The “Thinking About Animals” conference, held at Brock University in Saint Catharines, ended yesterday. It was very well-attended, ranging from teenagers to senior citizens, although the skin-tone was overwhelmingly white. (This issue came up in the last panel I attended when Jason Nord tried to argue that all social justice struggles are animal rights struggles. The argument struck me as extremely specious and overwhelmingly colonial. The title didn’t help: “Ain’t I an Animal?” A straight white male co-opting bell hooks? Really? One man of colour raised the issue and I found the responses somewhat disappointing. Jenny Grubbs seemed to push the issue aside–after complaining about how she is treated as a token in her own department–by saying that Breeze Harper, a black woman, won an award from ICAS.) Setting aside the unsatisfactory responses to a genuine and legitimate critique, the conference was fairly well-done. It was, however, a victim of its own success. There were, at times, six concurrent sessions. If this is to be the scale of the conference in the future, then it must be held over more than two days or organizers must be more ruthless in vetting submissions or there must be semi-annual conferences. Thursday was also too long: 8:15AM to 9:30PM. Perhaps it is just me and being prematurely old, but that is more than I can handle in a day!
Three papers stood out as especially excellent. Although, I should disclaim, that the papers that I thought were excellent were also highly scholarly and this likely doesn’t well represent the interests of many of the attendees. All the same, in order of presentation, I though that the following were the best: Stephen T. Newmyer’s “Some Ancient & Modern Views on the Expression of Grief in Animals,” which compared classical sources on animal emotions to modern cognitive ethology, Don lePan’s ‘Your sufferings, sinless things’: Changing Attitudes Towards Non-Human Animals and the Cattle Plague of 1865,” on the, as the title suggests, the cattle plague and various conflicting responses to the plague (religious/scientific, germ vs. miasma, and so on), and Vasile Stanescu’s “Paper Tigers: Nonviolent “Terrorists” & the Danger of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act,” on the genealogy of legislative efforts to police animal activism. Michael Loadenthal’s paper on terrorist labelling and Carol Glasser’s paper on changes in the structure of the major institutional actors in the animal movement were suggestive, but require some development. More quantitative analysis is needed in critical animal studies.
Other than one participant–whose antics I sadly missed–constantly yelling out “citation!” and failing to understand discursive norms in philosophy papers and the occasional reference to PETA–which never ceases to upset everyone–the sessions all ran smoothly. For my part, I didn’t enjoy the standard format adopted by the sessions. That is, fifteen minute paper followed by five minutes of questions/discussions. I much prefer the standard academic conference format of the three papers followed by general discussion for the second half of the session. This preference may be entirely idiosyncratic, however.
I was overwhelmed with the response to my own presentations (the full text of which I’ll post later once I edit them to reflect what I actually ended up saying). Both sessions were very well attended. The second session, first thing in the morning on Friday, was standing-room only, with people spilling out into the hallway. I was pleased to see the number of people not from an academic background at my first paper, on the conflict between the OSPCA and the Toronto Humane Society–there were representatives from various dissident groups in Toronto, some young women involved in feral cat work in the Niagara and Western New York region, and an older gentleman from Florida who runs a high volume spay/neuter clinic. (Unfortunately, the PETA derailment to which I referred above happened during this session.) The second presentation, on my ongoing critique of the theoretical basis of critical animal studies, went very well as well. The session was eloquently introduced by David Clarke, of McMaster, and featured papers from Eric Jonas of Northwestern University (and Deconstruction, Inc.) and Valery Giroux of the University of Montreal. I was surprised by two sets of comments on this paper. First, why would I bother wasting time criticizing Peter Singer and Tom Regan? Second, why won’t I write a take-down of Gary Francione?
31 Comments
I wish I could have attended and presented, but was presenting a keynote about whiteness and veganism at University of Illinois and it overlapped.
I am waiting to hear more about how it went by other folk.
Am trying to understand your comment/observation: “Jenny Grubbs seemed to push the issue aside–after complaining about how she is treated as a token in her own department–by saying that Breeze Harper, a black woman, won an award from ICAS.) ”
Best
Breeze
Thank you for your kind words. Your paper was also quite excellent.
