1Relational animals
Beyond-human geographies require a shift in our imaginings, constructions, and lives. Rooted in relational thinking, this chapter troubles the deployment of binary thinking in both mainstream thinking about animals and in animal activism itself. In binary thinking, animal beings are constructed not only as sentient and feeling, but also hyper-individualised geographical subjects, to whom care is extended only contingently. Animal beings are most commonly found in companion animals and charismatic animals (Lorimer, 2007), and where animals have resisted their objectification, such as escaping from slaughter. On the other side of this binary are animal things; at best these animals teach us how to be human (a rhetoric also found in pet-keeping). The most visceral animal thing is the farmed animal: objectified, fragmented and, ultimately, consumed (Adams, 2010). This binary is historically contingent on violent interspecies hierarchies, and can also be found in animal activism based around rights or welfare. Veganism, however, attempts to make it possible to grapple with, and refuse, this binary to establish more equitable multispecies imaginaries of space.
Disturbing this binary requires a different kind of space between and beyond âus.â Indeed, it requires a reconceptualisation of who counts as âus,â to open new beyond-human relationships and spaces. This firstly requires a reconsideration of previous theorisations of animals, particularly those which primarily work through the expansion of anthropocentric rights-based frameworks. This chapter confronts these theories in, through and beyond the archive, a site itself of anthropocentric violence. In so doing, I seek to illustrate the permeation of binary thinking in animal activist histories and critique the persistence of the human/animal divide in animal activism, setting up the frame for understanding and relating to animals throughout the book.
Animal constructions
The condition of belonging, value or position in society is determined, for animals as for humans, across geographical contexts. For humans, race, citizenship, gender, disability, age, and more are determining factors in the degree to which particular people and groups of people are extended social, political, economic, and cultural worth, varying across space and time. Geographical scholarship offers a lens into these variances, and resistance to them. Beingness in this sense is not simply biological life, but is imbued with degrees of political, social, and ethical mattering. The extent of this mattering relies upon closeness to the white, Western subject who has continually, violently been constructed as âhumanâ (Jackson, 2020). The propinquity, here used to mean both the state of closeness and close kinship, to those constructed as less-than-human has had material consequences on the condition(al) of beingness, for humans and animals.
Pushing back against the violence of binary thinking in multispecies work is not new; troubling the human/animal binary is commonplace in critical animal studies scholarship. For example, attention has been paid to the categorisations attached to animals as âpet, pest, profitâ (Taylor and Signal, 2009), the privileges afforded to âcharismatic animalsâ (Lorimer, 2014), and the exceptional positions that companion animal species occupy (Sutton, 2020). The attachment of the condition of beingness or thingness to animals is historically and relationally negotiated (see Haraway, 1984; Butler, 1990; Braidotti, 1994; Irigaray, 1996). This chapter is not a call to shift the animal condition from animal things to animal beings, but rather to understand how the geographical and relational locations of animals determine their thingness or beingness, and instead ask how we might occupy instead states in-between being and thing.
The state of closeness of concern here is twofold: of being in proximity, as with companion animals; and of somatic markers of belonging to the privileged group of (most) humans (Cuomo and Gruen, 1998; Puwar, 2004). Interspecies violence is not historically unique in its mobilisation, but rather situates animals within âinterlocking and multiplicative systems of domination and submissionâ (Fiorenza [1992] in Pui-Lan, 2009, 193). The political and spatial deployment of human and animal is not oppositional, but a relational construct entangled with notions of closeness and distance, the familiar and unfamiliar.
Destabilising the being/thing binary risks reasserting problematic anthropocentric narratives by appealing to logics that reveal that if pain can be inflicted on those close, or similar, to the self, this pain could affect the self. Critiquing such an approach is not a matter of moral purity, but rather one of valuing difference, ensuring multispecies worlds because of their difference, not seeking to homogenise it in these appeals. It is only in moving away from modes of binary thinking between human and animal, and being and thing, and towards relational thinking based on contemporary geographical understandings of the body, relationality, and intersubjectivity that fuller understandings of multispecies worlds can be found.
In the binary mode, the character and intensity of feeling towards particular animals and groups of animals is an ordered and organised process, not an unhappy accident (Joy, 2009). The examples we commonly hear to contest human inconsistencies of loving and killing animals are at the global scale: cows, dogs, and cats are loved or eaten depending on where they are. However, the binary/thing plays out in more complex ways in the hyperlocal multispecies spaces. For example, in the companion animal relationship, a âpetâ is loved as an honorary human and welcomed, until they act in ways that disturb their expected servitude, such as biting (see Sutton, 2020).
