Theoria

This past weekend I attended and presented at the Animals and Animality Across the Humanities and Social Sciences conference held at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. The conference was exceptionally well-attended (I understand over 140 abstracts were submitted and nearly sixty papers were delivered) and well-organized. It was refreshing to present in an environment where one does not have to first justify their subject matter prior to getting along to the substantive point and it was also refreshing to have vegan options at breakfast and lunch–try getting those options at any other conference! This shows, on the one hand, that “animal studies” is well, but on the other hand, it shows that “animal studies” is not well. By this I mean that the conference itself demonstrated some of the arguments I had made in my own paper; namely, that there is a growing bifurcation between what calls itself “critical animal studies” and what we might call “non-critical animal studies” and, further, that what often calls itself “critical animal studies” is not especially critical. The meaning of “not especially critical” is quite important: the “critical” in “critical animal studies” must refer to some sort of normative commitment in favour of animals and this commitment must extend beyond standard, commonly accepted view of animal welfare. However, this normative commitment need not imply that all “critical” scholarship must either derive from and be designed for activism. Writing a history of anthropocentrism can be a critical activity and it is a theoretical task that “critical animal studies” should take up. However, there is no clear connection between what Augustine thought of the divine and metaphysical relation between humans and animals, or the meaning of each category, and present relations between humans and animals. A reduction of theoretical activity to propaganda, as some members of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies in effect propose, is ridiculous and anti-intellectual. (Indeed, I understand that there was some controversy surrounding the use of the term “critical animal studies” in the call for papers–a representative of ICAS effectively demanding to know what relation the conference was proposing to ICAS!) Ultimately, the problem is that the university at once provides an environment in which we can more or less pursue our normative commitments without much interference, but at the same time, routinization of our problematics ultimately leads to blunting of normative commitments. This is easily verifiable when we look at feminism, which became women’s studies and then became gender studies, or when we look at political economy, which became political sociology. I suspect that the cost of having “animals week” in first year sociology courses will be that normative impulse will have to be left behind. While the university might be an uneasy bedfellow when it comes to animal studies, it is the only bedfellow that we have.

There were some tenditious moments. For instance, Carol J. Adams was criticize more than once for being “transphobic.” Often this “criticism” was appended to a paper without any clear connection to the topic at hand or with any effort to demonstrate that she is, in fact, “transphobic” or how this relates to her work. I found these criticisms quite surprising and weak. (I assume they ultimately derive from this post at The Vegan Ideal and similarly weak criticisms of her teacher, Mary Daly.) After all, when I suggested that we must be careful with our theoretical concepts, that it is not merely a matter of substituting “humans and animals” for “men” in the texts we read, I was told–and this in-itself was tenditious–that we “just can’t throw out a theoretical tradition because the thinker is a humanist” (a claim I did not, in fact, make), it is perfectly acceptable to criticize and condemn a feminist and her work on a wishy-washy charge of being “transphobic”! This is in spite of the fact that Steven Best, the patron saint of the politically correct activists, routinely engages in highly gendered attacks on his enemies, the “effete and privileged academics.” Similarly, there are only so many exegeses (regardless of how good they may be) one can do of, say, Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am!

Rumour has it that this event will be followed by another organized around a visit to Queen’s by J.M. Coetzee in the coming year.

(While I was away, Mica puked in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs for no discernable reason, Gordon pooped in front of the TV after having been outside for ten minutes, and one of our classy neighbours attacked our front door with a bottle–basically, it was a standard weekend.)