Breeze, this is what happened as I understand it. Jenny’s paper was, in large part, about being treated as a token in her doctoral program: as the person doing “animal stuff.” For good reasons, she felt devalued as an academic. The man of color, in response to Jason Nord’s paper, raised the issue that the animal movement is a very white movement and claimed, again quite sensibly, that this is problematic. His claim, as I understood it, was that many whites in the movement don’t take people of colour seriously. He is likely correct–as unfortunately demonstrated by Jenny, whose response was, to the effect, “You can’t make that claim about the animal movement because ICAS just gave Breeze Harper an award.” In other words, because you had been given an award by ICAS, ICAS was, in effect, impervious to an accusation of being overwhelmingly white. In other words, intentionally or not, Jenny used you as a token. Perhaps others understood what happened differently.
Thanks, Vasile.
Interesting, as I personally observe the overall animal movement in the USA as a white middle class movement in terms of language, rhetoric, strategy, and epistemologies and ontologies. Doesn’t mean they are ‘wrong’; it just means that the general structure (not sure if that’s the right wording) of the movement is embedded in ‘whiteness’ and it needs to be pointed out, simply because if it isn’t, it will remain ‘invisible’ to those who don’t yet have the critical race literacy training for a ‘post-racial’ Obama era. Then again, how many times have all of us doing critical animal studies found frustration with pointing out “obvious” structural speciesism to most folk, over and over again, who simply can’t see it because they lack critical animal literacy skills as well? Of course Jenny feels lonely in her program too. Makes sense. I wish I could I heard her talk.
I always find it interesting that what I see as the ‘obvious,’ those of the racial-class status quo (white middle class) see it entirely differently: they see the overall rhetoric, strategy, epistemologies, ontologies, etc of the popular mainstream animal movement as ‘not racialized-classed’ at all. I’m sure Jenny didn’t mean to tokenize me, but I guess these ‘examples’ happen all the time as this demographic’s “proof” that certain ideologies, movements, groups, “aren’t white”. How many times have we heard that because Obama is president, American doesn’t have the problem of being embedded in ‘whiteness/white privilege’ any more?
Carol J Adams brought up the problem of the ‘whiteness’ of the animal liberation movement in her book Neither Man nor Beast in Chapter 4, from 1994.
I don’t get mad when these comments are made, I just try to do my research and writing to understand why there still continues to be this descrepancy between the collectivity of white middle class status quo and non-white racialized people’s perception of ‘how race and whiteness operates.’ I mean, this is hard stuff to tackle and I know it’s emotionally difficult and frustrating for all folk, so I’m just doing the best I can to create ‘critical race literacies’ and am using veg/ar as a platform to do this.
Best,
Breeze
P.S. And I wanted to clarify that it’s not all individual white middle class people who lack critical race literacy skills of a post-civil rights era; I meant collectively, this is what I have observed.
“More quantitative analysis is needed in critical animal studies.”
Absolutely NOT. This only continues the ongoing co-optation and crisis of critical animal studies. Critical animal studies was developed as the very negation of a quantitative paradigm of research. The idea that it would need to become quantitative is anathema to its very definition. This said, the lazy qualitative theory that is often passed off as critical animal studies is also misses its mark more so than not…
Richard, it is a little naive to think that a particular method of conducting research is inherently political. If quantitative analysis tends to be moderate, it is because the vast majority of people doing quantitative analysis are moderates themselves.
“This only continues the ongoing co-optation and crisis of critical animal studies.”
Who is co-opting CAS? No one, as far as I can tell. And, if CAS is in crisis, it is because its theoretical basis is more or less incorrect.
“Critical animal studies was developed as the very negation of a quantitative paradigm of research.”
Now this is a conservative position: a thing’s meaning is limited to its genesis.
“The idea that it would need to become quantitative.”
No one said it did. Read the passage of mine that you quoted. Now, what is needed for CAS can only be done through quantitative analysis: for instance, determining if Francione’s hypothesis is true or not; viz., that new welfarism leads to increased meat consumption. Such a claim can only be confirmed or disproven through an incredibly sophisticated quantitative or computational methods. I trust it is of interest to CAS to know what are the most effective means of getting people to do the right thing.
“the lazy qualitative theory that is often passed off as critical animal studies is also misses its mark more so than not…”
Sure, of course. Bad scholarship is bad scholarship.