Where a being/thing binary is often deployed in animal activism that sits farmed animals on one side, and companion animals on the other, this oversimplifies multispecies relationships. Geographical variation in loving and eating animal species reveals the construction of this value as socio-spatially produced between humans and animals. Importantly, however, what we must also attend to are the forms of (violent) closeness and claims of care (Giraud and Hollin, 2016) in killing, eating, and owning animals to unsettle and rupture this binary further.
The archive
The work in this and the following two chapters draws on archival research undertaken in the archives of Richard D. Ryder. Archival holdings and documents by their very nature as human collections of space, time, and events, force beyond-human realities out of reach. The stories of animals are rarely deemed more than marginalia to the affairs of humans to institutions that collect archives, and this is the case for the Ryder Papers. While it is an archive that features animals more commonly than most, it was primarily preserved to document the emergence of the politically and socially important animal activism movement in Britain: a movement of humans. The reality of the conditions of animals being fought against is easily subsumed by the affairs of the humans who are self-appointed advocates.
As an archival reader and listener, beyond-human research in the archives required reading along the archival grain (Stoler, 2009) in a space where animals fall under a regime of power which seeks to homogenise their stories as minor addendums to an all-too-human history. âThe archive lies not only in the clues it contains, but also in the sequences of different representations of reality. The archive always preserves an infinite number of relations to realityâ (Farge, 2013, 30). Archival animals are as such âtemporally situated and yet also always in motion,â their existence âconstituted by stories of ⌠experiences, and encounters that might elicit alternative affective movementsâ (Lee, 2016, 34). The beyond-human stories in this chapter are entwined in politicised and expansive spatio-temporal networks of care; relations can shift with and in the archive, within an open but finite history (Nancy, 1990).
Before telling these stories, I will take a brief detour into how the archive is being constructed in this book. The archive is a holder of historical trajectories and contingencies: coming together and falling apart, interfolding. Understanding the interconnections and entanglements of there-and-then and here-and-now, archives âalways stand in active, dialogic, relation to the questions with the present puts to the past; and the present always puts its questions differentlyâ (Hall, 2001, 92). The archive remains elusive, never complete, always reaching through, and allowing the present to arch back to the pasts that in turn weave into the future. These interweaved and relational histories are, even in the absence of animals, always multispecies; our lives coexist and reinforce one another and paying attention to beyond-human histories disturbs anthropocentric worldly narratives.
The language of discontinuity, of transformation, and rebuilding in relation to archival storage and reading (Foucault, 2002) resonates with an imagining of a break between violent pasts and possible futures imagined from a vegan perspective. And so, the past must also be confronted speculatively, in the mode of as if in order to centre the disruptive potential of relational history. In recognising the necessity of âdecentring human agencies, as well as remaining close to the predicaments and inheritances of situated human doingsâ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, 12), we can begin to get into the beyond-human elements of history. How animals are included in the decentring of white Western humanity, however, must be approached with caution and sensitivity (Twine, 2014).
Anthropocentric theorisations and practices of animal rights foreground human superiority or beneficence, affirming humans' immovable centrality. This is evident in theories arguing for the inclusion of animals within a human framework, rather than a call to change the framework itself. Sentience and pain are the basis for the inclusion of animals in moral communities, most prominently through Singer's utilitarianism (Singer, 1975), centred on suffering as the moral impetus to do no harm, and Regan's deontology (Regan, 1983), which poses it as a moral right, or duty, to include animals in human rights-based frameworks. Ryder's painism combines Singer's aggregate suffering and Regan's conception of subjects-of-a-life (Ryder, 1983).
These theories do not remove the human framework but assume that animals can be moulded and anthropomorphised to fit human orderings. Pain and sentience remain within human conceptualisations of rights, duties, and human-centred worlds, ignoring non-sentient other-than-human ecological life and beyond-human community and interdependencies (Hall, 2011). They cannot offer transformative visions rooted in closeness and relationality.
