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1 Animal Housing/Housing Animals
Nodes of Politics, Practices and Human–Animal Relations
Kristian Bjørkdahl and Tone Druglitrø
The various things humans do with and to other animals often depend crucially on the physical infrastructures with which we order and regulate movement. Just as there could be no Sea World without large-scale aquariums, stadium-scale seating, and plaque-infested pathways; and no lab animals without laboratories, animal houses, and cages; there could be no factory farming without battery cages, animal mass-transports, and conveyor-belt slaughterhouses. In the same way, “free-range animals” would be impossible without…a range.
Though it might be tempting to view the physical infrastructures that regulate the movement of animals as mere matter – as inert objects that mean nothing and move no one – we are better served by seeing them as complex nodes of politics, practices, and human–animal relations. This is the central point we want to convey with this book. Animal housing systems are always part of larger sociocultural and political infrastructures; they are sites where the material reality of the housing system itself combines with the practices of human and nonhuman agents, with science, and with politics. If the physical things we use to house animals appear simple and straightforward, they are in fact precisely the opposite.
The battery cage is a case in point. Although in itself not much more than steel wire assembled in a particular way, the battery cage is also a symbol of agricultural development, a manifestation of the spirit of modernization that swept through the agricultural sector in the twentieth century. At the same time, the cage is much more than a symbol; it is a potent piece of material reality. As a material object, the cage structures how poultry farmers perform their job – one could even say it determines what it means to be a “poultry farmer,” as it changes the farmer’s job description from caretaker of sentient creatures to manager of machines. The cage also affects greatly the number of farmers who can stay in business. Because of the high capital investment needed to install a battery cage facility, this system creates an incentive to house a large number of animals, so that farmers can recoup their investment; this makes for a highly efficient production, but precisely for that reason, it also implicates the cage in the movement towards concentration of agricultural production – i.e. fewer, but larger, farms. As such, the battery cage becomes both a constituent component and an image of the central, not to say centralizing, aspirations of agriculture in our time. Last but not least, the cage changes life for egg-laying hens – dramatically. The changes implied by the battery cage are thus quite immense. It is not that the cage causes all those changes, and certainly not that it inevitably does so. Rather, like most animal housing infrastructures, the changes implied by the cage have been constantly debated, negotiated, appropriated, and criticized. Whatever its proper place in the complex chains of cause and effect, the seemingly inert and uninteresting battery cage emerges – along with the other things that enable animal housing – as a complex node of politics and practices.
What makes the issue of animal housing an important matter of concern for the humanities and social sciences is made clearer with the example of the battery cage. It illustrates how “animal housing” is a central policy area that brings together issues of animal welfare, human health, cultural practices, historical developments, and different versions of “humaneness” – as well as different relationships between humans and animals. These are all pertinent areas of research for humanists and social scientists, and in recent decades, a broad scholarly movement has emerged which argues that we, by including both animals and things in our purview, can gain a richer methodological approach with which to study social phenomena. In rough alignment with this movement, the present book offers a compilation of empirically rich studies that in various ways seek to understand emerging relations and dynamics between the material and the discursive phenomena that make up animal housing structures and practices. Some of the questions that frame this book are: How do systems of animal housing, and the physical infrastructures that surround central human–animal practices more generally, come into being? What kinds of practices and relations are formed around these physical structures? What norms, ethics, politics, and values develop around animal housing practices? By and for whom are they developed? A feature common to most, if not all, of the texts in this book is thus a developed interest in the materiality of animal housing structures, combined with a tendency to see physical things as enmeshed in practices and politics. The contributions to this volume are in other words concerned with animal housing both as noun and as verb.
This starting point signals our connection to a research tradition that has been growing since the mid-1990s, which puts into focus “the complex nexus of spatial relations between people and animals” (Philo and Wolch 1998, 110). This tradition of human – or more correctly, animal – geography (see Wolch and Emel 1998; Philo and Wilbert 2000), did much to alert the growing field of human–animal studies to the centrality of physical structures in human–animal relations.1 Indeed, as Henry Buller’s recent inside “reports” from this field make clear, one will have a hard time sorting the inside of animal geography from its outside, as this has become a “field with increasing interdisciplinary connections” (Buller 2014a; see also Buller 2014b and Buller 2015). Alongside geography, anthropology is another social science discipline that has concerned itself with issues of space, place and housing, in the vast ethnographic literature on domestication. These studies have demonstrated how domestication has provided the particular narratives that we live by, and that it sustains, justifies, and makes legible the “particular historical trajectories and biosocial relations” that resonate in the Euro-American context and tradition (Lien 2015, 5–6). As Cassidy (2007) points out, in Domestication Revisited, anthropology has been particularly concerned with the relationship between domestication practices and human mastery and control, and how it produces hierarchies and classificatory distinctions. She adds, however, an emerging insight in anthropology (particularly those invested in investigating human–animal relations) (e.g. Lien 2015): The unquestionable link between domestication and human mastery is far from obvious, and might not even be a particularly good description of domestication and housing practices. In other words, domestication is more than a question of unidirectional control. Yet, as Henry Buller’s contribution to this book demonstrates, domestication often involves the infliction of violence upon animals, and thus can hardly be described as a mutual process between equal individuals.