With respect to the social sciences, qualitative does not refer to “theory.” It refers to interviews, participant observation, etc. Theory is something else entirely.
Breeze, thanks for you comment. What do you propose we–that is, white, middle class, etc–academics and activists do? Is being mindful of the white background sufficient? There’s obviously a problem (or it appears that way to me) when a white man co-opts bell hooks for a presentation title (and the presentation actually contains the line “black people are animals, too”) and when legitimate comments are pushed aside through (unintentional?) token-ist comments.
I wanted to answer you Craig in terms of “black people are animals too” title by directing you to the Queer Animalities conference that is happening this Monday at Berkeley. Check out one of the speaker’s work. I will be attending and hopefully, with permission, can record her talk and post it on my blog. The source is from here: http://stsc.berkeley.edu/content/conference-why-animal-queer-animalities-indigenous-naturecultures-and-critical-race-approach
Begin Quote:
Zakiyyah Jackson, UC Berkeley and Indiana University
“Who Cuts the Border? Race and the Future of Animal Studies”
My scholarship is at the intersection of Animal Studies, Queer Theory, and African Diasporic Feminism and examines African diasporic culture’s attempts to redefine the human by redirecting representations that animalize black gender and sexuality found in law, science, philosophy, and neoliberalism.
Jacques Derrida’s 2001 essay “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” has become in recent years perhaps the seminal text of Animal Studies. Since the publication of Derrida’s groundbreaking essay, scholarly journals ranging from Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy to the literary criticism of PMLA, have devoted entire issues to the emerging interdisciplinary field of Animal Studies. Yet, this emergent field within critical theory has yet to integrate an intersectional approach into its critique of anthropocentricism. My work brings intersectional thinking to Animal Studies, enabling me to more fully uncover the political stakes of “the animal turn” for social relations. Furthermore, black culture and thought has been a location where “universal humanity” is perceived as a paradigm to be interrogated rather than assumed; yet, we have not asked what afro-moderns have to say about discourses of nature, environment, and species formation, despite their centrality in the (re)production of race. My scholarly intervention entails that I prepare a path for myself in the existing theoretical archive by drawing from the best of Animal Studies and African Diaspora Studies.
My dissertation “Becoming Human: Gender, Sexuality, and Species in Afro-Modernity” demonstrates that there is a strand of black (anti)humanist thought that provides crucial interventions into the racialization of the human/animal border. Through historical analysis, I reveal that “the animal” and “the black” are generic categories that mutually reinforce each other, as one term lends credibility to the other, in the history of western modernity. As we now know, what we deem “animal” includes forms of life that have widely divergent physiognomic, cognitive, and phenomenal experiences casting doubt over any notion of an “animal” essence. So, why do we need a discourse on “the animal”? What work is this generic construction doing culturally? What forms of knowledge and power is it stabilizing? I contend that the bifurcation of forms of life as primarily or exclusively human or else animal is a flashpoint in European anxieties about African slavery and colonial expansionism. In this context, “the animal” and “the black” became conjoined and mutually reinforcing tropes in liberal humanist discourse and practice. Thus, if we want to seriously interrogate our culture’s continual investment in (anti)blackness, we must go beyond perceiving bestialization as an unfortunate legacy of racism that can be resolved conclusively through the expansion of universal humanity. When we present universal humanity as a solution, we fail to appreciate that in a post-Darwinian context, inclusion rather than exclusion, is the primary modality of reproducing blackness as “the animal” within the human, black people as the lived border dividing human and animal forms of life. Instead, we must include an interrogation of the discourse of “the animal” as such, as the discourse of species is central to the logic and practice of animalizing black gender and sexuality in law, philosophy, science, neoliberalism, and popular culture. I argue that our failure to interrogate the discourse of species has allowed blackness to remain vulnerable to its appropriation by species discourse. As I show in my dissertation, African diasporic culture provide models for disconnecting black personhood from the trope of “the animal,” while also questioning the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority. In the final analysis, I suggest that the cultural production in my study exceed critique, by redefining what it means to be human from the perspective of those animalized by the gendered and sexual discourses and practices of biopolitics.
