Philosophy and the Politics of Animal Liberation

Paola Cavalieri

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137521194
• eBook ISBN: 9781137521200
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This edited collection testifies to the fact that the animal liberation movement is now entering its political phase, after a period dominated by ethical approaches that undermined the paradigm of human supremacy and demanded justice for nonhuman beings. The contributors of this book collectively confront and take on questions of social transformation, guided by the idea that philosophy has an important role to play even at such a new level. They start from such diverse perspectives as critical theory, left liberalism, and biopolitical thought. The result is an articulated picture in which, beyond any principled divergence, it is possible to detect the emergence of a relevant set of shared political preoccupations. This exploration of those offers fresh theoretical insights and suggestions for praxis.

© The Author(s) 2016

Paola Cavalieri (ed.)Philosophy and the Politics of Animal LiberationPolitical Philosophy and Public Purpose10.1057/978-1-137-52120-0_7

Begin Abstract

Counter-Conduct and Truce

Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel¹

(1)

School of Social and Political Science, The University of Sidney, RCS Mills Build., NSW, 2006, Australia

Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

It is recorded that Michel Foucault did not read out his whole written lecture at the College De France on 1 March 1978. ¹ Foucault concluded the lecture hurriedly by providing a quick gloss of his notes, and offering an apology to his audience: “There you are. Forgive me for having taken too long, and next time, this is a promise, we won’t speak any more about pastors.” ² However, Foucault’s lecture notes reveal that he had more to say; indeed, he excluded from his spoken lecture a fascinating contemplation of strategy and its relationship to truth:

Rather than say that each class, group, or social force has its ideology that allows it to translate its aspirations into theory, aspirations and ideology from which corresponding institutional reorganizations are deduced, we should say: every transformation that modifies the relations of force between communities or groups, every conflict that confronts them or brings them into competition calls for the utilization of tactics which allows the modification of relations of power and the bringing into play of theoretical elements which morally justify and give a basis to these tactics in rationality. ³

Here, political action does not merely require access to a “correct” version of truth that might circumscribe the appropriate tactics for change. Instead, every relation of power, every form of political context, requires a distinct appraisal of the political situation in question, generating different tactics and strategy, and with all of this, a theorisation of the prevailing forms of rationality, which might prompt and support the case for change. Here, the battleground for change is not merely a question of demanding the translation of ideals into practice; on the contrary, political change must deal with a shifting terrain, which is composed of both force relationships and evolving rationalities. It is not merely the challenge of political opinion or institutions we must contend with, but it is the challenge of truth itself.

Today, pro-animal advocates face an extraordinary challenge. On one hand, we confront massive systemic forms of violence directed towards almost all animals that humans have contact with, encompassing food systems, recreation, and scientific endeavour. This violence is so widespread and deeply embedded within institutions and practices that it almost seems impossible to imagine change: where might we begin? Simultaneously, we face a political challenge that relates to truth. While this systematically inflicted violence against animals is almost everywhere, almost nobody seems to care. Humans are either happy to be ignorant of this violence, or, alternatively, happily inflict this violence convinced of their own superiority, the supremacy of their own needs and pleasures, or confident of their prerogative over other creatures. Pro-animal advocates remain in an absolute minority with respect to their critique of the rationality that underpins the “animal industrial complex.” ⁴ In this sense, the politics of animal liberation carries a strange affectation: pro-animal advocates are confronted and convinced by a horrible truth regarding human violence against animals; however, perhaps like the truth that Hamlet carried about King Claudius, this is a secret horror whose public reception is thwarted by its unimaginability. ⁵

In this chapter, I offer an expanded discussion of the concepts of “counter-conduct” and “truce,” as I had initially proposed in my book, The War against Animals. ⁶ An ongoing concern for me in thinking through these concepts is how pro-animal advocates might develop strategies that respond to different sites of contestation: inter-subjective, institutional, and epistemic (in a sense, this is a variation of the frame that Paola Cavalieri offers—this volume, Chap. 1—between material violence and symbolic violence ⁷ ). As I have suggested earlier, and taking into consideration the Foucauldian perspective, the terrain of power cannot be disentangled from the terrain of truth; this is the same landscape in which we find rationality and politics intertwined. This chapter is divided into three sections. Firstly, I offer an outline of the main theoretical trajectories I offer in The War against Animals, which grounds my perspective on how we might think about the politics of animal liberation. Secondly, I offer an expanded elaboration of the concept of “counter-conduct,” a concept I derive from Foucault’s 1 March 1978 lecture I have described above. Here, I offer a more detailed explanation of the forms of counter-conduct that Foucault describes in his lecture, particularly with respect to forms of resistance against pastoral power in the Middle Ages. As I suggest in this chapter, it is my view that these modes of counter-conduct remain relevant to thinking through strategies, particularly tactics such as inter-subjective forms of conduct, including the pursuit of plant-based diets. Thirdly, in this chapter I provide an exploration of strategies for “truce.” The thought experiment I offer here in the form of a proposal for a one-day truce in animal killing is partly modelled on an address made by Andrea Dworkin in 1983. In this context, I examine the labour general strike, its resonance with a potential animal liberation campaign for “one day without killing,” and the potential alliance politics that might be involved in generating such an action. As I argue in this chapter, with reference to actions such as the 2015 veterinarian strike in Iceland (which led to “a lack of fresh meat in shops because pork and poultry abattoir shipments…[were]…halted” ⁸ ), a proposal for a truce in the war against animals need not be an idealistic unachievable demand, but might instead be materially realisable.