If the nodes between physical structures, humans, and animals was ever an exclusive domain of animal geographers, that is no longer so. Likewise, if the issue of domestication was ever a sole concern of anthropologists (or archaeologists), they have been joined by other social science and humanities disciplines. Indeed, in this book, scholars with backgrounds from history of science, STS, rhetoric, anthropology, art history, cultural studies, and environmental history grapple with precisely this issue. They start, however, with an expanded version of the central insight of animal geography, namely that we should include animals – and things! – in social studies not just as metaphors, or as mirrors of humans, but as entities that “matter individually and collectively, materially and semiotically, metaphorically and politically, rationally and affectively” (Buller 2014a, 3). This rings in workable harmony with other notable developments in the humanities and social sciences, not least with perspectives within human–animal studies and STS, which highlight the roles that nonhuman animals, technologies, and things play in the project of ordering society (e.g. Clarke and Fujimura 1992; Bowker and Star 2000; Daston 2004; Barad 2003).
In the remainder of this introduction, we will sample what we believe are some helpful points of departure for the study of the nexus between physical structures, humans, and animals. These should not be taken to represent an overarching theory, but are best understood as overlapping perspectives and approaches. Also, our sketch does not amount to a framework that unifies all the various motivations, methods and ways of engaging with the issue of animal housing that are on display in this book, or that one finds in the social sciences and humanities more broadly. That would be an endeavor that exceeds the limits of this introduction. Thus, we have chosen to situate the issue of animal housing in developments that have emerged across various disciplines and can be linked to a variety of “turns” that are not easily separated, such as the “material turn,” the “animal turn,” and the “constructivist turn.” Though they highlight slightly different concerns, these turns have in common a focus on how matter matters – how humans depend on, are shaped and challenged by, nonhumans; how human–animal relations are situated in constricted spaces; and how these relations take part in defining these spaces.
Drawing on these various perspectives and approaches we suggest, rather carefully, that the concrete sites and practices of animal housing are worth exploring in themselves, and we add only – what is admittedly quite significant – that a fruitful way to engage with this issue is with an assumption of humans, animals, and technologies as mutually constitutive phenomena, as entanglements that produce particular norms and politics of human–animal relations. Too often, discussions of “human–animal relations” are allowed to slip into the abstract, as if such relations had no placement in physical space, and no connection to the things one finds in such spaces. But as the essays in this book will show, such abstract relations, between what truly are two immense categories – Human and Animal – are often predicated on things, objects, physical structures, and material artifacts. In fact, many of the functions we ascribe, or rather impose, on animals would not even be possible – nor would the institutions and practices that crop up round those relations – if it were not for objects.
To the extent these objects have been at the center of attention, they have typically been cast as “instruments of torture,” as what stands in the way of animal welfare. In what follows, we aspire to a more complex understanding of the various normativities that infuse the nodes of animal housing. As many of the subsequent chapters will show, the values that are produced in and part of animal housing practices are often in tension, such as that between use and protection, or between principles of efficiency and welfare – which means that the “good” cannot easily be sorted from the “bad.” Instead of a simplistic critique that calls for “animal liberation,” we suggest a richer understanding of how and why we house animals like we do, what the prerequisites and the implications of that are, as well as what it would take to imagine a different way.
The Agency of Things
In his book Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity, Reviel Netz provides a creative narrative on the role of things in modern history. More specifically, through a history of barbed wire, he demonstrates the importance of things and technologies for demarcating space and controlling movement. Marx famously said that people, before they do anything else, must eat, drink, and clothe themselves, but in fact, says Netz, “even before people do those things, they must move, and they must occupy space.” Consequently, “History takes place as flesh moves inside space; it is thus, among other things, about the biology of flesh – as well as about the topology of space” (Netz 2004, 228). As Netz shows, this regulation of movement takes place by the help of technology, and it orders not only human lives, but animal ones as well.