Craig, to answer your overall question…
…well, there really is no concrete answer I can give. I know that for me to convince myself out of accepting ‘structural speciesism’, I had to read, read , read, read and that opened my mind to accepting what I couldn’t accept as a ‘real problem’ before.
I have an extensive reading list for folk who really want to understand what anti-racist and critical whiteness engagement looks like– whether it’s in an AR, veg, or any organization in which the racial class status quo is incapable of seeing what it is that I see. I could offer a reading list, but that’s about it because I can’t make anyone read and consider what is on that list. I can only share and ask folk to start reading literature to develop a critical race literacy that can applied to not just animal liberation and veg, but just life in general.
I also have a keynote talk that I gave at University of Illinois that other week called “Race and Whiteness in Popular US Veganism” and video recorded the whole thing. That may be helpful… or it may not be. http://vimeo.com/21896841 and ‘ecobreeze’ is the password.
I don’t think I will ever have all the answers and I know that no matter what I do or what my intention is, it will always be interpreted by each individuals own unique way. I still have a lot to learn and am just taking it one day at a time.
Best,
Breeze
The other video that I recorded the other week can be found here: http://sistahvegan.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/people-are-in-prison-because-they-make-that-choice-animals-dont-creating-critical-race-literacies-for-a-post-racial-usa-201/
It is called “People are in prison because they make that choice, Animals don’t”: Creating critical race literacies for a “post-racial” USA
Hi. I just caught wind of this discussion.
I feel like this is a horrible case of bad journalism. A REALLY bad case. My paper was not about simply tokenism. It was about the neoliberal individualism in academia. I spoke about how the CV functions to individualize our work, and commodify knowledge into capital production.
To reduce the paper to a self-indulgent confession of the ‘tokenized vegan’ is a poor summary of a much more critical analysis of academia. I further used the fragmentation of individualism in the academy to talk about how radical actors in the animal liberation movement operates.
Getting back to the flippant presentation of my response. I am highly offended at how this was presented. And that you did not contact me before presenting such a poor portrayal of me.
My work on animal liberation has been predicated on intersectionality and the roles of classism, sexism, and racism in the animal liberation movement in the U.S. I have spent a great deal problematizing how the vegan movement in the U.S. is represented by race and size. My visions for liberation are holistic. I thoroughly enjoyed the notion that we, as animal liberation advocates, need to take a politic of total liberation.
To be clear, I would NEVER push aside a discussion about the racial representation at ICAS. I think that is an important conversation to have. And I CERTAINLY would not have thrown out Breeze’s award as some example of exceptionality. I understand the pragmatics of using one person’s success as example to somehow dismiss systematic oppression and exclusion.
I was also honored with the Scholar of the Year Award, but the Britches. I am honored to be recognized in conjunction with Breeze. My mentioning of the award was pointing out that she represents one of the few women of color being recognized in the vegan movement. But the comment was misheard and completely misrepresented here.
Rather than publish inflammatory remarks about a presenter to make a larger point, you need to engage people in dialogue. Your job should not be to present me as an ignorant self-pitying white woman who shushed a discussion about total liberation. And if you don’t think that is what you did, then I reiterate that you have made me feel violently misrepresented. You have colonized my work and my words here.
I apologize to anyone that has read this and assumed I did respond this way. And I also invite all of you to email me for a copy of the presentation if you are interested, as it is NOT represented here.
Dialogues about race and the disparate populations present at academic critical animal studies conferences are important. DO NOT MUDDY THEM WITH ACCUSATORY AND INFLAMMATORY RHETORIC.
Jenny, I encourage you to actually read my original post and the subsequent comments. Your reply has little relation to anything that was said above. I wish I could say that I’m sorry that you are upset, but I’m not: you made a flippant response to a serious comment. As I said, intentionally or not, your comment was stupid.
Here is a bit more context for the comment as well:
The discussion was quite brief in the panel, as we had about 10 minutes total for questions on all four papers.
This post does raise the issue of whiteness in the movement. An issue not many are publishing on. So, I chimed into the discussion to mention one scholar who is advancing the discourse surrounding race in the vegan movement in the U.S.
