Humans, Animals and Biopolitics

The more-than-human condition

Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitro, Steve Hinchliffe, Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitro, Steve Hinchliffe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317119432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography

Human-animal co-existence is central to a politics of life, how we order societies, and to debates about who 'we' humans think 'we' are. In other words, our ways of understanding and ordering human-animal relations have economic and political implications and affect peoples' everyday lives. By bringing together historically-oriented approaches and contemporary ethnographies which engage with science and technology studies (STS), this book reflects the multi-sited, multi-species, multi-logic and multiple ways in which lives are and have been assembled, disassembled, practised and possibly policed and politicized. Instead of asking only how control and knowledge are and have been extended over life, the chapters in this book also look at what happens when control fails, at practices which defy orders, escape detection, fail to produce or only loosely hang together. In doing so the book problematises and extends the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics that has been such a central analytical concept in studies of human-animal relations and provides a unique resource of cases and theoretical refinements regarding the ways in which we live together with more than human others.

1 Introduction: The ‘More-Than-Human’ Condition

Sentient creatures and versions of biopolitics

Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitrø and Steve Hinchliffe

DOI: 10.4324/9781315587639-1

Humans are not alone – neither in their rich and complex daily lives, nor in the more rarefied chambers of philosophy or social theory. ‘We’ are dependents, reliant on a world that somewhat problematically is prefaced with the adjective ‘nonhuman’. We are, as a result, always more than human. Re-membering and re-constituting ourselves as such also reminds us of one of the first rules of actor-network theory (Latour, 1987; 1988). There is a tendency to mistake the attribution of agency, intention and purpose to humans as a signal that humans achieve these things on their own. Mistaking attribution as cause is to forget that what are often considered as quintessentially human characteristics are of course contingent upon a wide cast of helpers, co-travellers and companions of various shapes, sizes and kinds.

Nonhuman animals have animated some of the discussions that led to this book, and they form the key foci of the chapters that follow. For some time, of course, they have been a key and pressing constituency and a source of vibrant political activity. Too noisy and unruly to always play the part of mute and passive creatures (‘created’ for ‘us’), but sometimes too quiescent and under-resourced to mobilize on their own behalf, the conditions of living for nonhuman animals have reminded many of the injustices and violence of a human-centred worldview and politics.

Two broad movements animate the debate here. First, the reduction of so many nonhuman lives to what we can call the merest of living conditions, to life at the biological threshold, is a painful reminder of the consequences of human triumphalism and exceptionalism. This mere life, we need not remind ourselves, takes a number of forms: the extremes of human-induced species extinction, where wild populations are diminished to a barely reproducible number, sit alongside the inflation of domestic livestock populations in conditions that are barely called living. Second, and as these mere lives sometimes translate into shared disease, or as a sense of the common fates attached to a planetary demise starts to take hold, our shared fragility and precarity remind us of the instability of a clear boundary between human being and nonhuman being. The human condition is contingent on nonhuman animal life, and ‘our’ lives are intimately intertwined.

This volume, and our opening chapter, asks, what kind of knowledge practices could be viable for taking such diverse entanglements into account? We turn, in particular, to the resources that inhere to what Michel Foucault termed biopolitics, reviewing both the term and its recent (re)formulations. Our aim is to reclaim biopolitics as a means to generate a more empirically driven theorization of a more-than-human politics. We argue that Foucault presents possibilities for a livelier politics, in which the surprise of human-nonhuman engagements and entanglements can force us to hesitate and to think again about the obligations we have to others.

In the following, we suggest that at least two correctives or re-emphases are required to biopolitics. First, studies of life and the living alert us to the fact that biopolitics is not only about humans, or their (narrowly conceived) populations. It is rather about an assemblage of matters of life. Second, there is neither a self-evident nor a totalizing human power over life, nor an unproblematic politics of life. Rather, the relation between life and politics needs both theoretical and empirical specificity. In order to realize these aims, we will also need to engage various versions of biopolitics and navigate a way through the sizeable literature.

A key issue here is that this politics will always be in formation and hence unlikely to be pre-formatted by an overarching or totalizing approach to a (single) politics of life or biopolitics. Drawing sentient creatures into biopolitics is, we hope, an event or game changer, where the animal moment shifts the old certainties that relate to thinking life or to doing the biopolitical. It is, as Campbell and Sitze (2013a, p. 7) put it, a moment of turbulence, giving rise to hesitations, doubts and uncertainties. This chapter relates therefore to a core objective of the overall book, which is to draw together empirically focused research on human and nonhuman animals with the expanding interest in the politics of living. Research should surprise us and put our ideas and us at risk (Stengers, 2005). So the different analyses and narratives that each chapter provides may serve to unsettle any pre-established patterning of people and nonhuman animals. Species meetings and encounters in this sense retain the propensity to surprise. Another core objective has been to let the book take the form of an encounter – not only regarding how species meet (Haraway, 2008), but regarding how different research traditions and analytical approaches can be convened in order to deal, not to say engage, with such encounters. (We return to this below when more fully introducing the various topics and approaches of the chapters.)

