This Cage Saves Lives: Encountering Resuscitation & Risk as a Canary in the Coal Mine
SPECIAL ISSUE ON AVIAN TECHNOSCIENCE for CATALYST JOURNAL: FEMINISM, THEORY, TECHNOSCIENCE
media-rich essay in peer review
ABSTRACT:
Canaries are one of the most popular and widespread “cage birds” in the world, with a long history of human intervention that includes recreational bloodsport, companionship to wounded soldiers, use in scientific research, selective breeding for bright colors, and song training that has made their calls unattractive to potential mates (Svanberg 2024, Brady 2015).[1] Perhaps their best known anthropogenic application, however, is as living monitors for noxious underground gases, leading to that proverbial expression, “the canary in the coal mine.” It was in the context of these mining operations, which used the birds to detect carbon monoxide from the turn of the 20th century through 1986, that the first canary resuscitation cages were produced (Eschner 2016). These airtight metal and glass boxes, equipped with a wooden perch and a small oxygen tank, offered a strategy for miners to attempt to revive their birds after they collapsed. This would seem a kind gesture—the miners tried to reverse the damage when they could. But from the canary’s perspective, although this resuscitative technology likely did sometimes save lives (Pollock 2016), it also worked to justify continued extractive control of their lives and deaths. Promoted as a means of protection and healing, the resuscitator was, nevertheless, a cage that biopolitically controlled access to breathable air, created reliance upon an artificially mediated environment, and excused and obscured the results of intentional exposure to unlivable conditions of existence (Butler and Worms 2023). Taking the canary’s constriction as its starting point, this essay asks: how can we escape the confines of a cage we feel we must rely on for our continued existence?
The canary resuscitator exists within the historical context of rising industrialization, the tandem emergence of medical resuscitation as a secular method for dealing with death, and ongoing legacies of ecological and social exploitation that affect human and inhuman canaries in the coal mine alike.[2] Flitting through this web of relations, the canary is a literal and metaphoric ghost in the machine (Derrida 1994, Shildrick 2020, Gordon 2007), merging the underground with matters of air and breath, a living reminder and remainder of what is kept buried (Mbembe 2020, Kenner 2018, Harney and Moten 2013). These relations are then read through artworks that further unearth the creation and maintenance of debility (Puar 2017), including my Canary Resuscitator project featuring ethnographic interviews with disabled folks and folks working in resuscitative medicine (2022-2025), Carolyn Lazard’s Privatization (2020), and Johanna Hedva’s Scream Demo (2021). The many valences of the entrapped canary ultimately suggest that escaping the care/control of the cage requires encountering risk—of injury, death, and radical transformation. Combining critical histories of science, technology, and medicine with queer death studies, crip theory, and contemporary art practice, this media-rich interdisciplinary essay seeks a reclamation of “harm” that refuses promises of revival, and instead embraces the precarity of existence in excess of the cage.