Jason’s paper made really good points about speciesism against human oppression by animal liberationists. But, we do not want to erase those who ARE doing intersectional, coalitional work that does not privilege one form of oppression over another. We should recognize critical animal scholars that are already doing coalitional work and advocating total liberation. When the discussion did open up, people seemed engaged. We talked about PETA and how racism has permeated some of their campaigns. Toward the very end of the discussion, I brought up Breeze as someone drawing attention to whiteness in the movement, in case others were interested in contemporary scholars writing on these issues. I just mentioned that she received the award as ‘shout out’ because I really admire her work.
Blogging about a presentation you seemingly did not attend is not only poor politic, it is inaccurate. In the future, I recommend contacting the presenter before re-appropriating their work.
Now that Jenny is giving context to her comment, the comment appears, at least to me, less ‘tokenism’, and more like she is giving examples of someone (me) who didn’t get an award as a ‘token’, but someone who got the Tyke because she is doing critical race and critical whiteness engagement with critical animal studies. I didn’t attend the conference so I am just trying to get everyone’s perspective who attended Jenny’s talk. And its quite helpful to hear Jenny explain what she meant and what her paper entailed. Her description has given me an entirely different context to what was originally posted here.
So, since she has given a very descriptive context to what she meant by using me as an example to point out issues around race, I am now trying to understand why you believe her comment to be flippant and stupid.
Best,
Breez
Jenny, that may have been what you thought you said or what you intended to say, but it isn’t what I heard. This is why I said “intentional or not.” I have no doubt you didn’t intend to come across the way you did. The fact remains that you did.
As for your suggestion that I didn’t suffer through your talk, there’s photographic proof floating around on Fakebook. (The horror! I didn’t give permission to have my photograph posted! They should have emailed me first!) I emphasize “suffer”–I loathe me-search. But that only speaks to my preferences, of course.
Breeze, it doesn’t matter to me whose interpretation you prefer.
Of course, I have no real stake in any of this. I’m not a member of ICAS and have no intention of becoming one. And it really isn’t my place as a white man to intervene as I did above. I registered my discomfort with what I heard. How people take that up is their own business. For instance, Breeze, you initiated an interesting discussion; Jenny, not so much.
(This post sure has gone viral on Fakebook. I just wish that whoever posted the link originally would have sent me an email to make sure it was okay that they wanted to talk about it!)
“This post sure has gone viral on Fakebook. I just wish that whoever posted the link originally would have sent me an email to make sure it was okay that they wanted to talk about it”
Maybe Craig should have sent an email to Jenny before he misquoted her! I also attended this panel, and from my POV Breeze Harper’s name was not invoked to shut down the conversation, but to suggest FURTHER avenues of conversation.
I was also at Jenny’s presentation and saw her mention of Breeze’s work as an indication to research being done in the area of critical race studies and critical animal studies. Bringing Breeze’s award into the conversation was more a mark of respect than of tokenism. I’m not sure if Craig was in the same room, or listening at all. Jenny’s presentation was insightful, engaging and incredibly self reflexive.
the probablem of judging which are the best papers is, that as you said, there are several parallel talks. so maybe it would be good to stress, that you were´nt able to see all talks and therefore the papers you think had high scholarly value are just a choice ot a range of talks you attended…
you write in your paper “The problem
with Horkheimer, and the tradition of critical theory as a whole, is that it is unabashedly humanist and anthropocentric.” this is not true and is not a very scholarly argument. (just to pick out a quite where horkheimer talks about emancipation (in fact a very early work, written before the experiences the holocaust and before criticism of the domination of nature was taken into account) and´t doenst mention the animals is not a good proof.
i don´t know it you attended marcel´s and my talk an animals in critical theory of adorno and horkheimer (i can send you the paper once its finished or maybe also the script for the talk), but there we gave several examples of why their theory is everything but not anthropocentric. i would also recommend reading the “critical theory and animal liberation” book which was presented at the conference.
sorry, my comment was actually ment to be posted under your blog-article whith the pdfs of your papers…
Julia, I did attend your talk and learned a lot from it. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to take what you said into account in my own talk. The Horkheimer work was chosen purposefully: Best cites Marcuse and Marcuse cites the Horkheimer I refer to. Yes, it is an early paper of his, but it is also, at least insofar as the translations are concerned (that I’m aware of), also the clearest exposition of what he takes critical theory to be vis a vis positive theory. I’d appreciate reading your paper (when it is done) along with some pointers to more sympathetic works.