Beyond binary thinking
There were several copies of the Speciesism Leaflet in the Ryder Papers (see Ryder, 2010) and each time my hands found it, or I return to look at it, the image contained shocks me. A tiny chimpanzee, curled over, weak, emaciated, and covered in scabs from injections of syphilis during experiments. I recognise pain, I empathise and his distress breaks through the archive, with a sudden kick of pain. The image, the first time I saw it, dragged me out of my almost trance-like state of searching archival materials (see Derrida, 1996) to the current moment, in a recognition of a shared feeling, of a desire to reach out to this body in pain. This chimpanzee exists beyond the archive and persists through the archive to reach into and affect my present. This beyond is a space that breaches history, geography, and species.
For Yancy (2005, 215â6), âthe body is less of a thing/being than a shifting/changing historical meaning that is subject to cultural configuration/reconfiguration ⌠the body is a battlefield, one that is fought over again and again across particular historical movements and particular social spaces.â Through animal histories and biographies, some animals can (re)claim individuality and identity (Krebber and Roscher, 2019), but only this animal, not all. This animal becomes exemplary â the replica who reflects what we envisage of our own ideal image â in the rarity of their exceptionalism to âthe animalâ (Derrida, 2005). This body breaches the binary. What is read in these images and stories is an animal who has â through historical and geographical circumstance â enacted their struggle towards the reader they did not know existed. We exist only in this relation.
It is within the relation, then, that negotiations and rejections of the binary are possible. This requires a critical unmaking of the self, a cultural reconfiguration of the body forging history, as not only geographically located, but geographically created (Yancy, 2005). An uncomfortable task, perhaps, but one necessary to critiquing beings and doings (Berlant, 2011) towards a new multispecies ethic. The role of relationality requires a recognition of our shared worldly embodiment (Weaver, 2013) at the same time as our difference. So, with the relation providing a space to undo the binary, what matters in the representation of this relation? How do we speak of our shared worldliness without overwriting our important differences? Representational power and voice are prescient concerns in multispecies work; when the powerful speak over the less powerful, they reassert structures of oppression and silencing (Spivak, 1988). Yet, it is a common rallying call to hear from animal activists that they must speak as a voice for the voiceless.
At first glance, a valiant effort to represent animals might appear in this statement. But the assertion of voicelessness is actually doing work to uphold animals as things, rather than part of a relational community that might speak beyond the language of the humans: âconsider that human language ⌠rather than separate from the animal, instinctively returns to itâ (Massumi, 2014, 91). Complicity in upholding violence is an active process, manifested in a speciesist relation to and within the world. Articulating complicity despite intentions breaches our doing of relationships with animals, opening, and imagining alternative multispecies worlds. Turning back over a century, the question of voice and representation can be found with a brown dog.
In 1902, Lizzie Lind af Hageby and Leisa Schartau enrolled on a medical course at the London School of Medicine for Women. Here, they became one of the earliest undercover exposers of animal abuses in the name of science. In The Shambles of Science (Lind af Hageby and Schartau, 2012), the story of the brown dog is told. They first met the little brown terrier in December 1902, when William Bayliss undertook the first vivisection on the brown dog, cutting open his abdomen to demonstrate a medical procedure on his pancreatic duct. Two months later, Bayliss' assistant cut open the terrier again to inspect the previous wound, before clamping shut his abdomen and handing the brown dog over to Bayliss to cut open his throat and attach electrodes to the brown dog's salivary glands. Bayliss stimulated these nerves over the next hour as Lind af Hageby and Schartau witnessed the dog's body cut open, inadequately anaesthetised, clamped, and tied down to a wooden board, his mouth muzzled, in pain and struggling. The brown dog was handed to student (and future Nobel Laureate) Henry Dale, who removed his pancreas and killed the brown dog with a knife through the heart.
This is a story that tested Britain's perception of itself as a nation of animal lovers. The case went to trial. Three years later, a memorial was erected at a park in Battersea, inscribed: âMen and women of England, how long shall these things be?â infuriating medical students against anti-vivisectionist activists. This statue became the site, representationally and physically for questions of whose bodies matter. The brown dog was no longer killable, even though he had been killed; his body's memorialisation became the representative for political ideologies of anti-vivisectors. It projected a âgeography of sufferingâ (Garlick, 2015, 810) that violently disrupted modern conceptions of animals as beings or things, which depended upon the relation breaching enforced distance and exposing invisibilised practices (Arcari et al., 2020). Just as humans, animals and the world are entangled, breaching temporality and bringing human and animal closer through pain.
For Scarry, in pain, we are above pretence because of ...
