"Radical Hope: Rethinking Multispecies Work in the Anthropocene," a commentary on Jocelyne Porcher, Living With Animals: A Utopia for the 21st Century. (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
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.
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.
2014
Animals´ omnipresence in human society makes them both close to and yet remarkably distant from humans. Human and animal lives have always been entangled, but the way we see and practice the relationships between humans and animals – as close, intertwined, or clearly separate – varies from time to time and between cultures, societies, and even situations. By putting these complex relationships in focus, this anthology investigates the ways in which human society deals with its co-existence with animals. The volume was produced within the frame of the interdisciplinary “Animal Turn”-research group which during eight months in 2013–2014 was hosted by the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies, Lund university, Sweden. Along with invited scholars and artists, members of this group contribute with different perspectives on the complexities and critical issues evoked when the human-animal relationship is in focus. The anthology covers a wide range of topics: From discussions on new disciplinary paths and theoretical perspectives, empirical case-studies, and artistic work, towards more explicitly critical approaches to issues of animal welfare. Phenomena such as vegansexuality, anthropomorphism, wildlife crimes, and the death of honey-bees are being discussed. How we gain knowledge of other species and creatures is one important issue in focus. What does, for example, the notion of wonderment play in this production of knowledge? How were species classified in pre-Christian Europe? How is the relationship between domesticated and farmed animals and humans practiced and understood? How is it portrayed in literature, or in contemporary social media? Many animals are key actors in these discussions, such as dogs, cows, bees, horses, pigeons, the brown bear, just to mention a few, as well as some creatures more difficult to classify as either humans or animals. All of these play a part in the questions that is at the core of the investigations carried out in this volume: How to produce knowledge that creates possibilities for an ethically and environmentally sustainable future.
Designed to control: The architecture of animal farming
Zoopolitics of Life and Death. Critical Animal Studies Graduate conference, THE NEW INSTITUTE Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE) at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice & Institute of Philosophy, Kulturwissenschaften Faculty at Leuphana University, Lüneburg, 2023
Barns and warehouses for animal farming are some of the most common buildings in human landscapes at a global scale. Yet, these typologies are seemingly invisible, hiding at their core an industrial process which transforms living beings into commodities. The architecture of factory farming is largely anonymous, unsophisticated, and banal. However, it can be interpreted as the place of the utmost colonial project: that of human domination on non-human species. What are the historical roots of intensive animal farming and how did it become such a popular paradigm at a global level? Which technical literature (handbooks, publications) and what models supported the widespread application of factory farming to a great number of species and in different contexts? This talk aims at investigating the history of this invisible architecture, which has long sustained the development of our species since the industrial revolution and has tragically imposed our dominion on a vast majority of living beings on earth. This talk will discuss the research results of a two-month residency at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (July-August 2023) and the research project titled "Cages for non-humans: An architectural history of animal farming". The research will be based on archival documents owned by the CCA collection, which will allow me to trace the history of animal farming in North America and the twentieth-century architectural experimentations concerning this agro-industrial model. During the talk, I will put forward a few interpretations of the architectural model for animal farming. First, I argue that the architecture designed to host non-humans who are destined for production and slaughter swings between an aesthetic unsophistication and an utmost technological refinement, as it comprises complex machineries which limit the movements of the animals to maximize the economic results. When allowed, the movement of animals must follow strict rules; this is evident in a design case study collected at the CCA: the Westpen project by Cedric Price (1977–79), which includes several diagrammatic sketches controlling livestock movement for activities such as weighing, shearing, and cleaning (CCA Collection, Cedric Price fonds). Furthermore, I suggest that the limitation of livestock movement through architecture is aimed at transforming non-human entities into disabled bodies that are unfit for existence and ready for consumption (Taylor 2017). Finally, I touch upon the silent but pervading presence of the structures for animal farming on today’s industrial landscapes, where they act as efficient machineries that produce capitalistic goods and eject bones, liquids, and gasses – generating clear geological evidence of the Anthropocene. Keywords: Animal farming; architecture; industrial landscapes; livestock; machines References: Alex Blanchette, Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm, Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. Christophe Bonneuil, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene. The Earth, History and Us, London: Verso Books, 2016. Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden, New York: New Press, 2017.
Revealing the ‘Animal-Industrial Complex’ – A Concept & Method for Critical Animal Studies?
This paper returns to Barbara Noske‟s (1989) concept of the „animal-industrial complex‟ in order to develop and re/present it as a key organizing frame of analysis and research collaboration for the field of critical animal studies (CAS). In presenting various ways of refining its definition and illustrating some intersections between both different forms of animal use and with other „complex‟ concepts, the aim is also to help build CAS capacity in analyzing the role of political economy in shaping human-animal relations. Whilst keeping the permeability of the boundaries of the complex very much to the fore, this paper nevertheless focuses on farmed animals and case studies virtual methods of apprehending „livestock‟ genetics companies as one approach for potentially bringing the animal-industrial complex into a more clearly delineated space of scholarly and public critical scrutiny.