Judy, Jovian: I’m glad we agree that different people have different points of view. Regardless, it remains the case that when the issue of race came up, Jenny pointed to Breeze in order to, intentionally or not, diffuse the comment. Even if Breeze’s work is valuable and interesting (which I take it to be), the result of Jenny’s comment was to displace the accusation; not to address it. She could have, for instance, said something to the effect of, “Your comment is well-taken. You are right that the history of animal activism has been overwhelmingly white and the scholarship has likewise been overwhelmingly white. This is very regrettable. Fortunately, this is beginning to change. To give but one example, Breeze Harper, a black woman, is doing very interesting work on…” (Judy: I note, in passing, that you value exactly what I found tedious in Jenny’s paper–the self-referentiality. As I’ve said a few times already, this is entirely a matter of taste. For me, it is distasteful; for you and Jenny, it is the complete opposite.)
So, DOES anyone else who attended the talk share YOUR view of Jenny’s comment, Craig?
Jovian, your question is completely irrelevant. Truth, or for that matter interpretation, isn’t democratic. If it were, then animal rights–or any other form of moral concern for animals–would be false. You can decide for yourself which interpretation you find most compelling; you can’t make this decision with a show of hands. To be more blunt: the veracity of my interpretation isn’t a function of popularity. I have no idea if anyone agrees with me and the question itself is not the least bit interesting to me. Why is it so important to you to know if you hold a popular opinion? Do you have, like Michael Scott, a pathological need to be liked?
About the Horkheimer-Question: As Julia already mentioned it would be too simply to just interpret Horkheimer account on the human-animal-relation as anthropocentric – at least not in the common sense. That a post-marxist author writes about the emancipation of man (that equals humyn in the sense as it is mostly the translation of the German word “mensch” which means “the human”) is nothing very striking and to further we have to consider that human animal studies at a whole have been established a lot later. So in this sense pretty much EVERY philosopher and sociologist would have been anthropocentric until the 1970s or so, just because they do not always imply animal in every quote about emancipation of society.
To “disprove” this argument I as well would refer to our paper in which it is shown in how multifaceted way Horkheimer and Adorno are implying animals into their view of a ‘emancipated society’.
————-
About the discussion during the conference: I have been to the same panel and I must say that I did not quite understand the remark on Breeze Harper as I am not a native speaker. BUT: I know the person who talked about the hegemonial whiteness in the animal movements and in animal studies and I am pretty sure he would have commented (same as others on the room) if Jenny would have tried to instrumentalize Breeze to ‘wash away’ the problem of whiteness in ICAS. Since Jenny has given her position to this matter already, I do not think that a discussion about her person is further relevant or appropriate. It would rather be interesting to discuss the actual topic further and that is: “Why is the animal community so damn white?” Is it only due to demographic factors such as prosperity and education that are connected with social factors such as institutionalised racism?
Sorry for the messed up grammar…!
I not speaking English mother tongue
The show of hands is important, Craigg, because you’ve just done a hatchet-job on a fellow academic and activist by misquoting her, taking what she DID say completely out of context, and painting her as a dumb, self-indulgent white woman who doesn’t give a sh*t about race. You may think that “popularity is irrelevant” – I, for one, find it really telling that no-one else who was at the talk seems to share your warped interpretation of the events. I’m not surprised that you’re sticking to your story – you seem like that kind of a guy – but I think it’s pretty clear from this comment thread that you’re a lone voice on this one. If the arrogance and downright snarkiness you’ve displayed on this thread are any indication, it’s a very good thing for you that you don’t suffer from a need to be liked!
Complaining that the other kids in your class don’t want to buddy-up for group work because you’re so darn radical for the animals is a pretty piss-poor example of reflexivity. Claiming Grubbs’ talk to be “engaging” and “insightful” is, at least (or, at best), an almost understandable interpretation by a like-minded me-searcher. Go team!
