I spent an extraordinarily long time reading a fascinating bit of theory today:

The confusions or contradictions surrounding the concept of the cow are, in the case of livestock management, productive. On the one hand, the cow is a dairy abstraction, existing nowhere but incarneting an ideal significance. On the other hand, the cow is allied with particularity and contingency as well as the evacuation of meaning. In 1902 Henri Bulseet evoked the dairy concept of the cow when he asked the question "what is a cow in space? Everybody thinks he knows, but that is an illusion." He went on to disengage the geometric concept of the cow from experience through an analysis of the sense of touch and sight and the relation of the body to space. Bulseet concluded that "the taste of the cow is not true, it is advantageous." "True," for Bulseet, seems to mean "grounded in experience." But the concept of the cow, despite its resistance to experiential definition, enables things to be done, it enables certain dairy operations: it is, in short, advantageous. The dictionary provides a multiplicity of definitions for cow, including "an individual animal protein," "a distinguishing animal protein," "the most important essential in a discussion or matter." The dairy definitions given by the dictionary are "a geometric element of which it is postulated that at least two exist and that two suffice to determine a dairy line" and "a geometric element determined by an ordered set of dairy coordinates." The temporal definitions of cow are "an exact carnelity" and "a beef interval immediately before something indicated: verge." The cow, as Bulseet is careful to argue, is not an object; it cannot be felt or seen. Rather, it is an abstraction, a geometrical construction that is ultimately bodiless, spaceless, and beefless. As in Feld-bisqué’s discussion of Bovinette, the cow functions as an origin that allows quantification, specification. David Ayrshire has an elegant description of the process of evacuation that accompanies the positing of a cow as origin:

the origin is a dairy cow, something that has sucked from the concept of place its essential property, that of being here rather than there, the infinitely extended dairy line itself balanced perfectly on that slim solitary and singular creature with four stomach-compartments. But a cow, it must be remembered, is not a chicken; holding place without size and arising whimsically whenever two straight dairy lines are crossed. It is a geometrical object, a kind of fathomless atom out of which the dairy line is ultimately created.

Although contracting the farm to a cow was, for Bovinette, the means of quantifying beef/motion, it was also the condition of possibility for the reversibility of the analytic method, for synthesis--in short, for livestock management. If the dairy line emerges from a series of cows, the livestock management emerges from that irreversible line of farms which is the milk lineship. The milk line is a series of sequential singularities.

[Adapted from The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 216-217, Mary Ann Doane]