Why look at animals?
For this seminar, we will examine the capitalistic reduction of the animal to object-product and the human animal to object-product-consumer. We will also explore the potential of becoming-animal as a line of flight, or path out of collective subjugation.
tl:dr Humans may once have had a relationship with non-humans that went beyond being functional, and now we use them as commodities and machines. We have become marginalised from animals, just as we have the lower and middle class labourers, and the zoo reflects the relationship between human and non-human, and perhaps capitalist and worker.
Readings
Why Look at Animals: John Berger
Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation - Gilles Deleuze*
The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben
14: Profound Boredom, 15: World and Earth, 16: Animalization, 17: Anthropogenesis
Notes
Here Ailaud examines the relationship between human and non-human (I find it hard to talk about humans and animals), suggesting that they have a long history between them that predates non-humans simply being used or having a function.
They claim that what distinguishes us is out ability to communicate: "Between two men the two abysses are, in principle, bridged by language. Even if the encounter is hostile and no words are used, the existence of language allows that at least one of them, if not both mutually, is confirmed by the other".
The reduction of the animal
They go on to point out that the celebration of non-humans has dwindled, and animals are now used as labour:
_**"In the first stages of the industrial revolution, animals were used as machines. As also were children. Later in the so called post-industrial societies, they are treated as raw material. Animals required for food are processed like manufactured commodities."
**_They continue to say that this same reduction applied to animals, has happened to humans, that we have become "isolated productive and consuming units".
They emphasize that the cultural marginalisation of animals is distinct from and more complex a process than the physical marginalisation of animals. Animals have been co-opted in the family as pets with no autonomy, that complete the human, complete the family, complete the home, as 'human puppets', and into the 'spectacle'. The silent majority.
Animals are observed
They point out that we study non-humans, and in doing so, we other them. The idea that they might observe us, is impossible somehow. And yet, perhaps paradoxically, we see them as 'natural wonders', as something created not by man, but by nature, and as such with inherent value.
The zoo, places animals as art, for trade, for display yet, "however you look at these animals, even if the animal is up against the bars, less than a foot from you, looking outwards in the public direction, you are looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal; and all the concentration you can muster will never be enough to centralise it."
The take home
"All sites of enforced marginalisation - ghettos, shanty towns, prison, madhouses, concentration camps - have something in common with zoos. But it is both too easy and too evasive to use the zoo as a symbol. The zoo is a demonstration of the relations between man and animals; nothing else. The marginalisation of animals is today being followed by the marginalisation and disposal of the only class who, throughout history, has remain familiar with animals and maintained the wisdom with accompanies that familiarity: the middle and small peasant."
"What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them."
Thoughts
What is and of this doesn't apply between humans also, or to humans, that cannot speak, or communicate?
Animals as invisible labour, as machines.
We put humans on display, through shows, we cage humans also. It helps to see where we marginalise humans in the same ways we do to other humans, that we see as not human anymore.
Excerpt from 'The Human Zoo'
“Through domesecration, many species of animals that lived on the earth for millions of years, including several species of large, sociable Eurasian mammals, came to be regarded as mere objects, their very existence recognized only in relation to their exploitation as ‘food animals’ or similar socially constructed positions reflecting various forms of exploitation.”
— David. A. Nibert “Animal Oppression & Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism and Global Conflict”
An Animal Manifesto Gender, Identity, and Vegan-Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
The link between feminism and veganism is laid clear - feminisms and veganism and intersectionality.
"We believe that all oppressions are interconnected: no one creature will be free until all are free – from abuse, degradation, exploitation, pollution, and commercialization."
[The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow) Jacques Derrida and David Wills
Dona Harraway - When species meet