor. To do this, I turn to German historian Alf Lüdtke’s (1943–2019) work on Eigensinn, a concept he employed to identify the spatial and temporal niches of “willful freedom” and forms of “willful corporeality” that factory workers in the decades around 1900 managed to carve out for themselves amid the disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms of the industrial labor regime. Lüdtke stressed that Eigensinn was not the “turning against” often equated with resistance but registered a leaving out of account, a turning away from sovereignty. Drawing on examples from my own historical research in the U.S. context, I underline the extent to which willfulness operated as an explanatory framework in recurring practical confrontations with unwanted animal behavior, indexing an implicit folk theory of animal mind in which working animals figured (for better or worse) as willing subjects with interests, desires, motivations, and tendencies of their own, and often exasperatingly at odds with a more or less clearly articulated cluster of human demands and expectations.