Free the Warwick One

Animals, as you might expect from an account calling itself The Plashing Vole, are complex cultural creations. Beyond the physical reality of a bag of flesh that differs from our own shapes, the animal gets sorted into categories that differ over time and between cultures. We give them to our children so they can learn about birth, sex, nurturing and death. We let kids cuddle bears, while knowing full well what would happen if they tried that in real life. We project our own desires and fears onto them. We rely on them for labour, emotional support and dinner (and hope that that vector isn't suddenly and fatally reversed). We send them into space (and leave them there) and we buy them clothes, when we're not devoting massive scientific resources to discovering more efficient ways to destroy the ones we don't designate as cute. Our social media seem to be divided between sex and animals doing things that reinforce our fantasies about animals' purposes, behaviour and relationship to us (in the darker corners, this becomes a Venn diagram with way too much overlap).

I was thinking about this partly because like all reasonable and sane people, I like cat videos on Twitter, especially the #academicswithcats hashtag.* One of the stars of British academic cat Twitter is Rolf the Campus Cat at Warwick University, an 'ambassacat' with a remit to improve 'student wellbeing'.



Rolf is undoubtedly a resourceful, characterful beast, and Warwick has increasingly harnessed his talents to promote the institution as a warm, friendly, relatable and quirky place just like so many corporate organisations which employ someone to 'banter' on social media with their counterparts at other companies (there's even @universitycats to collate every neoliberalised HE moggy). Warwick particularly needs this because it's been seen as the capitalist Darth Vader of HE ever since it was founded: EP Thompson's Warwick University Ltd. has been reprinted several times since 1971 and is well worth a read. So Rolf serves a number of purposes, principally softening the edges of a distinctly hard-edged institutions. I don't know if Thomas Docherty's mindfulness and wellbeing was improved by Rolf visiting his office while he was persecuted for having a sarcastic face, but I doubt it. Likewise the students: is a machine that could have been designed to produce anxiety and precarity less harmful because a handsome killing machine is around to demand treats?

Rolf popped into my feed this morning looking cute in an economist's office and I realised that this was only possible if Rolf, the economist and the cat's media team had all crossed a picket line: UCU members at Warwick are on strike. Rolf is either a scab, or an undercover UCU agent using his AAA collar to identify scabs, the people who will take advantage of any gains made by their striking colleagues while betraying them all. Looking through Rolf's Twitter account, it's pretty clear that this most undirectable of animals somehow missed all the picket lines surrounding his home and place of work. The actual cat isn't a scab, but the simulation of him is clearly part of a sophisticated machine dedicated to spreading charm and diverting his public's attention away from the hard realities (and yes, The Cat Shepherd is complicit in the deaths of his delicious, tender charges, cute as he is) My UCU counterparts over there should be turning Rolf, if he isn't already our undercover operative: fit him with a bugging device and send him into the VC's office.

So Rolf is two or three things at once: an animal, but also a cultural and social construct (a political animal, if you will), or perhaps in Baudrillardian terms, Rolf isn't a cat but a simulation of one. Promoting strikebreaking and spreading the message of 'business as usual' is propaganda: it seems unlikely that impoverishing academic and support staff will really promote 'student wellbeing' in any meaningful way, but it gets Warwick uni a lot of free publicity. Rolf certainly fulfils all the marketers' mantras about quirkiness: Brown and McCabe's Brand Mascots and other marketing animals is a very instructive book on this subject. People have been culturally conditioned like cats, the thinking goes, so they won't be thinking straight when they cross a picket line or wonder why their jobs are being outsourced. The values and feelings they have for Rolf will be transferred to the institution that gives him a home and cuddles. Nobody will go to Warwick because of Rolf, but their choice might be swayed by the sense that it's a warm and caring place to be despite all the evidence that sexual predators are given an easier time than the women they harassed. A university is a complex place that's difficult for any entrant to understand: Rolf's function is to sweep away the stressful process of cogitation and choice, replacing them with warm feelings and a character that can't be analysed or dissected. Even better, one black cat can be replaced with another if it starts demanding more snacks, or a secure contract. Perhaps it's already Rolf 2.0…

My place used to have convenient animals available for adoption, but we pulled back. For several years a peregrine nested on a windowsill high up on our tallest building. Perhaps management felt that the signifier was too polysemous. Peregrines are beautiful, stunning creatures, but a ruthless killer perched above the crowd is a metaphor that even the most mulish union activist could grasp. On the other hand, we mere staff might have had some fun with the idea of a highly-skilled but desperately endangered species living permanently on the ledge. My institution's name offers another animal possibility but none of its referent's qualities are particularly cuddly, so I don't think we'll be going there either.

Our peregrine (sadly departed) is therefore unlikely to become an iconic brand mascot because it's too edgy: Guthrie (writing about religion) pointed out quite a long time ago that animals, anthropomorphised 'spokes-critters' or whatever you want to call them tend to appear during recessions and other hard times. Staff demonstrating outside? Cat pictures. Petting zoos during exam periods are designed to temporarily assuage anxiety by encouraging humans to spend time with nonjudgemental animals which exist within a less complicated social structure, though I can't help seeing them as indentured labourers at best. Rabbits are twitched up at the best of times - spending their time being mauled by distressed people can't be helpful.

I don't hate Rolf. I like him. I feel for him, a celebrity forced to perform for the cameras day in day out, his natural instincts repressed. To some extent I identify with him: I run my department's social media accounts and carefully separate my more critical views from the promotional duties undertaken on there, consciousness fully divided.



Free the Warwick One!

*I don't intend to relitigate the Cats v Dogs debate, partly because one Guardian reader settled it by pointing out that while there are plenty of police dogs, there's no such thing as a police cat. Libertarian individualists they might be, but cats aren't coppers' narcs, unlike dogs.