Versions of biopolitics and ‘biopolitics collectives'

In this opening chapter we intend to trace the various ways in which the writings of Michel Foucault are being brought to bear on the issue of human-animal relations. We are also interested in how other traditions in this area, notably those that relate more clearly to post-human and material turns in social theory, exist in tension with this re-investment in biopolitics, and how these tensions and cross-fertilizations can be mobilized to open up a different kind of life politics.

One could indeed legitimately ask: why biopolitics and Michel Foucault? Is there not a certain irony to the fact that a scholar who so famously has interpreted biopolitics within what is often taken to be a humanist frame, and who addresses the art of government in relation to the human population and the making of the (human) subject in particular, becomes the centre of attention when discussing the more-than-human condition? In these senses, the biopolitical frame, as initially outlined by Foucault, is certainly in need of a re-specification. Interestingly, as we will demonstrate, his work is both a target for critique and a source of inspiration – for scholars who from a post-humanist approach seek to undo the current status of human exceptionalism as well as to scholars who see in Foucault a series of openings for an irreductionist approach to politics and human-animal relations. It will be useful in this sense to ask how Foucault’s work can inspire such different engagements.

To be clear, we do not see our task as presenting Foucault’s work in detail or adjudicating on versions of biopolitics. As Campbell and Sitze (2013b, p. 6) note, we cannot suppose that ‘Foucault’s brief remarks on biopolitics, whether in his little 1976 book [The History of Sexuality, vol. 1] or, especially, in the lectures concurrent with that book, can be interpreted as though they are consistent, transparent, and fully worked-through’. Moreover, given the large readership of Michel Foucault and the interest and concern with biopolitics, there exist quite different, in part conflicting, ‘versions’ of Foucault. ¹ Each version enacts the debate on human-animal relations and the more-than-human condition differently. What we will do is sketch out some possible and existing arguments. Teasing these out is helpful, we suggest, both to clarify and to make different positions and ways of working explicit. This might help to enable encounters between different ways of doing and engaging with human-animal relations as well as helping to identify tensions within the field. As we will demonstrate, there is an important and interesting tension between an approach which relates to Foucault and biopolitics with the primary objective of teasing out a viable normative position that may underpin a post-humanism, and an approach which primarily finds in Foucault an analytical and irreductionist method for, more agnostically, exploring the emergence and transformation of ‘things’. We can call those, quickly, a normative approach and one that is perhaps more methodological in orientation. Our task is not to choose between contrasting positions, nor is it to resolve key tensions, but to generate openings and resources for understanding and engaging with the more-than-human condition.

Let it be quite clear though: to even try giving a complete overview, the full story so to speak, of Michel Foucault and his biopolitical readership would not only be impossible, but probably also relatively uninteresting. And fortunately enough, inspiring, insightful and quite recent contributions already exist. In our terms, they tease out their own version of a Foucault or a biopolitics collective. Two examples, namely Cary Wolfe (2013) and Thomas Lemke (2011; 2014), will command our attention here. While Wolfe is engaged in an effort to sort out a post-humanist version of biopolitics, Lemke is more focused on reading Foucault alongside subsequent turns to materiality, or the so-called new materialism. As we will see, in large part these remain as theoretical works, so in addition to these recent interventions, we will tease out a third version of Foucault as a biopolitical resource directed at practice-oriented, material-semiotic and empirically grounded interventions. Moreover, the feminist-inspired science and technology studies and animal studies, notably the work of and the studies inspired by Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers, are curiously absent from many of the biopolitical reworkings to date (for an exception see the reader compiled by Campbell and Sitze (2013a), although even there, the more-than-human and/or nonhuman animal aspects of a reworked biopolitics are somewhat underplayed). We therefore trace some of the promise that their interventions make in terms of a re-worked biopolitical animal studies.

