CHAPTER 7 Foucault’s Menagerie: Cock Fighting, Bear Baiting, and the Genealogy of Human-Animal Power

Alex Mackintosh

1 Introduction: “The Animal is Replaced by Man”1

In 1757, the French servant Robert-François Damiens was hung, drawn and quartered over the course of several hours for the attempted murder of King Louis XV. For Foucault, this spectacular punishment—the last of its kind in France—marked the high point of a particular configuration of power, one in which the power of the sovereign was displayed through violence inflicted directly on the body of the condemned. Within eighty years, public torture would be replaced by a system of disciplinary power that would aim to regu- late the living body and mind not only of prisoners, but also of schoolchildren, factory workers, psychiatric patients, and citizens.2 This new form of power was represented, famously, by the Panopticon, where the possibility of surveil- lance disciplined the bodies and behaviour of inmates even in the absence of any physical coercion. In his lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault speaks of a move from sovereign power—the right “to take life or let live”—to biopower—the right “to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die.”3 This sense of a major historical transition in the operations of power, so central to Foucault’s thought, has so far been almost entirely absent from the growing body of work addressing the application of Foucault’s ideas to human-animal relationships. As several writers have convincingly argued, the treatment of animals in modern agricultural facilities displays a form of power that appears to be deeply biopolitical in nature.4 The bodies of

1 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 203. 2 Ibid. 3 Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin Books, 2003). 4 See, for instance, Lewis Holloway and Carol Morris, “Exploring Biopower in the Regulation of Farm Animal Bodies: Genetic Policy Interventions in UK Livestock,” Genomics, Society and Policy 3:2 (2007): 82–98; Richard Twine, Animals as Biotechnology: Ethics, Sustainability and

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004332232_009 162 Mackintosh individual animals—to a greater extent even than those of humans—are shaped by breeding, genetic manipulation, and careful nutritional and medi- cal regimes (anatomopolitics), while biopower also acts on livestock species, through the statistical management of animal populations (biopolitics). Their ‘subjectivities’—if such a word can meaningfully be applied to animals operating outside human language—have also been shaped by techniques that could be considered as disciplinary.5 What has not yet been addressed in any depth is the extent to which the various forms of power operating in human-animal relations can be mapped onto the historical shifts identified in Foucault’s work. Does a similar transformation from sovereign power to bio- power and disciplinary power occur in human-animal power relations over the same period? Can these forms of power tell us something about how power operates on all bodies and minds, both human and nonhuman? Several writers have touched on the relevance to animals of Foucault’s gene- alogy of power, but few engage with the question in any historical depth. Paola Cavalieri dismisses the very possibility of a history of animals, arguing that “the power exercised over them is quite the same now as it was in the past.”6 Lewis Holloway takes the opposite view, arguing that “bovine subjectivity has a history rather than an essence,”7 a point made adeptly by his micro-study of the way in which particular contemporary milking technologies might be said to affect the subjectivity of cows; nonetheless, his focus is strictly contem- porary, and he does not attempt to describe forms of animal subjectivity that

Critical Animal Studies (London: Earthscan, 2010), 83–89; Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, “The war against animals: domination, law and sovereignty,” Griffith Law Review 18 (2010): 283–297; Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, “Cows and sovereignty: biopower and animal life,” Borderlands e-journal 1:2 (2002). [Available: http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol1no2_2002/wadiwel_cows .html] 5 See, for instance, Matthew Cole, “From ‘Animal Machines’ to ‘Happy Meat’? Foucault’s Ideas of Disciplinary and Pastoral Power Applied to ‘Animal-Centred’ Welfare Discourse,” Animals 1 (2011): 83–101; Lewis Holloway, “Subjecting cows to robots: farming technologies and the mak- ing of animal subjects,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25:6 (2007): 1041–1060; Clare Palmer, “ ‘Taming the wild profusion of existing things’? A study of Foucault, power and human/animal relationships,” Environmental Ethics 23:4 (2001): 339–358; Joel Novek, “Pigs and People: Sociological Perspectives on the Discipline of Nonhuman Animals in Intensive Confinement,” Society & Animals 13:3 (2005): 221–244; Stephen Thierman, “Apparatuses of Animality: Foucault Goes to a Slaughterhouse,” in Foucault Studies 9 (2010): 89–110. 6 Paola Cavalieri, “A Missed Opportunity: Humanism, Anti-humanism and the Animal Question,” in Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World, ed. Jodey Castricano (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008), 97–123. 7 Holloway, “Subjecting cows to robots,” 1055.