Jovian: your comment has no resemblance to anything I have said. I hate to take the highroad–because I really do like rolling in the mud and filth–but I don’t think you have a clue what I am saying or, indeed, what you are saying. Feel free to leave whatever comments you’d like, but, for the time being, I’m not interested in talking to you. Judy and Jenny can each leave another comment, if they so choose, to which I’ll reply, but after that, I’m done. Others can carry on the discussion, if they wish, but I’ve said what I wanted to say and I see no pressing need to re-iterate my points. We are rapidly approaching the point of diminished returns.
Marcel: I don’t disagree with you. My point in that passage–which I did not read at my presentation for a variety of reasons–is that we cannot uncritically take Horkheimer and Adorno (or, indeed, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc) and apply them to animal issues as though we somehow avoid the underlying humanism and anthropocentrism. If there was one point that I continually reiterated in my presentation is that this is incredibly difficult work! With very rare exceptions (perhaps only Spinoza? and a few scattered comments by Hume?) there has never been an attempt–until the recent past–to even consider thinking in a way that is not anthropocentric. Even the French anti-humanists of the sixties and seventies fail on this account.
Having said that, I’m all for salvaging whatever is of use and, equally, I’m all for abandoning whatever is not of use. If Horkheimer, Adorno and so on are valuable: make the case (which you try to do) or throw them out. Reasonably or not, Frankfurt School is often taken to be a left humanism in the English language, in large part because of the mediation of Marcuse and, later, Habermas. I haven’t read as much Honneth as I wold like, but I get more or less the same impression from him. (Indeed, in the English academy, “critical’ is used more often than not as a signifier of having the proper politics and not, so much, as signifying a theoretical commitment.)
So, to get back to my point from the presentation, I’m all for a critical animal studies. I’m all for what is called total liberation, of humans, of non-humans, and of nature. I have no argument with this political-ethical goal. But, we need to keep a few things in mind:
(1) Expressing this in theoretical or philosophical terms is not easy because no one has ever tried to do it. We can find glimpses of it in a variety of places, most notably in some statements of the critical theorists and post-structuralists, but there is no coherent and consistent statement.
(2) In order to express this adequately in theoretical or philosophical terms, we cannot be lazy. Adding in “and animals” for every occurrence of “man” or “human” is not sufficient. This is precisely the strategy adopted by Best in his uncritical use of Marcuse and Horkheimer.
(3) This possibly–if not necessarily–implies abandoning many of the concepts in our “critical” vocabulary: for instance, the concept of rights which is inextricably tied to its humanist origins.
Well, what you say is correct in the sense that it would obviously be naive to just understand the critical theory as a finished work (also there are some important differences between Adorno/Horkheimer and Marcuse as well as between A/H and Habermas).
But if we use the critical methodology that was offered especially by Adorno in his Negative Dialectic, then we can do the same with the Critical Theory as Adorno did with Marx, Kant or Hegel: Immanent Critique. That means we go ‘into’ the texts and separate: What is to be left behind? What is good as it is/ is still correct? What is to be modified in a progressive way? That’s what Marx has called dialectical “Aufhebung” and I think the term is also used in English.
Else it seems to me that we would discuss a mere separation in humanism and non- or post-humanism but that seems too dualstically (?) for me. In that sense it is of course not enough to simply add “and animals” to every use of the word “men” but it is possible to do so sometimes and we have to see, where the authors themselves were not radical enough to fulfil their own theories. Like Marco Mauritzi does, when he argues that Marx and Engels are idealists if it comes to animals. We should focus less of the real historical person and more on the theoretical conceptions and the way we can use them. Just to abandon the Frankfurt School (for example) because it is too humanistic (in a certain way of reading it, as I still doubt it being humanstic in a radical sense) would also ignore that there are a lot of progressive Aspects that are/were revolutionary for the history of philosophy which we can go on working with, modifying it – well, simply reading them in a dialectical way.
Marcel, I completely agree with your comment, although I might mediate it more with Althusser’s “symptomatic reading” than you do, which I think he did brilliantly with “Capital.” Obviously, there might be some problems remaining with the method as it is organized in such a way that humans are deemed exceptional to nature and non-humans. I forget how Hegel puts it, but the important difference between a human and an animal is that the animal, when it negates, doesn’t change; the human, when it negates, does change. This gets taken up in an interesting way by Bataille and Kojeve with Bataille being the far more convincing of the two.
I look forward to seeing the final version of your paper with Julia, I think it will be a rewarding read.