Versions of biopolitics I: The post-humanist collective

In insisting that humans are always ‘more than human’ – that is they are made up of matters and relations that make them ‘intricate’ with many nonhuman others – and in then referring to this more-than-human condition, we are clearly working against the grain of some key pillars of philosophical thought. In this sense the more-than-human condition can be read as something that is in tension (which is not the same as in opposition) with Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958). The latter clearly demarcates humans from nonhuman animals according to an ability to speak. According to Arendt, speech is that which makes ‘man’ a political being, hence it serves as qualification for membership in the political community (Arendt, 1958, p. 3; Wolfe, 2013, p. 7). This is in line with how the largely humanist philosophical critique of positivism more broadly has demarcated the social and cultural sphere from that of nature and natural science. According to this critique (of positivism), the most important difference between humans and animals was, precisely, language (Asdal, 2003; Skjervheim, 1957; 1959). Not only did this difference exclude nonhumans from the political community, it was also intended to do other kinds of work: humans ought not be treated like animals, as objects and passive nature-objects. Rather they had to be treated as subjects and as potential contributors to a shared community, even where that political community was not yet in existence. ²

One can of course appreciate Arendt’s predicament and still ask, what happens if the question is no longer the human condition exclusively or concerned with a community of humans that can easily, by way of language, be demarcated from that of nonhumans? How does it matter that the human condition is made conditional, to a large extent, upon nonhumans? And what happens if we leave such lines of demarcation, extend our concerns and expand the question to the ‘more-than-human’ condition? Who, as a result, are to be ‘taken into account’, or, indeed, how might we find the right terminology or spatial vocabulary for an expanded range of actors?

The questions above are intimately linked to the problems that Cary Wolfe (2013) addresses in his version of an ‘extended’ biopolitics committed to moving past humanism and the un-questioned demarcation lines between humans and the rest. This post-humanist version of biopolitics is crucially oriented towards a (philosophical) position, wherein established demarcations are thoroughly questioned and, importantly, are re-set along other fracture lines. It is a critique of conventional biopolitics formed around a set of questions confronting us when we cannot accept, or can no longer accept, ‘the human’ as the one and only focal point for being in the world. All humanisms, Wolfe writes, share some conception of freedom that ensures human exceptionality as opposed to and at the expense of nonhumans. Hence, this unconditional human exceptionalism needs to be countered or at least interrogated.

Space does not allow us to grant full credit to how Wolfe works himself around these questions, and also prevents us from detailing how he draws and works upon other scholars to form the biopolitical collective. However, important for us here is how such an alternative position is traced from a reading of Foucault’s biopolitics, in a double sense. First, this is done by addressing how Foucault represents an alternative to the demarcation lines that neatly but problematically separate humans from nonhumans in the tradition of Hannah Arendt and others (here Wolfe also includes Judith Butler). This is crucially related to how Foucault addresses and is concerned with politics and government of life rather than with human subjects. In this way, in principle, the collective can potentially be extended to include other forms of life, beyond the human. Importantly then, it is in this respect that Foucault becomes an important resource for a biopolitics which questions and works towards transcending the humanist frame and collective. Foucault’s concern with how life is inserted into history is one part of this potential. Likewise, his interest in how governmental tactics and programmes are re-directed towards ‘forces’ and ‘bodies’, rather than a more limited and narrower concern with political subjects, opens up a space for a more-than-human appreciation of biopolitical actions.

Second, and perhaps somewhat ironically, this is made possible through a reading of the Foucault, who is primarily concerned with addressing the human and how human populations are acted upon by way of governmental techniques. This is a reading of Foucault’s biopolitics that stresses the disciplining of subjects and the development of what is understood to be essentially repressive techniques. It is, in effect, a reading of Foucault that draws out and attends to the equation of biopolitics and biopowers as powers over life, without, we would argue, paying enough attention to the lively openings, and the irreducibilities, that may be opened up in this more-than-human world.

There is then, we argue, in this version of biopolitics, an interesting but also somewhat troublesome or problematic combination of the positive and the negative. There is the affirmative and, we could say, generous reading of Foucault when it comes to how his re-workings of social and political theory may serve as an invitation and resource for opening up the biopolitics collective towards nonhumans and their intricate relations with human forms of life. But this is combined with a reading that emphasizes the disciplining and repressive nature of go...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: the ‘more-than-human‘ condition: sentient creatures and versions of biopolitics
• 2 The practices of fishy sentience
• 3 Making pig research biographies: names and numbers
• 4 Modifying the biopolitical collective: the law as a moral technology
• 5 Pastorale: sheep traffic in modern trauma surgery
• 6 The measure of the disease: the pathological animal experiment in Robert Koch's medical bacteriology
• 7 Knowing sentient subjects: humane experimental technique and the constitution of care and knowledge in laboratory animal science
• 8 One health, many species: towards a multispecies investigation of bird flu
• 9 Sensory biopolitics: knowing birds and a politics of life
• 10 Loving camels, sacrificing sheep, slaughtering gazelles: human-animal relations in contemporary desert fiction
• Index