War Against Animals

In many respects the main impulse behind The War against Animals was an assertion I have heard made by a variety of activists and scholars that our fundamental relations with animals represent a form of deep hostility and conflict. Animal advocates, for example, have frequently described human violence towards nonhuman life as “a war on animals” ⁹ (a powerful example of this is the recent documentary The Ghosts in Our Machine, where the main protagonist of the film, Jo-Anne McArthur, proclaims that her task of documenting the conditions faced by animals across the globe has transformed her into a “war photographer”). ¹⁰ In Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer has framed industrialised meat production as a war: “We have waged war, or rather let a war be waged, against all of the animals we eat. This war is new and has a name: factory farming.” ¹¹ While in his last lectures, philosopher Jacques Derrida identified the Western philosophical tradition as enabling a war against animals, remarking that the “Cartesianism belongs, beneath its mechanicist indifference, to the Judeo-Christiano-Islamic tradition of a war against the animal, of a sacrificial war that is as old as Genesis.” ¹² These perspectives are in many ways cognizant of the immense material violence generated by our attitude towards other creatures, which represents an intense, ever-present, but frequently unacknowledged, relationship of hostility. Indeed, given the magnitude and near-universal dimension of human violence towards animals, it is not unreasonable to suggest that our mainstay relationship with animals is making them suffer and die for our own purposes. From this perspective, perhaps the intuition that “we are at war with animals” does not appear to be outrageous.

But this intuition felt by many pro-animal scholars and activists (that we are at war with animals) might also be supported by theoretical perspectives on war and its relationship to peace. It is, perhaps, interesting to note that “war” has been a continuing concern within modern political theory. Thomas Hobbes, for example, defines the unifying force of sovereign power by distinguishing it from a chaotic state of nature that is described as a war of “all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes). ¹³ In a different context, Niccolò Machiavelli considers the civil political sphere as a site for the continuation of war-like tactics, particularly in relation to weighing the judicial application of force against the manipulation of consent. Here, tactics in war and tactics in peace are considered interchangeably; arguably, this is why so much of The Prince and the Discourses is devoted to evaluating the use of violent as opposed to the use of non-violent means, ¹⁴ or trust and loyalty against the utility of ruling by fear. ¹⁵ War and peace sit at the centre of important theories of sovereignty, such as that advanced by Carl Schmitt ¹⁶ ; this has proved to be influential for theorists such as Jacques Derrida, who reads an inter-relationship between war, politics, and friendship. ¹⁷ The distinction between war and peace is a theme in postcolonial and critical race scholarship: Achille Mbembe, for example, locates Western sovereignty within a globalised context of colonisation and racialised terror, ¹⁸ and Aileen Moreton-Robertson suggests that race war is the key to understanding the evolution of rights discourse and the reframing of the question of indigenous sovereignty. ¹⁹

The particular trajectory on war that I found most compelling for my own analysis was derived from the work of Michel Foucault. In his 1975–1976 series of lectures, published in English under the title Society Must Be Defended, ²⁰ Michel Foucault devoted a great deal of space to thinking about the relationship between war and politics, particularly the ongoing relationship within political theory and the theorisation of conflict. It is in these lectures that Foucault outlines a model for understanding sovereignty and its relationship to population as an essentially antagonistic relation, a template that would underpin his development of the concept of “biopolitics.” From this flows an understanding of politics within societies as war under the guise of peace. Here, Foucault is essentially offering a critique of traditional models of liberal society founded on agreement or compact:

War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war. To put it another way, we have to interpret the war that is going on beneath peace; peace itself is a coded war. We are therefore at war with one another; a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someone’s adversary. ²¹

In this context, Foucault provides an understanding of sovereignty that follows from the annihilatory violence of war. Foucault notes that political sovereignty is founded upon a material and real set of “victories” in war-like contexts (e.g. when one nation invades another). Here, the outcome of war is not peace but deeply entrenched relations of power, with concessions granted to those who are dominated only in the face of the threat of death. Foucault observes:

The vanquished are at the disposal of the victors. In other words the victors can kill them. If they kill them, the problem obviously goes away: the Sovereignty of the State disappears simply because the individuals who make up that State are dead. But what happens if the victors spare the lives of the vanquished? If they spare their lives, or if the defeated are granted the temporary privilege of life…[they]…agree to wor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Introduction
• Animal Liberation: A Political Perspective
• Reorienting Strategies for Animal Justice
• Make It So: Envisioning a Zoopolitical Revolution
• The Problem of Akrasia: Moral Cultivation and Socio-Political Resistance
• Animal Subjects and the Logic of Human Domination
• Counter-Conduct and Truce
• Bringing the State into Animal Rights Politics
• Backmatter