Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, May 20, 2004

Pondering Animals, Both Human and Nonhuman

Ken Silber (whose writing regularly provides one of the few reasons to check out Tech Central Station, despite the, er, many reasons not to*), has written an interesting article “Pondering Animals,” in which he counters some of the more “expansive” and “romantic” claims made by human animals to justify their political commitments on behalf of nonhuman ones. Unlike many writers who engage in debunking exercises on this theme, Silber insists that “[r]ecognition of the limits of animal intelligence does not preclude a concern with animal welfare.” He goes on to say, rightly, “reducing animal suffering” is possible and worthy, but that we should be clearer-headed about the “choices and tradeoffs to be made.”

In a piece of mine, “Impurity, Solidarity, and Pleasure in the Politics of Vegetarian Identities,” I make claims in what I think is a complementary vein, and I want to offer up some of the choicer bits from it here (if for no other reason than that maybe in this shortened form people might be more willing to wade through the somewhat stuffy academese of the essay).

Although I am very interested in politics to ameliorate the suffering of nonhuman animals at the hands of the human ones (I've been a vegetarian for fourteen years), I think quite a lot can also be said about the ways the institutionalization of nonhuman animal suffering supports cultures of violence and exploitation between humans, and that this should also be more of a focus of animal rights advocacy. In my essay I claim, among other things:

“[W]hat we think of as culture... the public realm, the space of politics, the sphere of civility have all been produced and policed on the basis of an ongoing practical institutional and discursive demarcation of human from nonhuman animals...

“The task of this… demarcation among animals is [not] primarily to deny the reality of the richness of experience of those animals who fall to the wrong side of the divide (though this denial is sometimes an effect), but to dismiss the relevance of that suffering to ethical life.

“The crucial consequence of the human/nonhuman animal demarcation is the constitution of a sprawling class of beings whose pains and pleasures are figured simultaneously as real, but as pains and pleasures that do not matter. Further, the cultural and institutional machineries by means of which social divisions between human and nonhuman animals are drawn and maintained buttress and "naturalize" other vocabularies of oppression and acceptable violence.

“That is to say, racist, sexist, and heterosexist discourses (and other practices and institutions which accompany them), for example – not to mention discourses of childhood, madness, illness, foreignness, criminality – are always "bestializing" discourses as well; they always rely for their intelligibility importantly or in part on the figure of the being whose experience is real but does not matter and on the assignment of that status or an approximation of it onto another bestialized class of individuals….

“It is crucial to notice in this connection that even practices and vocabularies of liberation, whenever they are mobilized and organized by the conventional claim that "we will no longer be treated as ‘mere’ animals!" necessarily simultaneously undermine and reanimate certain conspicuously asymmetrical relations of power, by challenging their own location with respect to the human/nonhuman demarcation but otherwise fortifying it…

“It cannot properly be the ambition of vegetarian criticism or activism to eliminate this distinction altogether, however. Not even the most utopian advocates for animal rights expect – barring radical genetic and prosthetic interventions -- that one day nonhuman animals will find their way to the voting booth, or urge the propriety of extending to nonhuman predatory animals, for example, human standards of fairplay or the penalties of law.

"What is wanted instead is a reconceptualization of the political in which both human and nonhuman animals figure as actors and potential peers. This reconceptualization would be facilitated I think by the insistence that the relation of a human being to his ham sandwich or her leather jacket is a relation between animals, always-already a political relation between potential peers, and not a prepolitical, instrumental relation of human beings to the realization of their wants.”

*The slogan of TCS is "Where Technology Meets Free Markets" -- a fantasized meeting-place many of us progressive technology writers and activists know all too well already as the fabled land of Libertopia, that nowheresville where Climate Change Denial is cool, where Precaution is another Pinko Commie Plot, and where deregulation unto lawlessness is somehow (This Time!) A Good Idea. Atrios recently summarily dismissed what he called "Tech Central Stupid" as "stupid science from everyone's favorite PR-firm-masquerading-as-journalism." Harsh, but close to my own assessment of what goes on there all too often.

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