Revealing the ‘Animal-Industrial Complex’ – A Concept & Method for Critical Animal Studies? (original) (raw)

Biopolitics and Becoming in Animal-Technology Assemblages

Journal of History of Science and Technology (HoST), 13 (2), 2019

This article critically explores Foucauldian approaches to the human-animal-technology nexus central to modern industrialised agriculture, in particular those which draw upon Foucault's conception of power as productive to posit the reconstitution of animal subjectivities in relation to changing agricultural technologies. This is situated in the context of key recent literature addressing animals and biopolitics, and worked through an historical case study of an emergent dairy technology. On this basis it is argued that such approaches contain important insights but also involve risks for the analyses of human-animal-technology relations, especially the risk of subsuming what is irreducible in animal subjectivity and agency under the shaping power of technologies conceived as disciplinary or biopolitical apparatuses. It is argued that this can be avoided by bringing biopolitical analysis into dialogue with currents from actor-network theory in order to trace the formation of biopolitical collectives as heterogeneous assemblages. Drawing upon documentary archive sources, the article explores this by working these different framings of biopolitics through a historical case study of the development of the first mechanical milking machines for use on dairy farms.

Husbandry to Industry: Animal Agriculture, Ethics and Public Policy

Between the Species: An Online Journal for the Study of Philosophy and Animals, 2010

The industrialisation of agriculture has led to considerable alterations at both the technological and economical levels of animal farming. Several animal welfare issues of modern animal agriculture -e.g. stress and stereotypical behaviour -can be traced back to the industrialised intensification of housing and numbers of animals in production. Although these welfare issues dictate ethical criticism, it is the claim of this article that such direct welfare issues are only the forefront of a greater systemic ethical problem inherent to industrialisation. Consequently, this article provides an analysis of the foundational ethical problems in animal agriculture which derive from (I) overly positivistic science and (II) free-market ideology. It will be argued that both these ways of thinking allow for a systematic reification and commodification of animals and that this contributes to language and attitudes which cannot encompass ethical consideration of animals.

Modernity, HuMans and aniMals -tensions in tHe Field oF tHe tecHnical-industrial iMaginary

This essay is guided by two themes that concern the complexity of the modern world and the distinction between the human and the non-human. Keeping these themes in mind I will look first at the notion of modernity and the way in which notions of crises and tensions have been deployed, before turning to one set of tensions-the relation between the human and the non-human worlds through an analysis of the developments in the technical-industrial imaginary. In modernity, the regimes that humans put in place in relation to nature, and especially the animal world are constituted, principally, from the perspective of the industrialising imagination and technical regimes of control. I want to explore this theme and its crisis potential from the vantage point of both longer and shorter histories of human interactions with the animal world which intersect the history of modernity. The longer history includes the animal imbedded as a 'natural' extension to the human world, whilst the shorter one includes the animal as 'non-natural', prosthetic, or coded extension through the industrialization of the sign and the invention, for example, of DNA and genetic technologies. This interpretative move is made in order to throw the anthropological image of technical mastery into relief, as a prelude to critiquing it.

Livestock and Local Development: Going to a New Human-Animal Relationship

2019

Along the past ten years, the French National Agency for Research (ANR) has financed projects regarding livestock. Results of five projects were gathered to understand the long-term livestock trends. At the end of the 19th century, animal breeding was oriented towards the production of goods to meet the local, regional, national and global demand, according to the zone. The market gradually became the key-factor to norm both production and consumption. It is now integrating environmental norms and is starting to invest in the social domain. However, this economical vision of animal production does not take into account the other functions of livestock, from “farm fork” to “table fork”. So, in parallel to the multi-functionality of livestock at the farm level, which is mentioned by several authors, livestock has a significant role at the local scale. Furthermore, in the past four decades, animal production sector has known several serious scandals with severe consequences in human he...