Netz is not alone in arguing for the importance of taking things into consideration. In fact, social science and humanities scholars have in recent decades come to a greater appreciation of the role of things in the construction of human and nonhuman lives. They have shown how things are not, as we have acquired the habit of assuming, passive, given, fixed, or neutral (Latour 2005). Lorraine Daston argues, for instance, that things – material, physical objects – have traditionally been thought of as speechless, thoughtless, without agency, and thus without import. But without things, she says, what would the world be like? Well, it would be “just a kind of porridgy oneness” (2004, 9). Without things, the world would lose distinction, and indeed, “Without things, we would stop talking. We would become as mute as things are alleged to be” (ibid.). Likewise, David Baird has advocated what he calls “thing knowledge,” which refers to “a materialist epistemology … where the things we make bear our knowledge of the world, on a par with the words we speak” (Baird 2003, 39). It is not the case, argues Baird, that physical things are just props in a drama that is really about “words and equations” (Baird 2004, 4). “Instruments are not in the intellectual basement; they occupy the same floor as our greatest theoretical contributions to understanding the world” (Baird 2004, xvii).
Though they emanate from various backgrounds and highlight somewhat different concerns, these perspectives can, when taken together, stand as articulations of what has come to be known as “the material turn.” In recent years, the material turn has been driven forth by fields such as cultural history, history of science, and science and technology studies (STS). The material turn is thus not a uniform movement, but if we could bundle up the different perspectives and traditions in the same basket and talk about a “new materialism,” we would first have to note that this movement is characterized by a call to reconsider the ontological, epistemological, and political status of materiality; it is an agenda that champions the idea that matter is not passive or unitary, but active, forceful and plural (Lemke 2014, 2). If this turn has been particularly salient within animal studies, this is perhaps because animals have traditionally been seen precisely as a sort of “thing.” In the tradition we inherited from Descartes, animals were famously thought of as automata. Humans were spirit, animals were matter; humans acted, animals were acted upon; humans were subjects, animals were – yes – objects. Consequently, in human–animal studies, the material turn has boosted efforts to dismantle the human–animal distinction that were already underway, and has allowed a newfound appreciation of other-than-humans and their potentiality as actors. One central aspect of these efforts has been the attempt to overcome distinctions between humans and animals based on speech. Thus, the material turn has been an effort to move away from the power of linguistics and has turned “every ‘thing’ – even materiality – into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation” (Barad 2003, 801). The appreciation of materiality across the social sciences and humanities has been criticized, however, for an excessive concern with the matter of materiality at the expense of a concern for the role of language. “Discourse cannot be discounted!” say the critics. They suggest that we should attend not only to the role and agency of materiality, but to the semiotics that makes matter matter in particular ways, that enables matter to do stuff. In other – yes – words: When considering the thing, we also need to attend to the talk of the thing.
The Thing and the Talk of the Thing
The importance of acknowledging the co-construction of materials and language has been a central concern for scholars within science and technology studies (STS) and particularly those working with Actor–network theory (ANT) (e.g. Latour 1987; 2005). The central tenet of ANT for instance – radical symmetry – emphasizes how all things (be it humans, animals, technologies, but also, importantly, speech and words) have the potential to be actors (“actants”), or to put it differently, have the potential to produce effects and outcomes. In this “material-semiotic approach,” there is no such thing as pure materiality, since matter is always accompanied by scripts (Asdal and Ween 2014, 7). A crucial feature of material-semiotics, then, is its insistence that things and technologies are vital to the study of science, culture, and politics, but also, its insistence that these objects or technologies are always inscribed with meaning – with text and context. As such, technologies can be thought of as “speech apparatuses” (ibid.). This further entails that neither things nor their meanings are fixed or universal, even though we often think of them as such. At any point in time, what things are or can do is predicated on the networks they are part of.
What we should do, then, according to the material-semiotic approach of STS, is to pay closer attention to the work and practices of constructing and imagining arrangements (be it matter or meaning) for human–nonhuman spatial relations, and the politics and ideas that are part of these ordering practices. The notion of “infrastructural arrangements,” introduced by Adele Clarke and Joan Fujimura in The Right Tools for the Job (1992), is useful to keep in mind in this context as it seeks to capture how infrastructures are crucially based on the theories, technologies, people and animals as well as ordering practices. Thus, the notion of infrastructural arrangements emphasizes the interrelationship between and coordination of heterogeneous elements in the facilitation of techno-scientific work. It involves an attentiveness to the work and craftsmanship of producing and adjusting organisms, technologies, instruments, resources, politics, theories, and methods when exploring how the ordering of human–animal relations and technologies produce identities, relations, skills, norms and ethics. It is exactly such contingencies and complexities of animal housing that this volume wants to tease out, and that the material-semiotic approach helps us to do. Allow us to elaborate.
The Politics of Animal Housing
If th...
